The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220829_fbis-hunter-warning-and-climate-hysteria-with-mich
Aired: 2022-08-29
Duration: 01:35:13


=== Ban Cars, Depend on China (15:09) ===

[00:00:00]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:12]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:13]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and happy Monday.
[00:00:16]  The FBI today is responding to Mark Zuckerberg's claims that Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story after the agency warned about Russian propaganda.
[00:00:28]  The Fed's now saying it cannot ask or direct companies to take action.
[00:00:32]  But here's the bizarre thing.
[00:00:33]  Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have put out a statement saying he said all of the same stuff he said to Joe Rogan, which made such headlines over the weekend, to Senator Ron Johnson in public testimony in October of 2020.
[00:00:47]  And we went back to fact check that, fact-checked it, and we'll bring it to you.
[00:00:51]  We'll tell you whether Zuckerberg is correct.
[00:00:54]  This has been out there for two years or hasn't it?
[00:00:56]  Meantime, we're learning new details about another FBI operation, and that is the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
[00:01:01]  We're going to dig deeper into why they did it and what they found as we learned new details over the weekend once the supporting affidavit that was issued in support of the warrant was partially revealed.
[00:01:14]  But we begin today with the left swerving further to the left.
[00:01:19]  California now pledging to ban new gas car sales.
[00:01:24]  They're going to have to get rid of their cars that run on gas, while the Biden administration declares war on efficient and relatively clean burning natural gas.
[00:01:33]  Why?
[00:01:34]  We know why they hate oil.
[00:01:35]  What about natural gas?
[00:01:36]  What's so wrong with natural gas?
[00:01:38]  They'd rather people starve, apparently, because that's what's about to happen.
[00:01:42]  It's a decision my next guest argues will not only undermine Western civilization, but it will in fact kill people.
[00:01:49]  It has been killing people across the globe.
[00:01:52]  Joining me now, one of my favorite guests, Michael Schellenberger, best-selling author, journalist, and the founder and president of Environmental Progress.
[00:02:04]  Michael, welcome back to the show.
[00:02:05]  Good to be with you, Megan.
[00:02:07]  By the way, guys, if you're not following Michael on Substack, you absolutely should be.
[00:02:11]  I follow him personally and I read everything you write and I always find it edifying.
[00:02:16]  And I always learn something new.
[00:02:18]  So this really caught my eye because, you know, it's like, whoa, so you're going to have to buy an electric vehicle in California, not immediately, but not in the too distant future either.
[00:02:31]  And slowly but surely, gas guzzlers are not even going to be available in California bit by bit over the next 10 years.
[00:02:40]  What do you make of this policy?
[00:02:42]  I mean, it's part of the collective madness that's occurring in Western countries, including the United States right now.
[00:02:49]  I mean, as you mentioned, we're in the worst energy crisis that we've been in since the early 70s.
[00:02:54]  It might be much worse than that.
[00:02:55]  Hundreds of millions of people are going to die of hunger this year because of expensive natural gas, because of the war on natural gas, the war on oil and gas, both by President Biden, but also you see in Canada, in Europe.
[00:03:08]  So we're in a very serious crisis right now.
[00:03:11]  There is reason to think that one day we will move to hydrogen fuel cell cars.
[00:03:16]  It's unlikely to be a transition to electric cars in my view, because they're basically powered with lithium, which relies on rare earths.
[00:03:24]  That entire industry is based in China, and it's insane from a national security perspective to become more dependent on China at this moment in our history.
[00:03:36]  These are also very expensive, very heavy vehicles.
[00:03:40]  Most experts that look at this think that if we're going to move away from gasoline, it's going to be to hydrogen fuel cells.
[00:03:45]  That's been the view for decades.
[00:03:48]  So the idea that you're going to just ban internal combustion engines and move to, you know, a kind of vehicle that depends that would increase our dependency on China at a moment like this is just bonkers.
[00:04:00]  It's not going to happen.
[00:04:01]  They're going to have to reverse course.
[00:04:03]  But I think it epitomizes the, you know, the danger, the real danger that we're in with this war on energy and in particular the war on oil and gas.
[00:04:13]  So it's not going to be just California either, because at least Virginia has an automatic trigger in its law saying we're going to do whatever California does when it comes to climate change regulations.
[00:04:24]  And they say something like 12 to 16 other states are likely to follow suit.
[00:04:27]  So if you're in a blue-blue state, expect the same in your state if California goes through with this, which they're saying they're going to.
[00:04:34]  You're saying it's not going to happen because it's impractical, I assume.
[00:04:37]  But they've resolved to do it.
[00:04:40]  The vote happened on Thursday by the California air regulators.
[00:04:44]  They say that this will be one of the first such bans worldwide, just so the audience knows what we're talking about.
[00:04:51]  They set interim quotas for zero emission vehicles.
[00:04:55]  All right.
[00:04:56]  So starting with the 2026 model cars, 35% of all new cars, SUVs and small pickups sold in California, must have zero, must be zero emission vehicles.
[00:05:07]  That quota increases each year.
[00:05:10]  It's expected to reach 51% of all new car sales in 2028.
[00:05:14]  That's just six years away.
[00:05:16]  And then by 2030, it's supposed to be 68% of all cars have to be zero emission.
[00:05:25]  By 2035, 100%.
[00:05:28]  So not to be too dense, but when they say you have to have a zero emission vehicle, that more than half of all new car sales in 2028, six years from now have to be zero emission.
[00:05:39]  Does that mean they have to be totally electric?
[00:05:42]  Yeah, electric or fuel cell.
[00:05:44]  But look, I think the point of this is that, you know, we didn't get the iPhone by banning flip phones.
[00:05:51]  You know, we didn't get internal combustion vehicles by banning horse and buggies.
[00:05:55]  Innovation occurs.
[00:05:57]  It becomes better and cheaper than the incumbent technology.
[00:06:00]  And we move to it through market forces.
[00:06:03]  Governments can help with R ⁇ D, but this thing of kind of bans on technologies that are at this moment in time superior to the technologies that they want, it's just madness.
[00:06:15]  I mean, I think we're at a moment of peak climate hysteria, of peak climate nihilism, where basically the concerns around climate change, some of which I hold, by the way, I think climate change is real and we should do something about, but it's just created a kind of derangement syndrome among many people on the left, where they think that somehow you just get technologies by banning this or that technology and wishing a new technology to exist in its place.
[00:06:43]  It doesn't work like that.
[00:06:45]  These are, you know, we have technologies that are based on decades of development.
[00:06:51]  Electric cars, they're a long ways off still.
[00:06:55]  There's a lot of problems with them, as I mentioned, particularly the heavy reliance on rare earths, the heavy reliance on Chinese materials.
[00:07:03]  There's a lot of talk about returning those industries to the United States.
[00:07:06]  That hasn't happened.
[00:07:07]  And it's unlikely to happen within the next decade, if ever, for some of the reasons I mentioned.
[00:07:14]  There are good reasons to think that we'll move to hydrogen over time, but we're talking about a decades-long process, energy transitions, like the transition from coal to oil and gas or the transition from wood to coal before that, and the transition from what I think will eventually occur from natural gas to nuclear.
[00:07:31]  These things take decades and centuries.
[00:07:34]  You can't just go and make them happen in a few years.
[00:07:38]  It's just politicians gone wild in California.
[00:07:41]  And it's really the case all around the world.
[00:07:43]  It's a kind of mania that we're experiencing right now.
[00:07:46]  I think we're about to have a really abrupt wake-up call this winter when we see just how deadly many of these policies have become.
[00:07:54]  I want to get to that, but table it for right now because I want to stay on batteries for a second.
[00:07:59]  So there's at least a couple of problems.
[00:08:01]  One is supporting China.
[00:08:03]  According to my stats, current electric vehicles depend on lithium for their batteries, which store and use energy produced elsewhere.
[00:08:12]  Most lithium is produced overseas, chiefly in Australia, Chile, and China.
[00:08:17]  Batteries, primarily manufactured in China.
[00:08:20]  The U.S. has one lithium processing facility, and it's not even among the world's top 10 lithium-producing nations.
[00:08:29]  So we're not going to be making these batteries.
[00:08:31]  We got to get them from places like China.
[00:08:34]  So we've got a problem in terms of greater dependence on China for the batteries of these cars.
[00:08:38]  And we've got a problem of, you've mentioned this on the show before, the charging stations.
[00:08:44]  Anybody who's got an iPhone knows if you have something that's, you know, electronic, you've got to charge it at one point or another.
[00:08:50]  And the same is true for the batteries inside of these cars.
[00:08:54]  And does California have the infrastructure to charge, I don't know how many people are in the state of California, to charge all of their electric vehicles by, you know, 10 years from now?
[00:09:04]  No, it does not.
[00:09:05]  Absolutely does not.
[00:09:06]  You know, the materials component, just one more thing on that.
[00:09:09]  It's a huge issue.
[00:09:10]  It's not just lithium.
[00:09:11]  It's also nickel.
[00:09:12]  It's also rare earths.
[00:09:13]  We know that the mine of these rare earths is incredibly destructive.
[00:09:17]  The Associated Press just came out with a major report about how devastating rare earth mining.
[00:09:22]  These are these very, they're actually common minerals, but they're at low levels in the earth.
[00:09:28]  And so you have to dig up a lot of earth to get a small amount of these pure elements.
[00:09:33]  But devastating impact on the rainforests of Burma, of Myanmar.
[00:09:38]  We also know that they're all processed in China.
[00:09:40]  And the refining process itself is incredibly energy intensive, incredibly dirty.
[00:09:46]  It's very unlikely to see these industries coming back to the United States given our very high environmental standards.
[00:09:51]  So there's just a huge minerals component of this that is being underestimated.
[00:09:56]  Yes, the charging stations is, of course, a huge obstacle.
[00:09:59]  There's no universal agreement on how to, what the kind of charging system should be.
[00:10:05]  There's been some conflicts between the electric automakers around what that standard should be.
[00:10:10]  And then the other, there's many other issues.
[00:10:12]  Another issue is that fast charging has been promoted as a way to really quickly refuel the electric cars with electricity.
[00:10:20]  But that itself actually puts a heavy toll on their batteries.
[00:10:24]  It makes the batteries run out much faster than in a normal refueling.
[00:10:28]  So, you know, those are some of the problems.
[00:10:30]  Another problem, of course, is that you're going from you're having multiple energy conversions, just to get a little wonky here.
[00:10:37]  What you want is every time you convert energy, either from chemicals into electricity or from a fuel like coal or natural gas into heat and then into electricity, you're paying a penalty that has an economic cost.
[00:10:51]  And so you want to reduce the number of energy conversions.
[00:10:54]  With a hydrogen fuel cell, you only have one conversion, which is from natural gas to hydrogen.
[00:11:00]  Eventually in the future, it would be from water to hydrogen.
[00:11:04]  But with the electric vehicles, you're having multiple, you're having at least one or two more energy conversions, which makes the cost of it that much higher.
[00:11:12]  So yeah, I guess the bottom line, because there's a lot of complexity here, but the bottom line is that these are technologies that are simply not ready.
[00:11:19]  They're very expensive.
[00:11:20]  They require an increased dependence on China at a time where we really don't want to become more dependent on China.
[00:11:27]  Well, you mentioned the environment, and this is something we've talked about in your first episode on the show, how you sort of came from a place of loving the earth, being a nature lover, an outdoorsman, to working for Greenpeace, volunteering for Greenpeace, and then working with the Obama administration on Solyndra, these solar panels.
[00:11:46]  And your evolution into somebody who was a little skeptical of these things was very natural because you were a flag bearer.
[00:11:54]  I mean, you were one of the biggest proponents of all that stuff.
[00:11:57]  But your love of the earth, your love of environmentalism, it clashed in a way with this climate change extremism.
[00:12:07]  They're so focused on temperatures, they've totally forgotten about the earth and protection of the earth with things like these massive wind farms and solar farms.
[00:12:17]  And as you point out, that's why I think it's interesting to hear you go back to mining.
[00:12:21]  And I actually haven't given a lot of thought to what, you know, like when you were talking, why is it bad to be digging up the earth, like you point out, to get what's necessary for these batteries?
[00:12:31]  What does that do?
[00:12:32]  Why should we be concerned about it?
[00:12:34]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:12:35]  So, I mean, on the what you want from an environmental point of view is you want to use the least amount of natural resource.
[00:12:43]  Now, what environmentalists in the 60s, the pro-scarcity environmentalists believed is that that meant that we should reduce how much energy we use.
[00:12:51]  But it turns out the relationship is exactly the opposite.
[00:12:54]  You can reduce how much natural resource you use if you are using more energy.
[00:13:00]  So energy becomes a replacement of natural resource.
[00:13:05]  So if you're using, for example, natural gas and eventually moving to hydrogen, you don't have to use, you don't have to mine as much.
[00:13:14]  You don't have to use as much land for energy production.
[00:13:17]  The one statistic that I think everybody should know is that it takes about 300 times more land to generate the same amount of electricity from solar farms or wind farms as it does from a natural gas or nuclear plant.
[00:13:30]  That's a huge difference.
[00:13:31]  That's not 30% more.
[00:13:33]  That's 300 times more.
[00:13:35]  That's a gigantic land footprint.
[00:13:38]  So anybody that loves the natural world, that loves forests and deserts and grasslands where there's birds and endangered tortoises, we now know that the expansion of wind threatens the extinction of golden eagles.
[00:13:53]  So I mean, this is not a minor event.
[00:13:55]  These are, this is, I mean, really, the expansion of renewables is the greatest threat to endangered bird and bat and other species around the world.
[00:14:05]  So this is not a small thing.
[00:14:07]  So the, but if you're using, if you're getting energy, if you're just pulling more gas out of shales, which is this underground rock formation that we have in the United States and around the world, abundant amounts of it, you can use that gas to power the civilization.
[00:14:21]  And you don't have to do what the proponents of renewables and electric cars want to do, which is to massively expand mining and minerals.
[00:14:29]  I mean, you're looking at something like a five to seven fold increase of mining in order to power electric vehicles.
[00:14:37]  Mining, environmentalists have traditionally opposed this.
[00:14:40]  You're talking about not just ripping up forests in places like Southeast Asia or around the world.
[00:14:47]  You're then also digging into it and creating the waste byproduct, the tailings.
[00:14:52]  So you're trying, if you if you really love nature and you want to save the natural environment, you want to use less of it.
[00:14:57]  And that actually means using more power dense, more energy intensive processes rather than more material and land use intensive processes.

