The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220701_racist-attacks-on-clarence-thomas-and-our-culture-

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July 1, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show

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Filibuster Fraud and Reality 00:15:04
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and happy Friday.
	We are headed into a long holiday weekend where we celebrate all that is great about this country of ours.
	And some people are already melting down on Twitter saying there's nothing to celebrate.
	Oh, well, wait until they see what I've got planned here in my little town in New Jersey.
	Can't wait to show them how patriotic we're going.
	And if you're not an America lover, well, on you.
	All right.
	You don't have to live here.
	You don't have to sit around lamenting how terrible we are.
	Problems?
	Yes, sure.
	It's from the beginning.
	That's natural and we can work on them.
	But to say this is not a great country is just oblivious and agenda-driven.
	So we have much to be thankful for.
	However, there are many folks struggling.
	And you know that's true because we have record inflation, we have record gas prices.
	And a lot of Americans believe that right now our government is on the wrong track from our political discourse to those prices and the inflation and so on.
	President Biden, however, says, don't believe you're lion eyes.
	You're happy.
	You're fine.
	You're really happy.
	Seriously.
	He says no one believes that America is going backwards.
	Really?
	Well, I don't know.
	The only thing that's destabilizing, he says, is the U.S. Supreme Court.
	You see, all of our problems began last Friday with Dobbs.
	That's the problem he wants you to know.
	And of course, he believes that the answer is for you to vote.
	He wants now the Senate to change the filibuster rules, but just on the issue of abortion and privacy.
	Okay.
	Now, he knows that's not going to happen.
	So he's really proposing no solution at all.
	But it's such a precarious post, right?
	To suggest that we need to change the filibuster rules, the one thing preserving minority rights in the Senate, because he doesn't like the Dobbs decision.
	It's crazy talk.
	We're going to get to that and plenty more with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who now publishes on Substack and is with me now.
	Glenn, great to see you.
	How are you?
	Hey, Megan, great to see you as well.
	Okay, so there he goes.
	We're going to get...
	So this is, when he said that, let's get rid of the filibuster.
	In fact, do we have this?
	We might as well play it.
	No, we do.
	We do.
	Let's listen to it.
	It's sound by three.
	I believe we have to codify Roe v. Wade in the law.
	And the way to do that is to make sure that Congress votes to do that.
	And if the filibuster gets in the way, it's like voting rights.
	It should be, we provide an exception for this.
	All right.
	So he's talking about getting rid of the filibuster just for this.
	And then he went on to clarify he means for privacy rights.
	Isn't that how the Democrats got into this mess?
	They got rid of the filibuster for federal court judges, but they said not for the Supreme Court.
	And Mitch McConnell said to Harry Reid, you will rue the day you did that because you will not always be in charge of this chamber.
	Then the Republicans took control and they got rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court judges.
	And that is how we got Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett with votes that were far less than 60, which you would have needed in the past.
	Kavanaugh only got 50 votes.
	And that's how the Democrats got this Supreme Court majority, a conservative majority that they hate so much.
	So now they want to go back to their same old tricks, which similarly will come back to haunt them again because they, even if they did all this stuff, will not always be in charge of the Senate chamber.
	And the Republicans will use the same tricks against them in the future.
	Your take on it?
	First of all, I mean, this is a kind of bizarre, confounding refusal to confront reality that repeats itself in so many other contexts.
	Whenever I try and get people to understand that censorship is actually quite dangerous, even if they're really happy about the particular individual who just got silenced, the argument I try and make is I know you're really happy with that person who just got banned or silenced because you don't like them, but this system that you're supporting one day will be used by other people, including people who are your adversaries or enemies, and it will come to silence maybe yourself or your own allies.
	And that's a good reason not to cheer for it.
	And oftentimes it's just very difficult in this kind of very polarized and partisan culture that requires immediate gratification, especially with social media, to look past the next six seconds and think about the implications of the systemic values that you're cheering.
	The other thing, though, Megan, that I think is important to note is a lot of this is obviously about Democratic Party politics and Ternees and Democratic Party politics.
	The reality is Joe Biden has never really been particularly pro-choice as a politician.
	He obviously has always identified as someone whose Catholicism guides his politics.
	He's been a longtime supporter, for example, of the Hyde Amendment, which is very controversial among liberals.
	It prohibits the use of federal funds to support abortion.
	He only abandoned that view in 2019 as he was gearing up to run for president.
	And what's really happening is after Dobbs, most liberal activists are screaming and yelling that the Biden administration isn't taking more radical steps in the wake of that decision.
	The Biden administration, however, doesn't want to do that because they realize the majority of Americans aren't liberal activists.
	And with the midterm elections coming up, won't look kindly upon that.
	So he gave them kind of one crumb, which is to say, look, okay, I'll be in favor of suspending the filibuster, knowing that Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema would never approve it.
	So it was kind of a meaningless crumb to hand the Democrats when in reality, all the things that they're demanding that he do, he really won't do because he wants to win the midterm election.
	Right.
	It's all such a legal sleight of hand.
	And so is AOC jumping up and down and saying we need abortion clinics on federal land.
	And if federal parks and Elizabeth Warren saying, you know, we've got to pack the court or AOC saying we've got to impeach sitting majority conservative justice.
	These are all lies.
	They know they're lies.
	By the way, if AOC has the votes in the House to vote to impeach a Supreme Court justice, go for it, lady.
	Let's see you do your stuff, be your influential self.
	Because that's all you need for an actual impeachment, not for a conviction, which is how it would have to work.
	But let's make it happen.
	It's all a lie, Glenn.
	It's so annoying.
	If you talk to anyone in the house who has served with AOC, including or maybe even especially members of the Democratic caucus, she's respected by almost nobody.
	They regard her as a joke.
	And I don't know if you remember this, but after the 2018 election, she wanted to serve on the Finance and Commerce Committee, which is a very powerful committee.
	And she ran against somebody from the New York delegation.
	It's a seat reserved for New York, Kathleen Rice, who had opposed Nancy Pelosi's reelection in 2018.
	I guess this was 2020.
	And the Democrats who decide committee assignments voted overwhelmingly to put Kathleen Rice in that place and not AOC.
	She lost like 47 to 12 because they know that her social media celebrity or her cultural celebrity never translates into anything actually serious about policymaking or anything else like that.
	So she's on Colbert and she's getting retweeted, but it never goes anywhere.
	It's purely performative.
	And she knows that as well, that she's basically, her role is to take disaffected liberals and leftists and pretend that the Democratic Party cares about them because there's at least one person, AOC, who gets to rant and rave in a way that's satisfying to them, even though there's no chance that the Democratic Party would ever follow her because they know down that path lies electoral destruction.
	And as you say, it's just all absurd theater in which all the participants know that.
	And it's just, as you say as well, kind of just annoying more than anything else to watch it.
	Yeah, she is a congressional Kardashian.
	That's what AOC is.
	Informative, platforming, using it just to get her face on TV because she loves attention, but there is no substance there.
	And if you go back, I am on record.
	When she first took office, I had an open mind.
	I said, okay, she's got an unusual background.
	I got an open mind.
	She's not exactly my cup of tea, but I'm not going to call her names.
	I'm going to stay in that.
	She said a bunch of stupid stuff.
	I said, okay, she's young.
	Maybe she's learning.
	Nope, she's dumb.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm there.
	She is not a smart person and she won't do the work that's required to get smart, which is particularly galling.
	Yeah.
	You know, it's funny.
	I interviewed AOC during her primary run against Joe Crawley when barely anyone knew who she was because, you know, no one expected Joe Crawley, a very senior member of the Democratic House caucus, you know, in there for 10 terms.
	I don't think he had visited the Queens district he represented in like 15 years.
	I doubt he could even place it on a map, but that's how incumbents get re-elected.
	He was a creature of Washington, raising tons of money, talked about as a replacement for Nancy Pelosi as speaker, when if and when she ever decides to finally retire.
	And I interviewed AOC and I was actually kind of, you know, I had the same reaction as you guys.
	I was a little impressed.
	It was obvious to me that she had a political talent.
	I like when there are new people on the political scene who have more common experiences.
	I like Nancy Mace because she worked as a waitress in the Waffle House to support her family.
	You know, I like people who come from diverse backgrounds, who don't have family connections.
	So I was open-minded for that reason.
	But also, Megan, her whole argument was she wanted to get to Congress and challenge not the Republicans, but the Democratic establishment.
	That's how she convinced people to vote for her.
	And the minute she got there, you know, even in the interview, I asked her, would you vote for Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer for their like 110th term as to be reelected as house leaders?
	And she said, no, no, absolutely not.
	I think we need a new generation.
	And the first vote she took when she won was voting for Nancy Pelosi and Stenny Hoyer.
	So the whole thing has kind of been a fraud.
	And I think the reason is what you said, that she just doesn't have any of the discipline or follow through.
	All she wants is social media pause.
	And, you know, if that's all you care about, you'll never really do anything particularly disturbing or subversive or unpopular.
	It's heartening to know that people on Capitol Hill get it too, even within her own party and see sort of the Kardashian-esque nature.
	No offense to the Kardashians because they're very good at what they do, but there's not a whole ton of substance there.
	They're all about at least Kim Kardashian got a law passed.
	She was vital to the criminal justice reform bill that the Trump administration passed working with the ACLU.
	AOC doesn't even have anything like that on her resume.
	So it's true.
	It's almost like an insult to the Kardashians.
	Kim got Alice Marie Johnson out of jail and Alice Marie Johnson is an amazing person.
	That's actually one of my favorite episodes that we've ever done.
	So I'll have to give her that.
	Okay, so speaking of people who have been elected 110 times, but still think this is their moment.
	This is their moment.
	Hillary Clinton has weighed in.
	And I'm saying that because Chris Salizo, we talked about this yesterday, actually said this is Hillary's moment.
	Clem, this is her moment.
	So she, as you may have seen, has taken a shot at Clarence Thomas.
	And in a way that's really offensive to me, because if you know about Clarence Thomas's background, he grew up in the very racist South and his dad was subjected to awful, awful, you know, racist South behavior.
	And so was Clarence Thomas.
	And he's, if anything, this is a guy who's an example in how not to leave a life of grievance.
	You know, he's a guy who ascended based on his own hard work.
