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Aug. 8, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:30:19
20220808_truth-about-alex-jones-immigration-crisis-and-covi
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The Alex Jones Lawsuit 00:14:50
FICE presenter is super inkled by the factor of Robber.
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.
We begin today with Alex Jones.
A jury in Texas has handed down a nearly $50 million judgment against him: $4.1 million in compensatory damages, meaning what it would take to cover the plaintiff's actual damages in the form of therapy bills and so on, and $45.2 million in punitive damages, the damages awarded to punish a defendant and defer, deter future misconduct.
The punitive damages award may be reduced as Texas has a punitive damages cap of $750,000 per plaintiff.
There are two plaintiffs in this case, so that would be $1.5 million.
Though the plaintiff's attorney Mark Bankston has said he will challenge the constitutionality of that damages cap if necessary here.
A jury awarded the sums after sitting for a trial that was all about damages.
Alex Jones's liability to the plaintiffs was settled last year after Jones so continuously refused to comply with discovery mandates, court orders, and basic rules of litigation in the liability phase that this judge and two others, by the way,
issued a default judgment against him, finding Jones in contempt of court, stating that nothing had worked thus far to force Alex Jones to comply with the court's many orders and concluding that he had forfeited his right to a trial on liability.
This particular case in Austin, Texas, where Jones's InfoWars is based, was filed by Neil Hesslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of six-year-old Jesse Lewis, who was murdered in his first grade classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary, along with 19 other first graders and six adults on December 14th, 2012, 11 days before Christmas.
I covered that mass shooting that day while live on the air for Fox News Channel.
I was then pregnant with my third child, Thatcher, who would be born the following summer.
I remember getting ready for the show as the news broke, and my executive producer, knowing I had a three-year-old and a one-year-old and was pregnant with a third child, called me to prepare me for the job that was ahead.
This is going to be a bad one, darling, he said to me.
We had covered many mass shootings before, though nothing, nothing would prepare me for the horrors of Sandy Hook.
I remember I called one of my closest friends, Janice Dean, who would later become godmother to that as-yet unborn son of mine.
And we cried and we watched the preliminary reports of the death toll rising.
And I asked her, How am I going to do this, JD?
How can I go on the air and do this?
And she assured me that we would get through it and that I would keep it together because the audience needed me to.
And that is what happened as I sat on the air for hours that day reporting the shocking, awful details as they came in.
Two months later, Neil Hesslin testified before Congress.
And I was on the air that day too.
We intended to take just some of his remarks, but as we watched Neil, our team realized there is only one thing our audience needs to hear from us today, and that is the full testimony of this man, a gun owner, who had serious questions about how this evil shooter was allowed access to an AR-15.
Questions we're still asking in this society, not necessarily about guns in general, but about how did he get access to AR-15 and AR-15?
How did the parent, how did the mother allow it?
Neil's testimony that day was passionate.
It was honest.
It was raw.
And here's a bit of Neil describing what he had learned about his son's Jesse's actions in class that day.
Stated by several of the surviving students that Jesse healed.
Run, run now.
His fatal shot was in his forehead.
Dick went in right at his hairline, exited directly behind that.
Jesse looked at coward Adam Lance in the eyes, saw his face, and he looked at the end of that barrel.
Jesse didn't run.
Jesse didn't turn his back.
That was a fatal shot that killed Jesse.
I later met Neil.
I had him on the show.
I got to know many of the Newtown or Sandy Hook families.
I always felt a connection to them because of my own experience covering them on the air that day and the many follow-up interviews and pieces that we did on them and with them.
I came to know Neil Hesslin as a gentle, kind soul, a soft-spoken, thoughtful man who was never consumed with bitterness, but instead wanted to do justice to his young son's memory and to honor Scarlett, too, and her relationship with their son.
It was that Neil and Scarlett who just won their case against Alex Jones.
The lawsuit they filed was for defamation.
Because you see, Alex Jones had a very different reaction to Sandy Hook than most of us.
Instead of offering empathy for the families, he called them liars, crisis actors, and accused them of being part of a government conspiracy.
He said it over and over and over again for years.
And Alex Jones had a very big audience for those lies, some of whom began harassing the grieving parents as the alleged perpetrators of a hoax.
One woman was sentenced to five months in prison for her death threats against another Newtown dad, Leonard Posner.
Leonard's son Noah, who was the youngest of the Newtown victims, he had just turned six three weeks earlier, had his jaw blown off by the Sandy Hook shooter.
Leonard opted for an open casket so people could see what was done to his baby.
Alex Jones perpetuated the lie that Leonard was a crisis actor and had faked the death of his son Noah.
Posner too is suing Alex Jones in a different court.
The ongoing harassment, death threats, accusations, and horrific lies about them and their dead children eventually led several of the Newtown parents to file lawsuits against Alex Jones, claiming what we all, while we all enjoy a First Amendment right to our beliefs, repeated lies impugning the character of another have long been recognized as unprotected speech.
That's why, by the way, Johnny Depp just won a defamation claim against Amber Heard.
She claimed she had a First Amendment right to say whatever she wanted about Johnny Depp.
A court and a jury in Virginia found otherwise.
And the same lesson was just provided to Alex Jones.
Of the four cases filed against Jones, this one in particular held a personal interest for me.
Because it was connected to my own interview of Alex Jones.
I sat down with him then while at NBC News for a lengthy profile.
You may remember there was considerable backlash to my doing that interview at all.
A small minority of the Newtown families objected to our, quote, platforming Alex Jones, an objection shared by many, particularly on the left.
Bill de Blasio attacked me.
Brian Stelter had the nerve to suggest that no one would ever appear on any show I would ever do again.
And the left-wing press was generally apoplectic about it.
For the record, though NBC News would not let me publicly defend myself at the time, the truth is that the vast majority of Newtown parents were either openly in favor of that interview or had no objection to it, though you would never have known that from the way the media covered it at the time.
Very few of these so-called journalists attacking me for doing this piece stopped to defend journalistic principles like, we don't only get to interview the good guys.
Diane Sawyer interviewed Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Mike Wallace sat down with the Iranian Ayatollah and the head of the KKK while he was wearing a hood.
People considered those huge gets.
Alex Jones has unquestionably said some outrageous and offensive things, but he has not killed anyone.
The controversy was based more on the fact that I was sitting down with Alex Jones as a former Fox News anchor now at NBC, something many on both sides of the political aisle resented.
After all, several major publications from the New York Times to the BBC to HBO, Esquire, and CNN had interviewed Alex Jones before my sit-down with him and after his claims about Sandy Hook, and there was zero objection about platforming.
The amount of incoming we received for that interview was overwhelming.
I'm not going to lie.
It was extremely stressful for me.
I had people even on the right who I liked giving me a very hard time for doing it.
I was on the cover of the National Inquirer as the world's most hated mom for doing that piece.
A woman named Kristen Lemkow, a senior executive at JPMorgan, and it turns out a far-left progressive activist, pulled JPMorgan's ads from the show in advance, saying she was repulsed by our decision to interview Jones.
I'm repulsed by you, Ms. Lemkow, and your moronic understanding of what journalists do, along with your egregious misjudgment of what that interview would ultimately mean for Alex Jones and the Newtown families.
At no point did I ever consider not airing the interview, nor to its credit did NBC News.
When I traveled to Austin, Texas to interview Jones, it became very clear that he had not backed away from his claims that this was all a hoax.
He claimed that he had just wanted to examine, quote, both sides.
Both sides, he said, the belief that Sandy Hook happened and the belief that it hadn't.
But Sandy Hook did happen.
And Jones' suggestion that there was any evidence to the contrary was and remains a pernicious lie.
You said the whole thing is a giant hoax.
How do you deal with a total hoax?
It took me about a year with Sandy Hook to come to grips with the fact that the whole thing was fake.
