The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220425_elon-musk-buys-twitter-and-free-speech-under-attac

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April 25, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show

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Elon Musk's Twitter Bid 00:12:05
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
	Florida Governor Ron DeSantis remains in the headlines as he's now signed a bill revoking Disney's special tax status into law.
	Now, it doesn't officially happen for another year, so there's time for negotiation, but it's on.
	I mean, it's definitely on.
	Disney has operated like its own city in Florida since 1967, following Disney's campaign against the bill that its critics are calling the don't say gay bill, even though that's a lie.
	Leaders in Florida are pushing back and taking away its special privileges.
	But is this a good decision?
	Is it a good decision for the state of Florida, for Republicans?
	And does it set potentially a dangerous precedent for when it comes to government coming after corporate entities for their opinions?
	We're going to get into all of that.
	Also, less than a month into the launch of CNN Plus, the company is no longer.
	It's shutting down.
	Leaders at CNN are now fighting the narrative of failure, arguing, oh, this is just, this is corporate.
	It's just a corporate decision.
	The platform just wasn't given enough time.
	See, they were thriving.
	It's just unfairly, the plug was pulled early.
	Okay.
	We'll talk about it.
	Also, it's looking increasingly likely that Elon Musk will buy Twitter.
	Got to get Peter Schiff back on to talk about, he told us it wasn't going to happen, that he couldn't afford it.
	Guess again, because it looks like Morgan Stanley is behind him and he's partnering with other financial firms.
	And they are saying we could get an announcement that it's happening as early as today, but there are a couple of wrinkles.
	All right, joining me now to discuss all of it is our friend Charles C.W. Cook, Senior Writer for National Review.
	Charles, welcome back.
	Let's start with Twitter.
	Yeah, it looks like he's getting the money from a various group of people and that they could be announcing as really as later today that his $54.20 per share offer, best and final, he dubbed it, will be accepted as the board has met to recommend the transaction to Twitter shareholders.
	Yeah, I mean, I think this primarily should remind us that markets change and quickly.
	Who had this on their bingo card a month ago?
	At least outside of a fantasy.
	There's this strange tendency to look at the tech sector as if it were U.S. steel in 1960, but it's not.
	Even Facebook, this big giant, has had two predecessors, both of which are dead.
	Friendster, then MySpace.
	And if we get Twitter 2.0, it will be the second iteration of a service that essentially lived for 11, 12 years.
	So, you know, we ought to remember that things move fast in free markets, but they especially move fast in the tech sector.
	And Elon Musk, who has had a remarkable career.
	I mean, if you go back to the beginning, he was behind PayPal.
	He owned the bank that was bought and incorporated into PayPal.
	Obviously, we're not what he's done with SpaceX and Tesla and other services will be its new owner and will hopefully change it a great deal.
	They say there's still the potential things could go south for a number of reasons, one of which is Twitter would apparently be allowed to accept an offer from another party if it pays Elon a breakup fee under the deal they're considering.
	So there could be what the left would view as a white knight that comes in and saves Twitter and the world from the horrible fate of Elon Musk actually owning Twitter.
	And, you know, given the ideology of some people on the left, who knows that could happen.
	I remember I met Jeffrey Katzenberg at a party in 2016 before the election, and he said he would donate or spend every dollar he's ever made to stop Trump.
	Then he invested in Quibi and it went off of Cliff.
	So I don't know how many dollars he has left for social media outings, but the left is determined to not let Elon get his hands on Twitter or any other social media.
	They say he's lining up partners for the acquisition.
	He's continuing to speak to potential co-investors, again, backing from Morgan Stanley among others.
	And he spent the weekend meeting with several shareholders over the weekend outlining specifics of the deal, according to Reuters, forcing the board to seriously consider this bid.
	He's offered a detailed financing plan.
	That's what Peter Schiff was saying.
	He's saying even Elon Musk doesn't have the money, nor would he want to risk his shares of Tesla, which is really his cash cow for this.
	But guess again, it looks like he's ready to put his own real wealth behind this.
	And I think it's for a greater principle.
	Yeah, well, that would be really strange if someone came in and white-knighted the progressive movement and took this away from Elon Musk, because then you would essentially have a bidding war or at least a contest between two groups that seem to be interested in Twitter with its commercial value and potential as a secondary concern.
	One of the conservative critiques I've seen of Musk is that this isn't what corporations are for and that it's no more what corporations are for when someone does it, you know, quote unquote, from the right than when someone does it from the left.
	There's a Milton Friedmanite approach that says corporations are there to make money.
	And if they try and do anything else, they'll fail.
	And that as the result, Elon Musk will end up losing money here.
	He's going to overpay for a service that has never made any money and doesn't have great prospects and do so for ideological reasons.
	And if someone else came in and did that even more, it would be strange.
	I mean, I know Elon Musk says that he thinks he can make this profitable and that Twitter's lack of confidence in free expression is holding it back.
	Maybe.
	But it would be very strange indeed if the guy who is essentially buying it as a hobby was pipped at the post by someone else or a group of other people who were essentially buying it for a hobby.
	I think, you know, conservatives obviously like this because it feels like fighting back against the left's complete domination of all big tech and the information superhighway these days.
	Conservatives own absolutely nothing, no part of it, and are sick of being censored.
	And so it's, you know, I think I heard on you guys, it was either your podcast or somebody else's, but talking about how this couldn't be done with Facebook.
	You know, it's too big.
	It can't be done with Amazon.
	It's too big.
	But Twitter is just the size that it's gettable for a guy like Musk.
	So you can't help but cheer him to say, okay, there's one they don't control.
	But, you know, your point is well taken about whether can he really save it?
	And if most of the people on Twitter are liberal, as we're told, like, will conservatives then flock to it?
	Is it going to become a new conservative magnet if he controls it?
	I don't, I'm not sure.
	We're not like in the practice of making that our space, those of us who are center right or on the right.
	Well, I mean, I certainly think he can help it.
	And I'd quite like him to buy it.
	And the thing is, is that at the moment, Twitter is not being run especially well as a business.
	So why not try a new approach, even if it's not an approach that would be taught at a business school?
	I think that the strangest thing here, and perhaps the most alarming thing here, is the freak out that met the announcement from Musk that he might try and make it more of a free speech zone.
	You would normally expect the opposite, or at least sane people would expect the opposite, that they would be worried someone would come in, buy an internet communications company, and then want to moderate it more, want to censor it more, want to slant it more.
	Musk said the opposite.
	Musk said, well, I don't think that this is run very well.
	I think it's over-moderated, over-censored.
	I think it's capricious and biased.
	And about two weeks ago, when the idea was first mooted, we had this day of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
	It's a little more muted today, probably because all of that energy has been spent.
	So I think he can absolutely improve it.
	And he can improve it by doing very little, by setting down a set of neutral rules.
	You don't have to completely refuse to moderate it.
	I mean, if you want to say that people can't threaten to kill each other, for example, that's fine.
	Okay with that.
	What's happened with Twitter that is so pernicious is that it has set up this set of ostensibly neutral rules, but then it has used them in order to enforce whatever is fashionable in San Francisco this week.
	And so, you know, if you wake up one morning and you see someone has been suspended for saying, you know, men can't have babies or something, that really is not neutral.
	That's not a question of decorum or civility, at least not properly understood.
	And it's also impossible to anticipate because it changes so fast.
	If Musk can knock that off, then he will do a great service indeed.
	Well, let's not forget it was Twitter that shut down the New York Post first on its Hunter Biden reporting, shutting down their account, not letting anybody retweet their article and so on without taking accountability for that.
	And even once it was pronounced not Russian disinformation, more recently, as we seem to be looking at a possible Hunter Biden indictment and the mainstream press had to report something because the White House sees it coming and they see it coming as well.
	Speaking of the left-wing freak out, this guy used to be at CNN, Dean Obadala.
	Obaidala.
	And he tweets out, wonder if Elon Musk will copy the apartheid rules of his home country, South Africa, and give us check marks based on our skin color.
	The whiter the check mark, the more rights you have on Twitter.
	Hashtag asking for a friend.
	What?
	What is he talking about?
	You know, that's bigotry.
	There's no other way of putting it.
	That is, it's not only unhinged.
	It's not only illogical.
	It's not only a non-sequitur.
	That is bigotry.
	That is going to the well and pulling out a bucket of collective guilt.
	Elon Musk is originally from South Africa.
	There is no indication whatsoever that the guy is in favor of apartheid.
	There is no indication whatsoever that the guy has ever treated anyone badly based on the color of their skin.
	There is no indication that he shares any of the guilt for what happened in that country.
	You might as well look up someone on Wikipedia, find out that they were born in Mississippi and ask them if they owned slaves.
	That is bigotry.
	And I'm afraid that's exactly what I would expect from Dean Obad Delier, who has never found a cheap shot he wouldn't take.
	It's amazing how the CNN reporters continue to fail to connect on every level.
	We'll get to CNN Plus in one second.
	But along the lines of people love it because they see it as fighting back, right?
	Like the liberals control, progressives control everything.
	They control everything.
	That's how it feels.
	Right now, they control the White House.
	They control the House.
	They control the Senate.
	They control big tech.
	They control sports and so on and so forth.
