The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220420_corporate-medias-latest-smears-and-a-disastrous-bo
Aired: 2022-04-20
Duration: 01:31:23


=== Biden's Border Policy Shift (05:04) ===

[00:00:20]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:38]  First, we may be about to see a major about-face from President Biden.
[00:00:43]  He's now reportedly looking to keep one of former President Trump's major restrictions at the southern border because he's under pressure from moderate Democrats who know they're going to get their rear ends handed to them.
[00:00:53]  They're going to get booted right out of office in November if we make things even looser and less restrictive at their southern border.
[00:01:01]  Okay, so President Biden just vowed to lift this restriction, and now he's wavering because he realizes he's devastating his own party.
[00:01:11]  So we'll get into that in a minute.
[00:01:12]  And we'll also talk about Jensaki's refusal to apologize either on her own behalf or on behalf of the president to those border agents they wrongfully smeared back in September by saying that they had whipped migrants, which was a lie.
[00:01:29]  And they continued to make those comments even after they had, quote, opened an investigation.
[00:01:34]  But then, when asked yesterday, will you apologize to them?
[00:01:37]  Jensaki said, We can't because there's an ongoing investigation.
[00:01:40]  Well, you already condemned them in the course of an open investigation.
[00:01:44]  And now we're asking you to undo it or at a minimum apologize for commenting.
[00:01:48]  Oh, and suddenly Kat's got her tongue.
[00:01:50]  We'll get into it when we're joined later by President or by Brandon Judd, who is the president of the union that represents border agents nationwide.
[00:01:58]  He's fired up, and I am too.
[00:02:01]  But first, we have got to discuss this story, and we have the perfect person here to do it.
[00:02:06]  The Washington Post is now defending one of its quote reporters for tracking down and exposing the anonymous woman behind a social media account called Libs of TikTok.
[00:02:19]  It's very popular with conservatives because it shows content that's over on TikTok of these far-left progressives for the most part, outing their own oddities in ways you half the time can't believe are real.
[00:02:31]  But she sort of collates them and puts them on Twitter, and you don't have to go on TikTok and find them yourself.
[00:02:36]  And that's why a lot of us like it, conservative or not.
[00:02:40]  So it was very popular on the right wing and those of us in the middle as well.
[00:02:44]  So reporter Taylor Lorenz, formerly of the New York Times, now with The Washington Post, apparently decided this person needed to be outed, shamed, and harassed.
[00:02:55]  Yes, the same Taylor Lorenz, who days ago, days ago, was on national television crying about all the harassment she's faced online as the target of criticism so hard when people are saying the mean things about you and that then she continues what has been her entire career of doing that to somebody else.
[00:03:21]  That's literally her bread and butter.
[00:03:22]  That's maybe not literally that's, but that's literally her business.
[00:03:25]  That's her business.
[00:03:27]  Uh, Glenn Greenwald says, just imagine imagine, ask yourself whether the Washington POST would have done the same to a popular trans activist who chose to stay anonymous, or to a Pro-Black Lives Matter account posting content but insisting on staying anonymous.
[00:03:47]  We all know the answer.
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[00:04:22]  Glenn Greenwald is a Pulitzer Prize winning, now substack journalist, author, and co-founder of The Intercept.
[00:04:30]  He joins me now.
[00:04:31]  Glenn, I'm so happy to have you here today.
[00:04:33]  Thanks for coming on.
[00:04:34]  Happy to be with you, as always, Megan, but especially on an occasion like this one.
[00:04:39]  The thing about this, I have zero use for Taylor Lorenz.
[00:04:43]  I know you feel the same, but her behavior is indicative of so many larger societal, awful things that are happening that it's thrilling to talk about it.
[00:04:55]  It's thrilling to see it all embodied in one person's terrible behavior.
[00:04:59]  That's what excites me about the story.
[00:05:02]  The powerful, the elite, the snobs taking aim at the not downtrodden, but certainly not as famous, not as big a platform people of America to try to ruin their lives.
[00:05:15]  And then, where there's any tiny bit of backlash, they play the victim.
[00:05:20]  They claim to be harassed, to have one's picture posted.