	He's never been somebody to say, woe was me.
	And now Hillary Clinton comes out and says the following soundbite seven.
	I went to law school with him.
	He's been a person of grievance for as long as I've known him.
	Resentment, grievance, anger.
	And the thing that is, well, there's so many things about it that are deeply distressing, but women are going to die, Gail.
	Women will die.
	Hello, Pot.
	It's like a life of grievance.
	Hello.
	Megan, there's so many amazing things about that quote.
	So first of all, I don't even believe Hillary Clinton.
	You know, you went to law school, as did I.
	It's very uncommon if somebody's in a different class than you, given how large law school classes are, for you to really know them in such an intimate and deep way that you can opine on what their personality was like to that degree of detail from 50 years ago.
	On top of that, Clarence Thomas wasn't even a conservative in law school.
	It was kind of the beginning of his transition.
	He got there with fairly conventional views and became a conservative kind of along the way.
	But beyond that, the two points that I just want to note about that is, number one, needless to say, if some white conservative woman, white, wealthy conservative woman, spoke of any black politician the way Hillary Clinton just spoke of Clarence Thomas, he's an angry man driven by grievance and resentment.
	There'd be like a national day of crises over racism declared instantly because that's basically every trope that is used about African-American men for decades.
	You know, they're angry, they're complaining, they're whiny, they're driven by grievance.
	And to say that about Clarence Thomas, who whatever else you want to think of him, like we were just saying about AOC or Nancy Mace or whoever, you know, didn't come from wealth.
	He didn't come from like family privileged.
	He worked his way up into, you know, Yale Law School and then, you know, a top government position and now a Supreme Court justice.
	To say that about him of all people, it's just such basic, obvious, racist stereotypes about how liberals talk about members of marginalized groups that they believe they own who aren't sufficiently compliant and obedient.
	But the other thing about it, Megan, is I don't know if you saw this, but just last month, Sonia Sotomayor, who has worked with Clarence Thomas, yeah, go ahead, like side by side since 2009, talked about how there's no justice with whom she disagrees more, and yet she regards him as one of the most compassionate and empathetic people she's ever met.
	If you have that, definitely play it because it's the exact opposite of what Hillary Clinton said.
	This is a classy move by Sonia Sotomayor, and it's one of the reasons why I'm, while I might criticize any one of their jurisprudence, I'm pretty defensive of the Supreme Court justices as human beings.
	They have a tough job.
	They tend to be very respectful of one another, not always, but I have a lot of respect for them, having covered them for a long time.
	And here she is being a very classy lady.
	Watch.
	But I suspect I have probably disagreed with him more than with any other justice.
Racism Against Clarence Thomas 00:07:17
	And yet, Justice Thomas is the one justice in the building that literally knows every employee's name.
	Every one of them.
	And not only does he know their names, he remembers their families' names and histories.
	He's the first one who will go up to someone when you're walking with him and say, is your son okay?
	How's your daughter doing in college?
	He's the first one that when my stepfather died sent me flowers in Florida.
	He is a man who cares deeply about the court as an institution, about the people who work there, but about people.
	She actually knows him.
	Like knows him very well.
	Like they worked. side by side for 13 years.
	He'd be like, you know, there's only nine of them.
	So imagine how closely they work together.
	So if you hear her saying that, and she has no reason to say that unless it's true, exactly because of what she said, he's the person with whom she disagrees most on the court.
	What is it that we are to think about where Hillary Clinton got this caricature from, given that she doesn't actually know Clarence Thomas at all?
	I mean, even if they had some passing acquaintance 50 years ago in law school, to just create this image of him that is based on pure kind of caricatures and stereotypes.
	I mean, if any of it, if the ideology were inverted, that person would be banned from decent life forever.
	And I think, you know, there was a lot of stories and Ruth Bader Ginsburg talked about it as well, that actually Antonine Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a very similar kind of friendship.
	They used to go hunting.
	They would dine out a lot.
	They often spoke very fondly of one another.
	And I actually really think that our politics so much is missing exactly that because I really do believe that most people, most people are fundamentally decent.
	And so often we're denied the opportunity to recognize in one another, our common humanity, because we're told that if we have political differences or ideological differences with somebody, we're required to regard them as evil.
	And very few people outside like sociopaths and psychopaths are really that kind of cartoonishly evil.
	And yet we're always being encouraged to view one another in that way.
	So those examples are not just inspiring, but important.
	Well, I saw you tweeting about this.
	I hadn't seen it before your tweet on the negative list of what people do.
	Rex Chapman, who is, he was very popular on Twitter for animal videos.
	Like that apparently he stole from other people.
	So I kind of thought when I first followed the guy, oh, sweet, he loves animals.
	Okay.
	Yeah, me too.
	So you follow him and then he got more and more political.
	And then the next thing you knew, CNN Plus hired him.
	And he had about two days of shows before CNN Plus went out of business.
	But this guy with the racist tropes last night on Twitter about Thomas too.
	I mean, first of all, I find it quite notable and odd that there were five Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe and a sixth who voted to uphold the Mississippi law with Roberts, who didn't vote to overturn Roe.
	The majority opinion was not written by Clarence Thomas.
	It was written by Samuel Alito.
	And yet I would say like 75 to 80, if 85% of the angry liberal commentary has focused for some reason on Clarence Thomas.
	Why is that?
	And then you look at what Rex Chapman said, and he has become, you know, a very popular liberal social media influencer.
	He's far away from those neutral kind of animal videos that he stole that he caused him to be a popular Twitter figure.
	He basically has said that Clarence Thomas isn't really black because he doesn't seem to like the NBA since he doesn't show up at NBA games.
	I mean, I don't, I didn't know that in order to be like genuinely black, you have to like like basketball.
	But then for me, like the more offensive thing that he did was he said that Clarence Thomas is basically just like a dancing puppet of Mitch McConnell, playing obviously with very racist stereotypes about how a black man can't really think for themselves.
	Basically a house uh slave of Mitch Mcconnell and then proceeded to post photos of not just Clarence Thomas but him with Jenny Thomas, who's white.
	So the first two photos were of that race, interracial uh married couple and then the second two photos were of a different interracial married couple who Rex Chapman has identified as kind of the next protege of Mitch Mcconnell.
	Yeah, so here you have been on the show a bunch of times, the the ag of Kentucky and potentially next governor, exactly so look at those.
	It's just like four pictures gratuitously of two different interracial couples claiming that they're kind of captive to Mitch Mcconnell who also, by the way, is in an interracial marriage and the idea that this has now become an acceptable way to demean people.
	You know, as somebody is in an interracial marriage myself, I did react with visceral disgust and contempt for that.
	I mean, that is the kind of like thing that you used to hear prior to Loving Versus Virginia, when miscegenation laws were still popular in many states.
	That like treating the like, essentially saying, Clarence Thomas is not real, a real black person.
	He's a race traitor because he not only doesn't like basketball but is married to a white woman, just like the attorney general of Kentucky.
	This is repulsive, Megan.
	Yes, and you know, this isn't the kind of like subtle racism like I think Hillary Clinton did describing Clarence Thomas that way.
	I mean, some black men are angry and driven by grievance and resentment.
	I don't think it should be banned to talk about black men that way, though again, I I don't think she has any basis other than tropes to do that, but that's at least subtle.
	This is overt.
	This is the kind of thing that would get any conservative instantly fired, and yet I don't.
	Where's?
	Where's the censor machine?
	Right, like Jordan Peterson can't be on twitter because he said something controversial about Elliot Page, but so he's off.
	But how is this allowed?
	How's Rex Chapman allowed to post memes like that or post like that about a sitting, a g, a sitting, Supreme Court justice, and it'd say okay, it's no problem.
	Yeah, I mean, if you go onto twitter and you, you know, dispute the extremely controversial and tendentious core assertion of the new trans movement that trans women are women, if you assert that there are differences and especially if you um are somebody who is resistant to the idea of using proper pronouns.
	Now, I do use prop, I do use pronouns that people choose for themselves, because I respect their autonomy.
	But for people who don't believe in that practice, I think that, although I don't agree with it, it should be permitted.
	But if you do any of that, you're instantly banned.
	This is way worse.
	This is, you know, like a kind of violation of a settled norm in the United States for decades that there's nothing shameful or or race traitorous about being in an interracial marriage.
	And he is being very blunt about the fact that he doesn't think that it's so upsetting and he takes it.
Media Reaction to Testimony 00:12:23
	He never complains.
	He doesn't come out, contrary to what Hillary Clinton suggests.
	He, he's not a man of grievance.
	You never see him even leaking to the press saying you know like oh, you know behind the scenes, Justice Thomas was wounded, or really doesn't appreciate the attacks on his wife.
	Never, he doesn't do it.
	She just can't understand that because that's her life.
	That's how she's lived her life.
	And I think they call it projection in the psychological sphere, though.
	I don't care to analyze her in that way.
	We'll be here all day.
	Okay, let's talk about January 6th and the quote star witness and the follow from her testimony.
	Now, the media reaction continues to roll in.
	And I have to say, it's almost getting entertaining.
	Woodward and Bernstein.
	Remember when we all loved Woodward and Bernstein, all the president's men?
	We all watched it.
	I watched it when I was a sophomore in high school.
	And one of the things that made me think I might want to become a journalist someday.
	It's amazing.
	And it's a great film.
	It's a great story.
	Boy, oh boy, has the same thing that sort of happened to Rudy Giuliani happened to those two guys.
	You know, like they used to be held so high in most people's estimation.
	And then the more exposure and the older they get, you're like, oh, reassess.
	This was their take on the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, who went before the January 6th committee the other day and told a bunch of stories, some of which have already been severely challenged and seem to be falling apart, some of which haven't.
	Here's their take.
	This is Satanai.
	She pictured a mad king.
	The stability of the president of the United States, which incidentally, Republicans have been in the Senate and some in the House questioning his stability since the first days of his presidency.
	I think in a way, what happened today may mean that the January 6th committee has written Donald Trump's political obituary.
	Yes, I think it's that devastating.
	The portrait that was painted today of the president of the United States leaping from the back seat, trying to grab the steering wheel and allegedly choking his top Secret Service agent.
	I mean, pretty dramatic.
	Where is that skepticism in official stories that served them so very well five plus decades ago?