DeSantis vs Disney Tax Status 00:15:53
	This brings me to the Florida situation, which I know you've been writing about.
	And I heard the editors on Friday where you, Rich Lowry, asked you if you felt sufficiently beaten up by guys at the bar over your position on DeSantis' latest move.
	But I respect it.
	I respect it because you said, yes, you have been getting beaten up over it, but you said it's okay because I'm right.
	And I think we should talk about it because I've been loath to get into this in too much depth thus far because I wanted to really look at it before opining.
	And I share some of your concerns, though I'm not sure it makes me think this is a bad move strategically.
	I'm actually more concerned about what DeSantis is doing from a First Amendment perspective.
	I actually think there's a very decent chance a court is going to strike this down as viewpoint discrimination by the government against a corporation, which is not lawful.
	And again, it doesn't mean it's the wrong strategic move, right?
	He's punching the bully in the nose.
	He might have to go to the principal for it, might get suspended.
	Doesn't necessarily mean it was the wrong thing to do.
	But you seem to have a more macro problem with its approach as well.
	So let's talk about why you think this isn't necessarily the best move for DeSantis.
	Well, I have a number of problems with it.
	I'm sorry, Joe, forgive me.
	We should define for the audience what we're talking about because I failed to outline the Reedy Creek situation.
	Sure.
	So Florida in 1967 created an independent special district for Walt Disney World.
	Since that time, the independent special district program has grown enormously.
	There were six that were created before 1968, one of which was Disney's.
	Now there are 1,288 of them.
	And on top of that, there are 1,844 special districts.
	They're slightly different.
	The district that Disney enjoys essentially gives it many of the powers of a county.
	It has the ability to own its own municipal debt, levy its own taxes, and build its own construction without applying for permits or zoning waivers.
	Now, this has worked extremely well.
	And my first issue here is that it is obvious that the reason this is being revisited is not because there was a groundswell against the status quo, but because the Disney Corporation, incorrectly in my view, came out against the parental rights in education bill that's been disparagingly and erroneously called the Don't Say Gay Bill.
	People who are defending DeSantis's move here, And that move is to rescind as of next year, Disney's independent district here.
	We'll come on to the consequences of that.
	Have said, well, Disney has no right to this status.
	And that's true.
	But Disney had no right to it in 1967 or 1980 or 1990 or 2001 or 2015 either.
	The reason that Florida has kept this going is because it works.
	It's a really effective way of dealing with a strange problem.
	That problem being, what do you do with an enormous enterprise that is the size of San Francisco, that's the twice the size of Manhattan, you know, so big that it has 175 miles of roads inside it that's spread across two counties in Florida, Orange County and Osceola County.
	Do you hand all of the normal functions of government over to those counties?
	Do you push the taxes on the taxpayers, which is less of a problem now, but was a huge problem in 1967 because there's no infrastructure there.
	Do you allow the debt to be held by Disney or do you allow the debt to be held by property tax holders?
	You know, these are difficult questions and they were solved with this system, which has worked pretty well.
	And the reason that it's been revisited is not because the Florida legislature has suddenly decided that this is a bad idea or that it's unfair.
	It's not really unfair.
	SeaWorld doesn't want or need this status.
	It's because the Disney Corporation spoke out against the DeSantis administration.
	Now, I like the DeSantis administration.
	I agree with almost everything that it's done.
	I like the Florida Republican Party.
	I think he's an excellent governor.
	I support the underlying bill strongly.
	And I like the fact that DeSantis signed it and did so defiantly and told Disney to pound sand.
	I just think that making public policy worse in revenge for the politicking of a corporation is a really bad idea.
	Maybe it has the First Amendment implications that you proposed.
	I read an interesting piece by Eugene Veloc, professor at UCLA, saying it doesn't because of the special nature of the special district program.
	They're not retaliating in a classical sense.
	They're taking away a special privilege.
	Maybe.
	But morally speaking, they are retaliating.
	This is vengeful.
	This is retribution.
	And it's a really unusual move for DeSantis, who is very careful.
	He does his research.
	He doesn't enter into this sort of rash Twitter-driven politics that we see so much of.
	And I fear that here he has.
	I love Eugene Valak.
	And yes, he's almost always right on all free speech issues.
	My concern is that DeSantis has been very clear on the reasons he's doing.
	Usually you try to get out of the free speech challenge by saying, I just wanted to revisit special status of these districts.
	That's all.
	It was a good time to do it.
	We're going to re-look at the special status of the villages.
	I'm going to re-look at the special status of Disney.
	And I'm the chief executive now and I thought it was a good idea.
	But he's made very clear this is in retaliation for their viewpoint.
	I mean, he said specifically, I'm just not comfortable having that type of agenda get special treatment in my state.
	Talking about its position on the don't say gay bill, so-called don't say gay, and its wokeness.
	I mean, it is shoving its wokeness down our throat.
	You're against it.
	I'm against it.
	He's against it.
	And so it's pretty clear if a legal challenge were to come, he wouldn't be able to get out of it by saying it wasn't retaliatory.
	It was very clearly retaliatory.
	It's just the fact that they were starting with special privileges is what Bollock is saying, you know, would make this fall outside of the First Amendment.
	I'm just worried because it seems to me the left, if there's some newfound way of punishing corporations for their political views, and usually that's expressed through contributions, the left is going to do this every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
	I mean, they're going to be doing it at the federal level too.
	And so if this is paving that road, I think we should pump the brakes a little.
	Well, I think that's right.
	Conservatives who disagree with me, which seems to be almost all of them, will say, yeah, you don't understand.
	They already do this.
	They already tried to crush us.
	The corporations are already infested by this DEI woke agenda.
	And we have no choice but to use every tool at our disposal.
	And then they suggest that anyone who opposes this particular move, this tangential secondary move, is in some way opposed to winning or opposed to Governor DeSantis or conservatism or the advancement of social conservative ideas.
	But of course, that's nonsense.
	If you look at Florida in the last four years, I think I've come on your show and said this, the transformation has been dramatic.
	Ron DeSantis has not been sitting around doing nothing.
	You know, in the last month alone, the administration has endorsed constitutional carry.
	That will probably come up next year in the legislature, has debated and passed and then defended this parental rights in education bill, has removed critical race theory from school curricula, has signed a 15-week abortion ban ahead of the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade.
	You've got the last two years of American life marked out by really the approach that most of the country took to COVID and the approach that Ron DeSantis took to COVID, that Florida took.
	Florida was singled out.
	And I think it got an awful lot right.
	And my view is that you win by winning.
	I mean, if you're going to do this, then do so in a much more considered way.
	But you win by winning and Florida has been winning.
	Governor DeSantis has been winning.
	Conservatism has been winning.
	This was not the response to Disney having successfully overturned or had repealed this parental rights in education law.
	This was a response to Disney having lost.
	Disney was already vanquished on this issue.
	The law was signed.
	Polling showed that it was popular even among Democrats and popular nationally.
	And DeSantis had managed to isolate and marginalize Disney and tell him that he was in charge, the legislature was in charge, the people were in charge, not the Disney corporation.
	And I think that to hold this up as the shibboleth, to hold this up as the thing that determines whether or not Florida is succeeding, conservatism is succeeding, or one is willing to fight for principle is bizarre, especially because, as you say, it's destined to be messy.
	I don't know whether it will even happen.
	I don't know whether it will get bogged down in legislative deal making.
	I don't know whether a court will strike it down on First Amendment grounds, as you suggest they might, and they might.
	I do know that DeSantis had a really good record of clean, firm wins.
	And this just strikes me as a petulant mistake, even if I understand totally the motivations and the need to try to get corporations who are supposed to do things, run amusement parks, sell sneakers, make oil, to shut up for once.
	Yeah, your point is take the W. You had the W. There's no point in picking the scab off and doing more.
	I mean, I think it's the reason people are pushing back on that is it's not just about Disney in the view of conservatives who are writing about this and thinking about this.
	It's such a pleasure to see somebody fight back against this, you know, woke corporate bullying.
	They really, they are bullies.
	And so it's almost like as Ben Shapiro said in his podcast, fool around and find out, right?
	Although he said, use a different word.
	I quite say that.
	It was a different F word.
	You know, like you continue to mess with the agenda that is backed by the majority of the populace.
	Continue to push it on us.
	And one that's probably not even backed by the majority of Disney employees, right?
	It's just a few woke activists.
	This woman who's at the top, she's the president.
	And then the CEO who got pressured into it by Bob Igar Iger, who's no longer even running Disney, but doesn't like the current CEO from what I hear and sent out like an annoying tweet, like, oh, you're not backing the employees.
	And then that guy got scared and was like, oh, yes, I am.
	Oh, I'm against this whole thing.
	Let me let me become an activist too.
	In any event, the point is send a message, send a message to Disney, send a message to Coke, send a message to all of these corporations that we're going to do whatever it takes.
	And maybe it will be messy and it'll be ugly and it's going to cost you tons of money and we're going to publicly humiliate you and maybe we'll lose eventually in the courts or maybe even the tax burden, what have you.
	It's going to get ugly because we're sick of sitting back and taking it.
	And I absolutely understand that.
	And I feel pretty much the same way myself.
