The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220831_rittenhouse-two-years-later-and-markles-story-ques
Aired: 2022-08-31
Duration: 01:28:10


=== Megan Markle's First Interview (02:53) ===

[00:00:00]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:11]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:13]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:00:14]  Did you see the cover of the New York Post yesterday?
[00:00:17]  If you didn't, you need to.
[00:00:19]  Toddler and Tiara in reference to Megan Markle.
[00:00:23]  We're going to speak with the author of that barn burner of an article later this show while Nelson Mandela's family is responding to Markle's comments this week.
[00:00:33]  Also, a little fact check by yours truly on her latest round of lies.
[00:00:39]  But we begin today with an exclusive interview with someone whose work you definitely know.
[00:00:44]  Richie McGinnis was a video producer for the Daily Caller, and his job brought him to the front lines of some of the most impactful moments in recent American history.
[00:00:53]  The stories that others would ignore, the reporters who wanted to stand on the outskirts of, say, the BLM protests and tell you that they were mostly peaceful.
[00:01:02]  Richie was in the middle of them and is one of the reasons we know they were not, that they were not mostly peaceful, that they were violent, that people died, people got hurt, and so on.
[00:01:13]  This is a guy who, as the very best journalists will do, runs toward the danger so that you can know what's actually going on.
[00:01:20]  And as a result, he's found himself, especially these past couple years, in the midst of some of the biggest news stories in the country.
[00:01:28]  The riots that we saw, I mentioned from the summer of 2020, he was also there right in the mix on January 6th, and he was smeared by the New York Times.
[00:01:38]  We'll get to that.
[00:01:39]  But it was one night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that turned Richie McGinnis from a journalistic observer to part of the story as he became involved in the Kyle Rittenhouse saga and then a witness in the trial that captured the attention of the nation.
[00:01:55]  For the first time since taking the witness stand, Richie McGinnis is now speaking out.
[00:02:00]  This is his first on-camera interview.
[00:02:21]  Richie, how are you doing?
[00:02:23]  I'm doing pretty good, Megan.
[00:02:24]  Thank you very much for having me on.
[00:02:25]  Great to see you.
[00:02:26]  Great to see you.
[00:02:27]  We haven't spoken since I watched you testify in the stand and felt nothing but pride for how you handled yourself with class, with dignity, stuck to the truth.
[00:02:36]  It was very clear you didn't care who it helped, who it hurt.
[00:02:40]  You just told your story.
[00:02:42]  You were prosecution witnesses, but I would say you made more points for the defense.
[00:02:45]  I think Kyle Rittenhouse certainly feels that way.
[00:02:48]  But you were consistent from the start in what you saw that night.
[00:02:52]  And so kudos to you for handling it.