	I mean, it is pretty dramatic, that story.
	Unfortunately, it also probably is pretty false.
	You know, the first of all, this entire January 6th committee, right?
	You know, again, as a lawyer, if you ask any lawyer, they will tell you that you can essentially, if you're the only side that's present, if you don't, there's no adversarial component to the process, if you don't have someone cross-examining your witnesses, questioning what it is you're saying, examining the evidence, presenting other evidence, pointing out the deficiencies in your claims, you can basically convince a jury of anything.
	If you're like the only person that's looking good for the devil.
	Yeah, I mean, that's the reason why prosecutors have so little difficulty getting indictments in a grand jury because there's no one there to contest what they're saying or getting FISA warrants where the Justice Department goes and there's no adversarial proceeding.
	They always win.
	Now, you can blame whoever you want.
	You know, Kevin McCarthy nominated five members to serve on the committee.
	Nancy Pelosi rejected two of them.
	Unprecedented for Speaker of the House to reject the appointment by the House minority leader, the people he wanted on the committee.
	You can blame her.
	You can blame Kevin McCarthy for them not filling those two spots and pulling out all the Republicans.
	But whatever else is true, this is a committee that has zero dissent.
	Obviously, they have Adam Kittens journalist, Cheney, but for purposes of this proceeding, they're completely Democrats.
	They have zero divergence at all from the other five Democrats on the committee.
	So there's no adversarial component to this proceeding at all, which means that everything that we hear from that committee should be treated with enormous amounts of skepticism for that reason.
	The story that Cassidy Hutchinson told, which they, you just saw, people just jumped on and assumed was true, was one that by her own reasoning was a story for which she was not present.
	This is something she claims to have heard in the midst of very tumultuous and intense and highly paid days following January 6th or on January 6th, which again, by itself should have prompted immense skepticism, on top of which the story that she told was almost physically impossible.
	If you look at the design of the presidential limbo, which is called the Beast, it's almost physically impossible for Trump to have done what she alleged that he did.
	And yet the fact that they all ratified it and talked about it as though it had been dispositively proven, you know, it illustrates what the media has basically been doing since Trump descended down that escalator, which is viewing itself as not journalists, but warriors in partisan warfare against Trump and saying and doing anything, regardless of whether it has any connection to journalistic ethics or the truth, if they perceive that it will undermine or harm him.
	And that is such a vivid and perfect example, given who it is that's doing it.
	Yeah.
	Meanwhile, both the head of security and the driver of The Beast reportedly already gave testimony to the January 6th committee.
	And so either they didn't ask these guys about the alleged incident because now they're reportedly ready to dispute this account on the record and under oath.
	This is what the reporting is.
	These two guys are ready to come forward and say it didn't happen.
	He was angry.
	He did want to go to the Capitol.
	We knew that.
	He said it in his own speech.
	But this business about allegedly trying to grab the steering wheel and laying hands on the Secret Service agent and the Secret Service agent having to stop him from strangling the Secret Service didn't happen.
	So these two guys are ready to come forward and they've already given testimony.
	So either they already gave testimony and they weren't asked about any of this, and then they put on this witness without going back to them, to whom they had access.
	These are not two people who are not cooperating, right?
	So it's like they've interviewed them.
	So now she comes forward with her incredible testimony, Cassidy.
	And what do you do if you're a real investigator?
	You call up the other two guys and say, hey, we just had this explosive testimony.
	Is it true?
	You guys are the ones she's saying told her this and experienced this.
	Clearly, they did not do that.
	Or they did do that and the two guys, you know, crapped on it and they did it anyway, which would be the biggest problem.
	And I said, was this also possible?
	The two guys said, yes, it's 100% true.
	And now just under the heat of the spotlight are ready to change their testimony, but that seems unlikely.
	Meanwhile, another Secret Service agent, this is not the one involved, but he's a former agent, went on record with the Washington Examiner and said, this is kind of interesting, quote, there's not a chance in hell a Secret Service agent would put their hands on a protectee.
	Never.
	We would not touch them.
	If they decided to lunge at us or hit us, there is no retaliation.
	That actually has a ring of truth to it.
	And that story didn't, right, about Trump lunging and Wolf Blitzer where they tried to strangle him.
	And, you know, like it was on its face absurd, Glenn.
	And then just to add, to expand on Carl Bernstein, he said, she has, if she's not contradicted, she has nailed the greatest conspiracy, criminal and seditious, against the Republic of the United States since the Civil War and Jefferson Davis.
	You know You know what's so funny, Megan?
	This idea that like, oh, this is the final straw, they wrote his political obituary.
	This has really been going on since 2015.
	The funniest article I've ever read was by like the dean of the Washington Political Corps or whatever, Dan Boltz, who when Trump criticized John McCain and mocked him for having been, you know, a POW saying I like soldiers who, you know.
	I wasn't a fan of those comments, to put that mildly.
	But the idea that like Republican primary voters were going to rise up in indignation given all the problems they have in their lives and all the things they're angry about and all the things they're concerned with, as if they have the same protective love that the Washington Press Corps had for John McCain, as though that was going to end Donald Trump's political career is something you would think only if you're drowning in this extremely insular world of Washington media.
	And yet you can go read the article in the Washington Post from 2015 when Trump was leading the polls against his GOP rivals saying that this seems to me to be a bridge too far that's finally going to take Trump down.
	Obviously, during Russia Gate, every two months, you know, it was the walls were closing in.
	This is the last straw.
	He looks like this is going to go to prison.
	They've been doing this forever.
	And they're shedding credibility or they've shed all their credibility so rapidly because of this, but they can't stop because the model of liberal corporate journalism that they've settled on was that they were going to cultivate an exclusively liberal audience.
	And they know that audience doesn't care if what they're saying, it's true or false.
	They just want to have their presuppositions appeased and flattered.
	And even if you lie about Trump, they actually don't want you to retract it.
	They get angry if you retract it, which is why, Megan, to this day, all of those media outlets that right before the election spread the CIA lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, even though we all now know it.
	I knew then, but everybody now knows it was authentic and confirmed because even the post and the Times confirmed it, never once retracted those claims they spread before the election because they know their liberal readers care about partisan effect and not journalistic truth.
	And that is what is such a corrupting force here.
	That was on display the other day when Peter Alexander of NBC was the first to tweet out my sources, the White House correspondent for NBC, my source is telling me secret service agents involved in this alleged story are disputing this and ready to say this did not happen.
	And if you looked at the comments and the responses from, you know, the mostly liberal left to his tweet, it was like, oh, are the clicks worth it?
	You're so desperate to get new followers.
	It's like, it's news.
	It's directly on point to the very thing that you're reporting today.
	Oh, you, that reminds me, you had a great response to this, which I liked and retweeted.
	Oh, my God, I have to find it because it was so perfect about how all day long the left was like, bombshell, I'm trying to find it.
	This is amazing.
	This is huge.
	And then Peter Alexander writes that.
	And then a bunch of people come out and say, no, this isn't true.
	I have it as well that they're going to dispute it.
	And they were like, well, that wasn't at the crux of the story.
	Yeah, here it is.
	I found it.
	Glenn, journalist, all day yesterday.
	Trump assaulted his secret service agents and grabbed the wheel of the presidential limo.
	Headline news, smoking gun.
	Secret service agents, colon, that never happened.
	Journalists, Colin, that was never an important part of the testimony.
	I mean, we just watched Wolf.
	And I remember people saying, no, it really never, we just watched Wolf Blitzer, who called in, you know, they do that when they really think something momentous has happened.
	They called in not just Carl Bernstein, who's always there, but Bob Woodward.
	Because of course, the idea is, you know, these are the people who are the authorities to say this isn't Watergate.
	It's worse than Watergate.
	And they seized on the most dramatic part of the story, which is that Trump, who's not exactly known for his like agility or athleticism, somehow was able to like fly across the limo like only Superman could and like overpower these extremely strong and well, you know, trained Secret Service agents by grabbing the wheel of the car and lunging at their throat.
	And clearly that was the thing about which they were most excited because if that were true, that is a pretty dramatic story.
	And then as soon as it got debunked, they were saying, oh, conservatives are just debunking this kind of ancillary detail that nobody cares about in order to distract from the really important part of Cassidy Hutchinson's story, which was what?
	That like there was ketchup on the wall.
	So, you know, this, this, that is like the real kind of, you know, attempt to prevent people from realizing that what they saw didn't actually happen.
	That's gaslighting in its purest form, like watching journalists all day focus on that one part of the story.
	And then when it gets debunked, turn around and say, oh, well, that was just a small detail that never really mattered.
Corporate Fear of Being Woke 00:12:41
	Immaterial.
	Same with the January 6th committee.
	When she got caught, she was contradicted because she said she wrote this handwritten note that was dictated to her by her boss, the chief of staff, that was essentially going to go out saying anybody not invited onto the Capitol needs to leave right now.
	And she said that was her.
	She looked at it and said, that's mine.
	That's my handwriting.
	And then White House counsel, one of the lawyers came out and said, that's a lie.
	That is my handwriting.
	I am the one who wrote that.
	Now, I mean, that's deeply problematic because you do know your own handwriting.
	And if she's trying to self-aggrandize or make herself seem more important than she was, we need to know that.
	But instead of actually looking into it, what we got was a note from the January 6th committee saying, that's immaterial.
	We believe her, that she's, that she's credible.
	Her testimony was credible.
	Talk about being judge, jury, executioner.
	You're like, oh, it's great when you get to present the case, present all the witnesses, then tell us whether the witness is believable, then ultimately pronounce the final judgment, which is where this is going.
	I mean, the whole thing is just so unnerving to anybody who has a semblance of fairness, never mind justice under their belt.
	Go ahead.
	Go ahead.
	No, no, no.
	I just want to add one point about that, which is for me, this really underscores an important question that has really gotten ignored, which is why does the January 6th Investigative Committee even exist?
	When it comes to alleged crimes, the branch of government that is charged with investigating criminality is not the Congress, but the Justice Department and the FBI, because they have all kinds of protection, safeguards that citizens enjoy against what it is that they can do.
	Congress has very limited power to investigate.
	They can only investigate if it's in connection with some lawmaking purpose they want to have.
	So if they want to enact pollution regulations, they get to summon the chairs of various polluting corporations or experts in pollution, or if they're exercising oversight over the executive branch.