	I would just say that, you know, as someone who spent a lot of time arguing in favor of the Second Amendment and against gun control, it is possible and it's in fact necessary sometimes to separate out the instinct, the motivation, the frustration and a given policy.
	You know, when I debate gun control, I'm often told, well, this is a real problem.
	We have a real problem in America.
	I agree.
	I'm shown a particular case.
	Maybe a child has been killed.
	Maybe lots of children have been killed.
	And then the policy comes up.
	And, you know, more often than not, I don't think the policy is good.
	I think it might be unconstitutional.
	I think it might be messy, difficult to implement, perhaps ill thought through.
	And when I say that, eventually gun control advocates will say, you don't care about the problem or you don't care about this child or these children who've been killed.
	That's the only reason to oppose this policy.
	And it's not.
	It is entirely possible to share the motivations of a movement, which I do, being a conservative, but not to think that every policy that is proposed as a means by which to fight it is good.
	And that's where I am here.
	I mean, I don't know how much we've talked about Ron DeSantis or Florida on your show, but you listen to the editors.
	We talk about Ron DeSantis a lot.
	Well, I mean, I don't agree with him on everything, but I'm pretty much on board with his agenda.
	I mean, he is a Floridian.
	A conservative.
	And right, he's a Florida man.
	And I just think this one, this individual policy has a lot wrong with it.
	And I think that on balance, it is a bad idea.
	The other thing is this, I think conservatives, you know, it's exciting to see a governor fight back.
	I get it.
	I get that.
	But the win, as you point out, yes, it had happened legislatively.
	They got the bill passed and it's law now in Florida that you can't indoctrinate kids.
	And it's not about speaking about one's partner in, you know, a casual conversation at a young level.
	It's about curriculum, not pushing sexual agendas or gender ideology on children who are basically between the ages of five and eight.
	So what I think people are missing is like the win was even bigger than the legislation getting passed because Disney's stock price, as I understand it, had already started to go down.
	It's down now 15%.
	That's not all because of this pushback by DeSantis on Reedy Creek.
	It's because of Chris Ruffo outing the videos of the executives on tape saying they sneak their queer agenda in wherever possible.
	And the American public has been horrified to find out how woke they are, how agenda-driven they are with our very young children.
	That's what's happened to Disney in the past month.
	That's the biggest thing.
	You know, it's great to see an extra punch in the face, but the bully had already started to stumble.
	And the real punishment will be when, I mean, genuinely, people are going to turn away from Disney.
	This isn't like, don't eat french fries.
	This is like that has gone from a company that had our implicit trust to one we now view as dangerous.
	Yeah.
	And two days before I wrote my piece objecting to this particular policy, I wrote a magazine piece that was published at National Review in which I said Disney is losing this fight badly and it deserves to.
	And one of the reasons that it was losing is that it's wrong.
	It was wrong on this policy.
	And it was wrong on this policy in a way that is damaging to its core offering.
Why Disney Hurt Itself 00:02:19
	If AT ⁇ T put out a statement saying, we really like abortion, it would annoy me.
	But abortion, hopefully, is not that relevant to what AT ⁇ T does, which is provide cell service and lease phones.
	But with Disney, to see someone within the company saying we have a not so secret agenda and we are using our programs to advance it is obviously a disaster for them because Disney has programs on Disney Plus, on commercial television, that people watch with their children.
	Disney has amusement parks that people visit with their children.
	The analogy that I drew is if, say, someone high up at Coca-Cola said, we're putting something in our product, not so secretly, that will change you.
	And our aim is to change you.
	Well, I think people would say, well, I don't want to drink Coca-Cola anymore.
	Disney has hurt itself.
	It deserves to be in the position that it's in.
	Its stock deserves to be going down.
	It deserved to be lambasted as it was by Governor DeSantis for its interference, not because it spoke out.
	I don't have a problem with corporations or anyone speaking out, nor if they're honest to most conservatives.
	And if they did, they wouldn't have cheered the Citizens United decision, but because Disney did so in an inappropriate, unrelated, and fundamentally dishonest way.
	It miscast the law.
	It lied about the law.
	It bought activists' false premise when talking about the law.
	And that makes our politics worse.
	And if the governor of Florida or anyone else wants to use his First Amendment rights to respond and say, you know what, screw off, then that's fine with me.
	So, I mean, I absolutely agree with you.
	I think Disney has hurt itself here.
	And I hope that this will cause it to reconsider.
	Because our aim here should not be to destroy all American corporations.
	It should be to incentivize them not to behave like this and to save them.
	I mean, I don't want to burn everything in America down.
	I just think this particular policy was not the way to do it and actually made public policy worse, which is a very rare thing to say about a policy put out by Governor DeSantis.
CNN's Failed Political Pivot 00:15:31
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that's exactly right.
	I mean, most of us have taken our children to Disney World and it's a delightful experience.
	And you give your kids memories that will last a lifetime.
	And we don't want it to change.
	We don't want a weird agenda pushed on them or us or any agenda pushed on them or us other than happiness, which used to be the sole goal.
	But God bless Chris Rufo for outing what the real agenda is now.
	And we'll see whether Disney ever grows the stones to respond to that.
	There's much more to talk about with Charles, including we've got to discuss, okay, Patrice Cullers, one of the BLM founders, is apparently shocked and stunned and quote, triggered by the tax laws governing her organization.
	Well, Charles is triggered too, and we'll get to it.
	So before we get to Patrice Cullors and her being triggered by the tax laws, it's amazing.
	I want to ask you about the failure of CNN Plus because already the spin is starting.
	The new spin by the CNNers themselves is this was just a corporate decision.
	It had nothing to do with the strength of our performance or its promise.
	It only had to do with the fact that now CNN has new ownership and they just had a different corporate vision than Jeff Zucker in terms of streaming.
	P.S.
	It's a difficult time for streamers.
	And that's their narrative.
	And so that's why they had to pull the plug.
	Here is as an example.
	Let's see, Brian Stelter.
	This is Soundbite 4 on how this failure is just about a clash of strategies.
	All the sources I've been talking to the last 24 hours, they say this is just a crazy clash of strategies.
	Warner Media, the old team, Jason Kyler, Jeff Zuckerberg had one vision.
	The new team has a very different vision.
	And the new team won.
	That's it.
	And lest you be confused, we'll never know whether CNN was a success or a failure because, well, listen, Soundbite 5.
	Let me try out a theory on you, Matt, which is it's too early to know if this product or this service was a success or a failure.
	You know, you got all the haters today saying this thing was a failure.
	I don't know if we can even ever assess that because it just simply didn't have enough time because of the management's change in direction.
	And at the end of the day, if you buy something, if you buy a giant media company, you get to do whatever you want with it.
	But it does mean there's a lot of suffering for employees and frankly, disappointment among subscribers as a result.
	Disappointment among subscribers.
	Those three people are crying in their soup today, Charles.
	Don't forget about that.
	I love it.
	When Brian Stelter says, according to the sources I've been talking to, when he's talking about his own network, I just love it.
	He tries this every day.
	I mean, yeah, there probably was a shift in priorities and a change in visions in that the people who were coming in probably didn't want to throw hundreds of millions of dollars down the toilet.
	And the people who were going out did.
	And I asked this in a piece before CNN Plus was canceled, but when it was clear that it was in trouble, who told them that there was a demand for this?
	And the answer seems to have been McKinsey, whom they hired to do their due diligence.
	But why?
	Who believed this for a single moment?
	CNN is a network that struggles to get a million viewers in prime time on cable, which is bundled for most people, which takes no effort to see.
	And they thought there were going to be 14, 15, 16, 17 million people in four years' time who were watching this regularly.
	You know, Major League Baseball has an app, MLB-TV, that I subscribe to.
	For $120 a year, you can watch every single baseball game in America.
	And it has about two and a half million subscribers.
	There are 2 million people who subscribe to Sunday Ticket, the National Football League's every game package.
	15 million?
	I don't think we needed to wait to find out whether that was a realistic proposition.
	It wasn't one.
	I mean, even Fox, which CNN is, of course, completely obsessed with, maxes out on its biggest night at 5 million.
	15 million?
	It's lunacy.
	Yeah.
	That's insanity.
	Truly.
	I mean, I love that you tweeted out or wrote in one of your pieces.
	Actually, this is part of a piece, the CNN Plus catastrophe.
	And I quote, as for the network slogan, the most trusted name in news, one might as soon call Chris Cuomo a wit.
	I mean, look.
	I'm sorry, but this is who they've built their brand on.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, they had 10,000 regular viewers, 10,000.
	Right.
	And, you know, that is about as many people who go to the Durham Bulls minor league games.
	I've been to those.
	They're actually quite fun.
	They're quite fun.
	Well, of course, you've just seen the movie.
	Yeah, but that is as many people who go to the mermaid conventions.
	No, but literally, I get more likes on a tweet than that.
	I mean, and my tweets are free.
	You can enjoy them for free on Twitter, at least for the time being.
	So it's crazy that anybody thought this would grow in a way that would be meaningful and would line the pockets of the bosses.
	But, you know, I did the same thing last week.
	I talked to the audience about my views on this.
	CNN proper is failing.
	It's failing.
	It's been failing for a long time.
	700,000 in the overall number and 165,000 in the prime time demo.
	I used to get 700,000 in the demo.
