The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220603_harry-and-meghan-get-booed-and-a-free-speech-victo

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June 3, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show

01:38:53

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Victory for Free Speech 00:09:05
	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, and happy Friday.
	We begin today with an exclusive interview: a victory for free speech and an important defeat for the cancel culture mob.
	We first told you about the case of constitutional law expert Ilya Shapiro back in February.
	He had recently been hired by Georgetown Law, but just days before he was scheduled to start his new job, Ilya sent out a tweet questioning President Biden's decision to limit who he would be considering for the soon-to-be vacant Supreme Court seat based on their race and their sex.
	The tweet received immediate pushback, and while Shapiro repeatedly apologized, saying he had phrased it inartfully, there was a reference to quote a lesser black woman.
	It wasn't enough for the vultures who demanded that Georgetown revoke his employment contract.
	Four months of investigation of his tweet followed until Georgetown finally said yesterday that he could start the job he had been hired to do with some caveats.
	Today, Ilya officially begins his job as executive director of the Center for the Constitution and senior lecturer at the Georgetown University Law Center.
	And this is his first interview about it.
	Ilya, thank you so much for being here.
	Great to be with you, Megan.
	Congrats on your victory.
	Thank you.
	As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal, it was a technical victory, not quite a victory for free speech.
	Don't want to oversell it.
	The university did not say, yes, I'm protected by their excellent freedom of expression policy.
	They just said, oh, we forgot to look at the calendar.
	And it turns out I was not an employee when I tweeted.
	So all of these policies they've been investigating me under don't apply.
	Kind of ominous, indicating that if I or some other faculty member in the future were to have an errant tweet, then that might be a whole other story.
	Yeah.
	So let's go back for the viewers who haven't been following this as closely as some of us who are in this atmosphere, this sort of center, center-right media atmosphere, because it's caused quite a firestorm for us.
	I mean, all of us have been outraged by what they've been doing to you.
	It was a tweet.
	It wasn't perfectly worded.
	You've copped to that, but just tell us what you were trying to say.
	And I can find the tweet in front of me, but I'm sure you have it memorized by this point.
	Just walk us through how it went.
	Yeah, so this was back in January, January 26th, to be precise, when news of Justice Breyer's retirement leaked.
	And I was doing media all day.
	I put out statements.
	I was still at Cato at the time where I was vice president and director of their constitutional studies shop and commenting on the Supreme Court because that's my area of expertise.
	You see my books behind me, Supreme Disorder, Judicial Nominations, and the Politics of America's Highest Court.
	And that evening, I was still upset about President Biden's decision to limit his pool of candidates by race and sex.
	He said that it would be a black woman, as he promised during the presidential election campaign.
	And, you know, not best fall, not following best practices.
	I was doom scrolling on Twitter that night in my hotel room.
	I happened to be on a trip in Austin, Texas, and was just getting upset about commentary and thinking about, you know, what have we come to that, you know, with the racial preferences that have invaded all of our lives have now come to even high public office.
	It's anathema to I think how people should be treated.
	I thought to myself, you know, the best person for this job, if I were a Democratic president, would be the chief judge of the DC Circuit, Judge Jackson's colleague, Shris Navasan, who happens to be an Indian American immigrant, excellent judge, was on President Obama's shortlist for the spot that eventually went to Merritt Garland.
	And I said, well, by operation of logic, that means that everyone else is less qualified.
	And if, you know, President Biden said it was going to be a black woman, so I said, well, I guess we're going to be based on today's hierarchy of intersectionality, as I cheekily put it, we're going to end up with a, quote, lesser black woman.
	And those three words are what got me in trouble.
	I, of course, meant less qualified black woman because everybody by operation of logic was going to be less qualified than the person I thought would be the most qualified.
	And away we went.
	I went to bed at that point.
	And it was only when I woke up the next morning that I saw that a firestorm had erupted on Twitter.
	I thought, you know, I really did not phrase that well.
	I had been in a kind of a festy and a feisty mood after a friend's birthday or employment celebration actually at a restaurant.
	And so I thought, I should delete this.
	I should, this is not, this firestorm is detracting from the point I want to make that, you know, that 76% of Americans agreed with that all candidates should be considered.
	So I deleted it and I said, look, I meant no offense, but this was poorly phrased.
	I'm taking it down.
	But by that point, it was too late.
	The knives were out and things snowballed and quickly moved from Twitter to real life.
	The dean put out a statement attacking me and calling me an appalling racist.
	And away we went.
	This same dean right now, is it Trainer?
	It is, yes.
	Oh, wow.
	So, I mean, this is a guy who's now saying, okay, welcome to Georgetown.
	So there's some awkwardness there.
	It was, I think National Review Rich Lowry had a piece saying, in any sane world, you're taking down that tweet and explaining what you were trying to say would have been the end of this.
	It's Twitter.
	It's Twitter.
	It's not sworn testimony before the Congress or a Supreme Court brief where you think things out very carefully and have it reviewed by five different people.
	It's Twitter.
	It's a stupid late night tweet.
	I mean, who hasn't sent something out on Twitter that they'd like to have back?
	But the vultures, as you say, saw an opportunity and they were excited to get you.
	Now, just by way of background, can you explain like your own politics and what this constitutional center that you were hired to be the executive director of at Georgetown do?
	Because these are more right-leaning organizations.
	I mean, like I was surprised too.
	I didn't actually know about this.
	But when I see their mission, I'm like, oh, well, this is a little bit more conservative.
	So I'm sure it already had a big red bullseye over it.
	Yeah, I was hired to heighten their profile so people like you would know all about it.
	It's actually celebrating its 10th anniversary.
	Randy Barnett, who's a celebrated law professor, one of, I think, three.
	I would be the fourth at the entire Georgetown faculty who's not on the left, who's not progressive of some stripe.
	He's a libertarian.
	I'm a classical liberal, I guess you could say.
	I was born in the Soviet Union and my parents brought me out when I was little, when I was four.
	We came to Canada and enjoyed immigrating so much.
	I had to come to America as well.
	Like I like to say that like most immigrants, I do a job that most Native born Americans won't, and that's defending the Constitution.
	So, after a cup of coffee in big law, which was not that much fun, I came to the Cato Institute and wrote briefs for the Supreme Court, edited the Cato Supreme Court Review, did my own writing, both academic and popular, gave a lot of speeches.
	I've been doing media for a long time.
	And after nearly 15 years at Cato, which is the nation's premier libertarian think tank, I thought, you know, how can I have more impact or have a new challenge?
	And Randy Barnett, who's become a friend and a mentor, thought that it would be a good fit to have someone of my profile, my skills, my network come to the center and especially be the public face and get more engagement from judges and practitioners and publications and media and all of that to push the importance of the Constitution and originalist analysis, looking at the Constitution by what the original public meaning of its provisions are.
	A lot of people call that conservative, but it doesn't have to be.
	There are progressive originalists or living originalists.
	There's all sorts of different stripes.
	So it's more academic-y and nerdy in certain ways, but still very relevant to the discourse and certainly to the Supreme Court, where now a majority for the first time do call themselves some flavor of originalist.
	It kind of reminds me of the Kevin Williamson situation with the Atlantic, where the Atlantic's like, let's hire Kevin Williamson.
	He'll be great.
	People really like him.
	And then they found out, oh, Kevin Williamson doesn't sound like all the rest of our writers.
	He says things that to us are awful, but to at least half the country are perfectly reasonable and fine.
The First Few Days Were Hell 00:05:14
	And then they're like, oh, no, my God, what have we done?
	Right.
	I feel like there was a little bit of that going on with Georgetown.
	Like, oh, it doesn't sound like the rest of us.
	It doesn't look like the rest of us.
	It says weird things about, you know, race and gender not being the be-all end-all.
	And this adherence to identity politics seems to offend this guy.
	What on earth?
	So I'm mocking it because we've seen it so many times.
	It's just laughable.
	But you point out in your Wall Street Journal op-ed, which hit late last night, this is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone, except perhaps the instigators of the Twitter mob that launched this tempest, particularly the first few days, which were truly terrible for me and my family.
	Can you talk about that?
	Yeah, my wife had actually warned me a couple of days, a couple of days before my tweet.
	We were out celebrating her birthday and she said, you know, you're joining an academic institution now.
	You have to be careful, particularly about race and sex.
	And then I sort of step in it, which doesn't mean that my tweet is a firing offense or disciplining offense, but I open the door for my political enemies to go after me.
	And that's a one-way street.
	I mean, lots of law professors and other professors on the left say all sorts of things way more outrageous than what I did, even interpreted in its worst light.
	And yet Georgetown did nothing for them.
	But anyway, my personal experience, right?
	So I woke up that morning in that Austin hotel room and saw what was going on.
	And I felt sick to my stomach.
	And especially come around noontime when the dean issued his statement.
	I thought, okay, I'm going to get fired.
	I was transitioning jobs from Cato to Georgetown.
	How can I provide for my family?
	I have two little boys or four and six.
	This is horrific.
	I've blown up my life.
	I've, you know, it was honestly, Megan, probably the second worst day of my life, the worst being when my mom passed when I was in college.
	I really thought, you know, I worked hard my whole life.
	I had done everything right, went to the right schools, built a platform for myself as a, inserted myself into the national conversation about many important issues on the Supreme Court and the Constitution, public affairs, lots of different things.