=== Making Points for the Defense (15:51) ===

[00:02:54]  I'm sure it was a very stressful experience.
[00:02:56]  I appreciate that.
[00:02:57]  Yeah.
[00:02:57]  I got some kudos and some not so kudos, but I just did what I had to do and just try to detach myself from the rest.
[00:03:04]  Yeah.
[00:03:05]  So before we get to Rittenhouse and all of that in January 6th, you've always got your shirt off, your shirt's off and every.
[00:03:11]  I knew this was going to come up.
[00:03:13]  So are you referring to the first American tragedy or the second one?
[00:03:18]  Because the first, I think it was pretty obvious why the shirt came off.
[00:03:20]  But the guy was saying somebody was dying.
[00:03:24]  Yes, exactly.
[00:03:25]  And with respect to 1.6, I don't know if you've ever been pepper sprayed or been pepper sprayed multiple times, but if you have, you'd know how good it feels to take your shirt off in the middle of January.
[00:03:36]  Yeah.
[00:03:36]  And feel that cold air.
[00:03:38]  Don't make me direct people to your Twitter feed where your shirt is also off online.
[00:03:43]  Well, you can see the photo on the New York Times.
[00:03:44]  It's still on that.
[00:03:45]  It's still on the article.
[00:03:46]  So you can check that.
[00:03:47]  There's a couple corrections in there now.
[00:03:49]  You can still see the photo on her.
[00:03:51]  As a red-blooded American woman, I have no objection.
[00:03:53]  Proceed as you like.
[00:03:55]  Okay.
[00:03:56]  Let's talk about prior to those two massive events and the Richie McGinnis of yesteryear, right?
[00:04:02]  So you went to Georgetown undergrad, which I didn't know about you until we know each other.
[00:04:07]  Didn't know about that until I read up on this interview.
[00:04:10]  Go to Georgetown.
[00:04:12]  And when you went to Georgetown, did you want to be a journalist?
[00:04:14]  Were you getting a journalism degree or what was your background?
[00:04:17]  No, I studied Arabic and Middle Eastern history.
[00:04:19]  Actually, my Arabic minor was more credits than my Middle Eastern history major and studied Arabic five days a week for three years and for an hour a day in class and then lived in Jordan for six months.
[00:04:31]  And actually, I think the initial reason, you know, growing up outside of New York, my mom worked in Manhattan.
[00:04:37]  9-11 was a very impactful moment.
[00:04:39]  I was in sixth grade.
[00:04:41]  And actually, there's a bit of a deeper story there regarding like me personally.
[00:04:46]  That same day, my mom was scheduled to go in for lung cancer surgery the next day.
[00:04:50]  And so my parents had known for about a month.
[00:04:53]  I told them I felt very uneasy about something.
[00:04:55]  I could sense their energy was off.
[00:04:57]  And they had planned to tell us on 9-11, 2001.
[00:05:00]  So I found out that my mom had lung cancer on 9-11 and also obviously changed the broader world, not just my own personal one.
[00:05:08]  So I think I studied Arabic partially to learn why, you know, not only the world changed that day, but also my own life changed.
[00:05:16]  And over the course of that journey, I really came to realize that, you know, the Iraq war, everything that happened subsequently, I really viewed the media and the press as the linchpin where all of that was able to happen.
[00:05:30]  You know, when the WMD narrative was being spun up, it's the fourth estate's responsibility to put that in check and they failed to do so.
[00:05:36]  So that kind of directed me towards interning at Al Jazeera.
[00:05:39]  Then I worked at MSNBC as a production assistant.
[00:05:42]  And then I worked for Mark Levin as a video editor.
[00:05:45]  And then finally, Daily Caller.
[00:05:46]  So I've been across the spectrum in D.C.
[00:05:48]  Yes.
[00:05:48]  Yes, exactly.
[00:05:49]  Big swings.
[00:05:50]  How would you describe yourself politically?
[00:05:53]  That's a good question.
[00:05:55]  I think it's weird now in 2022 to define like your political party because I think we're in the midst kind of a tectonic shift in how exactly that's defined.
[00:06:05]  And obviously Donald Trump factoring into that.
[00:06:07]  But when I first moved to DC in 2008, I was knocking on doors for Barack Obama.
[00:06:12]  And so I actually volunteered for that campaign in Virginia.
[00:06:15]  So if you are a Democrat out there, I am one tiny little modicum responsible for turning Virginia blue.
[00:06:22]  But over the course of the Obama years, he had this promise to pull us out of Iraq, you know, to change the way that we deal, that America projects power in the Middle East.
[00:06:31]  And all those promises, Hillary Clinton took over the State Department.
[00:06:34]  I mean, look at what happened to the Middle East over the course of his eight-year presidency.
[00:06:37]  You know, you had the rise of ISIS, Syria collapsed, Libya collapsed.
[00:06:41]  And just to watch the way in which the Obama administration handled that, it was very eye-opening for me.
[00:06:47]  And so I think that kind of like naive innocence that I had when I first came to DC started to disappear.
[00:06:52]  So if you're going to ask how I define myself politically now, I would say, you know, I have I'm a free speech absolutist for sure.
[00:07:01]  And so I think that in the weird way, that would put me on the right, but also at the same time, I believe in, you know, using the power of the federal government for certain programs that might help, you know, the bottom of society.
[00:07:13]  So I don't really know where I fall.
[00:07:15]  I don't know.
[00:07:16]  I voted for Kanye West in 2020.
[00:07:17]  So I'm not sure where I'm going to go in 24.
[00:07:19]  And mushrooms, right?
[00:07:20]  Didn't you say?
[00:07:21]  Yes.
[00:07:21]  And mushrooms.
[00:07:22]  Well, mushrooms were on the ballot in D.C.
[00:07:24]  So I guess I probably should have clarified that, but they were on the ballot in DC and they are legal now.
[00:07:29]  So I did vote for that as well.
[00:07:32]  Okay.
[00:07:32]  I mean, I think there are a lot of people who they don't know what party they're for anymore.
[00:07:36]  Everything is so different than it used to be even just 10 years ago.
[00:07:40]  Are you, how do you feel about having turned Virginia blue and helped to get Barack Obama elected?
[00:07:47]  Well, I think it's interesting to see what's happened in Virginia since then.
[00:07:50]  So actually the latest gubernatorial election in Virginia, I think that that shows you that in a place like Virginia, you know, democracy is functioning pretty well because the parents and people who really cared about a lot of these like, I guess, you know, school issues and a lot of these culture war issues, they went to the polls and they spoke accordingly.
[00:08:09]  So I think, you know, in that moment in 2008, it's hard to like put myself back in those shoes.
[00:08:15]  But I think, you know, I was very much caught up in the emotion of the moment.
[00:08:18]  Barack Obama, I was a young person.
[00:08:20]  He was very much hope, hope and change, folks.
[00:08:22]  And you can keep your doctor too.
[00:08:25]  But I think, you know, since then, to see the way that he's been, you know, I guess places where he was elected, like Virginia, has been held, those policies have been held to account.
[00:08:38]  I think that's pretty encouraging, actually.
[00:08:42]  That happened to a lot of people, right?
[00:08:43]  They were felt inspired by him.
[00:08:44]  And then he actually started to govern.
[00:08:46]  And they said, oh, wait a minute.
[00:08:47]  I'm having different feelings.
[00:08:48]  Some of the feelings are gone.
[00:08:51]  Now, okay, so you wind up at the Daily Caller, which is, you know, that was founded originally by Tucker way, way back in the day, though.
[00:08:58]  I think he got rid of his team interest.
[00:09:00]  Yeah.
[00:09:01]  When he started coming to Fox News.
[00:09:04]  So you're working at the Daily Caller.
[00:09:05]  Now, was that too right wing for you?
[00:09:07]  Or was that, I mean, like, how did you sort of square that?
[00:09:11]  Well, interestingly, actually, someone I bartended with, because I bartended while I was working at NBC as a side job and a little bit once I started at Levin.
[00:09:18]  And so I was bartending with this guy and I saw him during the 2016 election doing these live streams on the Daily Caller and getting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views.
[00:09:26]  And the studio was like janky and I'm watching it from my office at Levin TV.
[00:09:32]  And I'm like, wow, there's something here.
[00:09:34]  I went in for an interview.
[00:09:35]  I actually got hit in a hockey game the night before and I had 28 fresh stitches in my face at 8 a.m. like still bleeding.
[00:09:41]  And I called him in the morning.
[00:09:43]  I was like, I don't know if I can make the interview.
[00:09:44]  I got all these stitches.
[00:09:44]  He's like, no, the boss is going to love it.
[00:09:46]  And I went in there and just the atmosphere in the newsroom was so open.
[00:09:51]  Everyone was kind of like shouting at me.
[00:09:53]  Like, you know, it was, it was really exciting.
[00:09:55]  It was, I just being there, I felt like I could say whatever I wanted in that newsroom.
[00:09:59]  And I didn't feel like coming in as somebody who wasn't like a buttoned up conservative, you know, was some kind of thing that they looked down upon in the newsroom.
[00:10:07]  And secondarily, I think with, you know, Tucker leaving, he's kind of, believe it or not, I guess this is people at home might not realize, but he was kind of a creative force at the caller just because Tucker, he started it with his roommate Neil Patel, who's still the CEO.
[00:10:19]  And Neil's very type A. Tucker's not quite as type A.
[00:10:22]  So I started the video program there kind of actually part of my job was creating this little kind of, I guess, creative enclave.
[00:10:31]  And a lot of our creatives that we hired weren't necessarily buttoned up conservatives.
[00:10:34]  In fact, far from it.
[00:10:35]  So I was like, Neil, we got no dress code.
[00:10:38]  We're coming in in hoodies.
[00:10:39]  We're video guys.
[00:10:39]  We're artists.
[00:10:40]  We're going to express ourselves.
[00:10:41]  And they were really receptive to that.
[00:10:43]  So I think in a weird way, the Daily Caller is representative of the fact that the tectonic shift that I'm talking about, when I was growing up, being a lefty meant you were pro-free speech.
[00:10:52]  And I think at least the NBC newsroom, other more quote unquote liberal newsrooms, you know, won't have that kind of open atmosphere.
[00:11:02]  Yeah.
[00:11:02]  In my experience, NBC is not willing to an open discussion of controversial issues.
[00:11:07]  I would just, you know, just my experience.
[00:11:09]  You definitely have some familiarity as well.
[00:11:11]  Exactly.
[00:11:12]  But, you know, speaking of Tucker, he also went from MSNBC, right?
[00:11:15]  Well, he'd been at MS. He'd been at CNN.
[00:11:17]  He's been fired.
[00:11:17]  He's shown up at Fox.
[00:11:19]  That's when he started the caller.
[00:11:20]  Yep.
[00:11:20]  And right when I signed my contract is right when literally May 10th, 2017, right when Tucker started in that APM slot taking over for Bill O'Reilly.
[00:11:29]  And before then, he wasn't kind of the villain slash hero that he is today in the media landscape.
[00:11:35]  And so to see like the toothpaste coming out of the tube during the Trump years of not only Trump, but Tucker and the way that he was treated for having his opinions about what was going on is very eye-opening for me.
[00:11:47]  And then obviously the way that the caller was interpreted as a result of Tucker taking that front stage, I obviously was on the receding end of a lot of those feelings because, you know, during the riots, for example, people have a certain idea.
[00:12:00]  You must be just like Tucker Carls.
[00:12:01]  You must think everything the same.
[00:12:02]  But actually, it's a very open-minded newsroom.
[00:12:05]  Yeah.
[00:12:06]  And one of the other thing about Tucker is too, what I find entertaining about him is you kind of never know where he's going to come down on an issue.
[00:12:12]  And that's what's interesting about him.
[00:12:14]  He's nobody's.
[00:12:16]  you know, dog and pony show.
[00:12:17]  Like he will turn on you like tomorrow if he thinks you've done something stupid.
[00:12:22]  If you're a politician who's put yourself on the field, he doesn't punch down.
[00:12:26]  But I like that about him.
[00:12:28]  And people think he's like, you know, like a Hannity, you know, Hannity's reliably right wing.
[00:12:33]  Yes.
[00:12:34]  Tucker's not.
[00:12:35]  And the Daily Caller has grown into a really interesting news organization with reporters I would 100% steal if I were to expand my Devil May Care Media, which one day I may.
[00:12:44]  In any event, so that's interesting.
[00:12:45]  And you, but like, I got to know you.
[00:12:48]  You came to my house for an interview that we did one time.
[00:12:50]  And, but I got to know your work just because you were sort of, I don't know if we can call it guerrilla news gathering because you're with a news organization, but you were just freaking not afraid.
[00:13:00]  You were putting yourself in the middle of all that shit.
[00:13:03]  It was like the dangerous stuff that was happening.
[00:13:07]  The more dangerous, the better.
[00:13:09]  You were like a moth to the flame for the past three years, wouldn't you?
[00:13:13]  Well, honestly, I'm going to give a lot of credit to Shelby because Shelby, you know Shelby.
[00:13:18]  She's actually a White House correspondent at the Daily Caller.
[00:13:22]  And she is now White House correspondent, but she's a former pro tennis player.
[00:13:27]  And when all those riots started, she was actually the one who went to her editor-in-chief and she was like, I'm going to go out and cover these.
[00:13:32]  And he's like, you're a girl.
[00:13:33]  You know, you can't do that.
[00:13:34]  And she was like, I'm going to go whether you like it or not.
[00:13:37]  And that first weekend, I was actually in New York and I returned on June 1st, which was the Trump Bible photo op day.
[00:13:44]  And over that weekend, Shelby was like walking into stores as they were actively being looted along with Jorge, who was one of our interns.
[00:13:51]  And so Shelby was really like the tenacious one who was getting out there and getting into the mix.
[00:13:56]  And kind of my job was between Shelby and Jorge, making sure that the video got up, that everything was delivered and recording, you know, focusing more on the video in these protest zones.
[00:14:04]  And so we had a couple of situations, you know, where Shelby's standing tall and I'm just like bear hugging her and dragging her out of there because I'm like, you're not the one who's going to get punched in the head first.
[00:14:14]  They punched the guy in the head first for sure.
[00:14:16]  But actually Jeff told Shelby or told me when we went out there, he said, if Shelby gets a black eye and you're not in the ICU, I'll kill you myself.
[00:14:23]  And he's a Marine.
[00:14:24]  So you got to take that with a grain of salt.
[00:14:26]  But it was definitely, I guess, we didn't realize how things were going to turn out at the very beginning.
[00:14:34]  It was a great team.
[00:14:34]  No, and weren't you, weren't you guys getting shit from some people on the left for doing it?
[00:14:39]  Like they were accusing you of like manufacturing it.
[00:14:42]  I'm trying to remember exactly the conjure, but it was like, oh, you're making it happen as opposed to just documenting it with your camera, something along those lines.
[00:14:48]  It was a bunch of nonsense from the left-wing press that didn't have the balls to cover it at all.
[00:14:54]  Yeah.
[00:14:54]  And we saw a lot of that after Kenosha, after 1.6.
[00:14:57]  And actually in Kenosha, I was took a lot of crap from the right wing because I was wearing a BLM shirt that night, which actually I used to try to save Joseph Rosenbaum, which obviously those efforts failed.
[00:15:09]  But wearing that shirt, that's exactly what you're talking about.
[00:15:12]  Our role was to be a fly on the wall for the American public, just using our cell phones, not becoming part of the story by coming in with a big camera.
[00:15:19]  And in order to do that, you kind of just had to blend in and hunker down with the protesters, rioters.
[00:15:25]  If you want to elicit, you know, their truth, why they think they're out there, then you kind of have to embed with them rather than coming in with a big camera and saying, you know, so why is this a party-like atmosphere?
[00:15:36]  Oh my God, it's because of you that we know a lot of the violence that happened at these BLM riots.
[00:15:42]  I mean, you're reporting your fearlessness and getting in the mix.
[00:15:45]  It's like because of your t-shirt at a thing where you were trying to blend in.
[00:15:47]  People are trying to say, people know nothing about you.
[00:15:50]  It's like they make all sorts of assumptions from the New York Times to the people who are ripping on you guys for your journalism during those riots.
[00:15:59]  What I have seen is an honest journalist who's actually fearless in getting us a story consistently with you, consistently.
[00:16:05]  It's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on.
[00:16:07]  So, okay, so let's flash forward to our first big flash point.
[00:16:13]  And that is the Kenosha, Wisconsin riot that involved Kyle Rittenhouse there as what he viewed as a protector of a business and somebody there to potentially provide aid.
[00:16:27]  Now, that's a piece of his story, again, that we know thanks to Richie McGinnis.
[00:16:31]  Okay, we know that because Richie was there.
[00:16:33]  And Richie, just to remind the audience, was the guy who got an interview with Kyle, who you didn't know from Adam, that night before the violence started, like 15 minutes before the violence started.
[00:16:44]  You saw this kid.
[00:16:45]  You're there to document the news.
[00:16:47]  This is just to remind the audience again.
[00:16:49]  Those riots happened in the wake of Jacob Blake being shot in Kenosha by seven times by a police officer.
[00:16:55]  He was resisting arrest.
[00:16:56]  This is the one that Kamala Harris called a hero and went to visit and paid the bail for and the people who all that stuff.
[00:17:03]  So the riots happened in Kenosha after Jacob Blake was shot.
[00:17:06]  By the way, it's still come out.
[00:17:07]  It's come out since that he had a knife and he threatened the police officers.
[00:17:10]  So anyway, that's, you know, like so many of these riots, it's like, you didn't know the full story.
[00:17:16]  Go back.
[00:17:17]  Go sit on your couch.
[00:17:18]  There's no reason to burn shit.
[00:17:20]  Jacob Blake resisted arrest, punched a cop and pulled a knife on him.
[00:17:23]  All right.
[00:17:24]  Take a seat.
[00:17:25]  Anywho, you go, you cover the thing and you see Kyle Rittenhouse.
[00:17:29]  And just tell us how that started and what your impressions of him were.
[00:17:32]  I think that that story is very interesting because basically the way that I came to talk to Kyle actually started the night before.
[00:17:39]  Shelby and I were walking past that same business that Kyle was in front of when I interviewed him, which is one of the car source businesses that he was defending.
[00:17:47]  That's car source one.
[00:17:48]  And actually the shooting took place in another car source lot, which is just up the street.
[00:17:52]  So we saw that business.
[00:17:54]  All the cars in front of it were burning.
[00:17:57]  And there were guys with one guy with a power washer and no joke, people with buckets and trash cans full of water, dumping them on these burning cars.
[00:18:05]  And so we interviewed the guy as he's power washing and we asked him why he was there.
[00:18:10]  And he basically told us that he was hired to go out there because the fire department wasn't responding.
[00:18:16]  And so the next day, we were in front of the courthouse covering all the violence.
[00:18:19]  You know, the tear gas came out.
[00:18:22]  They pushed everybody back from the fence.
[00:18:24]  Very standard kind of situation happening in front of whatever building it is that they're trying to, you know, burn or whatever they're trying to do, put graffiti on, throw fireworks at.
[00:18:34]  And so they get pushed away from that courthouse and end up in front of that car source business.
[00:18:39]  And I went inside because there was such poor internet to try to get on the Wi-Fi to get all of that coverage of what happened in front of the courthouse up.