	I would get that in the demo.
	The demo is a harder number to get 25 to 54 year olds.
	And they're getting it in the overall.
	You should be getting over 3 million in the overall on cable.
	That's the number of households sitting down to watch your show.
	The fact that they're at 7165 is disgraceful.
	It's an embarrassment.
	And it questions the entire CNN business model.
	I mean, they should be having serious conversations at Discovery about whether they should be wrapping this up as an experiment that has now failed, not adding more of A, some of the same, and then B, the same light, like stupid programs by the same failing anchors on food or parenting or a talk show.
	I mean, the first thing that they can do, frankly, is stop listening to Brian Stelter.
	They gave us five days a week.
	He has a show five days a week now on CNN Plus.
	But just in general, I've been writing about CNN for a long time.
	Brian Stelter is the contemporary mainstream media's janitor.
	His job is to, at every point, cast journalists as heroes and make it seem as if what they're doing is worthwhile and that whatever their peccadillos might be, they're correct.
	He does it with his own network, which I find mortifying, but he does it more broadly for pretty much everyone who isn't Fox.
	And clearly, he's wrong.
	It is simply not the case that everyone in America loved the mainstream media until Donald Trump came down the escalator.
	Trump, if anything, was a symptom of mistrust in the mainstream media or the corporate media, as people have taken to calling it.
	CNN is a disaster.
	It is not what it once was.
	If you went back to the 90s and you brought anyone who worked there forward 20 years and said, this is CNN now, they'd just be astonished.
	They'd be astonished by the bias, by the laziness, by the frivolity.
	There was just no way you could expand it, as you say, and expect that to work.
	The new owners need to go back to basics.
	They need to clear out a lot of the existing stuff.
	They need to remember what CNN was supposed to be.
	And then they need to take the real opportunity that exists, and it does exist to be that, to be an actual news network that isn't more focused on politics than on current affairs.
	I do wonder.
	I mean, remember the Bernard Shaw, Aaron Brown days of CNN where, you know, big days like 9-11, that was what made Aaron Brown, you know, very well known.
	I just, can they possibly get back to that after revealing to the country, anyone who's in the center or right of center that they hate them?
	It's not like, I'm a little biased towards the left, which I think everyone presumed.
	It's we can't stand you or your way of life.
	Well, I think it can, because most people don't watch cable news.
	I mean, even successful cable news shows are watched by a tiny fraction of the American population.
	And if CNN can return to where it was, you know, around the time of the OJ Simpson chase, yeah, I think you can rebuild an audience.
	Maybe they're not the same people who watch it now.
	And maybe they're not the people who've been made aware that CNN hates them.
	But it's an absolutely enormous country.
	You only need two, three, four million people.
	If you go back to the 90s, I wrote about this in a piece I wrote about CNN a few years ago.
	This was a cliche in movies.
	Turn on CNN, right?
	Whenever something happened in a movie, the equivalent of a 9-11, of course, that was in real life, was turn on CNN.
	That's what people said.
	That's why I mentioned the OJ chase, turn on CNN.
	Now, you would never say that, but we still have a need in the United States, everywhere, for television news.
	It is still the first thing that we do when something monumental happens.
	And as a streaming proposition, that could have worked too.
	It's just that they tried to transpose all of their problems, all of the inputs that have led them to collapse over to streaming and assume that what, people who stream things have different tastes?
	Of course they don't.
	Right.
	And here's the thing.
	I'm reminded of a conversation I had with Geraldo Rivera many moons ago.
	We were covering the Virginia Tech mass shooting.
	I was very young in my career.
	I was still working in the DC Bureau.
	So it was, I can remember the year of Virginia Tech.
	I want to say 2005.
	And CNN was crushing us in the field.
	They were getting all the best bookings and we were struggling to find the best guests down there.
	And I remember sitting on a grassy knoll with Geraldo saying, my God, we're getting our asses kicked.
	And he looked at me and he's, of course, been everywhere and been with all the networks.
	And he kind of laughed at me.
	And I was like, what?
	And he said, they don't watch because of the guests.
	They watch because of the hosts.
	And I remember being somewhat amused by his hubris.
	Of course, he was a big anchor at the time and me sort of laughing at it.
	But he wasn't wrong, Charles.
	Like Bill O'Reilly, he never got the huge guests.
	He never did.
	Like, you know, on a big breaking news story, if you were in any way on the left half of the spectrum, you wouldn't go on the O'Reilly Factor.
	He was by far the number one show in cable news for virtually all of his 20 years.
	Why?
	Because of him.
	People wanted to hear what he thought about the news.
	They found him a compelling character and host and, you know, thought leader.
	That's not the case for anyone on CNN.
	And so for CNN to mistake that its anchors had anywhere near that kind of connection with their audience to the point where they'd want to see them do more, like offer advice on parenting, right, from Anderson Cooper, who's been a parent for about two minutes, right?
	Or like a Don Lemon talk show, they don't have that kind of connection with their audience and they never have.
	I think that is a perfect point.
	And on Bill O'Reilly, it also demonstrated that political perfection or falty to a given ideology was not the key either.
	Because, you know, Bill O'Reilly was conservative, but Bill O'Reilly dissented on many key issues, immigration, for example, from his audience.
	And they still tuned in every night.
	As they say, I think CNN needs to clean the house.
	When you say that, people get upset and they say, well, that's terrible.
	We don't want anyone to lose their job.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I don't mean it in a vicious way.
	But if CNN wants to present itself as something new, it can't do so with all of the same on-air talking voices.
	And go on.
	Yeah, I was going to say now there's talk about moving Chris Wallace, who's freshly out of a job after them paying him something.
	I've heard 10 and I've heard $9 million a year to leave Fox and go over to CNN Plus.
	And now there's serious talk from what I'm hearing of moving him into the nine o'clock spot formerly occupied by Chris Cuomo, which I am here to tell you will be a disaster.
	That will fail instantaneously.
	That will never work.
	I've hosted a nine o'clock show in cable news for many years.
	He can't do it.
	It's not going to work.
	And let's not forget Chris Wallace's own statements that the reason, the alleged reason he was leaving Fox was, yes, he thought they had lost their minds.
	Okay, we've all heard that.
	But he also said, I was sick of doing politics.
	I wanted to do more conversational.
	So what?
	He's going to be like Larry King?
	Well, that show was failing at the end.
	I mean, there's a reason they moved to a more political model.
	Cable is all red meat now.
	Like they're out of options, but Chris Wallace moving to the 9 p.m. is not the solution.
	You know, if you ever talk to veterans of the Second World War, they'll tell you everything was different afterwards.
	And I think that the combination of the Trump presidency and then COVID has had a similar effect.
	And there are a lot of people, many of them work for CNN, but across media who cannot sort of reinvent themselves after that five, six year stretch.
	And, you know, this isn't a particular criticism of Chris Wallace, but Chris Wallace has now been through the last six years.
	He's been through the Trump years.
	He's been at Fox.
	He left Fox and he's explained why.
	He went to CNN Plus.
	It failed.
	You can't wipe that slate clean.
	And if I were in charge of CNN, which I never will be because of the way I talk about them, not least, I would say just cut it all, basically clean a house and start again because it's the, you know, the war has changed us all.
MSNBC's Audience Growth Struggle 00:06:14
	Yeah, I think that's right.
	You know, I remember thinking that, you know, the Trump derangement syndrome really was real for some of those anchors.
	You could see it.
	You could see them really losing all semblance of objectivity.
	And I wondered, maybe the American public will give them a pass when the Trump years are over.
	Like they were all genuinely temporarily insane, but they don't seem to want a pass.
	They don't seem to want to come back to objectivity and, you know, being fair to both sides of an argument.
	They seem to very happy where they are.
	So you're right.
	If they want to grow their audience with anything more than the hard left, they either have to start getting rid of people or no, they have to start getting rid of people or at least at a very minimum peppering in a bunch of people with different viewpoints, right?
	Because right now it's all one way.
	Right.
	And I mean, even the hard left, one of CNN's problems is that we already have MSNBC.
	Yeah.
	And you're never going to out MSNBC, MSNBC.
	And again, they're more honest.
	The MSNBC, to its credit, I think their motto is, this is who we are.
	Like, okay, we get it.
	CNN still wants to tell us that they're the must trusted name in news, which, as you point out, one ma to soon call Chris Cuomo a wit.
	All right, standby.
	We're going to do Patrice Colors next, right after this quick break, more with the one and only Charles C.W. Cook.
	And remember, folks, you can find the Megan Kelly Show audio podcast on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free.
	So if you miss us live on SiriXM, just download the audio podcast.
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	And you will also find our full archives there with more than 300 shows.
	Breaking news hitting right now.
	Back with us to discuss it, Charles C.W. Cook of National Review.
	Charles Reuters reporting Twitter is set to accept Elon Musk's $43 billion offer.
	It's happening.
	Unbelievable.
	And Elon tweeted, and I quote, just now, I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter because that is what free speech means.
	I can't help but feel this.
	This feels like a huge win for reason, rationality, and the ability to engage with viewpoints one might find potentially offensive.
	Absolutely.
	What he just said there is classical liberalism distilled.
	That is what free speech means.
