The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220606_cultural-drift-from-reality-and-depp-fallout-with-
Aired: 2022-06-06
Duration: 01:35:52


=== Ilya Shapiro's Toxic Tweet (14:35) ===

[00:00:16]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:45]  To our exclusive interview just this past Friday with Ilya Shapiro.
[00:00:50]  Now, in case you missed it, he's a constitutional law expert who sent a poorly worded tweet about President Biden's decision to select a Supreme Court nominee based on race and gender.
[00:01:02]  He was arguing that they should have chosen another guy from the DC Circuit who happened to be an Indian American and that anybody else would be lesser qualified.
[00:01:13]  And in lamenting that it wouldn't be this one judge, he suggested, and instead we're going to get quote, a lesser black woman.
[00:01:20]  And the left ran with it, not the left, but just sort of the woke left, was completely ungenerous in their interpretation of it, even though he immediately deleted it and explained what he had meant.
[00:01:30]  He just meant anybody other than this one judge, in his view, would be lesser qualified.
[00:01:34]  Well, they smelled blood.
[00:01:36]  He was about to take over this big legal center at Georgetown, and they tried to kill him.
[00:01:41]  I mean, they just got him completely on the ropes.
[00:01:44]  He was vilified for it.
[00:01:46]  No one would accept his explanation, even though this guy has a totally professional, laudable, admirable history as a commentator, but he's a conservative.
[00:01:56]  He's a classical liberal.
[00:01:57]  And he was put into a kind of purgatory by his new employer, Georgetown Law.
[00:02:02]  Well, Georgetown took four months to determine if that one tweet should lead to the end of Ilya Shapiro's stint at Georgetown before it even began.
[00:02:16]  All right.
[00:02:17]  Finally, they determined: okay, you didn't actually even work here before we foisted this misery on you, this four months' investigation, and never mind when you actually sent out the tweet.
[00:02:29]  So, we're gonna let you start at Georgetown Law.
[00:02:32]  Well, Ilya had just received that news the day before he came on our show.
[00:02:38]  And listening to him talk about what the requirements were going to be for him at Georgetown, what the dean had said publicly, even in announcing he could join Georgetown after all this, and Ilya's commitment to stand by his more originalist views of the Constitution, which they knew about in advance.
[00:02:56]  It's a little bit more conservative-leaning, more like Justice Scalia than it is like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
[00:03:02]  We were forecasting with him in that interview: this is going to be a hell of a bumpy road, even from this point forward.
[00:03:09]  Keep in mind, of course, there'd been huge outbreaks of upset on the Georgetown campus.
[00:03:15]  The Black Student Law Association demanding reparations because of this.
[00:03:20]  One demanding that they not be criticized for their criticism of Ilya because she claimed that they were the descendants of slaves.
[00:03:28]  I mean, it got absolutely absurd.
[00:03:31]  One demanding a cry room for students in the wake of that one tweet.
[00:03:35]  It was insane.
[00:03:37]  But in the end, not really because they supported his right to freedom of speech, but because they found a technicality saying he didn't yet work there when he sent it, Georgetown said, Okay, Ilya, you can come.
[00:03:47]  Well, today, unbelievable news on it.
[00:03:50]  Before we get to that, let me set it up with a bit of Friday's interview.
[00:03:54]  The dean put out a statement attacking me and calling me an appalling racist.
[00:03:58]  It was honestly, Megan, probably the second worst day of my life, the worst being when my mom passed when I was in college.
[00:04:05]  There were physical manifestations in my health, great personal and professional instability.
[00:04:11]  And today I'm with you the day after that purgatory ended.
[00:04:16]  My whole team was talking to him in the break, like, this isn't going to last.
[00:04:20]  How can this last?
[00:04:22]  Whether that is going to be feasible now.
[00:04:26]  You know, the proof will be in the pudding.
[00:04:28]  That is an interesting question.
[00:04:30]  And I hope to make a go of it.
[00:04:34]  But if it becomes, the environment becomes truly hostile, then I'll have to see what the next step will be.
[00:04:41]  Well, just 72 hours later, Ilya Shapiro is out at Georgetown.
[00:04:47]  He resigned.
[00:04:48]  He resigned after that interview, writing in a letter to Georgetown Dean, William Traynor, that upon consultation with counsel, family, and trusted advisors, it's become apparent that his remaining at Georgetown has become untenable, saying there's now a target on his back, making it impossible for him to do the job that he had been hired to do in, quote, a hostile work environment.
[00:05:15]  We called it.
[00:05:16]  I'll say that.
[00:05:17]  We called it.
[00:05:18]  And this is part of a growing and very disturbing trend.
[00:05:22]  We covered a couple weeks ago the turfing of lauded Professor Roland Fryer at Harvard.
[00:05:28]  He got sidelined.
[00:05:29]  His entire research lab got taken away from him, even though he had tons of money in there, millions of dollars in there.
[00:05:35]  They didn't care because he, a black professor, the youngest tenured black professor in Harvard history, he had the nerve to do studies on policing and whether it leads to a disproportionate killing of black men and concluded it did not.
[00:05:50]  And that, among other equally provocative studies, got him turfed.
[00:05:54]  Now, they blamed it on some trumped up Me Too allegation, but they've turfed him.
[00:05:58]  They can't fire him, but he's effectively been rendered feckless at Harvard.
[00:06:04]  And then it just happened to Professor Joshua Katz at Princeton.
[00:06:08]  Roland's at Harvard.
[00:06:09]  This guy, Josh Katz, is at Princeton.
[00:06:11]  Same thing, by the way, a trumped up Me Too charge from years ago, 2006.
[00:06:15]  He had a consensual affair with a student.
[00:06:17]  It was adjudicated.
[00:06:18]  He was turfed for a year to pay for his crime.
[00:06:22]  He was brought back.
[00:06:23]  Now, because he wrote an article objecting to some of the demands being made by the black professors, like an extra paid semester of sabbatical versus the white and the other race professors, he spoke out and said that that's ridiculous.
[00:06:34]  We shouldn't do that.
[00:06:35]  Suddenly, the Me Too thing reared its head.
[00:06:37]  The same case.
[00:06:38]  They want to go back, go back over it again.
[00:06:40]  And he just got fired for not being cooperative in that investigation.
[00:06:45]  Now I see Ilya Shapiro, one poorly worded tweet, which he immediately deleted and apologized for and explained the context of effectively subjected to a hostile work environment to where Ilya, a very smart guy, realized, I'm walking in the lion's den.
[00:06:58]  This is all set up.
[00:06:59]  And by the way, the words he chose, I'll tell you as a lawyer, a hostile work environment.
[00:07:03]  I consulted with counsel.
[00:07:05]  Remaining in my job was untenable.
[00:07:08]  I would suggest to you, Ilya being a talented lawyer, he's setting himself up for a lawsuit, as he should, because your boss can fire you by saying you're fired.
[00:07:16]  And then if you have grounds, you can sue him or her.
[00:07:20]  But they can also make it absolutely impossible for you to work at the place.
[00:07:25]  All these guys, I mean, Roland Fryer might have that too, where it's like, sure, come on to Georgetown.
[00:07:30]  It'd be great for you.
[00:07:31]  You're going to have to meet with every upset student and explain to them all why you're such a racist.
[00:07:37]  And you're going to have to go through DEI training from now to the cows come home.
[00:07:40]  Enjoy.
[00:07:41]  Good luck on your research and running the law center.
[00:07:44]  So we will see whether that's where this goes.
[00:07:47]  But I'm glad.
[00:07:48]  I'm glad he's gone.
[00:07:49]  I'm glad he did it because they don't deserve him.
[00:07:52]  Ilya Shapiro is too good for Georgetown.
[00:07:55]  They ought to be ashamed of themselves.
[00:07:57]  Princeton, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
[00:07:59]  Harvard, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves to lose guys like this, brilliant professors who offer a little, a little ideological diversity.
[00:08:09]  And every time they try to, you cut off their hand.
[00:08:13]  You tell them you find some other reason why they have to be silenced.
[00:08:16]  And George Schnag, you were the most disgusting because while you did this to him, you touted your free speech policy, which I pointed out to Ilya on the show on Friday, an episode you should go back and listen to.
[00:08:27]  It made no sense.
[00:08:28]  Well, I found a way, the dean said, I found a way to uphold our free speech policy, which allows for a diversity of viewpoint, but also reminding everyone that you must be cautious in such speech and sensitive not to offend.
[00:08:45]  Well, in today's day and age, that's a silencer.
[00:08:48]  It's a total silencer.
[00:08:50]  He saw it.
[00:08:50]  I saw it.
[00:08:51]  The dean understood.
[00:08:52]  And Ilya was going in there like a lamb to the slaughter.
[00:08:56]  So we'll continue to follow that and the other nonsense that happens on these college campuses.
[00:09:00]  I'll tell you what, my eldest is only in sixth grade, just finished sixth grade today.
[00:09:06]  I'm glad we have a few years to figure out what comes next.
[00:09:09]  It's no longer clear that you want to send him to any of these universities, any of them.
[00:09:15]  So I'm glad we have a few years to figure it out.
[00:09:18]  All right.
[00:09:18]  And I'm glad today to be joined by two very smart and interesting thinkers.
[00:09:23]  In addition to being smart, it's almost better to be an interesting thinker who are here by popular demand, including my own.
[00:09:30]  We have got something different for you today.
[00:09:32]  Dasha Necrasava, I hope I didn't screw it up, Dasha, and Anna Kachian, the hosts of the Red Scare podcast, known to me as Dasha and Anna, are with us today.
[00:09:44]  They are uncommon unifiers in the most ironic way possible.
[00:09:48]  Their cynicism and loyalty to no one has brought together people of all ideologies as their growing audience embraces their heterodox and often unpredictable points of view.
[00:10:19]  We're excited to have them on the show and to bring you their perspective.
[00:10:21]  Dasha, Anna, thank you for being here.
[00:10:24]  Thanks for having us.
[00:10:26]  You know, I can we just start now.
[00:10:28]  You don't need to know Ilya Shapiro to comment on the opening story, but isn't it infuriating?
[00:10:34]  I mean, I know you two often describe yourselves as people who, with Russian origins originally, are unoffendable.
[00:10:41]  That's how I feel too.
[00:10:42]  I always say that about myself.
[00:10:43]  It's my Irish roots.
[00:10:45]  Just basically unoffendable.
[00:10:46]  It's really, really hard.
[00:10:49]  And yet, this crowd running around demanding cry rooms because of his stupid tweet has effectively now made it impossible for this great guy to take over this law center.
[00:10:59]  And it's such a waste.
[00:11:01]  Yeah, I mean, I don't, I guess I don't buy that anyone really is offended.
[00:11:06]  Yeah.
[00:11:06]  And I, but also on the flip side, you have to remember that things that seem like horrible travesties or errors are often blessings in disguise because they kind of lay bare the underlying mechanisms and alienate people and make them rethink things and turn them away from these massive institutions that are now coming under a crisis of credibility.
[00:11:29]  That's very true.
[00:11:30]  That's that's actually very true.
[00:11:31]  I mean, I laugh because like there was a young student.
[00:11:35]  I'll let her remain nameless for purposes of this discussion because I'm not sure she wants this public.
[00:11:41]  But actually, she wrote an article about it on Barry Weiss's substack, so it's fine.
[00:11:46]  But she wrote, she wrote an article about me for Brown University.
[00:11:50]  And then Brown University didn't want to publish it because they don't like me.
[00:11:54]  What a shock.
[00:11:56]  And they thought she should have been harder on me, what have you.
[00:11:59]  And she wrote a piece for Barry Weiss saying, this is ridiculous.
[00:12:02]  You know, we have to have opposing viewpoints represented.
[00:12:05]  And I think this young woman, who definitely was, you know, more of the left has had a metamorphosis of her own as she sees viewpoint censorship pop up, perfectly normal mainstream views be labeled as racist or sexist or unspeakable.
[00:12:20]  So you're right, Anna.
[00:12:22]  I mean, this kind of thing, writ large, which it is now, can have the opposite effect of the one they intend.
[00:12:28]  And you have to remember that, you know, haters are just fans who don't know it yet.
[00:12:33]  And so any kind of critique or pushback from the peanut gallery has to be weighed with like a grain of salt.
[00:12:42]  Often it's a major, major compliment.
[00:12:44]  But I think the trick is also to not play into those dynamics, to not accept the terms or premises of the argument, which so many of us are guilty of doing.
[00:12:55]  Like how?
[00:12:56]  Give me an example.
[00:12:57]  Well, in sort of agreeing to gin up the conflict, I'm not sure myself if there's an easy way out because sometimes you do owe people like a response or a defense, but it seems that people are playing into this kind of like toxic attention economy, which is why Ilya leaving Georgetown is ultimately kind of an alpha moon.
[00:13:21]  Yeah.
[00:13:22]  It's just sort of opting out of the discourse at large, which is an option that I don't think people realize they have.
[00:13:30]  Well, they had said, I think it was Roland Fryer at Harvard.
[00:13:36]  It could have been the other guy at Princeton, but one of them, both of them facing these sort of trumped up Me Too things, the conditions of staying were basically you have to pull aside the students at the beginning of every year and confess to them all your sins.
[00:13:50]  Oh, I'm sure that's going to happen.
[00:13:53]  They want that.
[00:13:54]  Even, yeah, even that we know doesn't work because the minute that you start issuing confessions or apologia, they smell blood.
[00:14:03]  Yeah.
[00:14:04]  Absolutely right.
[00:14:05]  I mean, sometimes it's a condition of you maintaining your employment and you realize there's no other way forward.
[00:14:12]  I mean, we've seen that happen many times.
[00:14:13]  I'm thinking, oh, and it didn't work, but I'm thinking of Chris Harrison of The Bachelor.
[00:14:18]  Remember his, it was the saddest apology of any apology I've ever seen because it was so clearly just rehearsed and repeated by like a hostage.
[00:14:30]  And then they fired him anyway.
[00:14:31]  The ABC just fired him anyway.
[00:14:34]  Yeah.
[00:14:36]  Yeah.
[00:14:36]  I mean, and you have to know, like in the case of Ilya Shapiro, I don't know much about the specifics, but he has the privilege, the option to opt out, which is a good thing because it sets a powerful example.
[00:14:50]  That's true.

