The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220802_truth-about-terrorists-killing-and-media-lies-vs-m
Aired: 2022-08-02
Duration: 01:34:17


=== Ongoing Threat After Afghanistan (15:21) ===

[00:00:00]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:12]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:13]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:00:15]  Talk about a big news day.
[00:00:17]  One hour ago, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taiwan.
[00:00:22]  It is the highest level visit by a U.S. official in 25 years.
[00:00:26]  China has warned the U.S. that we are, quote, playing with fire and likely to, quote, get burnt by allowing this visit to take place, but you know, co-equal branches of government and so on.
[00:00:39]  So she did it over the White House's objections.
[00:00:42]  So what happens next?
[00:00:44]  This story is just beginning.
[00:00:45]  Plus, as we close in on the one-year anniversary of the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, the U.S. military has killed Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
[00:00:55]  Good news, right?
[00:00:57]  Well, yes.
[00:00:58]  But after the Biden administration declared Al-Qaeda gone from Afghanistan last year, saying the Taliban was no longer harboring any terrorists, a lot of people wondering what the hell the guy was doing there walking around like it was not a thing in Kabul.
[00:01:12]  He was killed in a drone strike as well while he was standing in a balcony in downtown Kabul in a house that he and his family had been staying in.
[00:01:20]  It was walking distance from the U.S. Embassy.
[00:01:24]  So what are the consequences of that drone strike as opposed to precision strike like we did with bin Laden, where we sent in the Navy SEALs and we were able to gather intelligence?
[00:01:34]  Joining us now to discuss these stories and more, one of our favorites, the extremely brilliant Victor Davis Hansen, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
[00:02:02]  Victor, pleasure to have you back.
[00:02:04]  What do you make of the news that we've killed the new Bin Laden?
[00:02:08]  He took over Al-Qaeda once we killed Bin Laden in 2011.
[00:02:12]  We haven't been able to get him since.
[00:02:13]  He was walking around like it was, you know, the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore in Kabul, feeling totally free and safe there.
[00:02:22]  And then we got him with a drone.
[00:02:24]  What do you make of it?
[00:02:25]  Well, I think we're happy if he's gone.
[00:02:27]  I mean, 50 years ago when he was in his 20s, he was one of the people who was responsible for killing Amr Sadat.
[00:02:35]  He tried to kill Mabarik.
[00:02:37]  He was involved in the Tanzania bombing.
[00:02:40]  He was involved in the USS COL. His fingerprints are all over where either allies of the United States or Americans were killed in terrorist attacks.
[00:02:48]  So we're happy about that.
[00:02:50]  But you hit it right on the nose when you announced that there was no longer a reason to be in Afghanistan at all.
[00:02:59]  That is, forget the 80 billion we left behind, the billion-dollar embassy that who knows what the future of that is, and the $300 million Bagram Air Force base that we refitted.
[00:03:10]  The idea was, well, there's nobody there.
[00:03:14]  Now we find out he's not only there, but he's prominently there and without worry.
[00:03:18]  So it's good that we got rid of him.
[00:03:22]  He was at one time in his life, if you remember, he was the ideological architect of Islamic jihad that kind of merged with al-Qaeda.
[00:03:31]  Raymond Ibrahim's bin Laden reader that had all of the text of bin Laden's speeches and writings were mostly written by Zawahiri.
[00:03:40]  And the thing about him, Megan, he was a keen student of the United States.
[00:03:45]  If you read what he was writing, say, 15 years ago, he was talking about climate change and campaign finance reform and that the United States was an illiberal actor.
[00:03:56]  So he digested the American left and then he regurgitated it back as criticism to us almost the way that we do it, the left does, that China does as well.
[00:04:05]  So we're glad that he's gone.
[00:04:07]  He was ineffective and not in control as Baghdadi had been.
[00:04:12]  There is one irony, though, Megan.
[00:04:15]  When Trump got rid of Soleimani and Baghdadi, Joe Biden was one of the fiercest critics of those operations and said that either Trump didn't deserve credit for it or that it was provocative or that he shouldn't have done it.
[00:04:35]  And so it is ironic now that he did the same type of operation.
[00:04:39]  I'm glad he did, but that's about all I can say on that.
[00:04:45]  Yeah.
[00:04:46]  My team told me about this last night.
[00:04:48]  My first reaction was, great.
[00:04:50]  That's great news.
[00:04:51]  I mean, I think those of us who lived through 9-11 as adults and had the right perspective on it and the aftermath of it could only do one thing but celebrate the demise of an al-Qaeda leader.
[00:05:01]  But you do have to ask, why?
[00:05:04]  Why was he strolling around Kabul so freely?
[00:05:07]  And why, as President Biden said last night, was he, according again, to the president, making videos, including in recent weeks, calling for his followers to attack the United States and our allies.
[00:05:22]  Mark Thiessen had a great piece in the Washington Post saying, that means this guy was planning and inciting external operations against the United States from Afghanistan, possibly under protection of the Taliban, which might not have been possible if Biden had just listened to his military commanders and left residual U.S. force in Afghanistan to begin with.
[00:05:41]  You know, when Biden pulled out the troops so disastrously a year ago, he was so cavalier about doing so, the consequences of it, the manner in which he did it.
[00:05:52]  We pulled a soundbite that underscores a bit of that.
[00:05:55]  It's number one.
[00:05:56]  Listen.
[00:05:58]  Look, let's put this thing in perspective here.
[00:06:01]  What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point with Al-Qaeda gone?
[00:06:08]  We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan as well as getting Osama bin Laden.
[00:06:19]  And we did.
[00:06:21]  Well, there was an ongoing interest.
[00:06:24]  And this was on the other side of the ledger for any president making the decision in how to do this and how to handle the ongoing terror threat.
[00:06:32]  And while it's great that we got Zahiri, it underscores the other point, which is there is an ongoing threat there.
[00:06:38]  And the Taliban, which has been assuring us that they're not harboring terrorists, including al-Qaeda, has been lying to us all along.
[00:06:45]  Yeah.
[00:06:46]  I think it's part of a general symptom symptology that, I mean, there was no accident that Vladimir Putin went into Ukraine after the Afghanistan disaster, which was the greatest humiliation in American history in the last 50 years, not since 1975 on the Saigon roof had we been so humiliated.
[00:07:06]  And it's no accident that Japan is now worried about more missile tests over its territories by North Korea.
[00:07:14]  And it's no accident that Iran keeps boasting that it almost already has a bomb.
[00:07:18]  And it's no accident that China, for the first time in 30 years, is openly talking about attacks on Taiwan.
[00:07:27]  It's all part of the loss of deterrence that this administration is responsible for.
[00:07:31]  And you can see how they did it.
[00:07:33]  I mean, with the Afghanistan, yes, but they have turned also the military into the perception abroad is it's becoming a social justice institution.
[00:07:44]  And its primary mission is no longer to deter enemies or kill bad people and help good people.
[00:07:50]  And we can see that with polls from the Reagan Foundation that says that only 45% have great confidence in our military.
[00:07:57]  That's way down from the normal levels of support.
[00:08:00]  And then in addition, they've only met Megan 40% of their army recruitment.
[00:08:05]  And I lay that at the feet of Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin in those congressional testimonies when they, without any data or supporting evidence, just suggested that an entire demographic, white males were somehow under a cloud of suspicion of white rage or white supremacy when that particular demographic, and I don't like talking about demographics in tribal terms, but they do.
[00:08:30]  And if you're going to do it, then you should look at who died in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they died at twice their numbers in the general population.
[00:08:37]  So there was a general sense abroad that the United States either can't or won't react in the way that it had in the past.
[00:08:44]  Yeah.
[00:08:45]  Oh, yeah.
[00:08:45]  I mean, that's why he was there.
[00:08:47]  Yeah, he was there.
[00:08:49]  He thought, you know what?
[00:08:49]  They're not going to do anything.
[00:08:51]  That's right.
[00:08:52]  These military families who now have to say, okay, so I'm going to send my son or daughter into the U.S. military to fight potentially and die for their country while being lectured about their white rage while being shamed for their white skin.
[00:09:04]  I don't think so.
[00:09:06]  And you're right.
[00:09:06]  I read your piece and there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that the lower recruitment success is linked to the woke leadership and their insistence on taking a role in the social justice movement, which they never should have touched with a 10-foot pole.
[00:09:23]  But just one other point on Zawahiri in Afghanistan, two other points.
[00:09:28]  Tiessen says the following, and I agree with this.
[00:09:31]  You know, Kabul was a city that had been liberated.
[00:09:34]  It had been liberated from Al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies, Tiessen points out, with the blood of courageous American service members.
[00:09:41]  And now to think of the guy walking around downtown Kabul, setting up operations, doing his videotapes, and we're supposed to skip over that point.
[00:09:50]  We're supposed to go directly to, we killed him.
[00:09:53]  What was he doing there?
[00:09:54]  It's not like he was some low-level no-name terrorist who they never would have known was running al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda.
[00:10:00]  They did know, right?
[00:10:01]  And this guy was allowed safe harbor there for some time and was actually releasing propaganda videos.
[00:10:08]  And the other piece of it, Victor, is what about the drone strike?
[00:10:12]  If we had had some people on the ground, perhaps we could have gone in there, Navy SEAL-like, Rob O'Neill-like, and taken him out, as opposed to doing a drone strike where we got no intelligence.
[00:10:23]  That is how it appears.
[00:10:24]  And Tiessen raises that point too.
[00:10:25]  He was a security official in the Bush administration.
[00:10:29]  And he's talking about how we didn't use U.S. Special Operations Forces.
[00:10:33]  We didn't get pocket litter, computers, hard drives, cell phones, documents, or other material intelligence.
[00:10:38]  None of it.
[00:10:40]  I think we didn't get any of that, Megan, because the attitude of this administration is therapeutic.
[00:10:45]  We saw that in Anchorage, Alaska, one of their first things in March of 2021, when they sort of gave a sort of kind of lecture to the Chinese who just then insulted them about everything from Black lives to racism and they shut up.
[00:10:58]  We saw that when Secretary Blinken said, oh my gosh, they broke the DOLA accords.
[00:11:04]  They're not supposed to have al-Qaeda people there.
[00:11:07]  And the problem with all of this is that what they think is magnanimity that's going to be reciprocated by kindness or reciprocal good feelings is interpreted, unfortunately, as weakness to be exploited.
[00:11:19]  And that's what happens across the globe now.
[00:11:22]  This is, again, this is a symptom of what is going to get worse and worse and worse.
[00:11:27]  People, I don't think this administration understands that China watches things like this.
[00:11:32]  They watch the Afghanistan humiliation.
[00:11:34]  They watch this attack.
[00:11:37]  They don't think, wow, the Americans are really adept at taking out Zawahira.
[00:11:40]  They do feel that, but they also feel, my God, they allowed that guy to be right next to the U.S. embassy and they didn't say a word.
[00:11:48]  And so we saw that with the logistic, when Millie said, well, it was a strategic failure, but a logistical success.
[00:11:55]  Or when one of the generals that was fleeing Afghanistan said, we have culturally appropriate food for the refugees when they land in Virginia.
[00:12:04]  And so they just, they can't help it, but send these messages that to other people who are not in the same wavelength continue to reinforce the message that Joe Biden and his people around him either can't or won't do anything to protect American interests.
[00:12:19]  Well, on the subject of China, they're in the news today very much because of Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan.
[00:12:25]  And just a little primer for people not familiar with Taiwan and China and the issue.
[00:12:33]  My belief as a news anchor is people who understand will forgive you a moment's explanation and people who don't totally follow this kind of thing will be grateful just for a one minute explainer.
[00:12:43]  So Taiwan has been governed independently of China since 1949, but China still sees it as part of China.
[00:12:51]  And Beijing has vowed to unify Taiwan with the mainland.
[00:12:56]  And most people who live in Taiwan just kind of want the status quo to keep going.
[00:12:59]  They don't want a massive push for independence.
[00:13:01]  They don't want China to come invade and sort of officially reclaim them.
[00:13:06]  They just kind of want status quo to keep going.
[00:13:08]  And they kind of have their independence.
[00:13:10]  They have their own government, democratically elected.
[00:13:13]  They have 23 million people.
[00:13:15]  And so as far as the United States goes, we've recognized one Chinese government, that's Beijing.
[00:13:22]  And we have formal ties with Beijing, not with Taipei.
[00:13:25]  But it also, we, the United States, has pledged to supply Taiwan with weapons if necessary.
[00:13:30]  Okay, Joe Biden has specifically said that we will defend the Taiwanese militarily if China invades.
[00:13:36]  That is not consistent with our strategic ambiguity.
[00:13:39]  That's our official policy saying sort of we're going to stay out of it.
[00:13:42]  We're not going to take a position.
[00:13:43]  We don't want to saber rattle or upset China.
[00:13:46]  But Joe Biden says what he's going to say, and then the White House continues to try to walk it back.
[00:13:50]  So that's the tension going on between Beijing and China.
[00:13:53]  Sorry, Beijing and Taiwan.
[00:13:55]  And in the midst of this, Nancy Pelosi, I have to say, for reasons I haven't totally understood right now, decided she needed to go to Taiwan.
[00:14:03]  And I get it.
[00:14:04]  She's got a long history of going over there.
[00:14:06]  And she was in Tiananmen Square after it happened.
[00:14:08]  And she cares about the human rights issues over there.
[00:14:11]  But why now?
[00:14:13]  And some online, like Sega and Jetty was saying, this is like her Yas Queen moment.
[00:14:19]  And was it necessary at this particular moment when we're already in sort of a proxy battle with Russia?
[00:14:27]  And do we really need to be poking the bear in China at a time when we've been asking them, you know, don't arm the Russians.
[00:14:36]  Don't backfill the Russians' military supplies right now as we backfill the Ukrainians.
[00:14:41]  And so far, it looks like China has been complying with that.
[00:14:45]  So is now really the time to go poke the bear, right?
[00:14:50]  Anyway, these are the arguments for and against her trip.
[00:14:52]  Just now, I think it was 26, was it senators, Deb, my producer Debbie, came out and said, we're in favor of Nancy Pelosi going there.
[00:15:01]  26 U.S. senators came out and said, we're, and it's bipartisan, saying we're in favor of what she's doing, even though the White House had said, oh, 26 GOP senators said it, even though the White House had said, don't do it, the military had said, don't do it.
[00:15:12]  And now she's doing it.
[00:15:13]  So what's your take on it?
[00:15:15]  You are a military expert, I should tell the audience.
[00:15:17]  Yeah, I think all of those considerations that you talked about are valid.