	And of course, he used the word critics, which doesn't mean that Twitter needs to allow people to publish your address or threaten to send you a bomb.
	But if that's where he's going, that's great because that's going to lead to a much better and more open conversation.
	And it will take some of the frustration, I think, out of our online politics.
	People quite rightly feel that they're treated differently based on their political views.
	And if Elon Musk wants to put an end to that, good luck to him.
	It's crazy.
	I'm just thinking about it this past year, you know, its suppression of the New York Post story.
	One of the tweets that they suppressed and said was disinformation was Dave Rubin saying that this is after, this is well into Delta.
	So him saying the vaccines don't prevent the spread.
	Like now that's not even controversial.
	He was shut down for saying that back then.
	And of course, the thing that seemed to have gotten Elon Musk upset in the first instance prior to his offer was their silencing of the Babylon B, right?
	For tweeting out that this woman of the year, who's a trans woman, was in fact their man of the year, Rachel Levine.
	And that, and they, so they shut down the Babylon B.
	And he's a fan of the Babylon B.
	And really, honestly, that tweet could have just saved our national conversation.
	Like it's just, that could have been a life-changing tweet for conservatives in America.
	I actually think it's worth meditating a bit on what you just said about the Dave Rubin tweet, because it reminds me that the free speech position is actually the humble position.
	And the pro-censorship or viewpoint moderation position is the arrogant position.
	And that in order to want a culture in which people speak freely and exchange ideas, you have to admit that you don't know everything.
	The people who are unpopular might have good ideas.
	And that what we consider at any given point to be true or likely will change.
	And obviously, that has happened throughout COVID.
	At various points, things that were regarded as verboten or wrong have turned out to be true.
	Now, of course, not everything has.
	There's been an awful lot of conspiracy theorizing and nonsense, as there always is.
	But the problem with having higher powers, whether that be government, which should be treated differently because it has force, or private actors deciding at every given point that they have the answers and that they will enforce those answers ruthlessly, is that they assume an omniscience that simply can't exist.
	And what Musk said there about leaving his own critics alone portrays a self-confidence and a humility that is necessary in a big, diverse country such as ours, where people do profoundly disagree on things.
	You can't know the answers.
	And if you can't know the answers, then whether by law, which is the government position or by choice, which is the private position, you should want a freewheeling debate in which people who are generally regarded to be wrong or crazy or eccentric are pretty much left alone.
	You know, Barack Obama was just railing about disinformation.
	This is going to be the big post-presidency push now for him.
	Disinformation in particular on social media.
	And put aside the irony that he's the architect of the lie of the year.
	If you like your plan, you can keep it.
	I mean, that's by political fact, right?
Free Speech and Misinformation 00:08:25
	That's not Megan Kelly.
	That's not any right-leaning media.
	If you like your plan, if you like your doctor, you can keep them.
	That was a lie.
	He knew it was a lie when he told it.
	So he's one to be lecturing us about disinformation.
	Put that to the side.
	He talks about how disinformation is getting people killed.
	Well, the stats just came out from the FBI, all right, a newly released FBI uniform crime report.
	This is just for 2020.
	They haven't done 2021 yet.
	And the killings across racial demographics have swelled by 30% between 2019 and 2020.
	The largest surge, Black Americans.
	The number of Black Americans murdered jumped 32%.
	In 2020, 9,941 blacks were murdered compared to 7,484 the year before.
	Okay.
	The pushback on the narrative about police that was spun in the wake of George Floyd was just and it was factual.
	And no one doing the pushback was saying all cops are good.
	They were saying your attempt to make all cops bad because of a guy like Derek Chauvin is dishonest and it's dangerous.
	And we know it's dangerous because we've seen the so-called Ferguson effect in city after city.
	When you rain down hell upon a police force because of the actions of one or a few, when you sick the federal government on a police force and the powers are just relatively huge and minuscule, the feds over the cops, the police back off policing.
	That's just a fact.
	They do.
	And when you take away cops, right, the ones who are there are not doing what they used to do because they're worried.
	They know no one's going to have their back.
	And there's fewer cops there to begin with because of defund the police.
	And then when you do finally get an arrest, the people are thrown right back out on the street because of no bail and soft down crime prosecutors.
	There are real life effects.
	And people were making those points in the wake of the hysteria surrounding George Floyd.
	And they were shamed and they were called racists and bigots and oftentimes shut down.
	So I don't want to hear about disinformation costing lives from Barack Obama or anybody else because most of the lives that were cost were of brown and black people.
	When is he going to come out and admit that?
	Well, I think you hit on the key point here, which is that misinformation or disinformation or whatever you want to put before information really is immediately filtered through politics.
	And so when figures such as Barack Obama say, we need to do something about misinformation, they mean misinformation that I dislike or that hurts my side or that is spread by the people that I disagree with.
	It immediately becomes partisan.
	It immediately becomes ideological.
	It is a feature and will always be a feature of any free society.
	This isn't an endorsement of people who lie.
	This isn't an endorsement of people who are hysterical.
	And goodness knows, with me, it's not an endorsement of the mob.
	But it is an understanding that power and the spread of information are intrinsically linked.
	And no one is motivated to stem the flow of bad ideas or falsehoods that help them, Barack Obama included.
	So, you know, what we've seen in the last few months and years, especially as Trump rose up in politics and then became president, is this very selective fear about lying, this very selective fear about the use of the internet to spread falsehoods.
	And Barack Obama is still doing it.
	So yeah, as you say, when the question is whether or not the average cop helps or hurts the crime rate, it's fine.
	As a nation, we adopt a whole bunch of ideas that are silly.
	If Major League Baseball does it, if Delta does it, if state legislatures do it, if the president does it.
	But when it comes to COVID, and misinformation has killed people in COVID, well, then that's a very serious problem that we need to address probably with laws, if not with corporate takeovers.
	And I just think this underscores the first point I made, which is that you just cannot have a situation in which the people making these decisions have perfect knowledge or are free from political bias.
	And that's why you should want, despite its destructive qualities, which of course it has, a free and open forum is your starting point.
	I mean, to me, it's, you know, you'd have to question it.
	I'd like to dig deeper because the people who are dying because they didn't take the vaccine, which I assume is what he's referring to on COVID misinformation, right?
	Or because they, whatever, relied on Iver Mecton, they tended to be conservatives.
	They tended to be older conservatives.
	The people who are dying because all the BLM disinformation or misinformation are black and brown people for the most part.
	He's supposed to care about that group.
	The liberals are the ones who are supposed to, they tell us they're the champions of those group, those groups, and that the Republicans are the evil people who want to see them die, right?
	Who don't care about them at all.
	We'll deal with the statistics, deal with the actual facts, because they don't support what you're saying.
	Speaking of BLM, Patrice Cullers has learned the hard way that when you run a charitable organization, you are supposed to use the money for charitable things.
	And insult to injury, then you have to disclose what you did with the money.
	You can't just be like, trust me, we got this.
	There's something called Forum 990 that makes you, it's a standard financial disclosure form that you have to file to tell people here's where the money went.
	And a couple weeks ago, she was speaking about this publicly.
	And let's just say she doesn't like it.
	Here is Soundbite 2.
	Listen to this.
	This doesn't seem safe for us, this 990 structure, this nonprofit system structure.
	This is like deeply unsafe.
	Like this is being literally weaponized against us, against the people we work with.
	I can't tell you how many people are like, am I next?
	Like, are they going to do this to me?
	She said she finds it like triggering, Charles.
	I mean, are they going to do this to me?
	Well, if by this, you mean require you to fill in the federal forms when you run a nonprofit and then disclose them if necessary to those who ask.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, this is how nonprofits work.
	You get to not pay taxes in return for filling in a bunch of forms explaining where the money went.
	I struggle to see how this is unsafe.
	I can certainly see how it's triggering given how Black Lives Matter has spent the money, especially on her.
	But as I wrote at National Review, you wait till she finds form 1040, which the rest of us have to fill out every year, which asks us where we got our money and how much of it we made.
	And then, and here's the really triggering bit, requires us to pay a percentage of the total to the federal government or face consequences inflicted by men with guns.
	I mean, it's just, it's just an extraordinary entitlement.
	The idea that by getting to circumvent normal taxes, she's in some way being victimized.
	I'm not against nonprofits at all.
	On the contrary, I think they're a key part of our civil society.
	I'm not wild about Black Lives Matter, but equally, I don't want to see viewpoint discrimination.
	And if Black Lives Matter runs a federally permissible structure, that's fine.
Private Platforms and Censorship 00:11:16
	But come on.
	The deal here is that the taxpaying public gets to see what you're doing to avoid the taxes.
	This isn't weaponization.
	This is accounting.
	Everything.
	I mean, the knee-jerk resort to I'm a victim again, the New York magazine article outing their $6.3 million house in California and another $6 million house in Toronto between, you know, she bought one, the spouse bought another, and it's all, oh, it's all on the up and up.
	Although the New York Magazine reporter got a hold of the text where they were like, how are we going to spend this?
	How are we going to get them off of it?
	Maybe we can say it's a safe space.
	Oh, wait, that's not going to work because we're all over YouTube right in front of it.
	Artists, enclave.
	That's what we're going to go with, artists, enclave.
	And now she's like, it's very triggering.