=== Sovietization of American Universities (04:21) ===

[00:14:51]  But most people don't.
[00:14:52]  No, exactly.
[00:14:54]  Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
[00:14:56]  Well, it's funny.
[00:14:56]  It's like, I feel like my own, my own dust up with NBC happened so early in this whole curve.
[00:15:03]  It was just everything was so much less clear then.
[00:15:05]  You know, it was like less clear what was happening in our society, less clear how these things were being used.
[00:15:11]  And one of the first, on our very first episode, we had somebody I know you guys both admire Glenn Greenwald on the program.
[00:15:18]  We love him.
[00:15:18]  I love him too.
[00:15:20]  And he's also an unpredictable thinker.
[00:15:23]  And he asked me, are you sorry?
[00:15:25]  Would you take back your apology now?
[00:15:27]  You know, a couple of years later.
[00:15:30]  And I said no, because the messaging had gone out from so many corners that were not my fans that I had said this terrible thing that basically I wanted Blackface to be revived.
[00:15:41]  You know, I was like a pusher of it, as opposed to just saying, hey, when did we go from A to B?
[00:15:46]  Because this used to be done without problem.
[00:15:48]  And now we have such a recoiling to it.
[00:15:51]  And So I said, no, I wouldn't take it back, but I sure would handle it differently.
[00:15:56]  You know what I mean?
[00:15:56]  Today's day and age, I definitely would have handled it much differently.
[00:15:58]  Like the first thing I would have done was gone out there and showed the 50,000 shows on NBC where people were actually wearing blackface within the past two years of them claiming to be offended.
[00:16:10]  And that's kind of what Ilya did in his piece in the Wall Street Journal, which he announced this today.
[00:16:15]  He goes through, not for nothing, just a couple of examples of the professors at Georgetown who have received no trouble.
[00:16:22]  They're fine.
[00:16:22]  whose speech was defended.
[00:16:24]  Professor Carol Christine Fair, School of Foreign Service, back in the Kavanaugh hearings.
[00:16:29]  Look at this chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist's arrogated entitlement.
[00:16:34]  All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasp.
[00:16:39]  Bonus, we castrate their corpses and feed them to the swine.
[00:16:43]  Yes.
[00:16:43]  Georgetown said this was protected speech.
[00:16:46]  No problem.
[00:16:48]  Yeah.
[00:16:49]  Right.
[00:16:50]  Well, that's, I mean, the talk about the credibility problem in academia, right?
[00:16:55]  I mean, I went to a women's college where I was, you know, sort of indoctrinated with kind of extreme feminist rhetoric.
[00:17:06]  And now that school is now like defunct.
[00:17:08]  It doesn't exist anymore.
[00:17:11]  I would like to think that's where these are going.
[00:17:13]  But, you know, the endowments are so big.
[00:17:16]  But I do kind of think that, you know, Victor Davis Hansen, I love him.
[00:17:19]  He's a great commentator.
[00:17:20]  You guys should consider talking to him.
[00:17:22]  He's an independent.
[00:17:24]  He publishes in more conservative publications, but he really is an independent thinker.
[00:17:28]  And he had a piece out today, which I want to talk to you about because, well, you'll see why.
[00:17:33]  But the title of it is The Sovietization of American Light.
[00:17:37]  I think you'll like it.
[00:17:38]  You'll understand what he's saying.
[00:17:40]  But he points out how now these universities and these institutions do this at their own peril.
[00:17:46]  Because what does it mean now in today's day and age to get a degree from Harvard?
[00:17:50]  Does it mean you're brilliant?
[00:17:51]  Or does it mean you walked the perfect line on the necessary woke boxes?
[00:17:58]  You know, like you played that game just right.
[00:18:01]  Yeah.
[00:18:01]  Or your parents went to Harvard.
[00:18:03]  Yeah.
[00:18:04]  Or your parents went to Harvard.
[00:18:06]  He said that.
[00:18:06]  Or you're so, that was actually his second point.
[00:18:09]  I'll read it to you because you'll, you'll appreciate this.
[00:18:12]  He says, stand by.
[00:18:16]  Well, I don't know where it went, but it was perfect.
[00:18:18]  You got to find it.
[00:18:19]  It's Victor Davis Hansen, that piece today in American Greatness.
[00:18:23]  I love that this is also a show where you struggle to find quotes on there.
[00:18:29]  We all can encounter that.
[00:18:30]  We do that out.
[00:18:32]  So much information.
[00:18:33]  I try to cram in before you come on, but sometimes the little hamster stops running on the wheel when it's actually go time.
[00:18:41]  So now I think.
[00:18:43]  Yeah, go ahead, Dasha.
[00:18:44]  We were actually just talking sort of about the Sovietization of the way in which America is kind of mirroring the late Soviet period when things were starting to sort of fall apart and people were like, at least on the surface, pretending to participate in, you know, the ideology of socialism, but no one actually really, really believed it.
[00:19:07]  Wow.
[00:19:08]  I wonder if Victor Davis Hansen is a listener to Red Scare.

=== Weaponizing Me Too Culture (09:07) ===

[00:19:13]  It's, you never know.
[00:19:15]  Yeah, so let's talk about that because this is how he puts it.
[00:19:19]  He begins the piece as follows.
[00:19:21]  One day historians will look back at the period beginning with the COVID lockdowns of spring of 2020 through the midterm elections of 2022 to understand how America for over two years lost its collective mind and turned into something unrecognizable and antithetical to its founding principles.
[00:19:37]  Sovietization, he says, is perhaps the best diagnosis of the pathology.
[00:19:42]  It refers to the subordination of policy expression, popular culture, and even thought to ideological mandates.
[00:19:51]  Ultimately, such regimentation destroys a state since dogma wars with wars with and defeats meritocracy, creativity, and freedom.
[00:20:02]  The subordination of policy expression, pop culture, and even thought to ideological mandates.
[00:20:09]  Man, that's so true.
[00:20:10]  That's exactly what we're going through, no?
[00:20:11]  Yeah, and that's exactly right.
[00:20:13]  But I would also point out that ideological mandates exist in some shape or form in all societies and in all cultures.
[00:20:21]  The problem occurs when the general underwriting ideologies are decoupled from the sentiments of most people to the point that they start to feel gaslit or manipulated.
[00:20:35]  Like, give me an example of that.
[00:20:37]  Like the idea, the kind of extremely progressive, like racecraft and gendercraft ideology circulating in elite spheres right now, which I think are confusing and alienating to the vast majority of people.
[00:20:53]  Right.
[00:20:54]  But people feel as if they're meant to say if you don't think, for example, that children should be taking puberty blockers that you're somehow like condemning trans people at large to like a life of indignity and death or something.
[00:21:06]  Yeah, there's like plenty of examples, the idea that kind of white supremacy is our greatest sin as a nation.
[00:21:13]  I think that these kind of ideas don't jive with the sentiments of, you know, like 80% of the American populace across kind of demographic lines.
[00:21:27]  Defunding the wholeheartedly.
[00:21:29]  Yeah.
[00:21:29]  Exactly.
[00:21:30]  That's why on the show, I'm always trying to make a distinction between the left and the woke because it's not the same group.
[00:21:37]  And I've talked to Crystal Ball about this many times.
[00:21:39]  And she wants me to stop saying even like extreme left because she, like you, is a Bernie gal.
[00:21:45]  You know, like, she's like, I guess you could call me extreme left, but she's not woke and she's sensible.
[00:21:50]  She just has an attachment to certain economic policies that she think will help the working class and others in a way that they haven't so far.
[00:21:58]  But she doesn't push this nonsense and she sees what a lie it is.
[00:22:04]  I think, yeah, and the chief aim there is really to create a sense of moral fatigue in people to make them give up, to make them lose energy.
[00:22:17]  And in that way, the United States in the present day does resemble a great deal the USSR on the eve of collapse.
[00:22:25]  I'm very fond of that line that's attributed to Mark Twain that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
[00:22:33]  Yeah, like the DEI committees and stuff are very reminiscent of like Soviet era culture commissars that were like, you know, approving things that fell in line with the dominant ideology, except in America right now.
[00:22:48]  It's this sort of, yeah, woke liberalism, which is why Me Too gets weaponized the way that it does.
[00:22:54]  I'm dying to talk to you about that and about some of the writings we've seen in the wake of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard verdict last week.
[00:23:02]  Before we get to that, though, I definitely want to, just can you guys just explain your backgrounds for people who are not familiar with Red Scare or Dasha, in your case, succession, which is where I very, I saw you for the very first time, which you play an amazing role in that very popular show.
[00:23:18]  But just give us a bit of your background and why it's called Red Scare.
[00:23:25]  I was born in Minsk, Belarus, and I moved when I was three in the early 90s to Las Vegas, where I grew up.
[00:23:36]  Nice.
[00:23:38]  Yes.
[00:23:38]  Big change.
[00:23:40]  Yeah.
[00:23:41]  Go ahead, Anna.
[00:23:43]  And I was born in Moscow and I came to the United States when I was five years old and settled in New Jersey with my family.
[00:23:54]  Also big.
[00:23:55]  So you have parents who were born and raised over in what used to be the USSR.
[00:24:01]  And in my experience, people of that generation with those roots really object to what's happening right now in our society because they've lived it and they can see where it's going.
[00:24:15]  So, I mean, how are you, are you imparting, have they imparted that knowledge to you or do you have any independent memories of what things were like when you were really little?
[00:24:27]  My parents are fairly young.
[00:24:29]  My parents are sort of Gen X.
[00:24:31]  So they grew up like they were what was called the Thaw generation because they were born.
[00:24:37]  My mom was born in 70, right?
[00:24:39]  So they didn't really, they're not as right wing as a lot of like older people from the post-Soviet states are.
[00:24:49]  But definitely, I mean, when COVID, COVID, I think is a good marker of time because I remember, yeah, like not being able to buy flour at the grocery store.
[00:24:59]  And yeah, really having this feeling of like, wow, my parents sort of fled this post-Soviet regime for me to just kind of like end up back in this situation again.
[00:25:10]  Right.
[00:25:11]  Right.
[00:25:11]  Yeah.
[00:25:12]  COVID lockdowns were eerily similar.
[00:25:14]  Yeah, go ahead, Anna.
[00:25:16]  No, I think if you look at the situation, it is very parallel.
[00:25:19]  My parents are a little bit older than Dasha's.
[00:25:21]  They're boomers.
[00:25:22]  I think they came to the United States hoping to reach some sort of freedom and prosperity that wasn't available in the Soviet Union.
[00:25:33]  And I think that they were sorely disappointed.
[00:25:36]  And this was a great tragedy.
[00:25:39]  I do, for example, count my father as the death of despair.
[00:25:43]  He died when he was 53 in the United States, but I think he very much belongs to the Soviet lost generation of people roughly his age who were outlived by their parents from the war generation.
[00:25:56]  So, you know, three of my grandparents lived into their 90s.
[00:25:59]  And meanwhile, my father and two of my uncles are gone.
[00:26:04]  It's awful.
[00:26:07]  And we have that here and we have that there as well.
[00:26:10]  And the deaths of despair.
[00:26:11]  I mean, America's, that's a shame of ours that we continue to not address.
[00:26:17]  So how did the two of you connect?
[00:26:19]  Because you've formed this podcast, Red Scare, which becomes very, very popular in very interesting corners.
[00:26:25]  I mean, it wasn't just, was it just your Soviet background or how did you find each other?
[00:26:30]  On Twitter.
[00:26:31]  Yeah.
[00:26:32]  We were friends on Twitter.
[00:26:33]  We had some mutual friends in New York.
[00:26:35]  I used to live in LA.
[00:26:36]  When I moved to New York in 2018, we started the podcast.
[00:26:41]  Yeah, partly because we had this similar Russian-American identity, but also we have been talking about similar things as they pertain to like burgeoning Me Too movement and like feminism on Twitter prior to starting the pod.
[00:26:57]  I wonder, did you realize at that point that your sensibilities were more heterodox?
[00:27:02]  I know that word gets overused.
[00:27:04]  And did you connect it to your family heritage?
[00:27:07]  I've never seen my sensibility as heterodox.
[00:27:11]  I see it as, you know, very boilerplate and common sense.
[00:27:16]  But yeah, it was certainly like a culture shock coming here and being confronted with like a different value system or like ideological paradigm.
[00:27:26]  I've always said, you know, not that I want to do my greatest hits, but maybe I will, that, you know, Russians are optimists masquerading as cynics and Americans are cynics masquerading as optimists.
[00:27:38]  And that's not to deny that there's obviously a marked streak of like cynicism and melancholy running through the Russian sensibility.
[00:27:48]  But I think because they acknowledge it and own it, they can more openly envision or imagine certain optimistic potentials.
[00:27:59]  Whereas in America, I think the kind of confrontation with reality is habitually ignored.
[00:28:07]  Well, that certainly seems to be the news of the day.
[00:28:09]  I mean, that's how it feels, like reality staring us in the face, but we refuse to acknowledge it.
[00:28:14]  We keep getting forced upon us this alternate reality that you know is not true.