=== Protecting the City Amid Chaos (05:54) ===

[00:18:46]  And I saw these armed individuals in front of that same business on Twitter.
[00:18:50]  And I was like, oh, I have to go.
[00:18:52]  I just dropped what I was doing and I walked straight out the hotel, which is right next to that business, the Stella Hotel, and walked right out there.
[00:18:58]  And Kyle was standing in front of everybody else.
[00:19:00]  And I basically just said, hey, does anybody want to do an interview about why you guys are out here?
[00:19:04]  And Kyle immediately volunteered himself.
[00:19:06]  And that is where he told you the following, which would wind up becoming relevant later at his trial for having shot three people, two of whom died.
[00:19:15]  Here's Soundbite One.
[00:19:18]  So people are getting injured.
[00:19:20]  And our job is to protect this business.
[00:19:22]  And part of my job is to also help people.
[00:19:24]  If there's somebody hurt, I'm running into harm's way.
[00:19:26]  That's why I have my record because I can protect myself, obviously.
[00:19:32]  That's you.
[00:19:32]  That's your, that's your interview.
[00:19:36]  That's what's so big because it would have been one thing, Richie, if he had just taken the stand and said, I went there to help people.
[00:19:43]  That's what that was my intention.
[00:19:44]  It's quite another if you've got him on camera before anything happened, telling some journalist.
[00:19:49]  You know what I mean?
[00:19:49]  It was very helpful to him that you and he had that exchange.
[00:19:53]  Yeah.
[00:19:54]  And the interesting thing is when I, after the shooting, I saw so much different misinformation being passed around about how the shooting actually took place.
[00:20:02]  Having been so close to it, you know, I knew what happened because it was 10 feet in front of me.
[00:20:07]  But the moment that I went out and relayed information like that to the public, the first show I went on was Tucker's show.
[00:20:14]  It was immediately started to be distorted.
[00:20:16]  You know, McGinnis supported the conservative claim that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense.
[00:20:20]  And it's like, no, I literally told him why Kyle told me he was there 13 minutes before the shooting.
[00:20:25]  And so those kind of objective observations and facts and quotes, it just goes to show how they get manipulated to kind of fit whatever narrative agenda that particular news outlet wants to mold.
[00:20:37]  I mean, this is so critical because, you know, I understand what Kyle went through.
[00:20:40]  And for him, this is absolutely about a criminal justice travesty averted.
[00:20:46]  But this is also very much a media story and a Democrat spin story because it wasn't just the media piling on Kyle Rittenhouse.
[00:20:55]  It was everyone right up to the president of the United States.
[00:20:57]  I mean, trying to tell us that he was a white supremacist in a case in which no black people were shot, right?
[00:21:06]  Like this wasn't about Kyle going there and hurting black people.
[00:21:09]  All of the people who were shot were white.
[00:21:12]  Kyle's white.
[00:21:13]  It was on the heels of a black man being shot by police, but he was there to keep the peace, right?
[00:21:22]  From rioters in a city.
[00:21:24]  I've said before, I don't think that was a good idea for a 17-year-old to show up there and try to keep the peace.
[00:21:30]  But the truth is the governor wasn't doing it.
[00:21:32]  So there were a lot of people like Kyle who thought, I have an obligation to go protect this city.
[00:21:37]  Absolutely.
[00:21:38]  And I think that is the first failure where the institutions that are supposed to protect those businesses, like the fire department and the police department, obviously failed.
[00:21:46]  And the fact that they had, for example, an FBI surveillance plane flying over this protest, the fact that they had drones flying over it, it goes to show that, you know, the federal government, federal law enforcement, they knew that this was getting bad.
[00:21:59]  I mean, this is the third night of rioting.
[00:22:01]  So why is it that with everybody paying that much attention to it in our federal law enforcement agencies, why is it that law enforcement in general was so absent from all of those businesses that were getting burned down?
[00:22:14]  Why is it?
[00:22:16]  I mean, it's a very good question.
[00:22:18]  And I've, that actually is something that I'm trying to, you know, dig a little bit deeper to figure out exactly, because that's not my area of expertise, kind of like, you know, how exactly the decisions were made for the National Guard, for, you know, did the governor allow this to happen?
[00:22:35]  Did it, was it offered?
[00:22:37]  So I'm that there'll be more of that.
[00:22:39]  And I'm digging more into that.
[00:22:40]  But I think that's definitely the first critical failure that even, you know, a kid like Kyle Rittenhouse would think that he should go out in the first place.
[00:22:47]  Didn't we have a, didn't we have a blue state governor, a Democratic governor, who didn't want to upset the BLM crowd by looking over-militarized in the face of these riots?
[00:22:59]  He'd rather let the city burn.
[00:23:00]  He didn't, he didn't care.
[00:23:02]  And it's really interesting for me, too, having seen the protests across the country, the way that different law enforcement handles, you know, civil unrest.
[00:23:11]  And in D.C., I mean, these guys deal with it obviously more than anybody.
[00:23:15]  They know what to do.
[00:23:16]  I mean, they are keeping this crowd effectively like contained on the street.
[00:23:19]  There's police on both sides.
[00:23:20]  So if parts of those crowds are going down side streets, they have eyes on, you know, they're following them.
[00:23:26]  They're extremely organized.
[00:23:27]  They protect the protesters from car traffic, all that different stuff.
[00:23:31]  In this sleepy city, Kenosha, they don't know how to do that.
[00:23:35]  So the way that they dealt with it was far less, you know, effective, far less professional.
[00:23:40]  They were using like long-range acoustic devices, like these loud sirens.
[00:23:45]  They were using a lot of tear gas, a lot of pepper balls.
[00:23:48]  And in DC, you don't see they kind of treat the group with almost white gloves a little bit more, you know, almost treat them like a kindergarten class that they're taking on a field trip.
[00:23:58]  And, but they have so much law enforcement overseeing it and making sure that people who leave are being watched, et cetera.
[00:24:05]  So there was none of that in Kenosha.
[00:24:07]  And I don't necessarily blame the police there because they don't know how to handle those kind of situations.
[00:24:12]  But moving forward, it's like, you know, who do we have who knows how to do that?
[00:24:16]  Yeah.
[00:24:16]  I mean, I don't think Kyle made a good decision to go there that night.
[00:24:19]  I think he admits that too.
[00:24:21]  But you can understand that people in and around the area felt like nobody was there to protect the businesses, the people, that they had just surrendered to rioters who we now know were rioting over nothing, honestly, over nothing.
[00:24:34]  Jacob Blake was the aggressor, right?
[00:24:36]  We know that now.
[00:24:37]  So it's like, wait for the facts to play out.
[00:24:39]  None of this had to happen.