	The whole thing is triggering.
	I'll bet it is.
	I'll bet.
	Charles, always a pleasure.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you so much for having me.
	I loved it.
	Okay.
	Coming up next, we're going to be joined by journalist and author Yasha Monk.
	He's been doing some great writing and reporting on cancel culture, on COVID, and now on democracies.
	Don't go away.
	The battle for the future of democracy is raging right now as Ukraine fights off Russia and France and Slovenia elect pro-European Union leaders and stave off challenges from the far right.
	Here at home, America is also facing a reckoning of its own with President Biden's own poll numbers underwater in a crucial midterm election year.
	My next guest just wrote a new book called The Great Experiment, Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.
	Yasha Monk is the founder of Persuasion Magazine and a Johns Hopkins University professor who has done some fascinating writing on cancel culture and COVID-2.
	Yasha, thank you so much for being here.
	Thank you so much for having me on.
	So you're interesting to me because you are of the left.
	I would say you're a committed Democrat, liberal, but you've pushed back against cancel culture and the crackdown on free speech and opinions that people find offensive.
	So let's kick it off with what's happening today with Elon Musk and Twitter.
	Carol Markowitz, who I love, she writes for the New York Post.
	She summed it up so well, I think, on Twitter.
	If you will indulge me, this is what she just sent out.
	In any other time, we would all recognize that Elon Musk is a liberal and it would be the left celebrating this purchase.
	But the fringe has taken control of language and that's why we are where we are.
	She writes, a guy from Silicon Valley who popularized electronic cars wants to buy a social media platform to protect free speech.
	But liberals, mostly in media, are super against this because they think of this as a right-wing cause.
	And she says, that's me today trying to explain the situation to me of 22 years ago back in 2000.
	Pretty good, right?
	Like, what's the problem again?
	Why is there a meltdown?
	Well, I mean, certainly free speech has traditionally been a broadly philosophically liberal value held by the liberal left and the liberal right, but particularly strongly in many moments of American history on the left when you think of the free speech movement at Berkeley in the 1960s.
	And I've watched with horror in the last years as my friends on the left have somehow decided that free speech is a conservative value, that it's something that they should criticize, that it's something that they shouldn't own.
	I think that everybody who believes in the Constitution, everybody who believes in the basic principles of our political system, should be agreed about this.
	So yeah, there's a funny kind of evolution in the last little bit where for the last years, I've always heard people say, if you're worried about arbitrary decisions for what to censor and not to censor on Twitter, then you're really misunderstanding the First Amendment because Twitter is a private company and they can do whatever they want.
	And the response to that is that that is legally true, but that there is a very real concern when one of the most important public fora for where people debate politics has these capricious forms of censorship.
	Some unaccountable people in Silicon Valley making random decisions for what is censored and what is not censored.
	Now, I think that's a general problem with Twitter.
	It'll remain if Elon Musk buys it.
	But certainly if he lives up to his promise of censoring fewer things and being much more consistent in how the platform is run, that would be a positive thing.
	I remember when this happened a couple of years ago, Facebook started to debate.
	It was when Donald Trump was running for re-election, if Memory Serves, should we start policing the ads, the political ads?
	Should we be fact-checking the political ads?
	And I remember thinking, this is the most absurd thing I've ever heard.
	Who doesn't know that political ads are full of spin?
	You could be uncharitable and say lies.
	They're politicians.
	They're trying to convince us to elect them.
	We know how the game works.
	We don't need Mark Zuckerberg over at Facebook or Elon Musk or anybody else at Twitter trying to help us decipher any of this.
	That's typically what the other side is for, to say, he's a liar.
	This is not true.
	Let me prove it to you.
	Now, it's like this utopian world.
	We talked about this with our last guest, Charles C.W. Cook, in which, you know, Barack Obama is going to decide what's disinformation and what's not.
	Or maybe it's Elon Musk or maybe it's still Mark Zuckerberg.
	It's just, it's not going to work.
	It's not the way our country was designed to try to censor this speech, but allow this other speech, but then that one, that goes too far, pull it back.
	It's the marketplace of ideas.
	You get on your soapbox and you yell your ideas louder than that guy yells his ideas and then let people decide.
	We've gotten so far away from that.
	Well, look, the reason why text on free speech are often appealing to people is that they start with a sensible thought, which is that lots of horrible things are said in the public sphere, lots of wrong things are said, lots of things that might mislead people to take actions that seriously harm themselves.
	And it wouldn't be wonderful if we could just stop all of that.
	But of course, the problem is that I have my opinion of what's bad thought and what's misleading and what's going to make people act in bad ways.
	And so if I was the censor, perhaps I'd be fine with that.
	But of course, I'm never going to be the censor and I'm never going to be willing to trust whatever committee of people is formed, whether it is some random faceless people in Silicon Valley, as is essentially the case now, or whether it is some publicly elected committee.
	I will never trust those people to decide for me what is in fact worthwhile speech and what is worthless speech.
	And then, you know, when you do have these restrictions on free speech, it has really bad impacts on the political system that we should be worried about much more than we are at the moment.
	First of all, it makes everybody paranoid.
	It makes everybody think that their side is being censored more than the other.
	I think you can see that on Twitter.
	Now, I think there is some bias probably, but even if it weren't, right?
	Even if it's just they're trying to ban the 10 worst actors on the left and the 10 worst actors on the right, they're always going to make some mistakes.
	That's inevitable.
	And so if I'm on the left and I see the people they're banning on the left and they're saying, well, these 10 people, fine, perhaps I can see that it's reasonable to ban them.
	But what about those two people where they made a mistake?
	That's really outrageous.
	How dare they censor these people who are just good faith actors?
	I feel like they're really out to get me.
	Now, if on the right, they're doing the same thing, they ban 12 people, of which 10 are bad actors and two are actually reasonable.
	I probably am less aware of that.
	I don't know those accounts.
	I don't follow them.
	And so I think, oh, well, you know, I'm sure that that's fine.
	So even if they actually were applying censorship in an even way, both sides would end up with the impression that they're the persecuted ones.
	They're the ones that are being treated unfairly.
	And so that actually is going to drive more pressure in our politics, more paranoia, more mutual hatred.
	And it undermines the core premise of our democracy, because the core premise is you might hate the other side.
	You might think the stakes of the election are really high.
	But you also know, you know what?
	If they win, I might be really upset, but they get to govern for four years and I get to make my case.
	And if I convince my fellow citizens, when I get to govern, my guys get to govern four years from now.
	If you start to worry that if I lose the next elections, I might stop being able to make my case.
	I might stop being able to say what I want to in public, then the incentive to not accept the outcome of the election, to say I'm going to fight in any way I can, including extra-legal ways, in order to stay in power, becomes much, much higher.
	You know, I think about it, like if you look at social media, for sure, the left controls it.
	I mean, there's no question that, you know, liberals are controlling those organizations from Twitter to Facebook and Insta, same ownership and Google and so on.
	But, you know, the right has a pretty big presence on Facebook in particular.
	And the right has found a way in the digital world to have their voices heard.
	You know, I mean, there are all sorts of places now where you can, whatever.
	I mean, the podcast, this is one forum, but there are lots of ways.
	And like, I'm thinking about my pals at the Daily Wire.
	That website's becoming extremely popular.
	For years, Drudge was more right-wing.
	I don't know how you describe him these days.
	He's like anti-Trump.
	I'm not sure exactly where he falls, but my point is there is a way of getting your voice out there, right?
	So the conservatives, as much as they do feel censored, there is still a way of getting your voice out there.
	I'm surprised to hear you even suggest that the left feels censored because from where I sit, they're not, they're the ones doing the censoring.
	They're not the censored.
	Sure, but this is the problem with this discourse, right?
	So I see lots of people share lists of what posts do particularly well on Facebook.
	And then we say, what do you mean Facebook is left leading?
	Actually, this is a right-wing cabal.
	Look, it's all of those daily wire stories that are in the top 10 every day.
	This must mean that there's a right-wing bias.
	So once you have these unaccountable mechanisms.
	Well, I'm talking about ownership.
	Just to be clear, I'm making a distinction between the ownership and their mission and the people who actually use it.
	No, sure.
	Yeah.
	I wasn't disagreeing with you.
	I was saying that I'm seeing people on the left who are sharing lists of what does particularly well on Facebook.
	I think Facebook publishes a list of the 10 top performing posts every day, or at least there's some way of getting to that.
	And so I see a lot of people on the left sharing those lists and saying, you know what?
	Actually, there must be some kind of secret conspiracy where Facebook is promoting those posts because, you know, how can those right-wing posts be doing the best?
	It must be because there's some bias against the left and we are somehow being censored.
	So the problem is that when you have these platforms with, you know, algorithms which nobody quite understands and some real censorship going on, everybody always feels like the victim, whether or not it's realistic.
	And so what we need is for those platforms to very clearly show that they are not favoring one form of content over another and that they are not censoring based on the content of...
The Facebook Algorithm Conspiracy 00:06:11
	Well, we know that they are.
	They can't show that because we, I mean, no, right?
	Like the jig is up.
	Like Twitter's caught.
	Like there's no, there's no way for them to deny that because look at the big stories that they've suppressed.
	You know, why was Hunter Button suppressed?
