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The CNN Debacle Explained
00:11:41
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| Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. | |
| It is a debacle unlike any in American broadcasting history. | |
| So, how did the most trusted name in news become the joke of the journalism world so quickly? | |
| The truth is, it was over before it started. | |
| I used to be a CNN fan, believe it or not. | |
| I used to watch it at night while getting ready for the Kelly file on Fox News, where our ratings trounced theirs so badly that I stopped looking at their numbers. | |
| There was no competition, it wasn't interesting. | |
| The only interesting numbers were internal at Fox. | |
| Did I beat Bill? | |
| Did I beat Sean? | |
| Did they beat me? | |
| I never looked at CNN, never mind MSNBC, never. | |
| But I liked their anchors, and I felt like I was getting the straight skinny on most issues. | |
| The show that preceded my own at Fox, the O'Reilly Factor, was an opinion show, so I didn't really rely on that for straight news. | |
| Plus, it was pre-taped, so you'd never get breaking news on Bill's hour. | |
| As much as I've had my beefs with Bill O'Reilly, he's an incredibly gifted broadcaster. | |
| I would never take that away from him. | |
| One of the very, very best. | |
| And so, it took a lot to draw my attention away from his hour. | |
| But before my own show, I needed to stay on top of the breaking news, and CNN was live and back then, pretty fair. | |
| I watched that die before my very eyes. | |
| Trump ended CNN. | |
| First, Jeff Zucker saw dollar signs in his eyes when he saw the Trump pressers and rallies that were entertaining, dynamic, unpredictable, and absolutely ratings gold. | |
| We decided on my own show not to take those rallies, even though we would have benefited from the ratings too, but we won without them. | |
| But we decided not to take the rallies because we knew very well we would not do it for his opponents, and it wouldn't be fair to do it for him. | |
| Zucker went a different route, taking each and every one to get some sort of number on the board for his struggling anchors. | |
| He didn't care about ethics, he just wanted to win. | |
| Then, Trump won the presidency and took aim at Jeff Zucker and his coverage, which by then had turned very nasty to Trump. | |
| When he was a joke, he could be indulged. | |
| When he was winning, he had to be destroyed. | |
| And Jeff Zucker took it personally. | |
| Many of the CNN anchors and staff felt it was their mission to take Trump down, that he was a uniquely evil politician, and covering him required a sacrifice of objectivity. | |
| Or maybe they just convinced themselves that he was objectively terrible and there was no other way to examine his presidency. | |
| Either way, little by little, they killed their own reputation. | |
| Night by night, as they mocked his voters, derided them all as racists over and over, misogynists and bigots, and misled the public on things like Russia Gate without ever correcting themselves. | |
| They telegraphed their hatred, not just for Trump, but for the right half of the country, their smug superiority. | |
| And the right half of the country and indeed the center, many of whom wound up voting for Trump, heard that message loud and clear. | |
| Bad move. | |
| I know a lot of Republicans who used to watch CNN. | |
| Maybe Fox wasn't for them. | |
| Maybe they thought Fox had gone too all in for Trump. | |
| But CNN became unwatchable. | |
| It turned into MSNBC without the same intellectual honesty to admit its agenda. | |
| They took hosts who had a certain kind of benign appeal and turned them into partisan hacks. | |
| Boring and benign is one thing. | |
| Biased and better than you is another. | |
| No sane Republican or centrist viewer remained. | |
| For a while, CNN enjoyed the same ratings boost that Trump brought everyone. | |
| And then he lost, and so did they. | |
| They helped kill their own cash cow because in the end, ideology was more important to them. | |
| And the stank they created in their own newsroom remained. | |
| The public remembered and their ratings never recovered. | |
| In the first quarter of 2022, CNN was third of the top three in cable news, averaging less than 900,000 viewers in primetime, down 56% from 2021. | |
| More recently, it's gotten even worse. | |
| Their primetime average in April was less than 700,000. | |
| I would have been fired so fast at Fox News if I had been averaging anything close to that. | |
| In the overall number, we were averaging over 3 million. | |
| They're under 700,000 in the overall. | |
| That's an easy number to get. | |
| And around 165,000 in the key demo of 25 to 50 or four-year-olds, which is the main number they care about because that's what they can base their advertising fees on. | |
| 165,000 in the key demo, 165,000 out of the 300 plus million people in America. | |
| That's nothing. | |
| That's embarrassing. | |
| The daytime numbers, by the way, are even more dreadful. | |
| This is five alarm fire stuff. | |
| This is basement dregs. | |
| This is too humiliating to show your face at industry cocktail party numbers. | |
| And what did they decide to do? | |
| Offer more CNN. | |
| CNN Plus. | |
| That's what the people want. | |
| More of what they're already not watching. | |
| Only we'll charge them 60 bucks a year to watch it. | |
| Is it any wonder no one tuned in? | |
| But the biggest mistake CNN made was thinking their talent had the kind of relationships with its audience that Fox News does. | |
| They looked at Fox Nation, the digital offshoot of Fox, and thought, we can do that. | |
| More content from our anchors and hosts who share the same bias of our anchors and surely the people will come. | |
| In other words, the anchors will be on there doing other things than news. | |
| And then we'll hire a bunch of people like Eva Longoria who have the same bias as our anchors. | |
| And yes, the audience will come. | |
| But CNN has never had the kind of fan devotion that Fox News has. | |
| CNN divides its fans with MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS. | |
| Nobody's rabid about CNN. | |
| It's just what's on, or used to be, at the airport. | |
| And it's what we used to tune into on the big news events because they flood the field with resources. | |
| They've been riding on the reputation built by guys like Bernard Shaw for years now. | |
| Fox has die-hard fans. | |
| Conservative media in general has die-hards because people are so grateful for something that is unlike the rest of it all. | |
| A channel or now digital media offerings that pushes back against the open hatred for conservatives or anyone who's a bit right-leaning and their ideals from homeschooling to abortion to gun rights to parental rights, free speech, small government, and all the rest of it. | |
| Conservative media consumers feel a connection to their anchors of choice because they know that they don't look down on them or on this country. | |
| And that creates a kind of loyalty CNN will simply never know. | |
| So no, their viewers did not want more Brian Stelter. | |
| They did not want Rex Chapman, some guy who started off by co-opting cube dog videos on Twitter and then got very partisan. | |
| And like so many of the CNN lineup, stayed in that extremely partisan lane. | |
| They did not want parenting lessons from Mandison Cooper or a talk show from Don Lemon or Chris Wallace, who never pulled a number even on Fox. | |
| Never mind on CNN Plus. | |
| And the lesson here is not streamers are struggling. | |
| The lesson here is go back to basics, CNN. | |
| Try. | |
| At least try to check your extreme bias or at a minimum, own it and then balance it out with some kind of ideological diversity. | |
| When I was in the primetime lineup of Fox, we had Hannity, a conservative, Greta, a Democrat, O'Reilly, a populist, and me, a rightly leaning independent. | |
| You never knew what you were going to get in terms of opinion or where someone would go on an issue, and it worked. | |
| This is a moment for CNN to do some serious soul searching. | |
| I don't expect any apologies for all the misleading they've done with their audience, but straight news coverage would be a delightful change. | |
| The new management is suggesting that this is their goal. | |
| They've got new ownership and new management. | |
| Let's hope it happens. | |
| Or CNN, the mothership, is headed for the very same result as its digital offshoot. | |
| And a lot of people are going to be out of their jobs. | |
| Back with me again for the full show. | |
| And with reaction to my opening is the host of Louder with Crowder, my pal, Stephen Crowder. | |
| Stephen, originally you are of the cable news wars. | |
| We were together at Fox News for some time there. | |
| I don't know that CNN can ever get it back, but I certainly don't think the answer to its struggles that it's been facing post-Trump was more of the shitty product that we'd been rejecting for years. | |
| Well, thank you for, can we say shitty? | |
| We can. | |
| Oh, it's just weird hearing shitty come out of your mouth. | |
| Speaking of which, that's why I have this shitty, you're catching me between sketches here, this kind of Joe Dirt look. | |
| So it's not a new look for me, and I'm incredibly self-conscious on air now that I see myself next to you. | |
| So apologies. | |
| Yeah, you know, one thing I will say, Megan, is I just pray that they keep Brian Stelter. | |
| No, no, I'm serious. | |
| What would we do with that? | |
| I'm dead serious. | |
| Yeah, because I want him there. | |
| I want Brian Stelter there. | |
| I want to, rather than have to, you know, present the leftist argument myself. | |
| I never want to strawman anyone. | |
| I just want to point. | |
| I just want Brian Stelter to be there like a mascot. | |
| The funniest thing to me that happened at CNN was, you know, they had this new CEO coming in and he said, we want to get back to news. | |
| We want to get back to, you know, delivering the straight facts. | |
| We've gotten too far into opinion. | |
| That was all he said. | |
| And Brian Stelter, you know, you heard the rumblings everywhere. | |
| It was reported, said, oh my God, I'm going to get fired. | |
| Everything is in that reaction. | |
| I mean, I'm hearing he might be getting pushed out. | |
| I mean, I hope he does not. | |
| I absolutely, I'm serious. | |
| I hope he does not. | |
| We have had so much material. | |
| I mean, once Chris Cuomo was gone, we lost like at least 15% of our of our sketches. | |
| But you still have Don Lemon. | |
| We'll see. | |
| Yes. | |
| Yes, we still have Don Lemon, but there's such a, so many, you know, victim statuses. | |
| You know, it's, there's a hierarchy in victim class, and there's depending on the week, if you're African American, if you're gay, and then they kind of jockey for position if you're trans, you know, in the LGBTQ kind of rearrange it like a conjunction junction sort of schoolhouse rock thing. | |
| But so I have to be careful with Don Lemon because he's a gay black man and it's just anything I say can be it'll somehow be a hate crime. | |
| So which is literally what he said when Jeff Zucker got fired, he went in the air and was like, I just want to remind everybody that I'm a black, gay man when Jeff Zucker put on the air. | |
| It's like, as you're thinking about firing people and the old boss is going, I just want to remind you, in case you weren't aware, that I'm black and I'm gay and I'm in the process. | |
| Exactly. | |
| In case we've forgotten, at the same time, Brian Stelter wanted us to be reminded that he's super heterosexual. | |
| It's like me going on the air and being like, I just want everyone to remember that I have lady parts. | |
|
Big Tech and Conservative Media
00:14:15
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| I've got lady parts just to FYI. | |
| In case you're wondering, I've got them. | |
| Boy, you can get away with anything here on Sirius, Megan. | |
| It's a whole new me, Steven. | |
| It's a whole new you. | |
| I'm seeing a holder inside of you. | |
| I will say, though, I didn't get started on cable news. | |
| You know, I got started acting and stand up comedy, really, which sort of took me full circle doing. | |
| I was not a child star. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| I, you know, I did a voice on a PBS cartoon and the most embarrassing thing was I had to do a Kwanza rap on that show, Arthur, as one of the friends. | |
| And I was a kid and I knew that Kwanzaa was bullcrap. | |
| I just did a little bit of research. | |
| I thought, well, this is an African holiday. | |
| And I remember I was in the seventh grade. | |
| And I said, well, it was created by Ron Everett. | |
| And I'm reading the court document and he committed sex crimes. | |
| This is what I have to talk about. | |
| And I brought up some producers. | |
| I'm like, do we really want to be doing this? | |
| Like, well, you have to, because it's a multicultural Christmas special. | |
| I said, okay, fine. | |
| But I did stand up and I was early, an early adopter with YouTube. | |
| And that sort of is what took me into Fox News. | |
| And I will be the first to say it was not the world that I was supposed to be in. | |
| It was a constant back and forth with the second floor. | |
| And it was no one's fault there. | |
| I had no business being there. | |
| It just sort of happened because I went out and had a few debates. | |
| And then they scheduled me a regular debate segment with Bob Menendez as the senator's daughter. | |
| And next thing I know, I'm on cable news just because I was the only sort of person with that point of view coming from my background. | |
| And I got to tell you, you know, I was, I became disenchanted with all of it. | |
| And I know that you've talked about this. | |
| There are some great people there. | |
| But, you know, peeking behind the curtain, not everyone is who they always appear to be. | |
| And for me, that was, you know, that was pretty disappointing because it was one thing I assumed that everyone was a piece of crap in the entertainment industry because I'd worked in it long enough. | |
| And I kind of thought I went in wide-eyed and maybe a little bit, you know, earnest with sort of the conservative media sphere. | |
| And I mean, I think, I think, I think people, I think people know what I'm, what I'm saying without saying it. | |