=== Alex Jones Interview Blowback (11:00) ===

[00:28:20]  And yet so many of our institutions have been captured by people saying the same thing.
[00:28:24]  You start to wonder whether you're the crazy one.
[00:28:27]  You know, am I the crazy one?
[00:28:29]  All right.
[00:28:29]  So I mentioned that Dasha's on succession.
[00:28:32]  What I didn't tell you is that her, I don't know if it was your first big on-cam moment, but just the very first thing that a lot of people saw of you.
[00:28:39]  And it was at a Bernie Sanders rally or event at which she happened to get cornered by a correspondent.
[00:28:48]  I'm going to use that term generously.
[00:28:51]  Of InfoWars.
[00:28:53]  And they had an exchange that went totally viral.
[00:28:56]  Dasha became known as Sailor Socialist or something about like your sailor outfit, which is also worthy of discussion.
[00:29:04]  But that's just a tease to keep them tuned over this quick commercial break.
[00:29:08]  You will see Dasha in her little sailor outfit and see how she handled herself when confronted by this woman.
[00:29:16]  All right, don't go anywhere with Dash and Anna right after this.
[00:29:23]  All right, so there you are, minding your own business, Dasha, at a Bernie event.
[00:29:27]  And this is before, it wasn't not a Bernie event?
[00:29:31]  I was not at a Bernie event.
[00:29:32]  No, I was at South by Southwest promoting a film that I co-wrote and starred in called Wobble Palace.
[00:29:39]  Why was she bothering you about Bernie then?
[00:29:42]  I thought her whole premise was I'm going to embarrass a Bernie supporter.
[00:29:45]  He was doing a, he was doing a rally at South by Southwest, but I couldn't go to it because I had to go to the Getty Images portrait studio to get my photo taken, which is why I was wearing that like anime sailor top.
[00:30:02]  Because the film Wobble Palace takes place on the eve of the 2016 election.
[00:30:07]  I thought if I dressed like an anime character, it would sort of appeal to maybe like a 4chan demographic that might like the movie.
[00:30:17]  Wasn't I thinking?
[00:30:18]  That's brilliant and provocative and fun.
[00:30:21]  So she singled you out and she decided to get into Bernie and his ideas.
[00:30:28]  And here's how that went, Soundbite 1.
[00:30:32]  Hi, are you a fan of Bernie Sanders?
[00:30:35]  Yeah, I am.
[00:30:36]  What do you like about him?
[00:30:37]  That he's a socialist.
[00:30:39]  Why is socialism good?
[00:30:41]  Are you like, I don't really want to do this.
[00:30:47]  What is this for?
[00:30:48]  We're asking people why they like Bernie Sanders.
[00:30:51]  For InfoWars.
[00:30:53]  Yes, we are Infowars.
[00:30:55]  I think he has a lot of integrity.
[00:30:56]  I like his value system.
[00:30:58]  I like what he stands for.
[00:30:59]  Exactly.
[00:31:00]  Values.
[00:31:02]  Eating the rich.
[00:31:03]  Eating the rich.
[00:31:04]  Well, are you aware that Bernie Sanders lives in $3 million homes?
[00:31:08]  No, I was not aware of that.
[00:31:09]  I just want people to have health care, honey.
[00:31:11]  I don't want like...
[00:31:16]  Oh, my God.
[00:31:17]  When he was taking over in Venezuela, you all have like worms in your brain, honestly.
[00:31:22]  I mean, you're the one who can't answer the question.
[00:31:24]  What question?
[00:31:25]  The question is, why do you support socialism?
[00:31:28]  You can have health care without socialism.
[00:31:29]  I want people to have free health care.
[00:31:31]  Why free?
[00:31:31]  Why the government pays for it?
[00:31:33]  Why would the government pay for it?
[00:31:34]  Because I think everyone has a right to have health care.
[00:31:38]  Okay, so what happened after that clip, Dasha?
[00:31:45]  We went our separate ways.
[00:31:48]  We were both, we were both very scared.
[00:31:50]  I was definitely like very afraid and could sense that Ashton was as well.
[00:31:55]  And then, yeah, and then I guess Infowars posted it.
[00:32:00]  And then it someone tweeted it and started to circulate online.
[00:32:04]  And then it was on John Oliver or something.
[00:32:08]  So yeah, it went quite viral.
[00:32:11]  I feel like what was so compelling about it was just your, your manner, your affect.
[00:32:16]  There's something different about you in a really compelling way.
[00:32:20]  Like you don't know what you're going to say next.
[00:32:23]  And yet you really do project.
[00:32:25]  I don't know if this is real, extremely comfortable in your own skin.
[00:32:29]  Even though you say I felt nervous and you said, I don't want to do this, you, to me, project very comfortable in your own skin.
[00:32:36]  Thank you.
[00:32:36]  Yeah, I part of me definitely didn't want to do it, but then part of me, you know, being familiar with InfoWars did want to see us on the opportunity.
[00:32:48]  Yeah.
[00:32:48]  For sure.
[00:32:49]  Yeah.
[00:32:49]  I just want people to have healthcare, honey.
[00:32:51]  That went totally viral.
[00:32:53]  Everybody was like, who is this magnificent creature in the sailor outfit who speaks this way?
[00:32:58]  Even people who disagreed with your points were fascinated by you.
[00:33:03]  And that's what led to a viral moment.
[00:33:04]  But this was not the beginning of your Hollywood career.
[00:33:06]  This was just in the midst of it.
[00:33:09]  Yeah, sort of.
[00:33:10]  Yeah.
[00:33:10]  I was like an indie actress at the time.
[00:33:14]  So now you two, once you came together and formed Red Scare, would go on, as I understand it, to form kind of a friendship, at least a professional relationship, but definitely kind of seemed like more of a friendship with Alex Jones, who's, you know, the creator and founder of InfoWars.
[00:33:31]  Yeah, we went to Austin to interview Alex Jones.
[00:33:36]  So how did that go?
[00:33:38]  And how did you wind up spending time with him?
[00:33:43]  Well, when we started the podcast, my boyfriend had a premonition that it would end up with us shooting skeet with Alex Jones, and he was 100% correct.
[00:33:54]  It happened very organically.
[00:33:57]  Yeah.
[00:33:57]  Wow.
[00:34:01]  Well, Alex Lee Moyer made a documentary called Alex's War.
[00:34:07]  Anna's boyfriend did the score for him.
[00:34:09]  He also did the score for my film.
[00:34:12]  And she sort of brokered, brokered the interview and we took took her up on the on the opportunity to talk to him.
[00:34:21]  Of course, because yeah.
[00:34:24]  Now, what were your impressions?
[00:34:25]  What were your impressions of him?
[00:34:29]  He's a very friendly, charismatic, affable guy.
[00:34:33]  I'm sure there's a part of him that's very troubled and tortured, especially with the colossal amount of fame that he has, which would make anybody go crazy.
[00:34:42]  But I think that he's a fundamentally well-meaning guy and primarily important as an artist who works in the mold of like a sad clown rather than like as like a political pundit.
[00:34:58]  Most fascinating guy.
[00:34:59]  Yeah, he, you know, he's wrong about a lot of things, but he has a lot of like clarity.
[00:35:06]  Well, I'll tell you something funny about Alex Jones.
[00:35:08]  So I went to interview him, as you may know, and he said all sorts of crazy things.
[00:35:15]  Like they sounded crazy.
[00:35:17]  We didn't err most of them.
[00:35:18]  It wasn't really about, you know, his theories on frogs and so on.
[00:35:21]  But I did have my team go back and check and like, check it all out.
[00:35:24]  And at NBC, they have like lots of fact checkers.
[00:35:27]  And can I tell you, like 98% of the stuff checked out.
[00:35:30]  It was like, it was kind of crazy.
[00:35:32]  You know, like the number of things he actually is right about was pretty stunning to me.
[00:35:38]  But of course, all of that sort of falls away because of what he did on the Newtown thing and not just Newtown, but there have been, there have been a few sort of targets of his that have been way, way off.
[00:35:50]  And so it's changed the way a lot of people look at him and certainly Infowars.
[00:35:56]  Yeah.
[00:35:56]  And you have to remember that Keene, much like Glenn Greenwald, began his career as a critic of conservatism from the kind of liberal side.
[00:36:09]  He very much has a kind of underlying social justice ethos, like all Aquariuses.
[00:36:16]  And like Glenn, yeah, they both, I think they both love truth as like an ideal to aspire towards, even if they, you know, Alex Jones uses hyperbole and conspiracy to sort of get at larger spiritual truths.
[00:36:30]  Yeah.
[00:36:31]  I'm like, I'll give you that on the way he presents information on things like, you know, the, there's like a goat with a human face.
[00:36:39]  I'm trying to remember some of the, some of the things that we looked into.
[00:36:43]  But there's just no getting around, you know, the lies that he pushed on Newtown and how pernicious they were and how much pain they heaped on these families.
[00:36:53]  You know, that was one of the reasons why I wanted to interview him, one of the reasons why our interview was very contentious.
[00:36:59]  And, you know, it's still something that a lot of the Newtown families, they will never forgive Alex Jones for trying to say that they, that their children were not shot in the heads while they went to first grade on December 14th, 2012.
[00:37:12]  And he's, you know, when I went down there going to interview him, I thought he was going to disavow it.
[00:37:18]  And he didn't.
[00:37:19]  He did not disavow it.
[00:37:20]  He stuck by it and continued even that interview to suggest that the parents may have faked it.
[00:37:26]  Well, when did you interview him?
[00:37:28]  It was in 2018.
[00:37:30]  Okay, yeah.
[00:37:30]  Well, when we interviewed him, he seemed very contrite and remorseful, but I completely understand people who maybe don't buy what he's selling and feel like he's not being genuine or authentic.
[00:37:42]  And, you know, it's not up to us to tell them that their feelings aren't valid.
[00:37:46]  But I do believe for my part that he does feel apologetic over that incident.
[00:37:54]  Well, and I have absolutely no problem with you going and talking to him.
[00:37:57]  You know, that was one of the crazy things when I interviewed him was there was all this blowback for just talking to him.
[00:38:01]  And we did a very hard-hitting interview like nobody has done with Alex Jones.
[00:38:06]  I put that interview up against anything that's been done with him.
[00:38:09]  But there was tons of blowback just for, quote, platforming him, right?
[00:38:13]  Just for platforming him.
[00:38:14]  Right.
[00:38:15]  Exactly.
[00:38:16]  And that's crazy too.
[00:38:17]  Like that's, we've really gotten to a place where, as I've said many times, like we don't get to interview only like the perfect people, right?
[00:38:23]  The people who like are totally the Dolly Partons, the Queen of England's, you know, like people who have no blemish on their record whatsoever.
[00:38:30]  And he's a, you know, a massively influential thinker.
[00:38:35]  So he's, you know, worth interrogating and worth talking to and worth, yeah.
[00:38:40]  Well, he certainly was back then.
[00:38:42]  I mean, when I talked to him, the White House was retweeting Infowars press releases and, you know, pieces.
[00:38:49]  So it was, it was extraordinary, though he's not as influential today.
[00:38:54]  I think rightfully, some attention has been called to the hurt he's caused as well.
[00:38:58]  In any event, that's Alex Jones.
[00:39:00]  Let's talk about what you guys think is sort of the big story right now, because my understanding is you are focused more on the class struggle in America at the moment than you are on the race struggle, the gender struggle, the LGBTQ struggle that is in all the news right now because of Pride Month.