	You can make the argument maybe that it falls into the latter camp, but what this really is, is the kind of thing that the McCarthy era Supreme Court twice said is inappropriate, which is conducting a political show trial that is really designed to be a parallel investigation to the Justice Department that enables you to do things the Justice Department can't do in order to kind of pressure the Justice Department to bring charges when you think they're not acting quickly enough.
	And that's exactly what this is about, Megan.
	They're angry that Merrick Garland didn't charge sedition for over a year.
	They finally got him to do that.
	And now they want Donald Trump prosecuted.
	So all this is a parallel Justice Department investigation designed to create criminal charges without any of the safeguards people are supposed to have, including basic adversarial scrutiny over what's being said.
	I find the whole show trial pernicious for that reason.
	I agree.
	And I also think if that's their goal, they're undermining it because they're damaging the witnesses Merrick Garland would need by being so shoddy as investigators, by not calling up the two Secret Service agents to make sure, hey, Cassidy Hutchinson's about to say this.
	Did it happen?
	And then presenting her to us as though she would be an uncontradicted witness and that everybody would support her version.
	So, I mean, if I were Merrick Garland and determined to prosecute you, I would be angry at what they're doing right now.
	All right, I'm going to pause it there, squeeze in a quick break.
	So much more to go over with Glenn, including the president saying we are happy with the direction of the country.
	85% say they're not.
	And his response is, yes, you are.
	You are too.
	Glenn's up next.
	Before we leave the subject of January 6th, can we just talk about this?
	Ben Shapiro was raging about this yesterday and was so good on it.
	Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC has got this piece out there talking about, here's what he writes.
	I think it was in the New York Times.
	The CEO silence on the January 6th hearings.
	He's pissed off corporate America's not coming out and taking a stance on the January 6th hearings.
	Andrew here, I want to speak with you directly this morning, much as I did after the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
	Who wants to hear from him?
	Okay.
	After January 6th, corporations across this nation rates to put out news releases condemning the insurrection, as well as the Republican members of Congress who tried to overturn the election and results.
	Many companies pledged to end or pause donating to these politicians.
	Fast forward to today, whatever your politics.
	Yesterday's testimony by a former White House aide about President Donald Trump's actions on January 6th was deeply disturbing, whatever your politics.
	It had to be deeply disturbing to you, Glenn.
	Got it.
	And yet you will most likely hear only one thing from the business community in the coming days.
	Silence.
	Why?
	I've been spending the past several days at the Aspen Ideas Festival asking chief executives and other leaders that very question.
	What I hear again and again is that the business community and perhaps the public at large has outrage fatigue.
	But there is something else happening too.
	Those who do want to speak out are concerned about retaliation from political officials and a significant portion of the public in ways they weren't a year and a half ago.
	Goes on to talk about various polls that show Trump remains popular, in many cases, brace yourselves, more popular than even President Biden.
	Others fear being labeled woke.
	And he goes on to talk about DeSantis.
	And then he says, but here's my question for business leaders.
	After years of talking about moral courage, where is yours?
	It's unbelievable.
	I don't even know where to start there, but I think, you know, I think it's hilarious like how he says Trump's not just still popular, but even more popular than Joe Biden as if Joe Biden is like the, you know, Nero or like on Mount Rushmore.
	And so the idea that anyone can be more popular than him, let alone Trump, is something that's shocking.
	But the thing that this is actually something that, you know, I've been looking at for a while now is for decades, it was a staple of the liberal left that corporations have too much power in the United States.
	And the idea of opposing especially the political power that corporations wield through things like donations and lobbyists was foundational to all kinds of left liberal politics.
	And now suddenly, ever since I think you could really trace it back to George Floyd, but even kind of before that with a lot of LGBT issues and the like, what has happened is as a result of Democrats becoming the party of the affluent, which is the dirty little secret of our politics, that Joe Biden didn't win because minorities rose up and voted for him in record number to eject the white nationalists from the presidency, quite the opposite happened.
	Trump attracted more Latino voters and African-American voters, Asian voters than any Republican in decade, whereas Biden won because affluent white suburbanites voted for him, who had long for a long time voted Republican.
	As affluent people become more and more liberal, corporations feel more and more comfortable espousing liberal political ideals, whereas they used to be steadfastly neutral.
	And seeing that, liberals are increasingly calling for corporations to throw their weight around when it comes to the democratic process.
	The way that they demanded that Disney, for example, get involved in the enactment of that law in Florida that was enacted by a democratically constituted state legislature and then signed into law by the democratically elected governor about what second graders and under can be taught about gender ideology, demanding that Disney did not denounce this.
	This is a constant refrain now that corporations, which we always wanted to make sure their power, their corporate power was confined to just doing what was in their business self-interest are now suddenly supposed to be ideological and partisan actors on the side of one side.
	That's incredibly dangerous.
	That's called, you could call it like the literal definition of fascism when corporate and state power start to create a union, but at the very least, that's called oligarchy.
	And yet there's unabashedly an increasing desire on the part of the liberal left for corporations to become heavily involved political actors in a way that's obviously very dangerous.
	Yeah, what are we going to have?
	We're going to go down the street and it's going to be all the red, the red corporations and the blue corporations.
	And you've got to go in depending on what your number says on your wrist, you know, or your color of your shirt says.
	One of the stories that Ben was talking about yesterday related to this UK bank, this Halifax bank, which is doing exactly what Aaron Ross Sorkin wants them to do.
	They tweeted out some photo showing an employee wearing, you know, her name tag and it said, you know, pronouns, she, her, hers.
	And it was roundly mocked online, you know, that this bank is bragging about how it mandates pronouns on its employees' name tags.
	And in response to the mocking, the bank tweets out in response, they double down and tweet and tweeted out: We strive for inclusion, equity, and quite simply in doing what's right.
	If you disagree with our values, you're welcome to close your account.
	A social media spokesperson identified as Andy decided to tell their bankers.
	I mean, so basically, I can't keep my money at your bank if I think your name tags are stupid.
	This is our future.
	You know, this is this.
	I think this touches a little bit on what we were describing earlier about this ability of the Supreme Court justices, Ginsburg and Scalia, now so do my Ora and Thomas, to maintain genuine friendships, respectful, even, you know, kind of affectionate interactions with one another across ideological divides, which used to be very normal and very common.
	And now the idea is that if you have an ideological difference with somebody, especially liberals believe this, that if someone supports Donald Trump or someone supports a conservative movement, they're not just misguided politically.
	They're bad people.
	They're racist.
	They're white nationalists.
	They're all those other things, such that maintaining any interaction with them is itself immoral.
	You know, and there's been op-eds even demanding that people renounce their own families if their families are found to be supporters of Donald Trump or the conservative movement or hold these certain views.
	And the reason that's so dangerous is because that does generate this balkanization of society.
	You know, you had the kind of like pillow companies where there were two pillow companies, one that was supposed to be on the left and one that was supposed to be on the right.
	So now where we buy our pillows is supposed to be determined by, you know, there's the red pillow store and the blue pillow store.
	This is begging for a kind of fracturing of our society that is remarkably inflammatory and volatile.
	I'm amazed that people want to flirt with that.
	Yeah, I don't know what, you know, registered independents like me, and I think you, what are we supposed to do?
	Where do we go?
	Are there going to be like a little line of purple stores like down the middle where we can shop and keep our money inside?
	All right, last question, because I've teased it.
	President Biden speaking over in Spain decided to talk about in response to questions, the fact that 85% of the U.S. public thinks the country's going in the wrong direction.
	And the question that was asked to him was, how do you explain to these people who feel the country's going in the wrong direction, including some of the leaders you've been meeting with this week, part of the G7, who think that when you put all this together, it amounts to an America that's going backward.
	His response was, they do not think that.
	They don't think that.
	You haven't found one person, one world leader to say America's going backward.
	America is better positioned to lead the world than we ever have been.
	We have the strongest economy in the world.
	Our inflation rates are lower than other nations in the world.
	And then he goes on to say the one thing that's been destabilizing is the outrageous behavior of the Supreme Court on Roe v. Wade.
	That's the thing, Glenn.
	Your thoughts on it in the minute we have left.
	I mean, look, if Democrats want to continue to live in this very delusional insular bubble where the only information they get, the only things they hear are things that they get from progressive activists and progressive media employees on Twitter increasingly becoming the same thing.
	They can do that.
	And they're going to march right into complete destruction in November.
	All polling data shows that for very good reason, Americans feel suffocated economically.
	And if your strategy is really going to be to send politicians and rich celebrities out to tell them that that's unwarranted or that they need to suffer for good cause, good luck with that.
	But I think that they're just digging their own grave with it.
	Yeah, it's not going to work.
	It didn't work on inflation is transitory.
	It didn't work on we're not having a crime surge and it's not going to work on this either.
	Glenn, always a pleasure.
ADHD Challenges and Hope 00:09:37
	Always happy to be with you, Megan.
	Thanks.
	Talk to you soon.
	You as well.
	Okay.
	So up next, if you have a kid who misbehaves, a kid who drives you crazy, a kid who constantly gets in trouble in school, well, wait until you hear what it might be when my friend and filmmaker Nancy Armstrong joins us right after this break.
	Does your child struggle with problems at school, with getting booted out of the classroom, with behavioral issues?
	At home, do they drive you nuts?
	Can they not sit still at the dinner table?
	So on and so forth.
	Well, then this next segment may be for you.
	My pal Nancy Armstrong is with me now.
	She's an Emmy-nominated producer and the executive producer at Happy Warrior Media.
	And she executive produced a game-changing documentary called The Disruptors.
	I love this film.
	She was inspired to make the film as a result of her family's experiences navigating life with ADHD, which someone in your life may have and you might not even know it.
	She joins us now.
	Hey, great to have you here.
	Thanks for joining us.
	Hey, Megan, thanks so much for having me on.
	Oh, the pleasure is all mine.
	Okay, so I love that you use celebrities at the beginning of this documentary to sort of show people that extremely accomplished household names have ADHD and have used its upsides to achieve great heights.
	But the film itself is really about regular people.
	It profiles regular families who are struggling with all of this.
	And to me, the place I want to start with is your own, because you have a regular family.