=== Kyle Rittenhouse's Dangerous Decision (15:21) ===

[00:24:41]  So you not only spoke to Kyle moments before he found himself embroiled in these three situations, but you were embroiled in the first one.
[00:24:50]  And I know this was traumatic for you as a human, as a man.
[00:24:57]  The first man that Kyle shot, I think we can stipulate, was not a good man.
[00:25:02]  Joseph Rosenbaum was a convicted child molester.
[00:25:07]  That's not to say he deserved to be shot, but he was the aggressor and Kyle shot him in self-defense.
[00:25:11]  So, you know, so legally, he deserved to be shot.
[00:25:14]  But that doesn't make it any easier for you to hold the man's head as he's bleeding and dying.
[00:25:21]  So, can we just start from with that aspect of it?
[00:25:24]  Exactly.
[00:25:25]  Well, so after the trial, you know, I've obviously stayed silent since then, but I'm kind of envisioning what my role is now that it's no longer witness.
[00:25:34]  And I saw all that firsthand.
[00:25:36]  And when I saw it, I didn't know anything about his background.
[00:25:38]  I didn't know what that guy's criminal history was.
[00:25:40]  I wasn't going to, even if I had asked him, you know, there was blood in his lungs.
[00:25:43]  He couldn't say anything.
[00:25:45]  So my only goal there was really to comfort him.
[00:25:48]  And actually, my dad passed away right when I started at the Daily Caller.
[00:25:51]  And I had an experience when he passed away where our whole family was there.
[00:25:56]  We got him home from the hospital.
[00:25:57]  He saw the nurse leave the room and he knew that was his time to go.
[00:26:01]  And we all hugged him.
[00:26:02]  My older brother, who's an ER doc as well, he put a stethoscope on his heart and we were telling him stories and holding him as he passed away.
[00:26:10]  And he chose to leave.
[00:26:12]  Like he saw the nurse leave and he chose to leave the world in that moment.
[00:26:15]  And so there was a certain peace there.
[00:26:17]  And it was the exact opposite with Joseph Rosenbaum.
[00:26:20]  And I think that there's a very, I guess, disturbing and interesting parallel there, which is, you know, my dad, I think, felt like he was ready to go.
[00:26:29]  He felt like his boys were ready to go out into the world and he had done his job.
[00:26:33]  And I think that that's an example of, you know, a life fulfilled in America.
[00:26:36]  And Joseph Rosenbaum is an example of a life completely unfulfilled.
[00:26:40]  And he was abused, sexually abused actually at a young age.
[00:26:42]  And so by his stepdad.
[00:26:44]  And so to see actually some of the people that he sexually abused are also now incarcerated.
[00:26:48]  So that kind of cycle of tragedy that surrounded his family is expanding beyond his own family.
[00:26:55]  And my only goal now moving forward is just to put that tragedy, what happened in the actual moment, the human suffering that took place, regardless of what this guy's criminal history is.
[00:27:07]  Because in America, you know, we believe that everybody is born in the image of God and that up until the moment that they die, they have the opportunity to repent for what they've done.
[00:27:15]  And, you know, he left the world knowing that he had done bad things.
[00:27:20]  And I saw it in his eyes.
[00:27:21]  I saw that regret.
[00:27:22]  And I think just conveying that to the public, that regret is an important thing because in America, everybody wants, you know, to die the way that my dad did, which is with their family and loved ones surrounding them and not the way that Rosenbaum did.
[00:27:35]  And so, using those two endings kind of in parallel, I think it it it goes to show that you should take your decisions in life extremely seriously.
[00:27:45]  But can I ask you, because?
[00:27:47]  Do you put that on Kyle or on Rosenpau?
[00:27:51]  Well that's, I think that's a great question um, that i'm trying to unpack and I think that that was part of what that piece got towards.
[00:27:58]  Uh, not necessarily the criminal side of it, but the more moral side of it and moving forward, it's like, what kind of behavior do we want to encourage?
[00:28:06]  Who are the people that we're looking up to in this situation?
[00:28:08]  You know, I think that uh, Joseph Rosenbaum obviously, I stated in court.
[00:28:12]  He screamed you right before he went for the weapon, and the way that he said you, I will never forget it.
[00:28:18]  I mean, there's so much anger behind those words and I don't know what would have happened if he had grabbed that weapon.
[00:28:23]  I I don't think it would have turned out well for Kyle Rittenhouse in any way, shape or form.
[00:28:28]  Um, but with all that being said, you know that situation going out there uh, and this is something I try to put into words, but it's almost difficult to express how stupid Kyle going away from that business alone with a fire extinguisher in one hand, with his med pack, and you know, originally uh Bulch was with him, Ryan Bulch was with him and he was walking alongside actually me.
[00:28:51]  Kyle and Bulch were all walking and actually I went to talk to some individuals who were shouting at Kyle because he was going medical medical, and I would say like 90 of the people in the crowd you can see in parts of my video looking at him very, very angrily and he just was completely naive, had no clue.
[00:29:06]  The negative uh looks that he was getting all the all the yells.
[00:29:09]  So uh, these four um guys who yelled at him, I wanted to interview them and see why they were mad at him and I went to talk to them and that's when I parted ways with Kyle.
[00:29:18]  Over the course of that time him and Bulch got separated and he ran off on his own down to another fire at the other car source lot and he actually it came out in court.
[00:29:26]  He asked some of the other other individuals if they wanted to come and they declined.
[00:29:29]  So he went out there alone with a fire extinguisher, a med kit and a rifle and in that instance you know he's trying to play not only medic, not only fireman, but also cop.
[00:29:40]  And so the level of stupidity of that decision, I think, is something that uh conservatives would want to overlook and that, you know uh, the lefties would want to emphasize.
[00:29:50]  And then the Rosenbaum aspect of him screaming, you going for the weapon and and missing and being shot um, and what would have happened if he had gotten that rifle.
[00:29:59]  That's something that the you know.
[00:30:01]  It's basically one side or the other.
[00:30:02]  It's you're highlighting certain facts based upon what your agenda is, what right and it's more complicated.
[00:30:08]  It's right you're trying to point out it's more complicated.
[00:30:10]  Yes, I get it.
[00:30:12]  I totally get this.
[00:30:13]  Um, 100 Richie.
[00:30:15]  I feel like I defended Kyle On from a legal perspective every day.
[00:30:20]  Uh, I just, it was very clearly a self-defense case and he was being railroad roaded and, thank god, those jurors did the right thing and justice prevailed.
[00:30:28]  But we can talk honestly about whether this was a good idea for a 17 year old to try to go there and keep the peace, because you know, you point out some of the the things he failed to observe.
[00:30:39]  That's in part due to his youth, his inexperience.
[00:30:42]  17 year old doesn't know, they don't know anything.
[00:30:44]  You're, you just, I don't know how old were you when this went down uh 32 30 no, I was 31.
[00:30:51]  So, you got, you know, over 10 years on the guy, almost almost 15 years on him.
[00:30:54]  You're a journalist.
[00:30:55]  You've been in rough spots.
[00:30:57]  You've seen a bit of the world and you're seeing things he's not seeing.
[00:31:01]  And that's one of the reasons why we don't generally put somebody out in this kind of situation to keep the peace without some training, like we give to law enforcement officers or the National Guard.
[00:31:10]  And again, we talked about the fact that they weren't sent, but there's a reason why we don't send 17 minors out there with no training to keep the peace in this way.
[00:31:19]  They're not sophisticated in this kind of situation.
[00:31:23]  And what you're telling me is you could see it and you could see how it was going to play into Kyle's Kyle's being in danger.
[00:31:30]  Never mind other people.
[00:31:31]  Yes.
[00:31:31]  And I have regret.
[00:31:32]  Honestly, I was playing the role of fly on the wall journalist there.
[00:31:35]  If it had been my younger brother, the moment that I saw him, I would have dragged him out by his ear.
[00:31:39]  So thinking about the differences in those roles, obviously after Rosenbaum was shot, I dropped my role as journalist, but I almost, you know, I'm not almost.
[00:31:49]  I mean, I think about it all the time, you know, if I had done it earlier, but that really, it's not our role to go out there and like admonish the people.
[00:31:55]  You know, people always say, oh, and he gave this rioter a friendly interview or whatever.
[00:31:58]  It's like, what am I going to tell him?
[00:31:59]  Did you know that you're not allowed to burn that to burn down that building?
[00:32:04]  So it's actually on that night in Kenosha, there was one attempted mugging.
[00:32:08]  And on the previous night, there was another one.
[00:32:10]  Guy's trying to take my phone off of me.
[00:32:11]  And what do I do in that situation?
[00:32:13]  You know, you create a little bit of distraction.
[00:32:15]  Oh, yeah, this thing's really.
[00:32:15]  And then you're running.
[00:32:16]  You're looking at your exit point and you're gone.
[00:32:19]  And you're sprinting until there's nobody behind you.
[00:32:21]  No, they wanted Brian stelter journalism.
[00:32:25]  You better go home right now or I'm going to report you to the principal.
[00:32:28]  Right.
[00:32:28]  And we saw how that ended for him.
[00:32:30]  Like, yes, during the insurrection, I was criticized for giving the guy smoking weed a friendly interview.
[00:32:35]  And it's like, what am I supposed to tell him?
[00:32:37]  You're not allowed to smoke weed in the Capitol?
[00:32:39]  Is that what I'm supposed to tell him?
[00:32:41]  That's not my job.
[00:32:42]  By the way, I voted for the shrooms.
[00:32:44]  All right.
[00:32:44]  Stand by, Richie.
[00:32:46]  We're going to show you the video that Richie was involved in and talk about.
[00:32:51]  Now there's blowback on him for saying what he just said.
[00:32:54]  So we'll get into that in January 6th as well.
[00:33:02]  Richie, there was this moment.
[00:33:03]  We'll get to your thoughts on Kyle in one second, but there was this moment where you capturing the event on camera and so on also become part of the event.
[00:33:12]  And that is when Joseph Rosenbaum, who would wind up dead that night, got into the scuffle with Kyle Rittenhouse.
[00:33:19]  And we're just going to show the audience the video and maybe you can explain, like, you can see it too.
[00:33:26]  Maybe you can explain where you are as we watch this.
[00:33:29]  This is like, because this guy, Rosenbaum, ran after Kyle and Kyle then had a confrontation with him.
[00:33:36]  Let's let's show it.
[00:33:37]  Maybe you can talk us through it.
[00:33:38]  Yep.
[00:33:39]  There's a figure in the foreground.
[00:33:40]  Who's that?
[00:33:41]  That guy right in the foreground is Kyle.
[00:33:43]  Boom.
[00:33:43]  There's Rosenbaum dead.
[00:33:44]  And that's me right back behind there.
[00:33:46]  That's you with the dark shorts.
[00:33:47]  Obviously, still alive.
[00:33:48]  So I was actually wearing pants that actually belonged to my dad, which I found in his closet after he passed away.
[00:33:54]  So they're my lucky ride pants.
[00:33:56]  Oh, wow.
[00:33:57]  Okay.
[00:33:58]  So you were right there.
[00:33:59]  I mean, you couldn't be more of an eyewitness to that actual shooting.
[00:34:03]  Yes.
[00:34:03]  And my boss will never let me hear the end of it, but I actually was on the phone with Shelby because I heard some screaming.
[00:34:09]  I saw Kyle running up the street with the fire extinguisher and assumed that something was about to go down.
[00:34:14]  So I called Shelby up and I was like, where are you?
[00:34:16]  It sounds like something dangerous is going to happen.
[00:34:19]  And actually, I was jogging up and I jogged up to that confrontation started with some people yelling.
[00:34:24]  The moment I heard that yelling, I said, oh, some expletive.
[00:34:28]  I can't remember.
[00:34:29]  I got to go to Shelby.
[00:34:30]  I hung up on her and I thought I went to my camera.
[00:34:33]  I did go to my camera app.
[00:34:35]  I thought I went to the video, but I actually took a live photo of the ground.
[00:34:37]  So you can see me with my hands up.
[00:34:39]  I thought I was filming, but actually took a live photo.
[00:34:42]  So in that instance after he was shot, you know, all of that went out the window anyways.
[00:34:48]  Whose video was that?
[00:34:51]  That one right there that you saw from the air, that was federal law enforcement had a surveillance drone.
[00:34:57]  But then the first one that you saw, that was Drew Hernandez, who was also traveling around the country, you know, covering all this stuff, independent journalist who, I mean, that just goes to show he works for TPUSA now, but I believe at the time he was independent.
[00:35:13]  And, you know, basically the group of people who were there at that time who were covering the event, I'd seen those people all around the country, you know, Drew Hernandez, Brennan Gutenschwager, Elijah Schaefer, me, Shelby, Jorge, and Julio Rosas.
[00:35:27]  We, you know, saw each other in all these different zones.
[00:35:29]  And it's like the running joke was like, we all come from different parts of the media, but like none of us are from the corporate media.
[00:35:36]  Yeah.
[00:35:36]  We had a lot of those guys on the show, actually, during this whole thing.
[00:35:38]  You couldn't do it because you were an actual witness.
[00:35:41]  Most of those guys were not.
[00:35:43]  But so you take the stand.
[00:35:45]  You were called as a prosecution witness, which was interesting because you were definitely, I think, more helpful net net for the defense.
[00:35:51]  And the prosecutor really wanted you to say that Joseph Rosenbaum was falling into Kyle when Kyle shot him.
[00:36:01]  And you were using the word lunge and he was trying to kind of get you on it based on an interview you'd given to Tucker shortly after the incident that you referenced earlier in this show, where I think you would use both terms.
[00:36:15]  And the prosecutor preferred the one.
[00:36:17]  He preferred the one that made Rosenbaum sound more innocent.
[00:36:21]  And we have a little bit of how that went.
[00:36:23]  Watch.
[00:36:25]  No, we don't.
[00:36:26]  Yes, it is.
[00:36:27]  We don't.
[00:36:28]  I'm listening to arguing with my producer.
[00:36:30]  Yeah, so.
[00:36:31]  I can reenact it.
[00:36:33]  Yes, this is the soundbite.
[00:36:35]  Let's play it.
[00:36:35]  Sound by three.
[00:36:38]  And you've already established that after the shooting, Mr. Rosenbaum never says a word.
[00:36:43]  Correct?
[00:36:44]  Correct.
[00:36:47]  You don't know, as you sit here today, what Mr. Rosenbaum was thinking, do you?
[00:36:54]  You mean at the time of the shooting?
[00:36:55]  Yes.
[00:36:56]  Or at any point in his life.
[00:36:58]  I mean, you have no idea what Mr. Rosenbaum was ever thinking at any point in his life.
[00:37:02]  You have never been inside his head.
[00:37:04]  You never met him before.
[00:37:05]  You don't know.
[00:37:06]  I've never even, I've never exchanged words with him, if that's what your question is.
[00:37:10]  So your interpretation of what he was trying to do or what he was intending to do or anything along those lines is complete guesswork, isn't it?
[00:37:19]  Well, he said, fuck you, and then he reached for the weapon.
[00:37:23]  I mean, that was another moment.
[00:37:25]  My producer is correct, but that was critical.
[00:37:29]  I mean, that was critical because you wouldn't, he wanted you to give it to him.
[00:37:32]  I had no idea what was in his head.
[00:37:33]  And as the eyewitness, the closest thing other than Kyle or Rosenbaum, you had a very different take.
[00:37:39]  And that was where he was trying to get me was basically he went from lunging for the front portion of the rifle, which he missed, to then there's just air.
[00:37:47]  So not only the fact that he got shot and that would, you know, conceivably keep him from being able to put his foot out to stop himself from then falling once he missed.
[00:37:58]  So like hashing that out, I mean, it's very simple if you think about it, like just with kind of in normal terms.
[00:38:05]  But in the courtroom, obviously he was trying to get me on my words.
[00:38:08]  And I think there was a lot of that going on, not only in the courtroom in that adversarial system, but in the adversarial system that exists in our media.
[00:38:14]  So it was a weird almost like being in the courtroom was almost like a weird kind of, I guess, parallel experience to being, you know, in between the two sides of the media.
[00:38:25]  Oh, I'm sure.
[00:38:25]  I mean, his attempt to try to make Rosenbaum appear like, oh, he just stumbled into the gun and Kyle, this hothead, reacted.
[00:38:33]  It failed, but it failed in large part thanks to you.
[00:38:36]  I mean, the jurors heard you say, I heard him yell, fuck you, as he reached for the gun.
[00:38:40]  I mean, that's pretty powerful.
[00:38:43]  Of course, Kyle can say that too, but that's, it's not the same as having a third party there who has no dog in this hunt, you know, say that.
[00:38:52]  So it was critical.
[00:38:53]  Exactly.
[00:38:54]  But so let's get to, so Kyle was acquitted.
[00:38:56]  Thank God.
[00:38:57]  And his emotions when he was found not guilty.
[00:39:00]  I mean, who could forget the sight of him going down?
[00:39:03]  He was just overcome.
[00:39:04]  We were live in the year when the verdict was read and just so moving.
[00:39:08]  I was moved emotionally myself watching it.
[00:39:12]  And then now you've come out with an op-ed.
[00:39:15]  And it's interesting to me, Richie.
[00:39:17]  I don't understand.
[00:39:18]  You tell me what's happening because I read that you're leaving the Daily Wire.
[00:39:22]  You post it in Newsweek, which by the way, does post daily collar.
[00:39:25]  Yeah, sorry.
[00:39:26]  Daily Color.
[00:39:27]  Newsweek does post a lot of stuff from the right, from the right now these days.
[00:39:31]  It's not wholly left.
[00:39:32]  So just because you went, it's not like you went to New York Magazine, right?
[00:39:35]  Then we know like, what's Richie doing?
[00:39:37]  So you post it in Newsweek.
[00:39:40]  Mike Davis has had something.
[00:39:41]  Anyway, my point is we know nothing from the fact that this is in Newsweek, but what you say in Newsweek is I was in Kenosha two years ago.
[00:39:48]  Kyle Rittenhouse is not a hero.
[00:39:51]  And you write in the piece that he was either presented broadly as a force for good or evil.
[00:39:58]  In my view, Kyle Rittenhouse was neither.

