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Aug. 5, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:29:19
20220805_parenting-in-todays-society-and-hunter-biden-lapto
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Debauchery in the News 00:02:26
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, and happy Friday.
I am so excited for today.
In just a bit, in our second hour, we're going to be joined by my old pal, Ken LaCourt, former Fox News executive and founder of the Media Action Network.
We're going to get into the latest on Hunter Biden's laptop and what role the FBI may have had in trying to actively spread the lie that it was Russian disinformation.
A whistleblower has just come forward.
Ken was in on this laptop early on, and we'll ask him what he thinks about the latest.
But first, joining me now, one of my all-time favorites, somebody I respect and love so much.
Her name is not unfamiliar to any of you listening.
It's Dr. Laura, host of the Dr. Laura program on Sirius XM, which airs right after our program on Triumph 111.
She is author of 13 best-selling books, and we are so excited to have her here with us today.
Dr. Laura, welcome back.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I'm telling you, the last week I've been so popular because everybody said, You're doing Megan Kelly.
Oh, goody goody.
After you came on the last time, you have been by far our most requested repeat guest.
Everybody's like, When is it happening?
When is it happening?
And I've been saying the same.
And my only hesitation was: We had you booked for the day my son got injured when I was in Montana back in March.
And I didn't do the show at all that day.
I had to cancel the whole show because he was in the ICU.
And I was like, There's no way I can rebook Dr. Laura for any day that I'm even close to wobbly, you know, and not being able to appear or breaking news.
Might, you know, so you know me better than that.
Come on, I know, but I just out of respect.
There's so much I want to talk to you about.
And this is a weird place to start it, so forgive me, but it's been on my mind a lot lately.
Lately, coming on the air and reading up on the news of the day, all I see, and I don't mean to sound 200, but all I see in the news is debauchery.
Trends of Intent and Control 00:07:14
I mean, truly, you're just scrolling through the news headlines.
What do I see?
A Courtney Kardashian and Megan Fox half-naked, fondling each other over a toilet to try to promote something the Kardashians are selling.
It happens every day where you see basically naked people trying to shove some body part in our faces as we're just trying to consume the news.
What are you looking at?
It's all over.
It's all over.
Daily Mail.
I've got my computer on here.
Tell me what site.
Seriously.
Daily Mail has got most of these headlines, but New York Post has got a lot of them.
Wait a minute.
Daily Mail.
That's British, right?
Well, they have American too.
They have the American version.
Yeah, but they're very into that sort of scandalous stuff.
So, you know, no.
Well, I just got me thinking about something that I know you wrote and you've talked about before: about how where are all the role models?
You know, where I've heard you say before, when I was a kid, it was like Shirley Temple.
And the kids today have half-naked women all over the magazines and Instagram and are really being led to believe that unless you show a boob, you can't get any attention.
Well, you know, A couple of decades ago, I got in trouble and I was astounded.
So I was there in the beginning of this going downhill, frankly, with respect to kids.
My kid was very young, and he was trying to do skateboarding.
Okay, so we're at a mall and I went into a store that was a skateboarding store.
And he's looking at skateboards and shoes and helmets.
And I figure, okay, he'll break something.
You know, it's initiation into adulthood.
And I pick up a magazine.
Now, if I say it again, I don't want my life to go down the tubes for a week again.
It had, these are for adolescents.
This store was all for adolescents.
And they had a magazine done by Hustler.
That was the parent company of this magazine.
And it had all terrible things in it.
And a male putting a sparkler in a girl's rectum.
Oh, boy.
So I go to the manager, throw a fit.
I go on the air, throw a fit.
Next thing I know, I'm in a courtroom, and the judge is saying I was wrong.
And I had to pay six figures out of my own pocket.
And to this day, I have been stunned by that.
I am protecting kids.
And they were all for, this is fine for kids.
Now, you would ask, why would this whole trend start where we're trying to take kids off a track which leads them to more family success, success in life, better mental, physical health, family health?
That's because it's part of a bigger, and I sound like some kind of conspiracy nutcase, but it's been growing.
I mean, we don't have male and female.
There are no more mothers.
It's just people who birth.
And the whole trend away from family.
Now, when you look at dictatorial countries in the history, in the history that you can read, one of the things you did was to eliminate differences and to eliminate family.
Think about it.
So this is just a small part.
And if you keep showing kids naked pictures and, as you said, debauchery, then what are they distracted from?
Everything that's a value.
So who takes over?
A ruling class.
So these small incremental things that we've seen in history so many times before are happening.
And it's like we're missing it because nobody's getting educated about history.
So you look at these things and you say, who stands to gain?
You distract people from things that matter.
You unravel the things that give them anchors.
And who stands to gain?
I said when it was over 20 years ago, that this was a trend and this was intent.
And you look at our colleges now, our public schools, and you can see.
So I was a bit prescient, I'm sad to say.
It is a mission by some groups to destroy the nuclear family.
I mean, that was in the stated mission statement of Black Lives Matter until they got some blowback on it and took it off of their website.
But there are definitely some far-left groups who don't believe in the nuclear family and want to see it torn down.
I think a far-left progressive ideology in general just believes we should, you know, we should have the thrupples.
I did a story on that when I was at NBC and they don't believe in male-female-headed families and they really want to see it torn down.
And even you mentioned the trans thing, like the acceptance of People who are being told that they're little girls when they're in fact little boys.
I mean, that's actually happening.
It happened at my son's school, which is one of the reasons we pulled them.
But even in the news this week, we've been talking about Demi Lovato, who last year declared that she was not a she, she was a they.
And now this year, this week, just declared she's back to she because she's really feeling her feminine energy.
And all of it's part of the same problem, which is a gross extension from what we used to consider norms and just stable, stable behavior.
That's correct.
Stability is it.
The more you can unstable the family and society, then the more it can, the easier it can be totally taken over.
I mean, everybody acts like, you know, this hasn't happened in history and it's not happening in any other part of the world.
I mean, please, come on.
What do you think that everybody wants to ignore it?
And I'm 75 and a half.
So I'm going to live 25 more years.
So unfortunately, I'm going to see more of this.
Well, God willing, and I hope that's right.
You've been taking good enough care of yourself that it's actually realistic.
What do you think the end goal is, though?
I mean, I wonder about it sometimes.
Like, who is sitting where making these decisions?
It's not some centralized power.
It's more diffused than that.
But then Soros is about.
What do you think Soros is about?
I mean, he wants violent criminals on the streets and for people who are victimized by that to shut up and go away.
What is that about?
I mean, I want, I'm going to sound silly now.
What about the movies where they sort of train people to be evil?
That way they can keep a lid on the good people.
That way they dominate.
That way they control.
We're getting into politics and stuff.
And, you know, I'm not sure everybody wants to hear us talk about that, but I know I see a definite trend to tyranny.
I just feel it in our culture in a way that's unavoidable.
Handling Bratty Moments 00:16:13
You know, I see these messages being spoon-fed to my kids on the magazine racks in the stores in their actual classrooms.
And, you know, their biggest role models, I know I've heard you say this, are us, the parents.
So I have stock in the fact that if I live a, you know, a good life, if I provide a good example, my husband too, they'll be fine.
And so far, they seem fine, but they are surrounded by very unwell people in the public arena.
And it's exhausting trying to tell them, no, it's not really a good idea, idea to show your genitals at the Super Bowl halftime show.
But mommy, everybody is doing it.
It's on TV.
It must be right.
It must be okay.
You're a funny daddy.
Right.
And I, of course, you know, I don't care.
I'm always like, they always try that.
My daughter really wanted her ears pierced before she turned 12.
No.
She wanted a phone.
No.
I'm the last one.
I don't care.
You know, but you do have to be hardline.
Yes.
You have to actually be a responsible parent.
And frankly, Megan, I'm seeing less and less and less of that.
I ask people who have 20-something-year-old snowflakes who can't function by themselves at all, have to be totally financially in every other way supported and never have consequences to their actions and never have to deal with failure.
And I asked them, Would your grandparents have done any of this?
And they all say, Well, no.
Well, then why are you doing it?
And it's this blank stare that you get over the radio.
Blank stare.
I can feel it's a blankness that comes over the face, but you're doing it in spite of the fact you know it is not in your kids' best interest, which means you're intentionally being a bad parent.
What's the gain?
Well, the gain is less stress, less confrontation, more I'm just liked, more peace in my life.
I get to feel like a hero.
I can be connected to my kid in a way I'm not connected to a spouse or friends or my own parents.
So there are a lot of untoward reasons for it.
I have a question for you on this front.
So just to remind the audience, I have three kids and you, a 12-year-old boy, an 11-year-old girl, and a now nine-year-old boy.
And my 11-year-old daughter is mature beyond her 11 years.
You know, she's more like an early teenager.
She looks like an early teenager and she acts like an early teenager.