| Not everyone is exactly how they appear. | |
| You know, the news industry is different than the entertainment industry, but they have some similarities. | |
| And I do think big egos and a general attraction to crazy personalities is a common theme. | |
| Like there are a lot of lunatics drawn to both professions, people who are working something out, people who want to be famous as opposed to actually act or in the news business, actually deliver the news. | |
| And I remember when I was young at Fox, I don't know, I guess maybe I won't say who said this to me, but it was an older distinguished gentleman there. | |
| And he said, you know what I like about you? | |
| You're not a silly girl. | |
| There are a lot of silly girls running around Fox News and you're not one of them. | |
| And here's the truth. | |
| He's not wrong. | |
| There are a lot of people in news in general who go because they want to see their faces on TV and that's really it. | |
| Or in Hollywood, they're trying to work out some burning hole that their parents created in their bellies and they think that that industry is going to make it better. | |
| And I think in both instances, it ends in ruination. | |
| Yeah, no, I think you're right. | |
| That wasn't the direction I was expecting you to go when you said an older gentleman at Fox News said, you know what I like about you? | |
| I thought we're still on serious. | |
| She's going to go for it. | |
| Yeah, no, you're right. | |
| But I guess, you know, in the realm of, you know, comedy, which we've gotten back into me and Dave Landau since the pandemic. | |
| So people can go check it out the website, oneplug herelivecrow.com slash tour. | |
| And they've all been sellouts. | |
| We're incredibly grateful because there's a craving for this content. | |
| But as a comedian versus, you know, being really sort of a conservative commentator, it would be fully expected for me to be hanging from a nice Windsor knot in my devil tree. | |
| I hate to wait. | |
| Why does just take a sip of water? | |
| Why? | |
| What do you mean? | |
| Why? | |
| Well, I'm just saying, people expect comics to be nuts. | |
| And it's a little bit true. | |
| You know, it is. | |
| I'm a little bit of an anomaly there in that I'm not someone who is, I think, cynical about everything. | |
| But, you know, comedians in general. | |
| And I think this is one thing that I always sort of, you know, with a lot of people in media, and this is both Fox News and MSNBC and not everybody, I want to be clear. | |
| But sort of the same thing you even see with Bill Maher, it's, you know, it's a day late and a dollar short where I'm always watching it and going, okay, is there a little bit more? | |
| You know, are you going to give me some insight here? | |
| Or are you going to give me maybe some additional resources? | |
| I mean, that's why with our show, I don't know of any other show where we basically post a bibliography every single show. | |
| It's two hours live and it goes on the website and you can check every single link and every single show. | |
| I am the person who does. | |
| I actually click on them and they're legit and they take me to good places. | |
| Well, thank you. | |
| I appreciate it. | |
| And if you notice, too, unless it's an exclusive story from a conservative site, we almost always try and use PubMed. | |
| We almost always try and use an objective source or a left-leaning source if we can, just because I think it stems from the fact that I was raised in a socialist, effectively a socialist province of Quebec. | |
| People who are Canadian out there know what I'm talking about. | |
| And I was forced to defend my views. | |
| And so I was always looking for resources and they weren't readily available to me in French Canada. | |
| You know, you have liberals and then you have liberal separatists, basically. | |
| So coming to the United States and seeing people in conservative media, I always sort of wanted someone to provide what it was that I was looking for. | |
| And this is the only way I know how to do it. | |
| And I think that's probably what you're seeing with CNN. | |
| You know, you really only know how to be successful at whatever it is that made you successful. | |
| I mean, this is why you'll see some great, great athletes who don't make great coaches. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Because you can't teach it. | |
| You can't teach a God-given, you know, 40-inch vertical or whatever it is, depending on which athlete that we're discussing. | |
| And you'll see some people who are sort of middle of the road athletes who worked really hard become great coaches. | |
| But generally, if you're successful at something, you sort of try and copy paste that right with someone else. | |
| And with CNN, in that case, I think they said with CNN Plus, hope you like more crap. | |
| That's the problem, right? | |
| Is it like, I didn't even know about a lot of the stuff they were putting out. | |
| Eva Longoria had a show over there. | |
| And apparently they were launching it with reruns of Anthony Bourdain's show. | |
| And I mean, when you are launching a new product with the shows of a guy who's been dead for several years, you know, you're in trouble. | |
| Like that, you may be wanting for content. | |
| And look, my favorite person at CNN is Jake Tapper. | |
| I like him. | |
| I think he's a good man. | |
| I think he tries his best to be fair. | |
| I realize he wasn't a fan. | |
| He wasn't a fan of Donald Trump. | |
| I get that. | |
| Nobody there was. | |
| But of the CNNers, I think by far he was the most fair guy. | |
| I feel bad for guys like that. | |
| I feel bad that he has to go to work every day and used to have to be next to somebody like a Chris Cuomo or now a Don Lemmon. | |
| It's like, what do you do? | |
| Because when he signed up to go to CNN, he and others like him. | |
| They're thinking they're going to the most trusted name in news. | |
| No one was watching CNN even back then, but at least you had sort of reputation to fall back on. | |
| You know, it's like, well, we do the news and we do it straight. | |
| And it may not be the sexiest thing ever, but it's, you know, it's solid. | |
| And now, now it's like they got surrounded by MSNBC without knowingly joining MSNBC. | |
| Yeah, I think that's the issue. | |
| Look, I've always said, and I've said this going back to 2008 or 2009, which is when I think, you know, Fox News sort of first discovered me online. | |
| One of the first pieces of content that I put out there was I said, I don't care if you're left. | |
| I don't care if you're right. | |
| Just don't lie to me. | |
| I have no problem with MSNBC. | |
| I'm going to have a problem with their points of view. | |
| I have a problem with the ideas that you hear a spouse at MSNBC, but I have no problem with someone letting their freak flag fly saying, hey, we're basically Marxists. | |
| Great. | |
| Got it. | |
| I have no problem with people at Fox News or people on AM Radio. | |
| I'm very open about my biases. | |
| I've never tried to hide from them. | |
| I don't believe that anybody truly can be unbiased. | |
| What to me, the unforgivable sin is lying to me about it. | |
| And CNN is consistently lying because they think that they are actual, my God, journalists. | |
| I mean, when you see, and I use him as an example, but Brian Stelter really, really wants to keep that facade alive. | |
| And the only way that these people can really survive, and what's most disturbing to me, Megan, is sure, okay, it's a great story. | |
| CNN Plus failed. | |
| We kind of all knew that. | |
| And if we want to get into the business aspects of that, you know, I've sort of made this work before pay content really was working. | |
| And we have an unbelievable viewership and just a support base entirely in the demo. | |
| So I'm grateful. | |
| But what I do think is important to note is I see them sort of circling the wagons and their only game plan is ingratiating themselves to those in power. | |
| So you have legacy media. | |
| You just mentioned sort of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN. | |
| And then you have what, you know, at one point was considered new media. | |
| Now we use the term big tech. | |
| But it's really only five companies when you're talking about it. | |
| It's Alphabet, right? | |
| They run Google, YouTube, and then you have Facebook, which is also Instagram, Twitter. | |
| You can add Amazon and Apple in there because of the app store and the platform. | |
| But these people control 99% of the distribution of information. | |
| And then there are really four, four multimedia conglomerates when you're talking. | |
| It's like ABC Disney, NBC Universal, right? | |
| You have Viacom, Time Warner. | |
| And what you see is this unholy alliance of legacy media knowing that they are going to die. | |
| And so what happens? | |
| You have YouTube start changing their algorithms. | |
| They're not saying, well, hey, we're censoring content, but they have fact checking that removes one point of view. | |
| We all know that. | |
| But let's go a little bit deeper. | |
| They no longer really have genuinely trending pieces of content because that's where independent content creators just blew people like CNN away. | |
| So they decide to curate that. | |
| And then they decide, you know what, we'll also create an algorithm that favors regular uploading. | |
| Well, once upon a time, independent content creators, right, if you only have an editor or two, which is most programs on YouTube or sort of big new media, I'll use that term, big tech, new media interchangeably. | |
| Well, you're lucky if you upload once a week or twice a week. | |
| Then YouTube says, no, no, every day. | |
| They say our algorithm is going to favor uploading two, three, four times a day. | |
| Well, the only people are left are the people who spend the big advertising dollars with them. | |
| And that's the four or five multimedia conglomerates who are dumping money into four or five big tech companies. | |
| And by the way, they all are on speed dial with this administration, with the White House. | |
| And you see it no more clearly than, I don't know, I mean, you probably haven't. | |
| Nobody does, but Brian Stelter, his show, I don't know if you've seen his sort of a, I mean, it's not even a Chiron, but he has a rotating sort of background. | |
| It just for no reason shows the Facebook icon, the Twitter icon, the YouTube icon. | |
| It's not plugging his Facebook or YouTube or Twitter. | |
| Really? | |
| It's just, it's just showing it all show long. | |
| And it's like begging, please kill me last. | |
| Please, deep, look, see, I'll do what you want. | |
| It's like a bat signal for a coward to the most powerful companies. | |
| And no one talks about it. | |
| And I watch it and I get chills down my spine because I know exactly what's happening. | |
| Well, he's also like, you know, they call him the hall monitor. | |
| And he is sort of like the hall monitor in the school who annoyed everybody, who's kissing the teachers' butts, right? | |
| And the teachers in this case would be big tech. | |
| And he's in there kissing and kissing away and trying to shame the rest of us into doing journalism the way Brian Stelter would like it done, even though Brian Stelter has never been a journalist. | |
| He's like, he's never done anything other than sit there monitoring the hall. | |
| That's it. | |
| And we're supposed to. | |
| Can you explain to me something, Megan? | |
| I have to ask you a question, but I have my suspicions. | |
| Brian, and I use this, the reason why I want him still on air, and I don't want to single him out. | |
| And I want people to say this is bullying. | |
| This is a public figure. | |
| Brian Stelter, I have searched high and low. | |
| I cannot find any really, honestly, legitimate, any fathomable reason for this man to be on air. | |
| I tried to look into his background. | |
| Some people tried to claim that he ran a blog that was like the Perez Hilton of the political world. | |
| Not really. | |
| I went through Time Machine. | |
| There wasn't a whole lot there. | |
| Didn't he start TV newser? | |
| Steve Krakar is my executive producer and he's of this world. | |
| He should know. | |
| Yeah, hold on. | |
| Started TV newser. | |
| Okay. | |
| Which was a moderate New York Times for a year. | |
| And then, and now he's like, never done anything, really. | |
| I mean, honestly. | |
| No, exactly. | |
| All he did was blog about journalists. | |
| Exactly. | |
| That's all he did. | |
| And then he's consistently been abysmal in the ratings. | |
| Right. | |
| And by the way, you're seeing new and improved Brian Stelter. | |
| If you look at a picture when he was younger, it's, I'm sorry, but Megan Kelly, I think you know that as a fetching lady, that does, that does bode well when it comes to on-air content. | |
| Tell us uphill battle. | |
| Fetching. | |
| Yes. | |
| You can be on serious, but I'll still be old network television. | |
| But Brian Stelter, you're seeing new and improved Brian Stelter. | |
| This is more attractive, Brian Stelter, than when he got that deal and he's only consistently had bad ratings. | |
| Does he have dirt on somebody in the industry? | |
| Well, for a while, I thought that one of the reasons Jeff Zucker was there is, or, you know, like I looked at Chris Guomo and these other people and I thought, what's happening? | |
| Why is Jeff Zucker not firing any of these people? | |
| Why does Jeffrey Toobin still have a job? | |
| Don Lemon, all these guys embroiled in these very ugly scandals. | |
| And now we know, right? | |
| And I said, so like they've got something on Jeff Zucker. | |
| They've got something. | |
| There's no reason he wouldn't be getting rid of Jeffrey Toobin for masturbating publicly in a Zoom call for the New Yorker. | |
| And as it turns out, yeah, they did. | |
| They did. | |
| It's just so sad. | |
| It's just so the Jeffrey Toobin thing is just, I didn't even want to make it. | |
| It's just so sad. | |
| A guy who can't control himself, not only can't control himself for the length of one Zoom call, but doesn't have the forethought to use a sticky note for crying out loud, mute your mic and put on a sticky note. | |
| And they brought him back. | |
| They brought him back. | |
| And then they blame you. | |