=== Pam Geller Media Critique (15:11) ===

[00:05:25]  Meanwhile, that's exactly what she does for a living.
[00:05:28]  What do you make of Taylor Lorenz?
[00:05:30]  Yeah, there's so much going on here, which is why this story merits attention.
[00:05:34]  If it were just one kind of aberration, clearly unwell reporter who alienated a lot of her colleagues at the New York Times when she was there, and especially when she left, and is controversial even within the media.
[00:05:47]  It wouldn't really be worth paying that much attention to one reporter, even though she's a very influential and powerful reporter.
[00:05:53]  After all, her stories appear on the front page of the two most powerful or two of the most powerful newspapers in the West.
[00:05:59]  First, the New York Times, now the Washington Post.
[00:06:01]  She currently works at a newspaper owned by the richest or second richest man in the world, depending on how you count, Jeff Bezos.
[00:06:09]  So she wields a lot of power and a lot of influence.
[00:06:11]  But if it were just her standing alone as this kind of exception, you would maybe pay some attention to it, but nowhere near enough.
[00:06:18]  The reason why it's worthy of the attention it's getting is in part because of what you said: that she is a somewhat extreme, but nonetheless, extremely illustrative expression of the prevailing values in the liberal wing of the corporate media.
[00:06:34]  She's over the top with it.
[00:06:36]  She's very melodramatic.
[00:06:37]  She's very narcissistic and self-centered, but it still provides a very vivid window into how they actually think.
[00:06:44]  And it's especially true because you see that when she does things like this, it doesn't receive any criticism from mainstream media figures.
[00:06:54]  They close ranks, they support her.
[00:06:58]  She was widely cheered by all of or many of the employees of the liberal digital outlets, of the Washington Post, of CNN.
[00:07:07]  The Washington Post issued a statement heralding her as a great and competent journalist.
[00:07:12]  So, what she's doing is something that the dominant wing of the media approves of, which is why it's worth discussing, because in this approval, you see this important shift that took place, in my view, with the emergence of Donald Trump, first as a candidate and then as a president.
[00:07:31]  Traditionally, I'm not saying it was perfect, but the model to which journalists aspired was captured by phrases like speak truth to power or afflict the powerful and comfort the powerless.
[00:07:43]  The idea was the most heroic journalism were things like the Pentagon Papers or Watergate or exposing the secrets of the CIA, the NSA.
[00:07:50]  That's what one Pulitzer is when you confronted actual power centers, exposed how billionaires hide their assets.
[00:07:57]  But what happened in the Trump era was they decided that these power centers, the CIA, the Pentagon, the kind of U.S. Security State, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley billionaires weren't their adversaries any longer.
[00:08:08]  They were their allies.
[00:08:09]  They were the ones who were feeding them Russia gate leaks, plotting against Trump, pouring huge amounts of money into the Democratic Party.
[00:08:15]  They didn't want to investigate those power centers any longer.
[00:08:18]  They were aligned with them.
[00:08:19]  And they decided instead that the real threat to the United States was not just Donald Trump, but the movement behind him, which meant that any citizen, no matter how private, no matter how powerless, no matter how obscure, who expressed conservative views or some kind of a sympathy with the MAGA movement became an enemy, a valid target of journalistic scrutiny.
[00:08:44]  And it wasn't just in this case where they unmasked a person whose politics they didn't like.
[00:08:49]  They've been doing it repeatedly.
[00:08:50]  CNN has done it.
[00:08:51]  The Daily Beast has done it.
[00:08:52]  The Intercept, the outlet that I shamefully co-founded and then left, proudly left, has done it many times.
[00:08:58]  There's an ethos in the modern day iteration of corporate journalism that the true enemies are not government institutions or centers of financial power, but instead ordinary individual citizens who should have journalistic scrutiny and punishment if they have the wrong ideology, by which it means a rejection of liberal orthodoxy.
[00:09:19]  So just for background by for the audience, Taylor Lorenz, she was called a tech reporter when she was at the New York Times.
[00:09:27]  Now I think they say she's like the online reporter.
[00:09:29]  I don't know.
[00:09:31]  Tiana Lowe of the Washington Programme.
[00:09:32]  I think they call her a columnist now.
[00:09:34]  Okay.
[00:09:34]  At the Washington Post.
[00:09:35]  Yeah.
[00:09:36]  Tiana Lowe of the Washington Examiner did a great piece on her earlier in March.
[00:09:41]  And the headline of her piece was, Taylor Lorenz did this to herself.
[00:09:45]  This is after she was crying in her soup about how mean the internet is to her.
[00:09:49]  And she gave a bunch of great examples of how this woman has, Taylor Lorenz, has made her career.
[00:09:55]  And one of the examples was the Ashri sisters.
[00:09:59]  They were apparently very popular on Instagram under the account girl with no job.
[00:10:05]  It was like a couple of sisters on there talking about their lives and one was talking about food and one was more about fashion and one was about life and so on.
[00:10:14]  And it looks like a couple of them were mildly political, but not, you know, just occasionally, and the other two weren't at all.
[00:10:20]  And the ones who were a little political were Trump supporters.
[00:10:24]  They sounded pro-Trump.
[00:10:26]  That's where they went wrong.
[00:10:27]  That's clearly where they ran afoul of Taylor Lorenz.
[00:10:31]  So she did a piece on them out for what she was writing for the Daily Beast.
[00:10:36]  Outraged that these girls never had the guts to admit that their mother is Pam Geller.
[00:10:44]  Pam Geller is a right-wing media figure, sort of.
[00:10:49]  She's the one who hosted the draw Muhammad contest down in Texas to try to make a point about free speech.
[00:10:56]  And that did turn potentially criminal where two guys got arrested who were going to attack the event.
[00:11:01]  Anyway, she was trying to make a point about free speech.
[00:11:03]  These girls, their sin, the reason they had to be outed and no longer allowed to remain anonymous was because that was their mom.
[00:11:11]  And unlike most 20-year-olds, I guess they didn't want their mom all over their Insta plan page.
[00:11:16]  And they didn't want to continue touting their mom and showing pictures with their mom.
[00:11:20]  And you could give them credit for not, you know, sort of riding on her coattails because she's very well known and liked by some in the Republican Party.
[00:11:27]  But to Lorenz, this was disgusting.
[00:11:29]  So she does a long piece outing them.
[00:11:32]  And the one, the most famous girl got fired.
[00:11:35]  She lost, she lost a piece that was like, she lost her talent agency after her show was canceled.
[00:11:42]  So she suffered consequences as a result of this Taylor Lorenz hit piece.
[00:11:46]  And then she tweets out, I guess, I don't know what happened, but one of the girls tweeted out that Taylor Lorenz shouldn't do this.
[00:11:54]  And Lorenz plays the victim even then.
[00:11:56]  Disappointing to see girl with no job, a racist influencer who doxed my entire family.
[00:12:02]  Here she goes again, threatened me and harassed me out of my apartment and never once apologized for her racist, Islamophobic tweets and posts, getting paid by Samsung now.
[00:12:13]  This is later when she got an advertiser on her new venture.
[00:12:16]  And then she goes on to talk about how it's truly horrible the way she incited and encouraged her fans to attack me.
[00:12:23]  She's never once expressed remorse.
[00:12:25]  You were the aggressor, Taylor.
[00:12:27]  You were the aggressor.
[00:12:28]  This girl denies doxing Taylor at all in any way.
[00:12:31]  But the reason I go through that long example, Glenn, is because as you will now walk us through, it is the beginnings of what would be a pattern for the so-called Washington Post reporter.
[00:12:43]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:12:44]  I mean, look, she got to the New York Times.
[00:12:46]  You don't get to the New York Times randomly.
[00:12:48]  You get to the New York Times by demonstrating that the work you're doing will be popular with their readers or otherwise in alignment with their journalistic values.
[00:12:56]  And if you look at what she did in the two or three years or more to build up her online platform, she wasn't a trained journalist, but she developed a body of work that became influential and controversial and polarizing and well-liked in some circles.
[00:13:12]  It was almost exclusively doing the kind of thing that you just described.
[00:13:17]  She would target teenagers who were popular on TikTok and would dig into their tweet history when they were 14 and 15 and find so-called problematic tweets and try and ruin their reputation.
[00:13:30]  I'm talking about like 18 and 19 year old kids.
[00:13:33]  She would like lurk outside of teenage influencers' homes.
[00:13:38]  You know, they would live together in homes like 18 and 19 year olds.
[00:13:40]  And at the age of no, she, her, her, her age is unknown.
[00:13:44]  She gives very conflicting accounts about it because she likes to create this perception that she's extremely young.
[00:13:49]  If you criticize her, they'll say, oh, why are you attacking this young woman who just entered journalism as though she's like 20 when in fact she's in her mid-30s?
[00:13:56]  She kind of developed a specialty for like lurking outside of teenage online culture and unmasking and uncovering their past.
[00:14:04]  I mean, talking about researching the tweet history of teenagers, like it doesn't get more bottom of the barrel than that, in my opinion, from the perspective of what journalism is supposed to be.
[00:14:14]  And in the case of, you know, the daughters of Pam Geller, you know, I am most definitely not a fan of Pam Geller.
[00:14:21]  She's even controversial in large sectors of the right.
[00:14:23]  I do think she's often veered into what I regard as anti-Muslimanimus.
[00:14:29]  I think her devotion to the state of Israel is often way too extreme and blind.
[00:14:34]  And she's willing to call people anti-Semites.
[00:14:37]  If you even criticize Israel, oh, there's a lot I don't like about Pam Belgeller.
[00:14:40]  But what does it have to do with her daughters?
[00:14:42]  I mean, I think it's a kind of like a foundational view of our culture that we're not an aristocracy, that you're not held to the sins or the accomplishments of your parents.
[00:14:54]  I mean, I wouldn't want to be held to the political views of my father, with whom I have all kinds.
[00:14:59]  And I wouldn't want my kids held responsible for my views either.
[00:15:03]  So of course Pam Geller's daughters have the right to use their father's name and to not quote unquote admit who their mother is or what their opinion of.
[00:15:12]  And also, even if they did have differences with their mother, what kind of sociopathic mindset would demand that they come out and publicly denounce their own mother?
[00:15:22]  So this is the sort of thing that she built her entire career on, Megan, as you know, is targeting people without power, dragging their private lives and their secrets into the public limelight in order to ruin their reputation, in order to generate hatred for them.
[00:15:37]  And every time it happens, somehow, not just Taylor, but all of her colleagues in the media take her, a woman who grew up in extreme wealth in Greenwich, Connecticut, who was educated in Swiss boarding schools, who went to a very expensive liberal private arts college and now writes for, as I said, the front pages of the two most powerful newspapers and somehow demands that we treat her as the victim, not the people whose lives she's ruining, who don't have any influence or power or not much compared to her.
[00:16:07]  Even if you criticize Taylor Enz, if you just criticize Kayla Renz, you get accused of stimulating hatred against her.
[00:16:14]  In fact, when she was on MSNBC sobbing, it was about a study that was supposedly done that accused myself and Tucker Carlson of being responsible for the hatred and misogynistic attacks and death threats that she gets, which I'm sure she does.
[00:16:28]  Most people in public life do.
[00:16:30]  Hello.
[00:16:30]  Because when we criticize her, it stimulates that.
[00:16:34]  That's exactly right.
[00:16:34]  So let's show the audience what we're talking about.
[00:16:37]  She goes on MSNBC.
[00:16:39]  By the way, the host of this segment who is sitting in on Meet the Press Daily.
[00:16:43]  I guess there's a daily show.
[00:16:44]  I have no idea.
[00:16:44]  I never watch MSNBC.
[00:16:46]  But this girl's sitting in.
[00:16:48]  Nobody does.
[00:16:49]  Yeah.
[00:16:49]  Nobody does.
[00:16:50]  So her name is Morgan.
[00:16:51]  What's her last name?
[00:16:54]  Okay, Radford.
[00:16:55]  So she was there when I was there.
[00:16:57]  And literally, what I remember is nobody wanted to put her on nightly and there was a pressure from the bosses to put her on nightly all the time.
[00:17:03]  And so this girl's gotten advantages, but she decides to use her time subbing for whoever hosts Meet the Press Daily.
[00:17:09]  I don't know if it's chucked out or not, to talk about how she's been the victim of so much racism.
[00:17:13]  And she reads one tweet about her that was racist.
[00:17:17]  And then the other two people who are on the panel, one of whom is Taylor Lorenz, talk about their online hate generated by attack pieces.
[00:17:25]  In your case, I guess an attack tweet against Taylor.
[00:17:29]  Tucker ran a segment about her calling her out on her nonsense.
[00:17:33]  And she's playing the victim because the online hate that followed this segment was very, very damaging.
[00:17:40]  Here it is.
[00:17:42]  I've had to remove every single social tie.
[00:17:45]  I had severe PTSD from this.
[00:17:48]  I contemplated suicide.
[00:17:49]  It got really bad.
[00:17:51]  You feel like any little piece of information that gets out on you will be used by the worst people on the internet to destroy your life.
[00:17:59]  And it's so isolating and terrifying.
[00:18:04]  It's horrifying.
[00:18:07]  I'm so sorry.
[00:18:09]  It's overwhelming.
[00:18:11]  It's really hard.
[00:18:12]  Oh, my Lord.
[00:18:15]  So can I tell you, then I talked about this with a group of students yesterday and somebody was saying nicely to me, you know, so you don't sound like you feel all that much empathy toward her the way you're at.
[00:18:26]  And I'm like, you're right.
[00:18:27]  I feel zero empathy for her.
[00:18:29]  Zero.
[00:18:30]  Because she's created this life for herself.
[00:18:33]  She's the worst about doing this to others.
[00:18:35]  And then when called out on the consequences of her choice of profession, she's made this her work.
[00:18:42]  When called down on the consequences that she unleashes on others, she wants us to feel sorry for her.
[00:18:48]  Well, I don't.
[00:18:49]  And it's a pattern.
[00:18:51]  She released a tweet.
[00:18:52]  I know you've retweeted this.
[00:18:54]  And I think we've got it talking about her many like psychological issues.
[00:18:58]  Do we have it, Debbie?
[00:19:00]  Maybe we can put it on the board, but oh, we don't have it.
[00:19:02]  Okay, but it's in my text.
[00:19:03]  Hold on.
[00:19:03]  I'm going to pull it up for you.
[00:19:05]  Here's what she tweeted.
[00:19:08]  June of 2021.
[00:19:10]  This is definitely TMI and I will probably delete, but I'm honestly so proud and I want to share it.
[00:19:15]  Something people might not know is I have very bad trichotillomania and dermotilomania.
[00:19:23]  And this is the first time in my life that I haven't had an open wound on my head.
[00:19:26]  And the bottom line is these things are a hair pulling disorder and a skin picking disorder, which they describe from the Mayo Clinic as a mental illness.
[00:19:36]  Are mental illnesses related to obsessive compulsive disorder?
[00:19:39]  All right, so she's got issues.
[00:19:41]  And you know what my bottom line is, Glenn?
[00:19:43]  You chose the wrong profession.
[00:19:45]  Get out of media.
[00:19:46]  It is not a nice, kind, sweet, loving, supportive place.
[00:19:50]  And you know that because you're helping to create the model, Taylor.
[00:19:56]  Well, you know, not only that, Megan, I mean, you know, we're both people who have experienced a lot worse than mean tweets.
[00:20:04]  You know, like when you did your job as the moderator of one of the Republican primary debates and confronted the extremely popular Donald Trump at the time, still very popular, but he was kind of at the peak of his popularity among Republicans at an extremely low abasement.
[00:20:21]  You confronted him on national television on Fox News as a Fox anchor with a very, very tough question.
[00:20:28]  And he then went on a rampage against you in kind of like very profane and obscene ways for days, you know, generating hatred against you.