And she's awesome.
But there are moments, there are moments, Dr. Laura, where I'm getting, I'm getting the sass, I'm getting the talk back, I'm getting the inappropriate tone, and I'm getting the defiance, you know, of like, well, I won't.
And it's, you know, something she's committed to doing, you know, showing up at like a sailing race or what have you.
I know your sailor.
She's an aspiring sailor.
And I say, well, you have to.
You said you'd be there.
Well, I'm not doing it.
And I've been asking myself for the first time, now what?
Because it's a power showdown.
I don't know what to do.
Like, what's my next move?
Well, give me one, give me one example.
Describe it as best you can as though you were giving me a video and let me recommend what you might say at that moment.
Go ahead.
Okay.
So she said, there's a regatta tomorrow.
Yes.
And we signed you up because you said you wanted to do it.
I don't want to do it.
Well, you said you'd do it and you're doing it.
I'm not going.
You are going because you said you wanted to do it.
We signed you up and we paid.
You can't make me.
And then, okay.
I confess I think I went wrong here.
You can stop.
No, you went wrong already.
So don't worry about the rest of it.
You, you, okay.
I don't know your daughter, but I can hear your daughter.
Okay.
So here's how you handle that.
The first thing you do is laugh.
And you must laugh because it does two things.
It takes the power back from her.
She has the power when you're struggling.
Yes, you will.
Yes, you will.
And I, you know, I signed it up.
You said you wanted to do it.
The minute you do that, they have the power because no wins.
Try to put food in an infant's mouth.
No wins.
So what do you do?
You tickle them, you laugh, you do all kinds of cool things and they relax.
And then they're enjoying the moment with you.
So here's what I would have recommended at that moment.
So what sandwiches do you want me to bring tomorrow?
Do you want me to do your hair before we go?
Stuff like that.
I'm not going.
No, she doesn't.
I don't need a sandwich.
You would have confused her.
Confusion is a very powerful therapeutic tool.
When you confuse somebody by not behaving at all the way they were anticipating, she's anticipating an arm wrestle and you gave her an arm wrestle.
But if you gave her the giggles and you kissed her and said, I can't wait.
It's going to be so much fun.
By the way, what kind of sandwich?
And you walk out of the room.
And she's left to herself thinking, I so confusion and cuteness, hug, kiss on the cheek.
You want to put your hair up tomorrow?
It's going to be windy.
And, but you escape from the room and it's just complete.
It's going to happen.
If you give her an opportunity to say no, you lost.
Now, if you're a hardliner type, you can say, mm-hmm.
So you don't want to go because.
And what do you have planned to do instead?
Well, I'm going to, yeah, I don't think so.
No.
Mm-hmm.
No.
And when your phone is gone for two months, are you going to learn smoke signals?
So in other words, you're sort of being sarcastically cute, but you're not arguing.
You're just saying, well, what are you going to do without your phone for two months?
How's that going to work out for you?
And not being able to see your friends for a month and a half.
How is that going to work for you?
But you don't have to go tomorrow.
It's okay.
But just, you know, let me know how are you going to handle the next two months.
I'm kind of curious.
So that is another technique.
That's another thing.
No, I was not that clever.
I wound up going with embarrassed to confess where it went, but I was like, she said, I can't make you.
I said, oh, or you can't make me.
I said, oh, I can.
I can.
You cannot have another sleepover this summer.
You cannot see this.
You cannot do this.
And she, of course, is like, fine, fine.
Yes.
Fine.
Because I killed myself losing an argumentative way.
But if the way I did it is, so what are you going to be doing for the two months that you won't have the phone?
I was just curious.
How are you going to, so you think you'll make phone calls on the house phone?
So you're just inquiring.
You're not going to war.
Everything you did was going to war.
You have to avoid that because you cannot win war with an adolescent or a teenager.
You can't win the war.
Right.
So the first thing you have to do is like you don't care, laugh a lot, smile, give her hugs and kisses.
It'll confuse the hell out of her.
I got there eventually.
I did go back.
We separated.
I went back into her bathroom and she was doing her hair and I said, I'm sorry.
I said, I'm not going to take those things away from you.
If you don't want to go to the regatta tomorrow, you don't have to.
And she said, I'll go.
What time is it?
And, you know, we left it on a good note.
You didn't win that.
No, I did not win.
No, I knew that.
I did not win that.
She bequeathed it to you.
She never had any intention of not going.
It's getting more complicated.
It was easier when they were toddlers.
Now that they're closer to, you know, thinking, really smart, interactive human beings, I'm on my heels a lot more, you know?
And one of the, here's another issue I wanted to ask you about.
One of the issue is their friends, right?
Most of their friends I absolutely adore.
One or two.
I don't know.
And they're fine, unless I hear that they're treating my child badly.
And that I know you're a mother.
When you find out that the friend has treated your child badly, your back gets up and you think, maybe this isn't a nice kid.
And then my other side says, stay out of it.
It's not your friend.
It's their friend.
But what do you, how do you navigate that when your child's friends are nasty to them?
Nasty consistently or have bratty moments.
Have bratty moments.
Yeah.
Say, you know, you put down bratty moments.
Come on.
Not with each other.
But everybody has bratty moments.
So your daughter has bratty moments.
You just told me of some.
So bratty moments happen.
If it's a pattern, then you get concerned.
If there's a bratty moment, ignore it.
But what do you do when you're trying to raise your child to understand they do need to self-respect?
You know, they need to, if it becomes a pattern, because you don't know it's a pattern until a lot of time has passed and you have a bunch of examples.
You know, I want them to remember to stand up for themselves.
It's not okay to be with somebody repeatedly who's constantly putting you down.
And yet I also don't know that I should even be getting involved.
You know, it's like they're young, so they deem me to be involved.
Well, no, no, no, no, if I may say it has nothing to do with going in between and moderating it.
What it has to do with part of parenting is teaching the major part of parenting is teaching children how to cope with life, their feelings, other people, morals, values, principles, and ethics.
That's your job.
So if you see that there's a pattern or taking poop, then you have to sit and say, you know, I noticed that Mary does this, this, this, and this, and this, and this, and you embrace her in your life anyway.
I guess you're very compassionate and giving her all these choices and opportunities.
And so you're giving her sort of a semi-compliment, but she doesn't understand it's not a compliment.
And I was wondering, what makes you hold on?
So instead of saying this person's bad, dump them, you're asking questions to understand her way of thinking and feeling.
Well, if I'm, if she'll say bad things about me and then nobody will be my friend.
These days, that's a real concern because you have the net.
In the old days when I was a kid, people actually just had to talk to each other, but they couldn't accumulate too many bodies that way.
So you inquire.
Your role is to teach her how to think and to respond to things that are upsetting or bad in a brave but rational way.
Sorry, rational way.
I know.
I like that.
It's like, what do you, what are your thoughts in general on the difference of parenting at this age, you know, these tender ages versus 18, 20, and 22, right?
At some point.
Well, 18, 20, and 22, you drop, kick them out of your house, and then all their decisions and the consequences are there.
So you're free at last.
But when they're this young, they don't know who the hell they are.
That's the main problem.
I feel, you know, I'm menstruating, therefore I'm a grownup.
And if it's a girl, if it's a boy, he's not menstruating, in spite of what they teach in school.
So, you know, so their hormones are up and down.
Their identities are not formed.
They want to be accepted as the number one thing with their peer group.
They want to be accepted, which means holding on to morals, values, and principles, and ethics thwarts being accepted in certain areas at certain times with certain people.
And it's crazy making.
In addition, your parents have no notes in their brain as to what they want you to do.
They give you rules and expectations.
You have family life and you want to be involved in family life.
But on the other hand, you want to be with your peers.
I mean, it's the craziest time.
Do you ever want to go back to be that age?
Hell no.
Hell no, baby.
Hell no.
That's why you have to be patient and understanding.
Have a strong line with a lot of compassion.
Yeah.
My daughter and my little guy had an argument and she got out of the car and I was still in the car with him.
And he said, you know, she makes me so mad sometimes.
I said, I understand.
I said, you know, part of it is she's in puberty and she's got these hormones and she's kind of going crazy at times.
And you'll go through it too a little bit.
Later on that day, they made up and she said, Thatcher, I'm sorry.
I was mean in the car.
And he said, I'm sorry, too.
It's not your fault.
It's your hormones.
And he'll be saying that to his woman for the rest of his life.
It's so true.
Early training, baby.
All right, I got another one I want to run by you.
And that is politics and owning them in 2022 America, in one's friendships, in one's life.
Now, I have an intern sitting here on the couch next to me named Gwendolyn.
And Gwendolyn is right-leaning and has had to navigate a school system that is far left her entire life and is now off to college where it will be far left and they will try to indoctrinate her into far left thinking.
And my observations of her have been she's always done it rather deftly.