| They blame you, the American viewer, for sowing mistrust in our institutions. | |
| The institution of the guy spanking it on a Zoom call and then you bring him back as your legal correspondent. | |
| You deserve this. | |
| This whole institution deserves to be burned to the ground. | |
| It's so true. | |
| Wait, so that reminds me of what Barack Obama just said. | |
| Hold on, my team sent this to me. | |
| I don't know if this is a soundbite. | |
| All we see is a constant feed of content where useful factual information and happy diversions and cat videos flow alongside. | |
| This is the part he doesn't like. | |
| Lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery, white supremacists, racist tracks, misogynistic screeds. | |
| And over time, we lose our capacity to distinguish between the two. | |
| I'm looking at this. | |
| Okay, lies, conspiracy theories. | |
| You mean like lies, lies, not, not, not, not. | |
| Let me finish. | |
| Lies, conspiracies, and factual misinformation. | |
|
Lies, Conspiracy, and Junk Science
00:03:16
|
|
| No, don't, don't, don't get all wee weed up. | |
| There you go. | |
| How about that? | |
| You made up a term. | |
| Have everybody said we weed up in the media said, oh, yeah, we've all heard of wee weed up. | |
| It's like, y'all. | |
| No, it's not. | |
| No, it's not. | |
| It's not a thing. | |
| So he is the walking exam. | |
| By the way, do you think he really buys this? | |
| Like, I feel like he has to go more woke than he actually is. | |
| No, he's not woke. | |
| I don't think he is woke, but I do believe he believes in, like, when he says junk science and quackery, that's, yeah, that's his side. | |
| That's his side. | |
| That's, that's people like Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci telling us the masks work. | |
| Oh, wait, they don't work. | |
| Get the mask. | |
| Don't get the mask. | |
| Oh, the vaccine's going to prevent you from getting COVID. | |
| Oh, wait, no, it doesn't. | |
| Like, talk about quackery, right? | |
| It's like, sure, I'm all in favor of cracking down on quackery and junk science, but I don't think we have the same definition of what needs to go. | |
| No, I think you're absolutely right. | |
| And when we have something now, you know, for a while, the left would try and sort of sidestep legitimate science and they would do this appeal to authority fallacy, sort of like you're seeing now. | |
| Like, are you a biologist? | |
| which is ridiculous. | |
| But now they just have decided to lean into it. | |
| For example, they used to try and separate sex and gender. | |
| That's not, that's a, that's a bullshit argument. | |
| Just so people know, uh, modern gender theory, separating it from sex, gender was really more of a grammatical term as someone who speaks French, all the Romance languages, right? | |
| You have gendered nouns. | |
| Gender and sex were interchangeable, but they tried to say sex is biological, gender is a social construct. | |
| Okay, fine. | |
| That could no longer apply because they didn't call Rachel Levine the first four-star woman. | |
| They said first four-star female general. | |
| Now, when you're looking at Leah Thomas, look, sports are not separated by social constructs for the same reason that you have high school and college wrestling meets that are separated by weight class. | |
| It's not a social construct. | |
| It's the scale. | |
| Sports have been separated by biology. | |
| They have been separated by sex. | |
| And now they're saying, well, no, you can be whatever sex you want. | |
| So they're just leaning into what only five years ago they would have claimed was anti-scientific, but they still wanted to accuse you of being a bigot. | |
| So this is one of those things where it's not even close. | |
| You know, they want to say anti-science with conservatives because you just don't believe that the Kyoto Protocol, which is now the Paris Accord, will actually stop the world from warming 1.6 degrees the next century or God forbid AOC's five-page Green New Deal taking over two-thirds of the economy would do that. | |
| They want to claim that you're anti-science if you don't believe that. | |
| If you don't make that logical leap, but no accountability when they say there is no male or female, which they used to say four years ago. | |
| They said, well, it's male and female are separate for man and woman. | |
| Not anymore. | |
| Sex and gender are the same. | |
| You can see it in sports and you can see it with how they labeled Rachel, that the, you know, the D. Snyder look alike Rachel Levy. | |
| Rachel Levy. | |
| Oh, no. | |
| By the way, the nerf of Barack Obama trying to lecture us on lies and how pernicious they are. | |
| The guy who, if you like your plan, you can keep your plan. | |
| If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, which we later found out he knew at the time he was repeating it over and over was false. | |
| He knew for years I didn't call it a lie. | |
| For years I said he claimed this. | |
| It turned out not to be true. | |
| That's as far as I would go. | |
| Then there was a long report about how he knew all along you were not going to be able to keep your doctor or your plan. | |
|
Prank Evidence and Abused Women
00:06:55
|
|
| And he just lied to try to get this very controversial Obamacare through, which didn't have the support of the majority of the people. | |
| And for the first time in history, he shoved an entitlement down our throats that did not have majority support. | |
| And now he wants to lecture us on lies. | |
| Thanks, but no. | |
| All right, Stephen Crowder, we've got to talk about Amber Heard and Johnny Depp because you've been doing such interesting coverage on this. | |
| Why Steven says this is an important case for men's rights, right? | |
| After this very quick break, don't go away. | |
| I love Steven Crowder. | |
| More with him in a second. | |
| All right, Steven. | |
| So you've been following the Amber Heard Johnny Depp trial. | |
| He is suing her for defamation. | |
| We did an in-depth report on this last week or the week that the trial opened. | |
| And I found it really interesting. | |
| Okay, so he's claiming she defamed him because in a Washington Post op-ed, she talked about herself as an abused woman and how she faced the wrath of the country when she came out as an abused woman. | |
| It was a very clear reference to Johnny Depp, even though she didn't mention him. | |
| They were married for a short time. | |
| It was completely tumultuous before, during, and now after. | |
| And I would love to hear your take. | |
| My take so far on this is she claims he abused her. | |
| She does have good evidence that he hit her at least once. | |
| And the evidence is overwhelming that she hit him and abused him all the time. | |
| So like you could make a case on his side that he was wrongly defamed because she painted herself as like a traditionally abused woman who's just like, you know, I have no power. | |
| Meanwhile, the evidence so far has been pretty overwhelming that she was extremely physically aggressive toward him in a disturbing way. | |
| Yeah, well, I would actually like to hear what it is that you think is super. | |
| And I don't mean this in a derogatory way. | |
| I haven't seen anything convincing that he hit her. | |
| I've seen sort of circumstantial evidence a little bit. | |
| The therapist says so. | |
| The therapist says that he committed violence against her and the therapist was his witness. | |
| Right. | |
| Okay. | |
| So there's, so the therapist is witness, but the therapist, I guess, also said that. | |
| Is it the therapist or the physician who said that she hit him and that she admitted to hitting him? | |
| It's the therapist. | |
| It's a counselor. | |
| You know, they sought marriage counseling before they got married. | |
| It's never a good sign. | |
| Okay. | |
| But they did. | |
| But she said it was mutual abuse. | |
| She said Depp may have initiated it on occasions. | |
| That I'm less sure on. | |
| But when asked if there was violence from Depp toward Amber Heard, she said yes. | |
| So, but I mean, look, she was there because she could testify to the violence that Amber perpetrated on Johnny Depp. | |
| So my own feeling is, okay, I guess she did get what I'm remembering is how did the therapist know that? | |
| Was the therapist? | |
| Oh, they sat there and admitted it. | |
| See, that's my problem. | |
| That's my problem is you get men very often. | |
| This does happen and it's very common. | |
| You know, I mean, there's a whole, there's a whole special on wrongful confessions, right? | |
| On false confessions. | |
| You get people who are mentally abused. | |
| You get people, you're just talking about a few hours of interrogation and they'll fess up the things that they didn't do. | |
| Now, the difference. | |
| He's on tape admitting. | |
| Now you're going to make me like defend her. | |
| And I don't really want to be in that position. | |
| No, no, no, no. | |
| I'm not making a defender, but what I'm saying. | |
| But no, no, but he is on tape saying that he denies that it was a headbutt, but he's on tape admitting that he, he claims in an effort to stop her from hitting him, he did something just short of a headbutt. | |
| Yeah, I don't think, no, no, he was talking about restraining her. | |
| If that's what we're talking about, yeah, that's very, that's very different from her punching him in the face. | |
| So that's what I'm saying. | |
| If that's the only proof that we have, that's not the same as being an aggressor. | |
| And, you know, Jordan, a few things to sort of get into here. | |
| And I know people use the term men's rights. | |
| I mean, you know, rights are rights. | |
| But in this case, look, I have a lot of young men who watch this show. | |
| And what I genuinely struggle with as a Christian who really does believe and advocate the institution of marriage, when I'm referring, what I'm really referring to, and I've sort of had to decouple this, is the biblical sort of, you know, definition of marriage versus the state getting in and screwing up because it's a contract right now that doesn't make sense for a young man to make. | |
| And that's why you're seeing fewer and fewer young men wanting to get married. | |
| So in certain states, someone like an Amber Heard could have never worked, could leave, cheat on someone like a Johnny Depp and take half. | |
| Now, I will say I don't believe that restraining a woman who was violent from what I had heard on these tapes, where that's where she put nail polish and faked like he broke her nose. | |
| I don't think that's the same as her admitting to him, unbeknownst to her that she's being recorded, that she punched him. | |
| And here's the thing too, a woman who behaves that way. | |
| And I mean, by behave that way, I mean go, oh, okay. | |
| So I punched you. | |
| I hit you like that. | |
| I didn't punch you because I was too busy hitting you. | |
| Go to the world and tell them, see who they believe. | |
| That's, that doesn't appear to be a woman who's afraid of being abused. | |
| A woman who takes, pardon me, well, use Johnny Depps. | |
| He's, you know, I noticed that there was, there was a poop on my bed. | |
| You know, he's sitting there like, he tries. | |
| It's just, he said, she had made a grumpy in the bed. | |
| I realized it was, you know, I thought there was a mint that was mostly poop. | |
| And you're just sitting there like, this is not a woman who's afraid. | |
| And people, she said it was a prank. | |
| Let's look at context. | |
| A prank is something you pull on your friends. | |
| Even then, I've never, once my friends be like, hey, this is funny, but that's not how you do it. | |
| It's gross. | |
| It's way over the line. | |
| It was the Yorkie, Steven. | |
| It was the Yorkie. | |
| That's her. | |
| It's not the Yorkie. | |
| That's right. | |
| But no, she admitted at one point. | |
| She did admit on the record at one point, it was either her or one of her friends. | |
| She said it was a prank. | |
| Okay, you pull a prank on somebody who's, I don't know the exact timeline. | |
| Mother is very sick, about to die, or just died. | |
| You pull a prank on someone who you just left. | |
| You pull a prank on someone who you just mentally abused. | |
| No, that's not when you pull a prank. | |
| You only pull a prank with someone you love. | |
| It's like comics roasting people. | |
| You don't roast people who you actually hate. | |
| So if you look at the context time and time again, best case scenario, best case scenario, you're talking about a mutually, you know, a tumultuous relationship. | |
| Most likely scenario is a woman who was absolutely mentally and emotionally abusive and very likely continually physically abusive toward Johnny Depp. | |
| And I just, again, I don't see a lot of evidence that that's. | |
| I don't disagree with that. | |
| And I do think that there is reason for him to be very angry that she went into the Washington Post and portrayed herself as just this victim when this story is a lot more complex. | |
| I mean, look, reading his texts about her, what he wanted to do to her dead corpse and like, of course, I have no use for him. | |
| I am no longer a Johnny Depp fan. | |
| I was never like a huge fan, but I'm like, I have no use for him. | |
| And the guy's got such massive substance abuse problems. | |
| I mean, like their drug-infused wedding and she does too. | |
| I have no use for either one of them. | |
| But she wrongfully portrayed the scenario as though she was just his domestic violence victim and an innocent one at that. | |
| And that is not true. | |
| It's not true. | |
| First off, you know, it's, let me give you two things, two, for me, most important takeaways. | |
|
Heartbreak Over Johnny Depp
00:09:08
|
|
| And I really do hope people take, especially the women watching, take this to heart because this is why men won't marry you, women out there now. | |
| And women are wondering where all the, no, they're not. | |
| They won't get married. | |
| And the reason for it is a couple. | |
| First off, this is why men don't get help. | |
| We need to change where everyone comes out after a mass shooting and they say, oh, mental health. | |
| This is why men do not get help. | |
| And most men won't go to marital therapy because it can be put on display for the entire world to see. | |
| Let's assume that nothing even happened physically violent between them, but a woman just wanted more money. | |