I did deep research and my gosh, it just pretty much didn't happen.
At that point, and I do think there's some cover up and some manipulation, that is pretty much what I believe.
But then I was also going in devil's advocate, but then we know there's mass shootings and these things happen.
So again.
You're trying to have it always, right?
No, I'm not.
If you wrongly went out there and said it was a hoax, that's wrong.
But what I already answered your question was listeners and other people are covering this.
I didn't create that story.
But Alex, the parents, one after the other, devastated.
The dead bodies that the coroner autopsy.
And they blocked all that and they won't release any of it.
That's unprecedented.
All of the parents decided to come out and lie about their dead children.
I didn't decide that.
What happened to the children?
I will sit there on the air and look at every position and play devil's advocate.
Was that devil's advocate?
The whole thing is a giant hoax.
The whole thing was fake.
Yes, because I remember in even that day, if I go back from memory, then saying, But then some of it looks like it's real, but then what do you do when they've got the kids going in circles in and out of the building with their hands up?
I've watched the footage and it looks like a drill.
When you say parents faked their children's death, people get very angry.
Yeah, well, that's all I know, but they don't get angry about the half million dead Iraqis from the sanctions, or they don't get angry about all the people.
That was a dodge.
No, no, no, it's not a dodge.
The media never covers all the evil wars it's promoted.
That doesn't excuse what you did and said about Newtown.
Here's the difference: here's the difference: I looked at all the angles of Newtown.
Once I was back in New York, I knew we needed a response from the Newtown families, so I asked Neil.
Typically gracious, he agreed.
And in a gripping exchange, he made clear what had happened to his son that day.
I lost my son.
I buried my son.
I held my son with a bullet hole through his head.
I dropped him off in 904.
That's when we dropped him off at school with his book bag.
Hours later, I was picking him up in a body bag.
Alex Jones and Info Wars responded to that interview by doubling down on their lies about the Sandy Hook parents, including Neil by name.
They claimed it was impossible for him to hold his dead son, Jesse, because the medical examiner, they claimed, had not released the bodies or some other nonsense.
All lies.
And InfoWar employee Owen Schreier admitted on the stand that he had failed to check any of these facts, though Alex Jones claimed it was all fact-checked, before saying these lies on the air.
And those lies told about Neil after our interview, after Alex Jones listened to Neil talk about holding his dead son, formed the basis for that lawsuit that just resulted in a $50 million judgment against Alex Jones last week.
Here is the New York Times Daily Podcast called The Daily this morning.
What was the specific claim of defamation against Jones from Jesse's parents?
First tonight, our report on the incendiary radio host Alex Jones.
So years later, in 2017, Megan Kelly was profiling Alex Jones on a show that she had on NBC.
For years, Jones has been spreading conspiracy theories, claiming, for instance, that elements of the U.S. government allowed the 9-11 attacks to happen and that the horrific Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.
Oath and False Claims 00:11:34
And Neil appeared on the show to provide the family's viewpoint of the lies that Jones had been spreading all of these years.
I dropped him off in 904.
That's when we dropped him off at school with his book bag.
He told Megan Kelly about his last moments with Jesse.
Hours later, I was picking him up in a body bag.
He had gone into the school in the wee hours of the morning on the night of the shooting and he held Jesse's body.
I lost my son.
I buried my son.
I held my son with a bullet hole through his head.
This was obviously a pretty sacred memory to Neil, and he shared it with Megan Kelly on the show that evening.
And how did a defamation suit come out of that?
What did Jones say?
Alex Jones was unhappy with the way he was being portrayed in Megan Kelly's broadcast that night.
And after the broadcast aired, one of his sidekicks, a guy named Owen Schroyer, went on InfoWars and said that Neil couldn't have held his son that night because according to official reports, which of course conspiracy theorists had picked through and parsed and cherry-picked, the families, quote-unquote, weren't allowed to see their children after their deaths.
Jones later picked up on Owen Schroer's false claims and amplified them.
And that was the genesis of the defamation lawsuit that Neil and Jesse's mom, Scarlett, filed against Alex Jones.
On the stand of trial, Jones was caught in several other lies as well.
For example, he had earlier testified under oath that he had absolutely no texts on his phone about Sandy Hook.
Neil and Scarlett's lawyer, Mark Bankston, knew different, as we learned in this moment that few lawyers will ever get in their entire career.
You were ordered to turn over any text messages machine sandy hooker, right?
Yes.
And you didn't have any, right?
Not that we could find.
Did you know that 12 days ago, 12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cell phone with every text message you've sent for the past two years?
Mr. Jones, in Discovery, you were asked, do you have Sandy Hook text messages on your phone?
And you said no, correct?
You said that under oath.
If I was mistaken, I was mistaken.
Jones skipped many days of the trial, perhaps to avoid hearing Neil and Scarlett testify about the pain his comments had put them through.
The renewed death threats, the danger, the harassment, the renewed need for therapists' visits, and the post-traumatic stress rearing its ugly head again.
Though it's clear that Alex Jones was at least watching the trial because he was commenting on it on his show every day.
And after watching Neil Hesslin testify about what happened to Jesse, this is what Alex Jones said on his program that very day.
He's a nice man and he's not an actor.
He is being manipulated by some very bad people.
But I'll just say, because I got to be honest, he's slow, okay?
And his ex-wife is not.
Now, I don't think he's stupid.
I'm just saying he's.
I've got family members that are really smart in a lot of ways, but they're just real kind of quiet and have this way about them.
And they move at a different pace.
Like they're fast in some ways and slow in others.
And he's, I mean, I think Hesselin acts like somebody on the spectrum.
Okay.
So he's on the spectrum.
There's something wrong with this man.
There's something wrong with Alex Jones.
He went on to try to dismiss his many comments about Neil, Scarlett, and the New Town families as just, well, you know, it's all unintentional.
It was unintentional.
Watch.
I never intentionally tried to hurt you.
I never even said your name until this case came to court.
I didn't even really know who you were until a couple years ago when all this started up.
The internet had a lot of questions.
I had questions.
And over that six, seven-year period before I got sued, or six-year period, it's clear you can see the whole progression of us the few times we covered it to try to actually find out what happened.
One day, Scarlett took to the stand.
And when it appeared that she had finished with her testimony, they took a break.
Only then did Alex Jones show up in the courthouse.
This was an incredible moment because Scarlett was not done.
with her testimony.
And Scarlett and Neil and many of the Newtown families have long wanted the chance to address Alex Jones right to his face.
Incredibly, Scarlett got that chance.
She was poised and she was amazingly restrained.
Having a six-year-old son shot in the forehead in his first grade classroom is unbearable.
Unbearable.
You don't think you're going to survive.
But there are people that have.
And then to have someone on top of that perpetuate a lie, a lie.
That it was a hoax, that it didn't happen, it was a false flat, that I'm an actress.
And you get on and you say, oh, sorry, but I know actresses when I see them.
Do you think I'm an actress?
No, I don't think you're an actress.
Don't, you can't stop right now.
Sorry.
I did.
I asked him a question.
You get to testify right now.
You're under oath.
Nobody else in the room is.
Scarlett was later seen offering Alex Jones a bottle of water for the cough that he had.
Neil Hesslin actually shook his hand.
What a man.
What a difference in character between these men.
Believe it or not, I was almost at this trial.
Neil and Scarlett's lawyer told me that they needed me to take the stand to get the NBC News interview into evidence.
They wanted to play it for the jury.
I will tell you the truth.
I was not excited to do this and really wrestled with whether I could or should.
This whole story, every iteration of it, has been personally and professionally painful.
Did I really want to leave my family, travel to Austin, Texas, take part in this insane trial with an out-of-control defendant and subject myself to a hostile cross-examination, not to mention relive a difficult time in my career and a chapter of dealing with Alex Jones that frankly I would rather forget?
No.