She's, she doesn't hide the fact that she's right-leaning and she's unlike most of her peers, but she has taken a fair amount of abuse because of it.
And I get emails from listeners and viewers all the time saying, you know, how do I befriend people who don't share my politics?
How do I get along with superiors, whether it's a teacher or a boss whose politics are very different than mine when my politics might be out there?
They might be out there on Facebook or Insta, what have you.
It's a tricky situation, especially now we're so divided.
Well, you put a lot of things on my list here.
I hope my brain can remember them one by one.
First of all, don't be putting your stuff on the net.
That's just stupid and asking for problems.
There's no reason for you to be on the net explaining what you feel and think about anything political.
Who cares?
It doesn't change the world.
If you want to be elected to something and try to make things happen in a different way, if you want to be an activist out there trying to educate and inform, I get that.
But just this idol putting stuff on Facebook to me is just useless and absurd.
And it opens you up to problems.
Number two, I race a sailboat and I have a crew, seven, eight guys.
I am sure from certain little tiny things, we all have different politics.
One time, one time in all the almost 10 years we've been together, one time somebody started to make a comment and I said, nope, no politics on this boat ever, ever stops right now.
I'm a skipper.
That was it.
It stopped.
We get along great.
Why?
Because we don't have any maniac on the boat who thinks his or her opinion is the be-in and end-all of how everybody should think, feel, and do.
And as long as you're not trying to impose on other people, everybody's going to get along that has a different point of view.
Not so in public schools, not so in colleges and universities.
It'd be very dangerous places because you have to shut up.
If you don't shut up, you're going to be bullied and you're probably not going to get good grades.
This is an insane situation.
So when people are okay in families, for example, families, somebody at the dinner table, well, I just can't understand why you think that that's it.
It's over for that family.
Sorry.
But if everybody can just eat their dinner and talk about other things and even go into those areas, and I always tell people to say, that's very interesting.
I'll give that some thought.
That usually shuts the other person up because, oh, you're going to give it some thought.
You're not arguing.
So I give people tools to handle that within the family.
But in the university, in the public schools, every day for 20 years, I've been begging people to take their kids out of public school and either homeschool them or find private schools that actually educate, not doctrinate.
Yeah.
Breaking the Family Cycle 00:15:44
Yeah.
I have to say I do the same myself.
I have tons of friends whose politics are diametrically opposed to my own.
And people ask me all the time, how do you maintain those friendships?
And my answer is the same.
We don't talk about politics.
Right.
We have lots of other things we can talk about.
Right.
And I'm not about to lose a good friendship knowing that they think this way or that way because how they think doesn't change the world.
How one person, you know, I don't care.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There are so many more important things you can talk about.
And it's one of the reasons why I like having people who have different politics in my own life because when I cover the news, it reminds me not to demonize everyone on the other side because I'd be demonizing my friends.
You know, they're not all awful people.
Some of them are, some of them aren't.
But it's just a good reminder that, you know, it's the politics with which you have an issue.
It's not necessarily the humans who support them.
Right.
Okay.
So now you are still sailing.
That's great.
I love that.
Racing.
Yeah, racing.
I hear you talking about it.
And you are also doing something else that I want to spend some time on.
So tell me about the resin jewelry and who this is helping because it's awesome.
Well, I just started working in making resin foundation jewelry with embedded flowers and other inclusions, you know, to make them very elegant.
And I used to do glass fusing work, knitting, putting together jewelry and necklaces and earrings and bracelets that had to do with semi-precious stones.
I've sort of moved from thing to thing.
And lately, I'm into the resin because people think of it as kind of a hobby thing, but it's it, I mean, it's that too.
But you can also do it on a very complex that I've been learning level, which is frustrating because it's a big learning curve.
That's okay.
I'll be perseverant.
And I do this all to have three or four boutiques a year through my radio program to raise funds for the Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation.
And the kids who are in families, the gold star families, where a parent has died in the line of duty, they're going to have a hard time with educational funds.
So that's what we help.
So 100% of the sale price.
So there, I think there were five or six adorable pieces left.
We started Monday, had 66 pieces.
And it's drlauredesigns.com.
If you don't wish to purchase a particular bracelets or left, there are some bracelets left.
All the necklaces went.
And you can just go to fallenpatriots.org and just donate.
And you don't have to buy a bracelet from me.
It's okay.
Well, you've got to make more in all your spare time.
That's in between the racing and the show and the working out.
You've got to make more.
We need America wants it.
It's absolutely beautiful.
The pieces are absolutely gorgeous.
I went and looked myself before we came on the air.
So it's good.
You can get something for yourself where 100% of the sales proceeds go to help a child in need from a Gold Star family or just donate, as Dr. Laura points out.
And can you just give us the websites one more time so people know?
drlauradesigns.com.
And we have the link to Fallen Patriots on the website.
By the way, if you looked at everything, I'd like to make you something.
What particular thing caught your fancy?
Well, I love the bracelets.
And I'm not just saying that because you have them left over.
But I love the bracelets and any color.
Oh, any color.
All right.
Yeah.
I'll make you something nice.
Probably.
I would love that.
Thank you so much.
And thanks for taking care of the Gold Star families.
That is a cause that we can all get behind.
It doesn't matter what your politics are.
That's because people are hurting and we move on too quickly once they are left without a parent.
We spend a day saying we're sorry and then we forget to think, you know, and do something about it.
All right.
So listen, there's something I want to do with you next.
And I don't even know if my team told you this, but I have a very dear friend.
She is well known.
Her name is Melissa Francis.
And she wasn't that little house on the prairie.
Yes, exactly.
She was brought in as the next wave of Ingalls children when the first round aged out and she and Jason Bateman acted together as Charles and Carolyn's new adopted children.
So then she went on.
She was very successful child actress.
She went to Harvard.
She got an econ degree.
She went on to be on CNBC for a time and then came over to Fox Business, which is where I met her when I was on Fox News channel.
We became very good friends and still are.
Oh.
And she listens to this show and she listens to your show.
And she asked me, she said, the next time Dr. Laura comes on, may I please call in?
Because I have something I need to tell her.
And it's an amazing, it's an amazing thing that I know you're going to want to hear.
So that's a tease.
We'll take a quick break and we'll be back with Dr. Laura and Melissa Francis.
Joining us now by phone is another dear friend of mine, Melissa Francis, who I mentioned before the break.
And Melissa, in addition to being a great broadcaster, a great actor, wickedly funny, is also an incredible mother.
And I've seen that myself.
She has three children.
She has a happy marriage.
But it wasn't always thus.
In her family of origin, she had a mother who was not quite as great as Melissa, to put it mildly.
And it's amazing that Melissa managed to break this cycle.
I mean, it's not easy to break the cycle when you come from a parent like Melissa did.
And the reason I know all this is not just our friendship, but she wrote a book years ago called Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter.
So I read the book.
I know Melissa well.
And she asked me next time I had Dr. Laura on if she could come on and talk to her just a little bit about her own background and Dr. Laura's surprise role in Melissa's life.
Melissa, thank you so much for calling in, lady.
How are you?
Oh my goodness.
I'm so nervous.
I've never been this nervous.
I love Dr. Laura.
This is so exciting.
I'm just going to fangirl out on you right here.
Two of the most impressive ladies on the planet.
First of all, I heard the top of the show.
I couldn't wait to get in.
Megan's children are perfect, by the way.
Recently, my husband and I were over at her house and they were sitting in the dining room, the three of them, by themselves, eating vegetables and grilled chicken, talking politely with napkins in their laps, having dinner.
And my husband and I have not stopped talking about it because we were so horrified for what it looks like inside our own house that we were like, well, now Megan and Doug can never see our children again.
So that's too bad.
When I hear her talk telling this story, I'm just dying laughing because her children are phenomenal specimens of human beings.
So anyway, but I'm so excited to talk to you because the first time I listened to your program was about 25 years ago.
And before that time, as Megan said, you know, in a nutshell, I was, my mother is a sociopath.
And that made growing up really tricky, kind of difficult.
There were a lot of challenges along the way.
But before I listened to you, it never occurred to me that I could walk away.
Never.
I never thought, I thought the family that you were born into, that's it.
You know, that's what you got.
That's what you got built.
And I spent the first, you know, 20 years of my life trying to solve that problem and trying to live within the problem, trying to deal with the problem, trying to understand the problem.
It never ever occurred to me that I could, for my own sanity, walk away.
And it took a while of listening to you to get the courage together to do it the right way.
You know, just saying my sister, anyone who's read my book, as Megan said, you know, knows the story, but it wasn't until my sister was gravely ill, you know, that I really realized I could physically see the damage that she had done.
I mean, I should have seen it sooner, but it was at this point in life that I could see it and was able to say, you know, we could start fresh, but we're not continuing like this at all.