| Guess what? | |
| They can demand your medical records. | |
| All of a sudden, we all know that the civil, the civil court, particularly as it deals with divorce, and especially if you're now fighting for child custody, all that goes out the window. | |
| No more privacy. | |
| So men will not get help. | |
| Men watching this, who may be struggling with some kind of a mental health issue, go, nope. | |
| If they have a substance abuse issue, they go, no, I'm not going to have that used against me. | |
| What if this broad leaves and takes half? | |
| That's also a problem that we have. | |
| This is the only contract that I know of in this country right now that exists with no fault divorce dates, which really means it's the fault of the primary provider. | |
| Sometimes that's a woman. | |
| More often than not, it's a man. | |
| It's the only contract that I know of where one side is financially incentivized to break it. | |
| In other words, today, if you're a woman or you're a man, but it's rare. | |
| It's an uphill battle, even in no fault states as a man to sort of get the alimony settlement. | |
| But it does happen. | |
| So I'm speaking in generalities here so people understand. | |
| But if you're a woman, let's say who comes from meager means, let's sort of separate Amber Heard and Johnny Depp for a bit. | |
| If you're a woman who comes from meager means and you want to get wealthy, you've never worked, you didn't get a degree, you have no skill set, but you're good looking. | |
| Your best path to victory is to simply marry a man, leave him and take half. | |
| It's a legal guarantee. | |
| Now, we all like to say that doesn't happen because of love, but we know that's easy to face. | |
| You know, it happens. | |
| And we see 100% of that happens. | |
| Of course, that absolutely does happen. | |
| I mean, I'd be lying if I said I didn't see that happen in many times over. | |
| And there are a lot of women who are out there just to get their so-called MRS degree, right? | |
| It's like they're at college because they want to catch a husband or they just want to get married to a rich guy who's going to take care of them. | |
| I say, if you're a young woman who just wants to get married to a rich guy to take care of you, you go for it, sister. | |
| Just be, just own it. | |
| You know, like if you, if that's how you want to live your life and you don't, are you not attracted to working professionally, you just sort of want to be taken care of. | |
| Okay, that's fine. | |
| You don't have to be ashamed of that. | |
| You just have to put your cards on the table. | |
| And there are a lot of men who want somebody like that. | |
| You know, there's like, typically it's a guy who would be a little less good looking. | |
| And it's like a trade-off. | |
| Okay, I'll get the beautiful woman. | |
| And she, no, those don't work out. | |
| We all know that, but maybe you get a few good years out of it. | |
| Maybe the girl gets a financial settlement out of it. | |
| Maybe the guy, I don't know, he gets beautiful children. | |
| I have no idea how these people make their decisions, but it's not for me to judge. | |
| What I don't like is A, when, you know, entire classes of women are painted with that brush, right? | |
| When that's not fair. | |
| And then B, when the woman's unfairly painted as a gold digger, when you totally know the guy knew his gold was being dug and was a willing participant in the exercise. | |
| Yeah, no, I think you're right. | |
| But I think the first part that you mentioned there, I agree. | |
| Okay. | |
| Lay your cards on the table. | |
| Don't throw a fit if the man proposes a prenup. | |
| Look, if both of you are working professionals, a prenup shouldn't be a problem for either. | |
| When people say a prenup, this is what you often hear, a prenup, you're expecting the marriage to fail. | |
| Well, it goes both ways. | |
| If you don't want to sign a prenup, that means that you're expecting to leave and take half. | |
| So I think we need to reform divorce laws in this country. | |
| I think we need to reinforce some kind of privacy rules because that's a huge problem, not just with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. | |
| That's an interesting point. | |
| But you're seeing this with social media now. | |
| And I'm telling you, I have lots of men who say, like, look, I think I love this woman, but I'm scared because this happened to my dad or this happened to my friend. | |
| And I'll never go to marital therapy because God forbid it ever be used, it ever be used against me. | |
| I mean, Johnny Depp does look, I was not a Johnny Depp fan. | |
| I'm sort of the opposite of you, where I always thought he was sort of a one, one trick pony. | |
| Like every single character becomes a creepy gay character. | |
| It's like Barbara, creepy, gay Barbara, Willie Wonka, creepy gay Willy Wonka, pirate, creepy, gay pirate. | |
| Oh my God, did he make Wonka gay? | |
| I refuse to see the sequel, the redo because I love the original so much. | |
| I mean, in the way that Johnny Depp does, you know, sort of like he fakes. | |
| He's from Kentucky and he has like a hybrid, you know, cockney sort of southern act. | |
| It's like, where does this come from? | |
| But my heart started going out to him when I listened to the audio. | |
| And I know that he sent these awful texts. | |
| But this is also something that I think that women, you know, would do well to understand with men. | |
| Jordan Peterson talks about this. | |
| We don't always know. | |
| A lot of men don't know how to deal with a continually aggressive woman, right? | |
| And like Bill Burr told a joke about it. | |
| It's funny. | |
| He's like, people say there's never a reason to hit a woman. | |
| I could think of like 19 off the top of my head. | |
| You just don't do it, right? | |
| That's his joke, but it's true because guess what? | |
| If one of my buddies here poops on my pillow, we're fighting. | |
| A lot of people don't know that. | |
| We're fighting because there is a level of accountability with men where you use your words, you know where that line is. | |
| And that is how we deal with each other. | |
| Now, when that is removed and a woman can be continually aggressive, a woman can be physically aggressive, like you see with Amber Heard. | |
| And we have a society that thinks it's just as violent to restrain a physically aggressive woman. | |
| You really do leave a lot of men as cornered animals. | |
| And then you add on top of that, men who are afraid to get help because if they're struggling with issues, it could be used against them. | |
| And I really see this is, I'm not going out there talking about men's rights as far as a pickup culture issue. | |
| This is something that's bad for women because the institution of marriage is being eroded and not by two dudes getting shacked up, you know, shacking up at the Folsom Street Fair. | |
| That's not what I'm talking about, but through these laws that take place at the state level. | |
| And it's hard for me as someone who truly believes in the institution of marriage to advocate it as anything other than a losing deal for a lot of young men out there. | |
| And that's what I see. | |
| That's what I see as the big issue from this. | |
| We're kind of watching it through two different lenses. | |
| And I think a lot of women maybe watch it and don't realize how scary of a prospect this is to men who maybe even don't have money, but they go, oh, this could happen to anyone because the law says it will happen. | |
| That's very, yeah. | |
| Well, the other thing is, like, their marriage was full. | |
| There's all sorts of abuse. | |
| And any woman who's been abused will tell you it can be physical abuse, but it can also be emotional abuse and it can be verbal abuse. | |
| And yes, he seems to have heaped some of that emotional or verbal stuff on her. | |
| She seems like the number one perpetrator in that way as well. | |
| I mean, if you look at the testimonial that's come out, the testimony in this court, she was belittling him as she was calling him an effing baby because he would complain about what she did to him physically. | |
| I mean, if the shoe were on the other foot, we would never stand for this, right? | |
| We would look at him as a total monster. | |
| And yet so far, all the headlines in this case are, they seem to be still pro-amber. | |
| And this is his complaint. | |
| His complaint is that she made these allegations. | |
| She set it up with a paparazzi to take pictures of what he says was a fake bruise on her face. | |
| There was testimony by the guy, a friend of theirs who saw it who said that there was no, she had nothing. | |
| He didn't, she claims he threw a phone in her face and that she had a bruise on her face. | |
| And I saw her right after. | |
| She says, look, right here, right here. | |
| And it's like, no, nothing's there. | |
| I see nothing. | |
| But the claim is that she set up a thing with a paparazzi where she made it look bad. | |
| And anyway, he says she ruined his career. | |
| So that's what he's alleging. | |
| I mean, there's very few Hollywood careers as big as his. | |
| And it's not about he needs more millions. | |
| We know he's got a billion bucks. | |
| It's just about his reputation and this, you know, the American public's belief in what kids are. | |
| Yeah. | |
| He has kids. | |
| You know, he doesn't want his kids to think that he's an abuser. | |
| This is something. | |
| And by the way, we're not just talking about ruining his career. | |
| She threw a vodka bottle at him. | |
| And this is something that the physicians, you know, provided testimony that Johnny Depp, here's a perfect example to me, kind of what crystallizes this case is people try to argue, well, why did Johnny Depp lie and tell people that his finger got caught in accordion door? | |
| Well, okay, he lied to other people, but at that exact, on that exact same day, he told the physician what had actually happened, that she threw a vodka handle at him, a handle of vodka, and it actually is what basically severed his finger and required surgery. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But here's the thing. | |
| That tells you right there, that's a man who is so emotionally and mentally abused that he's ashamed to admit someone shattered his finger. | |
| So he tells the public, you know, the people who aren't, you know, aren't subject to patient confidentiality says, oh, no, no, I just made a mistake. | |
| But fest up to his doctor. | |
| This is what actually happened because he needed to be honest about the injury. | |
| That's something that people need to understand. | |
| That is the textbook behavior of someone who's emotionally abused. | |
| And then, of course, you combine that with a divorce where all of that can be made public. | |
| Man, I really, it breaks my heart to see this, this, this happen. | |
| It breaks my heart to see, and I think, look, I don't, I think the guy is far from perfect, but what, what is, this is a genuine question to, to women out there is what is a guy like Johnny Depp to do if you, or any husband, you punch him and you call him a baby and you throw a vodka bottle at him, breaking his finger, and you continually belittle him, you shit in his bed. | |
|
Identity Models and Abercrombie Trends
00:15:31
|
|
| I mean, you know, then what? | |
| Yeah, but I mean, the answer is definitely not hit back. | |
| I mean, that's not the answer. | |
| What do you mean hit back? | |
| How many times did Humphrey Bogart go? | |
| Why did he stop? | |
| He admitted. | |
| I mean, he wrote a note to her father saying, I went too far in our fight and I promise you it will never happen again. | |
| He's on record as having said he pushed it too far as well. | |
| So he's doesn't have to say that. | |
| I'm not saying he hit her. | |
| I'm going to, I'm going to tell you, he didn't say he hit her. | |
| I haven't seen that anywhere. | |
| He said he physically restrained her. | |
| And I don't believe that that is the same as a person who is physically assaulted. | |
| One more thing that I would like to sort of address here. | |
| This is something, again, because I know that you have a commitment to this. | |
| I don't think we disagree on this a whole lot, but truth is important. | |
| You know, a lot of people aren't aware domestic abuse occurs at a much higher rate, physical abuse from women against men. | |
| I got to go because I'm facing a hard break, but I'm going to come right back to this. | |
| But no, to your point, I actually clicked on your link and it supported that statement. | |
| It's just people don't cover it as much. | |
| All right, Steven Crowder's right back after this break and we're going to talk about why Abercrombie and Fitch is now woke and we're supposed to be supportive of that. | |
| Let's talk about Abercrombie and Fitch. | |
| I know you were raising a thing about this. | |
| And, you know, the last I remember about Abercrombie and Fitch is like all the young people were wearing it in the 90s. | |
| It was like the thing to wear. | |
| And next thing I know, there's a, and then there was some scandal and it kind of like faded and they fell into some public scandals of some type of bad headlines about them and their CEO in particular. | |
| And now Netflix is giving them the documentary treatment, talking about how they've fallen and how that basically they're a bunch of racists and now they're woke. | |
| So everything is going to be fine again. | |
| Hold on. | |
| I think we have the trailer. | |
| Do we have the trailer from the Netflix thing? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| Watch this. | |
| Top five. | |
| You know that you're getting close when you're hit with the smell of Abercrombie. | |
| Big nightclub beats and bare chested guys. | |
| It was such a pop culture phenomenon. | |
| It was an all-American look. | |
| I considered myself an all-American girl. | |
| Oh, make me over. | |
| Abercrombie and Fitch said, we go after the cool kids. | |
| If they didn't look a certain way, they didn't belong in our clothing. | |
| Are we exclusionary? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| So it's basically an Abercrombie so white type complaint that they were too white and they leaned into being too white and that's why they fell. | |