=== Class Struggle Over Race (02:42) ===

[00:39:20]  Is that correct, first of all?
[00:39:22]  Am I right?
[00:39:26]  I don't know that I would frame it exactly that way as like class reductionist.
[00:39:32]  Yeah, I think I'm focused on reality rather than utopianism.
[00:39:41]  So where do you think it's a lot of people?
[00:39:42]  I see our project being like cultural criticism, I think.
[00:39:47]  You see that you said, can you repeat that?
[00:39:50]  It's more cultural criticism than like political analysis.
[00:39:53]  Now, I think for me, at least, it's like an aesthetic critique and aesthetic project.
[00:40:01]  Well, how do you guys think we got this way?
[00:40:03]  You know, in the way Victor Davis Hansen says, we lost our ever-loving minds from the beginning of COVID forward.
[00:40:09]  And we're sort of, you know, like the astronaut who gets disconnected from the rocket ship, sort of being pulled out into this black hole and reality is the ship.
[00:40:18]  And we seem to be farther and farther away from it as a country in the way we talk about things and see things.
[00:40:24]  What are those divides?
[00:40:25]  What's pulling us apart?
[00:40:27]  What are we doing that we shouldn't be?
[00:40:31]  I don't know that COVID is really the watershed moment where we lost our way.
[00:40:37]  I think COVID, much like Trump, laid bare certain processes that were already in place.
[00:40:45]  There's a great article that reminds me of the one that you just mentioned by Aris Racinos in Unheard magazine about the decline of American empire in the age of COVID and BLM.
[00:40:56]  And he makes this comparison between collapse era USSR and present day USA and talks about how there are certain similarities.
[00:41:09]  For example, the deaths of despair, the radically lowered health outcomes and life expectancies, the rule, the symbolic rule by like a gerontocracy, the capture of the state and academic institutions by, he calls them a rapacious oligarchy.
[00:41:32]  So I think those things were already in place, at least since the 70s.
[00:41:41]  Sorry, Dasha, were you going to add to that?
[00:41:43]  Yeah, well, yeah, and COVID merely like accelerated those processes.
[00:41:48]  So what do you, I mean, what is the solution to all of that in your view?
[00:41:51]  I mean, is it Bernie Sanders type Democrat socialism or what, or is it not a political solution?
[00:41:57]  Is it, as you point out, some sort of cultural rebuke?
[00:42:02]  Well, I, yeah.

=== Disillusionment with Left-Wing Politics (05:52) ===

[00:42:03]  So I was a registered independent prior to the first Bernie Sanders campaign where I registered as a Democrat to vote in the primaries.
[00:42:14]  And then I've talked about this on the podcast before, but the way that like the Bernie campaign was just sort of funneled into the DNC, which is what I have a problem with to begin with, made me feel very disillusioned with left-wing politics as well as like, you know, you could call it purity policing, right?
[00:42:34]  Like being told constantly that I was like inadequate as a leftist or some kind of like crypto fascist or something.
[00:42:42]  I think certainly has alienated me from any sort of like leftist democratic socialist political project.
[00:42:50]  I don't think I don't see that anymore as a successful or viable political strategy.
[00:42:57]  And I think also the left wing habitually sort of disavows its real role in American politics, which is not to act as a critic of establishment politics or the binary party system, but basically to drum up votes for the Democratic Party by pretending to launch a legitimate critique against them.
[00:43:25]  And I think that that's where a lot of people felt disillusioned and betrayed by somebody like Bernie.
[00:43:32]  Felt disillusioned by Bernie because why?
[00:43:36]  Well, because it turned, I mean, when he came in, right, he spoke, he was very plain spoken.
[00:43:42]  He spoke in this very no-frills way.
[00:43:43]  He focused on class rather than all these kind of identitarian struggles and movements.
[00:43:50]  And as time wore on, he began to what people perceived as like capitulate to the demands, the identitarian demands of what you called the woke left.
[00:44:02]  I'm not sure that there's a useful distinction to be made between the woke left and the not woke left.
[00:44:08]  Yeah.
[00:44:09]  Interesting.
[00:44:10]  I, you know, I see what you're saying, but I've always made a distinction in my mind, hard distinction between AOC and Bernie, right?
[00:44:18]  Because if you look at their economic policies, a lot of them might overlap, but he just never sounded like her on the wokeism.
[00:44:25]  She's all about identity politics.
[00:44:27]  And that really wasn't his jam.
[00:44:29]  But she, she just, now I look at her, I'm like, you're on an island by yourself with your so-called squad mates and have absolutely no support.
[00:44:38]  Yeah.
[00:44:38]  But Bernie, you know, empowered the squad.
[00:44:41]  It was, you know, the Bernie movement, I think, that was parlayed into this new enthusiasm for this like conflated category of identitarian politics with like so-called leftism.
[00:44:57]  So who does that leave you?
[00:44:58]  If you can't vote for Bernie now, who does that leave you?
[00:45:02]  I'm a non-voter.
[00:45:04]  Yeah, that's a great question.
[00:45:05]  I mean, now you see like a resurgence of like the populist right.
[00:45:10]  You see guys like JD Vance and Blake Masters making bids for political office and their platform sounds very reassuring to a lot of people, but I'm unconvinced that anyone can really make a difference in a system where the kind of left liberal ideology is the dominant one because we all have to agree to play by those terms.
[00:45:37]  That's depressing.
[00:45:39]  Well, yeah.
[00:45:41]  Yeah.
[00:45:42]  And I often wish that I was, you know, a political theorist and not merely a podcaster, because I think all of us struggle to come up with a solution.
[00:45:54]  Right.
[00:45:56]  Yeah.
[00:45:56]  Well, maybe it's the, it's the one we began the hour with, right?
[00:45:59]  Disillusionment from those who tried to believe but got burned bit by bit by bit, who then, those are the people who become revolutionaries.
[00:46:08]  And if there are not enough of them, maybe there's some way of recapturing institutions.
[00:46:13]  And I mean, certainly there's a way of recapturing government.
[00:46:16]  That's for sure.
[00:46:17]  Though too often it's been in with somebody who's not going to do that much to change it or in with somebody who's going to do a lot to change it, but is further going to divide the nation.
[00:46:26]  You know, it's just, I don't even know what the quote savior looks like anymore.
[00:46:32]  I mean, I almost have nostalgia for the Trump era as hysterical as it was, because it gave, you know, the woke left or whatever you want to call it, like a very clear target of their ire.
[00:46:43]  You know, they could kind of, they had their women's marches.
[00:46:45]  They have their like orange man is bad rhetoric.
[00:46:49]  And I think in the Biden administration, it's been more like diffused and incoherent.
[00:46:54]  Yeah, like decentralized.
[00:46:56]  Yeah.
[00:46:56]  That's a good point.
[00:46:58]  Now, it's in the same way that, you know, our guys went off to Afghanistan and they fought the terrorists over there so that they didn't come attack us at home.
[00:47:05]  It's like Trump was there dealing with these lunatics from the White House and they weren't focused on regular people.
[00:47:10]  They weren't trying to destroy the lives of, you know, McDonald's workers back then.
[00:47:15]  And now they are.
[00:47:16]  Now that's where all their ires is.
[00:47:18]  That's also very Soviet, the snitching, like when, yeah, the phenomenon of people filming people having like politically incorrect nervous breakdowns and the bonds and stuff is very reminiscent of like Soviets snitching on your neighbors.
[00:47:31]  Yeah, and you get like Pavlik Morozov incidences where children are like deputized to snitch on their parents or teachers or whoever.
[00:47:44]  But you mentioned the question of class, and to me, the real political binary is the one between the elites and the masses, which is very kind of obvious and trite to say.