The actual trial day that I was to be called, the day I was going to be called as a witness, happened to be scheduled for the same day of Thatcher, that third child of mine, his ninth birthday party.
Not his birthday, but his birthday party.
And for the first time in my 12 years of motherhood, that would mean I'd be missing one of my children's birthdays, one of their birthday parties.
I had never done that, notwithstanding the fact that I've been a busy working mom.
I knew that it would likely stir up a shitstorm of negative news stories from the left and would also not go over well with the right, some of which has come to really embrace Alex Jones more recently.
Some think of him as a martyr for having been deplatformed, another event that happened shortly after our interview.
But the bottom line was there was no world in which I was saying no to Neil and Scarlett.
I'd be missing my son's birthday party.
They have missed every birthday of their sons for 10 years, thanks to this evil shooter who murdered 20 first graders, including Jesse, in 2012.
I might get bad press.
How about reading over and over again online that you faked your sweetheart's life and death, and then having crazed lunatics threaten to kill you for it?
This whole thing is insanity.
These lies about Sandy Hook are insane.
And by the way, Alex Jones has been telling lies like this about 9-11, about Oklahoma City, about so many things and innocent people.
We could spend all day talking about it.
I agreed to go.
I booked my flights.
So did my lawyer.
And then, miraculously, I didn't have to do it.
Mark Bankston told us that the InfoWars team had screwed up and inadvertently their testimony had led to the entire NBC News tape being admitted into evidence.
I was not needed and I was relieved.
I was happy for Neil and Scarlett.
And I was uncertain up to this very moment whether I should say anything at all publicly about it.
There are some to this day who write to me asking me to apologize to Alex Jones for that interview.
They think I sandbagged him because he released a partial tape of me pitching him the interview, saying it would not be a hit piece.
Partial tape.
On the stand too, he and his team claim I somehow set him up, making him renew his Sandy Hook claims that he really, really didn't want to do, but for the big, bad, mean Megan Kelly making him.
The truth is, I told Alex Jones from the start that Sandy Hook would be part of this interview, that we would go over the controversies, but that I wanted to cover more about him than that.
And that's exactly what we did in the NBC News piece, which is one of the journalistic endeavors of which I am most proud in my career.
No one made him spew these conspiracy theories but himself.
He jumped willingly and recklessly into those defamatory claims about the Newtown families, which he now finally admits were false.
He admitted it under oath at this trial.
This judgment is morally correct and beyond past due.
Alex Jones, yes, in his own way, a talented, compelling, sometimes, sometimes on other issues, weirdly correct, entertaining force.
Redistricting the Texas District 00:15:13
He is in independent media, has hurt too many people too many times.
I am happy for Neil and Scarlett.
I am relieved the jury punished Alex Jones.
And I hope anyone who sees this as a free speech issue goes back to look at the law and the history of this case.
He is hurting people.
He is not actually sorry, though he claims to be now.
This is not about free speech.
It's about one man violating the law with impunity over and over and over again.
Hopefully, that ends now.
We'll be right back with a newly elected GOB congresswoman from Texas who is already making waves as an alleged far-right Latina, according to the New York Times.
We'll see about that.
Stay tuned.
New York City and Washington, D.C., now experiencing a little taste of the border crisis as Texas Governor Greg Abbott buses migrants north.
Oh, the mayors of these northern cities, they don't like it.
They're fine with an open border when it doesn't affect them.
Governor Abbott says he's doing this because the president refuses to acknowledge the crisis created by his open border policies.
New York's mayor is calling the governor's actions horrific, saying some of the migrants are being forced onto the buses, even if they want to go somewhere else.
What is it like?
Just a chauffeur service they get to just tell Governor Abbott's bus driver.
Well, you know, I've got relatives in Salt Lake.
What do you mean?
Joining me now, newly elected Texas Congresswoman Myra Flores.
She's a Republican who was born in Mexico.
She's young, I think 36.
Congresswoman Flores, do I have your age correct?
It's pretty amazing what you've done.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
And yes, I'm 36 years old.
My gosh, you're like a baby.
So I love it because, notwithstanding your youth, you've created quite the firestorm in Washington and with the media who are not happy about a young Mexican-born Latina woman winning as a Republican.
You're the first, amazingly, you're the first to ever do it.
You certainly aren't going to be the last.
But what do you make of the reaction to you?
Honestly, it doesn't surprise me.
I saw it very early on, but for me, it's really not about politics.
I was raised and I was born and raised in Burgos Tamaulipas, Mexico, raised with strong conservative values to always put God and family first.
And I'm just not willing to put my values aside for no political party.
And when I came here to the United States, I was raised with those same values.
It didn't change because I moved here to the United States.
Those values live in me.
They're within me and I'm proud of it.
And I want my children, our children, to grow with the same values.
And that's who we are here in South Texas.
I really don't know any different.
South Texas is very conservative.
We've always put God and family first.
We're all about hard work.
That is just who we are.
And that's why I felt very confident when I decided to run because I know my district.
I know my people better than anyone.
And I knew that if I focused on our values and the issues that really matter to the district, that we would be successful.
Now, I want to get into more of your personal story and background in one second, but let's just spend a moment on news of the day and how upset the DC mayor, the New York mayor are that Governor Abbott is shipping migrants who have crossed into the country illegally up to their towns.
You know, I grew up in New York State.
I lived down in the Washington, D.C. area for a few years.
They don't normally have to deal with this in the way that Texans do, Arizonans do, and so on.
So, what do you make of their complaints that this is just inhumane and it's horrible?
Well, I thought they were supportive of immigrants.
I thought that they love immigrants, that they want immigrants here in the United States.
That's what they've been saying all this time.
And all of a sudden, they don't want them in New York.
They don't want them in their cities.
It just blows my mind because they were okay with what's happening here in South Texas because I call it a humanitarian crisis.
I really do.
It's the Biden administration's policies that encourage illegal immigration, knowing the serious journey, dangerous journey that they will have to go through to come here to the United States.
They don't care about that.
And we do care.
We care about the immigrants.
We care about their safety.
We care about the American people.
That is why we advocate for legal immigration so the good people can come here to the United States where it's safer, where they don't have to go through such a dangerous journey.
That's why I will always encourage people to do it the right way.
I do understand that the legal process needs to be improved.
But it doesn't surprise me, Megan.
It doesn't surprise me that they react this way because they have been treated me the same way.
They claim that they were for immigrants.
And it doesn't matter to them that I came here legally.
They still treat me just the same.
So many of them have called me racist names, calling me Ms. Frijoles, Ms. Enchiladas, Taco.
So many of them have told me to go back to Mexico.
Why?
Because they want us to come here to the United States and obey them.
They don't want us to come here to the United States and embrace our values, embrace who we are.
So it really doesn't surprise me that they feel this way, but they're a bunch of hypocrites.
And if they are for what's happening in South Texas, which we're not, then they should take it.
Live with it.
And then you can have an opinion.
It's not, once it's not somebody else's problem, their messaging has changed a lot.
And I say this to somebody, again, who lives in the general region of New York.
It's like, fine, we should have to deal with it.
I mean, from all my years on Fox News, we used to cover the actual problems caused by people crossing into the country illegally to the border communities.
And most of the people on the left pay absolutely no attention to this, and many haven't even heard one story about it.
So if they have to be forced to live it to understand how dangerous it is and how problematic it is, then I support Governor Abbott in this tactic.
Let's talk about the attacks on you.
They've been disgusting.
When you say those terms, you're not just making them up.
As I understand it, you are supposed to face Vincente Gonzalez in November, right, to hold on to this seat that you won in a special election.
And this is a Democrat.
He's represented Texas, Texas 15, this district since 2017.
There's been some redistricting, which we can talk about in a second.
But anyway, the point is he's your opponent.
He's a Democrat.