=== Europe's Energy Crisis Explained (15:09) ===

[00:15:10]  So what, I mean, if you were in charge of this problem and you did run for governor of California, so you wanted to be in charge of this problem, at least in that state, what would you do when it comes to vehicles and reform?
[00:15:22]  Well, I think the first thing is, and first, thanks for asking that question, because I think this is a moment that calls out for a long-term vision.
[00:15:28]  So I think the first thing is that, you know, it recognizes that we're in an energy crisis.
[00:15:32]  We need to produce significantly more oil and gas in order to power, in order to provide energy to our allies in Europe and Asia.
[00:15:39]  They do not have abundant natural gas and oil like we have.
[00:15:43]  They're trying to move away from Russian oil and gas correctly in my view.
[00:15:47]  We do not want to return.
[00:15:48]  We do not want our allies to return to any amount of use of Russian oil and gas.
[00:15:53]  That means that we have to replace it.
[00:15:55]  And we can do it in the United States.
[00:15:57]  I just ran the calculations.
[00:15:58]  The United States has enough natural gas to both provide for ourselves and for Europe for a thousand years.
[00:16:06]  There's no way we'll ever want to do that.
[00:16:08]  We want to move to nuclear within the next 100 years, 150 years.
[00:16:12]  Same thing with the move away from oil.
[00:16:14]  We want to move to hydrogen over the next 100, 150 years.
[00:16:17]  So that's the long-term vision.
[00:16:19]  The long-term vision is to phase out the use of coal.
[00:16:23]  We don't need coal anymore.
[00:16:24]  We have abundant natural gas, produces half the carbon emissions of coal.
[00:16:29]  And then we want to use that natural gas increasingly both for electricity, but then also for transportation by creating hydrogen.
[00:16:37]  So natural gas, just to get a little wonky in the chemistry.
[00:16:42]  No, I appreciate it because I don't understand.
[00:16:44]  When you say hydrogen, I don't understand.
[00:16:46]  Yeah, it's super, in some ways, it's really simple.
[00:16:48]  I'm not a big math or chemistry person myself, but it's pretty simple to understand.
[00:16:52]  Natural gas is CH4.
[00:16:55]  So there's one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms.
[00:16:59]  Hydrogen gas is H2.
[00:17:01]  So you can just split the carbon atom off, and then you can also split that hydrogen into hydrogen gas.
[00:17:09]  So you can make hydrogen gas out of natural gas.
[00:17:13]  And so over time, and this again, we're talking decades and maybe a century or so to make this transition.
[00:17:21]  We can reduce carbon emissions in the short term because that's something everybody, most people want to do by replacing our coal with natural gas.
[00:17:29]  But then to replace oil, it's much trickier.
[00:17:31]  It's going to take a longer period of time to move to hydrogen, but we do that by starting with natural gas and reformulating it, as we say, into hydrogen gas.
[00:17:42]  And then you've got a move to hydrogen.
[00:17:44]  And once your economy is going from natural gas to nuclear for electricity and from oil and natural gas to hydrogen for transportation, you're in a so-called net zero economy.
[00:17:58]  But you're getting there through using more natural gas and oil, at least in the short and medium term, not less.
[00:18:08]  And so this drastic radical war on natural gas that President Biden is prosecuting, that the governor of California is prosecuting, that the Europeans have been caught up with, it's now literally causing energy and food shortages so that hundreds of millions of people will die.
[00:18:25]  You know, the other thing is that fertilizer, there's three kinds of fertilizer.
[00:18:28]  One of the most important is a nitrogen fertilizer, also made from natural gas.
[00:18:33]  So you need more natural gas for electricity, for eventually for transportation, and also for making food.
[00:18:42]  And so we're in an era of abundant natural gas.
[00:18:45]  The United States is blessed with these abundant natural gas resources.
[00:18:50]  We need to expand their use and have this longer-term vision of what you'd call decarbonization, which is to deal with climate change.
[00:18:57]  But we have to deal with the emergency at hand, and that's going to require significantly expanding natural gas and oil production in the short and medium term.
[00:19:06]  Natural gas, those are dirty words in the Biden administration.
[00:19:10]  He doesn't seem to make any distinction between natural gas and oil.
[00:19:14]  And you mentioned Germany and our European allies.
[00:19:17]  Correct me if I'm wrong, but they've been begging.
[00:19:19]  They've been begging us for help when it comes to natural gas and oil.
[00:19:23]  And we won't provide it.
[00:19:25]  We kind of give them like a sure, sure, sure.
[00:19:28]  I'll invite you to my party.
[00:19:29]  And then we never send the invitation ever.
[00:19:31]  I mean, he's against them, and he doesn't even care that we're kind of cutting off the spigot from Putin right now.
[00:19:38]  He won't backbill.
[00:19:40]  I mean, we're looking at a crisis, but Europe's really looking at a crisis like soon when it comes to energy, no?
[00:19:49]  Yeah, you said it just right, Megan, which is that the Europeans, they're very, Americans were a little bit more blunt.
[00:19:59]  Europeans tend to be more diplomatic.
[00:20:02]  And sometimes if you've ever dealt with Europeans, you'll know some of them are more direct than others.
[00:20:08]  But they try to tell you what they want in a really polite way.
[00:20:12]  And sometimes we Americans are really dense about it.
[00:20:14]  And so they have to be more direct.
[00:20:16]  And so we first saw this publicly emerge in June at the G7 conference.
[00:20:23]  We saw the French president, Emmanuel Macron, tell Biden in a kind of pretend stage whisper in front of a whole like gaggle of journalists.
[00:20:35]  He said, you know, I just spoke to the basically the UAE, the United Arab Emirates head of state.
[00:20:45]  And he said that the Arab nations are not going to be able to produce as much petroleum as we thought.
[00:20:51]  And this is Macron saying this to Biden.
[00:20:53]  You know, there's Biden.
[00:20:54]  He's kind of like not totally there as usual.
[00:20:59]  But what Macron was doing was he was telling the world that the United States needs to produce more oil because we can't rely on Arab nations.
[00:21:08]  Well, Biden obviously didn't get the hint.
[00:21:10]  So he went to Saudi Arabia begging them, a little fist bump to the Saudi royal prince, begging them for more oil.
[00:21:20]  They just announced that they're really not going to produce more oil because they like these high oil prices.
[00:21:25]  You know, so we saw the Biden administration going to Venezuela to beg for oil.
[00:21:29]  Meanwhile, Biden has not had the big oil companies to the White House yet to talk about how to expand production.
[00:21:35]  We don't have to explain oil.
[00:21:38]  It's absurd.
[00:21:40]  I mean, what are we doing?
[00:21:42]  I keep asking people, like, what am I missing here?
[00:21:45]  Like, how is it better for the climate to be asking the Arab nations to produce more oil and gas when we could produce it here, a benefit to American workers?
[00:21:54]  I mean, these are good, high-paying jobs, Megan.
[00:21:57]  This is really a blessing.
[00:21:59]  It's a jewel, this oil and gas industry that we have in the United States.
[00:22:04]  From a climate perspective, we reduced our carbon emissions 22% between 2005 and 2020 because of the transition from coal to cheaper natural gas.
[00:22:13]  So this is, we're in a bizarro world.
[00:22:15]  I mean, this is, I mean, look, what it is is Biden is trying to deliver for his fairly radicalized, apocalyptic Democratic Party base, but it's putting the whole world in jeopardy.
[00:22:28]  It's putting Europe in danger.
[00:22:29]  We have an obligation to protect our allies in Europe.
[00:22:32]  We don't have to do it militarily, but that means that we have to be able to provide them with the fuels that their economies depend on.
[00:22:38]  I mean, Germany right now is at risk of losing its glass manufacturing, its steel automotive.
[00:22:44]  This is the industrial heartland of Europe, and they depend directly on gas for producing those items and those commodities.
[00:22:53]  So, yeah, it's, I kind of am still shocked by it because I thought that the crisis would have woken the Biden administration up at this point, but it apparently hasn't.
[00:23:01]  And Germany's in such trouble because it's not getting its gas now from Russia or it needed to get its gas from Russia and it's being in an effort to penalize Russia.
[00:23:11]  And then Russia is striking back.
[00:23:12]  So they're involved in this whole Ukrainian conflict.
[00:23:15]  My team pointed out to me something very interesting.
[00:23:18]  Trump was at the UN in 2018 and looked at the Germans with a warning about Russia.
[00:23:26]  What's interesting in this clip for the listening audience who is not taking in the visual is at the end of it, the German delegation appears to laugh at Trump.
[00:23:36]  They mocked him.
[00:23:37]  We're going to play the sound, but here it is.
[00:23:41]  Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.
[00:23:51]  Here in the Western hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.
[00:24:04]  It has been the formal policy of our country since President Monroe.
[00:24:11]  He goes on, and you can see there's a cutaway shot of the Germans smiling, yucking it up.
[00:24:17]  This is no, I mean, and look, first of all, so I did not vote for Trump.
[00:24:22]  I confess I was a lifelong Democrat, not a Trump person, but Trump was absolutely correct about this.
[00:24:30]  He was prescient.
[00:24:32]  It might have been Trump's finest hour.
[00:24:34]  And you have to remember, Megan, he's warning against Germany.
[00:24:39]  He's saying that Europe is becoming dangerously dependent on Putin at a time that the entire Democratic Party and basically all of the mainstream news media was accusing Trump of being a Biden puppet.
[00:24:51]  I mean, I'm sorry, a Putin Trump, a puppet.
[00:24:55]  You know, so this coming at a moment where Trump is accused of being a traitor, and he's the one that's actually warning them against Putin.
[00:25:03]  You know, and I'll tell you something else.
[00:25:05]  I just, I went and looked at the media reaction to that speech back in 2018.
[00:25:11]  And the news media not only were they dismissive of Trump, they fact-checked him, claiming that he was wrong.
[00:25:20]  They said Trump was wrong in saying that Europe had become dependent on Russia.
[00:25:24]  I mean, I was like, you couldn't make it up.
[00:25:26]  And I'm talking like this was New York Times, CNN, Washington Post.
[00:25:30]  They all said that Trump was wrong to point out how dependent Europe had become.
[00:25:36]  Here's what I'll say.
[00:25:37]  I'll say, if anything, if Trump was wrong about anything, he understated how dependent Europe was.
[00:25:42]  He was actually warning against Europe opening up a second natural gas pipeline from Russia called Nord Stream 2.
[00:25:50]  They didn't even need that second pipeline for Europe to have become totally dependent on Russia.
[00:25:56]  And that's because, and this is a lesson in economics for all of us, is that you can exert extraordinary control over the global energy economy by only controlling a minority of its energy.
[00:26:11]  And because in economics, we call this marginal pricing, that the price of energy and electricity is determined by natural gas because it's such a heavy influence, even though it's not the majority of where the electricity in Europe comes from.
[00:26:25]  It is, it does determine the price because it's so embedded in so many different industries, not just electricity, but also making glass and steel, as I mentioned.
[00:26:36]  So, yeah, I think that everybody did a disservice to President Trump.
[00:26:43]  And I say this as somebody that was not a fan, but he was absolutely spot on.
[00:26:49]  And I think that they look very good now in historical retrospect.
[00:26:55]  Meanwhile, we're still, I mean, as Michael points out, in the grips of this crazed commitment to renewables and renewables only and Europe too.
[00:27:04]  And Europe is now facing some serious food shortage issues.
[00:27:09]  And what's going to happen to the United States, where huge percentages of the American people now cannot pay their electric bills?
[00:27:21]  So Michael, before we get to the United States and other parts of the world, let's spend one more minute in Europe and what's happening there.
[00:27:28]  Because I know you, you, you told me something in your substack that I did not know.
[00:27:33]  And I felt like I should have known it.
[00:27:35]  Answering the question, what happens if Russia decides to completely cut off gas supplies to Europe before winter?
[00:27:43]  Now, the Russian situation in Ukraine is one of those very hard to understand situations because there are sort of the, you know, NatCon folks who report on it and they're very pro, you know, slamming Putin and slamming Russia and putting an end to Putin's aggression.
[00:28:00]  And they report that Ukraine's winning and they're winning and winning and Putin's being devastated.
[00:28:05]  And then there are the folks who are against this war who say, no, Russia's already won.
[00:28:08]  It's just a matter of time before Ukraine surrendered.
[00:28:10]  I mean, this is how the news reporting goes.
[00:28:12]  It's one of my frustrations.
[00:28:14]  But caught up in that is how Putin's doing in the wake of our sanctions and the European sanctions, which were meant to devastate him to the point where he could not pursue this war anymore.
[00:28:25]  Remember, Biden, just wait a couple of months and get back to me.
[00:28:29]  Well, you did wait and you actually kept the tally of how he's doing.
[00:28:33]  And my jaw dropped when I read the stats on how he's actually doing when it comes to his oil and gas exports and the money he's taking in from them.
[00:28:46]  So because he's been cut off.
[00:28:47]  He's been cut off by Europe, by us to a large extent.
[00:28:51]  So tell us, tell us how bad, quote, air quote, it's gotten for him.
[00:28:56]  Yeah, I mean, and by the way, in terms of the debate, whatever the debate is around who's going to win, Ukraine or Russia, I think that really what matters here is that you can't rely on Russia for your energy.
[00:29:09]  I mean, that I think everybody agrees on, even if you are sympathetic to Putin, and I don't think many people are at this point anymore, he's not a trustworthy business partner because he's been cutting off oil and gas in retaliation for Europe's support for Ukraine.
[00:29:26]  So look, there's no question in my mind that the West needs to move away from any dependence on Russia or China, for that matter, for their energy, particularly and possibly for other and for sure on other strategic products.
[00:29:44]  I mentioned rare earths earlier, but we do not want to become dependent on totalitarian regimes, which, you know, it strengthens them around the world.
[00:29:54]  We want to, this is a moment to lean into the West.
[00:29:57]  This is a moment to realize how special our system of liberal democracy and liberal capitalist democracy is.
[00:30:05]  There's a reason everybody wants to live in the United States.
[00:30:07]  There's a reason that we have a border crisis.
[00:30:09]  People want to come here because it's the greatest system that exists, that has existed.
[00:30:15]  So for the, over the long term, we need to move away from Russia and China.