=== Human Perspective vs Media Spin (06:14) ===

[00:40:02]  And some on the right are mad at you.
[00:40:05]  They're pissed off that you said that about Kyle, that they feel like you're taking shots with him and even potentially siding with somebody like Rosenbaum because of things that you said, like what you just said on this show.
[00:40:17]  So how do you respond to people who are ticked off that you don't want to celebrate Kyle Rittenhouse?
[00:40:24]  Well, I think for one, the one thing that they might not understand is that perhaps one of the things that made my testimony stronger was the fact that, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't overtly like a Kyle Rittenhouse fan or I wasn't out there to get him off.
[00:40:39]  I was out there to tell the truth.
[00:40:41]  And so that was my role as witness.
[00:40:43]  You know, I told the facts and I tried not to, you know, cast my own opinions out there because I wanted just to stick to the facts and I didn't want any of that to interfere with my testimony.
[00:40:54]  But after that is all over, you know, I stayed quiet.
[00:40:57]  Every, you know, everybody was, some people were very angry about the results of the election.
[00:41:01]  Some people, I mean, the results of the court case, some people were obviously elated.
[00:41:07]  So I decided to wait and I waited nine, nine months about.
[00:41:11]  And on that anniversary, you know, I view my role moving forward as returning back to that role of like a journalist and a person who was there and a human being who experienced it.
[00:41:22]  And when people read about it in 20 years, you know, I just, I wanted to put that personal experience on paper, how I encountered Kyle Rittenhouse, how I saw him in that zone.
[00:41:32]  And then, you know, how Joseph Rosenbaum, not knowing his criminal history, how I experienced that in that moment.
[00:41:38]  So, you know, everybody, I got called the pedo lover probably, I don't know, hundreds of times this last week.
[00:41:44]  I expected all that to happen.
[00:41:45]  I knew it would, but my, my goal was to show that in the moment, you know, the way that you experience these things is different from the way that it's then interpreted by the media, the way that, you know, all the armchair quarterbacks say you should have done this or that.
[00:41:58]  I just wanted to provide my human perspective on that.
[00:42:02]  And obviously, I think the results, you know, the response to it kind of proved the thesis of the article, which is it's like, you know, we have these two trenches now.
[00:42:10]  Every story is interpreted through one of those two partisan lenses.
[00:42:15]  And if you go to try to climb up out of that trench and stand up in no man's land and, you know, shout to one side or the other, you're going to get blasted.
[00:42:22]  So I think that the response really kind of proved that thesis.
[00:42:26]  And I'm not, you know, asking for anything.
[00:42:28]  I knew exactly what was going to happen when I posted it.
[00:42:31]  And I wasn't doing it to take a shot at Kyle Rittenhouse.
[00:42:33]  I quite literally said he's not a hero.
[00:42:35]  He's also not a villain.
[00:42:36]  And I think that that's the problem is that he was cast as either one or the other.
[00:42:40]  And, you know, I think what the right did was see that people were calling him a white supremacist, see that the left was calling him a white supremacist and respond by saying, well, if they're going to call him that, then I'm going to call him a hero.
[00:42:50]  And I think that that aspect of the reactionary right is kind of what I was pushing back on.
[00:42:54]  It's like, you can't just abandon your whatever principles you claim to have.
[00:42:57]  For example, fame and values, parents who should don't let their 17-year-old kids go out armed to riots.
[00:43:04]  But secondarily, just, well, if they did that, then that means that us.
[00:43:10]  responding in kind is okay.
[00:43:11]  And I think conservatives always used to be the ones who were like, don't yell at politicians in the street.
[00:43:16]  You know, have a certain aspect of civil society that you preserve.
[00:43:19]  And now you see all conservatives, you know, shouting at politicians.
[00:43:22]  And my question is, is like, what's the end result of that?
[00:43:27]  Like, if the left goes lower and then the right responds by going low as well, well, that sounds like a death spiral into something that's very bad.
[00:43:35]  So I just try to, you know, stand up and say what I experienced.
[00:43:39]  And, you know, I expected the results.
[00:43:42]  So I think, you know, moving forward, it's a good learning lesson.
[00:43:46]  I thought Kyle himself did a pretty good job after the verdict in not being too self-congratulatory or leaning too far into, you know, I'm a hero.
[00:43:57]  Like he didn't really do much of that.
[00:43:59]  And that was not, you know, yes, stepping back, like after the fact, I could have been more clear about the fact that really it was the media that took Rittenhouse and turned him into that hero.
[00:44:11]  And he's just a kid.
[00:44:12]  You know, now he's by that point, he was 18.
[00:44:14]  So he was technically an adult.
[00:44:16]  But even still, you know, he was just getting sucked up by conservative ink and they were using him just for the, you know, to score their own points on the board after he was acquitted.
[00:44:25]  And I can't.
[00:44:26]  And let me just show what, show the audience what you're talking about.
[00:44:28]  Because in your piece, you write a month after the trial came, Turning Point USA's America Fest, where they wanted you to participate, but you declined.
[00:44:36]  You knew that they were going to surprise the audience with Kyle.
[00:44:39]  And it led to, we have it, right?
[00:44:41]  We have this moment.
[00:44:45]  Yeah, where he came out.
[00:44:46]  We'll just play it now while I continue speaking, but he came out and there's like pyrotechnics and there's spotlights and he got a hero's welcome for sure.
[00:44:57]  And I get, and I can see, you know, you had a problem with that.
[00:45:01]  To me, I saw that as like they're applauding his courage in having had to sit there for day after day thinking he might be going to jail for the rest of his life.
[00:45:12]  It's about a martyr less than a hero in my view.
[00:45:16]  Yeah, I think that that's a very, that's a very fair point.
[00:45:18]  And Drew Hernandez, actually, who was on that panel, who, like I said, I was traveling around with him, he said something similar on Tim Poole the other night.
[00:45:26]  And look, that's completely fine.
[00:45:29]  I totally understand that perspective.
[00:45:31]  And I also can't unpack, like, here's the thing is when a tragedy happens, you know, everybody says, oh, well, he had this criminal history and blah, blah, blah.
[00:45:41]  I can't unlive that experience.
[00:45:43]  And so my goal was to, you know, the way that I felt when I saw that, having one of the people that he shot die in my arms was sick.
[00:45:51]  And So I think that all I wanted to do in that, providing that anecdote and the way that I felt when I saw it was to identify the fact that people who are close to these tragedies, you know, that human side of it is something that gets completely lost.
[00:46:07]  And whether it's one side or the other, the human beings who are caught up in the midst of that are kind of, they do, they become these caricatures who are no longer human beings, according to the media.
[00:46:16]  That's the thing.