	Why wasn't there an apology?
	Sure, but that's why I think that Twitter and Facebook and other social media platforms should essentially hold themselves to the First Amendment.
	Now, they are private companies.
	They're not legally obliged to follow the standards of the First Amendment.
	But I think, and clearly, they do need to remove certain kinds of content like child pornography or direct threats of violence and so on.
	There's certain things we all agree should not be on those platforms.
	So there's need for some moderation.
	But I think that that moderation should basically be as content neutral as possible and as minimal as possible.
	And the way to do that is basically for these companies to say, we are going to try and hold ourselves to a First Amendment standard.
	That's going to involve some difficult calls.
	We have some kind of accountable committee that ultimately is responsible for adjudicating the most important cases.
	And that I think would take a lot of the heat out of this discussion and give Americans confidence that the most important public fora we have for debating politics aren't biased in favor of their political front.
	Yeah.
	Take yourself out of the alleged fact checking business.
	It's pointless.
	No one trusts you to do it.
	Leave it to the other side to flood the field with information they say is corrective.
	It's no one trusts big tech to do it.
	It's just gone on for too long with too much discrimination.
	And that ship has sailed.
	They don't have any credibility to be doing fact checking on anyone.
	I mean, here's a crazy example for you.
	Recently, we hosted RFK Jr., you know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he's been totally deplatformed.
	He's one of the so-called disinformation dozen that the White House called attention to on COVID.
	So we prepare.
	I mean, you should have seen me preparing for that, for that interview and my team.
	And we're straight, you know, we're straight news journalists.
	I do commentary as well.
	But when I'm presenting the facts, I'm doing it as a journalist trying to bring you the actual truth.
	And if this guy was a disinformation purveyor, I would absolutely be calling him out on it.
	And where he did stray afield of what I knew to be the facts, I called him out and he would have a response and so on.
	But he is not a disinformation dozen.
	When I spoke to him, I checked out all of his claims.
	They all have bases.
	In fact, it's his conclusions they don't like.
	It's his recommendation as a result of what he sees as the facts that they don't like.
	Well, that doesn't mean he's in the business of pushing disinformation.
	I was expecting to find, you know, him saying crazy stuff about, I don't know, snakes and vermin and the insects and how, you know, like it wasn't true.
	He said stuff about like what Bill Gates is doing in Africa.
	I thought, oh my God, this can't be true.
	No, there's no way Bill Gates did this stuff.
	Well, you know what?
	Lo and behold, all these independent sources backing up that this is what Bill Gates did in Africa.
	So too often, these labels are put on people who don't say the right things, right?
	Because he's challenging vaccines, that the left doesn't like that.
	And then we walk away not knowing what is true or just having the viewpoint censored so we can't make up our mind at all.
	So look, I haven't followed the debate about what he said in particular and so on.
	So I don't want to comment on him in particular.
	But certainly one of the classic arguments for free speech is that there is often very wide consensus that certain kinds of views are correct.
	And, you know, 20 years later, 50 years later, 100 years later, it becomes absolutely clear that people were deeply mistaken about some important issue.
	And so one of the promises of free speech is that those learning voices that disagree with the social consensus at least can try to get a hearing, at least can try to actually express their opinions to a wide audience in the major fora of discussion that exist at that time.
	Now, by the way, most people who do that are going to be saying things that are wrong, right?
	By and by.
	Of course.
	When 99% of people think something, they have a reason to think that.
	But it's socially really, really important that in those cases, when 99% of us are wrong, the people who figured that out, who are actually trying to point to our error, have a way of gaining a hearing because otherwise we're going to be missing out on really important insights and really important correct things that we're getting wrong.
	And certainly where I agree with you is that on some of the clearest examples where misinformation has been labeled and then removed, we have a pretty bad track record.
	So one of the most important ones is the so-called lab leak theory.
	For the first year or year and a half of the pandemic, anybody who suggested that COVID-19 may have its origin in gain of function research and then security breaches, which mean that that virus spread from a lab was deplatformed from YouTube and Facebook.
	Now, it's not clear to me whether or not the Lablik theory is right.
	There's an ongoing scientific debate about this.
	There's real disagreements between different branches of the United States government.
	Some security services seem to have concluded that the Lablik theory appears to be correct.
	Others have concluded that it doesn't appear to be correct.
	I don't know what the truth of the matter is, but it clearly is an open question and a very important one.
	And the fact that this is one of the first topics on which this misinformation paradigm was used in order to try to disappear certain ideas from the public sphere, I think is a very vivid example of why this is such a dangerous approach.
	The hubris, right?
	The hubris of some tech exec sitting in Silicon Valley to say, I know, I know this is disinformation about the COVID lab leak.
	You don't know anything.
	You know, like as you point out, the intelligence services are disagreeing about it.
	You don't know anything.
	You have to have some humility when running those companies for what you don't know, right?
	To allow the debate to play out in the public.
	It's one of the unique great things about America.
	And I know you, you have now become an American citizen, though you were raised in Germany.
Assimilation and Democratic Diversity 00:15:40
	And I loved your story about how you choked up when you were taking the oath and then you left and went to a rally against Donald Trump.
	But that's uniquely American.
	Like, I think that's awesome, right?
	Like, I'm not a rallier, but I totally agree with it.
	I think it's uniquely American that you get to do it.
	So you've lived it, right?
	Like you've been out there marching in the streets for the things that you believe in.
	So that's why it's so concerning to see the effective marching in the streets, you know, the social media streets being shut down, all these roadblocks put in front of people's ability to say how they feel.
	And it's such a great, you know, democratic forum, right?
	Because you don't have to leave your house.
	Like the wheelchair bomb person sitting at home can have his voice heard in the form of a virtual march if only they would allow it.
	And they're just getting a little too big and a little too scary.
	So I think the Elon Musk thing is a good development and I hope it goes through.
	It could still be screwed up, but it looks like looks pretty good if he's tweeting about it.
	All right, let me ask you this.
	How to save democracies?
	It's a big topic.
	And I think it's interesting because today we see France, you know, staving off the Marine Le Pen win, which isn't unexpected, but she made quite a run of it at the end there.
	You know, she got like 40% of the vote.
	Macron got 60%, I think, last I looked.
	And we're seeing this more and more, right?
	Like the rise of right-wing populism.
	And obviously we saw it in our own country to some extent with Donald Trump.
	You see Marine Le Pen doing better than she did a few years ago.
	You got Hungary, Slovenia staved off a similar challenge.
	But it's one of the things you addressed in your book.
	And I wonder, first, why you think it's happening more and more, right?
	Why more and more people are gravitating toward that kind of a leader?
	And secondly, what you do think, why you think it's pernicious and it needs to be staved off to save democracy?
	Yeah.
	So I think that a lot of people just don't trust the government anymore and they don't trust politicians anymore.
	Now, it's not that Americans or people in other democracies ever loved, you know, the people in their capital.
	You know, you go back 30 or 40 years in the United States and most Americans probably thought, I don't really like Washington, D.C. and don't really trust those senators and congressmen and what they're up to all day long.
	But they also had the sense that things were working, that they experienced real improvements in the standard of living, that they're doing much better than the parents did, that the kids are probably going to do better than them, that America's standing on the world stage was very strong.
	And they had an optimism about the future.
	And that's why they tended to say, let's let those politicians do their thing.
	In the end, something seems to be working.
	I think nowadays, a lot of people understandably feel that that's no longer the case, that they've worked hard over lives, but they're not necessarily doing better than their parents, but their kids might do worse than them.
	That America's standing on the world stage is much weaker than it was.
	And I also think in particular that they feel a deep pessimism about the subject that really is at the core of my new book, The Great Experiment, which is the state of ethnically and religiously diverse democracies like the United States, the state of integration, the way in which we're dealing with race relations and with immigration.
	And I think here there's a really interesting parallel of pessimism on different sides of political spectrum.
	Now, you have people on the far right who basically say that the demographic changes that we're experiencing are a deep problem because the kinds of people who are coming in are supposedly culturally or perhaps even genetically inferior.
	That what's great about America was the culture and perhaps the ethnicity of its majority group and all of that is supposedly being undermined.
	And so you have this real sense of doom that these changes will somehow ruin the country.
	Now, in the mainstream and on the left, people rightly disagree with that attribution of blame.
	They rightly disagree that there's anything less than about people who are coming here from Mexico or from Vietnam or from Kenya.
	But in an odd way, they echo that pessimism because they're saying, you know what?
	100 years ago, Irish and Italian immigrants could succeed because they were white.
	Whereas today, those immigrants from non-white countries, they experience so much discrimination, so much racism, so much injustice, that they can never succeed.
	And so, yes, they are experiencing all of these roadblocks and not making any socioeconomic progress.
	We're not integrating.
	It's just that it's a quote unquote our foot.
	And I think that that's actually wrong.
	In this book, I look at what the real state of our diverse societies is like.
	And I have to say, but I was astounded by how positive the developments are.
	A lot of people who arrive in the country take a long time to integrate fully, especially when they come from poorer countries and they have less educational opportunities.
	They may take a long time to learn the language.
	Some people never learn the language until the end of their lives.
	But we also see very clearly that the children and the grandchildren are succeeding very, very well.