=== Journalist Safety and Threats (07:01) ===

[00:20:36]  You had the entire world crashing down on you, you know, death threats and like serious death threats and like people organizing to try and harm you.
[00:20:45]  And, you know, I've done reporting where I got criminally prosecuted by the Brazilian government and threatened by the president of the country.
[00:20:52]  And when we did the Snowden reporting, I couldn't travel internationally for a year because of the threat of arrest.
[00:20:57]  Julian Assange just today lost another legal battle against the United States where the UK government ordered him extradited to the United States to stand trial for espionage because of the journalism he's done.
[00:21:08]  In Ukraine, journalists have been killed as journalists often are covering wars because of their bravery in wanting to show the world what's happening in Ukraine.
[00:21:17]  This is actual journalistic persecution.
[00:21:20]  But even there, we all chose this career.
[00:21:24]  We don't have to do this work.
[00:21:25]  We could do safer work.
[00:21:26]  We could do work that's less controversial.
[00:21:29]  And I don't think you should have to endure that abuse.
[00:21:32]  I don't think I should have to endure threats from governments for arrest and all kinds of online hatred as well.
[00:21:37]  You know, I can match whatever she's received with death threats and everything else that I get on a daily basis.
[00:21:44]  But I also know it's part of the work that we've done that also comes with benefits.
[00:21:48]  We get to influence public discourse.
[00:21:50]  We speak to millions of people.
[00:21:53]  It has a lot of benefits and it has a lot of costs, like everything.
[00:21:56]  And I think you're exactly right that if she's really as mentally unwell as she claims in that tweet to be, let's think about what she's saying.
[00:22:04]  She went 37 years before she had one day where she didn't have an open wound on her skull by virtue of tearing out her own hair.
[00:22:15]  And I believe that maybe it is the case that mean tweets send her into like severe mental distress to the point of wanting to commit suicide or having post-traumatic stress disorder.
[00:22:26]  It's not the job of the rest of the world to cater to her difficulties by saying, we're going to treat you differently.
[00:22:34]  We're not going to criticize you the way we other we would otherwise powerful journalists.
[00:22:38]  But this is that this is what they're doing, Megan, is what this is really about is saying, we as corporate journalists have the power to do anything to you.
[00:22:45]  We can destroy your lives.
[00:22:46]  We can expose you.
[00:22:47]  We can drag you into the sunlight and your secrets.
[00:22:50]  And you can't do anything to us, including even criticize us, let alone treating us the way we treat you.
[00:22:55]  Imagine if I knocked on the door of Taylor Renz's parents the way she did the relatives of the woman who runs that Twitter account or went to the workplace of her siblings and said, I'm here to demand dirt on Taylor Renz.
[00:23:07]  I would probably be accused by the national media of murder, you know, or attempted murder if I did what she just did.
[00:23:14]  So it's this complete double standard that they're trying to impose.
[00:23:17]  Yes.
[00:23:18]  So I, I mean, I just pulled up just for kicks.
[00:23:24]  And this is, this relates probably more to what Morgan, what's her name was saying on that thing, Bradford.
[00:23:30]  Okay, you want to read one racist tweet about you?
[00:23:33]  Like, do you, do you think that says anything about the online community and what most reporters have gone through, right?
[00:23:41]  And like, this is the business.
[00:23:42]  It's ugly.
[00:23:43]  There's not, there's no changing it.
[00:23:44]  This is the left constantly wants to word police everybody.
[00:23:47]  This is the business.
[00:23:48]  It's ugly and it's unfortunate, but it's the reality.
[00:23:50]  And they did whole articles on this.
[00:23:52]  There's one that we pulled.
[00:23:53]  I don't remember what it is, Axios, maybe.
[00:23:54]  The sexist slurs tweeted at Megan Kelly.
[00:23:56]  Here's just a few examples.
[00:23:58]  Bitch, bimbo, horror, blonde, ugly, cheap, skank, slut, hooker, C-word, on and on.
[00:24:05]  It goes, okay, all right.
[00:24:07]  Like you have to have the ability to laugh it off.
[00:24:10]  You know, people get angry with the Trump thing.
[00:24:13]  Yes, in the moment, it was more traumatic than it is now in retrospect.
[00:24:16]  But I threw a very tough punch at him and he was mad and he threw some tough punches back at me and skipped a debate that I was hosting.
[00:24:23]  I didn't leave journalism.
[00:24:25]  You know, I didn't, I didn't like give up.
[00:24:28]  It is a nasty industry.
[00:24:30]  There have been times.
[00:24:31]  I mean, I'll tell you, early on in my career, I was stalked very badly by a crazed lunatic.
[00:24:36]  And he was the guy who wound up being incarcerated for 10 years for what happened.
[00:24:41]  And at the time, I was very young and I hadn't yet protected my online information at all.
[00:24:46]  You know, so I was really exposed.
[00:24:47]  I was still basically a lawyer who had just become a journalist.
[00:24:50]  And I talked to my therapist.
[00:24:52]  I'm like, oh my God, this is, I hadn't planned on this.
[00:24:54]  This is really dangerous.
[00:24:55]  And she said, now is the time to sit back and ask yourself if this is what you really want.
[00:25:00]  Do you really want to be a part of this profession?
[00:25:02]  And she wasn't saying the answer should be no.
[00:25:04]  She was just saying you're entering an arena that is not for the faint of heart.
[00:25:10]  You know, you get things like that.
[00:25:11]  You get things like public attacks on social media and otherwise.
[00:25:16]  Sadly, like any public figure, you get death threats and so on.
[00:25:19]  Sometimes they're actually, there's something behind them.
[00:25:21]  Those are the ones that are really not okay.
[00:25:23]  But for her to poke the bears over and over and over, and then when the natural SWAT comes back her way, to want everyone to feel sorry for her is part of A, a pattern for her, and B, a pattern we've seen of the rich and famous and powerful in many corners.
[00:25:40]  You know, you and I have talked before about Naomi Osaka.
[00:25:43]  And it's not that she's poking bears, but she's going out there not wanting to play by the same rules as everybody else.
[00:25:48]  I don't want to do the press conferences.
[00:25:50]  I want to grab the microphone in the middle of a tennis match to address a heckler, which we don't allow anybody else to do.
[00:25:56]  You're going to have to deal with it just like every other.
[00:25:58]  And when it doesn't go her way, she gets upset.
[00:26:01]  You know, she, she, she thinks she's been victimized and she needs a whole meditation room and a mental health facility.
[00:26:07]  Okay.
[00:26:08]  This isn't the way it used to be where we would look at somebody who's literally one of the most powerful people and richest people in the world and be asked by them to feel sorry for them.
[00:26:19]  I think, you know, first of all, you know, I mean, I empathize with, you know, everything you were saying.
[00:26:24]  You know, when I did the Snowden reporting and we were causing like diplomatic breaches, we were, you know, going around the world publishing the most sensitive secrets of the most secretive agency within the world's most powerful government.
[00:26:38]  We had very powerful enemies, like extremely angry at us as we were doing it.
[00:26:44]  You know, it turned my life upside down in so many ways.
[00:26:47]  It severely restricted my freedom.
[00:26:50]  You know, there were governments threatening to imprison me.
[00:26:54]  My husband, when he was traveling back from Germany to bring a corrupted part of the archive that had been fixed, was detained for 12 hours in London and threatened with prosecution under an anti-terrorism law.
[00:27:04]  It was very, very stressful.
[00:27:06]  When we did the Brazil reporting in 2019 and 2020, that culminated in my criminal indictment that was ultimately dismissed because of a Supreme Court ruling on press freedom.
[00:27:18]  We had to spend a year with armed guards in our house and our kids taken to school in armored vehicles and our house turned into a fortress.
[00:27:26]  And of course there are psychological costs to that.
[00:27:29]  But when I look back on those experiences, I don't think to myself I was a victim, nor do I think I wish I hadn't done it.