And it turns out this political blogger who was paid to run ads for Gonzalez's campaign launched a series of racist attacks against you, calling you, as you point out, Miss Frijoles, Miss Enchiladas, and then questioned, claims that you worked in cottonfields with your Mexican immigrant parents as a child, calling you a cotton pick and liar.
He basically has stood by this and said, it was political satire.
This is Mikhail, the guy who did it, not Gonzalez.
And questioned, when did Frijoles become the equivalent of the N-word?
I'm going to be merciless with her.
I'm a liberal Democrat.
It's a war against the Republican, and I will continue to be merciless.
What do you make of it?
And he paid him to do those things.
And no apology, no apology.
And those insults weren't just towards me.
They were towards an entire culture.
The insults towards also the sexual harassment that I've received wasn't just an attack against me.
It was an attack against all women.
But I saw it very early on.
We said that Gonzalez did state that he was more qualified because he was born in Texas and I was born in Mexico.
And I never thought that a Democrat would say that.
But again, I knew exactly that this would be coming, but I just never thought that it was going to be about my legal status.
I mean, they were doing an investigation on how I got here to the United States.
They were doing an investigation on my father, how he got here to the United States.
They don't care about all the millions of people that are coming in into the United States illegally, but let's investigate Maira Flores and how she got here and how her parents got here.
I was blessed that I came here to United States legally.
I was.
I was blessed that my father became an American citizen.
And I do understand that not so many other people have that same blessing.
And that's the reason why I am focused on improving the legal process.
So more little girls like Myra, more children have the same experience like me.
I understand that I would say I'm blessed that I was able to come here legally.
And I want that for other children as well, for other people.
I don't want them to go through that dangerous journey.
Illegal immigration does fund criminal organizations.
I'm from Tamaulipas.
I know exactly what's happening here in the southern borders and the criminal organizations have taken over the border.
You cannot cross unless you pay them thousands and thousands of dollars.
Women are being abused.
Children are being abused.
We have a real problem here in the United States with child sex trafficking.
And if we want to put an end to that, we must secure our borders and focus on legal immigration.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, more and more of the Democrats are being forced to pay attention to this because they see how important it is in the polls.
But I will say, Gonzalez said in a statement of the Washington Post, his team, quote, advertises on many platforms and they have no control over the editorial content.
Quote, we do not pay for political attacks and we will not be advertising on this platform again, adding that he condemned the offensive remarks on the platform, just as he condemned Trump's racist rants about Mexico.
So, you know, the Dodge, right?
Like the equivocation.
It's not at all clear to me that Gonzalez disliked what Mikael said about you, notwithstanding what he's now saying.
But what's likely to happen?
Because my understanding is you and he are facing off, but redistricting gives him the advantage now because they've basically redrawn the congressional lines in Texas in a way where this district, which you won, will now be very favorable to the Democrat.
Hence, Politico is dubbing the race likely Democratic.
The Cook political report now has it as lean Democratic, again, because of redistricting.
So what do you do that's true?
Well, it got harder for Vicente.
When he initially decided to run for Texas District 34, he thought he had it in his pocket.
He never thought that we would win a special election and that he would have to run against Congresswoman, Maida Flores.
I am the incumbent.
And Texas 34, no matter the lines, we are very conservative, conservative by nature.
That is just who we are.
It doesn't change that.
We did win Cameron County.
Cameron County is the biggest county with the biggest population in the special election for the first time ever in history.
And look, if I was able to flip a district that had not been flipped for over 150 years, I feel very confident in winning our reelection in November.
But because I don't take no one for granted, I really don't.
I'm working very hard every single day.
I put God first.
And of course, the amazing team that is behind me that I'm confident that is going to get me through and my amazing family as well.
And I just, I just know we have it, but I take nothing for granted.
Yeah, you've done the impossible before.
Now, exactly.
Speaking of the attacks against you, the New York Times, I mentioned it in the intro.
They called you a far, far-right Latina.
Okay, far-right Latina, you and two other Latina Republicans.
Far right, okay, why?
Okay, let's we'll find out.
And then CNN says, you may be Latina, but you're not the real deal.
You're not a real deal Latino.
And this is why they say that.
This is an op-ed by Paul Reyes on July 12th, which says, you hold conservative positions on abortion, gun control, and immigration, but quote, that's just not where most Latinos are these days.
The Pew Research Center reports 60% of Hispanic adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
The June Quinnipiac University survey found 58% of Hispanics want stricter gun control laws.
Pew notes that an overwhelming majority of Latinos favor major fixes in the U.S. immigration system.
So what do you say to Paul Reyes who says you're not the real deal Latina, Latino, because 60% of Hispanics feel differently than you do on those issues?
I strongly disagree.
I mean, I really don't care, to be honest with you, what these people think because they know nothing about me.
They know nothing about our culture.
I mean, I was just, I was born in Mexico.
You know, I mean, what more Latina do you want?
Like, it's, it blows my mind.
Not real enough.
I wasn't born in Mexico.
I guess it's not real enough, right?
But I know my people.
I know my district.
I mean, I worked as a respiratory care practitioner for over seven years, worked with pediatric, work with the elderly community.
I have a strong bond and relationship with my district.
And we are pro-family, pro-life.
And it's all, I really don't, I go based on what I see every single day.
I don't go too much on what the polls say.
It has to match.
And it's just not what I see.
And I don't know.
I'm just really confident in the people that I represent.
And I know that here in Texas 34, I don't know throughout the country, but I know here in Texas 34, we put God first and family.
That is just who we are.
And the issues that matter to this district right now is the economy, border security, and family values.
Those are the top issues, you know, that matter to my district.
And I'm going to focus on that.
All the other numbers, I have no control of, but I do know my district.
And we know the numbers are changing.
They're changing with Hispanics and voters and the way they see the Republican Party.
That's been reflected in election after election, starting with Joe Biden's win, where their support was slipping away in a way that alarmed a lot of Democrats and continues to.
Okay, let's talk for a minute about the far right claim.
This is in part, I believe, political because they would just be labeling any Republican Latina far right.
It's just that you have to be dismissed in some way.
So, you know, make you less appealing to sort of center leftists who are eyeballing you.
QAnon Identity Politics 00:06:47
But I understand the one piece of it, which is you, I know you've talked about this, but you have cited or added hashtag Q and hashtag QAnon to social media posts, along with something that was new to me, WWG1WGA, which is shorthand for where we go one, we go all, a QAnon slogan.
So I've heard you say that you were on Fox News and you didn't, you said you're against Q and then it was just a hashtag and your post was actually against QAnon.
So can I ask you officially, like, because it doesn't look like it's against Q, in fairness, you have hashtag Q, hashtag QAnon, then you have hashtag MAGA, hashtag Donald Trump, hashtag build the wall, hashtag we are the people.
So like, it's a bunch of positive things that you like and Q and QAnon is in there.
So was it really an attempt to condemn Q?
No, it was it, to be honest with you, the hashtags are also for more audience, right?
To reach more people.
The post obviously is not in favor of none of that.
I've always said that I am against that and moving, you know, focused on the issues that matter to my district.
I've always said it over and over that I'm against all that.
No idea, to be honest with you, what goes and entails all that.
But a hashtag is just used to get more people to see your post, which was a positive post.
It was not again, it's not for any of what you're saying.
So I've never been in favor of it.
Don't care for it.
Don't care for the far left just as much as I don't care about the far right.
It's just not who we are, to be honest with you.
You know, and I don't mean no disrupt, but that is just not who we are as a Hispanic community.
We're conservative.
We're a lot more moderate.
And I just so glad that I represent a district where we don't have neither or.
We don't have people in my in Texas 34 that are far left.
We don't have people in my district that are far right.
That is just not who we are.
And I really think that as Americans, we are more in the middle.
It's just the media has been dividing us and telling us that we can have real conversations when at the end of the day, we're all Americans.
It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or Republican.