| And now they say that they're different now, you know, that they're, they've sort of turned over a new leaf and they're all about inclusion and they're going to have, you know, heavy models on their page and they're going to have people of all different races and backgrounds. | |
| What do you make of it? | |
| Well, you know what? | |
| I'm in this bizarre position today where I'm defending Johnny Depp and I'm defending Abercrombie and Fitch. | |
| Look, I'm a conservative. | |
| I couldn't, there are a few things that I could stand less. | |
| Although one of the most flattering. | |
| And you defended Brian Svelter. | |
| Yes. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, that one's okay. | |
| Incredibly heterosexual. | |
| So I am, since we're talking about Abercrombie, I need to delineate there to make sure. | |
| But I will say this, one of the most flattering interactions I ever had, I was on a date with a girl at this time and we were at an outdoor mall in California. | |
| And they approached me and said, hey, would you like to work at Abercrombie? | |
| They just looked at me and said, would you like to work at Abercrombie? | |
| And I assume it's because at this point, I wasn't, I was, you know, I was decently fit and I was younger. | |
| I didn't quite look like a catcher's mitt yet. | |
| But I was like, oh, well, thank you. | |
| No, I hate your store. | |
| I find it revolting, but I appreciate the offer. | |
| So here's the thing. | |
| I don't think there's a problem with models being exclusive. | |
| We don't expect it to be an actual depiction of all human beings. | |
| That's why they're models, right? | |
| And if you watch that, I don't know if you saw that. | |
| I don't want to hear anyone complaining anymore about how the unrealistic beauty standards only apply to women. | |
| Like I'm one green smoothie away from looking like somebody at Pulse Nightclub. | |
| And there is something too. | |
| I don't know if anyone's studying the science on this. | |
| There's something in the gay male diet that makes them thin. | |
| And there's something, obviously, you know, with lesbians that's incredibly fattening. | |
| So I don't know how that works. | |
| That is not true. | |
| Some of my closest friends are gorgeous lesbians. | |
| They're very fit. | |
| Oh, I'm sure they're gorgeous. | |
| I'm sure they don't. | |
| I'm sure they aren't shop at Orvis. | |
| No. | |
| I can't tell you they're gorgeous. | |
| If I had a picture, I'd put it up on the board. | |
| You yourself would think about becoming a lesbian. | |
| Well, okay. | |
| Yeah, I have. | |
| I have thought about becoming sure every teenage boy at some point is. | |
| But here's the thing is, is a lot of people don't know this too, the history about this. | |
| I haven't seen the full documentary. | |
| I'm sure they sort of brush past it. | |
| You know, Abercrombie and Fitch was a, was a sporting goods and gun catalog initially. | |
| Way back. | |
| It was an outdoor shop. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So they have changed and they tend to adapt. | |
| The problem that you're seeing now is sort of like with Disney. | |
| Okay. | |
| I'll use it as a parallel. | |
| You have two sides of this issue with Disney in Florida, right? | |
| But they just passed this, that Disney is no longer going to be able to basically govern itself like its own county, right? | |
| They've received special privileges because of how big they are in Florida. | |
| Now, you see people on the left saying this is hypocritical because people on the right are now allowing a governor to silence people for having a different point of view. | |
| And if that was actually taking place, I would agree, but it's not. | |
| What you're seeing is Disney trying to overturn the will of the people with political power and clout. | |
| And you're seeing people from out of state try and come in and influence the politics of Florida. | |
| And that's not market driven. | |
| The LGBTQ, AIP, and Pixar is not market driven. | |
| Same thing with Abercrombie. | |
| This new change is not market driven. | |
| It's driven from elites in power who say you need to be woke. | |
| It's not what Americans want. | |
| And then it becomes, in my opinion, social engineering. | |
| It's not capitalism. | |
| Well, the Abercrombie thing is interesting to me because it's part of a trend. | |
| The former CEO, Mike Jeffries, in 2006, I guess he spelled out his tactics. | |
| This is reading from an article from CNN. | |
| And he said, quote, we go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. | |
| Again, this is from 06. | |
| A lot of people don't belong in our clothes and they can't belong. | |
| Are we exclusionary? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Now, in my view, if that's how you want to be as a company, go for it. | |
| You're not going to get a lot of people who you otherwise could get. | |
| But there is sort of this push to sort of reject, you know, the traditional thin models and like the, you know, hip, whatever crowd as you're, the people who'd be on your website. | |
| Why? | |
| It's like, why can't there be a company like that that caters to people who want to, who are attracted to that? | |
| And then all the other companies that are more inclusive. | |
| Like we have to shame that group, right? | |
| Like if you, if you want to promote to like the fit, super attractive model crowd, somehow you're bad and you're racist and you're off and they have to do documentaries about how terrible you are. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I don't have a dog in this fight. | |
| I mean, can you imagine me, right, with my pelvic lines and baggy and I guess low-waisted jeans, whatever the term is now. | |
| I don't know what's hip. | |
| I think maybe now the trend is going back to Patrick Schwayze Roadhouse jeans, but chasing you around, spraying cologne on you and Abercrombie. | |
| Of course not. | |
| I don't think I've ever owned a piece of Abercrombie clothing in my life. | |
| It's the same issue that people have with Captain America, with Superman, with The Flash. | |
| It's like, look, if you want your own woke lesbian gay store, great, create it. | |
| I think you could even probably co-opt Hot Topic. | |
| No one would have a problem with it. | |
| The problem is when they take something that wasn't from the ground up designed to be that. | |
| It's like they say, we need our own heroes. | |
| We need our own examples. | |
| Good. | |
| Have them. | |
| Create them. | |
| The problem is when there's a social engineering coming from something that is seen as some kind of an American institution or something that obviously is viewed as a tradition in the United States. | |
| I don't know that Abercrombie qualifies. | |
| And you try and co-opt that. | |
| It's like, absolutely. | |
| No one has a problem with you creating your own thing. | |
| But time and time again, they try this and what happens? | |
| It fails. | |
| You can see that with Netflix. | |
| You can see that with Disney. | |
| They're going to be suffering more. | |
| You can see it with CNN and CNN Plus. | |
| And I guarantee you're going to see it with Abercrombie. | |
| There could have been a bunch of examples, right? | |
| You could not pay the average black American to go into Abercrombie and Fitch. | |
| His friends would have to, his friends would have to wear diapers because they'd be pissing themselves, laughing, mocking him for going in around a bunch of white, shirtless male models. | |
| But if they say, well, we need to diversify, well, what if black people don't want to buy your clothing? | |
| What if they would rather go shop somewhere else? | |
| They say, well, we need to bring in the lesbians. | |
| Well, maybe they want to shop at Bass Pro and Orvis. | |
| They don't want to go into Abercrombie. | |
| That's the issue they continually run into. | |
| And people try and argue it's the free market. | |
| It's not. | |
| And that's why you see these businesses fail. | |
| That being said, I couldn't care less if Abercrombie dies in the vine. | |
| The place is annoying as hell. | |
| When I'm going through the mall and it sounds like a nightclub, it's just awful. | |
| Wait, is Orvis a fishing store? | |
| What's Orvis? | |
| Bass Pro and Orvis? | |
| What is it? | |
| It's a fishing. | |
| Yeah, Bass Pro Orvis. | |
| You could throw Eddie Bauer in there. | |
| You know, the places that lesbian shop. | |
| And by the way, I have no problem with it. | |
| Go next. | |
| It's not true. | |
| Let me tell you, my friends, I mean, I think technically they would say that they're bi, but in any event, they are gorgeous and they're very fashionable. | |
| They blow up my fashion to door. | |
| So out the door. | |
| So anyway, there's always exceptions. | |
| Who knows? | |
| Let's talk about Disney a little bit more though, because I do think, yes, that little crying, that's the sound bite of the week. | |
| Jensaki, I mean, it's either her or President Biden not understanding the difference between what's happening at the border and what's happening with his appeal of his loss on the mask mandate, which we can also get to. | |
| But the Jensaki thing, I haven't played yet, literally in tears over what's happening with Ron DeSantis and this bill. | |
| Well, now it's law down in Florida that stands up for parental rights and says you cannot in the instruction of very young children push sexual identity or gender identity lessons until they get to past third grade. | |
| And then you can talk about it in class in an appropriate way. | |
| It doesn't say you can't talk about it. | |
| It doesn't say if the child says, what do you mean, your partner? | |
| You're not allowed to say, oh, I have a gay husband. | |
| You know, I'm gay and I have a husband. | |
| It doesn't say any of that. | |
| It says in the instruction, you shouldn't be pushing gender identity and sexual identity at K through three. | |
| This is how Jensaki reacts to that in this interview she did in this podcast. | |
| Listen. | |
| This is a political wedge issue and an attempt to win a culture war. | |
| And they're doing that in a way that is harsh and cruel to a community of kids, especially. | |
| I'm like going to get emotional. | |
| I'm going to get emotional about this issue because it's just, it's horrible. | |
| But, you know, it's like kids who are bullied. | |
| And this is like all these leaders are taking steps to hurt them and hurt their lives and hurt their families. | |
| And you look at some of these laws in these states and it is going after parents who are in loving relationships who have kids. | |
| It's completely outrageous. | |
| Okay. | |
| Going after for the listening audience, he was now banging his head against his desk. | |
| Well, first, I mean, she just shouldn't be sitting in front of a white background. | |
| It's like nature's evil camouflage. | |
| What do you mean? | |
| It's like the red hair. | |
| She's incredibly pale and she has no soul. | |
| Look, look. | |
| She also went on to talk about there's no such thing as transgender children. | |
| Okay. | |
| Let's be clear about that. | |
| It's not a thing. | |
| Transgender children, if they are below the age of consenting to sexual decisions, they're below the age of consenting to decisions medically that would affect them sexually for the rest of their lives. | |
| You know what I didn't know, Megan Kelly, about my second grade teacher? | |
| Her first name, let alone her scissor sister. | |
| Does anyone actually remember walking up like, oh, yeah, well, thank you, Mr. Johnson? | |
| Here's my book report. | |
| By the way, who are you banging today? | |
| When these teachers talk about how am I supposed to discuss, what do I tell my students about my same-sex husband or wife? | |
| How about nothing? | |
| How about nothing? | |
| That's a human rights violation. | |
| Now, and by the way, the bill doesn't even say that. | |
| I would have no problem if it did say, keep your sex life to yourself. | |
| Don't discuss it with our kids, whether you're straight or gay. | |
| But it doesn't. | |
| It just says you will not indoctrinate kindergarten through third grade on gender identity, where it could not be less age-appropriate. | |
| Remember when people said it was a straw man? | |
| When we said they're going to go after your kids? | |
| Here we are. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And they said, you know, they said they weren't doing it. | |
| It's like, well, if you're not doing it, then why do you care that it's being official that you're not allowed to do it in instruction, not in conversation, not in passing in the instruction that you offer to my kindergartner? | |
| I don't want to hear anything about any of this. | |
| If Doug and I want to talk to our children about that, we'll do it. | |
| We'll do it an appropriate age and an appropriate way. | |
| But to me, the thing that jumps out about this is the irony, Stephen, of Jen Saki, who works for this administration to talk about the abuse of children and using them in a political culture war. | |
| It's like, are you kidding me? | |
| You, you just put masks on three-year-olds for years, the people least at risk from COVID. | |
| And you insisted that they keep them on and that they eat outside and that they sit in the rain and that they stay six feet away from one another and that they get a vaccine they don't need when they're over five years old to protect them, to protect them from a risk that is not real for that age group. | |
| And you want to talk to me about what's good for children? | |
| You, the administration that's now paving the way for top surgery for teenagers and for them to be able to get cross-gender hormones without their parents knowing. | |
| And then you want to cry about the abuse the Republican Party is putting on your child. | |
| Spare me. | |
| Spare me. | |
| Yeah. | |
| No, I think, look, I don't, I often try to not attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance. | |
| This, this is evil stuff. | |
| I guess I can say this is evil, evil shit. | |
| When you're talking about not only hormone replacement therapy for not just teenagers, but if you look at if they had their way unfettered, that's always what I tell people is, okay, you have to look at what each political party would have if there were no blockades, if they had it completely unfettered. | |
| Well, do you doubt for a second when we were talking about COVID that the Democrats would have us in a similar lockdown to Australia? | |