You know, all these things have to change.
You need to get help, like you need help.
Of course, she wasn't willing to.
Of course, I knew that was going to be what she was going to say.
But, you know, I wanted to be clear that I wasn't going to go on and continue to let her create Mishigas in my life without getting help for herself.
If I hadn't listened to you and I hadn't gotten that courage together, I never would have had children.
I know that.
I never had any intention of getting married or having children.
And, you know, I met my husband first and that's when I started listening to you because I thought I need, I know what not to do.
Now there's an entire spectrum of choices out there.
How in the world am I ever going to figure out what to do?
And, you know, some people take issue with your approach.
And if you have a brain in your head, you understand that what you're doing is laying down a way of thinking.
You know, and if you listen to you consistently over a period of time, you get the gist of the idea of, you know, living to a certain moral standard yourself and holding people in your life to that.
And also when you just don't need to go around fixing other people's problems.
In any case, that's a very long way of saying, you know, the therapist that I have now said, I don't know how you and your husband managed to create such a loving family.
He's, you know, met my children and he said, I just, I don't know.
He's like, someday you're going to have to tell me how you were able to figure it out.
And it started with you.
It started with you.
You know, I just said, this is over now.
I'm not going to carry this.
And it's been a long journey, but I have a wonderful husband who I've been married to for 25 years and almost.
We're a little shy of that, but I always tease him about not knowing for sure what your anniversary is.
And then I just did it.
But we've been together for 25 years.
We've been married for 23 years.
And, you know, of course, it all started with that.
And then even beyond that, just, you know, taking it one day at a time and listening to your show.
But it started with the idea, which I had never considered, which was that I don't have to put up with this for my whole entire life.
And now it sounds so silly, but without you, I never would have thought of it.
So thank you.
Well, bless you.
And you're very welcome.
And it's, you know, you can put an idea out there, but it takes a lot of courage on the other side, your side, to wrap yourself in it and move forward.
As you said, I know now what not to do.
What the heck do I do?
So it takes a lot of guts and a lot of perseverance and a lot of heart to make the transition you made.
I'm very impressed with you.
Thank you.
And just jumping in, if you read Melissa's book, you'll know, I mean, she had a toxic mother.
She had a mother who is physically abusive, emotionally abusive to Melissa's sister, to Melissa.
Okay.
Stole from her and so on.
Please, I'm going to have to correct you.
Toxic refers to chemicals.
Her mother was a bitch.
Okay.
Psycho bitch.
You know, that's my diagnosis.
And all this toxic, that's about chemicals.
So I'm going to read Melissa's book.
I'm sorry I hadn't up to this point, but I'm going to get it as soon as we hang up.
I'm going to go get it.
Well, let me, can I please send you my own copy?
Because I'm so honored to have you read it and look at it or whatever.
But I just think that it's, I would love to send that to you.
And I have been begging Megan to come on because I wanted to know.
And I loved your advice also about the kids because my husband does that all the time where he will start laughing to diffuse the situation.
And he has taught our kids to do that when somebody tries to tease them, to bully them.
And it's amazing that the other side just becomes completely confused, just like you said.
So I knew he was brilliant, but to hear it confirmed by you is just amazing.
And I have so much fun listening to you.
And you're just the perfect person to have on next to Megan because you guys are both brilliant, strong, powerful women.
Yeah, we are.
Now we've got these kids right where we want them, Melissa.
We are armed with a lot of new skills.
They are not going to stand a chance.
But wait, just to round back, because I want to say this, it's, I, I pulled your book up, Melissa, because this is really important.
And Dr. Laura, you've talked openly about, you know, separating from your own mother, who also was a bitch.
And yes, thank you.
It's not easy.
It's not easy for a lot of people.
When it's family, you think you can't, you think you shouldn't, you think you'll regret.
And in Melissa's book, she talks about how she saw the effects that the abuse was happening on her sister.
And then her sister, Tiffany, died.
And you remembered, you write in the book about how you remembered your sister Tiffany saying, it would be so nice to have a mom.
And you write, I closed the door on my mother forever.
She had never called.
She had never returned the money she took from you, never opened her heart to the daughter who needed her.
There was nothing to forgive and nothing to salvage.
Our bond was just wiped away, gone.
I told my dad that I would take care of telling mom, meaning about Tiffany's death.
It had been more than a year since I had given her the choice of coming back to help Tiffany or losing us both forever.
And she had chosen to throw all of us away.
13 months of silence.
I wrote her a letter.
I sent it to this house where she was, you thought she was staying.
I informed her that her oldest daughter was dead and the window of opportunity with me was now closed forever.
She had made her choice and now she would have to live with it.
Her chance to make things right on this earth was gone.
This cycle of madness, this pain, it ends with me.
Oh, Melissa, my heart.
It's hard to hear.
Sorry to hear.
That last line is exactly it.
That's exactly it.
And that's why it's so important to do.
Yep.
It is.
And, you know, I was now, now you're going to make me feel emotional, Negative.
It's hard to hear those words.
You know, I was afraid to have children, of course.
And I was really afraid to have a daughter.
And I do have a daughter now.
She's our youngest and she's seven.
And it's amazing.
It's so much easier than I thought it was going to be.
Like all of it has been so much easier if you're honest and open and, you know, reach out and ask for help when you need it.
And what has stuck out to me over time was that all of the, everything that happened didn't have to happen.
Fear to Have a Daughter 00:04:07
You know, there was no genetic reason.
There was no situational reason.
You have so much more control than you think you do.
And I think that that is one of actually both of you.
I mean, that's something that I think both of you are always driving home to your audiences is that you may feel, and it's why you resist the victim movement as well.
You may feel like you have no power, you have no control, that people are doing things to you.
And yes, they are, but you don't have to sit there and continue to take it, that you can make a different choice, that you can take a different path.
And it's never too late to do that.
I would say that, you know, my mother came and confronted me when I was on my book tour for that book.
It was really something because I hadn't seen her for a long time.
And she came 30 seconds before I went live on the air.
I had the governor of California there.
I was there for a book tour.
We had security.
She had gotten past security, telling the security she was my mother.
Meanwhile, we had told the security when we set up the show that the only person we were trying to make sure didn't come in was my mother.
So there you go.
You can do anything.
And I was, I was, you know, it was traumatic.
She just came up and she said, she grabbed me by the arm and, you know, said, I, I do love you.
Because that was one of the things that I said in the book.
And just the way she grabbed me, you know, you go right back to that place of physical abuse.
And I just stood up.
I said, what do you want me to do with that?
And I stood up and I walked to the set and I sat down.
And I really had been about 15 seconds.
And luckily, the producer that was with me had never seen her, didn't know who she was, but he instantly knew what the heck was going on.
My wonderful producer, Jill Frangie.
You know, we all have those people in our lives who just know.
And, you know, she got security and I did a whole hour live show, you know, 15 seconds after that.
And then that was it.
I never heard from her again.
And recently, someone called me from California and was crying and said that she has moved on.
And she apparently this is according to this woman that she, you know, moved in with someone else and then he died in suspicious circumstances.
And, you know, she was really devastated.
And, you know, she said she wants justice.
And I said, I, you know, I did everything I could.
I wrote a book.
I went on national, I went on the Today Show everywhere telling people to beware of this person.
There's only, you know, you can't, you can't, you really can't stop people.
You can, but it's so, it's so rare.
And in both of your cases, Melissa and yours, Dr. Laura, you managed to stop this.
Mine was not anything close to hers.
Yeah.
Mine was before kindergarten compared to her in post-graduate school with that.
Well, listen, I'm so glad that we had this moment, this healing moment, this moment of gratitude.
I've been listening to Melissa talk about her love for you and me as well, Dr. Laura, for a long time now.
I'm glad that we made that happen.
Melissa, thank you for calling in.
Thank you.
I'm so grateful.
Thank you.
And Dr. Laura, I'm going to send you the book and I'm going to write something funny in it because I'm normally funny.
This is not fun.
She is very funny.
Please add a family picture for me, okay?
I will.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much.
I love you both.
Thank you.
To be continued, lady.
Now, Dr. Laura, don't go away.
I have to tell you, I want to ask you because you're still going strong.
You're still racing.
You're still doing the jewelry.
You're doing the show.
How are you?
How's everything?
Great.
It is.
It sounds great.
But I always want to check because, you know, I care about you and I want to make sure you're doing well.
Well, I have a few complaints.
I speak on behalf of your fans.
Thank you.
I have a few complaints.
I want to be 5'5 so I don't have to hem anything.
You know, things like that.
That's about the height of my misery.
Unraveling the Trump Years 00:16:06
That's pretty good.
Now, is there any time you're coming to the East Coast?
Because I would love to see you in person.
Never.
I escaped that.
Damn.
So I'm going to have to come to California.
Summer, spring all year long.
That's where I belong.