As a respiratory care practitioner, I cared for patients regardless of their political affiliation.
I didn't care, you know, what their political affiliation is.
Anything with Q gets people like, I mean, the original cue is that Democrats are running a sex, a child pedophile ring out of a, out of a pizza joint in Washington.
I mean, for the record, do you believe that?
No, absolutely not.
Most people haven't even heard of it.
You know, no, I've never even heard of it.
You know, but what I did learn about all this is that I have to be careful, like what type of, you know, hashtags we use, even though, yes, we want you to see that.
More than anyone, you more than anyone.
Just ask any black conservative, right?
It's like any member of a minority group that winds up declaring themselves conservatives or Republican will be targeted in the most vicious, unsparing manner.
It's not right, but it's true.
So it's one of the things that makes you sympathetic to me.
You know, I can see they're going to put you under the microscope in a way that others won't be put, but you do have to be careful, extra careful.
I had to be careful.
Absolutely.
It was a living, it's an experience.
And, you know, every day you learn and you become better and you become wiser.
And for sure, I am a lot more careful moving forward and using those type of hashtags.
Now, let me ask you this, because we now have a situation, as I mentioned, where Hispanics are drafting over to the Republican Party more and more and more.
And I think the Democrats, the more I listen to them, the more they keep trying to sort of tell Hispanics that they too should be on board with the causes of Black Lives Matter and identity and, you know, that they can sort of get ahead in the identity lane in a way that the Democrats want to foster that Republicans don't.
And more and more I see Hispanics in the polls saying, we don't want that.
We think about these things differently than you.
So why is that?
We believe all lives matter.
I honestly hate identity politics, but I do think that the Democrat Party has been taking advantage of us using identity politics.
And I believe that we're going to end identity politics by encouraging more Hispanics and African Americans to join the Republican Party and have equal, you know, have some balance on both parties.
We need representation, equal representation on both parties, because even amongst us Hispanics, we don't all think alike.
I mean, even those of us in the Republican Party, we do not all think exactly the same.
We're going to have some differences as well.
And that's okay.
But I do think that the only way to end identity politics is by having equal representation on both parties.
It's so nice to talk to you.
I cannot wait to see what happens in November.
I will say win or lose.
I hope you're not done.
I hope you stay in national politics.
I will never, yes, I will never be done.
I want the best for my country.
I want the best for the Hispanic community.
And I will always be a voice for them no matter what.
Oh, rock on.
Great to have you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
God bless you.
Oh, you do.
Bye bye.
All right.
And we're going to be right back.
Speaking of black conservatives who have gotten it unfairly, the Florida Surgeon General, who's been on this show once before.
In fact, I was here in the Sirius studios last time we had him on.
And here I am again for the day as well.
It's like I only interview him while I'm here in the Sirius studios.
And we shall do it again in one moment.
He's drawing the ire of the left again, including the media.
And we'll talk about why.
And remember, you can find the Megan Kelly Show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East.
And the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/slash Megan Kelly.
If you prefer an audio podcast, you can follow, download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free.
And there you'll find our full archives with more than 365 shows.
Joining us now is Florida Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Latapo.
He is the author of the new book out later this month called Transcend Fear: a Blueprint for Mindful Leadership in Public Health.
Yes, we need that.
Welcome back to the show, Dr. Latipo.
Great to have you here.
Thanks so much, Megan.
Vaccine Emergency Rationale 00:12:08
We do.
Thank you for putting it down in paper on paper and letting everybody read your thoughts because you're one of the few people who actually showed some reserve, some sanity, some considered judgment when everyone around you was panicking.
So we need somebody like you to stop and say, here's how I did that.
And here's what's in my background that led me to be kind of familiar with trauma and to not completely freak out whenever it hits and so on and so forth.
So I thought it was very insightful and personal and needed.
Thank you for doing it.
Thanks, Megan.
And that was the point.
You nailed it.
All right.
So we'll get to the book in one sec, but let's just talk about a couple of news headlines since you are a doctor and you know what you're talking about.
So right now, what's in the news scaring everybody is monkeypox.
And I have a confession to make to you.
I haven't been paying very close attention to monkeypox because I can feel the media trying to make me panic about monkeypox, which makes me say, I refuse.
I refuse.
I will wait until there's a need to panic.
But my governor, up until recently, I moved to Connecticut, but for most of my life, I lived in New York, Kathy Hochl, who's just awful.
She's declared a state of emergency over monkeypox now.
Do you agree with that decision?
Well, I mean, I think in general, obviously, states of emergencies should be used when there is an emergency.
And so in general, I mean, no, obviously, I don't know all of the factors that she was considering in making that decision.
But, you know, I think we just, it's this, the pattern of reaching for the panic button when we're faced with problems is, you know, that's just, it's not, it leads to normalization of ways of sort of, you know, ways of running in a society, governing a society that are harmful for individuals and for, you know,
important things like individual rights and liberty.
So in general, you know, emergencies really should be saved for that, in my, in my opinion.
Yeah.
And in the opinion of your boss, because Governor DeSantis came out and said, I am so sick of politicians.
And we saw this with COVID trying to sow fear in the population.
We're not doing fear, he said.
And he came out and said, criticized her move and said, they're going to abuse these emergency powers to restrict your freedom.
I guarantee you that's what will happen.
And, you know, we have seen that through COVID.
These governors get drunk on their own power and then decide they'd like to hold these emergency powers over us forever.
It's sort of the old camel's nose under the tent.
You know, once the nose is under, the camel's coming.
So they say, oh, emergency powers for monkeypox.
And before we know it, schools are closed and our kids are doing at-home learning for a year.
You know, that's how it goes.
I wish I could laugh and say, oh, you know, it's really funny, but you are exactly right, you know, and it's easier to, you know, to kind of imagine it's absurd, but look at all the absurd stuff we've seen,
you know, over the last two years, firing healthy nurses, you know, who've had COVID and, you know, trying to make like three-year-olds who, you know, I mean, you're lucky if you get them in their clothes and out the door in time for school, trying to make them like, and keep and have them keep those clothes on between the door and the car and trying to make them put like, you know, silly stupid masks on their face.
And it just, just, there's, it's, there's been so much absurdity.
So it's, no, I think it's a very realistic assessment.
On the subject of school insanity, we're seeing school districts like the Washington, D.C. school district mandate the vaccines for 12 and up, or they can't come back to school.
LA as well had that, but they've put it on hold for now since they're missing some 10 to 20,000 students from their roles who just bailed last year when they canceled school all the time.
And now they realize they're in the middle of a crisis that they created.
I've seen a school district in Louisiana make mandates on the vaccines.
And here's my question to you.
If you haven't gotten your kid the vaccine yet, and you're being told he can't enroll this year unless he gets it, is there any point to that given that they're now working on new vaccines to combat Omicron?
So it's an admission that the current vaccines are really not that effective against Omicron.
So why would I stick my kid with a vaccine that was for a version of this virus that is now a couple of versions old, only to be told probably in six months, I have to have him stuck again with the new one they're coming up with that actually addresses the current variant of this virus that we're dealing with.
But, you know, no, Megan, the whole thing's confused.
And, you know, fortunately, in terms of the, you know, the new toddler, Governor DeSantis likes to call them toddler vaccines.
And so I enjoy that he calls it that.
In terms of those, I mean, fortunately, parents are just, you know, they are just almost all saying no thanks.
So it gives me some faith and some confidence that some sanity is being restored in terms of parents like listening to their intuition.
Obviously, the fact that very few of them under the five-year-old group have said no thanks, while Dr. Fauci and, you know, Dr. Walensky and everyone else at the federal level is saying, you have to do this.
You've got to do this, gives me some more faith in parental intuition.
And I think, you know, I saw, I was pleased to see that LA backed down.
And I'm glad that, you know, some parents decided not to fold.