=== Time To Poke The Bear (06:55) ===

[00:15:21]  And I don't think there was any coordination between the speaker, the White House, and the Pentagon.
[00:15:27]  And so she just felt that she's in the lacuna of presidential leadership.
[00:15:34]  And there is a lacuna.
[00:15:36]  There's not really a force there in the White House that she's taking on increased foreign affairs responsibility.
[00:15:42]  And she thought it would not be a problem, accepted that the Chinese had much more goodwill toward the left than they did to Donald Trump, et cetera.
[00:15:50]  So she didn't coordinate it.
[00:15:51]  But all of that is in the past.
[00:15:53]  Now, the question is: once China said, not only can't you not go, but if you do go, there's going to be military, possibly military consequences.
[00:16:04]  Then she has to go.
[00:16:05]  I mean, it's sort of like that often quoted thing from Napoleon about the siege of Vienna that later became: if you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna.
[00:16:13]  If you're going to go to Taiwan, then go to Taiwan.
[00:16:15]  Don't back out now.
[00:16:16]  Because if you do, you've ceded veto power over U.S. foreign diplomatic travel to Beijing.
[00:16:24]  And we've got to put this in a larger context.
[00:16:26]  This is a government that officially had a virus that leaked out of a lab.
[00:16:33]  I think that's pretty clear now that killed officially 10 million people worldwide, but people suggest maybe 20 or 30 or 40 million and has been absolutely non-transparent, whether it was that phony Lancet investigation.
[00:16:48]  They will not let anybody, and that's a long other story, but they show no contrition.
[00:16:52]  They're not contrite about it at all.
[00:16:54]  And so you're in the situation where China is responsible for destroying an American administration, destroying an economy, giving us all sorts of social, psychological, cultural problems from this crazy two-year lockdown.
[00:17:11]  And then after doing all that, not apologizing, then they're telling the United States, your third-ranking official can't go to an independently governed Taiwan.
[00:17:23]  And so she's got to go now, and we've got to be prepared for the worst and hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst.
[00:17:30]  And because they didn't coordinate it, they're almost blaming each other.
[00:17:33]  You know, they're saying, well, I didn't want to do it.
[00:17:34]  The Pentagon.
[00:17:35]  Pentagon said, well, we didn't have anything to do with it.
[00:17:37]  That's crazy.
[00:17:37]  They should all be in the same front.
[00:17:39]  They should have rallied around her.
[00:17:40]  And privately, they should have said, what the blank is she doing?
[00:17:44]  But publicly, they should have said, the Speaker of the House of Representatives is a U.S. official.
[00:17:50]  She's in charge of funding U.S. foreign policy.
[00:17:53]  She has a primary role that's independent of the White House as a legislative branch.
[00:17:57]  And we support her efforts for their diploma.
[00:18:00]  That's all they had to say.
[00:18:01]  And they didn't do it.
[00:18:03]  Good point.
[00:18:04]  I mean, because there's the two questions of should she have done it in the first place, and what should she have done once threatened by China?
[00:18:12]  And National Review had a piece out saying once threatened, she had to go.
[00:18:14]  You're saying once threatened, she had to go.
[00:18:16]  Because it's about more than Nancy Pelosi at that point.
[00:18:19]  It's about us, the United States.
[00:18:21]  But was it a good idea for her to pick now to go in the first place?
[00:18:25]  Different question.
[00:18:26]  I want to pick up on what you just said.
[00:18:27]  So President Biden and President Xi just had a phone call, and the White House press corps got the chance to ask Karine Jean-Pierre, the terrible press secretary.
[00:18:38]  She's just not effective at her job at all about whether our president raised the issue of COVID origins with the Chinese leader.
[00:18:49]  Like, did we have the guts to raise it in what was like a two and a half hour phone call?
[00:18:54]  Just raise it.
[00:18:56]  And here's a little bit of how that went in soundbite four.
[00:19:00]  Did President Biden ask President Xi anything about getting to the bottom of the origins of COVID?
[00:19:08]  So on the origins of COVID, the two presidents did discuss the health security and transparency as a key part of that.
[00:19:18]  That's pretty vague.
[00:19:21]  Did President Biden tell Xi to start cooperating in the investigations into the origin of COVID that killed at least a million Americans?
[00:19:30]  I am just not going to go beyond what I just laid out.
[00:19:33]  You can't tell us whether or not the president pressed Xi to be more cooperative.
[00:19:37]  I'm just not going beyond.
[00:19:38]  I'm not going to go beyond the readout that I just gave you.
[00:19:42]  We don't get to know.
[00:19:45]  Well, I think that's a big no.
[00:19:47]  And when she talks in the third person abstract about the question of transparency, not an abstract question of transparency.
[00:19:54]  It's a Chinese will not tell the truth about the type of research gain of function that was going on in that lab, and it escaped.
[00:20:04]  And we know that now.
[00:20:05]  And people, I mean, there was a great op-ed by Dr. Stephen Kway, and I think it was Richard Mueller from UC Berkeley's Lawrence Laboratory.
[00:20:14]  And they were summarizing what was a consensus, not extraneous opinion, not people who were right a year ago that were demonized.
[00:20:21]  But pretty much the genetic sequence is now accepted by the majority of scientists that this thing does not appear in nature on its own like this, and it doesn't function like it has, and it doesn't mutate like it has.
[00:20:36]  And it was, and they're not saying that it was deliberate.
[00:20:38]  They were saying it was released from a sloppily conducted lab that had leaks in the past.
[00:20:44]  But the point is that they're responsible for destroying the world economy and millions of people.
[00:20:51]  And they did it out of negligence or laxity at best.
[00:20:55]  And we don't want to get into what the worst scenario was that the lab was run by the Chinese People's Liberation Army.
[00:21:00]  But nevertheless, they show no contrition at all.
[00:21:04]  And just to forget that is crazy.
[00:21:07]  And that's what emboldens them to get on their hind legs and tell us what we can do and what we can't do.
[00:21:12]  At some point, Megan, some administration is going to have to have symmetry.
[00:21:16]  And by that, I mean they're going to have to tell the Chinese, you've got 380,000 students here.
[00:21:23]  We have 2,500 in your country.
[00:21:25]  Most of your students are children of party members.
[00:21:28]  And we're not going to allow that to happen.
[00:21:31]  And we're going to bill down and we're going to have a reciprocal number in each country.
[00:21:36]  And we're going to have to go through trade.
[00:21:38]  We're going to have to do commerce.
[00:21:40]  We're going to have to do every single issue and say we're not provocative.
[00:21:44]  But whatever your policy is toward us, we're going to reciprocate in kind.
[00:21:48]  So if Americans cannot go over and buy farmland within a particular radius of a military base in China, if at all they can buy it, then you can't hear.
[00:21:58]  Because it's clear after 30 years that every time these asymmetrical issues arise, they see it as weakness to exploit and they get emboldened.
[00:22:07]  And that's their way of thinking.
[00:22:09]  And the only thing they understand is deterrence.
[00:22:11]  So I hope we can be symmetrical and just review every aspect of this relationship.