I used to like to come to New York once a year to go to Sirius XM, to go to the theater, to have tons of food and go shopping.
Yay.
But it's too dangerous now.
And people are getting soccer punched on the streets, shot, run over.
The crime is crazy.
It's like one of those dystopian New York movies.
Yes.
I forget.
Escape from New York.
Yeah, that was it.
It's like that's what it is now.
So I'm not going back.
I don't blame you.
I mean, California's got its own problems, but the crime in New York City is just, it's awful.
It's disgraceful.
And it's going to take decades to get us back to where we were.
Well, you're optimistic, aren't you?
Been accused of worse.
You're amazing.
I love you.
Thank you for being here.
And please come back soon.
Oh, anytime.
And don't worry about timing or any of that.
I love talking to you.
You're the greatest.
I listen to your call of the day.
I go to podcast.
I listen to you.
Listen to you when I turn off the show.
Like, I've taken a lot of my life wisdom from you.
And thank you.
I am.
Now, remember, laugh.
Laugh.
Last discipline.
Laugh.
Be weird.
Which I can't.
Be weird.
Yes.
Even better than laugh.
Be weird.
Lots of love.
Lots of love back at you.
Thanks for having me.
The FBI in the hot seat today following whistleblower allegations that biased agents actively worked to discredit and cover up negative information about Hunter Biden.
Ken LeCourt is a former Fox News executive and host of Ken LeCourt, big pod, which you can find on YouTube and your favorite podcast platforms.
Ken, it's so nice to have you here.
How are you?
Megan, thank you.
I am good, and we haven't spoken for years.
And I'm happy we are.
I know.
We go back a long way, though.
I mean, when what years were you at Fox in total?
Obviously, we had a lot of crossover, but what were you doing?
Yeah, I was there from like the beginning of 99 through the Trump election.
So I remember you and I would talk occasionally, not as much after you got your show, but more so when you were a reporter down in DC.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
And you were legendary within the halls of Fox News.
And everybody who works at Fox knows Ken LaCourt.
So it's great to have you on now.
Now you're out on your own.
You have your own independent media gig going.
And I read that John Moody is involved in it too.
Are you and me together?
He was.
And I just talked to him last week and he said to say hello.
You know, look, when I left Fox, I saw what was happening to the media.
It was getting ripped apart.
And I actually tried to do something that was fair and balanced.
And I got wiped out, lost a ton of money, and that didn't work at all.
It was a combination of it's really, really hard to have news that doesn't say, oh, this side is evil and this side is wonderful.
You know, that stuff doesn't get shared on social media.
And they still painted me as a right-wing crazy person and banned me from Facebook and did all that fun stuff.
So now I'm concentrating on a podcast because I actually think that this long format, this long format conversations is the best thing to have come out of the internet news-wise.
I mean, the internet, I think, helped drive everyone to the extremes, but this is a way that you don't have to do that.
I mean, and Joe Rogan, I think, is like a perfect example of that.
And he was the first guy that I saw.
Was like, I don't know if he's a Republican or a Democrat.
He seems to be telling the truth and he's just talking and he admits when he doesn't know things.
And he's grabbed an audience now, sometimes bigger than Fox or MSNBC on his shows.
So I think I don't know what Joe is doing.
My guess is he's a non-woke center lefty.
That's my guess, just based on what I hear.
Yes, who gets shoved more to the right every time they attack him for a wrong thing.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's the thing.
It's like, what does it mean?
You know, back 10 years ago, I used to say, well, maybe I'm more socially liberal on some of this.
I wouldn't say that about myself now.
I don't even know what that is.
Like, or the center of gravity is moved beneath us.
Right.
Because back then, being socially liberal meant let gay guys kiss each other.
I don't care.
Or do this.
Now it means use this exact language or you're worse than Hitler.
I mean, the center has changed.
And I think there's a whole lot of people who thought they were on the left and are now like, that's kind of weird.
I'm voting for people I wouldn't have liked five years ago.
Yeah.
And now they're actually registered Republicans and they're coming to grips with what that means, or they actually voted for Trump last time around.
So let's talk politics for a minute because then I want to get in the news because there's a lot I want to pick your brain on in our business.
The Hunter Biden thing.
So you had some sort of a connection to the laptop.
I think you were like one of the first people to actually be willing to report on it is my understanding, even though everybody was saying disinformation.
But you tell me.
So I kind of had a bit role in that.
So the guy who owned that Delaware, that Delaware computer repair shop, a guy named John Paul McIsak.
The legally blind guy.
Yes, the legally blind guy, kind of an odd duck.
He'd wear his Tam o' shanter and he, you know, he just kind of, he was an interesting guy.
Well, he had like a year earlier given this to the FBI.
He first had his dad do it because his dad had some government connections out in Arizona.
Then he had the FBI show up.
They took the laptop.
They gave him a receipt for the laptop, which he kept.
During that time or prior to that time that he gave it to the FBI, he looked on it.
And when he looked on it, he not only saw all of because he legally owned it at that point when Hunter dropped it off and then never came back, which wasn't the first time he'd lost a Mac laptop.
It was kind of ironic.
Or whatever word that would be.
And so this guy waited and waited to have something happen.
Nothing happened for a long time.
So he eventually called up Rudy's people, Rudy Giuliani, and gave them a copy of it.
And then still a month or so had gone by.
They said that they were going to shop it out to various publications.
And the guy found himself like three or four weeks before the election.
He's like, nobody's getting back to me and nothing's going on.
What's going on?
So through a bizarre connection, a former weather and helicopter reporter from Los Angeles knew me from back in the day and he knew John Paul's dad.
And so that's how it came to me.
And he came to me and gave me a subset of them, a very small subset, a few dozen of the emails, and then said like, you know, what do I do here?
And the first thing I did was read into them.
And it was very, very obvious that these were real emails and these were real documents.
I mean, it was things like they were with PR firms.
This was mainly centered around Burisma and the Ukrainian gas company, you know, the slimy Ukrainian gas company on which Hunter served on their board.
And they were clearly authentic.
Now, that didn't necessarily mean that he was authentic or that they came the way he said it because it was a weird story.
I mean, the blind guy is getting it from Hunter who comes in, fumbles around, then doesn't get it.
It was a weird story, you know.
But the documents were just, it was obvious that there was something real there because they were things that had phone numbers and CCs with multiple people in law firms and PR firms and all that.
So I tried to help him.
I was a nobody at that point.
I get under a million people a month looking at my stuff.
I was trying to help shop that out to some things.
What I found during that time was that the New York Post had it and they were actually going to start working on something.
I gave a few of them to a couple of Fox News shows and helped get that out there.
And then when the post came out, I think we saw the worst case of media malpractice I think that I can cite in my lifetime.
I mean, if the media were lawyers, they should be disbarred after that.
It was all they did was attack him hardcore.
We had a bunch of people from former, you know, former serious real guys and gals from the NSA and the FBI.
I mean, they signed that big letter.
It has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
And that's all that the mainstream media needed to kind of kind of pretend that that doesn't exist.
You still go look up this information on Wikipedia and it's like, nope, with no evidence on this and the Ukraine conspiracy.
They did their best.
I mean, look, the media had completely stopped being referees by the time Trump came up for re-election.
They really stopped by the time he came for election.
They started being players, not referees.
And their only goal was to get Joe Biden elected at that point.
And I think what you also saw was that that laptop was sitting in somebody's desk and gathering dust for months and months and months.
And the FBI was clearly going to sit on their thumbs and let that slide.
It was in their Delaware division, too.
It was in their Delaware division where he still had a lot of power there.
So it was.
The media were used to, you know, as Bernie and Bernard Goldberg would say, the slobbering love affair that the media has been having with the Democrats, Obama, and so on.
But the FBI's partisan role in this was truly shocking to me at the time.
I was shocked.
I did not, I think a lot of people had faith in like the FBI and CIA.
That was unraveled over the course of the Trump years.
And then this story in particular.
And the news today is that now Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican, he sent, this is according to Chuck Ross at the Washington Free Beacon, posted this story last week, that he sent the Justice Department and FBI a letter and says an analyst at the FBI named Brian Otten was named by whistleblowers as the person behind an August 2020 report that the FBI used to falsely suggest the Hunter Biden information was fake.
It was disinformation.
That bad information about him was disinformation.
And this is the same guy who had failed to advise others at the FBI about inconsistencies in the Steele dossier.
This guy, Brian Otten, pushed the Steele dossier, totally discredited now.
He pushed aggressively for surveillance warrants against Carter Page, then Trump advisor.
I mean, this guy's, this is the guy.
Like when we talk about what the FBI did to Carter Page, to Trump, on Hunter Biden, this is the one, according to the whistleblowers, who did it.
Not fired yet, by the way.
And then let me just finish the, let me just finish on him.