=== Libs of TikTok Exposed (15:20) ===

[00:27:37]  I chose to do that.
[00:27:39]  And that work is gratifying precisely because you know you're doing something controversial that's going to generate, that's what journalism is supposed to be about.
[00:27:46]  You confront powerful people and it makes them angry because you're holding them accountable and they try and attack you.
[00:27:52]  That's, and when I speak in, you know, journalism schools and that get asked my advice from journalism students, I say, if you're somebody who wants to be universally beloved, this is the wrong profession for you.
[00:28:03]  Don't become a journalist.
[00:28:05]  So if you're somebody who doesn't, can't even handle anonymous tweets that are rude, how are you going to handle war zones or persecution by governments or any of the things that journalists traditionally have had to confront?
[00:28:20]  But I think to your broader point, what has happened is there's this elite discourse and people who are in elite circles who are rich and powerful and influential want to insist that they deserve victimhood status because that's the best currency, the most valuable currency in liberal discourse.
[00:28:40]  And so somehow what they do is they say victimhood doesn't come from class deprivation.
[00:28:45]  Like white guys in Ohio who are unemployed or who can't get health insurance or who are living in communities where people are dying of overdoses of fentanyl, they're not the victims.
[00:28:55]  They're the oppressors.
[00:28:56]  They're white guys.
[00:28:57]  It's not determined by class, determined by race or sexual orientation.
[00:29:00]  So the real victims are us, these extremely influential, wealthy journalists and politicians by virtue of our race, by virtue of our sexual orientation.
[00:29:08]  And they've completely inverted what actual victimhood is.
[00:29:11]  So they use their status and their influence to insist that all the empathy and sympathy is supposed to go to them, the people who are the most powerful in the society, not the least, like Taylor Lorenz, and who frequently ruin the lives of people far less powerful than them, which I grew up understanding to be bullying.
[00:29:29]  And yet somehow it's the bullies who are the ones insisting that they're the ones being bullied.
[00:29:35]  And that's what's so nauseating about it to me is it's a complete perversion of what journalism is supposed to be.
[00:29:42]  And meanwhile, your sexual orientation, your race, your gender identity, that will not save you if you are not a woke progressive.
[00:29:51]  Ask Caitlin Jenner.
[00:29:53]  Ask you.
[00:29:54]  Ask Thomas Sowell, right?
[00:29:56]  Clarence Thomas.
[00:29:57]  It doesn't matter.
[00:29:58]  All of the identity stuff only works if you're woke and you adhere to the party line.
[00:30:02]  Then you get to play the card.
[00:30:04]  Otherwise, like Taylor Renz was just on TV saying, I'm a young woman whose information was put out there.
[00:30:11]  And what did she just do?
[00:30:13]  She just doxed a young Jewish woman who lives in Brooklyn where conservatism is extremely alienating and disadvantaging.
[00:30:21]  And how come Taylor Renz got all the young women who doxed sympathy, but this woman who was behind the TikTok TikTok, the liberals of TikTok account got none, even though she's a young Jewish woman as well.
[00:30:34]  As you say, this victimhood game is exploited and only available to people who have the right ideology.
[00:30:42]  And now the Washington Post appears to be lying about what it did because they're on the hook too.
[00:30:48]  You know, you talk about Jeff Bezos.
[00:30:49]  It's not just Taylor Lorenz.
[00:30:51]  They had to okay this and they did okay this.
[00:30:53]  And now, because there is a shitstorm brewing about it, they've come out to defend her and they've lied.
[00:31:00]  And that's where I'm going to pick it up right after this break because I want to get into this more with Glenn.
[00:31:04]  And then we're going to talk about the meltdowns or the mask mandate falling apart on the planes.
[00:31:08]  Have you seen the, wait until you hear what Jarrett, Valerie Jarrett has tweeted?
[00:31:13]  I can't wait to bring this to you.
[00:31:20]  Back with you now, Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning Substack journalist, author, and co-founder of The Intercept.
[00:31:27]  So she refers to you as an online influencer, which I love, not Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.
[00:31:32]  You are an online influencer, says real journalist Taylor Lorenz, who's being defended now by the Washington Post with a bunch of nonsense.
[00:31:42]  It's a bunch of nonsense.
[00:31:44]  You tell me, Glenn, because here's what they've said.
[00:31:46]  She's an accomplished and diligent journalist whose reporting methods comport entirely with the Washington Post professional standards.
[00:31:53]  They go on to rename the person behind Libs of TikTok, this woman, and they say that she's had significant impact on public discourse and her identity had become public knowledge on social media.
[00:32:04]  We did not publish or link to any details about her personal life.
[00:32:09]  So is that true?
[00:32:10]  So let's leave aside the characterization of Taylor as a diligent or competent or whatever adjectives they cynically used, reporter, because that's a question of opinion, I suppose.
[00:32:21]  We've already covered why it's a very baseless opinion, but put that in the opinion category.
[00:32:26]  What falls into the lying category, the factually false categories, are the last two assertions, particularly the last one, which is that they didn't actually reveal any compromising information about her in a non-private way.
[00:32:41]  It's a complete lie.
[00:32:42]  When they published the story, they had a link to a document that was her real estate license.
[00:32:50]  And on that real estate license, soon as you click on it, you immediately see her address that she provided on that on that license, as well as other information.
[00:33:02]  Subsequently, a couple of hours later, or however much time elapsed, they republished the article and deleted that link with no editor's note, obviously noting they did that, let alone explaining why.
[00:33:13]  But they exposed that information to the world in the article when it was published.
[00:33:18]  And I'm sure it was a very widely read article, given how much controversy generated on social media and how heavily it was promoted by the Post.
[00:33:25]  So that sentence is just utterly untrue.
[00:33:28]  The claim that her identity was widely known is also utterly false.
[00:33:34]  I've known Libs of TikTok and have been speaking with her for over a year.
[00:33:40]  As the article notes, I playfully referred to myself as the godfather of the account because I was one of the first with a prominent platform to promote it when she only had a couple of thousand followers.
[00:33:48]  Other people then proceeded to do so as well.
[00:33:51]  But I've talked about her work with her.
[00:33:53]  I actually don't approve of all of the things she's done, but I think it's provided a valuable service in general and illuminated the discourse.
[00:34:01]  I never knew her name.
[00:34:03]  I never asked her name.
[00:34:03]  It was clear she was eager to hide her identity because she was worried about the repercussions on her career if her affiliation with this sort of politics became known.
[00:34:15]  So it is true that the day before the Post published the article, sort of online snoopers began to find out information about her, but they were the ones working in tandem with Taylor Renz.
[00:34:26]  It wasn't like this has been going on for months.
[00:34:28]  It was just the day before the Post article was published, people started finding out information about her in connection with Taylor, and they were the ones who used it.
[00:34:36]  So even this defense by the Post, and obviously they're going to defend her, Megan.
[00:34:40]  Why?
[00:34:40]  Because Taylor doesn't have the ability to publish an article on her own.
[00:34:44]  It has to go through multiple levels of editorial approval.
[00:34:48]  And she announced to many people, including Ron DeSantis' press secretary, that she was going to do this.
[00:34:55]  She was saying, I give you an hour to provide comment because you've positively interacted with this account as though that's a crime.
[00:35:02]  And instead of responding, Ron DeSantis' private secretary published the email.
[00:35:06]  So everyone knew this article was coming.
[00:35:08]  It already created a huge amount of controversy.
[00:35:11]  Of course, it went through ample editorial scrutiny at the Post because of that.
[00:35:14]  And they published that article with that link to that article that absolutely doxxed her.
[00:35:18]  And it was their most read article yesterday on the Washington Post.
[00:35:22]  Of course, of course.
[00:35:23]  So imagine how many people now know where this woman lives because of what the post did.
[00:35:28]  And again, it was Taylor Renz two weeks ago who went on TV and wept about how if information about your life is publicized, the worst people on the internet will use it against you.
[00:35:38]  But also there's a tweet from her.
[00:35:39]  I don't know if you saw it, where as part of the controversy from the fallout, she said it's never justified to dox anybody.
[00:35:47]  And she said two weeks ago, and this is, you posted this, two weeks ago, she wrote, Do you, do you now see, do you not see how corporate journalists have created a framework?
[00:35:59]  Wait, hold on a second.
[00:36:00]  That's me talking.
[00:36:01]  That's you.
[00:36:02]  That's you talking.
[00:36:02]  And then you post her tweet.
[00:36:04]  I'm trying to find her tweet.
[00:36:05]  In any event, she's been complaining about the doxing whenever given the opportunity.
[00:36:10]  And she gets really upset if you bother somebody at their home, or she's complained about bothering somebody's relatives at their home, which is literally what she did to this woman.
[00:36:20]  That is what she did.
[00:36:21]  She went to the home of the relatives of the woman behind Libs of TikTok.
[00:36:26]  And now that it's turned into a controversy, you have all these corporate sort of backers of her defending her saying this is what journalism looks like.
[00:36:35]  Here's politico reporter Alex Thompson.
[00:36:38]  Showing up at people's homes is standard journalism that more reporters should do.
[00:36:43]  Like half of all the president's men is Woodstein showing up at people's homes.
[00:36:48]  And you, I know, have some thoughts on that.
[00:36:52]  Right.
[00:36:52]  I mean, I found that tweet so revealing because think about what it's implicitly suggesting.
[00:36:59]  It's saying that the investigation by these young reporters at the Washington Post into crimes committed by the highest and most powerful officials in the United States government, ex-CIA operatives, the director of the FBI, the attorney general, all of whom were indicted and prosecuted, and ultimately led to the resignation of the president of the United States, that that kind of an investigation into the crimes of the most powerful people in society is comparable to,
[00:37:28]  if not the equal of, what Taylor Lorenz just did in unmasking a person who has no power in government, who has no power in any institutions of authority.
[00:37:39]  But the fact that they're incapable of understanding this distinction, that journalism is supposed to be about what Watergate did, targeting powerful people and not about targeting obscure and relatively powerless individuals, to me, illustrates the entire pathology at play here about how they've lost the understanding of what journalism is supposed to be, as we've discussed.
[00:38:01]  The other point I just want to make, Megan, is that if someone wanted to argue in the abstract, and I'm interested in your views on this as well, that look, once somebody compiles a big enough social media following, they have enough influence on the discourse, the person behind Libs of TikTok went on Tucker Carlson twice, although appeared by phone to protect her identity, was clearly having an effect on the politics.
[00:38:25]  It's kind of fair game or at least newsworthy to find out who this person is.
[00:38:29]  If somebody wants to argue that, I won't, I don't agree with it.
[00:38:34]  But if it were applied consistently to everybody, regardless of their ideology, which means if there's some trans woman who feels unsafe having her name known and she develops a large following, as many have, advocating for trans rights, or a Black Lives Matter activist,
[00:38:49]  someone who's African-American, who says, I'll be in danger if my identity, if now we can go and expose all those people, and if we can also treat Taylor Lorenz the way she just treated this woman, whatever you think of the Libs of TikTok account, certainly Taylor Lorenz is much more of a public figure than her.
[00:39:04]  So can I now go to her house and her parents' house and do all the things she just did?
[00:39:09]  Of course, none of that would be permissible.
[00:39:11]  Nobody, if you unmasked the identity of a trans woman who said, like Libs of TikTok, that her anonymity is important to protect her safety, you would probably be arrested.
[00:39:22]  You know, we're certainly vilified by the same people defending Taylor Renz.
[00:39:26]  So there's no journalistic principle at play here.
[00:39:29]  It's purely a political operation designed to punish conservative dissidents under the guise of journalism.
[00:39:36]  And listen, I can speak to this firsthand.
[00:39:38]  The left doesn't give two shits about online hate coming your way, even if you're a member of a protected class, like you're a woman, if they don't like you.
[00:39:50]  Okay.
[00:39:51]  They liked me when I asked Trump a tough question and the online hate to me was coming from the right wing.
[00:39:57]  But as soon as I went over to NBC and I said something about blackface, which happened to be true, which was for years, people didn't make a big deal out of it.
[00:40:06]  And the online hate started to come at me.
[00:40:08]  Nobody said, oh my God, this is really nasty.
[00:40:10]  This is online harassment.
[00:40:12]  What are we doing to poor Megan's mental health?
[00:40:14]  It was kill, publicly humiliate.
[00:40:19]  They didn't care, right?
[00:40:20]  Because she doesn't share our politics.
[00:40:23]  And they got that.
[00:40:24]  And as soon as they realized that I wasn't a Trump hater, that's sort of when my, my, their break with me began.
[00:40:29]  So these are just a bunch of hypocrites.
[00:40:31]  And by the way, the DeSantis piece of it is important.
[00:40:34]  It's, there's a reason she tried to go figure out why DeSantis' press secretary was liking so many of the tweets by Libs of TikTok.
[00:40:41]  She wanted to tie him into it.
[00:40:42]  That's probably how it got approved at the Washington Post, right?
[00:40:46]  Like, look at her influence.
[00:40:47]  Look at the people who are interested in what she's sending out there.
[00:40:50]  That's all part of the game.
[00:40:52]  Without, I heard the guys on Ruthless, which is a fun podcast, talking about this saying, without spending any time, Glenn, trying to consider why Libs of TikTok has gotten so popular.
[00:41:03]  What is she actually posting about that has gotten, that's caught fire, you know, that's made all these conservatives retweet it or have Laura Ingram mention it on her show and so on.
[00:41:12]  It's she's really trying to call out teachers for the most part and a lot of left-wingers who have access to education and students with their far left ideologies.
[00:41:22]  This is one she just posted.
[00:41:25]  Normally she just reposts stuff she found on TikTok.
[00:41:28]  So it's she's not outing anybody who didn't want to be outed.
[00:41:31]  They've made it publicly.
[00:41:32]  Sometimes she gets news, like somebody leaks something to her in the way that Chris Ruffo gets.
[00:41:38]  And this is one of those.
[00:41:39]  It's a Boston first grade teacher speaking to K through second grades.
[00:41:48]  It's a Zoom call with K through two grades where he's speaking about being trans.
[00:41:52]  Watch.
[00:41:54]  Something that's really cool and unique about who I am is that I am transgender.
[00:42:00]  So we touched a little bit about that at the beginning of this week in the book that Ms. Hammond read, but I'm going to give you my explanation about what it means to be transgender as well.
[00:42:10]  So when babies are born, the doctor looks at them and they make a guess about whether the baby is a boy or a girl based on what they look like.
[00:42:18]  And most of the time, that guess is 100% correct.
[00:42:21]  There are no issues whatsoever.
[00:42:24]  But sometimes the doctor is wrong.
[00:42:28]  Okay.
[00:42:28]  This is the same group of people on the left that the press is telling us that stuff like that's not happening.
[00:42:34]  The quote, don't say gay bill in Florida is all about bigotry, that that kind of conversation either isn't happening in the kindergarten classes or is fine and that the right wing's overplaying it.
[00:42:45]  And it's thanks to people like Libs of TikTok that we can see for ourselves what's actually happening.
[00:42:51]  Yeah, I think this is the key.
[00:42:53]  You know, like I said before, there's some things that she has done that I'm not entirely comfortable with.

=== Classroom Video Controversy (02:14) ===

[00:42:58]  Sometimes she will try and, when she publishes a video that she finds highly objectionable, she finds out where they work.
[00:43:05]  She encourages people to call the school board to demand their firing.
[00:43:09]  She kind of instigates a form of mob justice against the person that I'm not, but that's completely separate.
[00:43:16]  I don't have to approve everything she does to respect the ability and the right she has to use anonymity like millions of Americans do to participate in social media and political debate.
[00:43:26]  The issue though is 90% at least of what she does is she takes videos that people have published purposely and put into the political domain.
[00:43:36]  These aren't, you know, videos intended to be for a private audience that are locked and she's hacking into them or manipulating her way into them.
[00:43:43]  They're intended to be public.
[00:43:45]  And she takes those videos and curates them.
[00:43:48]  And a lot of them are teachers of young children boasting about how they ignore the law and will ignore the law and don't think parents have any right to have to tell them what they can and can't teach their kids.
[00:44:02]  They're people who boast that they teach their kids things just like we saw in that video that many parents would object to.
[00:44:09]  So there is an ongoing debate now about the role of parents and their right to have especially their young kids.
[00:44:16]  You know, like maybe you could, obviously in college, I think Eddie thing goes in high school.
[00:44:20]  There's a lot more maturity to talk about political and social issues.
[00:44:23]  But I know as a parent that when I send my kids to school, I'm sending them there because I want them to learn math and science, Portuguese and English, you know, biology and chemistry.
[00:44:33]  I don't want them being indoctrinated with the social and political that are controversial by the teacher.
[00:44:39]  That's my job to do that.
[00:44:40]  I don't want them being, you know, when they're 16 or 18 and engaged in social studies debate.
[00:44:46]  And so seeing what is going on in classrooms and these people oftentimes are saying, we keep this from the parents.
[00:44:53]  We don't care if the parents want it.
[00:44:54]  We do it anyway.
[00:44:55]  Of course, that's valuable to see.
[00:44:57]  Of course, that's valuable to know.
[00:44:58]  And the reason why she's provoked so much ire is because she is showing the underbelly of liberal left culture that is influencing what is happening in schools.
[00:45:10]  And, you know, it'd be one thing if she were doctoring videos.