=== Trade And Reciprocity (11:14) ===

[00:22:17]  It's one of the downsides, one of the many downsides of the Putin invasion into Ukraine, which has made us focus on him and not China, right?
[00:22:25]  And we've sort of taken our eye off of that ball and made China more necessary in our lives.
[00:22:31]  We're kind of trying to get a more equal footing with them on certain of these issues.
[00:22:36]  And we're doing exactly the opposite.
[00:22:39]  Something you said reminded me of a piece that you wrote.
[00:22:41]  So Biden, his poll numbers dropped precipitously when he did the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan a year ago.
[00:22:49]  He's never recovered.
[00:22:51]  And now he's got the lowest average polling for his entire presidency of any president in the modern era, Trump, anybody.
[00:22:59]  But it all started with Afghanistan.
[00:23:01]  And you had a piece recently saying, okay, so we understand the polls are low, but the left should be happy with Joe Biden.
[00:23:10]  The truth is that they should really like this guy.
[00:23:15]  So we'll get to why they don't.
[00:23:17]  But can you make the case for why the left should be celebrating him as their leader?
[00:23:23]  Well, can you think of one policy issue that he's disagreed with with the left?
[00:23:28]  I mean, he destroyed the border.
[00:23:29]  They wanted that.
[00:23:30]  They don't like us overseas at all.
[00:23:32]  He got out.
[00:23:33]  They contextualized crime as sort of the fault of society.
[00:23:37]  He agrees with that.
[00:23:39]  He stopped all new federal leases on oil and gas.
[00:23:43]  He shut down Ammo.
[00:23:44]  He canceled Keystone.
[00:23:46]  He's done everything they wanted.
[00:23:47]  And so now when their own agenda blew up and the people despised it, they're attacking the messenger, not their own message.
[00:23:55]  And they think, you know what, if we had a glib young Gavin Newsom, just think of it.
[00:23:59]  He might be more articulate and he could repackage it.
[00:24:02]  No, that's not the problem.
[00:24:03]  It's not the messenger.
[00:24:04]  It's the message.
[00:24:05]  And so if you're a Republican or a conservative, you're kind of, you know, not happy what they're doing to the United States, but you're thinking they don't learn.
[00:24:13]  So they're going to go double down on this message and it's going to get worse and worse for them.
[00:24:18]  And we can see that with a lot of these minority communities losing their support.
[00:24:22]  But it's the message, it's not Joe Biden.
[00:24:26]  Megan, right now, if they had just taken the policies they inherited on the border, on the economy, on foreign policy, on crime, on energy, you and I would be talking about good old Joe Biden from Scranton.
[00:24:37]  You know, he kind of forgets things, but my gosh, the border is secure.
[00:24:41]  We're pumping up to 15, 16 million barrels.
[00:24:44]  We've got that force in Afghanistan.
[00:24:47]  Crime is still low.
[00:24:48]  GDP is coming back.
[00:24:50]  We don't have the inflation.
[00:24:52]  That's what we'd be talking about.
[00:24:53]  We'd be kind of laughing that Joe Biden seems to be non-complistment at times, but we wouldn't see that as a serious liability that we do now because he's a force multiplier, but he's not the catalyst for the message.
[00:25:07]  So it was such a good point when I was reading your issues, you know, statement of each issue and what he's done.
[00:25:13]  Yeah, I mean, we know he's governed from the far left.
[00:25:16]  So where's the love?
[00:25:17]  You know, where's the beef?
[00:25:18]  Where's the love?
[00:25:19]  Why do they so desperately, two-thirds of Democrats, according to the New York Times poll a couple weeks ago, want him gone?
[00:25:27]  They don't even want him on the ticket for his second run.
[00:25:30]  I think part of it is that they feel that their message is unchangeable, that it's part of their Bible, their doctrine, and they want an effective mouthpiece, a megaphone.
[00:25:41]  And they look at him and they don't see it.
[00:25:44]  And they really put a high premium on that, the media, academics, on rhetoric and glibness.
[00:25:49]  That's why they love Barack Obama.
[00:25:51]  He could have a terrible message, but he was glib.
[00:25:54]  And they think that if Joe Biden was as glib and as rhetorical as Obama, then their message would not be unpopular.
[00:26:01]  And then the second thing is they put a high crime primacy on, well, everybody does, but they especially on looks and attitude, the kind of JFK youth, Clinton youth, Obama forward, looking all that.
[00:26:16]  And when they see an aged Joe Biden that looks decrepit, I mean, I'm being cruel, but I'm being accurate, then they get embarrassed.
[00:26:24]  They say, that's not who we are.
[00:26:27]  We're not an 80-year-old that can't finish a sentence.
[00:26:30]  We're the party of JFK and Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
[00:26:35]  And so it's a psychological mechanism with not confronting reality that this is one of the rare times in American political history that the left got the presidency, the House, and the Senate.
[00:26:47]  And they had a green light and they basically Basically, they destroyed the economy and they destroyed foreign policy and they just destroyed cultural life in our major cities.
[00:26:56]  And they can't come to grips with that reality.
[00:27:00]  One of the issues you mentioned was crime, and that continues to be an ongoing problem in most of our major cities of skyrocketing murder rates, assault rates, robbery rates.
[00:27:10]  I could go down the list.
[00:27:11]  And, you know, many people who analyze this for a living, and also those of us who just report on it day after day, believe this is in part the fault of the soft on crime prosecutors and soft-on-crime policies that have been put into place in these cities, including thanks to the likes of George Soros, who has invested some $40 plus million dollars in getting soft-on crime DAs elected, like Chessa Boudin, who was just recalled in San Francisco, the LA prosecutor, the Philly prosecutor,
[00:27:41]  the New York prosecutor, all these DAs got elected in part thanks to Soros' money.
[00:27:46]  So he comes out with an op-ed this past weekend in the Wall Street Journal.
[00:27:51]  And I mean, it was like an alternate universe, his take on how this.
[00:27:57]  He says, okay, some people have tried to blame these recent spikes in crime on the policies of reform-minded prosecutors.
[00:28:04]  The research I've seen says otherwise, quoting now.
[00:28:07]  The most rigorous academic study analyzing data across 35 jurisdictions shows no connection, none, no connection, he writes, between the election of reform-minded prosecutors and local crime rates.
[00:28:19]  You will not be surprised to hear, Victor, he did not specify the study or research to which he was referring.
[00:28:26]  So, we're just going to have to take his word for it, despite the fact that you've got unprecedented levels of murders in Philadelphia and LA saw a 46% increase in homicides during George Gascon's first year in office and so on and so forth.
[00:28:42]  It goes.
[00:28:43]  Soros goes on to say he has no intention of slowing down his financial support of these liberal prosecutors and says, The funds I provide enable sensible reform-minded candidates to receive a hearing from the public.
[00:28:55]  Quote, judging by the results, the public likes what it's hearing.
[00:29:01]  You know, he did say what he did, I think the subtext is he did admit that he funded all these people.
[00:29:07]  He thinks it's good, but before all of these candidates, at least in California with Gascon and Boudin, they were denying that Soros gave them money because he filtered through third and fourth party pacts.
[00:29:18]  But now he at least says, I'm responsible for these people and they're good.
[00:29:23]  And he doesn't quote what their doctrine is, and we know what it is.
[00:29:28]  It's critical legal theory that says that laws don't reflect moral values or innate human nature.
[00:29:34]  They reflect constructs by white male, heterosexual Christians that have positions of power.
[00:29:40]  And so if you go into a store and you steal a candy bar, they have constructed that is illegal because wealthy people, white male, wealthy people, don't steal candy bars.
[00:29:51]  Therefore, what they don't do, they make it legal.
[00:29:53]  That's sort of a nutshell of what they believe.
[00:29:56]  As far as when he says I studied, you're right.
[00:29:59]  He didn't mention any, but even if he did, he could probably drag up one of these.
[00:30:03]  But we live in an age, Megan, when 50 experts with all sorts of letters after they assured us that Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation or 1,200 healthcare professionals.
[00:30:15]  Remember them who said it's innate to Black Lives Matter's mental health to go out and violate quarantine and masking right in the middle of the COVID lockdown.
[00:30:24]  Think those 15 Nobel Prize winners who assured us that Joe Biden's Build Back Better or Earlier Recovery Act was not inflationary.
[00:30:34]  I don't have any confidence in these people anymore.
[00:30:37]  I think they're all warped and absorbed by ideology.
[00:30:41]  And so, and I work in that field, I mean, an academic field.
[00:30:44]  And I can tell you firsthand that when I see somebody say something who's a PhD or an MBA or a JD, I don't have any more credits or any less credits than I do a person out here on my farm that does tractor mechanics, probably less, because I think the academic world has been perverted and subverted by ideology.
[00:31:06]  And you can get anybody to do any study for ideological reasons now.
[00:31:11]  We saw that with the research about the origins of COVID when the Lanson investigation came back, sent them all Peter Dossick's handpicked Echo Health nominees.
[00:31:20]  They went over there.
[00:31:22]  They made a routine cursory examination.
[00:31:25]  Chinese said, you're not going to get any.
[00:31:27]  They came back and said, wow, all of our expertise show us this was a pangolin or a bat.
[00:31:31]  And now that's all been refuted, repudiated.
[00:31:35]  They've all been shamed.
[00:31:36]  And they were the best, supposedly the best people in the world.
[00:31:42]  They're at it again this week.
[00:31:43]  We're going to get to this tomorrow in great detail, but they're at it again.
[00:31:48]  Two of these same authors just came out with another piece in Science Magazine, which is being hailed by people who refuse to take a look at the Lad League theory with any seriousness, saying, no, it really looks like it came from an animal.
[00:32:01]  Like, would you just stop?
[00:32:02]  We know about the nearly $10 million you got from Anthony Fauci.
[00:32:06]  We know you were on record saying this looks very much man-made prior to him giving you that money or promising you that money.
[00:32:14]  Like the graft, the lies, they go on.
[00:32:19]  And that's why it's so infuriating.
[00:32:21]  We know that the Chinese government.
[00:32:22]  And we know the Chinese government has subsidized a lot of medical journals and research.
[00:32:28]  And it's very hard to find anybody in the corporate world, sports, academic world, scientific research that has not had some experience with Chinese subsidies, whether a grant or a visit.
[00:32:42]  I mean, there's American names on virology labs in China.
[00:32:46]  And the lungs, the lungs that were genetically engineered to resemble in mice, to resemble humans, came from an American researcher.
[00:32:57]  So what we're basically looking at is they compressed 100 years of careful, steady virology research in the West that had developed an entire protocol of safety mechanism, not always in the best way, but they had.
[00:33:15]  And then they just stole it or they were given it or they bought it.
[00:33:19]  And they compressed that 100 years into about 20 years.
[00:33:22]  And basically they got people doing the most dangerous research in the world that's almost analogous to a bioweapon without any expertise.