He, in addition to him, there's another guy named Timothy Tibalt, I think Tybalt.
And he was an FBI assistant special agent in charge.
What is it, Cal?
T-Balt.
Okay.
In charge of the Washington Field Office, who shut down a line of inquiry into Hunter Biden when the laptop came out, October 2020.
He wanted the laptop to be labeled disinformation, despite he knew that some of the details were true.
And if you look at his social media, it's all anti-Trump, anti-Bilbar.
And just today before we got in the air, Ken news broke that this guy, T-Balt, has been removed from his leadership post, not fired, but removed, placed in another unspecified job.
Brian Otten, apparently not, apparently still sitting there as they investigate these allegations.
You know, I was one of those people who used to trust the FBI too.
And maybe our trust was overplaced 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
I mean, let's be honest, in the late 60s, when everybody loved the FBI, they were doing their best to discredit and Martin Luther King and tapped his house and tapped his work and sent him letters encouraging him to kill himself.
I mean, the FBI has always had some of that undertoning, but I kind of didn't see it in the last decade.
But when you see, you combine this with some of the emails and text with those two agents who were having the affair and we're going to stop him.
And these were high-level people.
This wasn't low sells on that.
They clearly politicized it.
You know, I hate to say people should go to jail, but man, people should go to jail.
That was a misuse of that will be ongoing.
Look, they did what they wanted to do.
They got Joe Biden in the White House.
The media has done its level best to ignore all allegations about Hunter Biden, whether it's corruption or his weird drug and gun habits, which appear to have broken more laws than I can count.
And I think soon this will all go away with either just a slap on the wrist or a plea deal, something small, something minor, which we all know would have looked very different had this guy been named Donald Trump Jr.
But it's part of the FBI's unraveling and the media's unraveling, right?
And what's interesting about it to me now, Ken, is that you're seeing places like CNN now try to find Jesus, right?
Like CNN has a new boss.
You were in executive management at Fox.
You know, they brought in a new boss, Chris Licht, who is a nice guy.
He comes from CBS.
He was doing the morning show there.
Then he got promoted to do the Colbert show.
That doesn't say necessarily those are his politics, but he was a successful executive running shows and so on.
Then he got pulled over to run all of CNN.
And now the new mission is reportedly to convince people that CNN can be fair, including to Republicans.
And I just don't know whether there's any chance of them convincing the public of that.
Yeah, or whether they're telling the truth.
I mean, I mean, I read those same reports, but then I also read reports that he wants to bring Morning Joe over to them.
So it's like, okay, well, you can't have both.
I don't believe that.
You can't believe that.
I believe that was planted by Morning Joe.
That was definitely planted by Jesse.
Might have been.
100%.
So we'll see.
Let's, you know, the proof will be in the pudding.
You know, CNN is pretty public about that, you know, they put up a 24-7 newsfeed.
And if they stop being a hardcore Democratic pipe organ, we will, we will, we will find out.
But it'd be nice if they would.
And I hate to say this.
They would lose ratings probably in the short term.
I mean, because look, when we started Fox, CNN was always to the left, but not, you know, but they were 20 degrees to the left and we were 20 degrees to the right.
It wasn't the kind of crazed stuff that you have now.
If you get off script and say something negative or positive about Donald Trump, your show gets blown up.
I mean, the world has changed and all of the news outlets have kind of gone to the mattresses and gone to a more extreme versions of themselves ideologically.
And that's not just politics because they're lefties.
It's also driven by money.
And that stuff works.
That stuff sells.
When CNN pounds the table and tells you that Orange Man is going to be a dictator, their ratings increase on that.
Those are the stories that get retweeted and Facebooked around.
And a modest, moderate voice, there might be a burgeoning increased population and audience for that, but I'm not sure it exists right now.
Their ratings are in the tank.
The New York Times did a big piece on CNN earlier this week.
They've drawn an average of 639,000 in prime time this quarter.
That is like just over half a million in the overall, Ken.
That's the overall.
That's not the key demo of the younger people, which is always a lower number, but the only one that advertisers really care about.
That's 25 to 54.
But 639,000, like I was getting that in the demo.
The Decline of Primetime Ratings 00:15:02
If I got that in the overall, my ass would have been fired.
Like I can't believe that anybody is still employed in the CNN prime time with those numbers.
But you know, if Donald Trump becomes the nominee, those numbers will double.
I mean, look where their numbers were last October.
I mean, you know, when you've decided that, okay, we're going to be the Yankees, you're going to be the Mets, and the Mets are having a terrible season, what happens?
All your numbers go down.
Not at the Fox News Channel.
Well, Fox does better than most.
You're right.
They keep there.
But don't forget, CNN has to fight with, you know, Fox had to compete against kind of the internet and not really OAN or Newsmax because they're just not off the table yet.
But CNN has to compete with the rest of the liberal media because they all think the same way.
That's true.
So yeah, they're down.
They're still profiting.
Their profits are down, but still a billion dollars a year for kind of crappy journalism.
So they're still making a ton of money.
So I'm not counting them out.
of their money, I believe most of their money comes from their digital property and not their cable news operation.
The New York Times report was that for the first time since 2016, they dipped below $1 billion in profit.
They're going in the wrong direction.
And they have yet to make any major personnel changes, right?
Like Zucker got fired.
Cuomo got fired for reasons not related to ratings.
But you look at that, it's like you still have Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, Ken, Don Lemon.
They really want us like Chris Licht, the new CEO, the new head, went around to all these Republican senators on Capitol Hill reportedly saying, please, please come back.
Please give us a chance on CNN.
You know, we would love to get more Republicans on.
What Republican would ever go on Don Lemon's show?
Yeah, I mean, and that's why you can't believe Chris unless he makes some changes there.
You can't just say, we've got a fresh new face and then have Don come out and say the Republican Party should be treated like terrorists.
I mean, that's, you know, that's just not good.
And you're a Nazi if you voted for Trump.
Like you're an actual white supremacist, period.
Doesn't matter if you care about unborn babies.
Doesn't matter if you care about corporate taxes, whatever.
You're a Nazi.
Yeah, it's, you know, they've dug a hole now for themselves.
And I'll be interested to see whether they really, really try to find more of a center ground.
And that's, look, that's a five-year, you don't spend five years destroying your credibility with half of America and then just say, I've changed my mind.
Let's change it all around now.
Please trust us and come back now.
If they decide to take that middle path, not sure whether they can, it would take years and years of them.
I mean, do you remember when Fox launched back in the day?
I mean, it was like we had Hannity sitting right next to Alan Combs.
You know, we had Greta, who I don't even know who Greta voted for.
She was no conservative.
And then we had Sean Hannity in the past.
I mean, even Fox News had like a balanced lineup in prime time.
And that's almost a quaint notion now.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Fox is an interesting case study, too, because ultimately they, you know, Roger got rid of Combs on the Hannity and Combs show.
But there was balance.
But yeah, there was balance.
I mean, like when I was in the primetime lineup, I was an independent.
I'm right-leaning, but my politics are kind of all over the place and really were back then.
Greta was there, who I think is a Democrat.
I mean, I don't know, but I think she's a Democrat.
They were Clinton supporters for some time.
Hannity, who's a conservative, and O'Reilly, who was always a populist.
He was a populist before being a populist was cool.
So there was balance.
Now I'd say it's more consistently right-wing, their primetime lineup.
And you also see, I mean, back in the day, Fox's early morning show had opinion.
Sometimes that 1 p.m. show, your hour, they allowed you to kind of kind of, you were at the forefront of bringing some opinion into the middle of the day.
And then it was like kind of straight news until you hit eight o'clock at night.
And then it was, and then it was, okay, these are, this, these are now people's takes on it.
You pop into almost every hour of the day at Fox and you're going to hear the anchors saying, and then what I think is this, I mean, you're going to hear them injecting kind of their personal beliefs and their opinion into, you know, they still actually have a pretty strong news division that is, that is, I truly think is fair and is out there not trying to spin things.
But most of the shows now have all decided, have all gone to the way of opinion.
You know, it just rates better.
And they are driven by ratings and they are driven by money from the dot-com to the evening shows to the afternoon shows.
And you come up with a Hannity and Combs.
I just don't think it's going to click as well as it used to.
What about the speculation that the Murdochs have turned on Trump?
There's been a lot of pieces written lately about some Trump attack pieces in the Wall Street Journal, which the Murdoch own in the New York Post, which the Murdochs own.
Not so much in the prime time of Fox, where Trump's got some real loyalists and Hannity and Laura.
Tucker's more of his own independent island, but I'm sure he'd take Trump over Joe Biden.
So anyway, there's speculation that the Murdochs have turned on Trump and that you would not have been seeing these harsh pieces on the January 6th hearings and how much they've exposed what a bad man Trump is in the journal, in the Post, if Rupert or Lachman hadn't made clear they're not behind him anymore.