	And with one bad tweet, I had just killed that.
	And what am I going to do?
	And it was just the most horrific, horrific feeling.
	And as I worked with my allies and friends over that day and the coming home and then the coming days, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, FIRE, which I told them is now my favorite nonprofit organization.
	I'm going to be kind of number one fundraiser.
	Other folks, just so many people came out of the woodwork, good friends, acquaintances who I hadn't seen or talked to in 10 years.
	How can I help?
	This is one thing I learned from this whole experience, just exactly who my friends are and how many I have.
	I'm truly blessed in that department.
	I'd rather not have had reason to learn about all that, but nevertheless, those first few days were, I have a metaphor that the first few days were hell.
	And then once the dean decided that he was going to let me join the Georgetown, be onboarded, but immediately be placed on leave.
	And then that leave became purgatory.
	So I had four days of hell and I couldn't sleep.
	There were physical manifestations in my health, my wife as well.
	I mean, we try to keep things from our kids, but they can sense when something's bothering mommy and daddy.
	And then it became purgatory.
	And it was kind of a roller coaster of emotions.
	You know, I made the best of that situation, going, you know, became sort of an inadvertent poster boy for cancel culture and whatnot, but great personal and professional instability.
	And today I'm with you the day after that purgatory ended.
	I'm not sure we're quite in heaven at this point to push the metaphor even further.
	But those first few days you asked me about, I really, I mean, it was, you know, we talked politically and we try to frame things and I had good crisis PR advice and things like that.
	But the personal toll was just visceral.
	Yeah, I can relate.
	And I think it's, we skip over that too quickly in these situations, no matter how they end.
	You know, I've said before one other time in this show, when I had my show canceled at NBC, I had the same feeling, the sleepless nights, like this stunned feeling of what just happened to me?
	Is my career entirely gone?
	Everything I've worked so hard for, you know, nothing matters.
	Only this one moment seems to matter.
	And will it be used to destroy me?
	Will I emerge from this?
	And I was seeing a therapist who I'd been seeing for years.
	You know, I hired him.
	I went, started seeing him in 2011.
	But anyway, he offered me antidepressants and I refused, Ilya, because the one thing I was certain of was Andy Lack was not going to put me on antidepressants.
	Like I, for me, that was the hard line.
Attacking Your Classmates 00:15:28
	Like I'm not doing that.
	I will not give that guy that power.
	And for me, it's a badge of honor.
	There's nothing wrong with antidepressants at all.
	I know a lot of people for whom they've done a lot of good, but it was like in that moment, I couldn't let that happen.
	You know what I'm saying?
	It was like that to me meant something in my little private battle.
	So I get it.
	These are people don't understand the like deep emotional toll these decisions can have.
	And, you know, it was not so much the Twitter mob.
	You know, I've, I've had attacks and, you know, the kind of snark, the surreality of all of the online stuff.
	It was the fact that I might be unemployed, that my reputation would be destroyed forever over a tweet.
	And how did I let this happen?
	And how am I hurting my family?
	Yeah, that was, that was pretty horrible.
	Then you have, so it's one thing if it's just like the dean who's looking to CYA and you're like, okay, you know, it's like your boss is basically looking to punish you for a little while, you know, just to make himself look like he cares.
	That's one thing.
	But you had the Black Law Students Association at Georgetown demanding that your employment be rescinded.
	We pulled up that statement, forgive me, but they demanded the revocation of your employment contract and that the college condemn your, quote, racist tweets at Georgetown Law.
	Black students are haunted by the shadow of imposter syndrome.
	Shapiro reinforced this phenomenon by reducing black women's accomplishments and so on.
	It goes on.
	But that stuff hurts too, because now you've got whole groups of minority coalitions coming together to basically condemn you as racist without any appreciation for the context or the apology or the, you know, everything that you said thereafter.
	Well, that's why the dean acted as he did, why he first condemned me and then why he put me on administrative leave and launched the investigation, because as administrators around the country are, they're afraid of student activist groups, which by no means represent the majority, I mean the majority of students, especially at a ladder climbing, you know,
	legal professional school at a place like in Washington, D.C., like Georgetown, the vast majority just want good jobs and get networked and what have you.
	But the very vocal minority who is cowing their classmates often, you know, peer pressure to sign letters and make denunciations.
	It's kind of a Maoist sort of unhealthy campus culture.
	They pressure administrators as well.
	And we've seen around the country in different contexts that if administrators from the beginning stand up for due process or free speech or other policies that are well considered and well written, and most schools actually do have on paper good policies, then they put down the unrest fairly quickly.
	But if they try to kowtow, it doesn't help them, frankly.
	And I think Dean Traynor is probably facing that right now.
	He kicked the can down the road four years.
	Sorry, four months.
	It felt like four years.
	And now, as I'm writing my Wall Street Journal off bed and talking about getting ready to go and host a diversity of thought in my classroom and everyone's welcome and will be treated equally, he's being pilloried by those same woke activist groups.
	I don't know if your producers found the latest Black Law Students Association tweet and statement from late last night.
	But if anything, it's even more strident than what you just read.
	Yeah, they're essentially saying we never, you know, we're basing our complaints on him being an actual Georgetown employee.
	They're not satisfied.
	They want to scalp.
	They have a demand for the dean to define exactly where the line is between conservatism and racism, as if that's the spectrum.
	At a certain point, they criticize the dean for calling my tweets as attacking females, black females, where there's some nomenclature dispute over female and woman.
	I might have to consult a biologist to understand what that's all about.
	There are none, especially on the sitting Supreme Court.
	And the justice who was then later nominated doesn't know either, speaking of black women.
	So by the way, I think she's qualified to be on the Supreme Court.
	Let's at the outset make clear that my tweet in no reasonable world can be interpreted as saying as no black women are qualified to be on the Supreme Court, which is how those acting in bad faith willfully misconstrued it to propagate this attack.
	No, as compared to Katanji Brown Jackson, I am a lesser white woman and a potential seat on the Supreme Court.
	I don't have anything like her credentials or experience.
	That's what you were trying to say.
	It didn't have anything to do with really an objection on your part to race or to gender.
	It was that we're getting somebody lesser than the guy I think you should choose.
	And it's sad that this guy won't even be considered because he doesn't have the right, you know, gender and he doesn't have the quote.
	Even though he's a member of a racial minority group and an immigrant, but yes.
	But not the preferred, not the preferred.
	So this is where things got really crazy.
	It was already crazy.
	So this whole story has already gotten so out of hand.
	But then, I'm sorry to laugh, Ilya, but you got to laugh a little.
	Then they had like sit-ins at Georgetown Law over you.
	And we played some of this because National Review got their hands on some of the tapes.
	And it was just, you couldn't believe your eyes.
	We're like, yeah, I think I made Nate Hochman's career there at National Review, the young writer who's like on the Shapiro beat the last few months.
	Well, it was shocking stuff.
	It was like, wait, what did he do again?
	You know, like, what, what exactly did he do?
	They had meetings with Dean Trainer.
	He was front and center in all of this.
	This is actually from Nate, from Nate Hochman's reporting.
	A chastened-looking trainer spent more than an hour answering questions from what appeared to be the Black Law Students Association leadership team in a closed auditorium.
	The dean, striking an apologetic tone, echoed the language of the activists in the crowd, assuring the assembled students that he was appalled by the painful nature of Shapiro's tweets and promising to listen, learn, and ultimately do better.
	And we have actually clips of that where one of the students demanded reparations for the time they missed in class to attend the sit-in and a free lunch.
	Here's a bit of that.
	Sot one.
	In terms of coming back to this reparation thing, because like this is, this is great, but we have to do so much work to catch up for all this stuff that we miss.
	All I'm saying is, I don't know if it's a couple dinners or lunches or something.
	But that would help us because we like, we can't, I can't go home for lunch now because I need money.
	I have to, I have to make up for this class that I lost.
	So it's little things like that.
	It doesn't have to be something that takes a year to figure out.
	It's like, we know our black students or whatever group is hurting and we're going to give them things today, whether it's snaps, whether it's counseling, whether it's whatever.
	But the part of that trust is to see an immediate reaction to what we are saying.
	Babu will be great.
	We have food on the way.
	Okay, stand by because the next soundbite was about the one gal demanding cry rooms.
	I'm sorry, but we need tougher people.
	Like if you're going to be a lawyer, you've got to have a thick skin.
	I mean, and there's no fucking crying in litigation.
	You would think in a legal career, you're going to face more challenging issues than a speaker who offends you or a tweet that you think correctly or not is racist.
	Of course.
	It's like, there's wait until you get into a courtroom.
	You want to, you talk about cry rooms.
	You're going to have to hold it in as you get berated by federal court judges, by opposing counsel 100%, by jurors who, after the fact, go out and publicly say you sucked.
	You know, like you got to hold it together, people.
	But tell that to this group because here they are demanding this dean to give them a place to cry over your tweets.
	It is really, really hard to walk out of class for a leading in tears.
	And you should always have a place on campus where you can go and feel like you're not then also under people's eyes and observation.
	Maybe you don't want to answer a question of what's going on or what's wrong.
	And if you're finding that you're not getting the person you want to talk to or not getting a space that you need, reach out to me anytime, anytime.
	So we will find you space.
	So that's Dean Trainor, who's totally into the cry rooms, correct?
	That was the associate dean.
	I forget what his name is.
	Mitch.