=== Mike White Inspired by Red Scare (02:44) ===

[00:47:55]  But I think a big problem that we do have is elite capture of all institutions that are globally spanning.
[00:48:06]  All right, I got to pause you there, but much, much more of the ladies of Red Scare right after this.
[00:48:30]  Guys, I have to ask you: is it true to your knowledge that the creator of the White Lotus, HBO's The White Lotus, based those two teenagers who were the stars of it on YouTube?
[00:48:44]  Yeah, it's 100% verifiably confirmed as true.
[00:48:49]  We have the receipts.
[00:48:50]  We got a care package out of it.
[00:48:52]  Amazing.
[00:48:53]  Getting royalties right now.
[00:48:54]  For those who haven't seen The White Lotus, which is an amazing, amazing show, except for its very disturbing ending, which Dasha and Anna have absolutely nothing to do with.
[00:49:05]  Here is a clip of these two teenagers.
[00:49:07]  One of them is like the daughter of the main star on the trip, and the other one is her friend.
[00:49:12]  And here's just a little bit so you know what we're talking about.
[00:49:15]  Where did you meet him?
[00:49:16]  Through friends?
[00:49:18]  Not Raya.
[00:49:20]  Raya?
[00:49:21]  No.
[00:49:22]  Not Raya.
[00:49:23]  How long is the engagement?
[00:49:25]  We actually just met last September.
[00:49:28]  Oh, wow.
[00:49:29]  That was really fast.
[00:49:30]  Yeah.
[00:49:30]  Like, how'd you know he was the one?
[00:49:33]  Oh, I don't know.
[00:49:36]  The chemistry was there.
[00:49:38]  And his deck's not small.
[00:49:41]  I don't know.
[00:49:42]  Shane really wanted to get married and he's very decisive and he's pretty convincing.
[00:49:49]  So it just felt right.
[00:49:52]  So do you see any similarities there?
[00:49:56]  Totally, us fellow teens.
[00:49:59]  I cannot really relate to those girls.
[00:50:03]  Yeah, Mike White, who is the creator of White Lotus, they're not based on us really explicitly, but he is a big fan of the show.
[00:50:11]  And so inspired.
[00:50:12]  Inspired.
[00:50:13]  Yeah, he implemented sort of the post-Red Scare voice.
[00:50:17]  Yeah, I think he incorporated our vernacular and our bibliography, just like our sources, which is kind of surreal to watch.
[00:50:26]  Yeah.
[00:50:27]  You know what?
[00:50:27]  To me, it's also that you don't suffer from something I suffer from, which is you feel no need to fill the space.
[00:50:37]  You're happy just to like let the thoughts sit.

=== New York Times Opinion Column (15:04) ===

[00:50:40]  Yeah.
[00:50:40]  Well, we don't edit our show.
[00:50:42]  So that's partly out of we've developed a rapport to minimize the amount of editing that we have to do.
[00:50:52]  But there's a searching, there's a searching nature to the way you speak to each other and in general.
[00:50:58]  And that's actually captured in these two girls too.
[00:51:00]  They're very good interrogators, but they're kind of sneaky about it.
[00:51:03]  You don't see it kind of doesn't hit you over the head until it does.
[00:51:06]  Yeah, they're very well written.
[00:51:10]  So this is near and dear to your heart.
[00:51:12]  I imagine, Dasha is somebody who's actually in Hollywood.
[00:51:14]  And I guess I should ask you up front, how are you in Hollywood and you're not woke and you're and you say all these provocative things?
[00:51:21]  How have you not been kicked out yet?
[00:51:23]  I don't know.
[00:51:24]  I'm waiting for them to kick me out any day.
[00:51:29]  And it's, I mean, it's hard to say really what professional opportunities I've, you know, have been precluded from because of my political beliefs.
[00:51:38]  But at the end of the day, it's, you know, it's too late for me to like course correct now and pretend to be woke.
[00:51:48]  And the podcast has probably also afforded me other opportunities that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
[00:51:54]  Well, and you're doing the smart thing.
[00:51:55]  You're becoming a creator of content, not just in the podcast, but making your own films now.
[00:52:00]  And that's, that's really the way forward, right?
[00:52:02]  Where you maintain control because you can go directly to the audience and the audience is there.
[00:52:07]  Well, I think, yeah, like academia, Hollywood is another institution that is sort of bolstered by this paradoxical kind of like unreality.
[00:52:21]  I mean, like the Oscars this year, like, I don't really know anyone who saw any of those movies even.
[00:52:27]  Exactly right.
[00:52:29]  But I think like the silver lining of this crisis of faith and institutions that we're experiencing is that there's a real opportunity for independent creators to come to the fore and cultivate their own large and diverse and organic audiences.
[00:52:47]  Yeah, I mean, we're seeing that more and more.
[00:52:49]  And it's nice to see that the audience is there.
[00:52:52]  And then you see these institutions try to crack down on it.
[00:52:55]  They try to crack down on Substack or Patreon or whatever podcast.
[00:52:59]  And, you know, Joe Rogan over at Spotify, you could go down the list.
[00:53:03]  Even now there's talk about how, well, you know, at Substack, nobody edits you.
[00:53:07]  You're sort of the mainstream elitist journalist when no one's there to edit.
[00:53:10]  Oh, sure, because that's worked out so well at places like the New York Times, which claimed something like 987,000 children had been killed in America from COVID.
[00:53:20]  Hello.
[00:53:24]  Yeah, the COVID reporter, the COVID reporter printed that in one of her reports, as if the editor is some magic button without which the rest of us are untrustworthy.
[00:53:32]  Yeah.
[00:53:33]  And I think the silent majority does feel the crisis of legitimacy in media, academia, Hollywood, all of these institutions.
[00:53:44]  Yeah.
[00:53:45]  And obviously, I mean, the rise of fact checkers and experts is an attempt by the institutions to issue a corrective to the fact that they are getting more and more competition from extra institutional sources.
[00:54:02]  And I mean, you tell me how this, if at all, relates to, you know, the old Soviet Union.
[00:54:09]  While they're doing the fact checks and the attempts at speech control, they're manipulating us, like Facebook and Instagram, you know, and the whistleblower that came out and then what we've learned about how they're really just amassing data on us to try to further manipulate us to really hurt our mental health without one care for that.
[00:54:32]  And I think like the chief distinction, we mentioned the similarities between the USSR and the USA.
[00:54:38]  The chief distinction is that in the USSR, at least this was nominally enforced from a top-down authority.
[00:54:45]  In the United States, it's much more decentralized.
[00:54:48]  So nobody is ever really held accountable for spreading misinformation or for smearing others or abusing facts.
[00:54:59]  And it's done through, I think, like what looks like a coordinated attempt, but not, but need not be between like the state and various corporate entities.
[00:55:09]  Yeah, you look just look at the shitstorm that's come the way of Elon Musk since he said he wanted to buy Twitter.
[00:55:15]  You know, it's like the pile on this guy, the demonization of him.
[00:55:19]  The New York Times basically called him a white supremacist because when he was seven, he wasn't marching in South Africa.
[00:55:25]  He's crazy.
[00:55:27]  Well, he just offends their liberal sensibilities.
[00:55:31]  But with social media, I mean, like Anna said, it's about it's designed to demoralize you, to sort of overwhelm you with things that trigger and upset you so that you become invested in using and ultimately, yeah, your mental health deteriorates.
[00:55:47]  And I think we've really seen that post-COVID happen in the extreme because people are like sequestered in their homes and only really have access to what they perceive as reality through social media.
[00:56:01]  I wonder if that's why the, you know, the left seemed to lose its mind more than the right during COVID, because most Republicans or people who are not established left did not listen to all those mandates.
[00:56:12]  They did go out.
[00:56:13]  They did see their friends.
[00:56:14]  They had social gatherings.
[00:56:15]  They basically thumbed a middle finger at the most extreme lockdown policies, whereas the left was extremely compliant and I think paid a dear price for it.
[00:56:23]  Yeah.
[00:56:27]  I don't know.
[00:56:28]  I think, by the way, Elon Musk, I want to tell the audience there was an update on that today, which we thought was important to get.
[00:56:34]  Disturbingly, for those of us who are- I was just going to ask you, is he buying Twitter?
[00:56:37]  Is he not buying Twitter?
[00:56:39]  It took a turn in the wrong direction today.
[00:56:41]  He asserted that he has the right not to consummate his acquisition of Twitter and that he has, quote, a right to terminate the merger agreement, according to a letter from his lawyers to the Twitter lawyers that was sent today.
[00:56:58]  He's ostensibly disputing data.
[00:57:01]  He wants Twitter to provide him with information that will help facilitate his evaluation of spam and fake accounts.
[00:57:06]  He says that they've understated the number of fake accounts on Twitter.
[00:57:09]  They say it's only 5%.
[00:57:10]  He says it could be as high as 20 plus, which would mean he's buying a product that's less valuable, right?
[00:57:15]  If it's 20% bots.
[00:57:16]  So he wants the real data.
[00:57:18]  And as I understand it, he signed a deal that said, I'm basically buying Twitter as is, which anybody who's ever bought a car or a house that way knows it means you don't get to kick the tires.
[00:57:29]  You don't get to back out because of due diligence or because you find out the house has termites.
[00:57:34]  And if the Twitter house has termites and he actually signed such a deal, that's not going to be helpful.
[00:57:38]  But anyway, he's saying he does have the right to back out, a right to terminate the merger agreement.
[00:57:43]  And that's sad, especially because Tesla's stock now is suffering and there's going to be a layoffs over there.
[00:57:49]  So he's kind of, you know, he needs that money.
[00:57:50]  Anyway, I want to see him buy it.
[00:57:52]  I think Twitter will be a better place if he takes it over.
[00:57:54]  So I want all these problems to clear up.
[00:57:56]  And of course, these people who write about Elon feel exactly the opposite.
[00:58:00]  Yeah.
[00:58:00]  Well, I used to be interesting.
[00:58:02]  I think it would be interesting.
[00:58:03]  Yeah.
[00:58:04]  He, I mean, I don't think it is about the bot accounts for him.
[00:58:07]  I think it is.
[00:58:08]  It does have to do more with the economy and it no longer maybe being the wisest purchase.
[00:58:14]  Right.
[00:58:14]  Exactly.
[00:58:15]  It's too bad, though.
[00:58:16]  I mean, he has it to burn.
[00:58:17]  So he should burn it.
[00:58:18]  But easy for me to say.
[00:58:21]  All right.
[00:58:21]  Let's talk about me too, because this is back in the news now.
[00:58:25]  And I know you've been very outspoken.
[00:58:27]  And I, I get it.
[00:58:28]  I, I like your thoughts on a lot of these issues.
[00:58:31]  But boy, oh boy, there's a meltdown in the wake of that verdict for Johnny Depp.
[00:58:36]  Uh, in the, and it was a verdict for Johnny Depp.
[00:58:38]  I love how these newspapers are like, split decision.
[00:58:40]  No, it wasn't.
[00:58:41]  He won five out of the six counts that were at issue.
[00:58:44]  And the only one she won was some small allegation that he defamed her when he said she messed up their apartment to make it look extra bad when the cops came one time.
[00:58:54]  The jury said, we don't believe she did that.
[00:58:56]  So we're going to say she was.
[00:58:57]  And people are like, split decision.
[00:58:59]  He said she said, we'll never know.
[00:59:00]  Well, no, I mean, we may never know, but we certainly know how the jury felt about this.
[00:59:04]  And it was not split.
[00:59:07]  Here's a sampling.
[00:59:08]  This is from Michelle Goldberg, opinion columnist for the New York Times.
[00:59:12]  The Amber Heard verdict was a travesty.
[00:59:15]  Others will follow.
[00:59:16]  The verdict in this case is difficult to explain logically, she says.
[00:59:21]  I guarantee you Michelle Goldberg watched none of his trial.
[00:59:23]  She writes, the confounding part isn't that the jury sided with him over her.
[00:59:27]  This is the country that elected Donald Trump.
[00:59:31]  And she goes on to say the explosion of defiant, desperate feminist energy that was Me Too has now been smothered by an even fiercer reaction.
[00:59:44]  Me Too was a movement of women telling their stories.
[00:59:46]  Now that Heard has been destroyed for identifying as a survivor, other women will think twice.
[00:59:51]  That's not why Heard was destroyed because she identified as a survivor.
[00:59:54]  She was destroyed because they did not believe her.
[00:59:56]  Her claim was not found credible.
[00:59:59]  She says, as a First Amendment issue, this verdict is a travesty because the New York Times cares deeply about everyone's ability to speak freely their opinion.
[01:00:09]  The First Amendment, this is a joke, right?
[01:00:13]  These same forces are the ones who are trying to shut anybody up if they say there's a difference between trans women and biological women.
[01:00:19]  You know, that biological sex is real.
[01:00:22]  Does she support my First Amendment right to say that?
[01:00:24]  I'm going to venture no.
[01:00:27]  Even if Heard had lied about everything during the trial, even if she'd never suffered domestic abuse, she still would have represented it.
[01:00:35]  So she's defending her statement in the Washington Post that I've come to represent a figure of domestic abuse.
[01:00:39]  We should slice that.
[01:00:41]  Who cares if it was true?
[01:00:42]  She represented it.
[01:00:44]  Like Jesse Smollett came to represent the victims of racial hate crimes.
[01:00:49]  It doesn't matter whether it actually happened.
[01:00:50]  You know, when you look at him, you think of that.
[01:00:53]  And then she concludes in part with, if there's one thing the American people hate more than decadent Hollywood elites, it's mouthy women.
[01:01:01]  It's mouthy.
[01:01:02]  So that was her takeaway from the verdict.
[01:01:05]  What do you make of it?
[01:01:09]  Well, it seems that everyone, whether they're an advocate or critic of Me Too, seems to think that this verdict signals the death knell of Me Too.
[01:01:21]  And I don't see it that way.
[01:01:23]  I think it's probably a rebirth of Me Too in a more diffused and ambient and arbitrary way.
[01:01:30]  Like now you no longer have to be a man accused of sexual offenses to be Me Too'd in everybody's basically fair game.
[01:01:40]  And I think, you know, from the start, for me, it was apparent that Me Too was this like dress rehearsal for this overall erosion of due process.
[01:01:51]  Yeah.
[01:01:51]  And what did you make of it, Dasha?
[01:01:53]  As somebody, you know, who sees the way Hollywood in particular works.
[01:01:56]  And I'll give her the point that he had more power than she did, for sure.
[01:01:59]  I mean, he had more part of that was charm.
[01:02:02]  Part of it was star power, but what do you make of it?
[01:02:05]  I mean, and there were, you know, problems in Hollywood with the old like Weinstein model, which was functionally an open secret.
[01:02:14]  When I moved to LA, I was told like, oh, you could be a Weinstein girl.
[01:02:18]  You'll just talk about it.
[01:02:20]  You know, and then it was like, then all of a sudden it wasn't sanctioned anymore.
[01:02:24]  And everyone sort of had to fall in line with these new behavioral guidelines, which, you know, maybe had some like ripple positive effects, but basically it was a net negative because I always saw Me Too basically as like a cynical power grab that wasn't actually going to correct any like power imbalances within the film industry.
[01:02:45]  It was just going to make the most like vocal, shrill minority of women more powerful.
[01:02:56]  The composition of the power structure would change, but the distribution would stay the same, basically.
[01:03:02]  Yeah, like your Amber Heards, your actresses, you know, like who come to symbolize domestic abuse survivors actually, I think, do a real disservice to women who actually are invulnerable positions who people don't pay attention to because they're like waitresses or hotel maids or something like that.
[01:03:20]  Right.
[01:03:20]  And the fact that a verdict, a jury who listened to this case for six weeks found against her has to be reduced to, I think it was Tarana Burke who coined the phrase, me too, something like our fascinating, our fascination with violence, you know, like our permissiveness toward violence.
[01:03:36]  Why can't it just be this particular claim was not found credible?
[01:03:40]  So many women's claims have been found credible and have been adjudicated in the court of public opinion or in a legal court.
[01:03:46]  Why is it just because of this one case now?
[01:03:50]  It's America's fault.
[01:03:51]  It's the patriarchy.
[01:03:52]  It's like she was rejected.
[01:03:55]  Sorry, but these people didn't watch it.
[01:03:57]  And I did a whole talking points memo last week on how when I watched her testify, I actually was one of the few who thought, I believe a lot of these claims of abuse.
[01:04:06]  I think she's telling them in a way that I find compelling and I can believe this.
[01:04:11]  And then I went on to listen to her when she got cross-examined lie about the small, the medium, and the large all around those claims of abuse and concluded, this is not a credible person.
[01:04:22]  This is not a truth teller.
[01:04:23]  She's lying about things she does not need to lie about.
[01:04:25]  And therefore, I rejected her testimony as a whole, which is exactly what you are typically instructed in jury instructions is your right to do as a juror.
[01:04:33]  If you think they lied about one thing, you can reject the testimony in full.
[01:04:37]  Instead, you get things like this from the co-founder of Ultraviolet.
[01:04:40]  You know, they sort of jump into situations like this and typically advocate on behalf of the alleged abused person, which is interesting because in this case, it was both.
[01:04:48]  He was alleging he was the abused person.
[01:04:50]  She writes as follows.
[01:04:52]  I was served an unbelievable amount of content from so-called survivors and feminists during this trial, she means, taking depth's side.
[01:05:02]  There was nothing authentic about it.
[01:05:05]  So now the actual quote, survivors and feminists, people who've been working in this field, people who say they've been through it, they get dismissed because they sided with the wrong person.
[01:05:15]  You have to, when they're both claiming victimhood and abuse, you're only allowed to side with the woman, you see.
[01:05:20]  Otherwise, you're inauthentic.
[01:05:25]  Yeah.
[01:05:26]  I mean, I think believe women does ultimately a disservice to women as it ignores, like you said, credibility and privileges like a victim status and then mines women for their trauma content to like gain footing.