I think two things happened in the last three months that were very, very interesting.
As Fox watchers and as observers, I was in many meetings with Rupert, less so with the kids.
But you kind of knew that the kids, or you kind of believed that the kids didn't like Fox, didn't like it at all, right?
Certainly the daughter.
Both of them?
I was going to say, not Lachlan, James.
Lachlan, Lachlan was an unknown quantity until that's the first thing I was going to talk about until a couple months ago.
I mean, Lachlan was always the guy.
He never came out and talked politics.
He, you know, Lachlan was the cool kid who like always had the tan, had the beautiful wife, had the, you know, was, was buying the bigger and bigger mansions.
He kind of seemed to be really living the Murdoch life.
And about three months ago, he gave a speech down in down in Australia about values, about, and specifically Australia, but he brought up a lot of the things that the right would say.
He talked about the rising censorship and how wrong that was.
I think he might have even talked about the Hunter Biden issue.
He gave a speech that DeSantis could have given.
It was intelligent.
It was a smart overview of, and again, what he pegged it off of was a poll that showed a large percentage of Americans, if they were attacked, a la Ukraine, would run away instead of fight.
And he used that as there.
And it was the first time that said he actually believes in the cause.
But to answer your specific question, I think that you certainly have seen a change.
I mean, you're right.
I don't very few, I mean, and you know this perhaps better than others.
And maybe you had a lot of executives from above.
But, you know, I talked to, I talked to Sean or I'll talk to Tucker.
And, you know, they claim up and down that they don't get that much feedback or pushback or, hey, do this or don't do that from executives there.
They both say, you know, it's been hands off.
And Tucker was kind of like, they kind of hardly ever call me.
So I think that those primetime shows, especially are given that flexibility.
But I suspect you're 100% right.
And look, I'm one of them.
I voted for Trump proudly.
And I think, and I'm one that looks at the 1.6 Commission and knows that it's kind of a sham in one way.
But also he did enough bad things in there that I'm like, yeah, that was not defending the Constitution.
He violated his oath on that.
So I'm one of those conservatives who like, you know, I was happy to support him, but I really hope somebody like DeSantis or somebody with fewer personality problems that, you know, Trump was always a flawed, a flawed hero to most of the right with a sense of humor that kind of overcame that sometimes.
So no, I think you're right.
And I think that they're giving a nod that this will be an open primary.
I mean, I can honestly say there were all sorts of books written and so on about the alleged instructions I got from the Murdochs to take out Trump in that debate.
It's all a lie.
It's all a lie.
I never ran those debate questions by anybody in management, not Roger, not the Murdochs, and never got editorial guidance from anybody named Murdoch ever.
You know, after the fact, Roger, if you did something he didn't like or did like, he'd call you in there and tell you, but never, never once in all my 14 years there did he ever sit me down and say, this is the way I want you to cover it ever.
So, yeah, I think there's more autonomy, but I don't know how it works at the journal, and I don't know how it works at the Post.
And I see the point that, you know, for both of those papers to be coming out with very harsh anti-Trump pieces, you know, right around the same time.
Yeah, it puts my spidey sentences up as well that maybe Murdoch has turned on Trump.
The thing is, though, Ken, I don't know that it matters because the Murdochs were not pro-Trump first time around either.
And he bent all of their properties to his will that they will effectively back the Republican nominee.
I mean, the editorials coming out of the journal and the Post are not going to be pro-Biden when 2024 gins up.
And so if Trump manages to wrest the nomination from DeSantis or, you know, I don't know who else is going to be a serious contender, maybe the Virginia governor.
We'll see.
But if Trump manages to emerge as the leader, they'll back him.
I think that's probably true.
I think, but that's a long time until that September or whenever that convention is.
And, you know, the thing about those other two papers is those were the editorial boards.
So it wasn't just like an individual there or the news board there.
I mean, the editorial boards, which Fox doesn't have an official voice, the editorial boards are their official voice.
And so one would expect the owner to say, all right, if we're going to have an official voice of the newspaper I own, I should have some input into that.
So I wouldn't be surprised if they get a little bit more guidance or encouragement from that.
Whereas at Fox, you know, you're not going to say, hey, Sean, you need to believe this and report this or Megan, don't, you know, don't believe that.
So, and there is no like kind of official stance of Fox News as much as everybody always tries to pretend there is.
No, I mean, look, I don't know how it works now, but back when Roger was in charge and I was there, Roger wanted television personalities and journalists in his lineup who people wanted to watch.
That's what he wanted.
He wanted somebody who could penetrate the lens, who was a good communicator, who had sort of an it factor.
And it's not like he was going to go put Rachel Maddow on the Fox News primetime lineup.
He understood who the audience was, but there was never any litmus test for your politics.
You know, he'd watch you, he'd sort of see you, he'd decide whether you were somebody who met all those things I just said.
And if so, he'd try you out and maybe in a lower role and move you up the line.
But it was never a litmus test for ideology.
And I don't think, I don't think that's how it is.
I think that continues to be how it is.
They want people who will rate.
They don't necessarily want people who are just going to back Trump or back the Republicans.
They want sensible opinion.
We'll see.
We'll see.
I mean, it'll be fascinating to watch the primetime lineup.
When it's DeSantis versus Trump and you've got these two 800-pound gorillas, because more and more DeSantis is becoming a gorilla of his own, they're going to be in an interesting position over there.
So, Ken, you mentioned January 6th, the committee, and Liz Cheney has been at the helm of that whole thing.
Her dad, Dick Cheney, used to be vice president of the United States and has put out a campaign ad for her.
I mean, she is dying on the vine in her campaign, but this is Dick Cheney's contribution, which has now been uniformly condemned by both sides.
But watch.
In our nation's 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.
He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.
He is a coward.
A real man wouldn't lie to his supporters.
He lost his election and he lost big.
I know it.
He knows it.
And deep down, I think most Republicans know it.
Lynn and I are so proud of Liz for standing up for the truth, doing what's right, honoring her oath to the Constitution, when so many in our party are too scared to do so.
Of course, the right wing is on Team Trump.
I mean, the majority of Republicans agree with Trump's claim of a stolen election.
The poll show that.
And the left, is there a figure besides Trump who they hate more than Dick Cheney?
He's not the messenger.
I don't get it.
Like, I'm not sure who this is appealing to.
It was, well, certainly aimed at the right, not the left.
It's a Republican primary in, you know, in God's country out west.
And you're right.
The crux of it all comes down to one sentence that he was wrong in.
Deep in their hearts, most Republicans think this election was stolen.
And that's because Trump said it was multiple times.
It's because also the media abdicated its responsibility in kind of looking into that in a fair way.
I mean, you had the left media who, even if it was stolen, was going to be cheering it.
And the right media didn't look into it all that much because, you know, if you're Fox or if you're somebody on the right, you don't get a whole lot of pats on the back for saying, hey, we looked into all these claims and there was some little stealing and some little stupid stuff around, but no, the election wasn't stolen.
I mean, if you in your heart believe that as a primetime anchor on Fox, it's not going to help your ratings to talk about that.
So the media on both sides have allowed that divide in America.
The left doesn't care, doesn't think it happened, and the right believes that strongly.
I can tell you, every time I've deep dived and looked into either a lawsuit or one of the allegations, I've still never found any kind of evidence that showed anything besides minor things that would not have affected the election.
No, I know.
Same.
I mean, there's been like red flags, but nothing that would change the actual results.
People believe it, whatever.
The point is, Liz Cheney, she's done.
She's done in Republican politics.
And the savior of that future is not Dick Cheney.
I mean, like, just, I'm amazed she's running again.
Media Bias and Political Divides 00:12:02
Why didn't she just say, you know what?
I did what I thought was the honorable thing.
Off I go.
I realize it's created too big a gulf between me and my party.
They've been trying to tell her that for the past year.
I guess she wants to go down in flames, which I think is where this is going to end.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think she failed at being able to convince her base that she was right.
And unfortunately, there might be a way to do that, but certainly that committee wasn't the way to do it.
Once the Republicans were rejected by the left and the Republicans decided to basically boycott, except for those two, boycott that hearing, they couldn't make the claim that this is any kind of a fair trial.
It's a trial without a defense.
And you would never lose a case, Megan, if you just had one side, despite whatever the facts might be.
Yeah, of course.
And she's, I mean, they've manipulated evidence.
They've manipulated videotapes.
They've put out witness testimony and talked about taking the Fifth Amendment in a way that's very deceptive and inappropriate.
So I really have no sympathy for Liz Cheney or the position in which she finds herself.
I do not think this has been an honest hearing.
It certainly hasn't been a fair one.
Now, back over on Capitol Hill.
The irony is, though, I would love to see a fair hearing on this because I think that most of my friends on this on the right are just wrong.
They just, they saw too many headlines.