=== Avoid Totalitarian Regimes Now (07:10) ===

[00:30:19]  I should say in the short and medium term rather, we need to move away from Russia and China.
[00:30:23]  Russia has exploited the crisis very well.
[00:30:25]  I mean, you know, Putin understood what people in the West had forgotten.
[00:30:30]  Yeah, very well.
[00:30:31]  I mean, he's, you know, look at, I mean, natural gas prices are, you know, basically 10x what they were just a year ago in Europe.
[00:30:43]  So, you know, it's like we took away all these purchasers of his product, but we didn't stop to think about what that was going to do to price.
[00:30:51]  And I mean, according to the International Energy Agency, since its invasion in Ukraine, the amount of revenue Russia has collected from exporting oil and gas to Europe has doubled.
[00:31:01]  It's doubled.
[00:31:02]  They say, to put it another way, the increase in Russia's oil and gas export revenues in just the last five months is almost three times what Russia typically makes from exporting gas to Europe over an entire winter.
[00:31:15]  One other thing, per the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, soaring prices have more than compensated Russia for the loss in sales volume due to sanctions.
[00:31:26]  It's crazy.
[00:31:27]  He's rolling in dough.
[00:31:31]  That's right.
[00:31:32]  Yeah, he's actually been, Russia's actually been making more money after the, you know, after the invasion of Ukraine.
[00:31:41]  And then they're shifting their sales to China and India and other developing economies.
[00:31:48]  And so there's a fantasy idea that Biden is pursuing now.
[00:31:52]  It's absolutely bonkers, but this idea they're pursuing is that they're going to set a price cap on Russian oil.
[00:32:02]  This is being pursued by the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
[00:32:05]  It's insane because, first of all, nobody's going to go along with it.
[00:32:09]  Even if Europe and the United States do it, Russia is not going to go along with a cap on its oil prices.
[00:32:15]  And China and India have said that they're not going to go along with it.
[00:32:19]  So there's these ideas that somehow the United States is going to pressure the shipping insurance companies.
[00:32:26]  It gets very convoluted very quickly.
[00:32:29]  We're actually at a very interesting moment historically and globally where, you know, these guys, you know, the Biden administration in Europe, they really think that the world is like it was after World War II, where the United States really controlled much of the world.
[00:32:45]  It's just not like that anymore.
[00:32:46]  You know, China and India and Russia have their own relationships.
[00:32:50]  And Russia is using its abundant oil and gas to basically bribe other countries by selling it to them at significant discounts, bribe other countries to be allied with it and not to stand up to it as the bully that it is.
[00:33:06]  So, you know, Putin understood something that the West didn't, which is that energy is not the same as other commodities.
[00:33:12]  I think there's still a lot of people in the West that think they go, oh, well, there's copper and lithium and nickel and wheat and corn and natural gas and oil.
[00:33:23]  But the last two are unlike the others.
[00:33:27]  The whole economy depends on natural gas and oil.
[00:33:30]  You can go without, you can have some temporary shortages of those other products without causing economy-wide inflation.
[00:33:38]  You know, Megan, one of the things I think we, people don't really appreciate is the extent to which the inflation we've experienced is entirely driven by high energy prices.
[00:33:47]  Now, the flip side of that is that if you can, if you create abundant oil and gas by expanding production of oil and gas in the United States and Canada, if they want to help, then you can reduce inflation without having to so-called destroy demand.
[00:34:02]  So there, I mean, it's kind of amazing when you think about it because energy is the master resource.
[00:34:08]  It's unlike all other commodities in that it determines the price of so many other commodities.
[00:34:14]  We can produce more oil and gas and we can make significant headway in reducing inflation without having to go into recession.
[00:34:22]  We just won't do it.
[00:34:23]  We just refuse to do it because he's so in the pocket of these renewable companies and the elites within his party who are effectively, as you point out, waging war really on the poor, on the working class who don't have the microphones to stand up for themselves and the cheap energy they need.
[00:34:41]  It looks like natural gas, according to my stats, meets more than one-third of the United States' energy needs.
[00:34:47]  And at the same time, I read that, I read you tweeting out that 20 million U.S. homes are right now behind in their gas and electricity bills.
[00:34:56]  20 million people cannot pay their electric bills at this time.
[00:35:01]  And Joe Biden has the power to make this cheaper for those folks, but he won't.
[00:35:07]  His energy secretary was asked on Fox News about, hey, you know, people can't pay their electric bills.
[00:35:13]  What are you going to do about it?
[00:35:14]  And she basically said, you should winterize your home.
[00:35:17]  Go ahead and winterize your home and you're going to do a lot better.
[00:35:22]  Yeah, she's like, for the poor people, we'll swoop in and we'll weatherize your house for you if you're really poor.
[00:35:28]  If you're just slightly better than poor, we'll give you like 30, 30% off something, you know, the price of all this stuff.
[00:35:34]  Like, this is their plan, but they want you to basically have better insulation so you can pay for your bills.
[00:35:40]  What do you make of that plan?
[00:35:42]  Well, we know that actually Obama did this as part of his stimulus is that we invested a bunch of money into home weatherization and we found out that it was not cost effective, that it actually wasted money because you did not save as much money in terms of energy as it costs.
[00:35:59]  Now, that might be slightly different with higher, with much higher energy prices, but you have other problems.
[00:36:04]  Like, are we really going to be able to weatherize millions of homes over the next two months?
[00:36:08]  I doubt it.
[00:36:10]  You know, you still have to use energy in order to heat your home.
[00:36:14]  And I think people need to realize far more people die of cold than heat.
[00:36:19]  This is something that people that really, my former colleagues at Raised Dealer about climate change, they don't like to talk about.
[00:36:26]  But with, you know, with it, with both warmer temperatures, you know, and with cold, they're both solved with energy.
[00:36:34]  You know, nobody needs to die because you, because of high, because of heat or of cold.
[00:36:41]  We have solutions called air conditioning and indoor heating, but they depend on having cheap energy.
[00:36:47]  So yeah, you mentioned the 20 million homes right now that are behind.
[00:36:50]  That number is going to double very quickly as energy prices rise.
[00:36:55]  And you're right, it doesn't need to be like this.
[00:36:57]  I mean, what we're dealing with is, I'm calling it a kind of nihilism.
[00:37:00]  There's a real, you know, hatred of civilization.
[00:37:04]  You know, folks that talk about how terrible civil, you know, I always joke, you know, it's like, what a surprise that the people who hate Western civilization turn out to be so lousy at running it.
[00:37:16]  You know, I mean, here they've been saying that how terrible Western civilization is and how terrible the United States is for decades.
[00:37:22]  And then when they get into power, sure enough, they make Western civilization unsustainable.
[00:37:27]  Yeah, self-fulfilling prophecy.