=== Supreme Court And Walls (13:41) ===

[00:33:32]  It's like giving a child, you know, instead of giving a child a BB gun, you give them a 30 out six with scope and say, go out at eight years old.
[00:33:41]  What do you think would happen?
[00:33:43]  With no supervision.
[00:33:44]  None.
[00:33:44]  No supervision whatsoever.
[00:33:47]  We talked about politics just a bit.
[00:33:49]  It's still looking, according to most pollsters, like the Republicans have a lock on winning the House come the midterms, which are now 98 days away.
[00:33:56]  The Senate could be as well.
[00:33:58]  And so if the Republicans take over both houses of Congress and perhaps even the White House in 2024, Victor with a provocative question this week asking, is turnabout fair play?
[00:34:17]  Before we get to your piece on are the new progressive rules reciprocal, because I really, I like this piece a lot and you raised very good questions in it.
[00:34:28]  Can we spend a minute on immigration and the wall?
[00:34:32]  Because the Biden administration has been criticized this week for rebuilding Trump's wall.
[00:34:38]  And Biden had said when he was running that he was not going to build this wall.
[00:34:44]  He wasn't going to touch this wall.
[00:34:45]  He said, there will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.
[00:34:48]  That's number one.
[00:34:49]  Published an op-ed in the Miami Herald saying the slogan, Build the Wall, is divorced from reality.
[00:34:55]  A wall won't stop the flow of illegal narcotics or human trafficking.
[00:35:01]  He halted new wall construction after he took the obvious he's anti-wall.
[00:35:04]  That's the truth.
[00:35:05]  He's anti-wall.
[00:35:06]  However, wait, there's a section of the border wall, wall, I say, near Yuma, Arizona, and they are going to complete a section of it, the Biden administration.
[00:35:18]  The plan includes filling four major gaps.
[00:35:21]  This is the third busiest crossing for migrants who can easily just walk across the river to surrender to board officials there or just get across.
[00:35:27]  Unclear when construction will begin.
[00:35:30]  But the administration has decided rather than explaining what's really happening or the fact that they've now come to believe walls do work.
[00:35:38]  Why else would we be fixing it?
[00:35:41]  To kind of go into denialism, here's again Karine Jean-Pierre.
[00:35:45]  Sound bye.
[00:35:47]  Why is the Biden administration building a border wall in Arizona?
[00:35:52]  So we're not finishing the wall.
[00:35:57]  We are cleaning up the mess the prior administration left behind in their failed attempt to build a wall.
[00:36:05]  President Biden, when he was a candidate, said there will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.
[00:36:12]  So what changed?
[00:36:13]  We are not finishing the wall.
[00:36:17]  Okay.
[00:36:19]  What do you make of it?
[00:36:21]  Yeah, she's our well-in-I mean, they always knew walls work.
[00:36:26]  That's why they didn't like them.
[00:36:28]  They knew they worked too well.
[00:36:29]  And they want open borders for a variety of reasons.
[00:36:32]  They want a new demographic.
[00:36:33]  They want to flip states from red to blue.
[00:36:37]  They want a large tribal constituency and ethnic constituency to vote along their superficial appearance.
[00:36:44]  So that's what they like.
[00:36:45]  That's who they are, the left.
[00:36:47]  So they know walls worked and they didn't want them.
[00:36:50]  And so when she said, that was very laughable, clean up the mess.
[00:36:53]  Well, the mess was that Donald Trump was sued every day of the week by left-wing lawyers to stop the wall and even had insurrectionary activity within the so-called administrative state that tried to stop it.
[00:37:06]  And the only reason that we have any of the wall, and he rebuilt, he started on new sections, but he mostly rebuilt the decrepit old section was that he just was obsessed with it.
[00:37:16]  And so when she says that he left the mess, what she's meaning is that we were able to stop him through lawsuits at key points and junctures.
[00:37:24]  And now we find out that people are pouring through here.
[00:37:27]  We have no problem with that, except there's an election in Arizona.
[00:37:31]  And one of these Trump senator candidates, to take one example, Blake Masters, is going to win and Kelly is going to lose.
[00:37:38]  And one of the issues that's hurting us is this open space influx of illegal aid.
[00:37:45]  And so we're going to build a wall and hope that for temporary fix, it doesn't look too bad by November.
[00:37:52]  And then we're going to deny that we're doing it.
[00:37:53]  And that's all she's doing.
[00:37:56]  I don't know quite their strategy because people are not stupid.
[00:38:00]  And when they hear that and say that, you know, we're not building a wall, we're not doing one foot of a wall, we're cleaning up a mess.
[00:38:07]  They don't believe that.
[00:38:08]  They know that that's a lie.
[00:38:10]  Of course.
[00:38:11]  So it's insulting.
[00:38:11]  It's insulting to people.
[00:38:13]  And it's insulting to a lot of, we've talked about this before, but one of the reasons, and they think this is counterintuitive, but one of the reasons the Hispanic vote is peeling off from Democrats is that they are ground zero.
[00:38:28]  Even I'm six miles, six hours from the border, but here in my hometown, we're having an influx of people who are illegal.
[00:38:36]  And you can just predict what's happening.
[00:38:38]  They go into the schools, they go into the federal and state dialysis clinics, ERs.
[00:38:45]  They need legal help.
[00:38:46]  They need more nutritional and housing help.
[00:38:49]  And that all comes at the expense of either city budgets that are adjudicated by Mexican-American politicians and officials or recipients who are poor that are citizens, are legal residents.
[00:39:02]  So why would anybody be for that?
[00:39:05]  And especially the insulting idea that we're going to put these immigrant communities, we're going to have immigrant communities, second and first, third generation to be on the receiving end of illegals.
[00:39:18]  There's another subtext that nobody talks about, Megan, and that is that for the first time, a large percentage of these immigrants are not even Spanish speaking.
[00:39:29]  They're from the Caribbean, Haitians, or from the Arab world or from Asia.
[00:39:34]  And that has changed the attitude in the Hispanic community in Normans.
[00:39:38]  That's a good point.
[00:39:40]  Yeah, one of the other consequences of this open border, we talked about it last week on the show or the week prior to my vacation, which is when chased, they bail out of these cars and make a run for it.
[00:39:52]  And it happened in places like Uvalde, Texas, to the point where the school was just immune from any sense of emergency when this happened on their property.
[00:40:01]  They were used to these bailouts where these illegal immigrants would just be running across their school property and may not have perceived the danger, according to the reports, when this guy first showed up on school, on school campus.
[00:40:14]  I mean, there's just all sorts of unforeseen consequences to an open border.
[00:40:19]  And by the way, now that's why the Texas governor and the Arizona governor are busing illegal immigrants to Washington, D.C.
[00:40:30]  And Mayor Bowser is beside herself.
[00:40:34]  She's begging now for the Biden administration to do something.
[00:40:38]  She says the pace has reached the tipping point.
[00:40:42]  These are abhorrent operations.
[00:40:45]  The situation is dire.
[00:40:47]  It's a humanitarian crisis, one that could overwhelm our social support network.
[00:40:52]  We need immediate and sustained federal intervention.
[00:40:56]  Oh, you know, it's not so pleasant, is it, when you feel this, when you're not a border state or city?
[00:41:03]  Yeah, when people in Arizona and Texas said just that, almost literally, her talking points were borrowed from people on the border in Texas and Arizona.
[00:41:12]  She and other people on the left said they were racist, but she should celebrate diversity.
[00:41:17]  And that, according to the left's own logic, this is a bonanza.
[00:41:20]  You have a diverse group of people coming in more diverse than any other group of illegal aliens.
[00:41:25]  And she has an opportunity to celebrate it.
[00:41:27]  And she should.
[00:41:29]  And, you know, I mentioned in a column not too long ago that we have about 2 million vacant dormitories right now on our university colleges, our colleges and university campuses.
[00:41:43]  Many of them have med schools, law schools.
[00:41:47]  They have student interns.
[00:41:49]  They have dormitories, not just dormitory, but cafeteria.
[00:41:52]  They're the ideal place for temporary residents for these people.
[00:41:57]  So you could bust them into Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Duke, University of Texas, let them live there for two months and get acculturated.
[00:42:04]  And then when school starts, they could leave.
[00:42:07]  But the left, it's very funny because it's always in the abstract.
[00:42:10]  They performance art and virtues signal in the abstract.
[00:42:14]  And then when they're subject to the consequences of their own ideology rather than somebody that they call a clinger or deplorable, but them, then they get outraged.
[00:42:23]  And that really kind of begs the question, what is their ideology if they're not comfortable in the concrete?
[00:42:30]  So they talk about open borders and they love diversity, but yet they don't want anybody that is diverse from South the border anywhere near them.
[00:42:39]  And you almost think it's a psychological mechanism to hide their own discomfort with diversity, or they don't feel they don't feel.
[00:42:47]  Well, exactly right.
[00:42:48]  Or how they don't care that they're deep on the police pushes and their Black Lives Matter messaging has hurt black and brown communities more than anybody.
[00:42:56]  They don't care.
[00:42:56]  They don't want to get to that part of the story.
[00:42:58]  And this is why I loved your piece.
[00:43:00]  Are the new progressive rules reciprocal?
[00:43:03]  Because you raise some very interesting questions.
[00:43:05]  If Republicans take control of both houses and or the White House, some of this stuff could be done just with control of the House alone.
[00:43:13]  Give us some of the examples you think, you know, they might consider trying on the progressive to see if they really meant in principle that it was okay, for example, to protest at the homes of Supreme Court justices.
[00:43:28]  Yeah, I mean, do they really want to live in a world?
[00:43:30]  And I'm not rhetorical where when the Republicans take charge that conservatives march up to Soto Mair's house, Justice Sotomayere, or they swarm her in a restaurant, or every once in a while, Mitch McConnell says, we're going to pack the court.
[00:43:46]  We need 15 judges.
[00:43:47]  Or he leads a group of people out to the Supreme Court doors and says, Sotomair, Kagan, you sowed the wind.
[00:43:57]  You're going to reap the world when you have no idea what's going to hit you.
[00:44:01]  Do they want to have a president in 2025 go overseas and trash the Supreme Court when they make a liberal ruling?
[00:44:09]  Do they want conservative legal clerks to leak opinions on liberal judges' rulings in advance to mobilize opposition to them?
[00:44:21]  So there's a lot of things that they have destroyed, the protocols that I don't think they're going to like if they were boomerang back.
[00:44:27]  And even in the Congress, do they really want a congressional impeachment in the first term and say a year from now where they go to Joe Biden?
[00:44:37]  They say, you know what?
[00:44:37]  He didn't even enforce it.
[00:44:38]  He didn't even make an attempt to faithfully execute the laws on the border.
[00:44:43]  And we're going to impeach him, even though we don't think we'll have the votes in the Senate.
[00:44:46]  And then, you know what?
[00:44:47]  Maybe when he's on his way out, we're going to impeach him a second time for his family leveraging quit quote quote grifting.
[00:44:54]  And even if he's a private citizen, we'll go after him.
[00:44:57]  And do we want to have Kevin McCarthy to tear up the State of the Union address when Joe Biden has another State of the Union address that's untrue and exaggerates?
[00:45:06]  He's so angry, national television, he tears it up.
[00:45:10]  And so there's all these protocols that they have destroyed on the assumption that they're so morally superior, nobody would ever in tit-to-tat fashion play it back on them.
[00:45:21]  And that's a good question, though, Megan.
[00:45:24]  I'm not saying they're antithetical, but when the Republicans take over, they're going to have an old versus New Testament question.
[00:45:31]  Do you reply in kind?
[00:45:33]  Do you tell the squad, you know what?
[00:45:36]  You're not going to be on any committees.
[00:45:38]  If the speaker in this new way of thinking, this new protocol paradigm can veto the minority's selections and nominations for a year.
[00:45:46]  No squad member is going to be on a congressional committee.
[00:45:49]  We just want to let you know that.
[00:45:51]  Is that necessary to teach them not to do these things?
[00:45:55]  Or is it sort of, well, let's move on and have an agenda?
[00:45:58]  Maybe you can have agenda and do both.
[00:46:00]  I don't know, but I'm getting kind of to the point where if they don't feel some of the boomerang, they're going to do it again.
[00:46:09]  And so they need to know the consequences of what they're doing.
[00:46:13]  Well, look at how well that worked out for them with Supreme Court filibusters being eliminated.
[00:46:18]  First, they said, lower court judges, we're going to get rid of the filibuster just for them under Harry Reid.
[00:46:23]  Mitch McConnell said, you will rule the day.
[00:46:26]  We'll be in charge of this chamber one day.
[00:46:27]  He changed it for Supreme Court justices.
[00:46:29]  And now, Roe versus Wade has been overturned.
[00:46:31]  So, turn about is barely.
[00:46:34]  But they're just talking about the filibuster because they're not sure they can always get, you know, they're not sure they can override because of the closeness in the Senate.
[00:46:44]  And so, they're talking about eliminating the filibuster again.
[00:46:48]  Barack Obama had said, you know, at the funeral, John Lewis, it was a racist relic of Jim Crow, etc.
[00:46:54]  So, maybe when the Republicans say if they win the Senate with 53, 54 seats, they might say, you know what?
[00:47:01]  They had a great idea.
[00:47:02]  Let's eliminate the filibuster.
[00:47:03]  And they would go crazy if anybody did that.
[00:47:06]  It'll be fascinating to see what the press writes after being so pro these, you know, very normal norms.