=== Nationalizing Abortion Rights (03:59) ===

[01:05:45]  So it establishes a victory according to a bad faith precedent.
[01:05:53]  Well, the precedent, it's being righted, right, bit by bit.
[01:05:57]  Like due process is a good thing.
[01:05:59]  Having one's claims tested with evidence demands is a good thing.
[01:06:05]  Yeah.
[01:06:06]  And I think you'll find that probably most people agree with you and agree with us that the verdict was correct in this case.
[01:06:14]  But you get these kind of like proxy battles about race or gender, I think, to paper over the fact that the very often the elites don't find the democratic result of a trial or a political process to be legitimate.
[01:06:33]  They find it intolerable.
[01:06:36]  Well, it's like, I think I've heard you, Anna, make this point about abortion, about how the vast majority of the American voters want to see it legal in the first trimester, do not want to see it legal in the last trimester, and don't want a lot of latitude in the second trimester.
[01:06:53]  But you know, to see the way like that, that vote that the Democrats put up to sort of nationalize abortion as a right, which would have been a disaster for them anyway, because it just would have gotten reversed.
[01:07:03]  If the Democrats have the power to make it a national right when they have control of Congress, Republicans have the power to make it a national ban when they have the power.
[01:07:11]  They're much better off asking for a federalist system where some states allow it and some states don't.
[01:07:16]  But apparently, they were too stupid to realize that, or they were smart enough to realize it, but just decided to do naked pandering on the issue of abortion by forcing through a vote that they knew they'd lose.
[01:07:24]  In any event, I've heard you say, you know, like the messaging is really just so craven, right?
[01:07:30]  Because it's just meant is similar to the conversation we just had.
[01:07:35]  It's meant to stir upset as opposed to stir action.
[01:07:40]  Yeah, it's meant to browbeat and gaslight people because I think most people, again, the abortion issue is something that probably follows the bell curve distribution.
[01:07:50]  80% of people are somewhere in the middle and not abortion zealots, neither direction.
[01:07:56]  But judging by what you see on social media and mainstream media, you would think that we live in some like handmaid's tale type scenario.
[01:08:06]  Well, then, yeah, and then they utilize the rhetoric of like free abortions on demand without apology, like up until birth, basically, which is alienating.
[01:08:16]  Yeah, I don't think most people agree with or would want most liberals.
[01:08:22]  Yeah, but it becomes like this refrain of the politically correct sort of opinion to hold.
[01:08:28]  That was in their bill that basically abortion on demand through the entire pregnancy.
[01:08:33]  And a lot of Democrats are already on record as saying it should just be up to the woman all the way up to the moment of birth, which is extreme.
[01:08:39]  Yeah.
[01:08:39]  Yeah.
[01:08:40]  So what do you think happens if, as we expect at some point this month, we get the Dobbs decision, which we've already seen the draft of, and it lands the way the draft lands, where Roe versus Wade is overturned, and whether a woman has a right to an abortion goes back to the states for them to decide.
[01:09:02]  Well, I want to know what the likelihood is that the final verdict will actually mirror the draft.
[01:09:08]  It's not 100% right that it will.
[01:09:11]  Correct.
[01:09:12]  But the latest reporting was that no one had changed their mind.
[01:09:15]  So we, right now, other than just speculation, we have no reason to believe that the 5-4 decision, or it could be as many as 6-3, Roberts hadn't yet, you know, revealed.
[01:09:25]  It sounded like it was going to be 5-4 to overturn Roe.
[01:09:27]  Yeah, but I feel like Roe v. Wade gets invoked all the time to sort of, whenever there's like a, you know, a midterm coming up or something, that's like, yes, they invoke the threat of repealing.
[01:09:38]  They've done it so many times that I would be, you know, surprised to see it happen, to see it actually happen.

