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April 28, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
21:05
20220428_megyn-kellys-special-message-on-open-and-honest-co
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Nurturing Our Podcast Audience 00:14:36
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
I'm Megan Kelly, and this is a special podcast-only episode for you today.
As you may know, the show goes out live on SiriusXM between noon and 2 p.m. Eastern every day, Monday through Friday, and we release it on YouTube among other online platforms.
But it started as a podcast, and it occurred to us that we should nurture the podcast audience and the folks who have been there with us via audio from the beginning in a special way.
So we are releasing this episode today only on podcast.
It is only for the podcast audience, and we hope you like it.
We feel very grateful to all of you for helping make the show a thing and giving us a reason to get up professionally each day and continue our mission.
And also, I just wanted to talk about the good news.
And the news this week was very, very good.
It was very good, very encouraging for those of us on the side of reason, meaning free speech and due process, love of country, and a general rejection of the pernicious ideas of wokeism that are trying to divide us based on race or gender or gender identity, et cetera.
Elon bought Twitter or is going to.
CNN Plus failed.
Jon Stewart's ratings are in the tank, embarrassingly bad.
Disney lost billions in value after openly pushing radical trans ideology and getting political in Florida.
So what does it tell me?
It tells me reason will prevail.
Reason is winning, right?
It's winning.
You can feel it.
We here at the show are grateful.
I feel excited about this.
I'm excited to be part of it.
So is my team.
We launched this program in September of 2020, which man, I look back now, it's like everything was happening.
My gosh, we were in such a state.
In fact, I was sitting on my couch in between, you know, NBC and this, not that motivated to do.
I was like, I need to do something.
I don't want to go back into the mainstream media at all.
What am I going to do?
And the madness of the summer of 2020 is what got me off the couch.
I'm like, I got to get back out there.
I got to own my own thing because I got to be able to talk about all these dicey issues in a way that is totally frank.
And then we did it.
We launched in September of 2020.
And our mission statement is right in the tagline.
Open, honest, and provocative conversations.
No third rails.
We'll discuss anything.
No spinning, no lying, no bullshit virtue signaling.
Let's give a platform to honest Americans with an opinion that is worth listening to, who the mainstream media ignores or attacks or censors as unworthy of consideration.
When we launched, it was an absolutely insane time.
We had like five people.
We were not yet on camera.
We took a little screenshot of the five of us looking at one another just on our on our Zoom computers thinking, this is going to be an exciting news time.
And boy, were we right.
I mean, it was truly, it was a sustained government assault on debate and discussion.
I mean, it's still ongoing, but we've made progress.
It was on COVID, on trans issues, on radical issues of all, you know, social denominations, racial issues, obviously.
I knew, I knew that I needed to start reporting and commenting on all of it.
Or I was going to go crazy.
Isn't that how we felt back then?
We were going to go crazy unless somebody started to say what was true.
More and more people have done it since, and it feels great.
But in the beginning, it was so gratifying to hear somebody say what we knew was true, right?
In the year and a half plus that we've been on the air, we've tried to tried to lead on what I call the third rail subjects.
I love to touch the third rail.
I don't know if it's character flaw or trait.
Can be both.
And I was thinking back through some of the examples.
Let's go back to December of 2020.
Okay, that was still back in the height of the COVID muzzling stage.
And a group of doctors put out what would become known as the Great Barrington Declaration.
These three doctors from like all the best institutions, Stanford and Harvard and Yale.
And it was completely shut down.
No one would talk about it.
I mean, these are legit doctors, very well respected.
Nobody would talk about it.
Now, we know why.
Now we know that Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins of the NIH were actively working behind the scenes to stifle it, to muzzle them, to censor them and dismiss them as a bunch of loons.
But we, I'm proud to say, in December of 2020, put them on the air.
And it was spectacular.
What were they saying that was so controversial?
They objected to the lockdowns.
They said the lockdowns were doing more harm than good, that they were going to wind up costing more lives than they saved.