=== Mask Mandate Selfishness (10:41) ===

[00:45:13]  It'd be another if she were doxing people, you know, taking private videos and making them public against their will.
[00:45:19]  She's not doing any of that.
[00:45:21]  She doesn't do to people what Tara Lorenz did to her.
[00:45:24]  And it has provided a valuable service.
[00:45:26]  And that's why there's so much anger against her.
[00:45:28]  That's exactly it.
[00:45:30]  They want her shut down.
[00:45:33]  It was foreseeable what would happen to this woman who's now had to go into hiding.
[00:45:37]  Thankfully, she's just been hired by the Babylon B, which is, you know, it knows.
[00:45:42]  And by the way, you point out she goes on Tucker.
[00:45:44]  So she went on to talk about the fact that her account had been shut down temporarily by Twitter, right?
[00:45:51]  Because she had broken the rules.
[00:45:52]  Like she's in it.
[00:45:53]  She's trying to fight this battle and she's not yet ready to come out with her real identity because she knows exactly what's going to happen to her, as does Taylor Lorenz, as did the Washington Post.
[00:46:03]  They didn't care.
[00:46:04]  Glenn, can you stay over for just a little bit?
[00:46:07]  Because we didn't get to mask mandate being lifted on the TSA and I need your opinion on that.
[00:46:11]  Can you stay a few minutes?
[00:46:12]  Absolutely.
[00:46:12]  I'm happy to do that.
[00:46:13]  Okay.
[00:46:13]  We're going to squeeze in a quick break.
[00:46:15]  We'll come back with Glenn Greenwald and the left melting down over a court order, including attacks on the judge and so on, because they don't like the fact that she said the TSA mandate on masks cannot be sustained.
[00:46:28]  Stand by for more on that.
[00:46:33]  So the mask mandate has fallen apart in the last, one of the last few places it was still being imposed, which is public transportation for the TSA, flights, now Amtrak, that kind of thing.
[00:46:45]  And it's thanks to a judge who has ruled it unconstitutional, a federal district court judge for the Middle District of Florida.
[00:46:50]  Her name is Catherine Kimball Mizell.
[00:46:52]  She's 35 years old.
[00:46:53]  She was a Trump appointee.
[00:46:55]  She had clerked for Justice Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court.
[00:46:58]  She's among the youngest federal judges ever confirmed, not the youngest.
[00:47:03]  And now the left is in full meltdown.
[00:47:06]  She's getting attacked as totally unqualified.
[00:47:08]  She actually spent some time working at my former firm, Jones Day, and she did a lot of clerking for a lot of very well-respected federal judges.
[00:47:14]  So she's obviously very smart, but she didn't have a lot of time actually practicing law under her belt.
[00:47:20]  But she did have a lot of time sort of being a judge in training.
[00:47:23]  I mean, it's kind of what you are when you're a judicial clerk.
[00:47:25]  Who do you think writes the initial drafts of the Supreme Court opinions?
[00:47:28]  Newsflash, it's not Justice Thomas.
[00:47:31]  He's not sitting there with his little pen or in the back room with his laptop.
[00:47:35]  That's why he has these brilliant clerks.
[00:47:37]  Anyway, she's taken a bunch of guff, but she can handle it.
[00:47:40]  And instead of just saying, thank God.
[00:47:43]  Like they saved us from this political albatross that was around our neck, the Biden administration, you know, because Biden's initial instinct was to say, okay, it'll be up to individual people now to decide what they want to do.
[00:47:54]  He said, it's up to them about whether people should continue wearing masks.
[00:47:57]  Now today, under pressure from the left, the DOJ issues a statement saying, if the CDC concludes that a mandatory order remains necessary for the public's health after its assessment, the DOJ will appeal that district court decision.
[00:48:11]  So they're basically trying to punt to the CDC because nobody wants this on them.
[00:48:15]  They're going to try to throw Rochelle Wolensky and her likely committee under the bus.
[00:48:20]  What do you make of it?
[00:48:21]  Yeah.
[00:48:22]  Well, first of all, there was a lot of deceit, deliberate deceit taking place and how journalists who know better, who cover the courts and the law, were presenting this to the public.
[00:48:32]  They were trying to act as though this, you know, kind of rogue Trump judge and they mocked her young age, which I didn't think you were allowed to do, like talk about a young woman as being inherently unqualified for jobs.
[00:48:48]  In other contexts, that would probably not go over quite as well.
[00:48:50]  They were clearly using that to say, look, she's so arrogant that she decided for herself that she knows more than the actual doctors and scientists about whether masks are necessary.
[00:49:02]  So the CDC said they were.
[00:49:04]  And this one kind of Trump person in the middle of Florida, you know, all kinds of tropes about who's important and who's not, gets to override and replace her judgment for theirs.
[00:49:16]  Now, that's not even remotely what happened.
[00:49:19]  The question before the court is one that is always before courts, which is not, was the CDC rule a good idea from a policy perspective?
[00:49:28]  Are masks actually necessary or not?
[00:49:31]  She had no opinion on that.
[00:49:33]  It was, did the CDC, under the laws and the constitution of our country, have the authority to issue this rule?
[00:49:40]  And did they follow the necessary regulatory guidelines that are important to give the public and experts time to comment and act against it?
[00:49:49]  Did they follow those rules in issuing those guidelines?
[00:49:51]  And from a very legalistic perspective, from a very confined judicial context, in a very careful and meticulous way, she reviewed the precedent.
[00:50:03]  And remember, at the time that the Biden administration announced this mask mandate, there was a lot of questions, even from liberal scholars, about whether the federal government actually had this authority under OSHA, if the CDC could do it, or whether you just needed a congressional act.
[00:50:20]  You know, Congress could have easily imposed a mask mandate.
[00:50:22]  Democrats control both houses of Congress, but they didn't.
[00:50:25]  When there was a vote in the Senate about whether to repeal this, it was 57 votes in favor of repealing it, 40 against, including lots of Democrats who voted in favor of repealing it.
[00:50:36]  So she simply said the CDC did not have this power.
[00:50:40]  They have a very limited scope.
[00:50:42]  They invoked a theory that is well beyond the kin of their authority to impose this mask mandate.
[00:50:47]  She also said they didn't follow the rules because they didn't give enough time for the public to comment and that legally it was invalid.
[00:50:54]  Now, you know, Megan, this happens every day.
[00:50:57]  This is what courts are for.
[00:50:59]  When there's a question about whether a law or a regulation is constitutionally legally valid, it doesn't go to the Supreme Court.
[00:51:07]  It doesn't go before like a panel of 12 appellate judges.
[00:51:12]  goes to a single federal judge in the first instance who has the authority to rule that it's either legally valid or not.
[00:51:18]  And she, in a very careful and respectable way, even if you don't agree with the conclusion, confined her analysis to the legal question.
[00:51:25]  But reporters pretended that this was a Trump judge who hated masks, who was overruling the CDC.
[00:51:31]  So there was lots of deceit involved.
[00:51:33]  From the question of the pragmatics, you know, I just traveled from Brazil to the U.S. a week ago and it was the most bizarre experience.
[00:51:41]  Nowhere in Brazil do people wear masks.
[00:51:43]  Nowhere is it obligatory.
[00:51:44]  You get to the airport, you don't have to wear masks, you go through security with no masks, you sit in the terminal with no masks, suddenly you get on the plane and you're told you have to wear masks at all times.
[00:51:53]  You wear it for the 10-hour flight, you get off, and again, nobody wears masks anywhere.
[00:51:57]  Which is being recirculated.
[00:51:59]  It's cleanest on the airplane.
[00:52:01]  Exactly.
[00:52:01]  That's where the least threat is for transmission.
[00:52:05]  And, you know, I was really, you know, you know how packed in you are with people in the line for security.
[00:52:10]  They were, you know, tons of people in my immediate vicinity.
[00:52:13]  None of whom were wearing masks.
[00:52:14]  And you're exactly right.
[00:52:15]  The airplane filtration system is designed to retard the spread of transmission in a way that most places aren't.
[00:52:22]  So it makes no sense pragmatically, but that isn't even what she decided.
[00:52:26]  But as you say, these mask mandates are so unpopular that the Biden administration can't say we're not appealing it because the left won't accept that.
[00:52:35]  But they also don't really want to appeal it.
[00:52:37]  So they're trying to pass off.
[00:52:38]  They also don't want to be politically responsible in midterms for forcing people into masks on long plane fights when it's so unpopular.
[00:52:45]  So as you say, they're trying to evade political responsibility instead of just saying we lost on the merits legally.
[00:52:51]  Yes, they're like, everyone hates Rochelle Wolensky.
[00:52:54]  Let's just keep her under the bus.
[00:52:55]  It's fine.
[00:52:55]  She's already under there.
[00:52:56]  She can stay.
[00:52:57]  Right.
[00:52:58]  And they're not wrong.
[00:53:00]  She's had her 15 minutes.
[00:53:01]  I don't hate is too strong, but I'm done with for sure.
[00:53:04]  Here's an example.
[00:53:04]  Mark Joseph Stern, writer for Slate.
[00:53:08]  Try explaining to your friends in other liberal democracies that a single unelected, life-tenured 35-year-old judge just abolished the air travel mask mandate for the entire country.
[00:53:18]  No peer nation would tolerate such a power-drunk juristocracy.
[00:53:21]  Goes on to say, Catherine Kimball Mizell had never tried a case civil or criminal or led or as lead or co-counsel since her admission to the bar.
[00:53:30]  She spent 10 months at a firm and three years in government practice.
[00:53:33]  The ABA rated her not qualified.
[00:53:35]  That's because she had not been actually practicing law for a long time.
[00:53:39]  And of course, they understood her politics too.
[00:53:42]  To pretend that the ABA is a totally objective organization would be a lie.
[00:53:47]  Now you get this piece in the, let me see, hold on a second.
[00:53:51]  I just pulled it.
[00:53:52]  Yes.
[00:53:52]  Oh, Robin Given of the Washington Post, not the Robin Given who was once married to Mike Tyson.
[00:53:59]  Robin Given writes that the headline is, whoops of selfish delight.
[00:54:04]  You've seen all these videos of the flight attendants and the pilots and the air passengers just delighted in taking off their masks.
[00:54:10]  I 100% would have been one of them.
[00:54:12]  And she writes about how this is a reflection on just how childish and selfish so much of the country has been in dealing with COVID and the mask mandate.
[00:54:22]  The cheers surely must sound insensitive to those who are still feeling trapped because of poor health, work circumstances, or the risk faced from those by those who have an inner circle who are immunocompromised.
[00:54:38]  And she's absolutely disgusted at the insensitivity people are showing at taking off this garment, which has been doing absolutely nothing on board these airplanes.
[00:54:50]  I mean, half the time, you don't have it on.
[00:54:52]  My last flight, Glenn, my friend, my pal, gave me a mask.
[00:54:56]  It was awesome.
[00:54:56]  It's mesh.
[00:54:57]  It looks like underwear.
[00:54:58]  It looks like ladies' saucy underwear.
[00:55:00]  And I basically had ladies' underwear on my face and it's totally mesh.
[00:55:03]  And it's just like a lie.
[00:55:04]  It's like, if you're, if I'm going to participate in your lie that your masks are doing something, you have to participate in my lie that this mesh mask complies.
[00:55:13]  And you know what?
[00:55:13]  One flight attendant first came over and she was like, is that mask TSA compliant?
[00:55:17]  I'm like, I don't think they're paying that much attention.
[00:55:19]  And then three other flight attendants came over right after her and they all said, where did you get that?
[00:55:23]  I need that.
[00:55:24]  I want it too.
[00:55:27]  You know, this is the thing.
[00:55:28]  I mean, first of all, even the people who we were told we were supposed to blindly obey, like the media doctors and scientists on cable and the New York Times, eventually came to admit that cough masks actually don't work.
[00:55:43]  There's this theater.
[00:55:44]  There were Biden administration officials who said, I'm really disappointed in scientists, the scientific community, for not acknowledging from the start that cough masks are a fraud.