=== Biden's Conflict of Sensibility (07:19) ===

[01:09:44]  Yeah.
[01:09:44]  What do you mean?
[01:09:44]  What do you mean by the Supreme Court or by the states after the decision's handed down?
[01:09:50]  I don't know.
[01:09:52]  I mean, I think if it's the issue, we're really political heavy hitters.
[01:09:59]  No, no worries.
[01:10:01]  I think that if the issue, if abortion does inevitably, or not inevitably, eventually go to the states, Freudian slip, there it will become virtually impossible, of course, in some states.
[01:10:14]  But I think that this will actually be a blessing in disguise for the Democratic Party because they could always do more fundraising and whip up morale for their kind of complex of NGOs, which can literally create kind of an underground railroad to red states to provide women with abortions.
[01:10:36]  So I think even in that case scenario, everybody wins, by which I mean the two parties of our political system and not actual people.
[01:10:47]  Right.
[01:10:47]  Right.
[01:10:48]  So what did you make of the people dressing up like the handmaid's tail, you know, characters and protesting outside of the Supreme Court justices' homes and so on?
[01:10:59]  Yeah, well, it's like, you know, the resistance liberals and Trump, I think people are really attached to this fantasy that they are living in some kind of like neo-fascistic, oppressive tyranny, which is not, you know, is not really the case.
[01:11:20]  No, when Trump was president, did you support him or how did you feel about him?
[01:11:25]  I loved him.
[01:11:30]  I think we're definitely losing that Hollywood position now.
[01:11:32]  That's it.
[01:11:33]  I mean, I didn't vote for him.
[01:11:36]  I'm a non-voter, as I've said, but I, yeah, I thought he was very funny.
[01:11:40]  I thought he, you know, was kind of this, like as he was like a work of art, you know.
[01:11:50]  And I definitely think he was a better president than Joe Biden.
[01:11:53]  Definitely.
[01:11:54]  Yeah.
[01:11:54]  And he was, he had a pulse.
[01:11:57]  Yeah, he was alive.
[01:12:02]  Go ahead, Anna.
[01:12:02]  Sorry, I interrupted you.
[01:12:03]  No, I think we were not nearly as horrified or offended by Donald Trump as many people around us were.
[01:12:14]  I think we could intuit that he would be a fairly standard establishment president and that what really offended, you know, both the liberals and the Never Trump conservatives was this conflict of sensibility and not really anything he did because they were happy to do the same stuff.
[01:12:38]  Well, that's so clear of you to have seen that in the moment, even though you're not of the right.
[01:12:44]  You weren't natural like knee-jerk conservatives or Republicans or on the MAGA train for political reasons.
[01:12:50]  You were just observing it as a sort of a societal dynamic.
[01:12:54]  What's happening?
[01:12:55]  When he was elected, I was surprised, but I remember feeling almost vindicated.
[01:13:02]  Like I was like, oh yeah, like reality sort of feels like it's actually reflecting the things that I know to be true about it.
[01:13:10]  Which might even have to do a little bit of me being from like Las Vegas, from being from this very like kind of like late capitalist, very like Trumpian landscape.
[01:13:19]  To me, it made like a lot of sense that he would be the president of the United States.
[01:13:23]  Yeah.
[01:13:24]  Well, that leads me to my questions I have for you about Joe Biden, which I will save until after this break.
[01:13:30]  And then we've got to talk about succession and a couple of scenes that I need answers to.
[01:13:37]  I have a question for you, Dasha.
[01:13:39]  This is from a piece I think that was, let's see.
[01:13:44]  Actually, I'm not sure where this Q ⁇ A came from, so forgive me.
[01:13:47]  But the question was, or the statement you made was the infatuation with consent back on the Me Too stuff is a good example of something that's very black and white, which feminist and American thinkers have brushed onto.
[01:13:58]  It's this very American liberal idea wherein everything is permitted as long as it is consensual, which is a very contractual framework that lacks nuance.
[01:14:10]  Now, I can see that because I'm the same age as your mom.
[01:14:14]  I too was born in 1970.
[01:14:17]  And we were back in the day where it was like, you know, long before they said no means no, we were kind of like, well, no might mean yes.
[01:14:26]  Try to push it a little and we'll decide together.
[01:14:30]  But now it's like you say that.
[01:14:31]  They're like, you want abuse, you want rape.
[01:14:32]  Well, no, it's just like a sexual dance between men and women is complicated and layered.
[01:14:37]  So I'm impressed that you say that because your generation, it's yet another reason they're going to disown you.
[01:14:46]  You're gonna be kicked out of the young female club for acknowledging such an obvious reality, right?
[01:14:54]  Yeah uh, that power dynamics are implicit in seduction and, you know, in relationships um, to me feels, feels very self-evident.
[01:15:05]  Yeah like, that's what you know.
[01:15:07]  That's what it means to seduce someone.
[01:15:09]  It means that you know something they don't, which is that you're going to sleep with them.
[01:15:17]  So one critical point, you two have found each other and you have similar worldviews, so it works.
[01:15:24]  But you must interact with other people in this world and do they find these views okay to talk about?
[01:15:31]  Like, what's happening with people your age and I don't?
[01:15:35]  I'm just curious, like for a window into your world and whether you can speak freely like this.
[01:15:40]  I mean, I know you do it on your podcast all the time, but maybe they don't listen.
[01:15:43]  Yeah, I mean, in New York people are very reactionary.
[01:15:46]  Yeah, it's funny because I think there's a perception that um, New York is like overrun with liberals, but I don't know anybody who thinks like that.
[01:15:57]  All of our friends are basically conservative and they're kind of artists and creatives.
[01:16:03]  Um, and I think what was the question?
[01:16:07]  This is just whether there are other people who you know your age well and I think also in like, in real life, we are normal, well-adjusted adult people who don't um can consistently and aggressively inject politics into everything.
[01:16:26]  Yeah yeah, I actually think it's rude to talk, also if i'm like on on on set, if i'm like amongst like colleagues or something, or I just won't really broach the subject of politics because I don't find it to be a person.
[01:16:40]  Good call, i'll tell you, I well I, i've been living in New York up until recently, 17 years.
[01:16:45]  I had a very different experience.
[01:16:46]  I mean, definitely I felt the very strong liberal bias, but of course my views are outspoken and people have known, you know where I stand on a lot of things.
[01:16:53]  But i'll tell you something.
[01:16:54]  I just went into the city on saturday night with my husband Doug and we went to see Macbeth, which is having a 15 week run starring Daniel Craig, and we wanted to see Daniel Craig.

=== Wokeification of Shakespeare (11:06) ===

[01:17:03]  We thought that'd be cool and he was great.
[01:17:06]  But boy oh boy, that was an interesting experience.
[01:17:10]  So it's sort of the wokeification of Shakespeare, the we.
[01:17:14]  You know this Macbeth, I guess, was written around 1606, someplace around there.
[01:17:18]  Uh long, long time ago, right 400 plus years ago, and um in Scotland, where there wasn't a lot of diversity, but the cast was definitely majority minority, but only only black actors, because you know, in the American, Indian or uh, Indian or um, you know, any other, like Hispanic, forget it.
[01:17:40]  Asian no, none of that rates on Broadway.
[01:17:43]  Only certain kinds of minorities rate.
[01:17:45]  There was somebody playing the son of the king who totally unnecessarily, was a woman like who owned her.
[01:17:52]  You know, it wasn't like they tried to disguise her, to make her.
[01:17:54]  It was like she was a woman and showing us that she was a woman who got cast as the, And there were plenty of women in the play.
[01:18:02]  I mean, the two female leads, or there are three leads basically after Daniel Craig, and two of them are women.
[01:18:07]  So it's like, why?
[01:18:09]  Then we had the masked Nazis running up and down the aisles going, mask up, mask up, with signs that read mask up.
[01:18:14]  And then if they see that it's dipped below, because you're still masking for some reason, all these same people were at a restaurant right across the street, packed in like sardines right before the show.
[01:18:22]  But magically, you cross into the theater and the mask is going to protect you from one another.
[01:18:26]  And then they're yelling at people, pull it over your nose, over your nose.
[01:18:29]  I've stepped in and there was a woman at the front door.
[01:18:31]  And then five steps later was the guy who takes your ticket, takes your ticket.
[01:18:34]  And the woman at the front door was like, Excuse me, where's your mask?
[01:18:37]  Where's your mask?
[01:18:38]  I'm literally holding it in my hand, putting him.
[01:18:39]  I'm like, it takes a second to get it from my bag onto my face.
[01:18:42]  You're in the building now.
[01:18:43]  It needs to be on your face, over your nose and mouth.
[01:18:45]  I'm like, what am I doing?
[01:18:46]  Why am I here?
[01:18:47]  Why am I doing this to myself?
[01:18:49]  We go at the intermission to the bathroom and we get this sign outside the bathroom, making sure, just in case you weren't sure, that you were at a woke Broadway theater that reads as follows: Gender diversity is welcome here.
[01:19:01]  Please use the restroom that best fits your gender identity or expression.
[01:19:06]  Like, okay, I don't need to deal with that either.
[01:19:08]  Well, I'm just trying to have a bathroom break over the, and on top of everything, there were no costumes and there were no, there was no set design, nothing, absolutely nothing.
[01:19:19]  They said this is trying to get back to the original Shakespeare, but apparently they did this as a Westside story too.
[01:19:24]  I think it's just a budget thing.
[01:19:26]  So you're looking at a guy like in a Yankees cap trying to do Shakespeare.
[01:19:33]  It was bizarre.
[01:19:34]  There was a guy in a wheelchair who opened it up perfect with some, I don't know, lecture on, but he broke the fourth wall and talked to us about Macbeth.
[01:19:41]  It was the most bizarre to four, 10 never-ending hours of my life.
[01:19:46]  And I thought this, this may be a harbinger of things to come, not just in Broadway, but in entertainment writ large, certainly America writ large, perhaps.
[01:19:55]  That's crazy that they still make you mask on Broadway if they're not even masking on planes anymore.
[01:19:59]  But what this screams to me is that Broadway is really hard up for cash if they can't even invest any money in costume.
[01:20:07]  I mean, it also sounds like it could have been a really good psychedelic post-modern.
[01:20:11]  Yeah, I mean, I like experimental theater.
[01:20:15]  The magic of acting.
[01:20:16]  But Broadway, yeah, I think it really is like a bastion of like elite liberal values.
[01:20:23]  The virtue signaling is really in the extreme and the impulse to sort of like over correct, I think is especially strong.
[01:20:31]  Broadway, because most of the affluent elite liberals go to the theater.
[01:20:37]  Yeah, and they feel so guilty.
[01:20:39]  It sounds like they squandered their entire budget on DEI or set designer costumes.
[01:20:46]  It's a good point.
[01:20:47]  They should have invested a lot.
[01:20:48]  I wanted to see like a king's robe.
[01:20:50]  I didn't ask for much.
[01:20:52]  Just like something kingly, princely.
[01:20:54]  And I would have appreciated it if the sun had been played by a woman.
[01:20:57]  I mean, by a man, not a woman.
[01:20:59]  But I don't call the shots and that's obvious.
[01:21:02]  What do you make of Feral Girl Summer?
[01:21:06]  Have you heard of this?
[01:21:08]  I've heard a little bit of this.
[01:21:09]  Yeah, it's the new, the new summer trend.
[01:21:12]  It's the new hot girl summer, which they've gotten rid of.
[01:21:15]  That was, I guess, last summer after COVID.
[01:21:18]  And now here's a clip.
[01:21:20]  This is from TikTok.
[01:21:22]  Somebody named Molly is explaining what it means to have Feral Girl Summer Nights Out.
[01:21:29]  I am convinced there are two separate versions of a Feral Club Rat Night Out.
[01:21:33]  Version number one is a night when you are being obnoxious as fuck.
[01:21:37]  Your Instagram story is like five minutes long.
[01:21:39]  You're documenting yourself screaming.
[01:21:41]  Just overall posting unhinged shit.
[01:21:43]  And you're version number two.
[01:21:45]  There's no fucking trace of you.
[01:21:46]  You don't post a single thing.
[01:21:48]  You run away from your friends and there is just like no evidence of your night out.
[01:21:52]  There is no way to predict which type of night you're going to have.
[01:21:55]  And I honestly cannot tell which one's better.
[01:21:58]  Okay.
[01:21:59]  Now there's now there's blowback to Feral Girl Summer saying it's setting a standard that no woman actually wants to meet.
[01:22:06]  And, you know, what are these girls?
[01:22:08]  I like, I can't keep up with the intra-feminist culture wars.
[01:22:12]  What do you make of it, Dasha or Anna?
[01:22:13]  Either one, take it, whoever feels something in response.
[01:22:18]  Yeah, a Feral Girl Summer, I guess it's like it's sort of a wish of like for whimsy or something.
[01:22:27]  They want maybe a kind of nihilistic reverie in their effeminacy or something.
[01:22:37]  I don't know.
[01:22:37]  I can't, I can't entirely really parse what's going on.
[01:22:43]  Yeah.
[01:22:43]  Yes.
[01:22:44]  The Independent says, as for what it actually entails, the spectrum is broad.
[01:22:50]  Wearing tiny outfits, getting free drinks, and quote, dancing naked around a fire under the moon are all definitions that have been bandied around social media.
[01:23:02]  There's also a theme of subverting beauty norms, like not shaving your legs or brushing your hair.
[01:23:09]  The general theme is unhinged chaos.
[01:23:12]  So what do we do this or do we not do this, Anna?
[01:23:14]  What do you think?
[01:23:17]  It's very pagan, but I think all the beauty norms were already subverted by COVID.
[01:23:22]  Good point.
[01:23:25]  It's true.
[01:23:25]  They can't take credit for that.
[01:23:27]  Yeah.
[01:23:30]  Yeah.
[01:23:30]  To me, it's, I mean, it sounds a lot like Hot Girl Summer.
[01:23:35]  I think, yeah, every summer there's this sort of fetishization of Bakianalia revelry or something.
[01:23:45]  I'm just looking into like TikTok for their instructions on just how to be over the summer.
[01:23:51]  Yeah.
[01:23:52]  And every summer there's like a new TikTok catchphrase that allows people to be disgusting and sweaty.
[01:24:03]  And then it's all about, yeah.
[01:24:07]  I'm not sure why one needs permission for any of that, right?
[01:24:10]  It's like there's something disturbing to me about, I don't, just these trends where it's like, okay, now this is what we're going to do.
[01:24:17]  And this is the hot trend and it involves no longer shaving.
[01:24:21]  I don't get it.
[01:24:22]  I'm doing, I'm doing fertility girl summer.
[01:24:26]  What does that mean?
[01:24:28]  I'm eating a lot of like organ meats and like drinking raw milk and taking root supplements.
[01:24:34]  Oregon meets as fertile as possible.
[01:24:37]  That's the way to go.
[01:24:38]  Oregon meats are the way to go.
[01:24:39]  We just had a couple of nutritionists and doctors on the show a couple of weeks ago.
[01:24:43]  We're big on the organ meats.
[01:24:45]  We're big on organs.
[01:24:47]  Hanni, may I ask how you eat them?
[01:24:48]  Because I haven't yet tried and I'm a little scared.
[01:24:51]  Your bare hands to cheer it out of the animal.
[01:24:56]  Fried liver.
[01:24:57]  I mean, pate is a great way to get your store or do you cook?
[01:25:04]  I just buy pate at the store or at one of Keith McNally's great, great restaurants.
[01:25:10]  Okay.
[01:25:11]  This is good to know because I haven't yet tried it.
[01:25:13]  Although I will say on our little date night in the city, I don't eat any seafood.
[01:25:16]  I'm like anti-seafood.
[01:25:18]  It's a psychological thing.
[01:25:20]  They're big on caviar.
[01:25:23]  So I ordered the caviar $150 later.
[01:25:27]  So I was like, I'm going to have to find a cheaper option.
[01:25:32]  It was pricey, but it was good.
[01:25:34]  You couldn't tell that it was fish.
[01:25:35]  So thumbs up.
[01:25:37]  Yeah.
[01:25:37]  Why are you vegan caviar now?
[01:25:39]  Yeah.
[01:25:40]  I feel, Dasha, that I suffered a childhood trauma in my grandparents' boatyard in Pyrmont, New York.
[01:25:46]  Can't really say exactly what it was, but I had an older brother have and he loved to fish.
[01:25:52]  And so I was immersed in like smelly fish from the Hudson River during the time that GE was dumping tons of chemicals into the water.
[01:25:59]  And I was also swimming in it.
[01:26:02]  And I do recall an incident with one of his friends and it was a dead fish and someone put a firecracker in it.
[01:26:09]  It didn't end up.
[01:26:10]  Oh, well, that'll be good.
[01:26:13]  Immersive.
[01:26:13]  Yeah.
[01:26:15]  Yeah.
[01:26:16]  And you know what?
[01:26:16]  It's really like, if you, like a friend of mine recently tried to get me over this and she made me this beautiful halibut and it had like panko crust on the top.
[01:26:27]  And I actually did like it.
[01:26:28]  It did not taste like fish.
[01:26:30]  But then my husband, who likes fish and likes to cook fish, apparently, something I didn't know about him in our 15 years together.
[01:26:37]  He's like, I can redo it.
[01:26:38]  So he redid it and he served it to me and he left the bottom skin on it.
[01:26:43]  Yeah.
[01:26:44]  Total game changer.
[01:26:46]  I was like, oh no, hell no.
[01:26:49]  Like the slimy fish just is just a reminder that it's a fish.
[01:26:54]  Yeah, the scales.
[01:26:56]  But they are, it is healthy for you if you can overlook all those chemicals that Alex Jones was right about.
[01:27:03]  It'll really plump your skin.
[01:27:06]  I know.
[01:27:06]  I need to do it.
[01:27:07]  I just fixed like baby steps.
[01:27:10]  What would you recommend be my next try?
[01:27:12]  I tried the halibut.
[01:27:13]  I did fish eggs.
[01:27:15]  What's the next most gentle?
[01:27:19]  I was going to say oysters, but that's a bridge too far.
[01:27:24]  Isn't that gentle?
[01:27:25]  Isn't that really fishy?
[01:27:26]  Fish girls being slavish girls.
[01:27:28]  But that's very, that's a very going to be a very fishy, messy, abstract experience.
[01:27:33]  That's master's degree fish.
[01:27:35]  All right.
[01:27:35]  I'm going to work still on my little like GED and then I'll get back to oysters.
[01:27:41]  Okay.
[01:27:42]  So we've got to discuss succession because I've teased it and now America wants to know what it's like to be a crossman.
[01:27:47]  Greg, the great Greg from Succession, who's everybody's favorite character, they brought on your character, Comfy, right?
[01:27:56]  Comfry.
[01:27:57]  Okay, Comfrey.
[01:28:00]  She was new like over the past season and she's on team Kendall Roy, who's against the patriarch, Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox.