	Your husband is featured in the film a bit, but you talk about your son, Jack, who I also know who's delightful.
	But when he was little, maybe less delightful.
	And you noticed some behaviors that you were struggling to sort of understand.
	Yeah, I mean, it was really a struggle.
	Pretty early on, we knew something was definitely going on with him.
	Something was definitely different, but we didn't know what.
	And I mean, we got kicked out of mommy and me class when he was a toddler.
	All the kids were sitting very calmly in their mother's laps in the room, and Jack was running around the circle and turning off the music.
	And she just asked us to leave.
	We cried all the way home.
	And I really didn't understand what was going on, particularly, particularly being a first-time parent.
	And then it took years to get diagnosed, and no one ever mentioned ADHD.
	Oddly, he had all of the symptoms that are the sort of the classic hallmark symptoms of ADHD, distractibility, hyperactivity, impulsivity on a pretty high scale.
	But it wasn't until he was eight years old that we finally got, you know, a real diagnosis.
	And at least then we knew what was going on and that we could get help.
	Now, your husband, Tim Armstrong, is featured in the film as well, and he has ADHD.
	So at the time that you were wondering about Jack, did you know that Tim had it?
	No, not at all.
	In fact, Tim was basically diagnosed in the room when the diagnostician was telling us about Jack's symptoms.
	He was running off the list of all the symptoms of ADHD, and Tim's hand kind of goes up.
	And I looked at him like, what now?
	What, you know, what's happening?
	He said, I have all those symptoms.
	And the diagnostician said, well, it's hereditary, which it is highly heritable trait.
	So that was kind of the beginning of his diagnosis journey and finding out that he had ADHD.
	And then our girls were also diagnosed, but we kind of missed their diagnosis for a long time because girls present so differently than boys.
	They're not as hyperactive.
	They're more inattentive type.
	They can also be hyperactive, but they don't present the same way as boys.
	And oftentimes we miss it and they misdiagnose girls with anxiety or depression.
	And they can kind of white knuckle it through K through five.
	And then when they get to middle school, a couple of things happen.
	Their hormones kick up, which can really exacerbate symptoms of ADHD.
	And also they're going from one class, one teacher to six classes, six teachers, six binders.
	Oh my God, the binders.
	I fought very hard for my daughters to have one binder because there was no way they could be successful with all those binders.
	Roy because you make a good point in the school setting.
	These schools are not set up for children with this challenge.
	In fact, it's to the contrary.
	And so the frustration that these kids are feeling and they don't know why they're feeling it must be immense.
	What they wind up thinking most of the time is, I'm not smart.
	I can't do it.
	Yeah, that's what's happening in school.
	And it's really sad.
	Actually, everyone is set up to fail in a school environment.
	The kids are set up to fail because it's kind of this assembly line approach to education, which is deadening to kids with ADHD.
	And teachers are also kind of set up to fail because they don't have the requisite amount of education to really help kids with ADHD.
	And it's 10% of the students they're going to have in every class.
	So I hope this film goes, you know, a long way toward a first step in education for teachers who really don't understand ADHD and inspiring further education because it's so important.
	Teachers can have a profound effect on your child's life in a super positive way if they understand what your child is dealing with.
	And we showed that in one instance with Will I Am in the film where Mr. Wright understood his talent and gave him a lot of positive feedback.
	And that was a formative moment for him.
	What most kids experience is a ton of negative feedback.
	And that is really demoralizing.
	And they end up thinking that they're stupid and not capable.
	And that's really a tragedy.
	There's one doctor in the film.
	This jumped out at me when I watched it.
	He says, these kids are misunderstood.
	He said, it breaks my heart because they receive such negative feedback from their world.
	And it's really not their fault.
	They're, I mean, I was saying in the tees that ants in the pants can't sit down at dinner, can't stay still, can't focus on the lesson plan, constantly getting thrown out of the class.
	That's part of the problem, constantly getting booted from the class, then they're behind, then it exacerbates everything.
	But their day-to-day experience is frustration, being told they're bad.
	They hear it from their parents, loving parents, but who are frustrated.
	They hear it from their teachers.
	They hear it from their band leaders.
	They hear it in every circumstance to the point where they wind up believing it, that there's just something wrong with them.
	Well, the manifestation of ADHD oftentimes is behavioral.
	So in other, you know, otherwise they look like normal kids, but their behavior is very outside the norm and disruptive, which is, you know, kind of gives way to the title of the film.
	But they end up thinking that they are incapable and they get such negative feedback.
	And it's really not, these are their formative years.
	So they're going into adulthood with this very negative view of themselves.
	And so it's very important to get diagnosis and treatment, I think, so that they know what they're dealing with.
	They can work, you know, they can find treatments and solutions that help them along the way.
	And also that people and their environment understand that this is neurological.
	That's kind of the biggest problem we face as a society with ADHD right now is that there's a deep disconnect between what the public thinks about ADHD, which is that it's just bad parenting and bad kids, and what we know from decades of research and hundreds, if not thousands of studies.
	We know it's neurological 100%.
	We know what parts of the brain it affects.
	We know it's highly heritable.
	And now we know from experts all over the country that even though ADHD does have challenges that need to be managed, it also has some pretty impressive strengths.
	And if you can find a path in life to activate and accelerate those strengths, it can be a big asset, but you have to be diagnosed and treated and you have to find ways to manage the challenges.
	Oh, I mean, after I watched the film, I remember emailing you like, I kind of want it.
	I wish I had it, you know, in some ways, because like a lot of these things, there's a great flip to the flop.
	You know, there's, there are definite upsides to these same quote unquote negative characteristics.
	And one of the points we make in the film is that you've got somebody in there saying, it's got the word disorder in it.
	There's a deficit in it.
	You know, there's something wrong with you.
	You're sick.
	But the film, you know, presents another option.
	It doesn't ignore the downsides of having ADHD, the challenges of it, but also gives hope because it's like, I think a lot of parents like you are probably frustrated at getting kicked out of the mommy and me and all the things that follow with behavioral instances.
	But it could mean your child is facing enormous upside once you get a handle on this and learn to channel the gifts that come with this into the right lanes.
	And that'll never happen without diagnosis and treatment.
	I mean, what all of the superstars in the film had in common was parents that stood behind them 100% and never gave up on them.
	And they also had education to get on that path that they wanted to get on to be successful.
	But we find, you know, people that are entrepreneurs have ADHD.
	They have creativity, curiosity, energy.
	They're not risk, they're not risk averse.
	So they take big swings at things and they're good in high stimulation environments like ER rooms or as surgeons or firefighters.
	They will not do well in a cubicle.
	That's not a path for them.
	But if they can find a path that stimulates them, that's very exciting to them, they can really have an incredible trajectory.
	Okay, so speaking of some of the celebrities, we pulled just a small clip that shows some of the better known names explaining what it's like to have it.
	Because I think now we have a lot of people out there wondering, do I have it?
	Do I have a high energy?
Medication for Undiagnosed Kids 00:15:41
	I can be distracted.
	So this is a clip of some folks describing what it's like.
	I spend my every waking moment trying to get outside of my own head because it's a mess in there.
	It's very busy.
	Your brain is always firing.
	You're firing at a thousand miles an hour.
	You're eight cylinders by eight cylinders, 24-7, 365.
	It is like I'm juggling 20 balls, but I don't remember where they were in the air.
	I'm just there trying to kind of catch all these balls.
	And I remember nothing.
	Imagine somebody sitting on the keys of the computer.
	That's what your brain is like.
	That's ADHD.
	That last one with Steve Madden.
	That's such a great descriptor.
	That helped me, right?
	Like just constant, constant, constant info.
	And you can't mute it.
	You can't, it's like, there's no muting it, I guess, without medication.
	Well, there's ways to focus.
	I mean, they also have this hyper focus, which is the ability to really go very deeply into a topic for a long period of time longer than someone without ADHD.
	And I think, you know, the misnomer about ADHD is that they have a deficit of attention.
	They really don't.
	They have too much attention.
	While a normal neurotypical person can just focus on what they're supposed to focus on, someone with ADHD is finding exactly the same amount of attention to something over here that has nothing to do with this moment.
	So they, it's like they have the difficulty focusing their attention, but they have too much attention is really what it is.
	So how do you know, right?
	How do you get that diagnosis?
	Because now we've got a lot of parents out there saying, I have it and all my kids have it too.
	Like, yeah.
	Yes.
	This describes everyone I know.
	The pandemic did not help in terms of ADHD.
	I mean, there was a real uptick in ADHD, partly because I think the pandemic and the shutdown and being online schooling, that really exacerbated symptoms of ADHD.
	You know, online learning isn't really good for anyone, but it's especially horrible for kids with ADHD.
	They just, they don't learn anything.
	And so that was really probably horrible for parents with kids who have ADHD.
	But that's, you know, that's really the diagnosis is so important so that they can understand really what's going on with them.
	It's so hard right now because you can't get in to see physicians or somebody who would be in a position.
	I guess you go to a neurologist.
	So you can't get in and the wait lists are long.
	And so it's like it exacerbated it and it also made it harder to get it diagnosed and treated.
	The pandemic.
	Yeah.
	I mean, well, that's the problem initially is that there are a dearth of clinicians in ADHD.
	So what needs to happen is that primary care physicians and pediatricians need to become an accredited first line of defense because there aren't enough clinicians on ADHD.
	And, you know, in Australia, I'm speaking to people all over the world.
	And there's this woman in Australia that says she knows she has ADHD, but it's an eight-month wait to get in to see someone.
	So people are turning to social media or online sites, which may or may not be the right way to go.
	And so that's really a huge problem is that we really do not have enough people to help the doctors.
	TikTok talk is never, never a good idea.
	So can you just expand though?
	Because I'm going to show a clip of Sweet Hogan, who is his experience is indicative of so many kids and parents.
	But can you expand a little bit on the differences between how it manifests in boys and girls?
	Because when we get to Hogan, you'll see, you know, he's big and there are confrontations, you know, in terms of his physicality and so on.
	That's not going to happen with ADHD girls.
	Yeah.
	I mean, with girls, it is exquisite sensitivity to rejection.
	It's hypersensitivity.
	It's emotional impulsivity that's very problematic when you are in friendships.
	And so where girls really struggle is in friendships sometimes because they're highly emotional and it's all psychological with girls.