=== Dutch Farmers and Nihilism (10:16) ===

[00:37:29]  That's right.
[00:37:30]  And it makes sense that they would go after energy because it's the thing that determines everything in the economy.
[00:37:36]  It's sort of the master resource.
[00:37:37]  And so if you can make energy expensive, then that's a quick way to making a lot of people miserable, very, you know, making a lot of people miserable around the world.
[00:37:47]  But Greta Turnberg will feel happy.
[00:37:49]  So there's that.
[00:37:50]  However, people like those living in Sri Lanka are dying and there's been an overthrow of the government there.
[00:37:57]  I know you did something on these Dutch farmers.
[00:38:00]  And I realize that to most folks here, it's like the Netherlands.
[00:38:02]  I've joked before about how the whole thing confuses me.
[00:38:06]  My husband, he's Dutch.
[00:38:08]  And it's like, the Netherlands, it's the same thing as Amsterdam.
[00:38:11]  Well, why?
[00:38:12]  Why is it the same thing?
[00:38:14]  Like, why is there a the before the Netherlands?
[00:38:16]  Why aren't they called Netherlandian?
[00:38:18]  Why are they called Dutch?
[00:38:19]  Anyway, that's my own side thing.
[00:38:20]  But my point is, what's happening with the farmers there actually is relevant to what we're dealing with when it comes to our government policy.
[00:38:28]  Before I play your soundbite, because you interviewed a Dutch farmer, it was really good.
[00:38:32]  Can you just explain to the audience why?
[00:38:34]  Why should they care about what's happening with Dutch farmers over here?
[00:38:38]  Why does our audience care?
[00:38:41]  Well, just as a reminder, you know, Netherlands, you know, as you mentioned, is a country that we're very close to in Europe.
[00:38:46]  It's been a very good ally of ours.
[00:38:49]  They have the, they are the second largest agricultural exporter by value, by economics, not by weight, but by the amount of money they make.
[00:39:01]  So it's been a huge part of their economy.
[00:39:02]  And we're talking flowers and seeds and meat that they export around the world, including much of Europe.
[00:39:10]  And so the government has, you know, the farmers, what I point out, and which the New York Times did not decide to mention in its own story that came after mine, but the farmers had been reducing the amount of nitrogen pollution that comes from the farms.
[00:39:27]  They had been successful in doing that through technological innovation.
[00:39:30]  We're really talking about manure management here, Megan, by the way.
[00:39:33]  This is just about managing the manure that comes from the livestock so that it doesn't create a lot of nitrogen pollution, which can hurt some of the nature conservation areas.
[00:39:45]  But then the government has now come along and is proposing really drastic measures that would basically reduce the amount of livestock by somewhere between one-third and half.
[00:39:55]  And it's just a kind of extremism.
[00:39:59]  There's no other way to describe it.
[00:40:00]  It's unreasonable.
[00:40:02]  The farmers are on the right side here.
[00:40:04]  They've really captured the support of the public.
[00:40:07]  You know, even Mick Jagger performed in Amsterdam a few weeks ago and gave a shout out to the farmers.
[00:40:13]  So the farmers, you know, to their great credit, have stood up for themselves and they've been having protests and blocking highways.
[00:40:21]  Some of them, of course, go too far as protesters will do.
[00:40:25]  But for the most part, the farmers are on the right side here in demanding technical innovations as the way to reduce pollution, not just, you know, reducing the size of your livestock herds by a third to half, which would devastate farmers and put many farmers out of business.
[00:40:43]  And Megan, as you know, farming's a way of life.
[00:40:46]  It's not just a job for these guys.
[00:40:48]  There's a lot of, you know, you're working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
[00:40:52]  My mom's family comes from farming.
[00:40:55]  It's really hard work, but they do it because they love it and they love the animals.
[00:40:58]  And so I don't know what clip you're going to show, but when I would ask the farmers, the Dutch farmers, and these are these huge guys, you know, they're like, everyone's like really tall.
[00:41:09]  They're really well-fed over many years why they loved farming.
[00:41:14]  They would get choked up and they would only start to cry because we have that.
[00:41:20]  We've got a little clip of you interviewing one of these guys.
[00:41:23]  And just to get into it, I mean, well, as you talk about the reduction in livestock, this is AOC's dream.
[00:41:27]  I mean, this is this is Green New Deal stuff.
[00:41:29]  This is what this was her dream of getting rid of all nitrogen, all farming.
[00:41:35]  Farmers in the Netherlands, this is from your substack, reduced nitrogen pollution.
[00:41:39]  So our audience knows by nearly 70%.
[00:41:41]  The government said that's not good enough.
[00:41:43]  They're demanding they cut pollution by another 50%, another 50% by 2030.
[00:41:49]  By the Dutch government's own estimates, that means 11,200 farms out of the roughly 35,000 that are dedicated to dairy and livestock would have to close.
[00:42:00]  17,600 farmers would have to reduce livestock and total livestock would need to be reduced by one half to one third.
[00:42:09]  The Dutch government has demanded that animal farming stop entirely in many places.
[00:42:15]  This is what has led to the fierce backlash among the Dutch farmers, some of whom spoke with Michael.
[00:42:21]  Here's one soundbite.
[00:42:23]  I know the families of my cows better than I do of my own family.
[00:42:27]  You know, when we talk about the dead cow, I can tell you about his mother, his grandmother, his great-grandmother, and I can picture them in my head.
[00:42:35]  So it's, I can't explain.
[00:42:44]  It's deep.
[00:42:47]  You love that.
[00:42:50]  It's just deep.
[00:42:51]  It's, yeah.
[00:42:53]  You're alive.
[00:42:57]  And you can see it's fucking crying for the camera, but it happens.
[00:43:02]  There's emotional value about it.
[00:43:03]  You know, a farmer isn't a farmer for money.
[00:43:07]  It's the way of life.
[00:43:08]  It's not appreciated anymore because modern people, especially in the city, you know, the only thing they care about is five o'clock in the afternoon, go to the supermarket and they grab their food for that day.
[00:43:18]  You don't have to milk cows.
[00:43:19]  You don't have to slaughter your pigs.
[00:43:22]  The fucking whole world is in crisis.
[00:43:24]  Ukraine.
[00:43:26]  Franz Timmermans from the EU says he wants to have Europe 25% organic farming.
[00:43:33]  Well, it's only causing hunger for 30 million people.
[00:43:37]  That's the thing.
[00:43:38]  So it makes the climate activists feel good for a moment, but people will starve as a result of these policies.
[00:43:48]  I mean, I still find myself very moved when I see that.
[00:43:53]  I mean, you're talking about what's going on here in the name of climate change is a war on the productive sectors of our economy.
[00:44:01]  I mean, these are the people that produce our food.
[00:44:03]  These are the people that produce our electricity.
[00:44:06]  These are the people that produce the natural gas that we heat and cook with.
[00:44:10]  What are we doing here?
[00:44:11]  I mean, it's like if you were just to arrive on the scene from another planet, you'd be like, why are you trying to destroy the livelihoods of the people who make your lives possible?
[00:44:24]  That's what I mean by nihilism.
[00:44:26]  It's at a certain point, it's without rhyme or reason.
[00:44:29]  You know, it's a kind of extremism.
[00:44:32]  It's a kind of religious radicalism.
[00:44:37]  It's obviously self-defeating.
[00:44:39]  I mean, I think people are looking at Greta Tunberg in a new light now.
[00:44:43]  They're looking at Al Gore and John Kerry in a new light.
[00:44:47]  I mean, what do we, these are some of the most privileged, wealthiest people in the world and, or AOC, you mentioned.
[00:44:55]  And here they are, you know, these are people that have never, you know, produced food.
[00:44:59]  These are people that have never produced energy or electricity.
[00:45:03]  And here they are attempting to really put down and tax and regulate out of existence these people that they depend on.
[00:45:15]  It's, I don't know.
[00:45:16]  I think it's a kind of collective madness.
[00:45:17]  I don't know any other way to describe it.
[00:45:20]  I think about Prince Harry, who was lecturing us all about climate change at the UN and elsewhere, as he, of course, flies around on his private jets.
[00:45:28]  And the news broke late last week.
[00:45:31]  He made his private jet sit and just idle, waiting for him because for 20 minutes to get his polo gear boarded.
[00:45:39]  He had forgotten it onto the plane.
[00:45:41]  I mean, like, that's who's lecturing us about climate change while this guy's farm is getting shut down as he's trying to put food on our table.
[00:45:49]  You know, Prince Harry is never going to have to worry about eating well at his mansion in Montecito.
[00:45:55]  But that guy actually has to put food not just on his own table, but on yours and mine and the citizens of the Netherlands and elsewhere, I mock because I truly don't understand the situation there.
[00:46:08]  But it's alarming and it's spreading, right?
[00:46:11]  It's spreading.
[00:46:11]  It's here.
[00:46:12]  It's in Europe.
[00:46:13]  It's in the Netherlands.
[00:46:14]  It's in, and by the way, places like Sri Lanka.
[00:46:16]  So we can see where this road goes, Michael, but we don't seem to care.
[00:46:20]  That's right, Megan.
[00:46:21]  And I think the only thing I can say, the silver lining here, is that I think we're up for a period of significant change.
[00:46:28]  I think that this is the energy and food crises, our wake-up call.
[00:46:32]  We're going to have a lot of pain and suffering over the next several weeks and months, but I do think it's a chance for us to reorient ourselves and start to appreciate this remarkable civilization we've created for ourselves.
[00:46:42]  It needs to be defended, it turns out, you know, from ourselves or from other people in our society.
[00:46:50]  And I'll leave the audience with this.
[00:46:52]  Okay.
[00:46:52]  This is from you.
[00:46:55]  Nuclear power is the safest way to make electricity.
[00:46:59]  We know that about 200 people have died directly or over time from Chernobyl.
[00:47:04]  That contrasts to the 6 million deaths from air pollution every year.
[00:47:11]  That's amazing.
[00:47:12]  People need to keep that in mind.
[00:47:14]  Nobody died from the radiation after Fukushima, you point out, but many people died from the panic and the relocation.
[00:47:20]  Nuclear is absolutely one of the greatest tools in our arsenal.
[00:47:24]  If only we would use it.
[00:47:26]  Michael, so great talking to you again.
[00:47:28]  Come back again soon.
[00:47:30]  Thanks, Megan.
[00:47:30]  Great to be with you.
[00:47:32]  All right.
[00:47:32]  And coming up, we're going to have some more guests.
[00:47:34]  We're going to get into the Trump raid in the very latest.
[00:47:41]  There are so many stories to get to, and we have got just the guests to go through them all.