| No, of course not, because they proposed that. | |
| That's what they wanted. | |
| There are checks and balances that pull them back a little bit. | |
| If the left had what they wanted unfettered, you would have to allow your six-year-old to go on puberty blockers or potentially be on the route to an actual sex change operation or forfeit your right to your children as taken by the state because they believe it's child abuse to not transition your child. | |
| This is the mainstream platform of the left. | |
| People need to understand that. | |
| People might point to some exceptions, but not the platform of the DNC. | |
| I can't think of something more evil than that. | |
| And really, when you look at their guiding North Star, and I'm speaking in a generality here, but I'm using the DNC as the example, it all ultimately points to more power of the state. | |
| And here's something else, you know, too. | |
| I don't think it requires a conspiracy theorist to say, you know, same-sex marriage happened, right? | |
| That was the big push. | |
| And you were back then, you were a Nazi. | |
| If you didn't want two guys to get married, okay, whatever. | |
| Once that happened, okay, same-sex marriage, they have it. | |
| You have it now. | |
| He had the first president who actually went into office who was pro-same-sex marriage, Donald Trump, ever, right? | |
| Barack Obama was against it until he was for it. | |
| So do you think all these people at organizations like GLAAD, do you think they're going to forfeit all these organizations the hundreds of millions of dollars? | |
| No, they have to advocate for something else. | |
| And so they had to push for, you know, men taking a dump in the women's bathroom at Target. | |
| Okay, fine. | |
| You have that now. | |
|
Gender Dysphoria and Medical Catastrophe
00:14:45
|
|
| There's really nowhere else to go. | |
| And there are still giant nonprofits with huge, with vast swaths of influence. | |
| What do they do? | |
| What do they fight for? | |
| They have to go back to the private sector and work for a living? | |
| That's not going to happen. | |
| And so right now we're looking at children on puberty blockers, right? | |
| We're looking at men beating the hell out of women in biological men beating the hell out of women in their own sports. | |
| What is next? | |
| And I think that's a very important question. | |
| It's not a logical fallacy to say a slippery slope. | |
| We are on a slope, period. | |
| If the left has their way on this. | |
| I think that's a fascinating question. | |
| Because I've talked to a lot of gay and lesbian friends who have said, like, I don't totally get why the T is at the end of LGBT, you know, and the Q and all. | |
| Like the interests aren't necessarily aligned. | |
| And in fact, if you look at like the trans activists, like the crazy trans, not like normal, like whatever, but the crazy trans activists are so vicious. | |
| And they, they're basically kind of doing conversion therapy on young gay men instead of you're not gay, you're trans. | |
| You're secretly a girl. | |
| It's better to be trans than to be queer than to be than to be gay. | |
| Just say that you're a girl and then you can get rid of that whole gay thing. | |
| And we're seeing more and more of this. | |
| Abigail Schreier writes about it in her book. | |
| I've had lots of people on the show talking about it. | |
| So there is a question about whether the interests of the gay community are aligned in the way that GLAAD would have us believe and whether GLAD's lost the real scope of its original mission. | |
| The other thing I wanted to mention to you on the Gensaki thing is she's talking about she doesn't like the kids being used in a political culture war. | |
| And what she really doesn't like is, can you believe these lawmakers going against these parents who only want what's best for their child? | |
| Hello, you were the people who sicked the DOJ on parents who were trying to protect their children from this crazy race essentialism in their class with the white kids being told they're inherently bad and evil and the black kids being told they're inherently inferior and weak. | |
| Like you were the one who wanted to have Merrick Garland arrest and investigate the parents for trying to stand up against that nonsense. | |
| Again, like the nerve. | |
| Yeah. | |
| No, you know what else too? | |
| This also brings us to the scientific issue while we're talking about children, because again, this is there, there are not, these are not isolated incidences, right? | |
| Incidents of children, for example, wanting to be on puberty blockers. | |
| And that is the mainstream platform. | |
| By the way, I was at a Vermont town hall, I believe, four years ago, five years ago, where they were teaching us, this was undercover, right, with cameras, how to use Medicaid. | |
| I don't remember if it was Medicare or Medicaid, but how to also use our insurance to get our children on puberty blockers and how to get insurance to pay, for example, for breast surgery for male to female trend. | |
| Children, by the way, it was removed from YouTube. | |
| It was removed from YouTube, even though it was a public town hall, but there were only five people who actually showed up. | |
| So we've been at the forefront of this war for a long time. | |
| When we're talking about science, and this is what I think really bothers a lot of Americans is, okay, well, for example, I have a good friend right now who just was diagnosed with breast cancer and she has to do a dibble mastectomy that's what's terrible, but she's going to be fine. | |
| What's the first thing they do with women right after if they do diblomastectomy or radiation? | |
| One of the first things they do, if they're dealing with breast cancer, is some kind of aromatase inhibitor, some kind of an estrogen blocker, right? | |
| People know it's arimidex, sometimes it's clomiphene citrate. | |
| These are drugs that people will be familiar with. | |
| Why? | |
| Because high estrogen levels in women can be cancergenic. | |
| We know that these can actually create a pro-cancer environment. | |
| There is no doubt, Megan, none whatsoever, that in men, it is even more catastrophic. | |
| So when we say, well, we know the science is very clear that if someone has breast cancer, if a woman has high estrogen levels, we need to try and keep that in check as they're recovering from some kind of a breast cancer. | |
| And we know that with men who have cancer. | |
| We need to keep that in check because men naturally don't have high estrogen levels. | |
| We know this. | |
| This is science. | |
| When injected directly into the buttocks of a six-year-old, however, we don't have any long-term studies. | |
| Well, can you make an inference, asshole? | |
| Can you do that? | |
| I don't know. | |
| Where did science go right out the window? | |
| And it does. | |
| It pisses me off. | |
| And I think it pisses a lot of Americans off. | |
| And this is also why there's mistrust in the scientific institutions. | |
| Well, is that our fault? | |
| Is that our fault when you said that popping an estrogen pellet into an eight-year-old is appropriate and the science is still out when we know what it does to the male body? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And to your point, that the standard of care has now just become too affirm, too affirm. | |
| Like if I felt we had a more skeptical medical community still out there that was like, okay, because I do believe transgender, that it is a thing. | |
| Gender dysphoria is a thing that can strike. | |
| It's very rare. | |
| It's exceedingly rare. | |
| And you know that just by looking at our history. | |
| And it's not all because it wasn't just always unacceptable. | |
| The numbers have skyrocketed. | |
| There are way more people being swept up into this than are really trans. | |
| And we know that from just the detransitioners alone who complain about this medical community that shoved so-called top surgery, which is actually radical double mastectomies on them and other life-altering things. | |
| But if I thought we had a medical community that would say, we're going to take a real look at whether this is actually a thing for you or whether you're suffering from parents who are going through a divorce or you feel socially awkward and you don't fit in and you're looking for something to, you know, sort of glom onto to make you feel special, which happens in a lot of these cases, or you're actually gay, right? | |
| Like that was talked about before, but we don't. | |
| The standard of care now is mandated affirm. | |
| Or a tomb, hey, you know what's extinct now? | |
| You know, it's an endangered species, tomboys. | |
| Remember those? | |
| Yeah, some girl who liked to play. | |
| She's a tomboy. | |
| Really? | |
| Well, you really grew into yourself. | |
| Good for you. | |
| But I know plenty of women who are tomboys. | |
| And we never would have imagined saying, like, no, You need to get a fake dick. | |
| That's actually what you need to do, nine-year-old Courtney. | |
| This is, but this is where we are. | |
| What do you do if you're a doctor today? | |
| Think of the questions we were always asked, right? | |
| Someone walks in and you go, okay, are you meh or f-f-f-let me just leave that blank? | |
| What's your height? | |
| And you know what? | |
| Just write down whatever you want and take drugs. | |
| Okay, I'll see you later. | |
| You can't. | |
| You can't ask them questions. | |
| Can I tell you something else? | |
| I mean, this is kind of dark, but okay, so let's say you put your kid on puberty blockers. | |
| Let's say you have a little girl. | |
| She's like, oh, I think I'm a boy. | |
| And this suddenly comes on, right? | |
| Because in all honesty, this has been something that mostly almost universally affects only boys if you look back at history and not girls. | |
| And now the girls are outnumbering the boys and saying that they have gender dysphoria and they think it's a social contagion. | |
| And I believe that too, based on Abigail's book and the work of Lisa Lippmann and so on. | |
| But in any event, let's say you have a little girl who says, I'm secretly, I'm actually a boy. | |
| I was, you know, I was misgendered or mislabeled, whatever at birth. | |
| You put her on puberty blockers so that she doesn't start developing breasts and she doesn't start growing and so all that. | |
| And then you put her on testosterone for, you know, a couple of years. | |
| She's infertile. | |
| That child can never have a baby. | |
| So if, like so many, she decides I was wrong, I was going through a phase, she's done. | |
| She will never be a mother. | |
| And not only that, and again, I forgive me for the graphic description, but Abigail talked about how they start to grow, the clitoris starts to grow into like a mini penis. | |
| And I forgive me for the graphic, but it's, she said, it looks like the elephant man. | |
| Like a, like a baby carrot. | |
| That can't be undone. | |
| That can't be, I mean, good luck, right? | |
| It's like, so now your little girl realized she was just going through a phase and you did all that to her before the age of 18. | |
| That's disgusting. | |
| That's totally child abuse. | |
| You like you could you really could face charges for doing something as catastrophic to that to a child if it were in any other lane. | |
| Right. | |
| No, you absolutely, yeah. | |
| I mean, if you just, for example, if you just took your son and sat him in front of a microwave so that he developed giant testicular cancer, right? | |
| People like, well, what are you doing to your kid? | |
| That's a problem. | |
| But when you're talking about doing it hormonally over the course of a couple of years, yeah, something else here is a lot of people who get sex exchange operations can never climax, sexually climax. | |
| You think that might add to the depression? | |
| People don't realize that the attempted suicide rate of trans individuals, and I've talked about this, it's about, it's the same pre-op and post-op. | |
| And when people say it's because of how they're treated societally, they have a higher attempted suicide rate than American slaves, than Jews and Auschwitz. | |
| We really want to say that in 2022, someone who identifies as a member of the opposite sex has it worse than concentration camp victims. | |
| And this is also something that, gosh, for crying out loud when let's put it into context too, okay, if we're if we're going down this route and talking about how dark it is, when people say, you know, it's you can't say that there's any type of mental issues that could be attributed to this here. | |
| I want men out there to think of something for a second. | |
| Okay, let's say you maybe don't feel like you fit. | |
| All right. | |
| Right now, look down at your penis. | |
| I want men to actually now think, put yourself in the shoes. | |
| What kind of a mental state would you have to be in? | |
| What you're looking to literally bring yourself right now, what would be required of you to cut that off for the rest of your life? | |
| Every guy just winced. | |
| It's a really, really severe action to take. | |
| And we're acting like it's putting, we're acting like it's just putting a kid on a Z pack. | |
| This is something that is really serious with irreversible effects. | |
| And there's an unbelievable. | |
| So we use this statistic for a long time. | |
| It was a very small sample study of 90 something percent of children, right? | |
| Who if they're not given puberty blockers, if they're not, you know, not gender affirmed, they grow out of it. | |
| Number goes to zero if you take these medical interventions. | |
| It was a small sample study. | |
| We were criticized for it because again, this is a really new thing. | |
| Well, now there's been a much larger study and we've linked to it and the number is still about 87 percent. | |
| 87 percent of children who, if they claim they are transgender and you do nothing, grow out of it. | |
| That number drops to statistically close to zero percent if you take medical intervention. | |
| So do we see that anywhere else in the medical community? | |
| So this is interesting to me because I i'll say this, I we have. | |
| I have somebody transgender in my family and my husband does in his family too. | |
| So, you know, we have two in our joint family. | |