	So that's an area that's really different with girls.
	And also, again, they just don't present the same amount of hyperactivity as boys.
	Well, that's fascinating because it's like, if as you say, if it really manifests in middle school when the school challenges change, how are you supposed to discern that from the normal hormone surge and kind of difficult behavior we all expect to get from our tweens and teens?
	Well, it's the degree to which it causes an impairment.
	Like you said, everyone is distracted every once in a while or everyone is hypersensitive every now and then, but it's the degree to which it is an impairment in multiple settings and it's kind of becoming chronic and really interfering with their life.
	That's a good point.
	I remember talking to my own therapist when my kids were little and I was trying to figure out whether everything was right and was anything normal or abnormal and so on.
	And he used to say, if there's a problem with your child, you don't have to go looking for it.
	You will know, you know, and that has proven to be true in my own life.
	Okay, so one of the families featured in the documentary is the family of Hogan.
	And this is a clip that shows, this is not unusual, that this child, 13 years old, had an incident at school that led to some very bad results that won't be totally unfamiliar to parents of kids with ADHD watch.
	This week, I got suspended from school for some stuff that I did.
	I was just kind of messing around in class.
	I got a call from a police officer Friday afternoon, 3.30.
	What happened was that he was walking down the hall playing with a friend.
	They were kind of pushing each other, horseplay, and that kid like pushes Hogan against the wall.
	And Hogan comes back and pushes him because it hurt.
	And then that kid just popped him in the face.
	And Hogan is about to start crying.
	He's in the middle of the hallway and he's embarrassed.
	Like his thought is, I'm going to go to the bathroom and cool off and I'm going to go to class.
	But the teacher says, no, you can't go.
	He keeps walking in with his head down.
	And then she blocks the door.
	Yeah, or kind of holds out her hand and he just kept walking through.
	And she pressed charges on him.
	He basically went to, you know, sort of school jail after that.
	And it's so hard to get them right tracked after an incident like that.
	Yeah, I mean, that was really an awful thing to happen to Hogan.
	He's such a sweet kid and I have no doubt he's going to go great places in life.
	But you can see how you can get on the wrong track.
	You know, one thing happens, you end up in this special school.
	Now you've got this thing hanging over your head.
	And you can see that snowballing.
	You know, if kids don't, and they know that Hogan's diagnosed and the teachers know he's diagnosed, which seems particularly unfair about this particular incident.
	But if kids are not undiagnosed and the teacher just thinks they're willful or badly behaved, then they get put in a special classroom.
	From there, they get, you know, start acting out and get into the juvenile detention system.
	And then from there, you can get into the criminal justice system.
	And they, you know, there's anywhere from 25 to 40% of prison inmates have ADHD, which is, which is undiagnosed or has recently been diagnosed.
	So if we could have caught those kids earlier, if we can catch everyone earlier that has it, just think of, you know, how many more amazing people we could have being super productive in the world and using their talent instead of ending up, you know, in a bad situation.
	Well, and in that situation, as you point out, the teacher knew, so it's especially bad.
	But where the teachers don't know, it's got to be something in the back of their heads.
	But I have sympathy for them because the documentary shows us how even some of the moms, I feel so bad for these moms, they beat themselves up once they get the diagnosis.
	It was Zara's mom.
	She's one of the girls featured.
	And she was so sad when she realized she looked back on how she'd been interpreting her child's behavior.
	And I mean, I feel like we've all been there where she talked about how she felt like there was an intention to like upset her or disobey her or antagonize her, I think maybe been the word she used, that the daughter was intentionally doing that.
	And only once she sort of started to understand what her daughter was actually going through and how it affects a girl's mind, did she start to get tougher on her own self as the mom, like, oh my God, there was a better, different way I could have handled that.
	Yeah, I mean, that's one of the saddest things is so much parental guilt.
	You know, parenting is hard anyway, but raising a child with ADHD is like parenting on steroids.
	And parents have so much guilt about getting it wrong and about losing their patients.
	I mean, I've had that myself.
	I'm not a naturally super patient person, but I've had to kind of really learn.
	And it's a growth journey for parents.
	And if you can just hang in there and really try to understand where your child is coming from and support them as best you can and never stop believing in them, the rewards of that can be, you know, really wonderful.
	It's very, it's a high intensity, but highly rewarding thing to parent a child with ADHD.
	But the parents have so much guilt.
	And I get all these letters, you know, now that the film is out from all over the world from parents who are just so relieved to see themselves in the film, to see other, to have this community, to see other parents that are in the same struggle as they are.
	And that's really what we wanted for the film.
	You know, I partnered with the dream team of documentary filmmaking talent with Stephanie Suktig and Kristen Lazor.
	And we had the intention to make the film for parents, for children, for families, because they didn't have a film like this before.
	And we really wanted this to be kind of the first step towards really opening the door to understanding this a little bit better.
	The one mom is talking about how she would go to the school and drop off apology notes for her child.
	She felt bad about how she dealt with like his refusal to get his stuff together and get into the car and we got to go.
	And the time is what the time is.
	And you have other children too who need, you know, the family can't cater to the one child at all times.
	And I mean, I feel like we can all relate to that, but this is a good sort of reminder for people that it may be more than just your child behaving in an annoying way.
	It's worth looking into because if it is ADHD, there are real coping mechanisms that you can use.
	And yes, therapy could be one, different parental reactions and behaviors and approaches could be one.
	And medication is one.
	And this is where we get to the, you know, Tom Cruise, these parents who are medicating their children and they don't know anything about the drugs.
	And now we've sort of flipped because people start abusing things like Adderall, you know, because they want to stay awake and active and thin, that those drugs get a bad name.
	Whereas they, I know, have been very helpful in your own family and in these families that you feature.
	And you say it's basically a game of trial and error by parents, but you try to destigmatize the meds.
	Well, we really tried to be agnostic when it comes to medication.
	It's a very personal choice whether or not to try medication for your child.
	And, you know, there's a toolbox of things you can use to help mitigate the symptoms of ADHD.
	And medication is one of them.
	And it's just important to know the research behind it.
	There are, you know, 22 longitudinal studies that show that kids who use these medications are not predisposing themselves to use drugs, which is one of the concerns.
	There are 35 studies that show that using these medications over time leads to the brain kind of wiring up more normally, more neurotypically over time.
	So those are really positive.
	And they've done more studies on these medications for ADHD than any other drug you will ever take because we use them with children.
	And I think they are abused, but they're not really abused by people with ADHD.
	They're abused by non-ADHD people because when you take a stimulant and you have a neurotypical brain, it does give you a high.
	When you take stimulants as an ADHD person, it calms you down.
	So it's, you know, usually kids don't even really want to take medication.
	They don't love the idea of it, but they want to be able to focus in class.
	They don't want to be impulsive and get in trouble with their friends and get in trouble with their teachers.
	So that's their motivation to take medication if it works for them.
	And like you said, it's trial and error, or we call it trial and examination because you may have to try one type of drug.
	And then if that doesn't work, you have to tweak the dosage or try a different one.
	And that's a very, very uncomfortable process.
	And I've been through that and it's really, really awful.
	But when you then finally find the one that works, it's this tremendous relief because they can have target symptom relief without any downsides.
	And that's really, you know, it's a tremendous lift for those kids.
	Well, and I think that's, that's a nice thing to know, too, is that you could be using the drug to get yourself off the drug.
	I mean, it really could help solve the brain problem to where you don't need anything eventually.
	I want to end with the upsides because, you know, you're talking about the kids who and the sort of the feedback that they get as kids, as children, that they're problematic, that there's something wrong with them.
	And, you know, it can be very damaging.
	That plus these great gifts that are there as well.
	Maybe they're not being called that or identified as that yet, of like great creativity and great energy and abilities to do super focusing explains to me why there are so many super successful people with ADHD.
	Because you tend, like, if you have all those gifts, you know, the creativity and the drive and the focus and all that, and then people crap on you for years and years, you probably will be a big success because you're driven.
	You have issues you need to overcome.
	I always worry that, like, I'm, I need to create more issues with my children if I want them to be very successful.
	I need to damage them more.
	I mean, I'm doing my part.
	I think I need to do more.
	I used to think that when I was like, you know, screaming bloody murder at the top of my lungs, but probably, you know, I've gotten to a place now where I almost never raise my voice just because, you know, I think that someone has to stay calm in the relationship.
	And my kids are very excitable people.
	So, but I do want to touch on the one thing that you said, which is that kids with ADHD tend to have to try so much harder to be good at what they're doing because they're particularly if they've been undiagnosed.
	And even if they have, even if they're undiagnosed and unmedicated, even if they are diagnosed, they still have to work harder.
	And so their pedal speed is very fast.
	And when they go into adulthood and their brain matures and things get a little easier, they still sort of have this very fast pedaling speed.
	So they're working on a higher frequency.
	And then they're, you know, they're able to leverage the skills of their brain.
	So they go like this.
	And I think that's really fascinating.
	And I think we saw that with so many people in the documentary that Scott Kelly felt terrible.
	Yeah.
	Scott Kelly, the astronaut, I interviewed him when I was on NBC and he talked about how he was a straight C student.
	He just, he did not do well in school.
	And you have this image of astronauts like, oh, I could never be an astronaut.
	You'd have to get straight A's and A pluses in every scientific course you ever took.
	Nope, not necessarily.
	And he's a great example of this.
	He's a great example.
	And he, you know, his grandmother told him he was stupid and he would never learn to read.
	And, you know, but that whole thing with getting C's, it's very interesting.
	David Nealman, who's the founder of JetBlue and many other jet companies, he always only got C's and he felt really dumb growing up.
	And even when JetBlue went public many years ago, he said he just drove home still feeling like the loser from high school because it was so ingrained in his head that he wasn't good enough and wasn't good as good as everyone else.
Consensual Affair at MIT 00:14:19
	And so I think that is kind of an internal motivator if you can flip it to that.
	If you're negatively motivated, not everyone is.
	But that's interesting that so many people had that struggle.
	I am because I'm Irish.
	So we responded just being insulted.
	And I mean, it doesn't upset us.
	It just, you know, we're like, I knew it.
	Yeah, you're right.
	Good things can happen if you try to turn it around.
	Nancy, such a pleasure.