=== Nuclear Secrets vs Air Pollution (15:36) ===

[00:47:46]  We know a little more about the Trump raid.
[00:47:49]  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg talking Hunter Biden with Joe Rogan.
[00:47:53]  And Megan Markle has found herself shockingly on the cover of a new magazine.
[00:47:57]  Remember how she didn't want publicity?
[00:47:59]  Hmm.
[00:48:00]  Turns out that may not have been entirely true.
[00:48:03]  Back with me now are two of my favorites.
[00:48:06]  They're both EJs.
[00:48:07]  Emily Jashinsky, culture editor for The Federalist, and Eliana Johnson, editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon.
[00:48:14]  I like that.
[00:48:15]  The EJs.
[00:48:16]  Great to have you here, ladies.
[00:48:17]  How are you?
[00:48:18]  Good.
[00:48:18]  Thanks, Michael.
[00:48:19]  Thank you.
[00:48:20]  Can I tell you, I looked at the revelations from the affidavit and I was, and I looked and I looked more.
[00:48:28]  I was like, look over there, something shiny.
[00:48:32]  I really need to do my laundry later.
[00:48:34]  What's happening?
[00:48:34]  I'm like, I'm waiting for the big, like, oh, I just didn't see it.
[00:48:39]  I just didn't see it.
[00:48:40]  I mean, like, some people are saying, like, oh, yeah, he could be indicted.
[00:48:43]  I saw Alan Dershowitz said that.
[00:48:44]  Okay, of course.
[00:48:46]  You wouldn't have gotten a search warrant if you weren't close to potentially being indicted.
[00:48:50]  I mean, of course, the feds can style anything they want to.
[00:48:53]  It kind of ignores the fact that he's the president holding all these documents.
[00:48:57]  He's the former president holding all these documents.
[00:48:59]  But I really did not see the smoking gun in here.
[00:49:01]  I'm open-minded to smoking guns.
[00:49:03]  Did not see it.
[00:49:04]  Am I missing something?
[00:49:06]  I had the same reaction as you.
[00:49:09]  And I'm still sitting here with the feeling, Megan, that there is a lot we don't know.
[00:49:15]  I don't think the lack of a smoking gun in this affidavit means that there isn't one, but certainly we don't know that there is one yet.
[00:49:25]  There's just a whole lot of unknown left.
[00:49:29]  Certainly, Merrick Garland and the Justice Department have not come forward with an open and shut case yet.
[00:49:37]  And I do think that if they're going to indict this president, like they have got to have that.
[00:49:41]  They cannot leave 50% of the the American public feeling like some grave injustice was done to the former president.
[00:49:49]  And on the other hand, we can essentially we cannot have RussiaGate 2.0.
[00:49:56]  What?
[00:49:56]  I mean, people are not going to have review of this.
[00:49:59]  They have got to have an open and shut case.
[00:50:01]  And I think we still don't know, like, do they have that or not?
[00:50:04]  Anything short of Trump was selling our nuclear secrets is going to be insufficient.
[00:50:09]  That Trump was clumsy with documents, that Trump didn't follow some procedure, which even my most respected legal experts cannot show me, cannot set forth as the clear and convincing three point bullet point list one must follow as president to sufficiently declassify that he didn't do that imaginary procedure perfectly is not going to justify prosecuting this guy in the minds of anyone who's not on the hard left in the country.
[00:50:38]  Am I wrong, Emily?
[00:50:40]  No, and and Eleana is completely accurate that we don't.
[00:50:43]  There's still so much we don't know.
[00:50:45]  But here's why, exactly to your point Megan, I think increasingly we should be pretty confident that we're heading into a Russia Gate 2.0, and whether it ever catches the traction is a different question.
[00:50:55]  They're doing this right before a midterm election as we head into the fall and continuing to do the leaking to some of the exact same reporters, some of the exact same newspapers, with the exact same nonsense.
[00:51:07]  Innuendo that they did in the early days of the Russia collusion hoax as they were building it, and we're seeing it again.
[00:51:13]  Innuendo about nuclear secrets, innuendo about the espionage act, and there's nobody coming out and saying, you know there's, we're pretty confident we have this smoking gun here.
[00:51:23]  You know, none of the leaks are uh, alluding to any real substance.
[00:51:28]  Um, it's just continually the same type of thing that we saw throughout the Russia collusion hoax, which I mean, I completely agree.
[00:51:35]  That's basically opaque.
[00:51:36]  We have no idea if, if there is a smoking gun, but i'm increasingly much less inclined to believe there is, specifically because of the pattern of leaks, because of the innuendo, because of what they are saying.
[00:51:48]  What they aren't saying, what's in the affidavit is the same type of stuff, and so I I really think they're trying to do a drip drip, drip.
[00:51:55]  They're going to do more january 6 hearings in the fall, probably and it just forces Republican candidates to talk about Trump over the shed of inflation and the economy.
[00:52:03]  That's exactly it.
[00:52:04]  They got Trump back in the news and, sure enough, Republicans fell on the generic congressional ballot.
[00:52:10]  But they there's nothing in this heavily redacted affidavit that says anything about nuclear secrets, by the way, which was leaked to the Washington POST by the DOJ which, after Merrick Garland, tried to pretend he was on the high road and really wasn't going to say much.
[00:52:22]  He ran to his favorite reporter and leaked that this is about nuclear secrets, which so far has been totally unsubstantiated.
[00:52:28]  But what we're seeing is they're pissed off that Trump had documents he shouldn't have had.
[00:52:32]  I'm sorry, but good luck trying to make that case for criminal prosecution.
[00:52:36]  In the mind of any fair American, he's the former president.
[00:52:39]  We've never gone after criminally a former president, not even Richard Nixon.
[00:52:43]  Okay that you're going to tell me we should go after Donald Trump because they're they're talking about indicting the guy.
[00:52:48]  We're going to go after Donald Trump like that, after having done something totally unprecedented and raiding his home, his private home to get documents he looks like maybe in best case scenario for Merrick Garland, he shouldn't have had.
[00:52:58]  I've had lots of lawyers on this show, including Mike Davis last week, who said he had every right to have every single one of those.
[00:53:03]  He could declassify anything that was classified.
[00:53:05]  The Presidential Records Act is not a criminal statute.
[00:53:08]  It doesn't prevent him from taking his documents.
[00:53:10]  And so like, so we went down the list.
[00:53:12]  Anyway, my point is, let's say he was sloppy.
[00:53:14]  Sloppiness is not going to do it.
[00:53:17]  And Merrick Garland is out on a thin read right now and is trying to keep his balance through complicit reporting.
[00:53:26]  Aliana, you're editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon.
[00:53:29]  Do you see it?
[00:53:30]  I mean, the New York Times, every day, the Daily does another podcast on how justified he was.
[00:53:35]  And oh, let's talk about all the investigations against Trump that are going to bring him down too.
[00:53:41]  Yeah, I think there are two different things.
[00:53:43]  It's what is the justice, what does the Justice Department actually have?
[00:53:46]  And I think for the Justice Department and Merrick Garland, politically, they have to have like Trump was endangering lives.
[00:53:54]  He was endangering sources and methods of intelligence collection here.
[00:54:00]  Or, or as you alluded to, like he had nuclear secrets, things that were endangering the national security of the United States.
[00:54:09]  The second bucket here is the reporting.
[00:54:11]  And I think what we're seeing in the reporting, and this is a guess, I don't know, but it is the triumph of hope over experience.
[00:54:18]  We had four years of reporting on every leak out of that Russia investigation indicating that we've got the thing that's going to take Trump down.
[00:54:28]  First, it was the Russian investigation, and now it's all of these investigations of Trump's businesses or this Garland investigate, this Justice Department investigation.
[00:54:38]  And there isn't really any, there doesn't seem to be any like learning in the reporting that, you know, guys, like they may not actually have the smoking gun.
[00:54:48]  And in fact, a lot of these investigations, like just maybe, may be politically motivated as opposed to substantively motivated.
[00:54:57]  I think we've seen, I think we've seen something sad and frightening, which is that our law enforcement and justice officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice, they do act out of political motivation and they do wield their power as a brickbat against their political opponents.
[00:55:17]  And that doesn't seem to be really servicing in a lot of the reporting about this in terms of the caution with which we are getting like we aren't seeing a lot of like that sort of caution in the reporting.
[00:55:30]  Okay, now speaking of the FBI and the media, it's a good segue into what happened on Joe Rogan's show last week.
[00:55:36]  So this is fascinating to me from a couple of angles.
[00:55:40]  Mark Zuckerberg, of course, the founder and CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, went on Joe Rogan's show and admitted that Facebook in part suppressed circulation of the Hunter Biden laptop story right before the last presidential election.
[00:55:56]  That they didn't ban it entirely the way Twitter did, but that they suppressed it and wouldn't allow it to be sort of pushed into people's feeds the way they might another story.
[00:56:06]  And he admitted this is because the FBI had gone to Facebook and other social media companies and said, beware, the Russians are likely at it again.
[00:56:16]  They definitely pushed disinformation in 2016 and were expecting another dump.
[00:56:23]  And this is how he explained it to Joe.
[00:56:26]  And then I'll make my second point.
[00:56:27]  So here's what he said to Joe Ruggin.
[00:56:29]  Watch.
[00:56:30]  So we took a different path than Twitter.
[00:56:33]  I mean, basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, hey, just so you know, like you should be on high alert.
[00:56:43]  There was we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election.
[00:56:49]  We have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump of that's similar to that.
[00:56:58]  So just be vigilant.
[00:56:59]  So our protocol is different from Twitter's.
[00:57:02]  What Twitter did is they said you can't share this at all.
[00:57:05]  We didn't do that.
[00:57:07]  What we do is we have, if something is reported to us as potentially misinformation, important misinformation, we also have this third-party fact-checking program because we don't want to be deciding what's true and false.
[00:57:20]  And for the, I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false, the distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it.
[00:57:35]  So you could still share it.
[00:57:37]  You could still consume it.
[00:57:38]  When you say the distribution has decreased, it got shared.
[00:57:42]  How does that work?
[00:57:42]  It basically the ranking in news feed was a little bit less.
[00:57:45]  So fewer people saw it than would have otherwise.
[00:57:48]  So it definitely...
[00:57:49]  By what percentage?
[00:57:51]  I don't know off the top of my head, but it's meaningful.
[00:57:55]  Okay.
[00:57:56]  So people on the right were very agitated over this because he's admitting that they suppressed the Hunter Biden story after the FBI went to them, after the FBI went to them.
[00:58:07]  And it just, you know, the FBI is having a rough couple of years.
[00:58:11]  And this is just yet another piece of that story.
[00:58:14]  But Zuckerberg and Facebook came out to say, this is old news.
[00:58:20]  This wasn't news at all.
[00:58:22]  Mark Zuckerberg said basically exactly this in open congressional testimony in October of 2020 to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, which is so fun to say.
[00:58:34]  I just want to say again, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
[00:58:37]  So watch.
[00:58:38]  So we queued it up to see, to let you guys and the audience decide for themselves whether he already had disclosed this a couple of years ago.
[00:58:46]  Listen.
[00:58:50]  Senator, as I testified before, we relied heavily on the FBI's intelligence and alerts to us, both through their public testimony and private briefings and alerts they gave us.
[00:59:02]  Did the FBI contact you and say the New York Post story was false?
[00:59:07]  Senator, not about that story specifically.
[00:59:11]  Why did you throttle it back?
[00:59:13]  They alerted us to be on heightened alert around a risk of hack and leak operations around a release information.
[00:59:24]  And to be clear on this, we didn't censor the content.
[00:59:28]  We flagged it for fact checkers to review.
[00:59:30]  And pending that review, we temporarily constrained its distribution to make sure that it didn't spread wildly while it was being reviewed.
[00:59:40]  But it's not up to us either to determine whether it's Russian interference nor whether it's true.
[00:59:47]  We rely on FBI and intelligence and fact checkers to do that.
[00:59:51]  Okay.
[00:59:52]  So my takeaway is Mark Zuckerberg did disclose this.
[00:59:55]  He disclosed it publicly in October of 2020, but we were busy and we were having a presidential election and it didn't get a lot of circulation.
[01:00:06]  With respect to Joe Rogan, I don't think he actually did break this news.
[01:00:09]  I think this news broke a couple of years ago and we were just drowning in a tsunami of presidential and Trump and related news.
[01:00:16]  We didn't pay close enough attention.
[01:00:18]  It's not a new black eye for the FBI.
[01:00:20]  It's an old black eye for the FBI and Facebook because now we know for sure that that was not Russian disinformation, that that laptop was real, that Hunter Biden did all those terrible things according to himself, and the media just wasn't interested and they decided to suppress.
[01:00:36]  Nonetheless, the story remains the same.
[01:00:38]  The FBI went to social media companies like Facebook and tried to get them to not publish or not promote articles like the one about Hunter Biden.
[01:00:49]  They claim to protect the electoral process and to prevent disinformation from getting out there in the wake of all that's happened, gals.
[01:00:58]  A lot of Americans have a tough time believing that was the true motivation.
[01:01:02]  What do you make of it?
[01:01:03]  They laundered their credibility for partisan purposes.
[01:01:06]  And I think it's also important to remember this was in the context of a letter that about 50 former intelligence people, many of whom we know should be treated with the utmost skepticism, sent a letter immediately saying that the laptop story looked like Russian disinformation.
[01:01:22]  So the FBI didn't need to go back to Zuckerberg and say, hey, this laptop story specifically, you need to suppress it because they did it in public with that letter.
[01:01:32]  They had already set that sort of tone and said, watch out for Russian disinformation.
[01:01:38]  And then when the laptop story dropped, all they had to do was release that thing publicly.
[01:01:42]  And so it is a stunning level of coordination from all of our institutions because the media essentially blacked out that story as well.
[01:01:50]  The New York Post ran it and all of these other outlets, major outlets that had run with nonsense leaks that in a better era would have been treated with the utmost skepticism coming from the intelligence community.
[01:02:02]  And we see this time and again, the media and the intelligence community have like the coziest relationship in the world.
[01:02:07]  They took this stuff and they did nothing with it.
[01:02:10]  And so you had coordination between the Biden campaign, the intelligence community, the entire social media basically atmosphere or all social media platforms.
[01:02:21]  And it's like incredible to sit back and watch and look.
[01:02:25]  And I think the reason, Megan, you're right that that Joe Rogan clip is super viral right now is because it's not in the fray.
[01:02:31]  It's a couple years later and people have that sort of hindsight being 2020.
[01:02:36]  And when you look at it from the 30,000 foot view and see the forest for the trees, it's just so anti-American.
[01:02:41]  It's shocking.
[01:02:42]  It's a slower news cycle right now.
[01:02:43]  So people have the attention to give to it.
[01:02:46]  And it's a reminder on the heels of the Mar-a-Lago raid about the FBI and what it's done in the past.
[01:02:52]  And it comes at an unfortunate moment for the FBI.
[01:02:54]  But too bad, nobody feels sorry for them.
[01:02:57]  This, you know, and I have real questions, Eliana, about whether the warning to social media companies back then was earnest about the Russian thing.
[01:03:09]  You know what I mean?
[01:03:10]  Like they can tell when a story is pushed by Russian bots.
[01:03:14]  They can, they know when it's originated with the Russians and when it hasn't.
[01:03:18]  And let's not forget the FBI had the damn laptop anyway.