=== Harvard Law Judge Debate (02:43) ===

[00:55:55]  They don't actually work.
[00:55:56]  Like if you really had wanted to do something, you'd have to force people to wear a hardcore surgical mask.
[00:56:00]  The other issue, though, is, you know, this talk of selfishness, I find so interesting because I do agree there was a lot of selfishness in the COVID pandemic.
[00:56:09]  For example, there are a lot of people who don't have children who were very insistent that schools remain closed because they didn't care about the severe social and intellectual harm that closed schools was imposing on children, the difficulties it was imposing on parents, and the severe limitations from remote learning, the harm that came to forcing children to wear masks at a time when they're using,
[00:56:36]  they're developing their emotive and empathetic skills and their language skills and they can't see people's mouths, all things that are going to have very long, serious, enduring harm on kids.
[00:56:47]  Lots of people without kids, lots of teachers, unions officials didn't care because they selfishly wanted to protect their own interests at the expense of huge numbers of children.
[00:56:57]  But, you know, ultimately, Megan, this whole question about this judge, too, I find so interesting.
[00:57:01]  You know, Elena Kagan, when she was appointed not to a low-level federal court judge, but to the Supreme Court, also had never tried a case.
[00:57:10]  She was the solicitor general for a year.
[00:57:11]  And other than that, she had been at Harvard Law School.
[00:57:14]  She was the dean of Harvard Law School doing administrative work, raising money for Harvard Law School.
[00:57:18]  But everyone was saying she's so brilliant, she should be, you know, she should go on the court.
[00:57:22]  And she got approved.
[00:57:23]  So the idea that somebody who obviously is very smart, has been at the elite levels of law school and clerking for a Supreme Court judge isn't qualified to be a low-level first instance federal judge is preposterous.
[00:57:37]  And you can go back and find that same reporter from Slate celebrating during the Trump era when like 103-year-old federal court judges sitting in Nebraska invalidated a Trump policy for the entire country on constitutional grounds.
[00:57:53]  And he would say, look at this heroic judge standing up to the Trump administration.
[00:57:57]  And then suddenly two years later, oh my God, aren't we so embarrassed that a single judge has the ability to invalidate for the entire country a law based on her constitutional analysis?
[00:58:06]  That's how our system works.
[00:58:08]  I think it works pretty well.
[00:58:10]  Whatever you think of her, she got confirmed by the Senate in accordance with the Constitution.
[00:58:13]  She's a real judge, just like everybody else.
[00:58:16]  But again, there's just no consistency in journalistic discourse, which in my view is the number one reason why there's so little faith and trust in our profession because they've deservedly lost that faith and trust by compromising every ethical duty that we often fail to fulfill, but at least we're supposed to aspire to.
[00:58:37]  Yeah.

=== Vaccine Mandate Punitive Measures (04:22) ===

[00:58:38]  She, Robin Given goes on to say this was not a case of a medical body taking note of silence.
[00:58:44]  This wasn't a case for raucous cheers.
[00:58:46]  And she's taking aim at the fact that this judge had the nerve to decide this case.
[00:58:51]  Meanwhile, it's like, I didn't see Robin Givens' article when Sonia Soda Mayor, who's sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court, said that we had 100,000 children in hospitals thanks to COVID, including on ventilators, when we hadn't even hit that number during the entire course of the two-year pandemic.
[00:59:06]  Never mind on that particular day, which is what she claimed and never corrected.
[00:59:11]  I don't remember her saying this is so wrong to have a person like this decide these cases.
[00:59:16]  What a fool.
[00:59:17]  All right, so we'll have to wait to see whether they appeal, but they shouldn't appeal.
[00:59:21]  And I'll tell you one story before you go.
[00:59:23]  Your background went black, which is kind of appropriate for my story.
[00:59:26]  Exactly.
[00:59:26]  Okay, I'll try and keep it that way.
[00:59:27]  It's fine.
[00:59:28]  So listen to this.
[00:59:29]  Speaking of the absurdity and the CDC, the White House is letting the CDC decide this thing on the airplanes.
[00:59:34]  Well, that's because the CDC actually is going to control it and the CDC is going to do whatever Joe Biden tells them to do.
[00:59:41]  I mean, that's the truth.
[00:59:42]  They have been all along.
[00:59:42]  The teachers union, it's a political body.
[00:59:44]  We learned that.
[00:59:45]  And it's because of the CDC that my 12-year-old has a mask on his face this week.
[00:59:49]  Again, he has a mask on his face because two Saturdays ago, he had exposure to a COVID positive kid.
[00:59:56]  So because he's not vaccinated, we had to keep him out of school all last week.
[01:00:02]  He's 100% fine.
[01:00:03]  He has no symptoms.
[01:00:04]  He doesn't have COVID.
[01:00:05]  He had to go remote all last week, which is not the same thing as real school.
[01:00:08]  We all know that.
[01:00:09]  And then he was allowed to go back this week.
[01:00:11]  Now it's 10, 11 days, right, since the contact.
[01:00:16]  And he has to wear a mask all week, a shitty cloth mask that doesn't come close to covering his face appropriately, nor will we ever put one on that does because this is all theater.
[01:00:26]  And he's already back to the school nurse, like, put it up, make sure it's on.
[01:00:29]  You have to wear it.
[01:00:30]  This is outrageous.
[01:00:32]  And what they're doing, Glenn, is trying to punish us for not vaccinating him, right?
[01:00:36]  Because the school has a mandatory vaccination policy.
[01:00:38]  Doesn't kick in.
[01:00:39]  Like you don't get expelled for not complying until you're 16 and he's 12.
[01:00:44]  And they're trying to force the parents because the vaccines don't prevent the spread.
[01:00:48]  They don't prevent the spread.
[01:00:49]  So what are we doing?
[01:00:51]  Like, if he had been vaccinated, he would have been no less likely, you know, to spread COVID if he had gotten it from that kid.
[01:00:57]  So this is punitive to try to force people to comply with their stupid mandate.
[01:01:02]  And our response so far has been to not complain.
[01:01:05]  You know what?
[01:01:06]  Fine.
[01:01:07]  Go ahead, punish our 12-year-old all you want.
[01:01:10]  We're not sticking him with your needle because of your pressure campaign.
[01:01:15]  I mean, COVID is over.
[01:01:17]  They've got to be kidding me with this.
[01:01:19]  And yet they, I don't know if it's, if it's exertion of power, what it is, but the school is just going to say it's the CDC.
[01:01:26]  We follow the CDC standard.
[01:01:29]  You know, I'll tell you when I kind of got radicalized about COVID.
[01:01:33]  It's amazing how your views really change when you become a parent, which I think is one reason why when people who don't have kids are insinuating themselves into policy debates that mostly affect kids, I get kind of resentful about that.
[01:01:46]  But when what really radicalized me about COVID was here in Brazil, there were extreme coercive measures against people who were unvaccinated.
[01:01:56]  You couldn't take your kids anywhere, like to the mall, to shopping centers, everywhere you go, you have to show a vaccine passport.
[01:02:02]  So when we got to the point where we had to make decisions for the three kids over whom we have legal guardianship, a nephew of ours, and then our two actual children, 17, 14, and 12 now, but, you know, a couple of years, a year younger, so last year, each one had different considerations.
[01:02:17]  And especially for our 11-year-old, you know, we were seriously contemplating not getting him vaccinated because we thought the risk outweighed the benefits.
[01:02:24]  The decision we realized had been taken away from us.
[01:02:28]  Like the punishments and the costs that would have been imposed on him were so great that we basically got forced into injecting into our own children substances that we weren't actually sure we wanted to inject into them for their own good.
[01:02:41]  And when your autonomy is deprived that way for no good reason, COVID was not a threat to healthy kids.
[01:02:49]  Being vaccinated did not mean that they couldn't pass the virus to other people.
[01:02:53]  It was purely punitive, as you said, which is so much of what the reporting we've been discussing also is punitive for people having the wrong political ideology.