	I forget his name now, but yeah.
	Look, people's feelings were hurt.
	Some people were offended.
	But I mean, come on.
	I'm happy to meet with any students and discuss what concerns they have.
	I already said what I had to say about the tweet.
	And I kick myself to this day that I pride someone.
	I'm someone who prides himself on communicating well, both orally and in written form.
	And this was a failure in communication.
	But you're not a perfect man.
	No one is.
	I bet you Dean Traynor's got some things he's said or written that he doesn't want thrown back at him.
	You know, Megan, one thing I've learned through this ordeal is that we as a society, I think, have lost our understanding of grace and of seeing your political enemies or social enemies for that matter, not simply as, you know, we now see them not simply as wrong, but as evil.
	And everything is unforgivable.
	And in an academic context, so many things, you know, everything's racist or sexist or offending the latest hierarchy of intersectionality is, as I, as I cheekily put it.
	So it's, you know, perhaps my eyes weren't sufficiently open as I was transferring to Georgetown from Cato, because I think if I had stayed at Cato and made the same sort of commentary, not, you know, the same thing wouldn't have happened.
	There would have still been a bit of a Twitter storm, but, you know, Cato wouldn't have fired me or investigated me.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Now, they were silent after this all happened, and that was telling.
	That was telling and disappointing.
	After nearly 15 years of service and purportedly being an institution that supports the freedom of speech, you would think they would have plenty of reason to come to my defense, issue statements, and they did not.
	And that's been one of the few disappointments or negative surprises in terms of people who have acted or not in my defense.
	But it's kind of a gift too.
	It is a gift.
	I mean, one of the gifts of going through something like this is, as you point out, you find out who your friends are and you find out who your friends aren't.
	And that list is significant as well.
	It's better to know.
	I'd rather know this person was only attached to me because whatever, they thought I was famous or powerful or, you know, in your case, powerful and well-known and sought after and respected.
	And then the second you've got a bruise, they run.
	Okay, great.
	That's perfect because that's information I didn't have about you before this happened.
	So better, better to be armed with it.
	Disappointing, but better to know.
	Which isn't to say that my many friends and former colleagues at Cato didn't reach out personally, I must say.
	It's not that everyone affiliated with the institution has pledged some sort of Omerta, but there is some, and it's been noticed in legal circles and libertarian circles there.
	Well, that's the thing.
	That's the test is it's like when your friends are down, number one, do you kick them?
	And number two, do you at least stay out of the Twitter, Twitter mob, right?
	Like that's the, but, but ideally, defend them.
	I mean, that's the ideal is to actually say a word.
	And I listened to those guys on National Review talk about this at length in the podcast saying, yeah, okay, it wasn't a perfectly worded tweet.
	We all get that.
	But you got to look at this guy.
	Like, you got to know who this person is.
	You got to, you got to like examine the man and see like this, you've devoted your life towards constitutional scholarship.
	Like this is a worthwhile task and you're not some bomb thrower, you know, some flamethrower.
	No one wanted to acknowledge that or give you the benefit of the doubt in any way.
	One of the other things on the students, which kind of stood out to me because you mentioned FHIR, and I love FIRE.
	They're a great organization and they stand up for free speech on campus.
	She pressed the dean to send out an email attacking the critics of the Black Student Law Association.
	And she said, quote, something that's important is to remind our classmates that are attacking us that they are only here because our ancestors were sold for them to be here.
	And I think that's a very important fact that is not talked about explicitly enough because we are still being attacked.
	So I would just appreciate in whatever message that's going out to the student body that our classmates are explicitly reminded, do not attack the people who were sold for you to have this opportunity.
	That needs to be something that these people are reminded of because they continue to attack us as if it is not on our backs that they are even here.
	This woman is talking like she is a modern day slave, like we have slavery right now, and she's enslaved at Georgetown Law, one of the most elite privileged institutions in the world.
	And that she is, no one is allowed to criticize her or her colleagues in the Black Student Law Association group because there's a history of slavery in the United States.
	Well, victim status is a form of privilege to turn the tables on the way the discourse works.
	And I mean, I really wish things didn't work that way and everyone was just treated based on the strength of their arguments, their intellect, what they contribute to the community, what grades they get, what institutions they build, all of those sorts of things.
	But we're told from some institutions that considerations of merit are racist in and of themselves or operation of logic or the scientific method, these sorts of things are racist.
Affirmative Action Case Context 00:13:11
	I mean, if everything is racist, then nothing is.
	And that's the real problem here.
	You know, you see those side-by-side statements.
	What you just read could have been read effectively by a white supremacist organization.
	It's the horseshoe theory where the most identitarian on the left from the racial minority groups match their rhetoric, you know, the 69 project, 19 project or what have you, with the most strident white supremacist racist organizations in their racial essentialism.
	And I think it's really a negative trend that has certainly infected academia, but obviously has spilled out into the greater world.
	It's like this idea from a Georgetown law school student, somebody who's, you know, one of the leaders of the legal profession in years to come, to suggest that she cannot be criticized because she's black and there's a history of racism in the United States, that you may not criticize her or anyone in this group is insane.
	I mean, it's deeply disturbing to me.
	And I can't wait to see how it goes for her when she gets out into the real world and starts actually practicing law, because there's a whole slew of criticism coming her way.
	She will be torn apart.
	She will be called an idiot.
	She will be told her ideas are terrible, that she doesn't belong at her firm or on this case or writing this brief.
	That's how it goes.
	Litigation or corporate law, it's just, it's not being ball.
	Or maybe not so much anymore, Megan, because these sorts of attitudes have certainly crept into the major law firms and general counsel's offices of corporate America.
	It's the legal industry as a whole, from the ABA setting out credentialing requirements for law schools that now incorporate certain diversity rules and equity rules and what have you through how affirmative action and racial preferences are practiced in different settings.
	I'm not so sure necessarily that that kind of attitude necessarily will result in negative repercussions.
	Oh my gosh.
	I mean, that would be the most disturbing thing of all.
	I mean, what are people going to do?
	Start seeding arguments in court because of the skin color of opposing counsel?
	That's madness.
	That cannot be.
	But you're right.
	I mean, I know that the law schools have become wokeified.
	The students certainly are.
	And that does lead me to the question of, why are you doing this?
	No, wait, don't answer that yet.
	I'm going to give you the break to think it over.
	I'm going to squeeze in a break.
	And Ilya Shapiro answers that question when we come back.
	My whole team was talking to the break, like, this isn't going to last.
	How can this last?
	Yeah, especially with the end of term Supreme Court decisions and even more when the students are back on campus this fall when the Supreme Court takes up the Harvard affirmative action case.
	And I'll be giving public comment, including probably to you, in a way that they won't like.
	Look, when I took this job, when Randy Barnett and I started talking about how to move the center into its second decade, it's now celebrating 10 years now, but we want to elevate its presence as an energy center for originalism, for constitutional interpretation.
	I thought that this would be an opportunity for me to kind of have a different sort of impact with students being based at an academic institution rather than an explicitly ideological think tank.
	And then for the students and judges, practitioners who I get involved in programming to learn from me and to expand upon originalism and have hopefully a better constitutional judicial conversation.
	Whether that is going to be feasible now, the proof will be in the pudding.
	Dean Traynor expressed to me as I wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he wants me to succeed.
	And as long as I behave professionally, that he will have my back.
	What does that mean?
	I'm not sure.
	I still don't think that tweets are firing offenses, but we'll see whether we can make a go of this.
	University has policies against disrupting events, disrupting classes.
	If I'm ceaselessly protested in my new role and the law school does not enforce its rules against that sort of thing, well, that won't be something that's feasible.
	And we'll have to figure out where to go from there.
	And also, with the various friends that have come out in my support and allies, I've gotten some interesting offers and things to do and ways to spend my time.
	So I think I'll end up all right out of all this, which doesn't justify the process.
	But that is an interesting question.
	And I hope to make a go of it.
	But if it becomes, the environment becomes truly hostile, which is ironic because I've been accused of creating a hostile environment by the diversity administrators who are investigating me, then I'll have to see what the next step will be.
	I know, because it's one thing to send out a tweet that wasn't perfectly worded.
	It's another to be punished, as is very likely going to be the case, for your viewpoints, for your genuine, genuinely held viewpoints on, as you point out, for example, the affirmative action case or any other or the growing DEI commitment that we see at all these institutions.
	Something FIRE, Greg Lugiana's organization, we had him on the show, has been pushing back against, saying you cannot mandate that.
	You cannot mandate that professors seeking tenure commit to DEI and certain expansive programs.
	That's mandated speech.
	And those things are fraught.
	They have a nice name, but they're fraught once you start to peel away the layers of the onion.
	And so, like, if you're not on board with that, as a lot of conservatives see that that's not really what it, what it says it is, you could get punished.
	Because as I read Trainer's letter announcing that you are coming back, he says the following: Georgetown Law is committed to preserving and protecting the right of free and open inquiry, deliberation, and debate.
	Okay, great.
	Hope that's true.
	We have an equally compelling obligation to foster a campus community that is free from bias and in which every member is treated with respect and courtesy.
	I'm committed to continuing to strive toward both of these indispensable goals.
	The problem is that respect, courtesy, and anti-bias could mean anything, right?
	It could mean anything.
	And it's going to be really hard for him to uphold both of those goals at once.