=== Labeling People As Hitlerian (15:03) ===

[00:47:13]  I got to have an answer.
[00:47:14]  Oh, sorry.
[00:47:15]  Yeah, no worries.
[00:47:16]  We're up against a heartbreak other.
[00:47:17]  I'd like to, I'd keep this going forever.
[00:47:19]  It's wonderful talking to you.
[00:47:21]  As always, Victor Davis Hansen, you've got to check him out, read him, listen to him, and thank him because we're lucky to have him.
[00:47:26]  All the best to you.
[00:47:27]  Up next, Adam Carolla is here.
[00:47:30]  Love him too.
[00:47:30]  We'll have some laughs and go over his latest musings on his book on life and on this controversy that's breaking over at The View.
[00:47:42]  Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:47:44]  Our next guest is our good friend Adam Carolla, host of the Adam Carolla Show and author of the brand new book, Everything Reminds Me of Something.
[00:47:53]  Advice, Answers, but No Apologies.
[00:47:56]  Welcome back, Adam.
[00:47:57]  So great to have you here.
[00:47:58]  Another book.
[00:47:59]  I'm excited about this.
[00:48:01]  And this is where I want to kick it off.
[00:48:03]  One of the great points you raise in the book, which I couldn't agree with more, is as follows.
[00:48:09]  I would argue in today's climate, news is more harmful than alcohol, internet porn, or anything you would give up, any other thing you would give up for Lent.
[00:48:19]  And you make the point that a network should not have positions on things like, do masks work?
[00:48:25]  Does ivermectin work?
[00:48:26]  Does hydroxychloroquine work?
[00:48:28]  And so on.
[00:48:29]  But they do take positions.
[00:48:30]  They do.
[00:48:31]  They are getting more and more opinionated, and it's mostly all on the left side.
[00:48:36]  And I've got a couple of examples that I want to go over with you on.
[00:48:41]  So, first of all, The View stepped in it late last week.
[00:48:45]  They were covering Turning Points, having its sort of young people summit down in Florida.
[00:48:50]  This is a right-leaning organization.
[00:48:52]  And they saw neo-Nazis protesting, whatever they do, outside of the event.
[00:48:59]  And this is where Joy and Whoopee went with that video.
[00:49:04]  Watch.
[00:49:05]  Neo-Nazis were in the front of Turning out there in front of the conference with anti-Semitic slurs and, you know, the Nazi swastika and a picture of a so-called Jewish person with exaggerated features, just like Goebbels did in the Hitler in during the Third Reich.
[00:49:25]  It's the same thing, right out of that same playbook.
[00:49:27]  I think it's important that every single person that attended that turning point, every Republican speak up against the swastikas, against the Nazi flags that were waved to left.
[00:49:40]  You let them in and you knew what they were.
[00:49:42]  So you are complicit.
[00:49:45]  You are an idiot.
[00:49:47]  They didn't let them in, Adam, at all.
[00:49:49]  But these, and I'll get to their backtracking in one second, but these women can't help themselves.
[00:49:55]  They see an organization like Turning Points holding a youth summit and they automatically think neo-Nazi.
[00:50:01]  Yeah, it's a weird first off, just the concept of 2022 and we're accusing people of being fans of the biggest atrocity that was ever perpetrated in the world.
[00:50:16]  You know, like the most heinous thing that's ever taken place in human history.
[00:50:22]  And they accuse every third American of like being a big fan of it.
[00:50:28]  It's kind of just conceptually bizarre, like on its face.
[00:50:32]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:50:33]  Yeah, yeah, that's where their mind goes.
[00:50:35]  They don't say, oh, it's a bunch of agitators out there.
[00:50:37]  We've seen this many times.
[00:50:39]  They say, oh, Trump supporters, they're all neo-Nazis.
[00:50:43]  You let them in.
[00:50:44]  Nobody was let in.
[00:50:45]  They were turning points had security try to get rid of these people, but it turned out that they were on public properties.
[00:50:51]  And so there's only so much you can do.
[00:50:53]  And I've seen, I've seen this happen before.
[00:50:55]  Whoopee clearly had a phone call during the break from what they have at ABC, what they have at NBC, CBS called Standards and Practices, which is a bunch of like old people sitting around a conference table who get paid to just watch what is said and call you up to say, wrong, wrong, try to fix it before we close out so we don't get sued.
[00:51:16]  And so here was Whoopee's attempt at cleanup before the show ended, though it wasn't exactly contrite.
[00:51:22]  Watch.
[00:51:23]  Make a quick clarification about the neo-Nazis at the Turning Point event.
[00:51:27]  They were outside protesters.
[00:51:29]  My point was more metaphorical.
[00:51:32]  You embraced them at your thing, I felt.
[00:51:35]  So I just, they were not in the building.
[00:51:38]  You're an idiot.
[00:51:39]  Wrong again.
[00:51:40]  You did not embrace them metaphorically either.
[00:51:43]  Right.
[00:51:44]  All right.
[00:51:44]  So let's see if we can break it down.
[00:51:46]  First off, it's confusing to me.
[00:51:49]  If you have neo-Nazis protesting outside, aren't they protesting what's going on inside?
[00:51:58]  So when a bunch of trans activists show up at a Dave Chappelle concert, they're protesting Dave Chappelle because they think he's anti-trans, right?
[00:52:10]  Or when the Westboro Baptist Church shows up to Kathy Griffin's stand-up show, they're protesting her because what she says goes against what they say.
[00:52:25]  So just the fact that you're saying a bunch of Nazi protesters showed up, mathematically, there's a problem, right?
[00:52:35]  In your logic.
[00:52:36]  Yes.
[00:52:37]  Right.
[00:52:38]  Protesting what?
[00:52:39]  Well, then the people at Standards and Practices got a nasty letter from Turning Points Council, which makes perfect sense to me because you got a bunch of young people, innocent college people who want to hear the expression of conservative ideas discussed in a way that doesn't diminish or mock them like you see on every mainstream media offering, including The View.
[00:53:01]  And they get called neo-Nazis.
[00:53:02]  And you know what?
[00:53:03]  That's defamatory.
[00:53:05]  And so here was the more full-throated, the lawyers have now gotten to us apology by Sarah Haynes on The View a couple of days later on Monday.
[00:53:16]  On Monday, we talked about the fact that there were openly neo-Nazi demonstrators outside the Florida Student Action Summit of the Turning Point USA group.
[00:53:24]  We want to make clear that these demonstrators were gathered outside the event and that they were not invited or endorsed by Turning Point USA.
[00:53:32]  A Turning Point USA spokesman said the group, quote, 100% condemns those ideologies and said Turning Point USA security tried to remove the neo-Nazis from the area, but could not because they were on public property.
[00:53:44]  Also, Turning Point USA wanted to clarify, wanted us to clarify that this was a Turning Point USA summit and not a Republican Party event.
[00:53:52]  So we apologize for anything we said that may have been unclear on these points.
[00:53:57]  They had them dead to rights.
[00:53:59]  Yeah.
[00:54:00]  Well, okay, so let's really break it down.
[00:54:04]  Do they not, before they come out and make these statements, whether it's about Turning Point or whether it's about Nicholas Sandman or whether it's about Kyle Rittenhouse, do they, or it's about Hunter Biden's laptop.
[00:54:18]  Do they not have access to the information that we seem to have access to?
[00:54:24]  You know what I mean?
[00:54:25]  These are news outlets.
[00:54:27]  So you're going after Nicholas Sandman for rushing in front of the elderly Indian.
[00:54:33]  Do you not have the video footage that shows the Indian guy walking up to him?
[00:54:39]  Because I've seen it.
[00:54:40]  Everyone else has seen it.
[00:54:42]  Do you not have access?
[00:54:43]  Do you not know what went on inside of that?
[00:54:47]  Do you not know they were out on the sidewalk?
[00:54:49]  Do you not know they weren't let into the building?
[00:54:52]  Do you not have statements from Turning Point?
[00:54:55]  Do you not have access to this information?
[00:54:57]  You're a news outlet.
[00:54:59]  Do you not know where Kyle Rittenhouse's dad lives or mom lives or her mom was working that night or the gun wasn't transported?
[00:55:09]  Do you not have access to that information?
[00:55:13]  Or Hunter Biden's laptop.
[00:55:15]  Do you not vet it?
[00:55:16]  Do you not have access to the information?
[00:55:18]  Your news outlet.
[00:55:20]  My argument is you do.
[00:55:23]  You choose not to ingest it, but you do have access to the facts because everyone else sees them the next day or the same day.
[00:55:33]  Well, it's two, the problems at least twofold.
[00:55:35]  The first is when the information is not yet at your fingertips, you've just seen a viral clip online, on Twitter, or perhaps right before you go on the air, your bias fills in the gaps, the void, right?
[00:55:50]  That's why you see Nicholas Sandman immediately as the villain and the Native American guy as the victim when it was exactly the opposite.
[00:55:57]  That's why, conversely, you see Jussie Smollett and you believe every word he says.
[00:56:03]  And it doesn't, you don't pause to just use your common sense before you get more information of what the hell would two MAGA guys be doing walking down Chicago in the middle of the polar vortex at 2.30 in the morning, attacking somebody with a subway sandwich while they just happen to be carrying a noose and bleach, right?
[00:56:21]  Like you check all your normal reporter skepticism because it's going to confirm your pre-existing belief that Republicans, I mean, really, this is the answer to all of it, are terrible racists, white supremacists.
[00:56:34]  This is the underlying sim and sim and virtually all of the stories you just mentioned.
[00:56:39]  And once they get the information, they're unwilling to reassess.
[00:56:42]  And that's how you know it truly is bias.
[00:56:44]  Because if it were just innocent mistakes, like, oh, shit, I saw the wrong thing and I said the wrong thing, they would just correct it instead of keep making it.
[00:56:53]  Well, you're 100% correct.
[00:56:55]  So when people say like, how come, you know, as it pertains to COVID, how come nobody has circled back and apologized or said they were wrong or Hunter Biden's laptop, you know, okay, they all got that wrong.
[00:57:09]  How come there's no corrections?
[00:57:11]  And my statement is, is there is a correction when you got something wrong, but there's not a correction when you lied.
[00:57:19]  And that's why there are no corrections because they were lying from Jumpstreet.
[00:57:25]  Well, now you have, I don't know, I guess he's still a member of the media, but Chris Cuomo is out there trying to get back on the air and trying to sort of play the role of impartial news anchor now.
[00:57:41]  Like he had some questions about whether the January 6th committee was fair.
[00:57:44]  I mean, please, just spare me, okay?
[00:57:46]  Just spare me because we all saw what you did night after night on CNN prime time.
[00:57:51]  And now actually on with Bill Maher actually went out there and defended CNN as not being an opinion operation.
[00:58:03]  Here he was the other night.
[00:58:06]  I think that is addressing the need of serving people's interests.
[00:58:11]  We were faced with something that the media has never seen in this country before.
[00:58:16]  Yes.
[00:58:17]  where somebody weaponized the truth and won pretty much every fight he got into by ultimately blaming a system that people have rejected, including the media.
[00:58:28]  And unprecedented risk is going to require an unprecedented effort.
[00:58:34]  I don't think it was about moving to opinion, meaning not relying on facts and analysis, but they had to take it on.
[00:58:40]  I felt very much that way.
[00:58:41]  Not everybody did it to the degree that I did.
[00:58:44]  It was very risky to do what I did.
[00:58:47]  God.
[00:58:48]  First of all, he needs another button done on that shirt.
[00:58:52]  Nobody needs to see Chris Guamo's chest.
[00:58:54]  And second of all, the self-aggrandizing.
[00:58:57]  I mean, he gets it into every single thing he says, whether it's his stupid weightlifting muscle videos or him talking about the Me Too movement, saying, do I look like a guy who'd have to do that?
[00:59:08]  Well, yes.
[00:59:10]  And now this, he's got to land it with, oh, no, not me.
[00:59:12]  You know, like I had to do, I did the right thing.
[00:59:14]  I never bullshit.
[00:59:15]  Bullshit.
[00:59:15]  CNN turned fully into an opinion network under Trump.
[00:59:19]  It was all anti-Trump.
[00:59:20]  And now he's just trying to do a hindsight is 2020 cleanup in Isle 7 because he's out of a job.
[00:59:27]  Yeah, I agree.
[00:59:28]  And, you know, it's like a lot of these news outlets did this with COVID.
[00:59:33]  They went, nobody knew at the time.
[00:59:35]  Nobody, it's like, okay, nobody knew, but you shut the beaches, you shut the schools.
[00:59:41]  You didn't have epidemiologists who could have told you that going outdoors and being in the sunshine and exercising was the best thing you could do for virus.
[00:59:51]  Like they hide behind this, nobody knew.
[00:59:53]  And then my argument is always, all right, well, then if nobody knew, why are we listening to you?
[01:00:00]  Right.
[01:00:01]  Well, what do you make of the, it's not even in that case, it's unprecedented threat.
[01:00:07]  You know, Trump, unique figure.
[01:00:08]  We had to do it.
[01:00:09]  We had to go full bore against him.
[01:00:13]  It's a very interesting, you know, kind of psychological dynamic, which is, look, you could do it with the president of the United States or you could do it with your roommate, which is once you label the person as Hitlerian and evil, then all options are on the table.
[01:00:31]  And as a matter of fact, you wouldn't be patriotic and you wouldn't be a good American if you weren't fighting against it.
[01:00:38]  So it's this thing that Democrats do, whether it's turning point or whether it's Trump, decide that they're evil, decide that they're Hitlerian, decide that they side with the fascists and the anti-Semites and the homophobes and the racists.
[01:00:56]  And now all is fair.
[01:00:58]  Take the gloves off.
[01:01:00]  Guerrilla warfare.
[01:01:01]  Do whatever you want.
[01:01:02]  Say whatever you want.
[01:01:03]  Lie as much as you want.
[01:01:06]  You know, the French underground had a bunch of forged documents and papers and passports.
[01:01:13]  They were lying.
[01:01:15]  That doesn't, but they're heroes for lying and forging papers and doing all the covert actions they did.
[01:01:24]  So once you decide that whoever opposes you is evil versus just having a separate opinion, then you're allowed to do whatever you want.
[01:01:34]  And that's where all the ad hominem stuff comes in.
[01:01:38]  The view, CNN, whomever.
[01:01:41]  You just decide that the other side is evil.
[01:01:44]  And that's why they spend so much time making the other side evil.
[01:01:49]  The right says to the left, you know, these are bad policies, raising taxes or having a porous border, whatever the policy is, these are bad policies.
[01:02:00]  But they don't call the people homophobic racists and neo-Nazis.
[01:02:07]  Well, I mean, we've played the clip before of Don Lemon and his panel saying anybody who voted for Trump is a racist.
[01:02:14]  Anybody.
[01:02:14]  You know, that's what you voted for, racism.