=== ISIS Shirts and Russian PR (07:12) ===

[01:28:10]  And you're his PR advisor and he's dealing with a shitstorm of PR and you're similar to the way you are in real life.
[01:28:18]  Kind of deadpan, not overly emotional, total scene stealer.
[01:28:23]  And here's just a clip of you and forgive me, what's the actor who plays Greg?
[01:28:28]  What's his name?
[01:28:28]  Nicholas Braun.
[01:28:30]  Nicholas Braun, you and Nicholas Braun in a little bit of TV magic.
[01:28:35]  What's up?
[01:28:35]  Hey, I'm glad I ran into you.
[01:28:38]  Yeah, yeah, me too.
[01:28:39]  Right, because I might have to brief the press against you.
[01:28:44]  Oh, the whole press.
[01:28:48]  Yeah, just Kendall's really going balls to the wall and, you know, you're only in the team.
[01:28:54]  But I'm going to try to keep it targeted rather than terminal.
[01:28:59]  Thank you kindly, ma'am.
[01:29:03]  It goes on from there, but I love that.
[01:29:05]  Targeted instead of terminal.
[01:29:07]  I read that you knew of what you spoke when you delivered that line because you were going through your own PR, whatever, some stupid Twitter dust up at the time.
[01:29:17]  And it was, you were managing both your own PR and the role of a PR guru.
[01:29:23]  Yeah, there was some meta irony in me playing a crisis publicist.
[01:29:27]  And my first day on set was when we got in trouble for our ISIS t-shirts.
[01:29:34]  And I remember, yeah, like on my breaks, like looking at my phone and being like, wow, I made it to HBO and they're definitely going to can me after these ISIS t-shirts.
[01:29:45]  You seem so unflappable.
[01:29:46]  It doesn't seem like even that would upset you.
[01:29:51]  Know, sometimes the pylons can be overwhelming sure, but they we've been through this, the outreach cycle, so many times now that we're just desensitized to it.
[01:30:01]  Yeah, so what happened with the Isis t-shirts?
[01:30:05]  Uh nothing, nothing.
[01:30:08]  It was like a joke based on not exactly Isis, as I remember it was based on, like you did, a t-shirt based on something else.
[01:30:15]  It was a sticker um that um, the MAGA bomber put on one of his like defective or maybe it was on his band, but that's where we got the design from okay um, and we just thought it was kind of clever and funny.
[01:30:32]  So you don't care, it doesn't affect you anymore, because I know when you first come into the public eye and people start attacking you as a terrible person I mean they really, you know they they don't just say oh, that was, I disagree with her.
[01:30:43]  It's a complete personal attack and attempted takedown.
[01:30:46]  Does that not bother you gals anymore?
[01:30:50]  I think you have to keep in mind that it's actually not personal and you have to be like, understanding and empathetic toward the people who are angry at you.
[01:30:58]  Um, when they go low, we go even lower.
[01:31:04]  Yeah we yeah, and understand that you're just like an avatar or an ab, an effigy for them that they don't seriously hate you necessarily as much as what you symbolically represent yeah, which to them is uh, a kind of alienating cynicism, or I think that people just don't really not respond that well necessarily to our like brand of humor.
[01:31:34]  It's good you have that perspective.
[01:31:35]  I I read a few of the things like.
[01:31:37]  One of them was something like leftist deadbeats or something i'm like now that I don't even get, I don't even understand that dirtbag leftist, that's what it was.
[01:31:46]  The American Conservative, I think, did a great piece on you.
[01:31:49]  They said, that's what some of your detractors got.
[01:31:50]  It's kind of like a badge of honor.
[01:31:52]  I don't know dirtbag, kind of like that one.
[01:31:55]  I'm not sure if that would even upset me at the at the first blush.
[01:31:59]  Well, that term was coined by our friend Amberly Frost and she meant it in a positive, not pejorative way, like a wave of of leftists who came up after Bernie.
[01:32:10]  But i've always maintained that we're too glamorous to be uh, dirtbags and too conservative to be actual left.
[01:32:17]  I agree with you.
[01:32:19]  I agree with you.
[01:32:20]  So what's?
[01:32:21]  I can't, I can't end without asking you about what the past you know three months has been like as people who come from Russia originally, or Belarus.
[01:32:30]  There's been so much Anti-russian sentiment here, this craziness of not letting the Russian players play, and one of the big tennis matches was the Australian Open, and now, like at the French Open, they his, his name was up there but the flag was blacked out.
[01:32:44]  Has that been affecting you and your lives at all, or what do you make of it?
[01:32:49]  Well, there's always been Anti-russian sentiment, you know, even going back to like the Russia Gate stuff with with Trump.
[01:32:56]  Um, I think the the cold war mentality still kind of holds strong in Russia.
[01:33:03]  Much like us, we just sort of represent something amoral or detestable to people.
[01:33:11]  But in my, no, in my life, it hasn't, I haven't really felt the impact of rusophobia more than I usually do.
[01:33:19]  Yeah.
[01:33:19]  And of course, I think while it's like preposterous that Russian people who don't even sympathize with Putin or the war are punished by these kind of institutions and associations, or even if they do sympathize with Putin in the war, that shouldn't affect, you know, their standing as professionals.
[01:33:38]  At the same time, it's not something that we've experienced personally.
[01:33:42]  I mean, you can't, it's not like you can tell off the bat that somebody is Russian as you can with somebody who's like Asian or black.
[01:33:49]  It's a different kind of thing.
[01:33:52]  And also more importantly, I think our haters would even reject the allegation that we're Russian.
[01:33:59]  They think that we're like LARPing for clout.
[01:34:02]  I only recently learned what LARPing is.
[01:34:05]  Do you think, because I, you know, I went over to Russia a couple of times to interview Putin and just was totally delighted with the people there.
[01:34:12]  And I, I think of them all the time as we pile on the sanctions and all this.
[01:34:16]  And I, my hope is that when this is over, however it ends, there, there'll be a way where we, the American people, can connect with them, the Russian people, you know, in an authentic, like meaningful way where we say, these people running our countries are assholes.
[01:34:30]  You know, this is a bunch of bullshit.
[01:34:32]  We're humans.
[01:34:32]  We, you may want to go to your DACA and I may want to go to the Jersey Shore, but we both want, you know, our kids to be raised well and safely and to have healthcare and to have some basic things.
[01:34:43]  And I don't know.
[01:34:44]  Do you, do you have hope for that still, notwithstanding what we're doing right now?
[01:34:48]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:34:49]  But I think that that connection is already there.
[01:34:51]  And I think like the people of any country can understand and sympathize with the people of another country and don't judge them by their leaders.
[01:35:01]  I hope you're right.
[01:35:02]  I mean, when we like ban Russian vodkas and kick, you know, Russian artists out of their productions unless they say exactly the following words, I start to worry that we're going to create, you know, a generation of hate.
[01:35:17]  We're doing it on a number of fronts, but look, you are part of the war pushing back against all of that.

=== Connecting Across Divided Nations (00:30) ===

[01:35:22]  And a couple of fascinating broads.
[01:35:24]  Thanks so much for coming on.
[01:35:26]  Thank you.
[01:35:27]  It's been a pleasure.
[01:35:28]  Support the ladies by going to patreon.com slash red scare.
[01:35:33]  They always talk like this.
[01:35:34]  They're really interesting to listen to.
[01:35:35]  And you've got like a nice car ride or whatever, just put it on, sit back, relax.
[01:35:39]  And I promise you, you'll learn.
[01:35:42]  Tomorrow on the show, David Sachs at the PayPal Mafia back on the show.
[01:35:45]  Don't miss it.
[01:35:45]  See you then.
[01:35:47]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
[01:35:50]  No BS, no agenda, and no