And I think that I think it's going to be a tricky battle because the issue is beyond, you know, which variant is being targeted or whatever, you know, the bottom line is just before any other issues, right?
Before you ask about waning immunity, before you look at, well, you know, how safe are these in children?
Before any of those other questions, there's just that basic question of, you know, is this something that my kid is going to be better off receiving?
And the fact is, and it is a fact, that a benefit in healthy children or children who've had COVID and therefore have immunity has like never been demonstrated.
So, you know, so in other words, why are we even talking about this?
Why is this even something that they're putting on the table?
Here's what, can I tell you, this is what they said in our school.
They said, and by the way, I just got the stats, less than 3% of children under the age of five have been vaccinated.
So yes, 97% of parents nationwide have said, no, thanks, but no thanks.
And only 31% of children between the ages of five and 11 have been vaccinated, despite mandates and so on.
The vast majority of parents there too have said, no, we're not doing that.
But here's what they say in our school to mandate, because we have a school that's mandated the vaccine for 16 and up.
And so far they haven't moved that down.
The reason they didn't go lower than 16 was because it was only the emergency use authorization, at least when we went into summer.
And I'm very much hoping they won't change that, even though now technically they've gotten beyond that in the approvals.
Anyway, their rationale is as follows.
When you get COVID, if you've had the vaccine, you have a lower viral load in your nose.
Oh, thanks.
Okay.
That's what they say.
Is that true at all?
I mean, my answer is that I haven't seen a study that shows that.
But my other, like the more relevant question is, like, this is ludicrous.
That's, that is the relevant response.
I mean, okay, let's suppose that's true.
You know, it's like, you know, was that an end point in the trials?
No, I mean, that's doctors care about, and public health is about, you know, making, helping people be as healthy as possible.
When you, I mean, I don't know, it's almost, I don't know whether to put people like that in a box and like just lock up the, you know, lock it and then let them out in a couple of days and ask them again if they still want to do that.
It's crazy talk because they'll say, and this, by the way, this is an all-boys school.
So they're dealing with the population, especially at those older ages that actually does have to worry about myocarditis and, you know, a real risk from the vaccine that's been documented.
So you ask them on the other side, well, okay, okay, even if you do have an increased viral load, if you haven't gotten the vaccine in your nose, what does that do?
That potentially makes you more of a spreader.
But getting COVID is sort of a foregone conclusion at this point.
Just ask Joe Biden, just ask Anthony Fauci.
The question is, how can we save lives?
And this is not a group that's at risk of dying from COVID or even of getting really, really ill.
So then you say, what about myocarditis?
That is a risk for these kids.
Yes, you can get it if you get COVID, but you can also get it from the vaccine.
And the vaccine is not something you have to do.
The vaccine is not something that necessarily is just going to come your way from living your life like COVID is at this point.
They don't care.
They want everyone to be shot with that vaccine.
I don't know why.
They just ignore the myocarditis.
And they say, you can't say that you have like a history of blood clots in your family.
You could have any sort of problems in your family.
They don't count any of that.
The only thing they'll allow you to get out of it for is if you had a negative reaction to shot one.
You have to get one jab.
And only then if you have a doctor they approve of, say, little Johnny had, you know, whatever hives, only then can you get out of shot two.
And meanwhile, they're telling the doctors that, hey, we're going to scrutinize any vaccine exemption that you do.
No, it's ludicrous.
And I mean, I just, I know that it can be really difficult, less difficult now than it was in the middle of all the craziness that we all had to deal with.
But I just, I encourage people to, you know, to just not participate, to really do their very best not to participate.
You know, I mean, I know it's difficult.
You know, in California, you know, some of my colleagues, when they were faced with the vaccine mandate, you know, they bit the bullet and they, if they didn't believe in it, there weren't many.
Most of my colleagues did believe in it.
But, you know, I had a few that, you know, one guy's not working there anymore.
Another guy was going to retire, but they, you know, they approved his religious exemption.
And, you know, my wife and I, you know, we were, we, you know, when we had to move to Florida, if like the crazies had gotten their way and instituted vaccine mandates for flying, we'd have driven to Florida, you know.
So I just, it's just, I know that, I know, I know it's not easy.
And I know it's way beyond not easy, but, you know, it's only, it is courage that changes the world.
And with every person that makes that step, it makes it a little bit easier for the next person.
And courage always rules the day.
That would definitely, I mean, if enough parents say, take a hike to the administrators at any school, that policy is done.
Transgender Minor Therapies 00:07:05
Yes.
Well, hopefully parents are starting to feel that more and more now that we see the vaccines are not what they were billed to be.
One other thing on Florida.
There's been quite a bit of news this weekend as the Florida Board of Medicine voted this past Friday to start the process of setting rules for treating transgender minors.
This is a debate that has come up state after state after state.
You know, places like Florida, like Texas have said, we're going to close down these transgender quote care clinics.
They're nothing of the sort.
We shouldn't be giving cross-sex hormones and so on to young teens, or we should at least severely restrict it.
More and more red states are saying that.
So now Florida is going to take a hard look at this issue.
And where do you stand on it?
Yeah, I was, you know, I attended that board meeting.
So I heard some of the discussion and I contributed a little bit to it.
You know, it's interesting, Megan, if we had had this conversation six months ago, I wouldn't have been able to say the things I would say now.
And I wouldn't have known what to say.
And, you know, what I've done is I've reviewed every study, every published study that has been cited by both proponents and opponents of these, you know, the hormonal treatments and the sex change and surgeries, you know, mastectomies, the sex reassignment surgeries.
And I've honestly, like, I had to, you know, I almost had to kind of wire my jaws shut.
It is, it truly, Megan, is appalling how much, how far physicians in this area have gone compared to how much we know, how certain we are about the evidence.
And essentially, you know, the studies, these people, you know, the advocates like to say that the surgeries, you know, either reduce like improved mental health or, you know, you know, whatever, they have some benefits, like these therapies.
And you look at these studies, Megan, and not a single one is a like a prospective study with good control groups.
There's not a single randomized clinical trial.
All of the evidence basically that they make their arguments on are what we call observational studies.
And they are vulnerable to like profound confounding.
So essentially, there is no high quality evidence that has shown a benefit.
Despite all the procedures and all the hormones that have been administered, there's not a single high quality study that shows a benefit.
On the other side, there's tremendous risk with these therapies.
And, you know, why is there a risk?
The risk is pretty obvious.
I mean, with the hormone blockers, the pubertal period is, you know, that's an extremely complex period where hormones are changing and they are active in development, including brain development.
So, you know, we don't know what we're doing at all in terms of, you know, in terms of long-term effects or short-term effects of doing, of manipulating these hormones that are critical to development during puberty.
That's astonishing.
And then, you know, obviously with the sex reassignment surgeries, there are clear risks of sterility and infertility.
So when you look at the fact that the benefits haven't been proven and there's been opportunity, like this could have been prospectively studied, you know, randomized clinical trials could have been done.
The benefits have not been shown.
I mean, they are absolutely not convincing.
Anyone who says they are is, you know, is sort of on a crusade.
And the risks are just obvious.
These procedures and these therapies fall into a quadrant in medicine that we avoid as standard of care.
I mean, we clearly avoid this.
You know, they just basically unproven benefit, high risk.
I mean, that's not how medical care works.
And then you add on top of that, you're doing this to kids, right?
That's the focus.
That's where we focused in Florida.
Like they can't provide consent.
You know, they can't provide any, you know, there's a technical term called assent in medical, but they, to think that there is informed, that the individual has the capacity when they're a minor to make such a, you know, such a monumental treatment decision, that's just ridiculous.
Like, you know, so, you know, for multiple reasons, I mean, this, it falls outside the standard of care.
They're upset because people are noticing and they're asking questions and they don't have good answers.
And I hope and I'm confident that the Florida Board of Medicine will rule in a way that is appropriate.