=== Trauma Behind the Opinion Piece (15:22) ===

[00:46:17]  So like when I see people attacking you for this opinion piece for what you're saying here, I want them to remember you've been through your own trauma.
[00:46:25]  You've been through your own trauma in this whole thing, trying to do the right thing, trying to bring us the news that was being snuffed out by too many in the mainstream and found yourself in a really hard situation where not only did you witness the shooting and were in danger yourself,
[00:46:42]  but again, not knowing who Joseph Rosenbaum was or anything about his criminal history, held him as he died in your arms after you'd already lost your dad in not the same way, but it's, you know, disturbingly, eerily, similar circumstances, sort of.
[00:46:56]  So I get it, Richie.
[00:46:58]  I understand exactly where you're coming from.
[00:47:00]  I will say we reached out to Kyle and asked him for his response to your op-ed and told him you're coming on today.
[00:47:08]  And I'll just leave that as the tease because we just did get a response.
[00:47:11]  And that's where we'll pick it up right after this quick commercial break.
[00:47:15]  We'll be right back with Richie McGinnis and we'll talk about January 6th as well.
[00:47:19]  And don't forget, folks, you can find the Megan Kelly show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash MeganKelly.
[00:47:31]  All right, now I got a favor to ask you.
[00:47:32]  Can you go there?
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[00:47:35]  Because we are now 2,000 subscribers away from hitting the 500,000 mark, which is exciting because we did that all in the past year.
[00:47:42]  We've only been video for a year.
[00:47:44]  And it would be great if on August 31st, we could get over that hump.
[00:47:47]  So do me a favor, go to youtube.com slash MeganKelly.
[00:47:50]  Subscribe now.
[00:47:55]  So Richie, we reached out to Kyle for his response to your op-ed in Newsweek and to what we anticipated would be your appearance here today.
[00:48:04]  And it was sort of an interesting series of events.
[00:48:06]  His spokesperson, David Hancock, responded first.
[00:48:10]  And then in came a lengthier statement from David Hancock.
[00:48:14]  And then in came a statement from Kyle himself.
[00:48:17]  So I kind of have sort of three responses to go over with you.
[00:48:20]  First came this from David Hancock, one paragraph only.
[00:48:24]  Kyle wishes Richie the best as he tries to reinvent himself and will always be thankful that Richie was honest and sincere when it mattered the most, not just for Kyle, but for America.
[00:48:37]  Okay, so that was number one.
[00:48:39]  David has since added a second paragraph to that reads, that reads, Kyle thought waiting until the two-year anniversary of Kenosha to pander to the left with selective storytelling was painfully transparent, but pretending the thugs who attacked him were now victims was hypocritical and unprincipled.
[00:49:01]  So that's him to you.
[00:49:03]  He's referring to your behavior.
[00:49:04]  Kyle, this is from him directly, writes as follows, quote, unfortunately, Richie's latest story leaves a lot of important details out, including my intentions to help others while I was there or the fact that I was chased down and assaulted by an armed mob.
[00:49:19]  I am grateful he told the truth when it mattered.
[00:49:22]  His new story doesn't change the facts of that day.
[00:49:25]  I am forever grateful for the justice system for seeing my innocence in all of this.
[00:49:30]  So what do you make of it?
[00:49:31]  You've left out a lot of details, including his intentions.
[00:49:35]  Grateful you told the truth when it mattered.
[00:49:38]  You now have a new story that they think is hypocritical, unprincipled, and painfully transparent as you attempt to, quote, pander to the left.
[00:49:49]  Well, see, that's what I was talking about earlier, which is if you, you know, step outside of, you know, that trench, then you're going to basically be cast into the other one.
[00:49:58]  And so when I was during the trial, you know, people were calling me a right-wing conservative.
[00:50:02]  And now people are saying that I'm pandering the left with this new piece.
[00:50:06]  I mean, I think that Kyle, you know, that response, I think that that's a very fair contention.
[00:50:12]  I did include details of why he said he stated that he was there.
[00:50:17]  He stated, I mean, he wasn't an actual medic, though.
[00:50:20]  So he was there to help people who were injured, but he wasn't, he wasn't an actual trained medic.
[00:50:27]  He had lifeguard certification.
[00:50:29]  So I'm just as much a medic as he is, having been a surf instructor.
[00:50:33]  Secondarily, I use the word playing cop for a reason.
[00:50:36]  And it's because what I picked up on the moment that I was walking through the streets with him is that he was playing the role of both cop, medic later on when he had the fire extinguisher, also fireman.
[00:50:47]  But it was like he was playing a role.
[00:50:50]  It wasn't like he was actually, you know, really knew what he was doing in that situation.
[00:50:55]  And so my piece is the intention is to show my personal perspective and going from witness to human being.
[00:51:04]  And so, you know, I didn't, I didn't intend this as a hit piece to Kyle in any way, shape or form.
[00:51:09]  And in fact, it's it's, I believe, more excoriating of the media than anybody else.
[00:51:14]  But that's what everybody focused on.
[00:51:16]  And I wish the best for Kyle.
[00:51:19]  I know that he suffered a lot of trauma as a result of what happened.
[00:51:22]  And I didn't mean to add on to that.
[00:51:24]  But with that being said, I did have to take the opportunity to state my human perspective of the events that night because I believe that, you know, down the road, it's an important perspective.
[00:51:36]  And I was right there.
[00:51:36]  And what people got from me prior to that piece was me trying my best to play the role of witness.
[00:51:42]  So if people don't like, you know, what my opinion is, that's fine.
[00:51:46]  This is America.
[00:51:47]  I mean, I really appreciate the fact that we're even able to have like the fact that we're on this show right now and we're talking about this at such great length and that we actually even got a response from Kyle and I'm now interacting with that.
[00:51:59]  That's exactly what I want to come out of all of what happened in 2020, which is people, a reckoning on the media where people realize that the corporate institutions that drive our discourse are driving us apart.
[00:52:10]  And you know what?
[00:52:11]  If like if Kyle wants to have a beer or sit down on a podcast and talk about it, I'm willing to talk to anybody.
[00:52:17]  You know, I'm not saying like he's welcome to do that right here.
[00:52:20]  He's never been on the show, though I invited him.
[00:52:22]  Yeah.
[00:52:23]  I have no problem with that because he is a human being and he was affected just like I was.
[00:52:28]  And so me providing my perspective, that word victim, it was not used in a legal sense.
[00:52:33]  I was not stating that he was criminally liable for anything.
[00:52:37]  They're dead and he's not.
[00:52:39]  And there was a series of decisions that went into that.
[00:52:41]  I know, but like, I'll just challenge you on that.
[00:52:43]  But the reason they're dead and he's not is there is there, that's what I was going at earlier.
[00:52:47]  Nobody made Rosenbaum show up at that thing at that protest.
[00:52:51]  Nobody made him run after Kyle.
[00:52:52]  Nobody made him lunge for a gun he could clearly see was there and dangerous.
[00:52:56]  You know, I see this and I say it's unfortunate he made those decisions, but that's on him.
[00:53:01]  That is on him.
[00:53:02]  So that's what people are reacting.
[00:53:03]  And then you find out his background and you really, like most of us, not those who held him while he was dying, think, I'm done.
[00:53:09]  I'm kind of out of sympathy for Joseph Rosenbaum.
[00:53:12]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:53:14]  Look, that's totally fine.
[00:53:16]  And I absolutely understand that opinion.
[00:53:18]  And I understand why people have that opinion.
[00:53:20]  But like I said, I can't unpack the lived experience of that.
[00:53:25]  And I didn't know those details at the time.
[00:53:28]  And what about this, though, Richie?
[00:53:30]  What about this?
[00:53:31]  Because they said people are hating you because when you went back to Kenosha, you said I tried to retrace my steps.
[00:53:36]  There was no memorial for Rosenbaumer Hoover.
[00:53:39]  Huber's the other guy who was killed.
[00:53:41]  And, you know, people are like, what?
[00:53:44]  What is he saying?
[00:53:45]  Those were bad guys who attacked a 17-year-old.
[00:53:49]  Well, what I was the point of providing that detail was actually to mirror the lionization that happened with Rosenbaum initially, and then how after the case, you know, they forgot about him.
[00:54:01]  And so, like, there's still a, if you go to where George Floyd died, there's a massive memorial that's still there, right?
[00:54:06]  And I'm not saying it wasn't a judgment on their behavior, it was a judgment on the way in which the city is moving forward.
[00:54:12]  And so, the fact that there was no memorial for them, I also said in the next sentence that there's, there was no plaque for the riots and the violence.
[00:54:18]  Like, so are you saying that they were fake news when they tried to act like they were all concerned about Hoover and Rosenbaum?
[00:54:24]  That that was beaten.
[00:54:25]  Yes, they were exactly.
[00:54:26]  And so, it's funny because that detail was actually what I was trying to get at is the fact that the left used him opportunistically, used Rosenbaum and Huber opportunistically as heroes, and then kind of just cast him to the wayside.
[00:54:39]  And the city itself wants to forget about what happened.
[00:54:42]  And so, that was the conclusion of that detail.
[00:54:45]  Yeah, I'm well aware of the way that people responded to it, but that was what I experienced and what I saw and what I thought about when I was there.
[00:54:53]  So, I really mean on the flip side, and we've talked about it at length on the show, though not with you.
[00:54:59]  The demonization of Kyle Rittenhouse by the media.
[00:55:01]  Yes.
[00:55:02]  Yes.
[00:55:02]  I mean, absolutely.
[00:55:04]  It dwarfs anything that we've talked about.
[00:55:06]  It's been absolutely disgusting from the beginning.
[00:55:10]  As we now know, this kid, he was not a vigilante.
[00:55:13]  He was not a white supremacist.
[00:55:14]  There was absolutely no evidence to that effect, but he was called that by people like Joe Biden.
[00:55:18]  I mean, it's crazy that Joe Biden actually called Kyle a white supremacist.
[00:55:22]  And so the kid has been through a lot.
[00:55:25]  He was on Tucker recently because we are at the two-year mark since it all happened and described his life these days as follows.
[00:55:34]  Well, we're going to make the media pay for what they did to me.
[00:55:36]  They made it hard for me to live a normal life.
[00:55:39]  I can't go out into public.
[00:55:41]  I can't go to the store.
[00:55:42]  It's hard for me to go anywhere without security.
[00:55:45]  True, doing basic things like taking my dog to the dog park is difficult.
[00:55:50]  So they made it really difficult to be normal and they affected future job opportunities to me.
[00:55:56]  I don't think I'll ever be able to work or get a job because I'm afraid an employer may not hire me.
[00:56:03]  So as somebody who was kind of living it with Kyle in a way, on a parallel track, at least, a witness, somebody was there that night and so on.
[00:56:11]  How do you see what the media and these Democrats?
[00:56:14]  I mean, it's not, you have to say it was people like Kamala Harris.
[00:56:17]  It was people like Joe Biden.
[00:56:18]  It was people like Hakeem Jeffries, head of the Democratic Congressional Congress.
[00:56:23]  Those are the ones who demonized him publicly and have not apologized, not even a little.
[00:56:28]  How do you see their role?
[00:56:29]  Yeah.
[00:56:30]  So basically, that piece was one slice of, you know, basically how each side tried to lionize and demonize them.
[00:56:38]  But I'm going to get into that much deeper.
[00:56:40]  And there'll be much more to come regarding that story of how I remember the next morning, I mean, I didn't even sleep.
[00:56:47]  I wasn't at the cops, the police station until like 4:30 a.m.
[00:56:51]  Got home.
[00:56:51]  There was a Vice News article that stated that he opened fire.
[00:56:53]  And that was when I decided, okay, I got to go on the news as fast as possible because it's crazy that people in the media are taking what happened and claiming that he opened fire because, you know, opened fire on protesters, they said.
[00:57:05]  So basically, like from the moment that I saw that article, I knew that there was going to be a huge narrative that was being spun up.
[00:57:12]  And then the fact that he was being called a white supremacist, obviously that just takes it a step even further.
[00:57:18]  I did state in the piece that, you know, one side called him a hero, the other side called him a white supremacist, and neither of those were true.
[00:57:25]  So I, you know, basically both of those.
[00:57:28]  I will say though, but I will say it was not, it wasn't even at all.
[00:57:31]  It was like a complete media pylon in the guy.
[00:57:34]  Yes.
[00:57:34]  And then there were some more right-leaning journalists who called him a hero, but I think a lot of people on the right were just open-minded to his self-defense claims.
[00:57:41]  It was like, they're not equivalent.
[00:57:43]  Would you agree?
[00:57:44]  I mean, the amount of incoming he took from the media was breathtaking.
[00:57:50]  100%.
[00:57:51]  But I also don't think that that warrants, you know, the right taking a reactionary approach, which is like, well, if they say he's the worst, then we're going to prop him up and not be seriously about the.
[00:58:03]  Just pulled a couple of examples.
[00:58:07]  This is, we saw some stuff like this, but NAACP president commented. after the verdict.
[00:58:14]  This verdict reminds us of the treacherous role that white supremacy and privilege play within our just, what?
[00:58:20]  What?
[00:58:21]  Then there was Reverend Al Sharpton never misses a moment to exploit.
[00:58:24]  These continue to be dark days for black people killed at the hands of people that believe our lives do not matter.
[00:58:29]  There were no black people there that night and involved in the shootings, right?
[00:58:33]  Nobody, no black person was shot that night and no black person was doing the shooting that night in Kenosha.
[00:58:40]  But still, like the race baiters like Sharpton, again, never miss an opportunity.
[00:58:44]  All right, let me turn the page because I know we only have a minute left.
[00:58:47]  The New York Times decided, I mean, this is like a theme in your life getting smeared.
[00:58:53]  Totally unfairly after January 6th, where you were covering that too, in your role as a journalist.
[00:58:59]  They put you in the New York Times in an article called The American Abyss, Picture of You, a historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob, and what comes next.
[00:59:12]  You're right there without your shirt.
[00:59:16]  I'm looking for my phone.
[00:59:17]  I lost my phone.
[00:59:18]  All right, I'm just saying your shirt's off again.
[00:59:20]  Okay, for our listening audience, naked as a Jersey from the belt up.
[00:59:26]  And they, this is the caption.
[00:59:28]  A rioter, a rioter, that's you, during the mayhem at the Capitol period.
[00:59:34]  He punched the door after being pepper sprayed and forced out of the building at 3.45 p.m.
[00:59:40]  Virtually every word in that is untrue.
[00:59:43]  Yeah.
[00:59:43]  Also, it's hilarious that they claim that like I punched that door and somehow that was me who broke it.
[00:59:49]  Because when I got knocked down, it was actually right as they were closing the final doors.
[00:59:53]  I was trying to capture that last moment of the last group being forced out and I got knocked into the door.
[00:59:59]  My head hit the door and I'm a hockey player.
[01:00:01]  Like I'm holding on to that phone no matter what.
[01:00:04]  And I've been in situations where I've been knocked down and clutching it.
[01:00:07]  I got my bell rung, concussion and dropped my phone.
[01:00:10]  And so I landed on actually a pry bar, not a crowbar, but like a bar that's like this long, which is used to pry open, you know, very heavy things.
[01:00:17]  And I landed on that.
[01:00:18]  I'm bleeding.
[01:00:19]  I get up and I'm tapping on the window phone.
[01:00:23]  You know, where's my phone to the cops?
[01:00:24]  It looks like I'm saying fuck in the photo.
[01:00:27]  I'm saying phone and I'm tapping with my finger.
[01:00:30]  And so they take that photo and then me tapping my finger and saying phone turns into he punched, he broke that door.
[01:00:37]  You know, that's the implication.
[01:00:39]  He's a rioter.
[01:00:39]  He looks like a lot of people.
[01:00:40]  Did they ever call you?
[01:00:42]  Did the Times before running this call you at all?
[01:00:45]  Oh, so I they did not call me prior.
[01:00:47]  No, absolutely.
[01:00:48]  Absolutely not.
[01:00:49]  They didn't call me.
[01:00:50]  I don't even think they knew that they'd relied on me for a lot of the stuff in Kenosha.
[01:00:54]  I talked with their forensics reporter like in multiple nights, multiple hours, so make sure that he got a lot of the details right.
[01:01:00]  So, no, they didn't run anything by me.
[01:01:03]  And then they actually had to get them to issue multiple corrections after the fact.
[01:01:07]  Yeah, the first correction says, okay, we were wrong in the earlier version of the essay, misidentified the shirtless man.
[01:01:16]  He was a videographer working for the Daily Caller, a right-wing website, not one of the Trump supporters who's not good enough, New York Times.
[01:01:23]  They had said you were a rioter, that you would punch.
[01:01:27]  What are you talking about?
[01:01:28]  You're going to have to be a little bit more forthcoming, or I'm going to sue your ass.
[01:01:31]  That's really what was going on.
[01:01:32]  So then finally come out with another correction saying, wrong again.