=== Blame the Jury for Disinfo (10:39) ===

[01:03:22]  They knew at the time that this was being pushed as like potential disinformation that it was Hunters.
[01:03:27]  They fucking knew.
[01:03:28]  Sorry.
[01:03:29]  They knew they had gotten it from the blind guy who was repairing it.
[01:03:33]  And there was nothing in there that was not consistent with Hunter's behavior or the FBI's own investigations of Hunter and the guns and the drugs and all that shit.
[01:03:41]  That's the context for them going to Facebook and saying, watch it.
[01:03:46]  And then, as Emily accurately points out, all these intelligence officials get together and drop the second bomb, which is we all think it's disinformation, which they didn't either.
[01:03:56]  They didn't.
[01:03:57]  I don't think that was in good faith either.
[01:03:59]  So it's been a long campaign, in my view, of them pushing disinformation on us.
[01:04:08]  I'm with you on all of that, Megan.
[01:04:09]  And I think the icing on the cake is former intelligence officials and media personalities coming out now in the wake of the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago.
[01:04:19]  And their line is, thou shalt not question the integrity of law enforcement officials.
[01:04:25]  Merrick Garland said that in his press conference.
[01:04:27]  And, you know, my reaction is, I'm sorry, but you guys have given us a whole lot of reasons to question the integrity of law enforcement officials.
[01:04:35]  And in this case, until demonstrated otherwise, I'm going to question the integrity of law enforcement officials.
[01:04:43]  They're interviewing Andrew McCabe, who's admitted to lying.
[01:04:46]  I was on the point of another thing that struck me in the side-by-side of those two clips, which is a little bit far afield, but I do think it's relevant to how we get our information is.
[01:05:00]  Congression, it doesn't surprise me at all that everybody missed it when this came out in congressional testimony where Ron Johnson is talking over Zuckerberg the entire time where he's trying to make a point.
[01:05:11]  Like that is just not conducive to an exchange of information and getting information out to people.
[01:05:18]  Like, no, I'm not surprised that, you know, probably two people tuned into that hearing.
[01:05:23]  And then Joe Rogan, you know, a couple of years later actually lets the guy talk.
[01:05:28]  And wow, the entire thing goes viral.
[01:05:31]  And I, you know, in all of this, like, I really don't blame Facebook.
[01:05:35]  Facebook had spent the four years of the Trump administration in the crosshairs of everybody accused of purveying Russian disinformation.
[01:05:44]  So yeah, when they get a warning from the FBI that says like, hey, once again, you know, you guys are in the middle of a Russian disinformation campaign.
[01:05:52]  I don't blame them for what they did.
[01:05:54]  I fully and wholeheartedly blame the FBI and the media for this.
[01:05:59]  And it would be nice separately if in some of our congressional hearings, lawmakers spent a little bit less time talking and more time letting their, you know, the interesting people they have in front of them, like Mark Zuckerberg, actually talk because they say interesting things.
[01:06:16]  Yeah, actually speak.
[01:06:18]  I mean, I'd love to go back and take a look at the entire testimony.
[01:06:20]  I haven't done that yet, but he appeared to want to tell us the full story for the interruptions, we would have heard it a little bit more clearly.
[01:06:29]  But so I give, I, as a fact checker, give Mark Zuckerberg a true.
[01:06:35]  I give him a true on I've already disclosed this.
[01:06:39]  And I give Joe Rogan a thumbs up for raising it again, but I have to give Ron Johnson kind of a medium thumb.
[01:06:46]  You got the information, but if you would just been quiet, you know, horizontal thumb, that's what now it's getting x-rated.
[01:06:53]  Okay.
[01:06:54]  Sorry, I'm in a mood today, ladies.
[01:06:59]  So let's talk about, just for one more moment before we move off of Trump and this whole thing.
[01:07:05]  Biden was asked about Trump and his claims that he declassified all the documents, right?
[01:07:09]  That's what Trump's been saying.
[01:07:10]  He had sort of a standing order.
[01:07:12]  Everything that he sent to Mar-a-Lago would be declassified.
[01:07:14]  And that may or may not save him on all this, by the way, because there's a separate thing about whether he should have had the records at all, even the unclassified ones.
[01:07:21]  But Biden weighed in on this over the past day or two.
[01:07:25]  And here is what he said.
[01:07:26]  This is SOP five.
[01:07:36]  Well, I just want to know I've declassified everything in the world.
[01:07:39]  I'm president.
[01:07:40]  I can do it all.
[01:07:41]  Come on.
[01:07:42]  Declassified the world.
[01:07:43]  I'm not going to comment on it because I don't know the detail.
[01:07:45]  I don't even want to know.
[01:07:46]  I'll let the Justice Department take that up.
[01:07:50]  He doesn't know anything.
[01:07:51]  Now, this is a continuation of what he's been saying all along when it comes to Mar-a-Lago.
[01:07:56]  He's like, what is it, Sergeant Schultz?
[01:07:58]  I know.
[01:07:59]  You guys are too young to know that.
[01:08:00]  It's a Hogan's Heroes reference, but I think it was Sergeant Schultz.
[01:08:04]  I know nothing.
[01:08:04]  I know nothing.
[01:08:07]  But it did emerge last week in that John Solomon reporting, who's a right-wing guy who does a lot of, breaks a lot of news from Trump, that the Biden administration, the White House was involved in this whole thing against Trump long before the raid, that they couldn't have even opened the grand jury proceeding without the White House having to weigh in.
[01:08:27]  And the FBI couldn't have taken a look at those 15 boxes Trump sent back if the White House hadn't said it was okay.
[01:08:33]  There were all sorts of procedures that the White House had to bless when the grand jury got started against Trump.
[01:08:40]  And so when Biden said to us repeatedly, I had nothing, no warning about the raid, I knew nothing, that was only half the story.
[01:08:47]  He's been misleading from the get-go on this, Emily.
[01:08:51]  Yeah, no, he absolutely has.
[01:08:52]  And that's why, again, when people ask what show is most like Washington, D.C. is at West Wing, is a house of cards, it's exactly VEEP.
[01:09:00]  And what you see here is them stumbling around legalese to try to avoid admitting to what likely happened, which is that it's almost impossible.
[01:09:08]  And as soon as the news broke, I think anybody knew it was almost impossible that the White House had absolutely nothing to do with this, that the Justice Department was just acting of its own accord in pursuit of virtue.
[01:09:19]  It's absolutely ridiculous.
[01:09:21]  And I think the more they are pressed to answer those questions, I mean, we'll see how much the media presses them to answer those questions.
[01:09:27]  That's a huge question in and of itself to the conversation we were just having.
[01:09:31]  But the more that they're pressed to answer those questions, the more they're going to look like they were intentionally kind of misleading the public, because I suspect they were legally very careful about these things, but in a way that when you are pushed enough, you're going to look a little foolish.
[01:09:47]  They just ran with what he said last week, which was, no, I knew nothing about the raid.
[01:09:51]  It's like, okay, there could be a follow-up question.
[01:09:53]  He said it was he was leaving the room, but like if we had a good media, they would ask a follow-up question.
[01:09:57]  Well, like, well, what specifically did you approve in the process leading up to the raid?
[01:10:01]  Did you know about the grand jury investigation?
[01:10:02]  Did you bless the FBI taking a look at presidential documents?
[01:10:05]  Did you call President Trump before you did that?
[01:10:07]  There's all sorts of things we'd like to know, but yeah, he won't make himself available.
[01:10:11]  Meantime, he has changed his, well, maybe not changed, but sort of amplified an earlier message about Trump and Trump's voters and who they are in discussing them as semi-fascists.
[01:10:26]  Eliana, I don't, he was asked about why he suggested that MAGA Republicans are semi-fascists.
[01:10:34]  And here's what he said.
[01:10:35]  This is Soundbite 6.
[01:10:38]  What do you mean by semi-fascist?
[01:10:42]  You know what I mean?
[01:10:44]  Oh, do we?
[01:10:45]  Well, his press secretary was asked about it to expand because we don't exactly know.
[01:10:51]  And do we have it, Steve?
[01:10:54]  Yeah, we got it.
[01:10:55]  Here's what she said.
[01:10:57]  I was very clear when laying out and defining what MAGA Republicans have done.
[01:11:06]  And you look at the definition of fascism and you think about what they're doing in attacking our democracy, what they're doing in taking away our freedoms, taking away, wanting to take away our rights, our voting rights.
[01:11:20]  I mean, that is what that is.
[01:11:23]  It is very clear.
[01:11:24]  And that's why he made that powerful speech that you heard from him last night.
[01:11:31]  And he has not shied away from saying that.
[01:11:34]  You have heard him maybe not use that specific word, but you have heard him certainly use that definition.
[01:11:43]  I mean, okay, so the Republicans are taking away our rights and taking away our voting rights.
[01:11:48]  That's really what she said there.
[01:11:50]  So to be kind to Karine, I guess we're saying Dobbs, the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs, taking away our rights.
[01:11:59]  That's what the Democrats describe the Dobbs decision as.
[01:12:02]  And voting rights.
[01:12:03]  So the what, like voter ID laws, taking away, doesn't take away anybody's right to vote, but does require you to show an ID in order to do so.
[01:12:11]  So truly, I mean, talk about loose language from the president of the United States, Eliana.
[01:12:17]  I don't think he was being loose in his language.
[01:12:21]  And when he said, I was clear, whatever it is, I forget his exact terminology.
[01:12:27]  I do think he was clear in the sense that when he calls Republicans semi-fascists, I think that's what he believes.
[01:12:35]  And I think that what he wants to convey is that my political opponents are evil and they're very bad people.
[01:12:43]  And it is precisely what Hillary Clinton said when she was campaigning against Donald Trump.
[01:12:47]  And she talked about deplorables.
[01:12:49]  And it is what Barack Obama said when he described his political opponents as clinging to guns and religion.
[01:12:57]  And it is the sort of thing that we got used to Donald Trump saying when he talked about the media as the enemy of the people and that sent his political opponents, Democrats, into fits of rage.
[01:13:12]  And so for the people who didn't like Trump's rhetoric, I think they should be concerned about what they're hearing from Biden.
[01:13:19]  And by the way, this is not exactly the first time Biden said this.
[01:13:23]  He compared Republicans to Bull Connor, you know, standing in the schoolhouse door in a speech that was scripted for him.
[01:13:31]  This is not an off-the-cuff remark.
[01:13:34]  That speech was written for him by the historian John Meacham.
[01:13:37]  So this is very much a theme of the Biden presidency.
[01:13:41]  And I do think he was crystal clear.
[01:13:43]  We got the message.
[01:13:44]  That's right.
[01:13:45]  And then we found out later that Meacham was commenting on the very speech on MSNBC.
[01:13:50]  Yeah, praising his wonderful work.
[01:13:53]  An independent commentator, like, that was amazing.
[01:13:55]  He's killed that he rocked that speech.
[01:13:57]  Fucking voted.
[01:13:58]  He was shook.
[01:14:01]  So eloquent.