Good.
Good.
They would be one of the outliers, sadly.
It's just more and more protests happen when you cut off ubiquitous access to this kind of care.
And as you point out, when it's a minor, nine times out of 10, you have somebody else doing some agenda pushing on the person and their yes is not a legal yes.
They can't consent.
But we choose to ignore that.
I want to remind our audience, you were the associate professor of medicine at UCLA from 2016 to 2021 before being recruited by Governor DeSantis to go on over to Florida and be the Surgeon General of Florida prior to that.
Got your Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from Wake Forest University, then moved on to get your MD from Harvard Medical School, PhD in health policy from Harvard as well, all the fancy degrees.
It's very hard for them to dismiss you.
You did, you checked all the boxes they wanted you to check, and then you started to sound like a conservative and now they hate you.
They're funny.
They'd take that degree back if they could.
But yeah, no, I mean, it's, you know, it's a lot of Craziness out there, but we will, you know, that's my favorite part of the job is, you know, being a voice of sanity, of sanity in a field of insanity.
Yes.
Well, and you found the right partner in Governor DeSantis.
So you write this book, Transcend Fear, a Blueprint for Mindful Leadership in Public Health.
Shedding Fear for Love 00:06:17
And I was surprised at your backstory and how forthcoming you were about it and how much time you spent on the abuse that you suffered.
And I think you must have felt this was very important to your personal story and sort of how you got to where you are.
You tell me why, why was that in there?
Was it hard to reveal so much about your personal background?
Yeah, thanks for that question, Megan.
Well, I mean, honestly, Megan, I love people and I really want everyone to, you know, have the best chance that they can to, you know, to live a life that they want to live and a life that, you know, that they find fulfilling.
And, you know, and I can, I can't be honest about me without sharing those things because sort of me being here is not is not an accident.
Ironically, you know, had, you know, had that, you know, the babysitter not abused me, not sexually abused me in the way that she did, I, you know, I wouldn't have developed the sort of the numbness that I carried around in my life and thought, didn't think anything of it because I thought that's how, you know, that it was normal.
And I wouldn't have, you know, I wouldn't have had such a sort of a volatile sort of crisis, kind of an emotional, physical, emotional, spiritual crisis when I fell in love with my wife.
And had I not had all that, I would not have, you know, essentially been forced to, you know, face it and get help.
And my wife was the one who she's guided me the whole way.
And not all that happened, I wouldn't have been able to, you know, essentially to transcend my own fear, to shed the things that I was holding on to in my own life that were preventing me from,
you know, from being free of fear, being able to connect to other people, being able to be authentic, to be who I, you know, to find who I am and to be who I am and to be, you know,
the reflection of God that all of us are, though we all manage, you know, in this world to, you know, to collect all this stuff that is this buffer between between who we are and how we end up, you know, showing up in the world.
So, you know, without those things, I wouldn't be where I am.
I wouldn't have been able to do the things that I've done.
I certainly wouldn't have been able to sort of withstand and sort of sail through the criticisms that I've received without changing something about myself, whatever, or, you know, dealing with tremendous doubt, losing my way, losing my clarity.
So, you know, all of those things, you know, I fortunately got on a path thanks to my wife that led me there.
And I think that's the most important thing is, you know, to share that with folks so that people who are also interested in getting free of their own fears.
And fear is the most central one of all the things that tend to confine us as humans.
Look, look what you did.
I mean, I listed some of your resume items.
It's like, talk about overcoming fear and trauma.
You've clearly done that.
I mean, you don't get those credentials without doing that, but you're open about the fact that you were wrestling and you were struggling.
And it wasn't like, oh, I'm perfect.
You know, I became an adult and I've got it all together.
Brianna, your wife, critical role.
And I love the part about how when you fell in love, this actually happened for my husband and me in a way too, where we were dating long distance when we first got together.
And so you're kind of forced to fall in love with the person's mind or not at all, right?
It's not like a physical thing all the time.
And for you, in your case, that was actually very important.
Yeah, absolutely, Megan.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When it just so happened to me, and you know, the thing about different types of traumatic experiences, as you know, is that they affect everyone differently, you know, so you don't know how they'll affect anyone.
And for me, when that babysitter broke my boundaries, you know, it affected me in a way that not only sort of numbed me to just kind of emotions and experiences, but it also kind of introduced all the sexual trauma where I basically couldn't handle.
And when I say handle, I mean actually take in.
So couldn't handle the, you know, sort of the energy of anything sexual.
And I didn't know, right?
So, you know, how did that show up for me?
Well, I was in relationships.
I wasn't emotionally connected.
You know, I wasn't really sexually connected, even if I were sexually active.
There wasn't any, there wasn't any, there was no, there was really no humanity in it, no me in it, because most of me was, all of me, in fact, was sort of shelled off.
So, you know, you fall in love.
And fortunately, and, you know, having a long distance relationship, having the phone conversations with my wife and falling in love unknowingly over the phone moved that out of the equation.
And so I couldn't introduce that whole, you know, screwed up part of myself into the relationship.
And, you know, that let her kind of come in through the back door of my heart.
Freezing Through Meridian Work 00:11:19
Thankfully.
That's amazing.
And when she got there, she saw how fucked up you were and she did not flee.
She didn't flee.
She stuck it out.
She said, I'm in long haul.
You had three kids together.
And ultimately, she introduced you to somebody who would help you really get things under control and change your life.
Tell us who that was and sort of the new techniques that came into your life as a result of, well, Christopher Maher and sort of what you learned at that point forward.
Yeah.
So, yeah, that's exactly right.
So, you know, so she didn't flinch.
Fortunately, oh man, my poor wife.
I mean, I feel terrible for her.
I could apologize from now until the day I leave this earth and I wouldn't need apologies.
But, you know, fortunately, she knew that, you know, underneath all that, all that crap, there was a, you know, a really good man.
And so, you know, the, she finally, we tried lots of things and, you know, everything helped a little bit, but, you know, I was, I was really effed up.
And finally, she got me to Christopher Mayer.
And Christopher is a, he's a Navy SEAL, he's an ex-Navy SEAL and has had his own journey.
And basically out of this journey, he has developed a number of techniques that he uses to help individuals get free of their traumas.
And it's the stuff that every single person on this earth accumulates as they live on this earth.
And, you know, and it's a combination.
I really don't understand it, but I'll share it.
I'm sharing it not as someone who understands it, but rather someone who went through it and emerged from it.
It's a combination of like, it's a lot of stuff that's based on like Chinese medicine and meridian theory and like qi and the flow of qi.
And it involves like different techniques.
Like one of them's this thing called Mao Xing that where basically stress and trauma are released through the thighs.
And it's because, I think it's because there's a meridian that it's like one of the more, one of the more sort of fuller meridians or one of the more powerful ones in terms of its access to, you know, like mind, body, spirit, emotions.
And, you know, that's one of the techniques he uses.
He uses another technique called body of light that, I mean, it's, it's, it, as, as someone who went to medical school, it's nothing that you read in books, but I can tell you that it works in terms of like releasing trauma.
And then he's developed a number of, he calls them bester sizes, but they're essentially like exercises, stretches that are, that help process like the daily stress that we build up.
And, you know, and I do those every day.
And, you know, I'll tell you that it's the closest thing to a miracle that I've ever experienced.
I worked with him for five days, and that's like sort of the standard thing that he does.
He's helped thousands of people actually.
And, you know, I was, I mean, I honestly, I was complaining before the, before we started it, because my wife, you know, she came home one day and she was like, and my poor wife.
I mean, I really, honest to God, now that I look at myself and what I was doing and all part of my language about the shit that was coming out and I was just throwing it out on her, which is how people live their lives.
Their shit comes up and they just like spew it out into the field.
And anyway, one day she came home, it was like October 2019 and she's like, honey, I think I found someone for you.