	That in fact, the socioeconomic mobility we see in immigrants today is exactly the same at the same speed as that of Italian and Irish immigrants 100 years ago.
	Now, that shows that the far right is wrong to say that these immigrants are somehow inferior, there's something wrong with them.
	But it also shows that a lot of the mainstream and the left is wrong to say that for all of the injustices that exist, our country is so unjust, is so racist that these immigrants are somehow being stopped from succeeding.
	In fact, the reality looks much better than it does.
	But when this pessimism wins, as it did in France, as it does sometimes in the United States, that's what makes it much easier for these far-right populists to win.
	Because if you're basically being told, whatever happens, the future is going to be bleak, then it's easier to blame outsiders for that than to blame your own group for that.
	So let me ask you about that, because admittedly, I haven't studied this as closely as you have.
	But when I think about the rights objection to immigration, illegal immigration in this country is mostly what they object to.
	It's not that they're an inferior people.
	I mean, of course, you're going to have some racists who say that and believe that.
	It's that they flood the border.
	We don't have the facilities to take care of them.
	They come across and there's no provision for these folks and some wind up taking jobs that they don't have a right to.
	And then there's also an objection on another level to will they assimilate, right?
	Because all the immigrants who came over during the 20th century, they would eventually assimilate and they had a shared love of country.
	There was a patriotism, you know, this is an immigrant yourself, that would bind us together, even though we had our little tribes, right?
	Like I'm Irish-Italian.
	They were two separate tribes, but then they merged a lot.
	That's why you get people like me.
	But anyway, I had our little tribes, but one thing that brought us all together was love of country and that now that's being eroded.
	And without love of country, you can't have separate tribes.
	You can't have people who don't assimilate and just come here just like big blobs, you know, like the big Hispanic community, the big Irish community, the big whatever community, but they don't, they have nothing in common.
	So like, that's what I've heard from the right about America.
	I mean, there's always people like Pat Buchanan who are out there like, the white people are diminishing in number.
	Like we always had somebody like that, but I don't think he speaks for really even what we'd call the far right today.
	I don't know.
	You tell me.
	Well, I think there is a strong strain of that, actually.
	So look, absolutely, it's legitimate to say we want to have control of our own borders.
	to make sure that we determine who comes into the country and that we have some amount of agency in that.
	And that's a perfectly legitimate argument.
	I do think though that there's two things which are a little bit more concerning than that to me.
	And the first of those is a claim that there is something inferior about the people who are coming in.
	You know, in Michael Anton's very influential Flight 93 election essay in 2016, which was making the case for why sort of movement conservatives should vote for Donald Trump, he talked about, I quote, the ceaseless importation of third world foreigners.
	And he assumed, and this is the second point, that they would have no liking of the Republican Party, but more broadly, no liking of the American Republic, that they just didn't have democratic values.
	So this is this idea that immigrants don't tend to integrate, that perhaps they don't tend to learn the language, and certainly they don't care about democratic values.
	Now, I think that that actually just happens to be very wrong.
	Let's take language acquisition as one important case.
	On the right, you have concerns that immigrants aren't learning the language.
	On the left, you actually have some people who say immigrants shouldn't have to learn the language.
	It's perfectly fine if you have immigrants and their children, their grandchildren just continuing to speak Spanish or Chinese or whatever other language.
	We don't have to have a unified language in the United States.
	Both of those positions simply miss the empirical reality because what happens, and it's incredible how strong this empirical regularity is across time and across different immigrant communities, is that the first generation that arrives often doesn't learn the language perfectly.
	If you come to the country at 30 or at 40, and perhaps you didn't have a chance to have a lot of education in the country you come from, you might find it hard to learn the language fully.
	And even if you live in the country for 50 years, you might never come to speak it perfectly.
	Now, the children of that generation overwhelmingly speak both languages, but prefer to speak English.
	So when they're among their siblings, among their cousins, among friends who have a similar background of migration, they predominantly speak English.
	And by the third generation, by the generation of the grandchildren of the original immigrants, only about 1% of people still speak any of the original language.
	So actually, by that point, English has won a very definitive victory.
	So that's just sort of one point at which I think some of the fears just aren't true when you look at reality.
	And that's the same about other things.
	So it actually turns out that immigrants are more patriotic on some key measures than average Americans, perhaps especially when Americans who tend to be more on the left and who tend to be much more self-critical about the country.
	They say they love America more than the average person.
	They identify very deeply with the constitution.
	And so I think some of those fears about immigrants not integrating simply aren't reflected in reality.
	That's fascinating.
	What do you make of the, well, let me, before I move on to that, so that we talked about the rise of populism and the concerns about immigration and so on, like the changing demographics of the country, obviously also a dynamic in France.
	That's a whole long, that's a different, longer conversation because they really are facing an issue with a large number of, I mean, I don't know if they're all radical Muslims, but a large number of Islamists moving into France and changing the culture.
	We've talked about this with Ayan Hersi Ali, who's done great writing and research.
	She's at the Hoover Institution on it.
	And I understand, you know, given what's been documented there, a concern about, now that's, I mean, like, Muslim is not the same as radical Muslim.
	Muslim is not the same thing as Islamist.
	A lot of Islamists coming into Paris and trying to change the culture there to where the women get like attacked if they walk without an escort to where they get looked down on if they have a tank top on and skin exposure.
	That's worth fighting over.
	I mean, that's that's a difference in culture that's not tolerable.
	That's going back into the dark ages if people want to change your culture that way.
	And it's worth fighting over.
	Though in France, Macron's been against that.
	So, yeah, whatever.
	Le Pen has made an issue out of it.
	But what else would you say for people who haven't read the book and the great experiment are sort of the things that you feel we're losing that we need to shore up if we're going to save our democracy?
	Well, sort of on the topic of how to build ethnically and religiously diverse democracies, what I would say is that a lot of people are quite naive about how difficult it is to do that.
	But interestingly, that kind of naive optimism then easily turns to pessimism.
	So what I see among a lot of my friends and colleagues is to say, look, diversity should be really easy.
	How hard is it not to be a bigot?
	How hard is it not to discriminate against your neighbor just because they're somehow different from you?
	But then when they look at the current state of America and see that there are some real injustices, they become very, very pessimistic.
	Now, my starting point in the book is a little bit, I hope, less naive.
	I show the ways in which human beings across time and across cultures have a very deep instinct to form groups, to discriminate in favor of the in-group and against members or against people who are outside of that group.
	I show that throughout history, some of the worst conflicts have been across the lines of ethnic, racial, religious, national divisions.
	Some of the worst civil wars and genocides and forms of ethnic cleansing have been motivated by that.
	I think that precisely that account of why we are going through what I call the great experiment for why it is so difficult, then also allows us to be much more optimistic about the progress we've made over the last decade.
	Because in fact, America today is much better at building this ethnically religiously diverse democracy than most societies in the history of the world, than most countries around the world today, and a lot better than we were 50 or 25 years ago.
	I mean, you go back 30 years in American history, and a majority of Americans thought that it was morally wrong to have interracial marriage, morally wrong for people from different ethnic groups to marry each other.
	Today, that is down in the single digits.
	So, actually, the transformation of America in the last decades has been really inspiring.
	And in that sense, I believe as a new American citizen, that there's deep injustices in American history that we have to face up to, but also that the founding principles of our country is what has allowed us to make great progress towards living up to our ideals and that we can build on those founding principles in order to live up to our ideals more fully in the decades to come.
	I love hearing that.
	I agree with it fully.
	I wish more people would hear it on the left who are so determined to tell us that our country is awful.
	And you're right, some pessimism on the right too about the future and where we can take it.
	I think it's similar to the discussion we've had earlier.
	It's based on staying factual.
	You know, it's just trying to pull your ideology out of it and actually look at the numbers and actually look at how people are doing.
	You know, Jason Riley wrote a great book about what the black experience really was like under Trump and how it is right now in America.
	Glenn Lowry, he's been saying a lot of the same things that you're saying.
	He's more conservative than you are, but we need more sane voices of reason that just speak the facts, not colored, you know, harshly by partisanship.
Staying Factual Amid Pessimism 00:00:37
	Yasha, thank you so much.
	Good luck with the book.
	It's called The Great Experiment by Yasha Monk, and it is out right now.
	Thanks.
	All the best to you.
	Thank you so much.
	Tomorrow, one of my absolute favorites.
	When Douglas Murray talks, I stop what I am doing and I listen.
	And he's back with us.
	He is absolutely brilliant.
	As my friend Donna put it, he's such a brilliant and prophetic man.
	She said, what a crazy combo of insight, clarity, and eloquence.
	You will love him.
	Do not forget to tune in.
	Subscribe to the show so you don't miss it.
	And we'll see you then.
	Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no

Chapters

00:00:00 Elon Musk's Twitter Bid
00:12:05 DeSantis vs Disney Tax Status
00:27:58 Why Disney Hurt Itself
00:30:17 CNN's Failed Political Pivot
00:45:49 MSNBC's Audience Growth Struggle
00:52:04 Free Speech and Misinformation
01:00:29 Private Platforms and Censorship
01:11:46 The Facebook Algorithm Conspiracy
01:17:57 Assimilation and Democratic Diversity
01:33:38 Staying Factual Amid Pessimism