=== The Long Story of Typecasting (03:29) ===

[01:01:39]  They got rid of the right wing thing because somebody there wised up and said, Let's not be douchebags about it.
[01:01:43]  Well, I hired my own lawyer, and there's a there's a long story there on how that all happened.
[01:01:47]  But even that had to be forced out.
[01:01:51]  I paid for it, literally.
[01:01:53]  God.
[01:01:55]  I mean, I had a great lawyer, but basically, you know, I talked to 50 lawyers before I settled on him.
[01:02:01]  And they're all saying, Oh, we're going to go to the Supreme Court and we're going to just keep going until they pay up.
[01:02:06]  And this lawyer, who I won't name because I haven't gotten his permission, but he was like, Yeah, I bet you everybody's telling you we're going to take the Supreme Court.
[01:02:12]  He goes, Guess what?
[01:02:13]  They're getting paid and you're paying them that whole time.
[01:02:16]  He's like, I'll pursue corrective action.
[01:02:18]  Give me your wish list and pay me X amount.
[01:02:21]  You know, it was, I sold some Dogecoin.
[01:02:23]  So it was, it was good that I sold that at the time, anyways.
[01:02:27]  And so I'm not, I'm not like, it's such a long story in terms of how the first correction happened and how, you know, I kind of argued for the second correction and still wasn't good enough.
[01:02:36]  And then I had to go and hire a lawyer.
[01:02:37]  And, but that whole story, I think it's a great way to unpack, you know, how these tragedies happen and then get completely manipulated.
[01:02:44]  Like, you know, people were saying that Kyle opened fire or people were like used me as that same kind of caricature of evil, shirtless.
[01:02:52]  You know, I'm not going to lie.
[01:02:54]  My hair is long.
[01:02:55]  You know, I look kind of like a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal.
[01:02:58]  Okay.
[01:02:58]  You have a weird face on, but, but your muscles look good.
[01:03:04]  But, you know, no, you're right.
[01:03:05]  This is all part of the same long story about a media that's agenda-driven and not fact-driven.
[01:03:11]  Unlike you, I'd like to believe myself as well.
[01:03:14]  And so that leads me to my last point, which is what next?
[01:03:18]  You left the Daily Caller.
[01:03:20]  Why?
[01:03:21]  And what next?
[01:03:23]  Well, I left because I've been number one, trying to unpack everything that happened in 2020 and 2021, writing all that down.
[01:03:30]  And I've been doing it all in my off time on the weekends.
[01:03:33]  And now that I have, you know, basically a manuscript together, I have to edit it.
[01:03:37]  It's an incredible amount of work.
[01:03:39]  So that's one.
[01:03:40]  And, but number two, the typecasting that we were talking about through, you know, both, both sides, one side typecasting me as tripanering to the left when my opinion is not in their favor.
[01:03:53]  And then one side, you know, calling me a right-wing rioter, et cetera.
[01:03:59]  I just wanted to step outside of that and just kind of be free to say whatever I want, regardless of workplace typecast.
[01:04:07]  And my first story that I'm working on, I've known this, well, he likes being called a bum.
[01:04:11]  So I'm using the term bum.
[01:04:12]  I actually talked to him about that.
[01:04:14]  He claims that they're the wisest people in DC because they see everybody.
[01:04:18]  But I've known this guy for eight years.
[01:04:20]  I give him a couple of cigarettes or a couple bucks or a nugget of weed, whatever to help him over the last eight years.
[01:04:27]  And I've just been sitting down talking to him, you know, under the bridge and we're just hanging out, eating steak.
[01:04:33]  And so I think that the message there is like, I'm sick and tired of the media saying, oh, you can't talk to this person or you can't put a human face on that person.
[01:04:40]  I will, you know, talk to whoever and elicit their truth and then let the audience decide.
[01:04:46]  And so while, you know, I put my opinion in that newsweek piece, I do, I do want to approach these kinds of stories that are getting polarized by the media really with that same strategy that we did in 2020, which is just be a fly on the wall and elicit their truth.
[01:05:02]  But now that I'm doing it on my own, really, you know, the coverage, what stories I decide to focus on, that's up to me, which is my favorite part about it.

=== Lion King and Made-Up Stories (05:09) ===

[01:05:08]  That's great.
[01:05:10]  And what, Substack?
[01:05:11]  I would assume that would be one out of the way.substack.com.
[01:05:15]  Okay, good.
[01:05:16]  And also, well, you're welcome to come on here anytime.
[01:05:21]  I trust your journalism.
[01:05:23]  I can say that firsthand.
[01:05:24]  I've seen it for many years now.
[01:05:25]  And I'm totally rooting for you, Richie.
[01:05:27]  All the best to you.
[01:05:28]  I appreciate you having me, Megan.
[01:05:30]  Thank you very much.
[01:05:31]  Yeah.
[01:05:31]  All right.
[01:05:31]  We'll see you again soon, I hope.
[01:05:33]  Coming up, you will not believe this, but there is breaking news about Megan Markle.
[01:05:37]  We'll tell you who's coming forward to challenge her latest round of BS in that magazine article that's getting all that buzz.
[01:05:44]  You're not going to want to miss this.
[01:05:50]  My guest here is Maureen Callahan, critic at large for the New York Post.
[01:05:54]  If you don't read Maureen Callahan, oh, you are missing out.
[01:05:57]  She is so great with a pen.
[01:06:00]  Her piece was on the cover of the post yesterday, and she gives a hilarious and unforgiving and totally honest take on what she calls toddler and tiara tantrums that Megan Markle continues to throw over her alleged mistreatment by the royal family.
[01:06:15]  Maureen, welcome to the show.
[01:06:17]  Oh, thanks so much for having me, Megan.
[01:06:19]  Thanks for that intro.
[01:06:20]  Oh, it's amazing.
[01:06:21]  I read everything you write.
[01:06:23]  Oh, thanks.
[01:06:24]  Oh, and my God, we all circulated.
[01:06:25]  We're like, Maureen, she's back.
[01:06:27]  If you haven't seen the one she did on Alec Baldwin a couple of weeks ago, you're missing out.
[01:06:30]  Okay.
[01:06:31]  So she said, so Megan Markle said that she saw the live production of The Lion King in London.
[01:06:40]  This is what she says to the cut magazine.
[01:06:42]  And that when she saw it, someone came out from the cast who was from South Africa and told her that basically when she married Prince Harry, it was as big in South Africa as when Nelson Mandela was freed.
[01:07:05]  So already, it says a lot about Megan.
[01:07:07]  Like, okay, so I'm thinking, all right, the fact that she would choose that anecdote to relay to New York magazine, essentially the cut, as indicative of her press and how people feel about her is totally tone deaf and her head is in the clouds because people have said crazy nice things to me and they've said crazy mean things to me.
[01:07:28]  And I would never repeat them to a reporter as indicative of what my press is or how people really feel about me, right?
[01:07:35]  So the fact that she plucked that one to say this, this is what I mean to the people, tells you a lot about Megan Markle.
[01:07:42]  But now we find out it appears to have been a lie.
[01:07:48]  You don't say.
[01:07:50]  Maureen, the Daily Mail, and God bless the Daily Mail for going and doing this.
[01:07:55]  They went and found all of the actors who were in that live version of The Lion King.
[01:08:01]  And they found the one guy who was from South Africa.
[01:08:06]  As Megan claims, the person who said this to her was in the cast and from South Africa.
[01:08:11]  Okay, and I'm going to read it to you.
[01:08:12]  An acclaimed actor and friend of Nelson Mandela today told Daily Mail he's baffled by her suggestions that the country had rejoiced when she married Prince Harry and revealed he's never met her, despite claiming to be the only South African member of the cast in Disney's remake of The Lion King.
[01:08:28]  All right, so that his name is Doc.
[01:08:30]  He's gone on the record.
[01:08:31]  His name is Dr. John Connie, K-A-N-I.
[01:08:34]  He believes the Duchess of Sussex has made a, quote, faux pas after she used a U.S. magazine interview to imply that her royal wedding sparked celebrations in South Africa, reminiscent of the release of his friend, Nelson Mandela, the legendary anti-apartheid leader.
[01:08:49]  He said Mr. Mandela's Walk to Freedom after 27 years was a landmark moment, while her marriage to Prince Harry was no big deal in South Africa, adding that the two events, quote, cannot be spoken of in the same breath.
[01:09:00]  And you can't really even say where you were when Megan married Harry.
[01:09:04]  She, of course, had gone on, blah, blah, blah.
[01:09:06]  Oh, here's her quote.
[01:09:07]  I just need you to know.
[01:09:07]  He allegedly looked at me and said, I just need you to know when you married into this family.
[01:09:12]  We rejoiced in the streets the same as we did when Mandela was freed from prison.
[01:09:16]  But Dr. Connie, a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company who voiced the Mandrill shaman Rafiki, told DailyMail.com he was the only South African in the production.
[01:09:26]  He's never met Megan.
[01:09:27]  He was not at the UK premiere.
[01:09:30]  And he said the only other South African who was involved was Lebo M, a composer who was responsible for the music, but he was not in the cast.
[01:09:38]  Anyway, Maureen, it appears to be completely made up.
[01:09:44]  Oh, you know, I feel as though everyone aside from Megan Markle has realized that Megan Markle is now firmly in camp territory.
[01:09:55]  You know, to compare yourself, you know, a minor royal who worked for, I think, 18 months, maybe, to Nelson Mandela.
[01:10:06]  I mean, I said in the column, it's clear she has no friends left.
[01:10:11]  It's clear that there is no publicist or crisis manager of repute who would work with her.