=== Border Patrol Agent Assault (16:20) ===

[01:03:00]  That's what this is too.
[01:03:02]  That's when you get really resentful because it's a complete abuse of coercive power of the state to not just punish adults, but children, especially for making valid decisions that aren't the ones the state and the society are demanding that you make.
[01:03:18]  So well said.
[01:03:19]  One of the many reasons I love when Glenn speaks.
[01:03:22]  He always has just the right way of explaining things.
[01:03:24]  Glenn Greenwald, such a pleasure, as always.
[01:03:27]  Come back soon.
[01:03:28]  Happy to do that.
[01:03:29]  I told your producer anytime, Megan.
[01:03:30]  I'm always available for your show.
[01:03:32]  Great talking to you.
[01:03:33]  It's done.
[01:03:33]  It's a done deal.
[01:03:37]  We're joined by Brandon Judd.
[01:03:39]  He is the president of the National Border Patrol Council and an expert on border security and illegal immigration.
[01:03:45]  There's a lot to discuss today, including the record-breaking border numbers.
[01:03:49]  There were more than 200,000 migrant encounters in March.
[01:03:54]  That is the highest in more than 20 years.
[01:03:58]  More than 20 years.
[01:04:00]  And Title 42, the thing that lets us reject the migrants without entertaining their asylum claims at all.
[01:04:06]  It was basically a COVID measure that the CDC put in place, is about to end at the end of May.
[01:04:12]  But will President Biden let it?
[01:04:15]  He's starting to waver because he's coming under pressure from moderate Democrats who say, I'll be fired.
[01:04:20]  100% I'm going to be fired in October and November if you allow that to happen.
[01:04:24]  Brandon, thank you so much for being here.
[01:04:26]  Megan, it's good to be with you.
[01:04:28]  Thank you.
[01:04:28]  Okay, before we get to just how bad it is, because the last time you were on, we talked about this BS story about the Border Patrol agents allegedly whipping migrants at the border.
[01:04:38]  And it was a lie and we knew it.
[01:04:40]  And the media peddled it and the White House peddled it.
[01:04:44]  We played the soundbite a minute ago, but let's hear just a little bit of, well, this one's, I think, Jen Saki specifically saying that they, what that, what she believed the migrants did.
[01:04:58]  The mounted border patrol officers, president accused of whipping migrants, have been notified they will not face criminal charges.
[01:05:06]  So when is the president going to apologize to them?
[01:05:09]  There is a process and an investigation that's gone through the Department of Homeland Security.
[01:05:13]  I don't have any update on that.
[01:05:15]  The president said that they were whipping people, which would be a criminal offense, and they've been told they're not going to be criminally charged.
[01:05:20]  And there was an investigation into that.
[01:05:22]  And I'll let the Department of Homeland Security announce any conclusion of that investigation.
[01:05:26]  You accuse these officers of brutal and inappropriate measures now that they've been told they will not be criminally charged.
[01:05:32]  Will you apologize?
[01:05:33]  And Peter, there was an investigation into their behavior.
[01:05:36]  So that investigation is playing out.
[01:05:39]  Whenever it's going to be announced, the Department of Homeland Security will announce that.
[01:05:43]  And then I'm sure we'll have a comment on it after that.
[01:05:44]  Go ahead.
[01:05:46]  Okay.
[01:05:46]  That was her yesterday refusing to apologize.
[01:05:48]  The way she speaks is annoying.
[01:05:49]  It's irritating.
[01:05:50]  Okay.
[01:05:52]  But here she was in September singing a very different tune while the investigation was ongoing.
[01:05:58]  Listen.
[01:05:58]  Well, first, we understand and agree that this has been an incredibly heart-wrenching issue.
[01:06:04]  We've watched the photos of Haitians gathering under a bridge, many with families, and the horrific video of the CBP officers on horses using brutal and inappropriate measures against innocent people.
[01:06:16]  I think it's important to take to address that and separately address what our immigration policies are and understand that people are combining them, but that's why I asked that question.
[01:06:26]  Brutal and inappropriate.
[01:06:28]  So it's fine for her to say that before the investigation is complete.
[01:06:33]  But when asked if she will now apologize that they, since they've been exonerated, she will not do it.
[01:06:39]  She completely dodges, as has the president, the president who said someone will pay and accused them of strapping, strapping the migrants, which is not at all what happened.
[01:06:50]  And there's absolutely no willingness to own up to what they did and said, Brandon.
[01:06:54]  Yeah, there's very few things that get my blood pressure up than hearing things like this, just flat out lies.
[01:07:01]  When she says that there's an investigation by DHS, she's lying.
[01:07:05]  It's CBPOPR that is doing the investigation now.
[01:07:08]  When Peter Doocy asked her about what President Biden said, President Biden accused those agents of a criminal act, not an administrative act, a criminal act.
[01:07:19]  They have been cleared criminally.
[01:07:21]  They've been compelled to give a statement.
[01:07:23]  Once they are compelled to give a statement, they can no longer use that against them criminally.
[01:07:27]  The criminal charges are now gone.
[01:07:29]  There are no criminal charges.
[01:07:30]  The president owes those agents an apology because he accused them of a criminal act.
[01:07:35]  I would say that Jin Saki also accused them of a criminal act when she says that their actions were brutal.
[01:07:41]  That would also go into criminality.
[01:07:44]  She also is unwilling to issue an apology because, again, to issue an apology would mean that they were wrong.
[01:07:50]  This administration refuses to take any responsibility for anything that it does, regardless of whether they're accusing law enforcement of something or economic issues, you know, Department of State issues.
[01:08:03]  They refuse to take responsibility for anything.
[01:08:07]  And that's part of the reason why this country is in the state that we're in right now.
[01:08:11]  This is a continuation of the discussion I was having with Glenn Greenwald about a media and in this case, politicians who create a false narrative about somebody low on the power totem pole and then don't take any accountability for what the consequences of what they have done.
[01:08:26]  So in this case, they took video of Border Patrol agents trying to control migrants who were rushing the border and in no case whipping anybody.
[01:08:35]  They had reins of horses that they were twirling to try to control their horses.
[01:08:40]  And it got spun out of just a thin air into they were whipping.
[01:08:46]  They were whipping the migrants.
[01:08:47]  And even the Reuters reporter who was taking the photograph said, that's not what the photographs show.
[01:08:52]  You're not reporting the right stuff.
[01:08:54]  And yet here, just to remind folks, is an example of what we heard from the media at the time.
[01:09:01]  It's short, Soundbite 6.
[01:09:03]  I was not aware that whips, which come from the slave era, slavery era, were part of the package.
[01:09:10]  We saw that image of at least one Border Patrol agent using a whip potentially as a whip.
[01:09:15]  Even appearing to whip.
[01:09:18]  No accountability.
[01:09:19]  And those agents' lives were essentially ruined.
[01:09:22]  And that's the reason why the Biden administration is willing to go out and tell lies because they know that they're going to be covered by the mainstream media.
[01:09:30]  The mainstream media is never going to hold him accountable.
[01:09:33]  And if they don't hold him accountable, he's going to continue to tell lies to the American public because that's what his base wants him to do.
[01:09:41]  But let's set the stage.
[01:09:43]  Let's let all of your viewers and listeners understand what this situation was.
[01:09:48]  There were 10,000 people under a bridge that the Biden administration caused.
[01:09:52]  They caused this problem.
[01:09:53]  There were 10,000 people under the bridge.
[01:09:55]  All of these people thought that they were going to be released into the United States.
[01:09:59]  The message was getting out that they were going to be sent back to Haiti.
[01:10:03]  And so it was a powder keg.
[01:10:04]  DPS, it was so bad that DPS had to deploy hundreds of resources down to that bridge.
[01:10:11]  Those agents on horseback were specifically told to go to the river and stop anybody else from crossing and getting into that group.
[01:10:20]  Those were the orders that they were given.
[01:10:22]  And by the way, they were given those orders while complete and total control over DHS, which would include CBP and the Border Patrol.
[01:10:37]  Those agents did exactly what they were ordered to do.
[01:10:40]  And those orders were legal and they were humane.
[01:10:44]  They were just trying to keep people from crossing and getting into that group to create a bigger problem that would already existed that this administration, that this administration created.
[01:10:55]  But of course, because the images then come out and the administration is now embarrassed, they then blame the agents for some sort of wrongdoing.
[01:11:04]  when they did everything absolutely correct.
[01:11:07]  And of course, the mainstream media then justified the president's decision to accuse those agents of a criminal act.
[01:11:14]  Oh my God.
[01:11:15]  I mean, God forbid, talk about like punching down the president of the United States, picking on these Border Patrol agents, he's the one who put them in this situation, then kicking them when they're down and then not owning up to it, not just saying even through his press secretary, we got it wrong.
[01:11:31]  We're sorry.
[01:11:32]  It is cowardly.
[01:11:33]  And meantime, he's in the midst of creating more danger for the Border Patrol agents down there by letting in migrants by record numbers.
[01:11:41]  I mentioned the number in the intro that were now highest, the highest numbers of encounters that we've seen in 20 years.
[01:11:51]  This is the third time that under the Biden administration, there have been more than 200,000 migrants at the border.
[01:11:56]  All the numbers are up.
[01:11:57]  Individuals, families, unaccompanied children, they're all up at record numbers.
[01:12:02]  And this is before we've lifted Title 42, the thing that allows us to just deny asylum because of COVID and just send people back right away.
[01:12:10]  And I know you believe, even though that Title 42 is supposed to be getting lifted at the end of May, now there are reports Biden might be wavering because of this pressure from the moderate Dems who know that they're going to get booted out of office if we have an even greater influx than the 7,000 people a day who are flooding across the border.
[01:12:27]  That's who we catch, never mind how many make it, you know, who we don't catch.
[01:12:32]  So he's wavering a little, but I know you say he may have already sort of unofficially started to lift that Title 42.
[01:12:40]  What do you mean?
[01:12:41]  Yes.
[01:12:42]  Well, let me first go back and address something that is currently happening.
[01:12:46]  President Biden's ineptness doesn't even know boundaries.
[01:12:49]  It doesn't even know borders.
[01:12:50]  If you look at what's going on in Mexico right now, you have border officials in Mexico that are quitting their jobs, as reported by the New York Post and something that we already knew about, but they're quitting their jobs because of this influx of people that are committing acts against Mexican officials that are trying to control immigration in their own country.
[01:13:12]  So Biden's policies are not just affecting the United States.
[01:13:15]  They're also greatly affecting the Mexican government and how they're able to control illegal immigration.
[01:13:22]  But when you look at it, you know, to answer your question about whether President Biden has already gotten rid of Title 42, Title 42 only applies right now under this administration to a handful of countries.
[01:13:33]  The vast majority of countries, he's already cut out from Title 42.
[01:13:37]  And that's why we've seen this huge number in illegal crossings that have been taking place right now.
[01:13:45]  What he has now done is because those numbers have now increased in the Northern Triangle countries, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, countries that were still amenable to Title 42, because those numbers have jumped up exponentially.
[01:14:00]  ICE doesn't have the resources to send them back to their countries and their flights are completely full.
[01:14:07]  So what's happening now is we're putting them in expedited removal proceedings, but that's a farce.
[01:14:13]  You know, by name, it sounds really good, but nobody is being removed.
[01:14:17]  All you have to do once you're processed for Title VIII, once you're put into an expedited removal proceeding, all they have to do is claim a fear of going back to their country.
[01:14:27]  And now that expedited removal gets canceled and they're given a notice to appear, which ultimately means that they're going to be released.
[01:14:35]  So Title 42, even though it still applies to these countries, it's not being used the same way that it was under President Trump.
[01:14:45]  And that's why this administration's immigration policies have failed so bad.
[01:14:49]  And that's why we've seen this huge influx.
[01:14:52]  And once Title 42 goes away altogether, it's going to be nothing but chaos on the border.
[01:14:57]  They were saying there could be up to 100,000 people right now waiting for that day, like waiting for this day in May when it's lifted and getting ready to rush the border.
[01:15:06]  I mean, the Biden administration keeps saying we're coming up with plans.
[01:15:08]  We have plans.
[01:15:10]  Do we have plans?
[01:15:11]  Can we handle that kind of influx?
[01:15:13]  There are no plans.
[01:15:14]  There has been nothing that has been passed down to the rank and file on how this is going to work once Title 42 goes away.
[01:15:22]  All we know is that we're going to have a huge influx of people.
[01:15:25]  We're going to be pulled out of the field.
[01:15:27]  Our resources are going to be pulled off of the border, put into administrative duties, processing people, releasing people.
[01:15:33]  That's just going to encourage more people to come.
[01:15:35]  You know, if you look right now, we have stretches of border that aren't even patrolled.
[01:15:41]  At any given time in Del Rio, we could have as much as 250 miles that aren't being patrolled.
[01:15:48]  If you look at Yuma, at times we have 90% of our resources in 150 miles that are doing administrative duties rather than patrolling the border.
[01:15:57]  What's that caused?
[01:15:59]  It's caused huge gaps in our coverage that the criminal cartels are then able to exploit.
[01:16:04]  There should be no question why the rise in the number of drugs on the streets today has coincided with illegal immigration.
[01:16:12]  The cartels thrive on our policies.
[01:16:15]  And any time that we invite people through the catch and release program, when we invite people to cross our borders illegally, the cartels are then able to get their higher value products, their dangerous products into our communities.
[01:16:27]  And that's why so many of our children are dying today.
[01:16:30]  And that is what is so frustrating.
[01:16:32]  This administration prioritizes its base, its open border pundits that want a complete open border rather than protecting our children and United States citizens from the dangerous drugs that these cartels are bringing into the United States.
[01:16:48]  Can you expand on that?
[01:16:49]  Like, what do the cartels do?
[01:16:51]  And what drugs do they get over their southern border and how do they do it when they see us letting our guard down?
[01:16:57]  So these are now transnational criminal organizations.
[01:16:59]  When I originally came in the Border Patrol back in 1997, you still had mom and pop organizations that smuggled.
[01:17:06]  95% of the people that we dealt with were coming from Mexico.
[01:17:11]  A mere 5% were coming from other countries such as Brazil, the Northern Triangle countries.
[01:17:16]  But the vast majority of people that we dealt with were coming from Mexico.
[01:17:20]  Now these transnational criminal organizations are going throughout the world and they're able to advertise their services to people, tell them that if they give them several thousands of dollars, they'll get them to the United States-Mexico border.
[01:17:33]  They'll be able to cross the United States and they'll be able to be released into the United States, which is ultimately what they want.
[01:17:39]  So these cartels get a bunch of clientele.
[01:17:42]  They flood our resources with illegal immigration.
[01:17:45]  We then have to respond to those illegal immigration events, take those people into custody, take them back to our stations, which takes agents out of the field.
[01:17:54]  And that's where the cartels, that's how the cartels create those gaps.
[01:17:58]  They flood us with illegal immigrants, create those gaps, and then they cross their products such as fentanyl, opioids, cocaine.
[01:18:06]  They even cross criminal aliens, aliens from special interest countries.
[01:18:10]  That's why it's so dangerous right now.
[01:18:12]  And what we see is going to have a large impact on the United States.
[01:18:16]  We're already seeing it with the drug overdoses, but it's also going to have an impact on the United States with all the criminals that are coming in.
[01:18:22]  You got to remember, we're apprehending about 8,000 people per day right now, but about 2,000 people are able to evade apprehension and escape into the United States.
[01:18:34]  We don't know who those people are, where they're coming from, or what their intentions are here in the United States.
[01:18:40]  That is, and just to remind the audience, Obama's DHS secretary, Jay Johnson, said 4,000 people crossing the border a day is a crisis.
[01:18:47]  4,000.
[01:18:48]  And you just put the number at more like 8,000.
[01:18:51]  And it's not going down.
[01:18:53]  It's going to go up.
[01:18:54]  It's going to go up no matter what Biden does, you know, based on the way he's handled it so far.
[01:18:58]  And it's certainly going to go up if Title 42 gets lifted at the end of May as planned.
[01:19:04]  So can we talk about, you mentioned it at the beginning of your remarks.
[01:19:08]  So we're talking about, okay, the cartels exploit the distraction by the Border Patrol by dealing with all the migrants who are running over, who are orchestrated in large part by the cartels in the first place.