	I mean, it used to be we could go and slug it out, and maybe it wasn't perfectly respectful in the eyes of everybody there, but that's what college is for, to duke it out.
	Yeah.
	I mean, you say that I might be persecuted for my viewpoint, or as just happened with Josh Katz, a professor at Princeton, who was stripped of his tenure and fired, you know, some pretext will be generated to punish someone for their viewpoint.
	So the next time, you know, it might not be a tweet.
	It might be something that I've already said to you, taken out of context, some clip that emerges this fall during the Harvard affirmative action case.
	And that's being pointed to as, well, now that's the second incident where he quote unquote misspoke.
	And so clearly that's a pattern of his racism.
	Something like that.
	You know, that's certainly within the realm of possibility.
	Is it scary being here and talking so openly about it?
	I mean, to your credit?
	This is this is brave of you.
	I don't want to oversell it.
	I'm not into patting myself on the back.
	I like talking to the media.
	I certainly respect what you've done professionally.
	I think, you know, I've developed certain skills in conveying ideas and translating the highfalutin academic theories down into, as my judge who I clerk for, like to say, got to chew it up for the little goats to eat it.
	Because I think it's important.
	I think it's important for the American people to understand what the Supreme Court is doing, how our law works, how the different branches work, because we have a real crisis in our public discourse.
	And if I can contribute to alleviating ignorance and fostering more civil discourse, that's what I'm all about.
	At the end of the day, if someone wants to take disciplinary action against me or the next cancellation campaign, what this process has taught me is that I think I'm going to be okay.
	I have enough friends.
	I have enough of a profile at this point that I think I might be okay.
	Now, it might not be the planned career transition that I had in mind.
	But the real problem with cancel culture, with people who are really brave, are those who don't have the sort of platform, that don't have Megan Kelly asking to interview them, that don't have the Wall Street Journal saying, yeah, we'll take whatever comment you have after this decision is made.
	And that includes professors.
	It's not, before we even get to the average people that get fired or doxxed or boycotted for contributing 20 or 100 bucks to some politically incorrect cause, that's terrible enough.
	But even other professors or high-ranking business people that don't have a platform per se, and lots of horrible things happen to them.
	So, you know, as long as I have the ability and the analytical capacity to bring something to the table that folks like you want to hear about, I'm going to keep talking.
	You know, they're not going to shut me up.
	You know, next time I slip up and say something poorly, you know, I'll own up to it always.
	I try to be honest and fair.
	But look, life is too short.
	And as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident, said, live not by lies.
	Let the lie triumph, but not through me.
	So you are not going to be able to hold me down.
	I'll be careful with my tweets.
	And I have a whole new approach to Twitter these days anyway.
	But even beyond that, I think it's important to talk about what's going on in our public life honestly and forthrightly.
	And if someone wants to lie about that and slander you, that's on them.
	I love your attitude about it.
	You've gotten to a healthy place.
	I know they're going to make you do DEI training, implicit bias, cultural competence, and non-discrimination training.
	Yeah, all of that stuff clearly susses out or converts the real racists.
	I mean, it's like all the studies have proven that actually, that actually makes people more racist.
	If it's implicit or it's like, you know, sort of this quiet, simmering bias, these studies bring it out.
	That's what the studies have shown, but the universities won't listen.
	And you must make yourself available to meet with student leaders concerned about your ability to treat students fairly.
	I'm sure that will be a joy for you, Ilya.
	I actually wonder whether they'll want to meet with me.
	You know, the university folks I've talked to said it doesn't necessarily have to be a town hall.
	It just might be, you know, if someone wants to arrange a meeting or whether it's the Black Law Students Association or just anyone, I don't know if they're going to want to come to like office hours or a, you know, reparations lunch or something like that.
	Predict you're going to get the gal who's like, You remember, how did she put it?
	That it was my back on which you're even here.
	Okay, do not attack the people who were sold for you to have this opportunity.
	So, you better prepare a line to be clear.
	I don't want to attack the students, you know.
	I want to educate, I want to, you know, and to be clear, my classroom, my programs are open to all, and I can promise that everyone will have the freedom of speech and be treated equally and fairly.
	Yeah, well, we're definitely going to be watching that piece of your next chapter with great interest and 100% rooting for you.
	Um, but while I have you here, I want to take advantage of your legal mind, if you don't mind.
	I've seen some of your writings recently on guns.
	Last night, President Biden made a big speech on guns, seeming to suggest he wants to bring back the assault weapons ban that was in place from 94 to 04, or at least that piece of it that bans high-capacity magazines, and on and on.
	Sort of similar rhetoric to what we've heard from him for many years now.
Mass Shootings and Background Checks 00:03:20
	And I've, I mean, you tell me what your view of it is, because right now there's a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court on guns that most people expect to go in favor of Second Amendment advocates.
	They're not tightening gun laws right now, they're not restricting their interpretation of the Second Amendment, or so we believe, from oral argument.
	And so, and nor is there the political will for an assault weapons ban.
	But he says it worked.
	He said mass shootings have tripled since it expired, and that there's a moral obligation to do something.
	Your thoughts on it?
	So, it did not work.
	No studies show that there was less gun violence attributable to the assault weapon ban.
	Whether there's more mass shootings, yes, we have seen more mass shootings in recent years.
	Although, since the ban ended nearly 20 years ago, it's hard to compare 94 to 04 to recent years because there's a lot of other things going on.
	But more broadly, most crime in this country is not mass shootings, and it's not committed with so-called assault weapons.
	And by the way, the way assault weapons seem to be defined is semi-automatic rifles.
	That's pretty much all rifles that aren't shotguns.
	It means you pull the trigger and each time a bullet comes out.
	These are not machine guns, these are not automatics.
	And there's a whole misapplication of words here.
	But also, more people get killed through people's bare hands and feet than rifles.
	In 2019, I just pulled up a statistic.
	There were about 14,000 people murdered in this country.
	Nearly half of them were with a handgun, 1,500 of them, about 10% with knives, 4% with hands or feet, and about 3% with rifles.
	And that doesn't distinguish between semi-automatic rifles and, say, a single-shot 22 rifle.
	So, anyway, this is all trying to reach for easy solutions for tough problems or problems that are simply insoluble because they're cultural or they have complicated roots.
	And, you know, the most the latest horrific shooting at the elementary school seems to be a complete breakdown of not the background check system, he passed his background check, but of the police standing around not going in with an active shooter situation, contrary to the training that they just received.
	So, before we pile on new legislation that has little chance of changing things, why not enforce our existing rules or against sales to straw purchasers or felon in possession?
	By the way, those existing rules and laws will disproportionately affect racial minorities.
	These are tough issues to deal with, particularly in the debates over George Floyd and police misconduct and what have you.
	But there are no easy solutions.
	And certainly certain things that Biden is proposing, maybe more and better red flag laws so that people who are seemingly crazy or are a threat to themselves or other people, they have to be narrowly drawn with plenty of due process protection.
Punishing the Leaker Now 00:02:18
	So they're not locked out of your rights forever and sort of things.
	So certain things there are there's room to discuss.
	But the assault, the so-called assault weapon ban, that's a cosmetic thing that really, you know, most, as I said, the most common handgun used in crime is a handgun.
	And nobody's talking about that because it can't be done.
	And that's the best gun for self-defense as well.
	And the most deadly school shooting ever was committed with handguns at Virginia Tech.
	The guy had two of them and it unleashed carnage.
	And that was a failure of the background check system because he actually had a record of mental illness that was disqualifying that did not get into the record system.
	So again, existing rules are there and there's a failure of existing structures.
	Yeah.
	Quickly, before I let you go, got to ask you about Supreme Court leaking.
	And by the way, I'm not a gun nut.
	I have never owned a gun.
	You're connected.
	I'm a constitution.
	Call me a constitution nut, but you know.
	Supreme Court leaker.
	What the hell?
	Only this week, the marshal asked for the cell phone records of the clerks.
	I'm starting to lose faith in the marshal, Billya.
	How about you?
	This infuriates me.
	I'm losing even more faith in Chief Justice John Roberts.
	If he really wanted to come to the bottom of this, as he expressed his outrage, you know, when it happened a month ago, then, you know, you ask for all the phone records and the email records of the clerks, of the justices, of the staff that had access.
	You know, and not because it's a criminal investigation, but because this is a very serious threat to the functioning of the Supreme Court.
	This is an unprecedented circumstance.
	You know, the leaker needs to be caught.
	The leaker needs to be punished.
	Now, I don't know.
	The leaker may be celebrated with a professorship at Yale Law School or a contributorship on MSNBC or something, but they need to own up if they think what they did was heroic.
	Yeah, the leaker may wind up being a colleague of yours at the Georgetown Constitution Center.
	They may welcome her with open arms.
	All right, listen, thank you for your analysis.
	Thank you for your honesty.
	And come back anytime.
	Next time we'll talk about more about the news and hopefully not at all about you and your job troubles because there won't be any.
	That's my hope.
	Well, next time I might be coming to you asking for a job, Megan.
Welcome to Buckingham Palace 00:03:36
	We'll see how things go.
	It's done.
	Consider it done.
	It would be my honor.
	Ilya, all the best to you.
	Thank you.
	Take care.
	That's a lot.
	Wow.
	That's just like so wrong.
	It's so wrong what they did to him.
	Just remember that.
	You know, there's a real human behind these cancel culture mobs with families and kids.