	I really, really love the film.
	It's already won a bunch of awards.
	It's called The Disruptors.
	It's available now on Apple TV and iTunes and YouTube, Google Play, Amazon, and more.
	Promise you, you will love it.
	I promise you.
	The disruptors.
	Check it out.
	All the best, my friend.
	Thank you so much, Megan.
	Okay, coming up after this break, we are going to meet somebody who I've wanted to meet and who you may know, whose name you may know.
	Her name is Susie Weiss.
	You recognize the last name.
	You probably know of her sister.
	Why is Susie here?
	I have to stay tuned to find out.
	Joining me now, Susie Weiss.
	Susie is a former New York Post reporter and a contributor to Common Sense on Substack.
	She is also the younger sister of Common Sense's founder, Barry Weiss.
	Susie, I am so excited to meet you and to have you here.
	Thanks for coming on.
	Me too, Megan.
	Thank you so much for having me.
	Oh, you look a little like Barry.
	I've read so much of what you've written, but I've never seen you.
	That's fun.
	This is so fun.
	You have the same face and voice.
	It's terrifying.
	Talent must run in the family because I read your stuff.
	I'm like, how's this girl 27?
	This is crazy.
	Your writing is beautiful.
	Your thoughts are.
	What happened on Tuesday, Megan?
	I'm 26 still.
	Oh my God, sister.
	Don't even get me started.
	Okay.
	I'm in my what, fifth decade now, 51.
	I always hate to do the math.
	Is that considered your fifth or your sixth decade?
	I don't know.
	Whatever.
	I didn't go to the fancy schools like you did.
	All right.
	So Susie writes for Barry Weiss for her common sense.
	And you should never miss a Susie Weiss piece because they're very insightful, way beyond the wisdom any self-respecting 26-year-old should have.
	You should have been out partying more and not developing that beautiful brain.
	But we'll get to that later in life.
	So the piece that really got our attention, they're all good, but the one I really wanted to talk to you about was the piece you did on David Sabatini.
	And just to set it up for our audience, we've been covering on this show the weaponization of Me Too.
	And it's happened to Roland Fryer, this brilliant Harvard professor, happens to be a black professor there.
	I think the youngest tenured black professor in Harvard's history who's been completely railroaded out of his prestigious opportunities there over trumped up Me Too charges.
	Joshua Katz, this just happened to him at Princeton, a similar situation.
	And Ilya Shapiro was not Me Too'd out of his Georgetown law position, but he did send out just a poorly worded tweet about Katanji Brown Jackson that basically wound up costing him his opportunity there.
	And when they finally gave him a like, well, we guess we'll let you start to his credit, he said, forget you.
	This is doomed and didn't go.
	And that brings us to David Sabatini, who I think might be the worst case of all.
	I'm horrified by what you wrote.
	Not only did I read it, I then listened to it, you know, the audio of it, and then I shared it with everybody I knew.
	I want everybody to go to Barry Weiss's substack and read this, but Susie's going to walk us through the basics of the story here.
	So who is David Sabatini?
	Right.
	Thanks, Megan, for that setup.
	David Sabatini is the most important scientist you've never heard of, right?
	So he studies something called the MTOR pathway.
	He discovered it when he was a graduate student.
	I don't really know about the mTOR pathway.
	I think it would take a PhD to explain.
	The important thing to understand is that the mTOR pathway, which Sabatini and his team of 39 researchers worked on, is essential to understanding cells and eventually the cure for cancer.
	Okay, so I think when we talk about overreach in the Me Too movement, we tend to think of producers or comedians or whoever it is.
	But I think it's a different story.
	And I think it requires a big magnifying glass when you're talking about someone who could potentially save the lives of millions of people with his research.
	So David Sabatini had a consensual relationship with a colleague.
	It didn't end well.
	She later claimed that he harassed her.
	And now one of the country's most important scientists who was getting something like $4 million in funding from places like the American Cancer Society and the Pentagon.
	And he had won every science prize under the book.
	He was expected to win the Nobel as well.
	He's collecting unemployment.
	So he's unemployed and unemployable.
	And, you know, it's just a kind of crazy story.
	And it goes from MIT to NYU, who was thinking of hiring him.
	And it's a piece of what's happening in our whole culture.
	And it shows who has the power.
	Is it the people at the top?
	Is it the Robert Grossmans who run NYU's medical school?
	Or is it a graduate student who claims that they'd be unsafe if David Sabatini were to continue doing his research in New York?
	My gosh.
	All right.
	So let's walk through it so people understand the slow murder of David Sabatini's professional career.
	I mean, this guy-it really is.
	And we need this guy.
	And so, like, I look, you know, of course, I'm very open-minded to somebody's Me Too claim.
	I don't think I have to prove that to anybody.
	But this is horrific.
	And what it sounds like to me, this is my opinion, is an affair that didn't work out and somebody who decided she'd been jilted and wanted to get him.
	And boy, she did.
	And in this environment, you know, somebody like this woman, who's very well credentialed, saying the things she was saying about him, she's going to have a lot of power.
	So this woman had a consensual affair with him.
	There was an age difference.
	He was 50.
	She was 29.
	He had split with his wife.
	There was no allegation of like extramarital stuff or whatever.
	And he ran a lab at MIT and she was coming in.
	She was coming in to run her own lab at 29.
	Is that correct?
	That's right.
	So David was a principal investigator at his lab at MIT.
	And Kristen Knaus, who he had an affair with, was also an incoming principal investigator.
	Usually you don't get that position when you're so young.
	MIT has this sort of special program through the Whitehead Institute.
	So I won't deny that David Sabatini, as a rock star in his field, had more power than her.
	But technically, according to the Whitehead Institute, where they both worked, the only, you know, the only rule he broke was not disclosing that he had a consensual relationship, which violated their consensual relationship policy.
	So as much as this is about, you know, maybe a jilted lover, maybe someone who wanted to take another person down, I think it's also about what happens when we litigate sex to this degree, when an affair becomes so procedural and your boss is involved in it.
	I mean, we're trying to.
	Can I say for the record, I will distinguish this from, for example, Jeff Zucker at CNN, who had a consensual affair with a colleague who was his underling, who he continued to promote up the ranks over other young women who worked at CNN.
	That's a deep problem.
	That's an ethical problem.
	This was not that situation.
	She had already gotten this position of running her own lab.
	And the policy against consensual affairs amongst people in these positions didn't even kick in until after they'd already begun it.
	So, you know, whatever.
	He basically got hung up on a technicality.
	Right.
	So there's that technical aspect of it.
	And then there's the fact that according to this 250 page report that I reviewed, where they brought in these criminal investigators, including a DA to investigate David Sabatini, a former state attorney, he violated their consent for relationship policy, which is the technicality.
	And then there was a lot of mushy language about how he violated the anti-harassment policy because his behavior created a sexual undercurrent in the lab.
	They said.
	His relationship exacerbated things because of her, because of his quote indirect influence over her, and ran afoul of the spirit, if not the letter, of the policy.
	So because you have these like bricks of legalese, you can find a way so that if you swore in the lab, that could count as harassment because it could make someone uncomfortable.
	Um, so we have the technicality aspect of it and then the the bad behavior in the lab, which is what they really needed to get him kicked out.
	Because if that's what makes it about the Whitehead itself that everyone I spoke to about, you know a dozen and a half people who worked with David Sabatini say that his lab is the gold standard um, that women there weren't uncomfortable, that it just wasn't in the air.
	So that's what where I think the Whitehead really overstepped.
	Well, and this was one of the conclusions in their report this is from your reporting um, that they found Sabatini's propensity to praise or gravitate toward those in the lab that mirror his desired personality traits.
	Scientific success or view of science above all else, creates additional obstacles for female lab members.
	Omg, because because a woman can't believe that science above all else is the correct way to approach work at a science lab.
	You know, they're just way too concerned with having babies.
	I have no idea.
	I think that really jumped out of me too.
	Yeah, it was absurd, the absurdity of this, so that so they come out with this report, all these, you know, people brought in to investigate him and he was, forgive me, dismembered.
	I mean, piece by piece, he lost everything.
	I mean, some of those guys I I mentioned had like a year suspension.
	Or, like Rolin, lost control of his lab at Harvard where they did all these great studies on like police officers and you know, black men and so on.
	Roland is a black man, so that happened, but he wasn't totally fired.
	Ultimately, the guy at Princeton was.
	But David I mean, it was swift and it wasn't just the lab, the professorship at MIT.
	Talk to us about what happened to him.
	His prizes got taken away, his funding got taken away.
	When you're a scientist at this caliber, you're really reliant on these huge institutions, huge research labs.
	It's not like a writer who could just go start a sub stack and do something else.
	You know what I mean if they, if they have to leave the mainstream.
	So David Um got his, got his funding taken away, got his prizes taken away.
	He was on the board of a ton of startups in the Boston area that were biotech startups with, you know, missions like looking for the cure for cancer.
	And he tells me he wasn't living in his house because he couldn't stand the sound of the Fedex envelopes dropping into his mail slot uh, which was invariably another uh institution or startup up or whatever it was cutting ties with him.
	He lost about 35 pounds.
	Uh, he doesn't sleep anymore and you know the real loss I think is to all of us.
	I mean, this was a guy at the prime of his life and now he's shuffling around taking care of his 11 year old, whom he shares custody of with his ex-wife, and really doing nothing.
	And I think that is um as much as loss to him, a loss to to the country.
	And this is, you say he can't build his own and that that struck a chord, because I know that's Barry's thing.
	You know she's been saying that.
	Um Ben Shapiro says that I believe in it as well.
	Like, don't let them cancel you.
	You know, build your own thing.
	Like Barry started a whole new university because just to try to create an alternate.
	But this is not really an area in which that's all that possible.
	He, you can't just cure cancer from your living room yeah, and you need the influx of students at prestigious places who want to go to the prestigious places because they're more likely to get um public published at those prestigious places.
	So it's just like sort of crazy ecosystem.
	And when NYU thought, you know, maybe we could try and pick this guy up, they learned the hard way that a vocal minority of their postdocs and graduate students were not going to let that happen.
	This is a horrifying piece of the story too, because let's talk about this.
	So David's there, avoiding the Fedees, losing 35 pounds, losing his hair.
	He can't sleep, he can't eat.