=== Conservatives Leave Extreme Politics (03:36) ===

[01:14:02]  Our media.
[01:14:03]  Go ahead, Emily.
[01:14:04]  No, I was going to say that it's just John Meacham admiring his own eloquence.
[01:14:11]  To Eliana's point, the reason that they keep breaking norms despite claiming to be really concerned about norms is because they truly believe that Donald Trump is this exceptional fascist threat.
[01:14:23]  Thus, they are the noble saviors and champions of democracy.
[01:14:27]  And that's why they can keep violating all of these norms.
[01:14:30]  And you just can you're going to continue to see that.
[01:14:33]  I can't help but wonder whether part of what happened at Mar-a-Lago is related to that.
[01:14:37]  Like they're still in disbelief that Donald Trump had access to the nuclear codes, that he like that he should ever have access to confidential or top secret documents makes their heads explode.
[01:14:48]  So in their minds, it really like just the fact that he's still got any of them or access to anything is too, it's too great a load to bear.
[01:14:58]  In somewhat related news, when it comes to messaging, this hit my inbox when I was, it's from Jim Garrity over at National Review, who I know we all like.
[01:15:06]  And he was pointing out some of the rhetoric we're getting from these Democrat politicians, which is getting a little bit more extreme.
[01:15:12]  Kathy Hochl, who took over for Andrew Cuomo, God save us in New York State.
[01:15:18]  So she said this past week, and don't forget, this is sheep, she came after Andrew Cuomo after he got bounced out.
[01:15:26]  Now, I remember this story from 2014.
[01:15:28]  Garrity raises this too.
[01:15:29]  Andrew Cuomo, then governor of New York, said, extreme conservatives, extreme conservatives who are right to life.
[01:15:36]  So you mean like virtually all conservatives?
[01:15:38]  Most conservatives would say they're right to life.
[01:15:41]  Extreme conservatives who are right to life, pro-assault weapon.
[01:15:45]  Okay, assault weapon from the left just means the semi-automatic pistol, which is the most popular gun in America.
[01:15:52]  And anti-gay, which I don't know what he meant by that.
[01:15:55]  They have no place in New York, right?
[01:15:57]  They have no place in New York.
[01:15:59]  So remember this?
[01:16:00]  It was like, oh, so if you're a conservative, you got to leave New York because Andrew Cuomo has declared you unacceptable.
[01:16:05]  Now, Kathy Hochl, she's his successor.
[01:16:08]  She comes in and says, the era of Trump and Zeldon, that's her GOP challenger, just she kind of changes gear.
[01:16:17]  She says, the era of Trump and Zeldon and this other person, Molinaro, just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong.
[01:16:24]  Get out of town.
[01:16:25]  You don't represent our values.
[01:16:28]  You are not New Yorkers.
[01:16:31]  Okay, so if you're a Trump supporter living in New York, you're not a New Yorker, says the current governor of New York.
[01:16:37]  And that leads me to my last, oh, by the way, Lee Zeldon, the guy she's attacking, saying you need a leaf if you support him, was just attacked by a knife-wielding man after she called on people to stalk him.
[01:16:49]  So she might want to dial it back just a notch, Governor Hochul, and your stupid vaxxed necklace.
[01:16:55]  Then there's Charlie Christ down in Florida, who is going to challenge Ron DeSantis for the governorship.
[01:17:01]  And he says, if you have supported Ron DeSantis, stay with him.
[01:17:06]  I don't want your vote.
[01:17:08]  If you have hate in your heart, keep it there.
[01:17:12]  Now, you guys, so DeSantis has a 54% approval rating.
[01:17:15]  I don't think this is the best way to win some of those people over to your side, but I'm sensing a trend here.
[01:17:20]  Semi-fascist, get out of New York, keep your vote and your hate in your heart.
[01:17:26]  Like, I'm thinking that President Unity might need to try harder.
[01:17:30]  Yeah, the moment that I saw that Charlie Chris quote, I like assigned one of our writers to write it up as this is his deplorable moment, Charlie Chris's deplorable moment.

=== Ben Shapiro's Hate Strategy (09:18) ===

[01:17:38]  And all of these things are part of the same exact pattern and trend.
[01:17:42]  And Charles Murray started documenting this with Coming Apart back in 2012, that as we're increasingly isolated by class and sorted by class, we have really come, especially from the people who control the levers of power in this country, to disdain each other.
[01:17:56]  We don't share the same cultural touchstones.
[01:17:58]  We don't share the same concerns.
[01:18:00]  We don't even share the same churches, the same civic institutions, the same bowling leagues, to go back to Robert Putnam.
[01:18:06]  And that really fuels this elitism that's tearing us apart.
[01:18:11]  We are coming apart, as Murray said 10 years ago and was kind of mocked for it.
[01:18:15]  But you see this showing up in political rhetoric.
[01:18:17]  And it's a great, like Megan, one thing you said is like they can't wrap their head around the fact that Donald Trump had access to the nuclear codes.
[01:18:24]  Frankly, I can't either.
[01:18:25]  I don't know how the host of Celebrity Apprentice has access to the nuclear codes, but they're making it so much worse.
[01:18:31]  They're making it so that that's going to continue to happen because it sprang from people recognizing this deep contempt that exists for this wide swath of the public from the people who control our institutions.
[01:18:43]  Yeah.
[01:18:44]  And then they want us to just respect, you know, respect them, respect institutions that they run.
[01:18:49]  And I think a lot of us who are, we know they hate are thinking, well, I'm not exactly feeling that.
[01:18:56]  I'm thinking about when Senator Tim Scott was on the program a couple of weeks ago, and he's such a good guy.
[01:19:01]  And he talks all about like how we have to reach across the aisle and we have to remember the goodness.
[01:19:04]  We have to remember the things that bring us together.
[01:19:06]  And it's like, this is a really tough time for that message to break through.
[01:19:11]  All right, stand by.
[01:19:12]  We've got to get to what happened with Megan Markle.
[01:19:17]  Emily Jashinsky of The Federalist and Eliana Johnson of the Free Beacon are with me now.
[01:19:22]  Both have very successful and amazing podcasts, which I really enjoy.
[01:19:26]  I love the Federalist and I love ink-stained wretches.
[01:19:29]  Your partner in crime, Chris Dyerwalt, will be here with us later this week.
[01:19:32]  He's got a book that's making a bunch of news.
[01:19:34]  But just a moment on the Federalist.
[01:19:36]  I've said this before, Eliana.
[01:19:38]  Sorry, Emily.
[01:19:39]  I learned something every time I listen to you.
[01:19:41]  I can't say that about everybody.
[01:19:42]  Like you guys come at things from a very different, unexpected angle over there.
[01:19:47]  And that's what I love about the Federalist.
[01:19:49]  However, you may not have been invited, notwithstanding your success and your innovation, to podcast movement.
[01:20:00]  Are you familiar with podcast movement?
[01:20:03]  I was not invited.
[01:20:04]  It's an annual conference for podcasters and other content creators.
[01:20:08]  Okay, it's summer 2022 meeting took place this week in Dallas, Texas.
[01:20:14]  Among the myriad attendees was Ben Shapiro reading from Reason Magazine here.
[01:20:20]  Ben Shapiro showed up.
[01:20:22]  Why, you might ask?
[01:20:23]  Well, because the Daily Wire had a booth.
[01:20:26]  And who owns the Daily Wire?
[01:20:28]  But Ben Shapiro.
[01:20:29]  Now, this led the little snowflakes to absolutely melt down.
[01:20:35]  They were very upset.
[01:20:36]  Why?
[01:20:37]  Because as Ben told the reporter at Reason, this is what he did.
[01:20:44]  Quote, I was in the room and standing there breathing oxygen.
[01:20:49]  That is the entire story.
[01:20:52]  There was no confrontation.
[01:20:54]  No one spoke to me about anything political.
[01:20:56]  Some people asked for pictures and I obliged.
[01:20:58]  That's literally it.
[01:21:00]  Because of that, podcast movement got a bunch of complaints and has now issued a deep, heartfelt apology.
[01:21:09]  They are extremely sorry.
[01:21:12]  They say yesterday afternoon, Shapiro briefly visited.
[01:21:15]  He was near the Daily Wire booth.
[01:21:16]  That's where he was spotted.
[01:21:18]  Though he was not registered or expected.
[01:21:20]  Hello, podcast movement.
[01:21:22]  A simple Google search would have helped you out there.
[01:21:24]  We take full responsibility for the harm done by his presence.
[01:21:29]  And they said that it was the conference referred to the painfully clear weight of its decision to let even the Daily Wire participate in this conference.
[01:21:41]  Those of you who called this unacceptable are right.
[01:21:44]  In nine wonderful years growing and celebrating this medium, podcast movement has made mistakes.
[01:21:50]  The pain caused by this one will always be with us.
[01:21:56]  So what do you make of it, Emily?
[01:22:00]  You have your eyes squinted and your head cocked as though you don't understand the pain of Ben's presence there.
[01:22:06]  This is how I feel anytime I'm forced into a room with Elana.
[01:22:09]  The harm and the pain, it just got so deep.
[01:22:13]  She's truly deplorable.
[01:22:15]  But actually, and Eliana, you're sort of like, has had, you know, sort of a different take on stories and has existed like you, Megan, in legacy news environments.
[01:22:26]  And I can't imagine what that's like.
[01:22:28]  I've never had to do it.
[01:22:30]  But just because of everything we just talked about, there's this brewing contempt that I think gets worse and worse with every year.
[01:22:37]  We're doing absolutely nothing to fix it, nothing to address it, that just by virtue of being someone who disagrees.
[01:22:45]  I mean, think of J.K. Rowling, fully progressive across the board, fully progressive, has donated money to progressive causes, has gone out ahead of progressive causes and offered support.
[01:22:57]  And because she has one heterodox take, she has nothing against trans adults, but with children.
[01:23:02]  That's her one heterodox take.
[01:23:04]  Unforgivable, not allowed in polite society anymore.
[01:23:09]  And so to be Ben Shapiro, even someone who's like fully conservative, you're just not allowed in those spaces.
[01:23:16]  And not only that, you're causing harm.
[01:23:18]  We've inflated the definition of terms like violence and harm to include to a ridiculous and meaningless extent.
[01:23:25]  Well, that's the thing.
[01:23:26]  So Eliana on your podcast, Ink Stained Wretches with Chris, you guys, I would certainly not describe you as left, but you'll take on the right.
[01:23:35]  You know, you will definitely be critical of the right too.
[01:23:37]  You're very open to people who push it too far or say outlandish things and you'll call them out as well.
[01:23:44]  This is something else.
[01:23:45]  Like you can't breathe our same air because I'm sure it's because the Daily Wire in general does not use preferred pronouns and does not believe in any of these treatments, you know, these aggressive, aggressive treatments for transgender youth and so on.
[01:24:04]  They've got Matt Walsh with his documentary, What is a Woman, which was amazing, by the way, and featured many voices from the left trying to make the case that all this stuff is okay.
[01:24:13]  It's just, you know, in my view, Matt wins the arguments.
[01:24:16]  But anyway, as a result, literally short of Joe Rogan, like the most popular podcaster in America can't even be in the same airspace.
[01:24:26]  Yeah, their justification for what they did would be because Ben Shapiro is a racist, transphobe, you know, semi-fascist in the words of President Biden.
[01:24:39]  But what I think we've seen over the past decade, maybe 15 years, is a radical redefinition of harm and violence.
[01:24:50]  And the redefinition is that discomfort or having one's feelings hurt is violence and therefore speech is violence.
[01:25:00]  And so what you're seeing is that Ben Shapiro's speech or his views are actually violence against those who disagree with it.
[01:25:08]  And so Ben Shapiro has to be read out of rooms in which those in which there are those in which he's present with those who disagree with him.
[01:25:17]  And you see this playing out, like the reason this jumps out at us is that we see this playing out in all types of organizations on university campuses, in corporations.
[01:25:27]  This is an epidemic that is playing out across our country and that is further dividing people from one another because the powers that be are saying like, oh, we're sorry.
[01:25:39]  Yes, Ben Shapiro, you got to leave rather than taking a stand and saying, no, actually, even if somebody's views make you uncomfortable, cause your feelings to be hurt.
[01:25:53]  We actually encourage conversations, even when they result in distress and hurt feelings.
[01:26:00]  And we stand for welcoming all points of view, even when they're opposite.
[01:26:05]  That's right.
[01:26:07]  And by the way, it's like they should be on their hands and knees thanking him for showing up because he's by far, you know, one of the most successful, as I said, podcasters in the country who called attention to their event.
[01:26:16]  They should be thrilled he showed up.
[01:26:17]  I doubt he's going next year.
[01:26:20]  So speaking of podcast success, it was all over the news that Megan Markle had bumped Joe Rogan out of the number one position on Spotify.
[01:26:28]  And I haven't taken a deep dive into this, but generally what it means when you're number one on Spotify or an Apple or what have you is it means you're the number one people adding new subscribers that day.
[01:26:39]  That's what it means.
[01:26:40]  So it's not that Megan Markle has more downloads or listeners than Joe Rogan does.
[01:26:45]  It's that when she dropped her very first podcast, she had more people tuning into her for the first time than anybody else did on the Spotify platform.
[01:26:54]  That's how it works on Apple.
[01:26:54]  I assume it's the same on Spotify.