| And the person who's trans in my family says, this is male to female, says from the time he was two years old, he knew. | |
| He has no memories of ever believing he belonged in a boy's body, like he knew, and wound up fully transitioning. | |
| Now, I believe him. | |
| Now he's a her. | |
| I believe that claim. | |
| And I've, I've talked to children, very young children. | |
| I did a segment on this on NBC who say that as well. | |
| I do believe there's a very small, very small segment of the population that genuinely has this gender dysphoria. | |
| I don't know what the quote solution is. | |
| You know, I don't know what I would do if, God forbid, I had to deal with this in my own family. | |
| I don't know how I would handle it, Stephen. | |
| I do think there's a segment of the population that deserves our really thoughtful consideration about whether the best thing for them is to allow them to develop into biological women and so on. | |
| I don't know. | |
| But what I see is a society that's totally abusing this small population, like what they actually are going through to try to work out all sorts of other issues in ways that are truly catastrophic. | |
| And if you raise any objection to the exploitation, right, of like what is a real thing for a teeny tiny segment of the population and using it to perform these horrible procedures, I mean, these are these like catastrophic procedures. | |
| You cut off a boy's penis for people who might not necessarily need it. | |
| And then you're not even allowed to, you know, talk about it or you get labeled a bigot or whatever. | |
| Like that's what that has to stop. | |
| I feel like people are starting to get that. | |
| Am I crazy? | |
| No, I don't think you're, I don't think you're crazy. | |
| I think that the problem too, like you said, is that then it ultimately leads like Jen Saki sitting there, you know, crying like Casper the Unfriendly Ghost about parents being bigots, you know, because they don't want to transition their children. | |
| Okay, let me use your personal example where I believe that this person you're describing, I absolutely believe that that person believes it. | |
| My belief, now my approach is I believe that they believe it. | |
| That's legitimate. | |
| Now, let's match that up with the science and how that informs us as to whether they believe it correctly or incorrectly. | |
| You may disagree with me. | |
| Is that hateful? | |
| Because that's what's being labeled bigoted. | |
| And by the way, that was the most, that was a consensus among the medical community for a very, very long time. | |
| A lot of people don't know this too, this little bait and switch. | |
| You know, you go to the DSM-4 to the DSM-5, gender dysphoria was a disorder, just like body dysmorphia, you know, like some of the Abercrombie people or bodybuilders, people who become anorexic. | |
| It was this unhealthy body image that was unrealistic and didn't match up with reality, effectively. | |
| That's what gender dysphoria is, was in the DSM-4. | |
| They switched it in the DSM-5. | |
| Gender dysphoria is still a thing. | |
| But gender dysphoria now describes the symptoms of distress associated with being born into the wrong body. | |
| But it doesn't really address how you qualify being born in the wrong body. | |
| Think of that little switch. | |
| And I want to know where the paper is, the scientific paper that reflects it. | |
| People can search high and low. | |
| It doesn't exist. | |
| So this is, again, this kind of ties us back to right, CNN Plus. | |
| You're talking about Disney when you're talking about this administration. | |
| You're talking about now. | |
| You're talking about science. | |
| I just I think the biggest problem is not only blaming America, not the biggest problem, but I think the through line here is blaming Americans for being hateful, blaming Americans for being bigoted, blaming Americans for distrusting the government no no no, no. | |
| All of these institutions have uh, self-inflicted these wounds. | |
| If you want to blame somebody for sowing mistrust in American institutions well, I think it's the institutions themselves, and I think that it's equally applicable to the scientific community in a lot of ways, especially if you look at I don't think we've had a more clear example, Megan. | |
| There is value to the fact that we had trust the science right for the last two years with the, with the pandemic and the protocols uh, and the silencing of other scientific and medical voices of dissent, while simultaneously, this unbelievable acceleration of the transgender movement. | |
| We were able to see that happen in real time and I think a lot of Americans just said okay oh oh, I was, I was a little bit you're full of yeah no, it's like uh, Jim Comey and uh, what's his name? | |
| Uh Struck and Lisa Page, and then Brennan and Clapper. | |
| All those people did for sort of the national security industry, what Fauci and Rochelle Walensky and the CNN commentator. | |
| What's her name Leo? | |
| What's Ever? | |
| Whatever her name is when? | |
| What's her name? | |
| Uh, Leanna Wen that what they did to the medical community, right and and, and the same doubts that have now been raised by, you know, even lefties, about our medical authorities and what they tell to us. | |
|
Jason Crowder and the FBI
00:07:01
|
|
| Um, it applies in the transgender lane too, because we know, we know, and you're seeing, you're seeing it explode, and you're seeing kids who are clearly on the autism spectrum suddenly saying they're trans. | |
| And you know they're not trans. | |
| They're looking for a lane to belong, they're looking to something that's going to make them get snaps when they go out onto the stage, as opposed to feel odd or off or what, and it's wrong. | |
| It's wrong right, to tell a story with what's clearly a delusion on that particular person's part. | |
| Yeah, go ahead right, all right, because you just mentioned and I I really do appreciate, by the way Megan, that you described it as what the national security industry. | |
| Okay, so this is true. | |
| I've told this uh, I believe i've told this on air. | |
| I kind of had to keep it under wraps, but there was a long. | |
| Now, I don't because I don't care, because everyone knows who this guy is so a long time ago uh, me and a producer, we infiltrated Antifa. | |
| This is like maybe 2005 2016, and this was in Salt Lake City Utah, Ben Shapiro was speaking, and they handed my producer uh, an ice pick, a knife, and they were going to get a sawed off shotgun. | |
| And uh, this was for a Ben Shapiro show. | |
| So anyways, we infiltrated them. | |
| Long story short, some of these people ended up being arrested by local authorities and it was amazing to me that an ABC reporter there had no interest. | |
| We're like, here's the footage. | |
| They're handing him a, a bully knife and they're like well, we don't care. | |
| So what happened is we ended up getting on the phone with a guy at the FBI okay, and he said, how did you get involved? | |
| Uh, how did you get into this? | |
| Uh Antifa, uh app. | |
| And we're like, shouldn't you be telling us this and shouldn't you know this? | |
| You know, so we, we thought it was odd and the FBI didn't get involved. | |
| There were no arrests that were actually made. | |
| But after this, for a while, this was our contact at the FBI, uh, who worked, I guess, in their counterterrorism unit. | |
| Okay, was was based out of well, based out of Michigan, and uh was working with us at one point because then he had body armor, because they had a lot of death threats, and said, well, you know, this body armor is not Necessarily legal for civilians, but for law enforcement. | |
| Long story short, kind of some loose contact for a while, lost touch. | |
| Guess who was involved with the Governor Whitmer kidnapping plot? | |
| You know, where like 29 out of the 31 people were FBI agents? | |
| Guy named Jason Chambers. | |
| So it's public record now, Jason with the Y, Jason Chambers. | |
| This was the guy on a fishing expedition with my office. | |
| I think he was looking at me like, yeah, these must be extremists. | |
| And he just realized that we were normal sort of Christian conservatives and moved on down the trail. | |
| But when I read it publicly, I said, oh shit, that guy was a spy. | |
| That could have been us. | |
| It could have been us. | |
| It could have easily been us. | |
| And it could have been me just saying, hey, someone's trying to kill me. | |
| Do you know how I, because I was ignorant. | |
| This was before we had Spartan Armor as a sponsor. | |
| I was like, where can I find some, you know, some kind of a bulletproof vest for when I'm on stage? | |
| And the guy could have baited me, just giving me the slightly illegal version of a defensive tool. | |
| Luckily, we didn't bite and it really just stemmed from laziness. | |
| Actually, cheap. | |
| I was frugal. | |
| I was like, that's too expensive. | |
| You see, barking up the wrong tree. | |
| I'm just, I'm just your normal, provocative, inappropriate comedian. | |
| People hate me for just all sorts of reasons. | |
| I just do want to live. | |
| That's it. | |
| I'm not plotting anything. | |
| Jason Chambers. | |
| I remember going, I said, like, I haven't talked to Jason in a while. | |
| What's going on? | |
| And then I'm reading an article going, what? | |
| So this is close. | |
| All right. | |
| So much more with Steven Crowder. | |
| You never know where it's going to go with him. | |
| Just like Jason. | |
| When we come back, don't go anywhere. | |
| All right. | |
| There's still so much to go over with Steven Crowder, including I don't watch the Mass Singer, but my team was like, You've got to see this clip. | |
| They asked me to be on The Mass Singer. | |
| Politely ignored that. | |
| Rudy Giuliani went on. | |
| And I guess the premise of the show is like you sing while masked, and people try to guess who you are. | |
| And then the judges, I don't, I'm not, I don't totally understand. | |
| But in any event, Rudy Giuliani was revealed as the guy inside of what was a parrot costume, I think. | |
| Here is the big reveal where the female, the blonde who's on the judging panel, who I think used to sing the song, am I right? | |
| Do we know you guys? | |
| Did she sing it? | |
| Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me? | |
| Right? | |
| Is that the one? | |
| No, there's a different blonde. | |
| Well, anyway, this girl thought it was Robert Duval. | |
| She doesn't recognize Rudy Giuliani. | |
| Watch this. | |
| Oh my goodness. | |
| Former Associate Attorney General, former mayor of New York City. | |
| No, that's not Robert. | |
| Rudy Giuliani. | |
| Okay, so it's the girl from Pussycat Dolls. | |
| I think it thought it was Robert Duval. | |
| Then there's Jenny McCarthy saying, oh my God. | |
| Then Ken Young, Ken Jung, storms off. | |
| He's pissed. | |
| He leaves because he's so mad that the mass singer would put on Rudy Giuliani. | |
| What, if anything, do we make of this? | |
| Are you asking me? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Do you have any thoughts? | |
| No, I didn't know. | |
| I just find it funny that even to you, all blondes look alike and you made that mistake. | |
| You just confuse two blonde singers. | |
| You need to check your own prejudice there. | |
| Well, I just found out about this, Nicole. | |
| I didn't know that's who she was. | |
| She's actually got dark hair, but she, I know that song. | |
| I was just singing it with my daughter. | |
| Don't you? | |
| Really? | |
| Your girlfriend was. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| Keep going. | |
| Well, yeah, now I question your taste in music. | |
| I mean, I'd like you to rather you just, yeah, rather than sing that song, just give your, you'd be better off giving her puberty blockers. | |
| That's almost abuse. | |
| I just, you know, Ken, and I also appreciate, you know, you're trying. | |
| This is what happens with white people when we try and get near like Ken Young, it's Ken Jong. | |
| It's fine. | |
| And that's why I just pronounce it the American way, because I see what you're trying to do there. | |
| I'm going to step in and save you, Megan. | |
| Because I don't mind stepping on that landmine. | |
| I do it all the time. | |
| And I just say it the regular white way. | |
| You know why? | |
| Because I was French Canadian and I watched the mispronounce stuff all the time. | |
| My mom still does it. | |
| People think that Americans are the only ones who do it. | |
| They say it the white way. | |
| I don't know. | |
| It's like, I have no idea. | |
| Like, Mr. Jimenez, it's like, just shut up. | |
| Okay. | |
| You just should, just shut up. | |
| Just say Jimenez. | |
| Just say it the way that you want to say it as an American. | |
| It's fine. | |
| They do it with us. | |
| Ask them. | |
| Ask them to pronounce Crowder. | |
| They can't do it. | |
| That reminds me of when I studied abroad in Italy, people were like, oh, where are you studying? | |
| They'd ask me in Italian. | |
| And I'd say, oh, a la Università di. | |
| And then instead of just saying Syracuse, I'd be like, Siracus. | |
| And I'm like, what am I doing? | |
| Syracuse is pronounced Syracuse. | |
| Like I'm from Syracuse. | |
| I know how to say Syracuse. | |
| Why am I putting in an Italian accent? | |
| So I corrected. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And then they laughed at you because you're from Syracuse and they just said, at least it's not Cleveland. | |
| So you had that. | |
| No, it's basically. | |
| Wait, wait, stand by. | |
| She says, actually, we have the walk off as well. | |
| Watch this. | |
| Okay. | |
| Here to perform unmasked. | |
| Oh, my God. | |
| What and for all? | |
| The artist formerly known as the jack in the box. | |
| Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together. | |
| I'm not a parrot. | |
| Rudy Giuliani. | |
|
Comedians in Boxes and Parrots
00:05:20
|
|
| All right. | |
| I broke a thousand hearts before I met you. | |
| And I'm done. | |
| Break a thousand more, baby. | |
| Before I am through. | |
| And now he's walking off. | |
| Ken John is walking off. | |
| I know him from the bachelor party. | |
| I'm here to check. | |
| Ken Johnson. | |
| The hangover, I think it's the hangover. | |
| There we go. | |
| The hangover. | |
| Yeah, you can see I don't have any of my cultural references correct. | |