=== Ad Hominem Attacks (08:50) ===

[01:02:16]  That's what you are, a racist.
[01:02:18]  That's opinion.
[01:02:20]  I hate to break it to you.
[01:02:21]  And I could give you 25 more examples like that.
[01:02:24]  They, they, on a nightly basis, showed their hatred, hatred for the right half of the country.
[01:02:31]  And I don't think it's going to be any easier for Chris Cuomo than it's going to be for CNN, his old network, to try to convince the American people that that wasn't real.
[01:02:41]  It looked real, it felt real, and people understood on a nightly basis how deep the loathing ran, right?
[01:02:47]  It says, you can't fix it by just trying to rewrite history.
[01:02:52]  Now, speaking of racism, Sesame Street under fire for alleged racism.
[01:02:58]  We've had like three of these stories in the past week.
[01:03:01]  There's like a Sesame Street place outside of Philadelphia where you can go and you can, you know, see the Sesame Street characters walk by in like a parade.
[01:03:10]  And there was an incident showing a Sesame Street character blowing off a little child who was African-American, who was clearly trying to get the attention of one of the characters.
[01:03:23]  Forgive me.
[01:03:23]  I can't remember the name of the character.
[01:03:24]  It's not in front of me right now.
[01:03:26]  But my crack team will get, will get the news to you of which, oh, it's Rosita.
[01:03:31]  Okay, Rosita, who now is being accused of intentionally, intentionally ignoring two girls, two young girls.
[01:03:42]  The Congressional Black Caucus has weighed in on this.
[01:03:45]  Benjamin Crump is involved.
[01:03:46]  Here is the videotape.
[01:03:51]  Here comes Rosita, clapping, waving.
[01:03:54]  The two girls have their hands up for a high five.
[01:03:56]  And Rosita clearly says no.
[01:03:59]  Rosita shakes her head no.
[01:04:01]  I think it's a her, and does like the, you know, the flat hand waving like no.
[01:04:07]  Now, I don't know what was going on with Rosita there, but Benjamin Crump tweets out, this is absolutely heartbreaking.
[01:04:14]  These two young queens did not deserve to be blatantly singled out and ignored by this Sesame Street character.
[01:04:20]  Sesame Street, Sesame Place must address their staff's disgusting behavior.
[01:04:27]  Congressional Black Caucus wants a meeting with Sesame Place's president about the park's practices.
[01:04:34]  And then apparently that image brought up a memory for a second family that had its own incident.
[01:04:43]  We've got videotape of that two earlier.
[01:04:46]  And this second family, we're about to show you the video of, this is from Father's Day, has filed a class action for $25 million against Sesame Place.
[01:04:55]  Here's that one.
[01:04:59]  It's Ernie.
[01:05:00]  Ernie waving.
[01:05:03]  And there's a black girl putting out her hand for a high five.
[01:05:07]  And he did not give her a high five.
[01:05:08]  He had already passed by her.
[01:05:11]  Now she's still got her hand up and Ernie's moved on to the other side of the crowd.
[01:05:14]  I don't know, Adam.
[01:05:15]  I got to tell you, this is going to be an uphill legal battle.
[01:05:20]  They're saying that they've violated the contract not to discriminate on the basis of race when purchasing a ticket for Sesame Place.
[01:05:28]  How you are going to prove that Rosita and or Ernie scorned the girls because of skin color is beyond me.
[01:05:37]  But Sesame Place is now on its heels.
[01:05:40]  First, they said Rosita did not intentionally ignore those girls.
[01:05:44]  This was all a big misunderstanding.
[01:05:46]  The character was gesturing no at someone else who was asking Rosita to hold their child.
[01:05:52]  So basically saying Rosita didn't even have her eyes on the two girls in question.
[01:05:57]  Then you know where this is going.
[01:05:59]  The second statement, we sincerely apologize to the family.
[01:06:02]  We know this was not okay, vowing to conduct additional employee training.
[01:06:07]  Then the third apology.
[01:06:09]  We sincerely and wholeheartedly apologize to the families.
[01:06:12]  It's our responsibility to improve, to be very clear what the two young girls experience, what the family experience is unacceptable.
[01:06:18]  It happened in our park with our team.
[01:06:19]  We own that.
[01:06:20]  On and on it goes.
[01:06:22]  So what's your take?
[01:06:25]  Well, you know, again, like the motivation, like here's where we're kind of losing it as a society.
[01:06:35]  There is always going to be somebody in an outfit with very limited vision.
[01:06:41]  You know, you're in a mascot outfit.
[01:06:44]  You have a big cardboard head on.
[01:06:46]  You're looking through your mouth, you know, like that's your field of vision is very limited.
[01:06:53]  So you could probably find hundreds of thousands of hours of footage of people in mascot outfits ignoring people trying to high-five them.
[01:07:02]  If you just pull out the black kids, then it's going to look racist.
[01:07:06]  But you could probably find another 100,000 hours of little white kids holding their hands up and being ignored if you wanted.
[01:07:14]  But the bigger picture is whether it's Sesame Place or the person, possibly the young lady, possibly the black young lady, I don't know, who decided to go out for the Rosita costume fitting or Charlie Kirk.
[01:07:33]  What would be in it for them to be Nazis or racists?
[01:07:37]  How would that even work?
[01:07:39]  What's the economics behind it?
[01:07:41]  Is Sesame?
[01:07:43]  It's got to be one of the most progressive places on the planet.
[01:07:48]  Half their clientele are people of color.
[01:07:52]  The person that's in those, the people in those mascot outfits are mainly college students who are in the area, who may be of color as well.
[01:08:03]  What is in it for them?
[01:08:05]  Like, let's just say you're racist.
[01:08:07]  You go, I want to do some real damage.
[01:08:10]  I'm going to get a job as a mascot for Sesame Place.
[01:08:15]  Like, what are you really saying?
[01:08:19]  Is Crump saying this came down?
[01:08:22]  Like, are you going to find some smoking gun decree, some paperwork from a pie telling the employees to ignore or abuse black people, patrons to come to the park?
[01:08:34]  Like, what do you really, what are you saying?
[01:08:37]  If you're saying, what I'm saying is, is if you're driving on the freeway and you slow down and somebody hits you from behind, that's because they were texting or not paying attention.
[01:08:51]  You're trying to accuse them of ramming you and trying to hurt you.
[01:08:55]  And my argument would be, what's in it for them?
[01:08:59]  Yeah.
[01:09:00]  Well, I mean, I think it's not that they need to gain from it.
[01:09:03]  It's just that they have hatred in their heart and they don't see people of color.
[01:09:06]  Well, we'll see because there's going to be more videotape.
[01:09:09]  And I guarantee you, we're going to see tape of Rosita high-fiving other black children and ignoring other white children.
[01:09:18]  And it doesn't matter.
[01:09:20]  Sesame Street is just on its heels.
[01:09:23]  It's afraid.
[01:09:24]  It's been, it doesn't defend its employee.
[01:09:26]  I'm sure this employee is mortified.
[01:09:28]  I mean, I guess, look, it could turn out this person is a raging racist and just said, I need to play Rosita and show the world who deserves a high-five, right?
[01:09:36]  It could be.
[01:09:37]  But the odds are more likely that Rosita dissed the children because Rosita can't see very well inside of the big costume.
[01:09:45]  And there's this pretty specific explanation that somebody was wanting the character to hold their child.
[01:09:50]  If you were racist and we're trying to reject children because they were black, would you really be looking down at the black girls being like, oh no, not you, right?
[01:09:58]  It's just not that plausible.
[01:10:00]  But again, it's just Benjamin Crump's got to rush in.
[01:10:03]  He's got, yeah, yes, queen, right?
[01:10:05]  Like, they don't deserve this.
[01:10:06]  This is wrong because he's got an agenda.
[01:10:08]  He likes to get hired for the Congressional Black Caucus to weigh in.
[01:10:11]  They need, they've got too much time on their hands.
[01:10:14]  This is absurd.
[01:10:15]  This is a private matter to play out in the civil court and it will be thrown out soon.
[01:10:20]  I agree, but it also obviously and sadly shows that we are turning over every rock looking for racism in this country because it's at such a premium for these people.
[01:10:33]  And actual acts of racism are few and far between.
[01:10:39]  So they have to conjure them.
[01:10:41]  But it also, I think, whether it's the view or whether it's the National Black Caucus, do they ever just go, ah, this beneath us?
[01:10:52]  Like, nah, nothing to see here.
[01:10:53]  We're not, we're not getting involved.
[01:10:55]  We're not weighing in on this.
[01:10:56]  There just doesn't seem to be, you know, like, what if the National Black Caucus said, you know what?
[01:11:01]  We're looking for actual cases of racism, not crap that took place on an amusement park parade.