	What we're doing to one another is wrong.
	All right.
	When we come back, Mark Stein is with us.
	I'm very excited to have him.
	We used to work together at Fox News a bit, and I always loved his commentary.
	He's coming on.
	We're going to talk about all things royal and beyond.
	A spectacular celebration happening in the United Kingdom, where they are marking Queen Elizabeth's 70 years on the throne.
	She was seen beaming with pride yesterday on the balcony of Buckingham Palace along with Prince Charles, Prince William, and all the other senior royals.
	Last night at dusk, she led an incredibly moving ceremony at Windsor Castle.
	She pressed a small globe, which set off a river of lights across the lawn.
	Look how pretty that is.
	You can check it out on our YouTube channel later.
	It also signaled the beginning of a chain reaction of lighting ceremonies across the UK and the Commonwealth.
	However, she did not take part in today's church service at St. Paul's Cathedral, the palace saying that she had felt some, quote, discomfort during yesterday's festivities, so she needed to rest.
	She's 95 years old, and she's got something planned for this evening.
	So it is a big few days for the queen.
	And in addition, she reportedly got to finally meet her great-granddaughter, Lilibet.
	Yes, Prince Harry and Megan Markle finally found the time to introduce their daughter to the, is she 95 or 96?
	My script here says 96-year-old monarch.
	96, okay.
	It's Prince Harry's and Megan's first time back together in the UK since 2020, since Mexic.
	And today, when they emerged from St. Paul's Cathedral, well, take a listen to this.
	I listen to a couple times.
	They received a bit of a frosty reception.
	You can hear some cheers and plenty of booing in the crowd.
	Listen.
	I was joking with my team before the show that, you know, that they were each thinking those boos are for the other one.
	And my team was saying, no, they're thinking, oh, these racists booing us.
	My guest now grew up in England and has met like many, many members of the royal family.
	He's got some great fun stories of his own history there.
	He's also an old pal from the Kelly file.
	His name is Mark Stein, and he's host of the Mark Stein Show on GB News in Britain, which is a great, great channel.
	Mark, great to see you.
	Hey, great to see you too, Megan.
	Good to be back with you.
	I'm so happy, first of all, that you're with GB.
	I love what they're doing over there.
	I love their mission.
	I love Dan Wooden and so many of the anchors over there.
	So congrats on finding a spot with a great place.
	No, no, it's been great fun, and it's a scrappy little station, but we did quite credible coverage of the Jubilee yesterday.
	So I'm thrilled with how it's going over there.
	Yeah, it's going very well now.
Royals vs. Show Business 00:12:20
	Okay, so let's talk about what this is about.
	70 years on the throne, that officially makes her the longest reigning monarch ever, right, in Great Britain's history?
	Yes, she's the longest reigning British monarch in Canada.
	They say she's the longest running monarch of the British, of the modern era, because back when it was still New France, Louis the whatever it was, actually reigned for 72 years.
	So she's got a couple of years to go yet to be the longest, as this idiotic way of looking at it in Canada goes.
	But in the UK, she's the longest running.
	She took the throne at 26, right?
	That's when her father passed.
	So, I mean, the things that this woman has seen and been through and the fact that she's still, we're running tape of her, you know, in black and white coming out when she had just been coronated.
	And the fact that she's still walking out in that balcony, Mark, and to the beloved British people below really says something about her commitment to this role and to her country.
	Yes, she was first on that balcony on VE Day in 1945 when the Germans surrendered.
	And she came out with her father and mother onto that balcony.
	And then she and her sister slipped out of the palace among the crowds on the streets of London.
	And that's how so she's now been on that balcony for almost 80 years.
	She's been on the Canadian $20 banknote since 1935.
	That's like 87 years.
	So, you know, this is not how we think.
	Politicians come and go.
	But if you have a non-political head of state, the memories go back a lot further.
	Well, I heard you say something in defense of the monarchy that I thought was intriguing.
	And it was right along these lines about how politicians here in America, for example, have a little too much power.
	I think some of us feel uncomfortable with the amount of power they have or they think they have or we've given them.
	And you see the queen in a way as a check on that.
	Explain.
	Yes, I think that I think it's healthy.
	I think it's actually a design flaw.
	I don't want to send your previous constitutional scholar get his head exploding or anything, but I actually think it's a design flaw to have a combined head of state and head of government.
	It's very necessary to have something that's bigger than politicians or your politicians start getting all queenly.
	I mean, Nancy Pelosi is far more queenly than the Queen is in terms of putting on airs and graces and expecting to be flown around.
	You wind up even with an hereditary political class.
	The only reason anybody gives money to Hunter Biden or to Jim Biden is because they're the son and brother of the connected president.
	Same reason anybody gives jobs to Chelsea Clinton.
	Nobody wants really to pay $4 million for a speech by Chelsea Clinton on diarrhea in Africa, but it's because of the proximity to power.
	So you end up with all these pseudo-monarchical things.
	And one of the things I love, especially for Republicans, there's a lot of Republicans in Australia and Canada.
	But the great thing about if you have a monarchy is it arouses a certain chippiness in their subjects.
	So people are always, you wind up with far less corruption.
	When William and Kate were in Canada, the Royal Canadian Air Force, which was flying them around, decided to refurbish the accommodations and buy them a couple of comforters.
	And so the press all complained, why do Canadian taxpayers have to pay for these pampered little princelings to fly around our country?
	And the lady from the RCAF who'd bought the comforters said she'd gone to Canadian Tire, which as its name suggests, is a very basic kind of store.
	And they'd had a great deal on two comforters for $120.
	And it was such a great deal that she'd bought a second set for herself.
	And so I think actually having people running around calling themselves duchesses and prince actually keeps the citizens on their toes too.
	So you'd never be able to get away with the stupid 48-car motorcade like the president has here because people would just be resentful of it.
	I've never considered the monarchy in this way, but I like it.
	You're talking me back into it.
	We're going to look at George Washington totally differently now.
	Maybe you weren't as smart as I thought.
	Just kidding.
	No, no, in fairness, you know, George Washington, that George Washington, and there was some talk at the time that he would be known as his most excellent highness or whatever.
	And he chose not to do that.
	But the fact is, since then, you've wound up with a monarchical presidency.
	And ludicrously, you know, the Queen got stuck in traffic yesterday on the way from Windsor Castle to Buckingham Palace.
	She was a little late arriving.
	She got stuck on the motorway, the interstate, as you say.
	And that would never happen for the president because the president, when he came to Vermont, the vice president came to Vermont.
	They closed basically the entire road system of Vermont for the vice president.
	I mean, there's nothing in the least bit Republican about that.
	Wow.
	No, there isn't.
	It's a good point.
	And now you've got people acting like they're entitled to that, although that's a problem we have across industries here in America.
	Just go back and read Rosie O'Donnell's book where she talked about how, thanks to her famous celebrity, she got to the point where she believed she could just run the red lights because she was so famous.
	Look how that ended.
	Okay, so let's talk about the significance of what we're watching because I don't think most Americans totally understand like what's the jubilee, what's the trooping of the colors, and what does it mean that, you know, only the senior royals were on the balcony, notably absent were the Mixit couple.
	So just put it in perspective for us, what's happening and what we're looking at.
	Well, we're celebrating basically an extraordinary 70-year reign.
	If you think about it in U.S. terms, Harry Truman was in the White House.
	Joe Stalin was in the Kremlin.
	Chairman Mao had just taken over in China.
	There is nothing that survives of 1952 except this woman.
	And she survived in an industry in which for the last century, it's been taken as inevitable that crowns don't survive.
	You know, all her cousins in the German Empire, in the Russian Empire, her more distant ones in the Habsburg Empire, you take the Ottoman Empire, they're all gone.
	And she's somehow managed to cling on and cling to, you know, an awful lot of valuable real estate all around the world.
	And I think that's helpful too.
	I think it's, I was, I mean, I don't want to do a lot of name-dropping or whatever, but I was at Buckingham Palace.
	I think I can tell this because I think I'm the only guest still alive.
	I was at Buckingham Palace for a small private dinner a few years ago.
	And at the end of it, we're all sort of relaxing and in the easy chairs and kicking off our shoes.
	And somebody said, started one of those after-dinner conversations on who's the most impressive person you ever met.
	And the Queen's husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, said, oh, I would have to say, after a bit of thought, he said, I would have to say Vincent Massey and Sir Robert Menzies.
	And Vincent Massey was Canada's Governor General in 1952.
	And Sir Robert Menzies is the longest-serving Australian prime minister.
	And I can guarantee you that nobody else in that room had given those guys a thought in several decades.
	But they're like the icebergs.
	It's the seven eighths below the surface.
	It's what Abraham Lincoln called the mystic cords of memory.
	And it's a lot easier to bring those to the surface under a monarchical system.
	How is it that you were invited to go to Buckingham Palace for a dinner and to just hang with the royals?
	Well, I'll tell you, my assistant in New Hampshire, who was very New Hampshire focused, she was a little bit interested in stuff from Maine, not so much in Vermont, and no interest at all in Massachusetts.
	But the telephone rang one day and she picked it up and she's going, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.
	And then she puts her hand over the mouthpiece and goes, some palace on the phone for you.
	And it was because the Duke of Edinburgh had read a column I'd written on the European Union and wanted to hear more about it.
	So I agreed to go to dinner.