They said we need to focus on what they called, quote, focus protection, focus on the most vulnerable.
Those are the ones who need our attention, who at that point, we were saying, when we get the vaccine, need the vaccine first.
Those are the ones who we need to socially distance from and so on.
It was great stuff.
And it was crazy that they couldn't get any corporate media attention.
And I loved to put them on.
And Dr. Bhattacharya recently told us that we were literally one of the first in the mainstream, because we're not sort of far right or far left, to even ask them if they would come on, right?
The mainstream media, most of them, they're just eager to help suppress them.
In early spring of 2021, so just a few months later, we put on Josh Rogan of the Washington Post.
You guys know him by now, right?
He wrote the book on COVID and how it got started.
Well, Josh Rogan, even though he's with WAPO, was completely ignored by most in the mainstream.
They didn't want to hear him talking about the COVID, that COVID might have come from a lab.
They didn't want to hear that Dr. Fauci might have been responsible for the very gain of function type of research that may have led to the pandemic, that he was funding the very type of research that may have wound up causing this whole thing.
You weren't allowed to even speak those words, but Josh Rogan came on and did it.
And we, again, were one of the first to give him a platform.
So that's what I love about the show.
That's what I've been enjoying most, the middle finger to the mainstream and its absurd judgments about who's worthy of listening to and who's not.
Months into the insanity following George Floyd, and really the nation lost its mind.
They lost its mind after George Floyd.
Months into it, we had on people like Sam Harris.
Glenn Lowry, amazing.
If you haven't listened to that, if you haven't listened to that episode with Glenn Lowry, where he talks about why we love America and why America is the greatest country in the world, including for people of color, you're missing out.
Go back and listen to that.
People like Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal, who I absolutely adore, other thought leaders who pushed back hard on this fake narrative about cops and the dangerous racism being pushed on our kids and our institutions as a result of a bad cop named Derek Chauvin.
We booked Shelby and Eli Steele, whose documentary, What Killed Michael Brown, remember that case in Ferguson, Missouri? Was banned on Amazon.
They banned it.
Two black men having their say about what they think happened in this community that became the epicenter for these racial debates for so long.
Their take on it was banned by Amazon.
For a discussion that we had on this show, it still brings me to tears.
It was amazing because of course we wanted to hear what they had to say about Michael Brown.
But then we got into everything, how Eli has made it in Hollywood, despite the fact that he is deaf.
And how most of the shows, even the ones who wanted to hear more about their documentary, had canceled him.
Eli is Shelby's son because he's deaf and they weren't sure if he would make a good guest.
And I confessed to him that we were concerned.
on our show too, but we said, if he's willing to do it, so are we.
And that's when he told me that he'd been canceled by all these other shows and he, how exhausting it had been for him to do it, but he was so proud of himself that he had made it through.
Oh my God, dying.
Those are the exchanges I run home and tell Doug about.
To be honest, I just run downstairs and tell him about because we're in the same house.
But there have been some special, special moments.
We booked people like a teenager from Missouri, this young girl, her life was ruined over false allegations of bigotry by her school, which was so focused on kowtowing to anyone crying racism.
They forgot about the need for due process, for fairness, the importance of decency and actually getting to the bottom of facts.
Her sin was she had a support, the police flag on her laptop.
And where they went with that and this one accuser who falsely pointed the finger at her was insane after that.
It was insane.
They didn't care.
She was a teenager.
They didn't care.
We interviewed a mom, a new mom and business owner whose frustration with the lockdowns, her distrust of the corporate media, people like Lemon and Quum over at CNN forced her into other pockets of media that wound up taking her down a rabbit hole online and ultimately culminated in her being at the Capitol on January 6th.
We didn't judge her.
We listened to her.
We learned about her and how she got to that place.
I don't know.
The interviews that I most look forward to probably were the parents and the teachers and the students speaking out about the craziness in the schools, right?
The racial agendas, the trans agendas being forced on them, including my own, my own schools in New York City, which we loved, but had to leave because of their crazy, crazy ideologies.