	Everyone has severed ties with him again.
	There's not even an allegation that he inappropriately touched somebody.
	He had a consensual affair which they said violated the policy, and you know, I that's about it.
	I mean maybe some sort of a bro culture they said was in the lab because he used to have whiskey tastings, that's it, that's it.
	So he lost everything because of that.
	And so he reaches out to a friend at NYU and she was open-minded to him and then take it from there right, Daphna Barsegai, who runs science at NYU, called up her friend, David Sabatini, to check in on him and he was sort of saying i'll never work again.
	And she was saying, you're David Sabatini, you're gonna work again like you're the man.
	And he was like well, would you hire me?
	And she was like oh, okay.
	So then that started, um NYU going through the process of vetting this guy and and Daphna said something really beautiful, I think, to me, which was, you know, it was incumbent upon us to check out these allegations for ourselves, at the risk of depriving generations of his scientific discoveries.
	And what they did was they obtained the Whitehead report which hasn't been made public but uh, which i've read, and they sent it to three other lawyers who all said that David Sabatini was completely denied due process here.
	Um, they thought it was just kind of a sham investigation, frankly.
	Um, so that when it leaked that NYU was considering hiring Sabatini it leaked to Science magazine a huge protest um erupted at NYU.
	I went to the protest and I I spoke to one student and I said, you know, if David's, where should a David Sabatini go, this brilliant scientist?
	And she goes prison like they just want nothing to do with him and they think by NYU hiring them, it just shows that all they care about is prestige, Prestige and research dollars, and that they don't care about their, you know, the safety of their postdocs.
	So after NYU students protested, NYU stopped the process of vetting Sabatini to potentially hire him.
NIH Funding as Death Sentence 00:07:47
	And then, you know, before he gets, before you get to that, because I know where you're going, but before we get there, this is from your piece.
	NYU shared the Whitehead report with several outside lawyers who all concluded he was not afforded due process, as you mentioned.
	Postdocs at the medical school were threatening to retract papers.
	Faculty had been ostracized for not publicly blasting Sabatini.
	Andrew Hamilton, NYU's president, sent a letter, quote, strongly advising that the medical school not go through with hiring Sabatini, writing, quote, faculty at the university and elsewhere have been told not to work with us.
	And also, speakers are being told not to come here.
	And then it goes on to say that on May 3rd, NYU announced after careful and thorough consideration, it will not be possible for him to become a member of our faculty.
	And then let's talk about the NIH.
	Right.
	So NYU gets about $470 million.
	No, excuse me, it's $500 million in grant money.
	$770 of that is for a study on long COVID.
	And Daphne Bar Sagai is sort of like the arbiter of all of this money.
	And this is a person who's never had a complaint against her in her entire career.
	A lot of anonymous complaints are filed to the NIH about Daphne Bar Sagai, who is now being audited for, you know, her involvement in all the NIH money because of the potential that she creates an unsafe environment in her lab.
	So I think going back to your original point, Megan, about the overreach of Me Too, what we have here is a lot of policies that were enacted, a lot of anonymous complaint boxes, a lot of avenues that you could, you know, lodge a complaint if something happened to you.
	I think there's a potential, and maybe we're seeing it here in the Sabatini case, that those avenues are being taken advantage of.
	I mean, the fact that not only does he get booted from MIT and every single organization that he was associated with, including some of the organizations he founded, they all severed ties with him.
	But then the university that considers hiring him, the person there, gets investigated by the NIH herself.
	People start writing in complaints against her, which were totally out of the blue.
	And now the NIH is looking at possibly withdrawing that funding.
	That's next level.
	I mean, that's mafia shit.
	That's scary.
	And if, and if you really think about it, the NIH funding, they changed their policies around Me Too, because basically, before, you know, historically, there was a game of pass the harasser.
	So if a researcher brought in a lot of money, the institution wouldn't be as likely to investigate them for doing something wrong in their lab.
	But now with the change of policy, the institution is almost incentivized to prove that something untoward happened in the lab so that they could kick out the harasser, in this case, David Sabatini, and keep the grant money for themselves.
	They're more likely to be able to transfer the name of the grantee if they're able to prove sexual harassment.
	So it's sort of like, you know, watching.
	So, you know, we're laying the bed that we made, I think, in a big sense.
	But the NIH money part of it is really fascinating to me.
	And frankly, I think while we were all talking about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, this was the Me Too story that really should have gotten our attention.
	And if the NIH turns on you as an academic institution, you're dead.
	You're dead.
	That's where your funding comes.
	Like you, no, he, Sabatini's, he was already in his professional coffin.
	This was the nail, because no one will look at him now, not just because NYU got scared and got away, but because the NIH basically came in and said, we will ruin you, if you even consider him.
	And it's not just that, it's not just Sabatini, it's his lab members who loved him, who were told by the Whitehead uh Brass, including Ruth Layman, who runs the Whitehead that um, if they went against the Whiteheads ask not to contact David Sabatini, not to help him, not to be communicate with him in any way um, they wouldn't want to jeopardize their NIH funding, basically.
	So I talked to all of these people who say David Sabatini changed their life, he's the most brilliant scientist, he's a pillar.
	None of them would go on the record with me.
	Why do you think that is?
	It's, it's because they're afraid of going where he is and and not being able to get NIH funding, which one of them described to me, exactly as you said, as as a death sentence.
	Well, if they're going to do it to this woman who runs the NYU program, who didn't have a blemish on her record and all she did was sort of recommend him, who wouldn't they do it to exactly?
	And it's, and it's interesting because on one hand you have Whitehead publicly saying, you know, we're just trying to protect trainees from this monster, but then on the inside you have them saying we're gonna, we're gonna make your life very difficult if you try and save your your old boss right, because didn't they?
	They said that they couldn't right, didn't they mandate that the people in his labs not speak, even if they wanted to, even if they wanted to offer a positive testimonial, and not to be in touch with him.
	That's right.
	They were told not to be in touch with him.
	And I mean, they were in the middle of multi-million dollar experiments on ovarian cancer.
	There were half-used reagents in the lab.
	I mean, this guy was just kicked out, told not to enter the building, and this lab, which was, you know, publishing more papers than you know any other lab in the building, was just dismantled.
	And another fold of this is that a lot of these uh, trainees are immigrants and they don't want to jeopardize their visas, so they're even less likely to speak out because they just want to be in America doing their work.
	Does he know what happened to his lab or any of the projects he was working on?
	He, he really doesn't know another scientist.
	I think his name is Jonathan Weissman, but I would need to double check.
	He got put on a few of the grants uh, and I think they were.
	They were wound down, but you know, the papers are still coming out that he worked on, but he, he has no idea what became of the lab.
	In short, so no, I mean, the only thing that's available to him realistically is the law, and I understand he he has filed a lawsuit.
	So how's, where are we with that?
	That is like in pre-discovery, I believe and um, David knows it's going to take probably a minimum of five years to get his day in court with this.
	But he fire filed a defamation lawsuit uh, against his accuser, the Whitehead, and Ruth Layman, and then, of course, she filed a counterclaim.
	And you know those, those claims are online and you could read them and they're pretty uh, they're pretty incredible documents.
	He should go hire Camille Vasquez, the the Johnny Depp lawyer, that's who it's a defamation Case.
	I know.
	I don't.
	I see what I would do.
	For him.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know what?
	I'm thinking, like, how can we help him?
	And I'm thinking, like, maybe Vivek Ramaswamy can help.
	Like, he's been amazing and he's in this field of, you know, medical technology.
	That's how he made his money.
	And he wrote, you know, wasn't even his book.
	It was like anti-woke, whatever.
	Woke Inc., that's what it was.
	Like, somebody like that.
	We need a, we need a guardian angel to step in and help fund him and make this an independent lane available to him.
	Yeah, I agree.
	But, you know, it goes back to building whole new worlds and building incentive systems that would make the best and brightest minds in the country want to work under David Sabatini in a lab, maybe funded by a billionaire and not by Harvard or the Koch Institute or whoever it is.
	And I think that that is the wheels of that are slowly turning, but unfortunately, probably not as fast as David Sabatini needs them to.
Vivek Ramaswamy and Woke Inc 00:02:00
	All right, last question before I let you go.
	How, I think you're one of four in your in your family.
	That's right.
	How did are you all this way?
	And how did your parents raise daughters like this?
	Oh my God, Megan.
	No, me and Barry have two middle sisters who are totally normal and aren't doing crazy articles that get them in trouble all the time.
	They're awesome.
	They're both new moms.
	They live in Pittsburgh with my parents.
	And yeah, me and Barry are just either something good happened or something very, very bad happened.
	We're still trying to figure it out.
	Something very, very good.
	I know.
	I remember reading something you'd written when you were much younger, and it was something to the effect of, I was, it was very different as I was the youngest.
	And instead of my parents waiting up all night to make sure I made it home by curfew, it was more like, don't wake us up when you sneak in in the middle of the night.
	We need our sleep.
	Yes, yes.
	That story from a million years ago.
	Oh, wow.
	I'm still really proud of that story.
	But it was great.
	Yes, yes.
	I guess we were moths to a flame.
	We just can't stop.
	My dad also writes a lot of columns for the Wall Street Journal that I think are really fabulous.
	But if everything had gone according to plan, me and Barry would be selling carpet in Squirrel Hill where we grew up.
	So I don't know what happened, but I'm happy to be here.
	Let's be glad it didn't.
	You are welcome here anytime.
	And everybody should check out Common Sense if they haven't already.
	What a pleasure, Susie.
	So nice to meet you.
	Thank you so much, Megan.
	It was a pleasure to be here.
	OMG, next week, you've got to listen.
	Download now.
	Sammy the Bull admits to being part of 19 murders, turned on John Gotti in the Gambino crime family, and he's here.
	See you then.
	Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
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Chapters

00:00:00 Filibuster Fraud and Reality
00:15:05 Racism Against Clarence Thomas
00:22:22 Media Reaction to Testimony
00:34:46 Corporate Fear of Being Woke
00:47:28 ADHD Challenges and Hope
00:57:05 Medication for Undiagnosed Kids
01:12:47 Consensual Affair at MIT
01:27:07 NIH Funding as Death Sentence
01:34:55 Vivek Ramaswamy and Woke Inc