	I was the only mister there.
	Everybody else was an earl or a viscount or whatever.
	And I quite liked being the only mister in the room.
	Well, can you tell us, because I read this in preparing for the interview about how you had sort of boned up on how to say hello to the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen's husband, Prince Philip.
	And it didn't go exactly according to plan.
	No, I took the precaution of because I love genuine republicanism.
	You know, I fell in love with New Hampshire because everything's decided at town level.
	So if you don't like the school district policies, you can call the guy up in the evening and yell at him about it, which is, you know, tough.
	It's not something that cabinet secretaries in Washington have to put up with.
	So I loved all that.
	And I'd been in New Hampshire so long that I'd quite forgotten all the sort of fawning and groveling you had to do.
	And so I'd been boning up on it beforehand.
	And you have to bow from the neck when you are introduced because as George V says, only a waiter bows from the waist.
	That was his line.
	And so I land in London and as usual, everything's a bit flustered.
	I'm running.
	I go and I change into my evening dress and I'm all running a bit late.
	And I get to the palace and I'm ushered in by the footman and the Duke of Edinburgh's on the other side of the room.
	And so instead of remembering to walk up to him and bow from the neck and go, Your Royal Highness, I just did the New Hampshire thing where I stuck out my arm and went, hi.
	And he was a bit startled, but he went, hi, and shook my hand, which was very, and I feel, I sort of felt bad about that when he died because the last time I had to bow to the neck was about a year, a year or two back for dinner with the Queen's Viceroy in Ottawa.
	And so there I was completely on top with all the fawning and groveling.
	And I did bow from the neck.
	And she just went, oh, Mark, and gave me a, brought me in for a huge hug.
	So I felt in Buckingham Palace, I feel bad about being so informal.
	And in Rideau Hall in Ottawa, I feel bad because the Queen's Viceran declined to accept my formality.
	So I get it every which way.
	I can relate to this.
	It's not exactly royalty, but I love Cardinal Dolan.
	And he's got a show right on Sirius XM too.
	And I went and participated in his Christmas special, which was shot live at Sirius headquarters.
	And I walked in and I've known Cardinal Dolan and I've interviewed him repeatedly.
	He's been super nice to me my whole life.
	So I walk in and he calls me Meg, which I like.
	Only a few people call me Meg, but I like it.
	And I walk in and he says, Meg.
	And instead of greeting him properly, I said, CD.
Crass Comments About Grieving Parents 00:09:42
	Right.
	And his right-hand man said, Your eminence.
	I was like, oh, my God.
	I'm going to help.
	No.
	Well, it's the same thing.
	It's like you, it's nice to have a place in the world for formality.
	And I'm a little disturbed by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
	He'll be the next king but one.
	And he and he says, oh, I'm not really comfortable with all this bowing.
	So I don't know whether we need to have that.
	I think people actually, every schoolgirl loves to, it doesn't matter.
	It's all, it doesn't matter whether it's in Mauritius.
	It doesn't matter whether it's in the Solomon Islands.
	It doesn't matter whether it's in the Turks and Caicos.
	Every schoolgirl loves to curtsy to the Queen.
	And it's important to keep a lot of that stuff.
	Well, I mean, that reminds me of Megan Markle complaining in her Oprah interview that no one taught me how to curtsy.
	They don't teach you those things.
	She didn't understand, Mark.
	You know, she didn't, she wasn't able to figure it out.
	And I'll tell you one thing she's got figured out because watching that ceremony yesterday, she was sure to undo that window when she was in the car so that she could be photographed.
	I mean, literally days after she...
	She flew, she was the only celebrity to fly to Uvalde, Texas to make sure she had a photo up there.
	I'm sorry.
	That to me was an obvious press generation move, and I found it absolutely abhorrent.
	Oh, absolutely, absolutely disgusting.
	She didn't get the job.
	You know, my kid, youngest kid said to me when the Duke of Edinburgh died last year, he's been educated pretty much in America all his entire life.
	And so he was talking with his American chums and he said to me, oh, dad, you just can't talk about the monarchy to Americans because they just don't get it.
	They think it's like a celebrity who opens supermarkets.
	And I think that's what Megan failed to misunderstand.
	She thought it was like a sort of a group celebrity.
	It's like the rat pack with tiaras or something.
	And so the fact that it's largely boring and it's about the subjects, and particularly if you're a minor royal duchess like her, it involves being, you know, colonel in chief of some island on the other side of the planet and you have to fly into and pretend to take it all seriously.
	Then you have to go to New Zealand and open a hospital.
	And I think, and she genuinely thought, I think, that you'd be just swanning around with A-list celebrities all day long and didn't give any thought to the fact that, no, you're going to be sitting in a room talking to some guy in Bangladesh who started a rural ambulance service for remote parts.
	And she had no interest in any of that.
	And she likes George Clooney and Oprah.
	And she was entirely unsuitable for the role of minor royal duchess.
	And it's a very sad fact, but that's just the way it is.
	So now they did come back.
	They did not get the invitation to go up on the balcony with the queen because they're not, I guess, considered senior royals.
	They're not working royals anymore.
	And the reports I've read today say things between Harry and William appeared somewhat frosty at the church.
	They sat on entirely separate sides.
	Everything's choreographed, and it seems the choreography has kept them away from one another.
	When the ceremony ended, we're told that, again, the senior royals went out to lunch.
	Megan and Harry went back to Frogmore Cottage and did not join the rest of the family for lunch, though she did find time to introduce the queen to her great-granddaughter, whose name Megan and Harry chose to use while calling someone in the royal family racist.
	Who knows who?
	Nevertheless, here's Lily Bet.
	So what do you make of the relationship there and what we can glean from these facts?
	Well, when you use that expression, senior royals, you know, they've basically invented this since Harry and Megan chose to check out because there's a, you know, there's an order of precedence.
	She is, he is the queen's grandson, the queen's second most senior grandson.
	So he should have a certain place in the procession behind his older brother and their kids.
	That's where he should come.
	And as they were walking out the church, he was way at the back with all the riffraff, Which gave me a spectacular laugh because essentially they've invented this idea of working royals, senior royals, just as a way of moving him, you know, from flying in up front in first class all the way back to sitting in row 274, right, wedged up with the riffraff right at the back.
	And they've, and I think they're quite right.
	I think they're quite right to do that.
	You can't, you just can't have, I mean, for a start, it's all totally fraudulent.
	These, these two are not in show business.
	You know, if you're, if you are, if you are George Clooney, that's one thing.
	If you're Katie Perry, that's one thing.
	But if you're just two people who have no talent in that sphere, but you want to hang around with them all the time, you want to live on the beach at Malibu, that's just kind of sad and pathetic.
	You know, the Netflix deal is Netflix is tanking.
	And so they're not, people can't afford just to throw away millions on useless royals just to get their name on things.
	This, whatever it was when they were trying to raise money through GoFundMe or one of those kinds of things to pay off the mortgage on that mansion they live in, which is a multi-multi-multi-million pound mansion.
	And I think they raised $1,047.73.
	So the public gets it.
	They don't want to pay money for them.
	The only thing they have going for them is their titles.
	She uses it on book spines, which, you know, generally speaking, you shouldn't do.
	Megan, the Duchess of Sussex, which isn't even the right style, but she has to use that to sell the book.
	It's usually the, when, when the royals are trying to break into show business, it's usually the opposite.
	I knew Prince Edward when he was the Queen's youngest son, when he was trying to pass himself off as a filmmaker.
	And I remember the first time I knew him in his new incarnation.
	I was at a party and he came up to me and he stuck his arm out as I did.
	And he goes, hi, Edward Windsor.
	And the lady I was with turned to me and said, is that his stage name?
	And it's the opposite with Megan here.
	She's basically milking.
	She actually is in show business.
	She's got a stage name and she's improperly using this royal title because it's the only thing that makes any money for her.
	I'm going to go by Megan Duchess of Sirius from now on.
	It's going to be my new self-appointed 2020.
	No, right around the world.
	Well, since she came along, I prefer your spelling too.
	Thank you very much.
	She's put me off that spelling of the name.
	Well, what do you make of the fact that they were openly booed?
	You can hear, it's hard to hear when we just play it like over the transom here, but I've listened to a few times.
	They were getting booed, she and Harry, as they walked out of the church.
	That's just remarkable.
	I mean, I realized the polls, there was a Yuga poll that shows the popularity of the royals.
	Of course, the queen remains the most popular by far.
	She has a net score, a positive score of plus 69.
	Prince William is second at plus 59.
	Princess Kate, plus 55.
	Charles, doing better than years ago.
	He's at plus 19.
	Even Camilla is at plus nine.
	Then we get to Harry, minus 26.
	Megan Markle, minus 42, which is down a few points from where it was not long ago.
	And Andrew, of course, is the least popular with a minus 80.
	We all know why you don't pall around with Jeffrey Epstein and get any higher than that.
	But the booze, I thought, were remarkable.
	What do you make of it?
	Yeah, I think it's because they see the phoniness of it.
	You know, they lied to us.
	When they checked out, they said they were going to commit themselves to working for people all around the Commonwealth.
	And on the basis, the day before they left, they went to Canada House in London, which is the central Canadian building in Trafalgar Square.
	And oh, Canada, Canada, we love Canadians.
	They flew then out to Salt Spring Island off the coast of British Columbia on the west coast in Canada.