=== Canada's Attitude Toward Guns (02:52) ===

[01:11:07]  Like that's this isn't, we have real issues to deal with.
[01:11:11]  Right.
[01:11:11]  So refreshing.
[01:11:13]  They don't know what happened, and neither do we, but it'll play out.
[01:11:17]  And my prediction, based on what I've seen so far, is it's not going anywhere.
[01:11:21]  Unless Rosita's got some long history or Ernie of doing this kind of thing, it's not going anywhere.
[01:11:28]  Okay.
[01:11:28]  Much, much more with Adam Carolla right after this quick break.
[01:11:31]  Don't go away.
[01:11:32]  So many more fun things to discuss that are in the news.
[01:11:34]  And in his book, he's got strong thoughts like, where the hell is Canada's contribution to the great cuisine of North America?
[01:11:45]  Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show here with us today.
[01:11:47]  Adam Carolla, author of the brand new book, Everything Reminds Me of Something.
[01:11:53]  Advice, Answers, but No Apologies.
[01:11:56]  I have to tell you, this book makes me laugh out loud and reminds me of why Mark Garagos, your co-host on your legal podcast, is always saying, like, there's something about you.
[01:12:06]  You got like this sort of sage ability to cut through all the BS and just encapsulate an issue or a fact pattern like nobody else, Adam.
[01:12:17]  So people will laugh and they will learn when reading this book about more things than why Canada hasn't given a shit.
[01:12:24]  And Mexico gave us tacos.
[01:12:26]  America gave us burgers.
[01:12:28]  And the North American region, nothing from Canada.
[01:12:32]  Nothing.
[01:12:33]  Yeah.
[01:12:33]  Well, somebody posed the question, you know, which is better, burgers or tacos.
[01:12:37]  And I was thinking about it.
[01:12:39]  I thought, that's a pretty tough question.
[01:12:41]  But then it got me to thinking, yeah, we do the burgers, Mexico does the tacos, but where's Canada's contribution to our cuisine?
[01:12:50]  And it's, it's, it's silent.
[01:12:53]  There's nothing.
[01:12:54]  I mean, you know, people bring up poutine or putting mayo and fries, like you said, but that's that's not a contribution.
[01:13:01]  No.
[01:13:01]  And what a utopia we'd be living in if Canada offered as much from a cuisine standpoint as Mexico.
[01:13:11]  Could you imagine the options we'd have in this country?
[01:13:14]  I mean, Mexico, you know, okay, we have a porous border and we have a situation with folks coming into California, Texas, and Arizona, but you can't argue with the food.
[01:13:26]  They've really contributed from a cuisine standpoint more than any other countries to this country.
[01:13:33]  The drinks too.
[01:13:34]  Not just the food, the drinks as well.
[01:13:36]  My honeymoon was in Mexico is like one of the greatest times of my whole life.
[01:13:39]  Not just because I was on my honeymoon.
[01:13:41]  Yes, Canadian Debbie, let's step it up a notch.
[01:13:45]  Or as Adam puts it in the book, what the fuck, Canucks?
[01:13:49]  I can't think of a worse neighboring country.
[01:13:51]  He writes, I'd rather be next to Hungary or Poland or even a country in the Middle East and at least get some kebab going.
[01:13:59]  All right.

=== How Criminals Operate (05:37) ===

[01:14:00]  Among Canada's many problems is its crime.
[01:14:03]  And, well, in particular, its attitude towards guns.
[01:14:06]  They have crime just like any other country, and they have disarmed their entire country.
[01:14:10]  Well, the reason we like our Second Amendment here in America is because of incidents like the one we saw in your state of California.
[01:14:20]  I don't know if you've seen this, Adam, but it's in the town of Norco, and it's a convenience store of the same name.
[01:14:27]  This thing's gone totally viral today.
[01:14:30]  The store clerk, who is 80, sees three men come up to the store in a car.
[01:14:37]  And when the one gets out, he is wearing a mask and has a gun.
[01:14:41]  It's very clear what the intention is as the guy enters his store.
[01:14:45]  And the 80-year-old clerk is like stone cold fox.
[01:14:50]  I mean, he doesn't blink.
[01:14:53]  And here's what happened next.
[01:14:55]  Hey, here, come here, come here.
[01:15:00]  He's the one.
[01:15:01]  He's the one.
[01:15:03]  Mm-hmm.
[01:15:04]  It was four men.
[01:15:05]  And the 80-year-old Kirk saw him coming in.
[01:15:07]  He grabbed a shotgun when he saw the guy coming in with the mask and the gun.
[01:15:10]  The guy comes in and says, put your hands up.
[01:15:11]  The criminal says, put your hands up.
[01:15:13]  And instead, you know, he put his hands up, all right?
[01:15:15]  And he blew the guy's arm off, according to the defendant, who's now in the hospital and everybody's been apprehended.
[01:15:22]  Sadly, the 80-year-old man had a heart attack after it was over.
[01:15:26]  So screw those guys, but is going to be expected to be okay and handled himself like a boss.
[01:15:34]  What do you make of it?
[01:15:35]  Well, I mean, obviously, if you asked any criminal, would you like the person in that store or in that school or in that shopping mall to have a gun versus not have a gun?
[01:15:50]  The answer would be they would hope that nobody has a gun but them.
[01:15:55]  I mean, that's how criminals work.
[01:15:59]  If the other side has a gun, if the good guys have a gun, then your gun is nullified.
[01:16:05]  So why not just do the opposite of whatever the criminals want?
[01:16:10]  Do you know what I'm saying?
[01:16:11]  I mean, like when criminals are robbing a house, do they want bars on the window of the house that they're trying to rob?
[01:16:21]  Do they want a deadbolt on the front door?
[01:16:23]  Do they want an alarm system?
[01:16:26]  Low, or forget him.
[01:16:27]  Do they want a German shepherd that would be trained to attack anyone who came through the front door?
[01:16:33]  So if you said to a criminal, would you like this?
[01:16:36]  Would you like that house on that side of the street with no German shepherd or this house on this side of the street with a German shepherd?
[01:16:43]  Which house would you like to rob, criminal?
[01:16:45]  They go, well, I'll take the house without the German shepherd.
[01:16:49]  Thank you.
[01:16:50]  And if you said to them, okay, one house has an owner and he has a gun.
[01:16:56]  Would you like that house or would you like the other house?
[01:16:58]  Would you like to have the liquor store with the guy with the shotgun or liquor store with the guy without the shotgun?
[01:17:04]  Well, whatever it is they don't want, that's what we should give them.
[01:17:09]  And taking away all the guns, that's what they do want.
[01:17:14]  Yeah.
[01:17:14]  And this guy, I mean, I'm very happy that he managed to defend himself and he wasn't hurt.
[01:17:19]  And if you watch the whole videotape, so the whole thing is only about 40 seconds long that I saw.
[01:17:24]  After he shoots the guy and he goes running out.
[01:17:26]  And by the way, one of his, you know, co-criminals was getting out of the car in his mask with his gun as he saw the friend run out and say, he shot my arm off.
[01:17:35]  And he got back in the car.
[01:17:36]  But the point is they were about to gang up on this guy very clearly.
[01:17:40]  And the older gentleman, after firing the shot to defend himself, he stands there.
[01:17:46]  He doesn't cower behind the counter.
[01:17:48]  He doesn't run.
[01:17:50]  He stands there with that shotgun in case they come back in.
[01:17:53]  I have to say, I mean, I was, I marveled at his nerves of steel.
[01:17:57]  I'm sad to learn about the heart attack after the fact, but he's going to be okay.
[01:18:01]  And he's been running the store.
[01:18:02]  I think it's his store for 55 years.
[01:18:05]  Now he's got to deal with this nonsense.
[01:18:07]  And I do believe it's because of soft on crime prosecutors in places like LA and San Francisco.
[01:18:12]  Now they're doing better in San Fran.
[01:18:13]  But these criminals think it's open season and they know that most of these DAs aren't really going to do anything to them.
[01:18:20]  And also, it'll be funny when the ladies from The View turn on the 80-year-old guy with the shotgun and accuse him of being a racist or something.
[01:18:29]  Like just remember they turned on that guy at the shopping mall at the food court?
[01:18:35]  Like someone was going to commit a mass shooting and that guy killed them with his and they won after the guy, the hero, the young man who killed the guy who was about to perpetrate the mass shooting.
[01:18:53]  Criminals do what they're going to do, what we let them do.
[01:18:58]  I mean, just think about the drug cartels in Mexico.
[01:19:03]  What do they do?
[01:19:04]  Well, they deal pot.
[01:19:06]  Well, what do we do?
[01:19:07]  Well, we legalize pot.
[01:19:09]  All right.
[01:19:09]  So they stop dealing pot.
[01:19:11]  They start dealing fentanyl and they start doing human trafficking.
[01:19:14]  Like they're very fluid.
[01:19:16]  Criminals just do what we let them do.
[01:19:20]  And that's basically what they're in the business of doing what we let them do.
[01:19:25]  And so in a lot of blue states, especially California, we have decided to go easy on them, which has then created more criminal behavior.