It takes guts for teachers to come on and speak out.
They know this is a career ending decision.
It shouldn't be, but it is.
Or somebody like Jodi Shaw.
Remember her from Smith?
She was an administrative assistant.
She had no power at Smith, but she spoke out first on Facebook saying, I refuse to let you racialize my experience here, me, my colleagues, my experience here.
And then Smith unleashed hell on this poor woman and she wouldn't shut up.
She was great.
She came on.
She did her first big interview with us and it was magic.
The debates we've had on the show have been so important.
I've learned so much.
You know, it's like we don't do enough of that in the media these days.
You get one side.
You go, if you're conservative, you go to conservative media.
If you're a lib, you go to liberal media.
That's it.
You don't learn.
You just get your worldview reinforced.
That's not helpful.
I like to learn.
I want to, I don't know.
I don't know a lot about a lot, right?
It's like I'm not an expert in critical race theory or in climate change just because I've been covering this stuff.
That doesn't make me an independent expert.
So we did debates on some of this stuff.
And I think it was really good stuff.
We did one on guns.
We did one on whether the bans in schools on critical race theory are a good idea on climate change.
We did a great one on Israel and Palestine that was on fire.
People loved it.
We did primers, like just short little episodes to help people understand Cuba, Hong Kong, UFOs.
That was a good one.
We did a debate with girls in Connecticut, high school girls who didn't want to run against biological boys.
And then we brought on a trans female, athlete, trans woman, athlete, who pushed back with a different way of looking at it.
Great.
You get both sides of you.
You can make up your mind as to which one you think is the more sound judgment.
We did wellness weeks.
Talked about sleeping and drinking and time management and all sorts of good things like working out, which I was inspired to finally try to start.
My God, it's been hell.
The crime week we did over Christmas was one of our most popular weeks yet.
People love a break every once in a while from hardcore politics, right?
Take some deep dives into some really interesting cases.
It's a rich diet.
You're not getting red meat every day.
You're not getting, you know, chocolate cake every day.
You're not getting only martinis or only coffee, you know, your or green juice.
You're getting a mixture of all of it, like you should have in your real diet, right?
Something balanced, something that serves the whole you, that helps you work out your issues and then creates more of them.
I'm trying to service myself and you together.
I'm trying to grow right alongside you and try to learn right alongside you.
I'm not the evening news anchor with my glasses at the end of my nose judging you.
None of us is here at this show.
And I think and I know you can feel that.
Most recently, we did the RFK Jr. interview, which was great.
I absolutely love that.
I was so proud of my team.
Turns out he's actually not some crazy ass quack whose viewpoints are so dangerous they have to be silenced, but he's actually a really thoughtful environmental lawyer who has spent a lifetime trying to protect us from a government that too often really has taken crazy risks and endangered us when it comes to dirty waters or dirty air or sketchy vaccines.
There have been some questions.
Some of the questions he's raised about vaccines are legitimate and deserved answering.
And actually, some of the issues he's raised have been addressed and then reversed even by the CDC.
So this guy is not, he's not part of the disinformation dozen.
That's White House spin.
And if you listen to that interview, the two-parter, you'll see what I'm talking about.
And then you'll learn tons about the Kennedy family history, which is also equally fascinating.
By the way, we've managed to do all of this, all of it, without getting censored on any platform.
Commitment to Honest Truths 00:04:42
There's a way of doing it.
Okay.
Some censorship is real.
There's no question and it's viewpoint-based.
But there's also discussions that offer no nuance and never offer the other side.
And in general, those tend to get censored.
We're not that show.
We're going to make sure you have the full picture before you click off.
Look, we pride ourselves in debating respectfully, whether it's with the New York Times reporters, many of whom we've had on or Democratic presidential candidates, same, or with diehard MAGA fans, many of whom were in the Trump administration who come on and we have fun with them too.
Try to bring you all points of view on the show because we know that you can get angry, one-sided talking points anywhere.