| Anyway, he couldn't, to me, it's like pathetic, right? | |
| It's the whole show is kind of funny. | |
| Sarah Palin was on it. | |
| It's like, so you've got to be offended because it's Rudy Giuliani. | |
| You can't stand there and just have a laugh and just like make light of it, have a moment where despite all the political differences, we can just have a laugh for a minute. | |
| No. | |
| No, and this is what else. | |
| Look, I mean, he would have, he wouldn't have walked off if they opened that box. | |
| And rather than the former, you know, Times man of the year, America's mayor in a parrot costume, if it was some doctor performing transition surgery, I guarantee he wouldn't walk off. | |
| This is very important. | |
| An abortion doctor. | |
| Right. | |
| An abortion doctor. | |
| What bothers me most is he's a, he's a comedian, right? | |
| This is a comedian. | |
| And to not understand, first off, this is a very silly show. | |
| So it's not like he's coming on there pushing a point of view, even if you disagree with, you know, Mayor Giuliani, even if you disagree with everything that he believes, this is him in a parrot costume in a box and a comedian can't handle it. | |
| And again, this brings us back to these ideas of institutions. | |
| This brings us to the entertainment industry, right? | |
| Think of, you go back to the Dean Martin roasts, Don Rickles. | |
| You even go to the 90s, even go to the early aughts where it was at least respected. | |
| At least comedians were thought to be thought-provoking. | |
| At least they were thought to be able to mock the king, right? | |
| The court gesture. | |
| At least it was encouraged. | |
| And now there is a culture of thought policing and comedy. | |
| And I was talking about this for a long time. | |
| It's a big reason I started to hate stand-up comedy because someone who was coming up younger and I would deal with these clubs or these colleges who would say, you can't say that joke, even though it was a clean comedian, they would say it was offensive. | |
| I would talk about this with other comedians. | |
| They would say, no, no, no, no, that's never going to happen in comedy, right? | |
| This is the last bastion of free speech. | |
| Well, here we are. | |
| You saw them try and do it with Dave Chappelle. | |
| If someone is powerful enough, they can't succeed. | |
| But you see right here a comedian so thin-skinned that he can't sit in the mere presence of the person who was once the most popular mayor in the entire country. | |
| But it's because Giuliani represented Trump. | |
| It's because he pushed Trump's election claims. | |
| That's the reason. | |
| Because, I mean, listen, it's not Vladimir Putin, right? | |
| It's like that. | |
| Okay, I can get this. | |
| He's in the middle of killing a bunch of innocent people in Ukraine. | |
| That's the problem. | |
| However, it's not Vladimir Putin. | |
| It's Rudy Giuliani who pushed an electoral claim that Ken Jung did not find persuasive and thought was specious. | |
| I get all that. | |
| But you tell me whether Andrew Cuomo, if he had popped out of the jack in the box, he wouldn't have left. | |
| Andrew Cuomo killed 15,000 seniors with his order, making them all go into nursing homes, rubbing elbows with one another when they were COVID positive without one care. | |
| He's never apologized for it. | |
| He doesn't take any responsibility for it. | |
| He would not have gotten up and walked out over that at all. | |
| Not one second. | |
| No, he wouldn't. | |
| He would have complimented him on his nipple barbells, which is still really weird. | |
| And I don't know why people don't talk about that more, that Governor Cuomo had nipple rings that you could see through his, you know, flimsy golf shirt. | |
| Yeah, I just, you don't remember that? | |
| No, I do. | |
| I had a comedian who reminded me and it makes me want to like, in the same way you talked about cutting off your peanut, make me want to touch my breasts. | |
| It makes me want to like, no, don't do that. | |
| No, get away. | |
| Well, don't say on air that it makes you want to touch your breast because everyone right now who's listening on audio just stopped their car, hit a pile up, and they're trying to switch over to the video feed. | |
| Now, whereas if I said that it made me want to touch my nipples, you know, people would just be putting a tarp over their screen. | |
| I just, this is really protective manner, in a get away from the manner, not in a welcoming, like it feels good. | |
| All right, Lanny, keep going. | |
| No, sure, that's fine. | |
| But guess what? | |
| With men watching, the principle is the same. | |
| Do you think a man goes like, oh, no, wait, this is protection and this is, this is, this is being a little bit quite no, they're just that men, but it doesn't matter. | |
| My point is, you know what? | |
| Just take a compliment. | |
| You can't take a compliment, Megan. | |
| You can't take a compliment. | |
| That's your problem. | |
| No. | |
| I am really disturbed by this because you don't just see it from Ken Jong, but there is a culture of this. | |
| There's nothing more bothersome to me than comedians trying to silence other comedians. | |
| That absolutely should never happen. | |
| There used to be an unwritten sort of code of conduct, an agreement that even if you couldn't stand everything that this comedian, you didn't go after him and try and try and remove him because of his point of view. | |
| You never tried to get a comedian taken off the bill because of controversial content. | |
| Now, you might say a guy's a hack and you don't like him, but this has changed dramatically. | |
| And it's also because like we see in other institutions, right? | |
| The best way to get ahead is to claim some kind of a victim status. | |
| Well, people realize that, you know, second tier comedians and you see this are second tier act like an Amber Heard. | |
| You see with Amber Heard, someone who's sort of a second tier actress compared to Johnny Depp. | |
| Oh, this is this is a fast path to victory to claim to be a victim. | |
| You see it with comedians who go, oh, let me get in on this train and say that this comedian is a sexual harasser when some of them, for example, like Aziz Ansari, who I don't even like as a comedian, his comedy isn't for me, had a bad date. | |
| But it's a way for comedians to try and sort of, you know, hopscotch other comedians who've paid their dues. | |
|
Mike Tyson and Victim Status
00:06:08
|
|
| And that's how it started. | |
| And now there's just a culture where I just get, you know what, Ken Jong, not only in a comedy circle. | |
| And by this, by the way, I don't just mean stand-up comedians. | |
| I include improvisational comedians, actors. | |
| I'm not an elitist with that. | |
| But Ken Jong, what other men just in a circle of guys who are relatively funny and like ribbing each other, he wouldn't be welcome for being an overly sensitive pansy. | |
| This is the state of comedy today. | |
| No, it's too much. | |
| It's like, come on, just, you can have one second where you'll laugh at him. | |
| And they do, we do it to former presidents all the time who have unleashed all sorts of death and destruction on the world. | |
| And we just overlook it and we have a few laughs because it's about humanity. | |
| It's about just like connecting where we can, even with somebody who we don't, whose political positions we found, we find hateful. | |
| Now, speaking of connecting, here's my nice segue. | |
| Speaking of connecting, Mike Tyson connected with somebody in an airplane. | |
| And have you seen this? | |
| This is like, this is crazy. | |
| So what kind of a crazy lunatic decides to pour water over Mike Tyson on an airplane and continue like needling him? | |
| This is what allegedly happened. | |
| I don't know. | |
| They were in the first class of JetBlue. | |
| Does JetBlue have first class? | |
| Anyway, they were towards the front. | |
| And this guy, I guess on the tape, just kept, something happened and he kept needling Mike Tyson. | |
| And then he poured a drink on Mike Tyson. | |
| And everyone knows what's going to happen if you pour a drink on Mike Tyson, his water. | |
| And I guess we have the video of it, right? | |
| Do we? | |
| Let's watch what Mike Tyson then did. | |
| Yeah, here it is. | |
| I'll describe it for the listening audience. | |
| He's punching. | |
| Punching. | |
| Punching. | |
| Let's go stop that. | |
| Let's lose the horse man. | |
| Very lightly. | |
| That blue flight. | |
| Boy just got beat up by Mike Tyson. | |
| Is that the guy? | |
| He's got terrible hair. | |
| He looks inebriated, right? | |
| He's got to be. | |
| What sober person would ever punch Mike Tyson or pour water on him? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, look, here's something too. | |
| I mean, I've read the Mike Tyson biography. | |
| I've seen his one-man show. | |
| I mean, I've always just been interested in boxing. | |
| Mike Tyson at one point really was an animal. | |
| He was a monster in a lot of ways. | |
| But if you read about it, he would admit that to you because he grew up in a really, you know, in a horrible borough of Manhattan there. | |
| I believe it was Brooklyn. | |
| He kind of jumped around. | |
| But then he sort of got a handle on it. | |
| I mean, this is a guy, keep in mind, Mike Tyson, who just had someone not too long ago pull a gun on him and he ended up hugging him. | |
| This is a guy who came home to, yeah, yeah, that happened. | |
| Your producer can probably bring it up, but it sort of slips my mind who it was. | |
| But this is a story, I think, a few months ago. | |
| Maybe it was a year ago. | |
| This is a guy who, a lot of people may not know this story, though it's been in the public for a long time. | |
| And now they've tried to recirculate it as though it's new. | |
| He came home when his wife, you know, Robin, Robin Gibbons. | |
| Gibbons? | |
| Gibbons or Gibbons? | |
| Given. | |
| I think she, I can't remember. | |
| There's the Washington Post lady who's Robin Gibbon, and she writes about style and actually is in the Abercrombie and Fitch. | |
| And then Robin Gibbons, I think it's just Gibbons with an S. | |
| So let's just call her Robin. | |
| Yeah, Robin. | |
| But Robin, his wife at the time when they were separated, Mike Tyson came home and she was in the house that he was paying for in the bed that he was paying for with Brad Pitt before he was a stone. | |
| Oh my God. | |
| Brad Pitt. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And Mike Tyson just ended up sitting in the car with him and chatting with him for a little bit because he knew like this guy, my wife did the lying bit. | |
| He told him that he was single. | |
| He didn't know. | |
| I'm not going to, I'm not going to kill this man. | |
| You know, he was just not going to hurt him. | |
| So this is, my point is this. | |
| Look, you can't just commit assault against somebody because they're bothering you. | |
| I understand that. | |
| But I do also think Mike Tyson is famous for a quote saying, you know, social media have made people way too comfortable disrespecting people online and not getting punched in the face for it. | |
| And that's the guy you chose to piss off? | |
| Is there an assault charge? | |
| Probably. | |
| Do I think this guy deserved it? | |
| I haven't seen all of the video, but I do think there is something to be said for, again, between two men. | |
| And we treat it differently because it's a celebrity. | |
| And of course, because this is Mike Tyson, who was one of the greatest fighter, you know, greatest heavyweights of all time. | |
| Joe Lewis is number one great heavyweight of all time. | |
| If people disagree with me, they can tweet me at S. Crowder. | |
| I will make the case. | |
| No one's even close. | |
| Muhammad Ali, not even in the same league as Joe Lewis. | |
| But the point here is men do have fighting words. | |
| Men do have a line. | |
| I'm not saying that this would have crossed that line, but we often act as though celebrities are somehow beyond that. | |
| And this is something that I think everyone needs to understand up until very, very recently, and still most young boys recently, boys grow up and having twins, you know, having a boy and a girl, they had to have these conversations. | |
| Even I realized when talking with my mom about this, you know, who's now a grandma, and I said, you know, one thing that I think you didn't understand fully, because she would give me advice on how to deal with a bully versus my dad, is that young boys and men grow up, unlike most women, under the perpetual threat of violence. | |
| Constantly. | |
| We know that we know, no, no, every single boy has multiple stories of getting his ass kicked, either by a bully or because he was a bully. | |
| And this is the way that men sort of learn where that line is. | |
| And there is a point where I don't know if he poured water on Mike Tyson. | |
| I didn't see that. | |
| But for example, if Mike Tyson says, stop bothering me, please leave me alone. | |
| And he pours water on him and he insults his mom, something like that. | |
| This would be an interaction where if you were with someone who you knew in private, not in public life, you'd probably be coming to blows. | |
| And we've really removed ourselves from that. | |
| There are still legal ramifications to it. | |
| But all of that. | |
| But there's also, the law recognizes this to some extent. | |
| There is something called assumption of the risk that can be a defense. | |
| And if anybody could argue that, it would be Mike Tyson. | |
| You knew exactly what you were going to get. | |
| Steven Crowder, the one and only. | |
| Always so interesting talking to you. | |
| You're so funny. | |
| Thank you for coming on. | |
| We don't do this enough. | |
| Thank you, Fred. | |
| I know it's been a weird schedule, but I'll come back soon. | |
| I appreciate it. | |
| All right, good. | |
| Love that. | |
| All right. | |
| You can find him at Louder with Crowder on YouTube, on all podcast platforms. | |
| As you can see, he's well worth your time. | |
| Beyond excited to tell you that next week, Douglas Murray is coming back. | |
| He's one of my favorite people ever. | |
| Don't miss it. | |
| Download the show in the meantime. | |
| Have a great weekend. | |
| Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show. | |
| No BS, no agenda, and no | |