I think I found the right person for you.
You know, this guy, he helps people who've had traumas.
And I was like, I was like, all right.
She showed me the price.
I was like, oh man.
And I looked for, I found, try to find every way to like get out of it to, you know, and I talked to Christopher and I was before we met.
And I was, I was trying every single way to have it.
But I will tell you, after just the first day, because I woke up and something had already changed that was very meaningful.
It was my ability to emotionally connect with other people.
And after the first day, like it was already worth it.
And I told him and he laughed about it when I came in for the second day.
But I would tell you that like I would give every penny, every penny with not a drop of hesitation to in exchange for what I've gotten from working with him.
Wow.
All right.
Yeah, I'm I've got to know what you do with your thighs to make trauma easier to deal.
Wait, stand by, though.
That's a great tease.
So let me pause you there.
I'll squeeze in a quick break and we'll come back with that, with that nugget.
Before we get on to COVID policy and how all these life lessons helped you there and the sort of your takeaways in it, what do I need to do to my thighs to be a better manager of my stress?
What happens there?
Well, I will do the best I can, considering I'm just, I'm a beneficiary, but I'm not a practitioner.
But, you know, basically, my understanding is that, you know, again, one of the most powerful meridians, apparently it runs through your, you know, through your thighs and your legs.
And it has access.
It's sort of like when this meridian has access to aspects of your physical being, your mental being, your emotional being, your spiritual being, more so than any other meridian.
So I think Christopher often will work with people on this meridian early on in the work, just, I think, because the benefit is high for the input.
And so I'm, I, you lay down, I'm laying down on the ground.
So I'm, you know, I don't know, you know, I can't, I don't have eyes in my head, but I'm, you lay down, he has you laying down on the ground.
And basically, I don't know exactly how he does it, but he, he basically, I think it translates into horse stomping.
And he kind of walks up and down your thighs, the back of your thighs and your legs.
At least, then that's what it feels like.
And he's up, you know, he's over you.
So wait, so he's on your hamstrings or he's on your quads.
Oh, on the hamstring.
So yeah, so you're face down.
Okay, okay, got it.
Walking along.
And he's, he's very gifted.
So I'm, you know, he's, he's like not like if I were doing it, I don't know that I would be able to help anyone at all.
Do not try this at home.
Yeah, I have, but basically, what the experience feels like is, I'll share, I'll share it all with you.
So he, so it feels like, like initially, you know, on a scale of one to 10, I mean, some places, and I think he knows sort of exactly where to put pressure.
I mean, it feels like a nine or a 10 out of 10.
In pain?
Yes.
Yes.
And I mean, it effing hurts.
And eventually it'll come down a little bit, a little bit.
And eventually it'll feel like, at least for me, it basically felt like a five or maybe even a four, where it was like, it wasn't even hurting really, you know.
And this is a very good thing because it means that you're having more flow, sort of more chi is flowing through that meridian.
And so there's that.
And so I'll share a little bit more.
I don't write about this in the book, but I'll share a little bit more.
So we did it, and he does a number of different things, but that particular thing we probably did two or three separate times.
And maybe the last time or the penultimate time he did it, at the end of it, by this time, it felt pleasurable.
Like it, instead of being pain, it felt good.
And as crazy as it sounds, Megan, I actually felt like a tiger.
And I know it sounds nuts, but I felt like an animal, like I was connected with an animal.
And Christopher, I told him, because that's what it felt like.
And he shared with me that it was my spirit animal.
And one of the times when he finished it, when he finished doing it, I felt I felt I felt frozen.
I felt incredibly cold just in my chest.
And I was shivering.
And Christopher laid me down.
He told me to lay down on the couch.
He put some blankets over me.
And so I was shivering.
I was freezing.
This is, you know, we're indoors, I'm freezing and shaking and shivering.
And just here from, you know, kind of just in my chest.
And Christopher explained to me that that was the fright from my experience when I was, you know, when I was three or four years old melting away.
And, you know, and I laid on that couch and shivered for maybe 40 minutes or so that I was like freezing.
And then it went away.
So, you know, it's like, you know, like I said, there's, I never have had anything like it before, but be certain, but I know from my own experience that there is far more to our bodies and our beings than, you know, than we, you know, sort of learn in medical school.
And what you learned at Harvard.
Wow.
So all of that in the rear view, how did it change you as a man, as a doctor, as a public health official?
Decisions Beyond Trauma 00:05:02
Yeah, so Christopher, you kind of wrote a book about his own experiences, Christopher Mayer, and he calls it free for life.
And that's actually what his goal.
That's like, that's what he's, that's what his purpose is when he works with people to help them get free for life.
And that was the result.
Does it mean that everything is perfect?
No, you know, it's not really so much that.
And I still work with stuff.
You know, they're different, not new things, right?
Not the same things.
I like have challenges now that are different, obviously, than what I had, you know, before I worked with them, you know.
But they're, you know, but it's, but they're also more evolved challenges and they're more honest challenges and they're less messy because there's less of my own past trauma in the room with me.
There's less, you know, caring that I'm carrying around.
There's less of my own, you know, honestly, bullshit, right?
Like that's how most of, you know, many of us, like all of us really function carrying different amounts of this in terms of like what we believe about ourselves and the world and like what we should, you know, what we're entitled to and how things should be and all that stuff.
So there's less of that stuff.
So, you know, so I still have challenges, but they're, they're nothing like the challenges I had before.
And, you know, and that's for and for me, and, you know, for almost, I think everyone who works with him who wants to actually get better, it's totally, it's free.
So, you know, so for me, like one of the things that was a constant part of my life was fear.
I was fearful of everything.
And, you know, you look at me on the outside, you wouldn't know, you know, but that's because I had really good self-control in terms of, you know, blocking.
And frankly, part of the way that happens is because I had a lot of disconnection.
You know, I wasn't very well, I wasn't connected to my, you know, to my insides.
So it was easier to kind of block off, you know, whatever it was that, you know, keep it from showing externally, right?
Because I was less connected.
And, you know, the fear that I was just a constant permeating part of my life was gone.
A lot of other junk was gone too.
And, you know, it was like just kind of having almost like a clean plate or something.
Yeah, I feel like listening to you, this allowed you to start making decisions intellectually and not necessarily emotionally, you know, like driven by demons, by past trauma.
If any of that can get removed in any large portion, not entirely, of course, we are human.
It can be freeing.
So the name of the book means more to me now.
Transcend fear, transcend fear.
By the way, I just, I do want people to know it's, it's not out yet.
It's available everywhere on August 23rd, but you can pre-order it right now on Amazon, which helps out the good doctor.
The pre-orders help it come out ideally at number one, which the New York Times will try to stop it from being.
But together, we could help overcome that if we pre-order it in great enough numbers.
Transcend fear, transcend the New York Times blocking system on conservatives and transcend all of that nonsense.
I love this.
I love that you've done this.
This is a gift to us all.
Thank you for telling your story.
Megan, let me just add something really briefly.
Okay.
I actually want to say that if anything, it's actually, it lets me make decisions from who I am.
And that's everything, right?
So brain, heart, spirit.
And if anything, I actually use my other stuff more now than I use this.
I mean, this is interesting.
And I use it, but like the world happens, you know, the world heart happens here.
The world happens here in terms of, you know, heart and gut and all that.
So it's, it's access to all of that and more to make decisions.
So more emotion, but less, less damage, less negative like influence, but still a lot of heart.
Lots of heart because that's where we are.
I mean, that's how babies come out.
That's who we are.
It's the other stuff we add on over the years.
Abby, get over here and walk on my hamstrings right now.
She's ready.
She's coming.
Doc, so much love.
Thank you so much.
And our love to your beautiful wife, Brianna, too.
Thanks, Baby.
Thanks so much.
Hope to talk again soon.
Don't forget, transcend fear.
Order it now on Amazon.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
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