=== Royal Family and Press Deals (05:37) ===

[01:26:56]  But of course, her PR team is out there saying she's dethroned the king.
[01:26:59]  She's now the podcast queen.
[01:27:01]  I doubt it.
[01:27:02]  I got my doubts.
[01:27:03]  In any event, Miss I Want My Privacy has decided not only to launch the podcast and talk to Serena Williams about how rough her life is, but she gave an interview with some magazine called The Cut in which she once again rips on the royal family.
[01:27:20]  Now, the only reason we know who you are is because you married into the royal family.
[01:27:25]  No one knew you as backup girl number 40 on Howie Mandel's game show.
[01:27:31]  And nobody but a few people in Toronto knew you from your show, Suits.
[01:27:35]  We were all focused on the hot guy who was the lead in all of the advertising, but we never clicked in to watch the show.
[01:27:41]  And you, we knew you because you married into the royal family, which you now cannot stop bashing, just for the record.
[01:27:47]  But now she wants to, in this interview, she compares herself to Nelson Mandela.
[01:27:53]  She talks about how she's made an active effort to forgive the royal family that made her a star and gave her a castle and made it possible for her to live in a $16 million Montecito mansion.
[01:28:10]  And she talks about her husband only referring to his family with a, quote, vocal eye roll, right?
[01:28:19]  So she's openly discussing how her husband can't stand his family either.
[01:28:24]  She also suggests, here's the capper, that the tabloids, the press corps in Great Britain has been calling her son Archie the N-word.
[01:28:38]  Okay?
[01:28:39]  Who?
[01:28:40]  When, where, explain.
[01:28:43]  Same reaction as her Oprah interview, right?
[01:28:46]  That there's some raging racist within the royal family who allegedly want to know how brown her child was going to be.
[01:28:51]  Okay, so all of this gets dumped in the cut.
[01:28:54]  I'll read you just one of the quotes.
[01:28:55]  This is a written interview.
[01:28:56]  It's not a soundbite thing.
[01:28:58]  She recalls a moment from the 2019 London premiere of the live action version of The Lion King.
[01:29:04]  I just had Archie.
[01:29:06]  It was such a cruel chapter.
[01:29:08]  I was scared to go out.
[01:29:10]  Why?
[01:29:11]  You had like armed security everywhere paid for by the royal family.
[01:29:16]  Why?
[01:29:17]  What?
[01:29:17]  Then she goes on to say a cast member pulled her aside from the show.
[01:29:21]  He looked at me and he's just like light.
[01:29:24]  And he said, I just need you to know when you married into this family, we rejoiced in the streets the same as we did when Mandela was freed from prison.
[01:29:37]  Is there any end to this person's narcissism?
[01:29:41]  I read this because it was on the list of topics that we got, Megan.
[01:29:46]  And I mean, I kind of recommend it because it really is a window into how vapid and incredibly boring and contentless this person is.
[01:29:56]  Although I really did like her earrings.
[01:29:58]  She looks amazing in all of the pictures.
[01:30:01]  But on the side of the article, there's like other links you can click to that are 39 pairs of sneakers to upgrade your wardrobe and 14 luxury candles that are worth it.
[01:30:12]  And I totally clicked on both of those links because those are a lot more interesting than she is.
[01:30:19]  She really is empty.
[01:30:22]  Yeah.
[01:30:23]  And but full of allegations about racism that she cannot support, Emily.
[01:30:27]  The one that she that I just referenced was what she's talking about releasing photos of her child.
[01:30:34]  And she's mad that if you're part of the royal family, you're supposed to release them first to this group that's the UK media pool, I guess.
[01:30:42]  And she doesn't like it because it includes the British tabloids or I don't know, includes some people who don't like her.
[01:30:48]  Why would I give the very people that are calling my children the N-word a photo of my child before I can share it with the people that love my child?
[01:30:57]  Who called her child the N-word?
[01:30:59]  I mean, like, if you want to scrub the internet for the nastiest comments about you and your child, you can do it.
[01:31:04]  I can do it right now.
[01:31:05]  I can list you the worst things in the world.
[01:31:06]  That doesn't, that's not representative of the media writ large to where you give an interview and make it the defining characteristic of your relationship with this group.
[01:31:18]  Well, exactly.
[01:31:19]  And it's so incredibly unhealthy.
[01:31:21]  We see this happening from the left constantly with the definition inflation.
[01:31:24]  They blow up things that are wildly beyond their proportion to make the country, to make the West seem so much worse than it is, which is actually really tragic because we have made so much progress in such a short amount of time that to rewind the clock and blow this out of proportion is actually like a really, really messed up thing to do, especially from somebody whose success is built on the fact that they are an African American that was brought into the British royal family and was thus treated, especially in the American press.
[01:31:54]  There's a difference between the American and British tabloid circus for sure, but in the American press was absolutely fetid, was treated with the most like love and kindness.
[01:32:04]  You see that in the cut article where the author writes the sort of stream of consciousness admission that she was worried that when Megan reads the article, something might be unintentionally interpreted as a dig or an insult.
[01:32:17]  And for a reporter to say that and to proudly put it in their article is such a statement on where American journalism has gotten.
[01:32:24]  The reason that Megan Markle has steals at Spotify and Netflix is because the press treats her so kindly that those places know they can count on PR exactly.

=== Tabloid Love for Meghan Markle (02:00) ===

[01:32:34]  like this when they were making that deal.
[01:32:36]  They were like, oh, hell yeah, we can get the cut to put her on the cover and write something really nice about how interesting she is.
[01:32:42]  When to Aliana's point, it's no surprise that suitcase girl number 40 has absolutely nothing interesting to say, nothing of substance to say about anything.
[01:32:51]  It's just all stale, vapid, progressive, vaguely progressive sounding talking points.
[01:32:57]  Okay, here's the, to your point, Eliana, that this is how the cut covered her.
[01:33:02]  The conditions are right for confession.
[01:33:04]  This is the reporter.
[01:33:05]  I'm going to read it in my sexy 900 voice.
[01:33:07]  I had a big party.
[01:33:08]  I was going to tell you about it tomorrow, but as a result, I have an inappropriate voice.
[01:33:12]  But it's appropriate for this reading.
[01:33:14]  It's a beautiful day in Montecito, in a beautiful sitting room, in a beautiful home.
[01:33:20]  Archie Harris in Mountbatten, Windsor, a lively three-year-old with a shock of ginger curls identical to his father's, toddles into the room demanding, Mama.
[01:33:28]  Listen to his heartbeat with a wooden toy stethoscope.
[01:33:31]  He stands, Tommy protruding, while his mother, Megan, convincingly performs her glee at hearing the thump, thump, thump, thump in his chest.
[01:33:42]  Archie giggles and, satisfied, toddles right back out again.
[01:33:47]  Megan, relaxing in a cozy chair, gazes over all that is climate-controlled and high-ceilinged and sun-dappled and perfectly marshmallow-y and hers.
[01:33:57]  An invisible hand has lit a Soho house-branded rose water candle.
[01:34:02]  The founder, Nick Jones, is a friend from long before I met Harry, she says, and the scent fills the air, mingling with the gentle tones of a flamenco-inflected guitar floating from a speaker.
[01:34:12]  Last one.
[01:34:13]  Then, in the lull of conversation, Megan turns to me and leans forward to ask in a conspiratorial hush, Do you want to know a secret?
[01:34:21]  Megan, silenced no more, looks around, making sure nobody, who would be, is listening in.
[01:34:26]  Then the top secret drop.
[01:34:28]  I'm getting back on Instagram, she says.
[01:34:31]  Her eyes alight and devilish.

=== Megan Trolls the Media (00:39) ===

[01:34:34]  This could have been a troll delivering a nothing with such gravitas.
[01:34:38]  Feels as if Megan, who has been so trolled by the media, is serving it back just a little.
[01:34:42]  But as I quickly realize, it is actually news.
[01:34:48]  Challenge.
[01:34:49]  Challenge.
[01:34:50]  Ladies, I'm going to let that be the tease for people to run to the cut, something I'd never heard of prior to this.
[01:34:57]  And read the interview in full.
[01:34:59]  Read instead, actually, the Washington Free Beacon and the Federalist, and you will wind up smarter and better for it.
[01:35:04]  Ladies, thank you.
[01:35:05]  Thanks, Megan.
[01:35:06]  Thank you.
[01:35:09]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
[01:35:11]  No BS, no agenda, and no