=== Blame From Shame (13:59) ===

[01:19:37]  It's a pretty simple equation.
[01:19:39]  I don't know how it could go any other way.
[01:19:43]  Now, everything reminds me of something, to quote somebody really smart who once said that.
[01:19:48]  And this conversation is reminding me of another crime.
[01:19:51]  It was the crime of assault.
[01:19:52]  And we all witnessed it at the Academy Awards this year when actor Will Smith, right before he won for Best Actor, assaulted Chris Rock, who was hosting the Academy Award ceremony.
[01:20:06]  And in a blow that was seen around the world, he embarrassed himself.
[01:20:10]  And he'd been trying to apologize ever since.
[01:20:13]  Chris Rock has yet to really squarely address it.
[01:20:15]  He's made a couple of small quips here or there.
[01:20:18]  But now for the first time, Will Smith comes out in a six-minute video on YouTube and almost six and really goes straight at the issue and again apologizes directly to Chris, to his family.
[01:20:30]  Here's a little bit of what he's done.
[01:20:33]  I will say to you, Chris, I apologize to you.
[01:20:42]  My behavior was unacceptable.
[01:20:47]  And I'm here whenever you're ready to talk.
[01:20:51]  I spent the last three months replaying and understanding the nuances and the complexities of what happened in that moment.
[01:21:06]  Jada had nothing to do with it.
[01:21:09]  I'm sorry, babe.
[01:21:13]  I'm going to say sorry to my kids and my family for the heat that I brought on all of us.
[01:21:22]  Disappointing people is my central trauma.
[01:21:27]  I hate when I let people down.
[01:21:32]  So it hurts.
[01:21:37]  It hurts me psychologically and emotionally to know I didn't live up to people's image and impression of me.
[01:21:49]  All right.
[01:21:50]  Well, he has a movie coming out.
[01:21:51]  Apple's set to release a film starring Smith in December.
[01:21:55]  And Chris Rock, the only response we've heard so far was the night Will Smith released this while performing at Atlantis Fox Theater.
[01:22:03]  Chris Rock not directly responding, but saying, if everyone claims to be a victim, then no one will hear the real victims.
[01:22:10]  Even me getting smacked by Shug Smith, which appears to be a reference to Marion Shug Knight, co-founder of Death Row Records, who's currently serving 28 years in prison.
[01:22:20]  He said, I went to work the next day.
[01:22:22]  I got kids.
[01:22:23]  Period.
[01:22:24]  Seems to be trying to say, I'm not a victim.
[01:22:26]  I'm not going to spend time on this.
[01:22:28]  I'm moving on.
[01:22:29]  And it doesn't sound like it's full of forgiveness.
[01:22:31]  But what's happening here?
[01:22:33]  Why do we get yet another apology from Will Smith?
[01:22:37]  I don't know.
[01:22:39]  You know, I would love to really examine Will Smith's psyche because there seems to be so much going on inside his head.
[01:22:49]  And he seems so sort of tortured in so many ways that you don't think a guy who seemingly has it all should feel.
[01:23:01]  I watched a lot of it.
[01:23:03]  And, you know, he did start off at the beginning of it announcing that he was human and humans make mistakes.
[01:23:10]  I never liked that.
[01:23:11]  I never like when somebody does something wrong and then announces I'm just human because I'm a human.
[01:23:16]  My kids are humans.
[01:23:18]  You're human.
[01:23:19]  Everyone is human.
[01:23:21]  You know, Mother Teresa is human and Charles Manson's human.
[01:23:25]  You know, like it's kind of letting yourself off the hook when you do the everyone makes mistakes and I'm human.
[01:23:32]  We're human.
[01:23:33]  We would never walk onto the stage and assault somebody that way.
[01:23:38]  So stop lumping us in with your humanity.
[01:23:41]  But he just seems so haunted in a weird way.
[01:23:48]  I mean, haunted is probably the wrong term, but I just mean it's like he has demons.
[01:23:55]  And I think his wife probably helps cultivate those demons.
[01:24:03]  And I feel like he should just be on top of the world.
[01:24:07]  He's good looking.
[01:24:08]  He's rich.
[01:24:09]  He's super talented.
[01:24:12]  You know, why not just have a drink?
[01:24:16]  Put your feet up.
[01:24:17]  You know, have a barbecue.
[01:24:19]  Like, I know this sounds trite, but I mean, like, at a certain point, instead of sitting around and breaking yourself down psychologically over and over again, crack a beer and watch it.
[01:24:33]  Watch a game.
[01:24:34]  I don't blame the wife, Jada.
[01:24:36]  I blame him.
[01:24:37]  I mean, there have been all sorts of rumors about their marriage for years.
[01:24:41]  And if any of them are true, they both got a hand in their odd setup.
[01:24:48]  But I agree with you.
[01:24:49]  He should be enjoying life.
[01:24:51]  Why is he so tortured?
[01:24:52]  Why did he feel the need to make that moment about him in the first place?
[01:24:56]  And now I think this latest apology is he's got another movie coming out.
[01:25:00]  He's got to make sure he's okay with everybody and everybody knows how sorry he is and how human he is and how he's really struggling to separate.
[01:25:08]  I think it was like blame from shame.
[01:25:11]  Like I'm kind of over it.
[01:25:12]  I just like, I'm done with his apologies.
[01:25:15]  He showed us who he was.
[01:25:16]  And it had the exact opposite of the effect he wanted.
[01:25:19]  He's a weak person.
[01:25:21]  It was about him.
[01:25:22]  It wasn't about Jada.
[01:25:24]  And I don't know.
[01:25:24]  Chris Rock, he hasn't forgiven him.
[01:25:26]  I don't know whether the American public will.
[01:25:28]  We'll find out when his movie comes out.
[01:25:30]  Okay, shifting gears now.
[01:25:33]  Oh, wait.
[01:25:34]  I had to get this to you, Adam.
[01:25:35]  This just in.
[01:25:36]  Breaking news.
[01:25:37]  There has been a third incident of a character ignoring a child in a public setting.
[01:25:46]  This one comes to us out of Wayne, New Jersey.
[01:25:48]  It is not a Sesame Place character.
[01:25:51]  It is Chuck E. Cheese.
[01:25:52]  Chuck E. Cheese is also a racist.
[01:25:56]  A mother has posted a video at Twitter of the Chuck E. Cheese Mouse high-fiving numerous white children on stage, but seeming to ignore her black daughter dancing around him on the floor.
[01:26:06]  I actually saw this shortly before AR.
[01:26:08]  Here is that clip.
[01:26:27]  Now, I don't, this Chuck E. Cheese clearly blows off this one adorable child who happens to be black and is dancing in a sweet little pink tutu like dress right in front of him.
[01:26:37]  She's the only one from what I can see.
[01:26:39]  I see that.
[01:26:40]  And I think Chuck E. Cheese, who's ever inside of that is in the wrong job.
[01:26:43]  Like you do need to interact with the children.
[01:26:45]  He's not like he's interacting with white children.
[01:26:48]  He's just blowing off everyone.
[01:26:49]  He looks bored.
[01:26:50]  I have no idea.
[01:26:51]  But who knew that there was such an epidemic of these animal puppets racism, you know, like suffering from real and severe racism?
[01:27:02]  Well, it is kind of, it's interesting, like as a society, you know, we get, it's like every 14 years, we get onto shark attacks.
[01:27:16]  And all of a sudden, it's in the news.
[01:27:18]  It's in the zeitgeist.
[01:27:19]  Like sharks are sharks.
[01:27:21]  Sharks are spotted.
[01:27:22]  Shark attacks.
[01:27:23]  And then it goes away for a long period of time.
[01:27:25]  And then one happens and then we get back on it again.
[01:27:29]  So maybe this will be the time with racist characters at children's theme parks and restaurants.
[01:27:36]  And it's now we're going to get on this.
[01:27:38]  But what is the bigger picture and more insidious is we are making black people feel like they're not wanted in this society because the news gins this stuff up and it's really damaging to any community.
[01:27:58]  If you did it to Asians or Jews or any Hispanics or any community, it would be really damaging to that community.
[01:28:07]  I mean, imagine living in a society, growing up as a young person and being fed a diet of they don't want you.
[01:28:16]  This society doesn't want you.
[01:28:18]  And, you know, the kids are just sort of pawns in this game, but the people I blame are the people that are, you know, CNN and a lot of news outlets that jump on this, but as people like Michelle Obama, who write about going in to get ice cream with their daughters and having a white woman cut in front of them in line because she's black and she's invisible,
[01:28:45]  she's using being cut in front of in line to get ice cream as an example of racism in this society.
[01:28:54]  And who amongst us has not been in line and had somebody cut in front of you in line, sometimes willingly or unknowingly.
[01:29:05]  But this notion of seek it and you will find it is where we're at now with racism.
[01:29:14]  And I just think it's horribly damaging.
[01:29:16]  And it's not going to, it's definitely not helping the people it's intended to help.
[01:29:22]  I think that's really true.
[01:29:23]  And I think it's not exactly the same, but it's somewhat similar to what, let's say, a conservative might feel on a college campus, where they're, but in that case, they're genuinely not wanted.
[01:29:36]  You know, they're genuinely loathed.
[01:29:38]  And so probably any negative interaction they have, they attribute to the fact that people know that they're a Republican.
[01:29:43]  And that may or may not be true.
[01:29:45]  But once somebody gets in your head with an idea that you are loathed for one reason or another, that idea keeps cropping up.
[01:29:52]  And you could be the one doing it to yourself.
[01:29:54]  People who suffer from self-loathing, you know, can talk themselves into the fact that, like, he hates me, even though the person doesn't even know you when you get cut off on the road or road rage or something that happens to anybody.
[01:30:04]  It could happen to anybody, but you convinced yourself it's because of you, because you're terrible, or because you're black, or because you're a Republican, or whatever it is.
[01:30:13]  That's an interesting dynamic you raised that now like we're perpetuating this belief.
[01:30:18]  And so we'll see more incidents and cause more pain.
[01:30:23]  Yeah, well, look, if the threshold for racism is a person in a mascot outfit not high-fiving you, or the first lady going out for ice cream with her daughters and some white woman staring at her phone, stepping in line in front of her.
[01:30:42]  If that's the threshold for racism, then we're never going to eradicate racism because that stuff's going to take place all day, every day, everywhere.
[01:30:51]  That's right, because it happens to all of us, white or black.
[01:30:54]  I mean, we can all attest to that.
[01:30:55]  It's happened to every single one of us, irrespective of our skin color.
[01:30:59]  Okay, I want to end with this because I love this line from your book: Beware of those who are too nice.
[01:31:05]  It's probably a smokescreen.
[01:31:07]  That is so true.
[01:31:08]  That's 100% true.
[01:31:10]  When somebody's nice all the time and they're over-the-top sweet to me, I'm always like, You're a bad person.
[01:31:18]  Yeah.
[01:31:19]  Well, think all you have to do.
[01:31:22]  You know, I was thinking about this.
[01:31:23]  Yeah, I think a lot of people, I, you know, I don't want a nice neighbor.
[01:31:27]  I want a fair neighbor.
[01:31:29]  Like, I want people with character around me, but not nice.
[01:31:32]  And nice is fine, nice and fair, great, nice and high character, great.
[01:31:39]  But nice compensates for lack of character and a lack of fairness oftentimes.
[01:31:45]  And look no further than, well, I always use this as an example.
[01:31:51]  There are two people that started their TV shows by dancing, Ellen and Bill Cosby.
[01:31:59]  Go look at the opening of the old Bill Cosby show where he's just dancing, dancing, dance.
[01:32:05]  Watch Ellen and go, Hmm, were they nice?
[01:32:11]  Were they trying to get us to think they were nice?
[01:32:13]  Were they overcompensating for how they felt inside?
[01:32:17]  I don't trust nice.
[01:32:18]  Nice is an attempt to manipulate, it's an attempt to get you to feel a certain way about them.
[01:32:24]  And the real question is: why are you trying to get me to think this way about you?
[01:32:29]  Why not just be who you are?
[01:32:31]  And I will evaluate you based on your actions.
[01:32:34]  My God, everything you just said, like as the kids say, shoot it into my veins.
[01:32:39]  That's 100% right.
[01:32:41]  This is like validating my instinctive feelings about so many people.
[01:32:45]  I don't trust constantly nice and sweet and like saccharin-y.
[01:32:49]  It's like I'd rather see somebody, as you put in the book, be kind of douchey once in a while, and then I would trust them.
[01:32:57]  Yeah, you know, you know who they, you know, who they are.
[01:33:00]  They're consistent and there's no compensation for anything.
[01:33:05]  I don't trust nice.
[01:33:06]  I know every, I know it's everyone's goal is to be around nice people.
[01:33:12]  Your goal should be to be around high character people.
[01:33:16]  Yeah, I love that.
[01:33:18]  That's just one of the many profundities in Adam's new book.
[01:33:22]  You've got to buy it.
[01:33:22]  Buy it for somebody as a gift, too, because it's a funny read and they'll thank you.
[01:33:27]  The book is called Everything Reminds Me of Something It's Out Right Now.
[01:33:31]  Adam, such a pleasure.
[01:33:32]  All the best to you.
[01:33:34]  Love you, Megan.

=== Surround Yourself With High Character (00:41) ===

[01:33:36]  Very excited about tomorrow's show.
[01:33:38]  We've got Josh Rogan of the Washington Post here.
[01:33:41]  He's the perfect person to bring on right now.
[01:33:44]  Not only is he an expert on China, we can talk about Nancy Pelosi and all that, but, and we'll have an update by that point on how the trip went, but he is an expert on COVID and the lies we've been fed.
[01:33:56]  And this science piece, like this science magazine piece being touted again by the left and some of the defenders of the natural origins theory, we're going to get into it.
[01:34:07]  These two guys are compromised.
[01:34:08]  They've been compromised for a long time.
[01:34:10]  And we'll explain it all.
[01:34:12]  Don't forget to download the show in the meantime and go to youtube.com slash MeganKelly to watch it.
[01:34:16]  Thanks, everybody.
[01:34:17]  We'll see you tomorrow.