	In fact, they were living down the road from a couple of old rock star pals of mine, Randy Backman from Backman Turner Overdrive in the 70s and his son, Tal Backman, who had a big hit in the 90s with She's So High.
	And that's because it's in Canadian terms, it's where like Canadian pop celebs like to live.
	And they stuck Canada for a couple of weeks.
Senior Royals on Gun Discussions 00:03:41
	And then Megan decided it was all boring and provincial and she'd had enough of Canada and preferred Beverly Hills.
	Well, that's fair enough, but you told a lie to get yourself out of the deal.
	And people don't, you know, that's what their whole thing was.
	They always, we want to serve the Commonwealth.
	No, they didn't.
	They want to go to cocktail parties in Beverly Hills.
	At least be honest about it.
	At least be honest about it.
	People don't mind George Clooney being George Clooney, but they resent Megan Markle, the most mediocre actress, who can't really carry off the pretense of wanting to do everything for the little people, who doesn't understand basic things like inserting herself into a gun shooting in Texas is in the most ghastly bad taste.
	They get that these people are just talentless self-promoters and they're sick of them.
	Who does she think she's kidding?
	I'm sorry, but she did not go to Uvalde out of the goodness of her heart.
	She went, if she had done that, then we wouldn't know about it.
	She would have managed to get there.
	She would have paid private tribute somehow without going to the very spot where all the press were and laying flowers.
	And we wouldn't know about it.
	She made sure that she was photographed and she made sure that she had a bunch of positive headlines generated out of it.
	And the sycophantic media just goes along with it as though this is an exploitative.
	That's what she did.
	She exploited the death of those children so she could get herself on camera.
	That's the same thing Beto O'Rourke did at that press conference that the mayor and the governor were having.
	And it's wrong.
	I mean, to me, I really think it's indicative of a deep character flaw that you can even think about yourself and your image in a moment like that.
	Yes, I don't even understand how you can be crass enough to think like that, whether you're talking about Beto or about the Duchess of Sussex, because it just instinctively you should know that this incident is about the grieving parents.
	It's about the police who stood in the corridor.
	These are the people who need to be in the picture.
	You don't need to be in the picture.
	You might want to help.
	You might want to give blood.
	You might want to give money to support those families or whatever.
	You can do all that without getting on a plane.
	And I'm absolutely astonished at seemliness, which is a word we don't hear terribly often these days.
	But I'm absolutely astonished at the way people have no idea anymore about what is seemly and what is not.
	And that alone, to me, would be a disqualifying act because if she were to return to being a working royal and there was to be a, you know, some kind of mining disaster in Australia or whatever, you certainly wouldn't want her doing the same thing there that she's just been doing in Texas.
	It's terrible.
	Well, I know a lot of people speculated after Mexic that this couple, the two of them, would be the downfall of the queen.
	You know, somehow this would be the end of the royal family.
	And, you know, that's clearly not going to be the case.
	Like the other, the senior royals seem to have withstood Mexic just fine.
	And as I was thinking about it when you were talking about the queen and how long she's been on the throne, there's been a lot of tumult.
	Obviously, the Diana nightmare was probably way bigger than Mexic.
	But what do you make of that, the speculation that somehow Megan Markle will be the downfall of the royal family?
Immigration and Open Borders 00:15:16
	Well, I think it fundamentally misunderstands what a royal family, you have a royal family because you're a constitutional monarchy, which is a system that Britain invented.
	It's taken up elsewhere.
	And in fact, I think if you look at the Freedom House rankings of the freest nations on the planet, seven of them are constitutional monarchies.
	So it's not a bad system of government to live under.
	You know, I was listening to what Ilya and you were talking about earlier about the Supreme Court nominations and so forth.
	And Ilya, although he was briefly Canadian, he couldn't actually make a living in Canada as a constitutional scholar because under the Canadian theory or the English theory, the queen is the state and the state is the queen.
	And that's the beginning and end of it.
	If you look at the Canadian Constitution, I think it's paragraph nine says executive power, its headline.
	And it goes, executive power shall be vested in Her Majesty.
	And you think, wait a minute, where's the rest of it?
	Where's the mention of the prime minister or elections?
	And there's no mention of any of that in the Canadian, the Australian, whatever constitutions.
	And it's because it's a system of government.
	And the fact that they occasionally go to a pop concert or the Duke of Edinburgh is informed at the James Bond premiere that Madonna is singing the title song and he turns to the queen and says, I told you we should have brought the earplugs.
	That kind of thing, that kind of thing is all very well.
	But at the heart of it, it's a system of government.
	And so the showbiz fripperies are just for entertainment value.
	What is that word?
	Showbiz fripperies?
	Fripperies.
	F-R-I-P-P-E-R-I-E-S.
	There's a lot of fripperies around.
	I like it a lot.
	All right.
	I'm going to be looking that up in this break, and we will be right back with more with Mark Stein.
	Don't go away.
	So let's hit a couple of news headlines because I know you comment on everything.
	I know that from my days of working with you back at Fox on the Kelly file.
	And I'd love to get your take as somebody, you know, British via Canada and then New Hampshire, your take on the gun debate.
	Because now, I mean, Joe Biden, I'll play the soundbite.
	He's pretty explicit about wanting to bring back the so-called assault weapons ban.
	It's Soundbite 5.
	Let's take a listen.
	We need to ban assault weapons in high-capacity magazines.
	And if we can't ban assault weapons, then we should raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21.
	Strengthen the background checks.
	Enact safe storage law and red flag laws.
	Repeal the immunity that protects gun manufacturers from liability.
	Address the mental health crisis.
	Deep into the trauma of gun violence and as a consequence of that violence.
	These are rational, common sense measures.
	A lot in there.
	What are your thoughts?
	He, as you say, there's a lot in there, and he hasn't got the political energy to make any of it happen.
	I'm talking about, you know, Democrats, too.
	I live in New Hampshire across the Connecticut River from me is what they call the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.
	They're all Democrats who vote for Bernie Sanders because Bernie Sanders doesn't mess with their gun rights.
	In Co-OS County, in far northern New Hampshire, they vote Democrat because they want bigger government checks to spend at the gun shop.
	There are not Democrats, rural Democrats like Bernie Sanders, Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire.
	They're not going to go along with any of this.
	None of it's going to happen.
	A lot of what he talks about has happened.
	There's laws on, you know, the big problem with any society is that if you have a small number of laws, they tend to be observed.
	Then when you pile on law upon law upon law upon law, background checks and all the rest of it, what happens is that they all go unobserved.
	I mean, this guy sailed through a lot of the laws that are already in place, as with most of these mass shooters.
	The fact is, politically, judicially, none of this is ever going to happen.
	Politically speaking, you were talking about it from the court's point of view, but the political reality is this, that since in the last two years, things have got a lot more dangerous on the crime front.
	I travel with a gun in my glove box, just tootling around, which I never did before, but I've done for the last two years simply because I've seen enough of these things where people are just out on the streets in broad daylight and they're suddenly attacked.
	This is no, culturally speaking, this is not a time when anybody is going to mess with American gun rights.
	It's not going to happen.
	And the truth is about these mass school shooters, the vast majority of them get their guns from their parents' cabinet.
	The vast majority don't actually apply for a license and actually go out and shoot with that gun.
	They just take the gun from their parents', you know, whatever, vault, security, wherever they keep them.
	His solution to that is have these mandatory lockup laws for the guns.
	Okay, I'm sure every parent's going to observe that perfectly and hide the key to where the kid could never find.
	Like, that is not the answer.
	And then, so he says, he calls assault weapons.
	It's like, that's not really a thing.
	You know, that's a senior royals.
	That's the senior royals of gun discussions.
	Yeah, that's basically a category of gun that doesn't exist except when Democrats are calling for gun control.
	I mean, what's the old line that it's basically a scary looking weapon that doesn't have a wooden stock?
	You know, I'm old-fashioned because I was in the cadets when I was at school.
	So we had old Lee Enfield rifles, which was the backbone of the British Empire.
	And I think now it's Arctic Rangers in Canada and one police department in India are the only ones who like.
	And so I'm old-fashioned.
	So I like the wooden stock.
	But the fact of the matter is, this is just filling up airtime on MSNBC and has no actual reality.
	And I think also, you know, I don't want to be cruel or hard-hearted about this, but that, and I think the school, the school thing is, well, I mean, my neighbors all say, oh, yeah, I was at school in the 70s and I used to take my gun to school for show and tell.
	A lot of us boys did.
	And we all thought it was cool and didn't mean we were going to shoot up the place.
	But the reasons for why we have an atomized society in which loners sit and fester until the point they reach where it seems like gunning down large numbers of people is the logical form of self-expression.
	That's actually far more dangerous.
	And in a country this large with this many guns, you cannot have, you cannot actually devise a regime that will protect one group of people from another person.
	It's way beyond any of that.
	And so this is all so shallow.
	The level at which it's talked about is completely shallow and preposterous.
	And I would imagine that a lot of other Western societies, countries that haven't had such great gun cultures, they're going to find that actually they'd like to be packing heat these days rather than America adopting continental ways.
	Well, I'm looking at his other suggestions.
	We should raise the age to purchase these so-called assault weapons from 18 to 21.
	Perhaps he's unaware that that's already been struck down.
	The Ninth Circuit, the very liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, has already said, in at least one case, that's unconstitutional.