They saw too many.
There's a lot of smoke, don't get me wrong.
But I think they're all wrong.
And this wasn't the way to convince them.
Back over on Capitol Hill, we have a relatively new press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who's just been absolutely dreadful.
I mean, she just knows nothing.
She's not ready for prime time.
And I think it was the RNC put together a budded sound bite showing a trend that they noticed in the way she handles the press.
Here's a little bit of that, Ken Watch.
I don't have anything.
just don't have anything.
I don't have anything.
We don't have anything.
Just don't have anything.
Don't have anything.
So I don't have anything.
Just don't have anything.
I don't have anything.
I just don't have anything.
I don't have anything.
We don't have anything.
I don't have anything.
I just don't have anything.
I don't have anything.
I don't have anything.
Again, I don't have anything.
So I don't have anything.
We don't have anything.
I don't have any.
I don't have anything.
I just don't have anything.
I don't have anything.
A hundred times.
True words were never spoken.
Well, she certainly doesn't have anything.
She's made that point.
How would you like being the press spokesperson for this seven with its wings on fire, people leaping out of it, people running for president, pretending not to run for president?
I mean, that's not the easiest job.
And she's probably not the pilot you wanted.
So I would never do this job because you get paid to lie.
I mean, that's the truth.
You get paid to lie.
So you can only the people who take that job, you automatically have to ask yourself, what is it in that person's character that's making them take the job?
But secondly, it's not because he's such a dumpster fire in terms of the polls and policy.
It's because she's a dumpster fire in terms of her ability to spin and stick with facts that are helpful and do what we learn to do as lawyers, which is bridge, bridge away from negative information.
You can find a way of defending his policies.
If I were a died in the world Democrat, I could defend every single thing he's doing.
I could do it right now if I wanted to, if I had the heart to do it.
And then bridge to something, you know, sort of answer the question asked, then bridge to something.
She's not capable.
And yet they keep her out there.
And now they've backdrafted in John Kirby from the Pentagon, who's a white guy.
Then there's black, there's backup because she's black and he's white.
And they're saying, why are you bringing in a man?
And it's like, why don't you just admit that skin color aside, gender aside, this woman is not ready for prime time?
You need somebody else.
As annoying as the I'll circle back was with Jen Saki, she was light years ahead of Corine Jean-Pierre.
And it's not, the message is really the problem, but the messenger is also deeply flawed.
Yeah, that's true.
And they will move slowly on that and you know why you just said it.
But you know, what I find is, is so many people on both the left and the right, they're so kind of in their own echosphere, they don't know how to bridge to the other side.
They don't know how to find those reasonable things.
Because if you really believe 50% of the world is 50% of America is Nazis, you kind of don't want to find that middle ground between a normal person and a Nazi.
So it's, you know, I kind of enjoy it.
I live, I live in the San Francisco area where, you know, I can, I can count Republicans on one or two fingers.
And it gives you better practice to be able to make your points and explain why you think things when you're explaining those to those on the other side.
It just puts you in a different mindset.
I don't think she ever had to do that.
I think she wasn't hired because she understood kind of where the center or right of America was at all.
She was hardcore on the left and they cheered that on.
Yeah, that's right.
She made her positions perfectly clear on MSNBC for years about how much she hated the right and what she thought of the right and certainly what she thought of Trump and so on.
Those are requirements now to get this job if you're, you know, you want to work under a Democratic president.
Speaking politically, we've had an interesting phenomenon this week where virtually all of the Trump endorsed candidates won or all, might have been all.
He's saying eight no in these primaries that we've been seeing.
And a lot of my Republican pals are saying, I feel good this week, but I'm not going to feel so good when the actual election comes in November because the more, quote, extreme right-wingers won who are less likely to win in a general.
I see the concern, but I also see the bias against a candidate like Carrie Lake, who we had on the show.
Yes, she believes the election was stolen, but she's a star.
I mean, this woman's, she's a star.
She made a good point.
She's been in the homes of Arizonans for 30 years.
They know her.
They like her.
She's beautiful.
She's articulate.
She's saying all the right things that the Republicans want to hear on things like immigration and homelessness.
I don't know.
I see a media bias in dismissing them too quickly, like the way they did with Trump.
But I wonder what your take is on it.
Did the Republicans shoot themselves in the foot this week by going too far right or not?
You know, they always, I mean, the opposing side, because the Democrats actually helped some of those candidates.
They gave them money.
They pushed them along.
They encouraged them.
And it's, and as an observer, a close observer for politics for 40 years, that never works.
You always, I mean, when Ronald Reagan got nominated, Democrats were giddy because he was just too far out there, too far to the right, and he was going to be an easy, crazy cowboy boy to beat.
You know, you go back to Trump and when he started moving through, started moving through the ranks in the primary, people were laughing their rear ends off at the concept that he might be the nominee, and they were actively encouraging him.
And what you generally find is, and this is almost always the case, sometimes they nominate somebody who's too extreme, but 98% of the time, the person who wins the primary is the best candidate that that party could offer forward.
And maybe they have some extreme views, but they're also, as you say, more articulate, attractive, have other platforms.
They have a reason for winning, not just because they're crazy.
And so, and I see it on both sides.
It's like the person who won the primary is by and large the best person who has a chance of winning.
So I don't think the Republicans should worry about that at all.
They might have some nutty people in there, but they're probably nutty people who had a better chance to win than the opposing person.
These are the ones that the voters found inspirational for whatever reason.
And inspirational is important on general election day.
You want to get people up and out to go down on a midterm election.
It's not a presidential election.
It doesn't have the turnout.
So I think you raise a good point.
I mean, the Democrats are playing with fire here in helping get the Trump nominated or backed candidates ahead and in the victor circle on these primaries.
We'll see.
We don't have that long to wait.
Now, meantime, you mentioned that you live in San Francisco and in your wonderful home state of California, Gavin Newsom is reaching out to Hollywood filmmakers now, Ken, begging them to come home.
Please come home.
He says it's about values.
It's time to choose.
They're going places like Georgia and Oklahoma to make their movies because they get tax breaks and they don't get bothered by the government.
And he says they have waged a cruel assault on essential rights.
And he's talking about things like the Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court, trying to tell people, come home to California.
And he's expressing his support for new legislation that would provide $1.65 billion in tax credits for TV movie creators.
Even Hollywood is leaving Hollywood.
What do you make of it?
Well, two things.
One is, you know, encouraging another boycott is probably not the best thing for California.
The city of San Francisco has a boycott against 27 American states.
Sometimes it's gay stuff.
Sometimes it's abortion.
And it's creating all sorts of problems because it's like, well, they can't travel to those states.
They can't procure unless it's emergency type of goods.
And it's just created this nightmare that it's not affecting, you know, no states out there.
Gee, California's not buying from us.
So we'll change our position on something.
And it created all sorts of problems for San Francisco, which is one of the worst managed cities in America.
The flip side, though, is Gavin is by far being the smartest national person out there who is running for president, pretending that he's not, saying it's ridiculous, and doing a decent job of getting himself out of California and into the national conversation.
The first one was hilarious.
He went after DeSantis.
Remember, he put some ads in against DeSantis in Florida.
And then later they were like, well, why did you do that?
And he couldn't say the truth, which is, because I'm running against an old man who can't finish his sentences and people will get mad at me in the meantime, especially the powers that be.
So I have to pretend that I'm not doing what I'm doing.
And he came up and he, I don't know if you remember this or saw this because it was a couple days after this.
He said, well, it was when DeSantis went after the Special Olympics and their mass mandate.
And I just couldn't handle that.
So he literally wrapped himself around mentally disabled kids to lie about why he was pushing these things out there.
That said, he's effective.
He's a pretty boy.
And I wouldn't be surprised if he's the nominee.
And these actions right now that he's taken, even if you and I roll our eyes at him and know they're stupid, are smart for him politically.
That's the Turning Points USA Youth Summit in Florida this past week or last week.
They were asked in this more right-leaning group, who do you most fear running on the Democratic side?
And he was by far and away the number one candidate, Gavin Newsome.
It would be, I mean, a Newsome-DeSantis matchup would be, I mean, a Newsome Trump matchup.
They would just be, I would buy a ticket to that, Ken.
I would buy a ticket to that.
And I just wanted to say that.
Your ratings are going to go up, Megan.
I guarantee it.
I look forward to that.
Ken, such a pleasure to be back in touch.
Good luck with the new pod.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
And good chatting with you again.
I hope to do it soon.
All the best.
Yeah, we'll do it again soon.
Thanks to all of you, and I hope you have a great, great weekend.
And in the meantime, be sure to subscribe to the show, download the show, the podcast.
It's furry.
Also at youtube.com/slash MeganKelly if you would like the visual component.
In the meantime, thanks for listening and have a great, great weekend.
We'll see you Monday.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
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