It's more interesting to hear a back and forth, right?
A variety of voices and you make up your own mind.
But it's true, sometimes we ruffled a few feathers.
There may have been a couple guests who might not want to come back.
Mark Cuban, Scott Gottlieb wasn't too thrilled.
But you know what?
I don't really care.
I'm more interested in having a good discussion with you, like in having a truthful discussion that's unafraid than I am in licking the boots of my guests so that they'll come back on.
As we gear up for the presidential elections, we're going to have to think about this.
It's not like being in the primetime at Fox where like they have to come on.
I'm an independent.
don't have to come on so do i interview these folks and try to you know have to think about maintaining access and doing the coverage day to day or do i just skip those interviews so that i can just you know let it fly right we'll see we'll work that one out together um look we have no tolerance for spin on the show doesn't mean none ever gets through but we have a strong bias against spin And so you come on,
you try to lie about BLM or masks, which was the problem with those two guys, and you're going to get it.
It's going to get tense.
Some people can take it, some people can't, but I'm committed to honesty, you know, to the belief that there really are facts that are knowable.
And honestly, that commitment to being honest and not trying to mislead my audience is why we had to pull one pre-taped episode recently.
A person came on.
They asked for it to be pre-taped, allegedly because of their schedule.
And we don't normally do that, but we said fine.
And we had a very nice exchange.
It was a good interview.
This person presented themselves as a warrior for taking bold risks and reaching out across the aisle, even when it feels politically risky to do so.
You know, you got to take the slings and arrows because it's worth it.
This person happens to be a Democrat.
And no sooner had the interview ended than this person had their PR guy contact us after the show to remove a big chunk of the interview, which they were afraid would create political blowback for them.
And try to tell us how they wanted the clips handled on social media, how they wanted them styled.
Okay.
Well, no, we said, we're not doing that.
We're not going to start hacking away at the interview and taking out the parts you're afraid of after looking into the camera with a microphone on and saying them, understanding this was for an interview to air.
We're not going to remove the parts you feel might create blowback for you while you sit there and tell our audience this is a time they must take those very risks.
We're not doing that.
So we told the guest the interview stands.
It can either air or not air, which out of courtesy for the guest, we left up to the guest, but we're not slicing and dicing it in a way that would present a dishonest picture to our viewers and listeners.
And this guest, the one who'd been so brave on Cam moments earlier, cowered, afraid, and said, please don't air it.
We were well within our rights to, to air it in its original condition with all the parts he didn't like.
We were well within our rights to do that and some of the team felt that we should.
Out of respect for my guest, I chose not to do it.
But in no world was I going to air a dishonest portrait of someone painting themselves as a take risks champion who couldn't even make it 10 minutes past the taping before running to us through his PR hack and begging us to slice and dice the controversial parts.
Wasn't going to happen.
The point is, we're never going to try to mislead you on this show.
We'll never willingly mislead you, either directly or through a guest.
We'll never side with spin over you.
Finding the Right Venue 00:01:45
And I remain confident that the tagline, open, honest, and provocative conversations are the way forward for us, for Twitter, for the digital world, for our institutions, for our schools, our universities, our corporations, for the country.
And I do feel confident that we're winning, that this battle is starting to turn our way, that the temporary insanity is starting to subside.
And the reason for that is all of you listening to points of view other than your own, is all of the guests I just mentioned willing to put their neck on the line and come out here and take a risk, understanding there could be blowback.
but understanding there was a higher principle at risk, right?
Those are the people who have started to turn the conversation.
So I am grateful again to this audience.
I feel really honored and lucky that I'm in the position I am where I get to have these exchanges for you and that I'm not limited to three minute segments like I was on cable or to doing cooking segments like I was on broadcast, right?
I think, as I've seen a lot of you guys remark in the comments, I've found the right venue for me.
You know, I feel like I've, I don't know, I'm home.
That's how it feels.
I hope you feel the same.
I'm excited to see this mission spreading and succeeding.
And thank you all for being a part of
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