	You're 18, you're an adult.
	It's a constitutional right and you can buy a rifle.
	So good luck, because that's going to pose some legal challenges if he tries to do it.
	He goes on, okay, the repeal the immunity that protects gun manufacturers from liability.
	He always hits this.
	They're the only industry that has this protection.
	That's absurd.
	If you buy a Glock and the Glock is manufactured poorly and it misfires because of the manufacturing defect, you can 100% sue the gun manufacturer.
	You just can't blame someone's random gun violence on the gun manufacturer.
	That's not something special to the gun lobby.
	That makes perfect sense.
	But they're being cynical, Megan.
	That's the point here.
	Joe Biden and the Democrats, Joe Biden can't get anything through Congress on this.
	So he's just serving up PAP to placate metropolitan lefties who dislike the Second Amendment.
	But it has no real world meaning.
	And this is, again, one of the, I think, one of the problems in the system that you wind up with a guy like this.
	None of us know who's actually running the United States government, but it's clearly not him because as we just heard, he wasn't even informed of the baby formula shortage until late April.
	So you have a guy who they just say, you should really, you should go out.
	This is again the deformation of the presidency, because you can say what you like about McKinley or Chester Arthur or whatever, but they didn't live in a culture where, oh, something's happened.
	Go out there and say something to everybody just for the sake of saying something.
	This is absolutely, but nothing Joe Biden says on anything, whether he's threatening regime change against Putin or anything else, is taken seriously anymore.
	So these are just, this is just presidential dinner theater and is rather pathetic in that respect.
	There's a question about who's calling the shots there and who's pushing these crazy policies that he either has no chance of getting through or that won't do anything to address the problem he's purporting to tackle.
	And that leads me to my next question because I saw and read about National Reviews Jim Garrity wrote this up today, and it was from a Charlie Sykes podcast.
	This is a conservative, never Trumper Charlie Sykes, but he had a very interesting exchange with a Washington Post columnist, former reporter James Homan, about student loan, quote, forgiveness, right?
	It's not really forgiveness.
	It's a transfer of wealth from the working class to rich, elite university graduated professionals.
	And the only requirement is that, according to what he's thinking of, is that you make less than $150,000 a year.
	Okay.
	So you can make $149,000 a year and qualify for this, quote, forgiveness, or $300,000 as a married couple.
	And you might get this debt forgiven or paid for by, you know, a trucker who didn't go to college because he decided didn't need to or didn't want to take on debt.
	Now you're going to have to pay for somebody else's debt.
	So the question Charlie Sykes was asking this reporter, James Homan, who's done reporting on it, is, why is he doing that?
	This is insane for him to be pushing this right now.
	And the number he's reportedly getting ready to settle on is $10,000 a person.
	And for the first time, there was a real answer based on this guy's reporting.
	Listen to this exchange.
	I mean, seriously, where does Joe Biden think this groundswell is going to come from, except for this small group of highly entitled college graduates who dominate college graduates who dominate the staffing and the inner workings of the Democratic Party?
	I've asked, I've repeatedly asked people, and I've asked a lot of people in the White House this question.
	And essentially, the answer is this is the fault of Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock.
	What?
	Stacey Abrams has been browbeating the White House on this and says that this is the only way she can win, that this is going to be a base turnout election.
	This isn't about persuading people in the middle.
	It's about getting the base to turn out and the base isn't going to turn out if they don't do this.
	And that they have all sorts of stats about how a lot of graduates from HBCUs have all this data.
	And so there are a lot of people very close to the president who privately understand that this is a complete disaster for them.
	But the president is being pulled really hard by these woke leftists who believe it's all about the base.
	And that's just, they just don't get it because they haven't spent time in the Wow counties or in Apple Valley, Minnesota.
	Extraordinary, right?
	Stacey Abrams.
	No, that's just insane to be doing it for Stacey Abrams.
	There is a problem with American education.
	There's too much of it.
	People, in 1940, the average American had an eighth grade education.
	That's the America that won the Second World War and emerged as the dominant power on the planet.
	So when people think of the America's glorious 1950 moment, that was built by eighth graders.
	And now we encourage everybody to stay in school to 28th grade to do transgender and colonialism studies at a cost of a quarter million bucks.
	It's completely worthless.
	And if you decide to do student loan forgiveness, people think, oh, yeah, I was a bit, I thought maybe I should just leave the front door and go to work.
	But maybe if they're offering student loan forgiveness, I should do transgender and colonialism studies, although not just for four years, maybe for six, seven, eight years.
	That's the way to make an already decrepit system that is far worse than, say, China's even worse.
	So it's the biggest structural defect in America today is the education system, as we've seen over the last two years, where in effect the system has been prepared to traumatize children rather than actually bring them back into the classroom to teach them.
	So then to reward what is absolute and I agree with 1940 America.
	I think K-8 is the most important education you get.
Pleasure Catching Up With Guests 00:04:14
	If you screw that up, you can stay in school till you're 37, 48.
	It's not going to make any difference.
	So I'd like us to get K-8 back to being passingly respectable again.
	But if you encourage, what this does is encourage absolutely the worst and most unnecessary element of the American education system.
	As you say, it's transferring, it's a wealth transfer from the poor to people considerably richer than them.
	And in that sense, it's the perfect Democrat policy.
	And there's something else in there that's revealing.
	So Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock, who's a senator from Georgia, thanks to that election that happened, both are black Americans, concerned about the black vote.
	That's really what he's saying, that students who have graduated from historically black colleges and universities, HBCUs, are not ready to turn out for Democrats in the midterm elections or possibly beyond, and that he needs to pay for their votes.
	That's basically what that reporter was saying.
	And we've seen him losing support with Latinos, with black voters.
	And now there's a five-alarm fire.
	And these two lawmakers, well, one aspiring and one existing, are sounding the alarm saying, you better do what politicians do best, which is go buy some votes with some taxpayer dollars to motivate people to go and support the team blue comes November.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's very, what's, we live in a very weird moment because the Democrat Party would not be doing what it's done the last year and a half if it was thinking rationally.
	You know, basically everything that can go wrong now has go wrong.
	Oh, you can't afford to gas up your car.
	You can't find any formula milk for your baby.
	You know, everything that can be screwed.
	And at the same time, we've got open borders.
	So there's six million people coming in between now and September who'll be able to help push the gas prices even higher and make the formula milk shortage even worse.
	And the Democrats have, if they were thinking rationally, they wouldn't be doing any of this.
	And their whole theory that you can build a coalition of the fringes that will, in effect, make their punitive policies not matter.
	There aren't the numbers for that unless they're planning on serious big-time electoral theft, in which case none of this matters.
	But the fact is, no rational person would govern as they've governed these last 18 months.
	Well, let me ask you quickly about immigration because I know you were saying something about how in Great Britain, they're encouraging people not to have sex.
	It's a total open border there and here.
	Maybe we're focusing on the wrong problem.
	Yeah, I just think this actually is the, you know, it's the biggest story of our time.
	I mean, anyone who's ever crossed into the United States from Canada, where they check every little thing, you know, and they forbid you from bringing in kinder eggs for your kiddies and all the rest of it.
	And then you have the contrast with the Rio Grande, where everybody just walks.
	It's a continuous stream of people just walking in.
	At some point, it doesn't have to go on that long for it to have really demographically transformative consequences.
	And these days, when you're looking at, I think, 40% of the planet's jobs being eliminated by artificial intelligence, nobody really needs mass immigration anymore.
	No country really needs it.
	And in that sense, the cultural issues trump the economic issues and they're far more long-term and far more consequential.
	Yeah.
	So they'll try to prevent monkeypox by policing what you do in your bed, but they will not control the borders.
	That's a bridge too far.
	It's a perfect point, Mark.
Pleasure Catching Up With Guests 00:01:05
	It was such a pleasure catching up.
	I hope you come back on.
	No, I always, you have one of the best shows out there, Megan, and I'm always thrilled when I get to.
	You know, we've talked some serious stuff when I think about the Shari Epto shootings and things.
	It's always a pleasure to be with you.
	Thank you.
	To be continued.
	Thanks for joining us today.
	I really enjoyed that show.
	I hope you did too.
	Two really interesting guests.
	And we have a lot more great content coming your way next week.
	Our friends from the Ruthless podcast will be back.
	We love those guys.
	Plus, for the first time ever, the hosts of the Red Scare podcast will be with us.
	Very, very popular, and we're all very excited about that.
	David Sachs, part of the PayPal Mafia, he's coming back on.
	He was great the last time.
	And then later in the week, we're going to be doing an entire special focused on President Biden's mental fitness.
	You don't want to miss that.
	So go ahead and download the show right now on Apple Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher.
	Go to youtube.com/slash MeganKelly and have a great weekend.
	Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no

Chapters

00:00:15 Victory for Free Speech
00:09:21 The First Few Days Were Hell
00:14:35 Attacking Your Classmates
00:30:04 Affirmative Action Case Context
00:43:15 Mass Shootings and Background Checks
00:46:35 Punishing the Leaker Now
00:48:54 Welcome to Buckingham Palace
00:52:31 Royals vs. Show Business
01:04:52 Crass Comments About Grieving Parents
01:14:35 Senior Royals on Gun Discussions
01:18:17 Immigration and Open Borders
01:33:33 Pleasure Catching Up With Guests
01:37:48 Pleasure Catching Up With Guests