=== Immigration Reform Solutions (11:20) ===

[01:19:20]  But when you're dealing with those people who have crossed the border who you have caught the seven to eight thousand a day, what happens with them?
[01:19:27]  I had a very interesting conversation with Stephen Miller, who just gave me some alarming facts on how they're kind of just told, okay, here's your asylum date.
[01:19:37]  If they say they want to sign, like, here's your date, you know, honor system.
[01:19:40]  Hope you show up.
[01:19:42]  And they, they're never going to get asylum.
[01:19:43]  They don't really get asylum.
[01:19:45]  But if they don't get asylum, they're just sort of turned out without, they're not like kicked out.
[01:19:50]  It's not like a, okay, and now Brandon will escort you back to Mexico.
[01:19:54]  So explain how it works that they wind up staying here.
[01:19:58]  So we give them a de facto legal status to be here.
[01:20:02]  When we issue them the NTA and we release them from our custody, that's a de facto legal status.
[01:20:06]  Now, there's a series of court appearances that they're supposed to show up to.
[01:20:09]  The first one, they're supposed to present themselves before CIS, Citizens and Immigration Service.
[01:20:14]  They then go through a credible fear interview.
[01:20:16]  CIS finds that the vast majority of people have a credible fear because it's a much lower bar than actually asking for asylum.
[01:20:25]  Once they find that there's a credible fear, they then release them.
[01:20:27]  They're able to get work permits.
[01:20:29]  They're able to get driver's licenses.
[01:20:30]  They're able to put their children in school.
[01:20:32]  They're able to get all of the social benefits that exist here in the United States.
[01:20:36]  They become de facto U.S. citizens, if you will.
[01:20:40]  What they do is they'll show up to all of their initial court appearances because by showing up, they're able to keep all of those benefits.
[01:20:48]  Once it comes down to the final court appearance, where they then have to prove that they have a legitimate claim to asylum, that's where they disappear.
[01:20:58]  They just disappear into what President Obama coined the shadows of society.
[01:21:04]  And because this administration doesn't go after those people, then a warrant is issued for their arrest, but they're now gone.
[01:21:11]  You can't find them and they'll never be removed from the country.
[01:21:14]  So if you look at the number of people that have been released into the country since President Biden has been in office, there's been over 800,000 people that have been released into the country that cross our borders illegally, or in other words, they were rewarded for violating our laws.
[01:21:29]  Those people will never be removed from the United States because they won't show up to their court dates.
[01:21:36]  You also have to remember the low percentage of people that actually are granted asylum.
[01:21:43]  Immigration judges, when they hear the cases, it's only between 7 and 14% that actually have a legitimate asylum claim.
[01:21:51]  Most of the people are coming here for economic reasons.
[01:21:54]  They claim that they have a fear of going back to their country, but they can't prove that fear.
[01:21:58]  They're coming here for economic reasons.
[01:22:00]  And economic is not a good, is not one of those things that meets the standard of law for asylum in the United States.
[01:22:08]  Just because you don't like the economic circumstances in your own country doesn't mean you can violate U.S. laws.
[01:22:14]  But in effect, this administration is allowing that to happen.
[01:22:17]  So how is it, if we've had Title 42 in place, you know, it happened first under Trump and it remained in place under Biden, that people are crossing the border and getting asylum hearings at all right now?
[01:22:29]  Aren't they not supposed to?
[01:22:31]  They shouldn't be.
[01:22:32]  But this administration gave a great many cutouts to different countries.
[01:22:36]  Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, China, all of these different countries were given carve outs from Title 42.
[01:22:46]  So if you look at under President Trump, it was about 95% of the people that crossed the border illegally, they were expelled under Title 42.
[01:22:54]  There were a small percentage that were coming from war and torn countries or countries that legitimately had a need for asylum.
[01:23:04]  Those people were allowed to make their claims, but they were held in custody.
[01:23:08]  What we're seeing now is only 52% of the people that cross our borders illegally are expelled under Title 42.
[01:23:15]  The other 48% are processed under Title VIII.
[01:23:18]  And when we process them under Title VIII, that's when they get released into the United States.
[01:23:23]  And that, again, is why so many people are crossing our borders illegally.
[01:23:27]  That's why we have the explosion.
[01:23:29]  You know, when Jay Johnson said that 4,000 people a day is a crisis, we have the resources to handle about 3,000.
[01:23:36]  Once it becomes 4,000 to 5,000, it's a crisis.
[01:23:39]  Once it's 8,000 like what we're dealing with now, we've just completely, we've lost complete control of our border.
[01:23:44]  And that's where we're at today.
[01:23:46]  The latest reporting from Fox News, I think, is over 40, it's 40 plus people who are on the terrorist database have been stopped at the southern border.
[01:23:56]  It was between originally they reported 23, but I think they upped the number to over 40 coming across the southern border who were on terror watch lists as recently as 2021.
[01:24:07]  That's concerning.
[01:24:08]  And I know that there are a lot of bad, you know, like murderers, pedophiles, and so on.
[01:24:13]  It's not just potential terrorists, but how concerned should we be about that?
[01:24:18]  We should be extremely concerned, but the White House continues to downplay that as well.
[01:24:22]  In that same press conference where Jensaki refused to apologize to those agents, she downplayed that as well.
[01:24:29]  She said only 0.005% of the people that cross the border are on the terrorist watch list.
[01:24:35]  But again, what she doesn't address is she doesn't address the gotaways, people that want to escape apprehension.
[01:24:41]  The cartels know who they are and they work very hard to ensure that those people don't get caught.
[01:24:46]  We were lucky to get those 40 people, but now you have to look at the 2,000 people every single day.
[01:24:53]  2,000 people are able to evade apprehension.
[01:24:57]  Like I said before, we don't know who they are.
[01:25:00]  We don't know whether they're coming from Syria, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Yemen.
[01:25:06]  We don't know if they're coming from the Middle Eastern countries who obviously want to do us harm, Iran, Iraq.
[01:25:13]  We just don't know who they are.
[01:25:14]  And there's no intel out there telling us when they're coming.
[01:25:17]  Those 40 individuals that we took into custody, it's not like we were given intel saying, hey, look out for these people that are going to cross in this particular area.
[01:25:25]  We were lucky to get them.
[01:25:27]  We were lucky to apprehend them.
[01:25:29]  And then their names matched names that were on the terrorist watch list.
[01:25:32]  There's 2,000 people that are evading apprehension every single day.
[01:25:38]  There's hundreds right now as you and I are speaking.
[01:25:41]  Meanwhile, we're enabling the endangerment of these people who are, you know, the good-hearted people who really are, whether it's seeking asylum for genuine fear and so on reasons, or it's just economic betterment, they're making the run for it.
[01:25:55]  And a lot of times, if it is, you know, young women, if it's kids, it's very dangerous ground to have to cover and the Rio Grande.
[01:26:03]  And I know that there are drowning deaths.
[01:26:05]  You guys are trying, you know, you do what you can to prevent it.
[01:26:08]  But a lot of the times you have to, you see people die because it's a treacherous journey.
[01:26:15]  You know, Megan, I wouldn't be discussing this with you right now if I didn't know that you believed in the rule of law, if I didn't know that you had a heart and that you understood that we are the most compassionate country in the world.
[01:26:27]  And we do need to take care of individuals that are coming from war-in-turn country, war-torn countries, or from countries where they will actually do harm to people because of their political beliefs, their religious beliefs, and all of those different things that qualify for asylum.
[01:26:42]  I know that you recognize that.
[01:26:43]  I know you understand that.
[01:26:44]  We all do that.
[01:26:45]  We want to take care of individuals.
[01:26:48]  We want to be the greatest country on earth.
[01:26:51]  But if we don't follow the rule of law, if we don't recognize that the laws were put in place to protect vulnerable individuals, not people that are trying to flee from economic circumstances, but vulnerable individuals that will literally lose their lives or will be tortured, we just lose everything in this country and we become no better than the countries that these people are fleeing from.
[01:27:15]  And that's the problem that we're seeing today.
[01:27:18]  We've gone from compassion to apathy.
[01:27:21]  We've gone from compassion to believing that whatever is politically best for an individual that's in the White House at the time, that's what we're going to do.
[01:27:30]  And unfortunately, the media enables that.
[01:27:32]  And that's why there's not as much public outcry as there is.
[01:27:36]  Luckily, there are enough people out there that are trying to get the message out to the American public to tell them what's really going on on the border so that we can actually get this problem under control.
[01:27:47]  Look at the most recent polls, and illegal immigration, border security, is one of the highest things on the minds of the American public.
[01:27:55]  Not really.
[01:27:56]  Thanks to the mainstream media.
[01:27:58]  That's what's crazy.
[01:27:59]  Like, if you look at any poll, it's inflation, economy, immigration.
[01:28:04]  And now, I mean, COVID used to be up there, but it's no longer people have moved down from COVID, although the CDC doesn't know that.
[01:28:09]  But immigration continues to be a major concern for all of the reasons we're discussing.
[01:28:14]  And I wonder because, you know, as I was reading your tweet about, you know, these crossers who are drowning in the Rio Grande, and you were saying something like that, we're not going to see, we're not going to see AOC crying at the banks of the Rio Grande over that, right?
[01:28:28]  Like, where's her concern now that it's a Democrat in the White House?
[01:28:33]  And that's how you know it's politics.
[01:28:34]  But, you know, you started this off talking about how Democrats are breaking from the president.
[01:28:39]  They're not just breaking from him, they're running from him right now.
[01:28:42]  They recognize that they're in jeopardy of losing their next election on this issue and this issue alone.
[01:28:49]  And that's why they're encouraging the president to keep Title 42 in place.
[01:28:53]  But the reality is there are simple solutions.
[01:28:56]  You know, Jensaki, in that, again, in that same press conference, she said that she's willing to work with anybody that has solutions.
[01:29:03]  That's not true.
[01:29:04]  They've been given the solutions.
[01:29:06]  I personally have met with DHS.
[01:29:08]  I've met with Secretary Marcus.
[01:29:10]  We have given the solutions, solutions that have worked in the past that have been proven to work.
[01:29:14]  All we have to do is challenge the Flores decision.
[01:29:18]  Allow us to hold 17, 16, 15-year-olds in custody beyond 15 days until their deportation or asylum proceedings.
[01:29:26]  Once you challenge Flores, it allows us to do that.
[01:29:28]  Then hire immigration judges on a short-term basis.
[01:29:32]  And I say short-term basis because the American public should not have to burden this.
[01:29:37]  It shouldn't be the taxpayers that are funding what's currently happening on the border.
[01:29:41]  Hire these immigration judges on a short-term basis, hold these people in custody, pending those asylum and deportation proceedings, and people will stop coming.
[01:29:51]  The argument is always: well, we don't have the resources to hold hundreds of thousands of people per month.
[01:29:56]  You won't have to.
[01:29:57]  Once you start holding the first people that cross the border illegally, hold them in custody, that word spreads throughout the world, people stop coming.
[01:30:05]  It's like a light switch.
[01:30:07]  The migrant protection protocols prove that.
[01:30:09]  Those are the solutions.
[01:30:11]  Unfortunately, this administration wants amnesty.
[01:30:14]  They don't want a solution to the border security crisis.
[01:30:18]  They want to be able to give amnesty.
[01:30:20]  And they recognize that if we get the border under control, then there's less possibility that they're going to get amnesty.
[01:30:26]  want this chaos because then they can continue to go out there and preach.
[01:30:30]  This is why we need immigration reform.
[01:30:31]  And immigration reform, all that means is amnesty.
[01:30:34]  Take a look at how they do it in Australia.
[01:30:37]  There is a way of deterring people from coming.

=== YouTube Subscriber Milestone (00:42) ===

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[01:30:46]  Thank you, Megan.
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[01:31:06]  Would you go and subscribe?
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