=== Digging Her Own Grave (07:54) ===

[01:10:18]  You know, I just, it, it, it made me laugh out loud, but also it was jaw-dropping and offensive and narcissistic isn't a big enough word.
[01:10:31]  Um, but I, you know, she just, she keeps giving us like this is the content she's providing.
[01:10:39]  She doesn't realize it's, it's comic relief.
[01:10:43]  Like we're not admiring her.
[01:10:44]  No, understand.
[01:10:46]  And then and then when we don't admire her, she gets confused.
[01:10:48]  Like I'm being misrepresented again, as opposed to the reality of, no, you're perfectly well represented.
[01:10:55]  We see exactly who you are and are reacting accordingly.
[01:10:59]  Well, the, you know, you mentioned at the, at the top of the segment, um, her second podcast episode.
[01:11:07]  I listened to the first.
[01:11:08]  It was really, it was really tough going.
[01:11:10]  I mean, I earned my paycheck that week.
[01:11:13]  But, you know, Mariah Carey saying to her, you've given us some diva moments.
[01:11:18]  And, you know, Megan has this sort of on-air meltdown in which she sort of talks herself out of believing that somehow shade into Mariah actually paying her the highest of compliments.
[01:11:30]  You know, it's a really fascinating window into that psyche where criticism of any kind, it just cannot be tolerated.
[01:11:39]  Yes, that's exactly right.
[01:11:40]  And she has a pattern of that, right?
[01:11:42]  Assuing, I mean, we all get bad press.
[01:11:44]  Anybody who's in the public eye is going to get negative, nasty press.
[01:11:47]  For me, I move past it.
[01:11:49]  I'm quick to forgive.
[01:11:50]  It's our business.
[01:11:51]  You can't be a public figure and not be able to take some barbs and arrows and just move, move on.
[01:11:55]  You know, like, my God, be a grown-up.
[01:11:57]  But the more she talks, the more I'm like, oh, now I get it.
[01:12:01]  Like Mariah Carey, who Megan is calling a diva, turns to her and says, you've had diva moments too.
[01:12:08]  And she's so wounded that she later says she began sweating and realized her girl crush might be over and was only able to move past it once Mariah clarified that she meant it as a compliment and was speaking about Megan's looks.
[01:12:24]  I threw up a little in my mouth, Maureen.
[01:12:29]  Yeah, I mean, this is kind of what we're in for.
[01:12:31]  I think her Spotify, her presence on Spotify will not be a long one.
[01:12:38]  I just, the other thing that, you know, perplexes me, and we saw it with the Oprah interview.
[01:12:47]  And at the time, and I'm not saying this in sort of any self-congratulatory way, but at the time, I felt like I was the only person watching it who thought she was completely full of it, you know?
[01:12:57]  It was such a terrible performance.
[01:12:59]  And Prince Harry looked so uncomfortable, especially when she brought up the thing about the quote unquote racist royal, you know, and you saw Oprah's eyes just light up, you know, and then they pretended to be offended beyond all measure, but you know, you see Oprah going, oh my God, this is the most amazing piece of gossip I've heard in forever.
[01:13:20]  But she lies.
[01:13:21]  She's a liar.
[01:13:22]  She's a liar.
[01:13:23]  And I see very few in the media willing to call her out on that.
[01:13:28]  Yeah.
[01:13:29]  And I think it's an interesting bellwether in terms of where we are as a society.
[01:13:34]  You know, there's something a little bit deeper going on.
[01:13:37]  And, you know, I think that with her, you know, she brought up race again in the interview without ever bringing it up, you know, without ever using the words, but, you know, a lot of charged stuff.
[01:13:49]  And, you know, what she's really doing is trivializing it.
[01:13:53]  And what she's really doing is, you know, sort of digging her own grave because there will come a point when nobody will believe.
[01:14:00]  My other favorite tall tale from her podcast last week was in some substance that baby Archie almost burned to death while they were on tour in South Africa and the royals did not care.
[01:14:12]  That's right.
[01:14:13]  He was caught in a towering inferno.
[01:14:15]  Right.
[01:14:16]  And no one gave a shit.
[01:14:17]  Yeah, the space heater, the errant space heater that almost went up, you know, I mean, dear.
[01:14:21]  In a room in which the baby was not present.
[01:14:24]  No, the baby wasn't there.
[01:14:25]  Conveniently left out.
[01:14:26]  The baby was not there.
[01:14:27]  The baby was never in danger.
[01:14:29]  But, you know, to Megan, in her description of it, this was just the most monstrous thing for the royals to expect her to carry on with her duties as though nothing had happened because in essence, nothing had happened.
[01:14:45]  Right.
[01:14:45]  So she does lie.
[01:14:47]  And you're exactly right.
[01:14:48]  I wanted to make a point on the race thing.
[01:14:50]  So she says to Oprah, there's a raging racist, basically, in the royal family who is concerned about how dark my children are going to be.
[01:14:58]  And she doesn't have the presence of mind while Prince Philip at the time was on his deathbed to at least exclude the old people.
[01:15:05]  It's not the queen and it's not Prince Philip who's almost dead.
[01:15:08]  Right.
[01:15:08]  No, she won't do that.
[01:15:09]  Harry didn't do that either.
[01:15:11]  They just kept their mouths silent and indicted everybody in doing that.
[01:15:15]  And Oprah, no follow-up.
[01:15:17]  What?
[01:15:18]  Like, right?
[01:15:18]  Like she, I would have been all over them like white on rice.
[01:15:22]  You know what I mean?
[01:15:22]  Like, who exactly?
[01:15:23]  You have to tell me.
[01:15:24]  You can't make an allegation like that.
[01:15:25]  And not, she gave one pushback and that was it.
[01:15:28]  Who, when, where, why?
[01:15:30]  What was the follow-up?
[01:15:31]  What did you do?
[01:15:32]  Same problem for this reporter from the cut, right?
[01:15:35]  Where Megan goes on about, she says that the press has been calling her children the N-word.
[01:15:42]  Totally unsubstantial.
[01:15:43]  Who?
[01:15:44]  Which press?
[01:15:44]  Which reporter?
[01:15:45]  Which publish, which publication did that?
[01:15:48]  When was it?
[01:15:48]  What did you do?
[01:15:49]  Was it ever retracted?
[01:15:50]  How did they say it?
[01:15:51]  Did they actually use it?
[01:15:52]  Because that word could never appear in a paper in today's day.
[01:15:55]  Like, no follow-up.
[01:15:56]  She just throws it out there because she knows that they'll dine on it.
[01:15:59]  They'll love it.
[01:16:00]  And then on the flip side, she's apparently doing the same thing in a positive way.
[01:16:04]  She's using race in a positive way and comparing herself to Nelson Mandela, which is also a lie.
[01:16:09]  It's also, I think that's, it's terrible.
[01:16:14]  Nelson Mandela.
[01:16:15]  I mean, that's sacrilege.
[01:16:16]  I, you know, but I do think the, um, what you were saying about Oprah, I do think Oprah realizes the dent that that interview did to her legacy, her brand.
[01:16:28]  She's kept her distance since.
[01:16:29]  It was remarkably sycophantic for someone like Oprah.
[01:16:32]  I mean, she, you know, that was incredible.
[01:16:35]  The other thing that I'm so glad you brought up that the assertion that Megan made that her baby has been called the N-word.
[01:16:44]  Okay.
[01:16:44]  A baby.
[01:16:46]  Now, someone as wildly litigious as Ms. Megan Markle, you don't think she would have slapped whatever outlet that was, whatever journalist that was with a lawsuit post-haste?
[01:16:58]  Please, do you think that if that had been printed anywhere, aired anywhere, that that wouldn't be a huge story that even people who are not fans of Megan Markle would find that offensive and wrong?
[01:17:12]  You know, I mean, she, she, she's not nearly as smart as she believes herself to be because she makes up these lies that are so easily debunked.
[01:17:23]  Debunked, fact-checked quickly.
[01:17:26]  And I wonder, you know, I think, you know, the more she talks, I think the more toxic a presence she becomes.
[01:17:35]  I don't think, you know, she's sort of gone from when she first married in, she was editing British Vogue.
[01:17:43]  And she, before she was even married to Harry, she was on the cover of Vanity Fair, which if anybody needs a good end of summer read, Tom Bauer's book on the royals, he's got this great vignette in there in which, you know, the royals said to her, you cannot, you can do this cover, but you cannot talk about anything regarding your relationship with Harry or your, you know, sort of, they were fast tracking her in, which is also something she never, ever talks about.

=== Relational Difficulties in the Family (08:15) ===

[01:18:12]  All the sort of special dispensations she was given because she was, she was seen as a win.
[01:18:17]  You know, she was seen as an asset.
[01:18:20]  And they wanted Harry to be happy.
[01:18:22]  But, you know, she's gone from Vanity Fair, which in Bower's book, he talks about how she lied to Harry and told him they were putting her on the cover because of her of her basic cable show that like 10 people watch, you know?
[01:18:36]  And so now he must know this is, I mean, you have to wonder what it's like in that house, you know, when lie upon lie sort of reveals itself.
[01:18:45]  Sounds like a nightmare.
[01:18:46]  I mean, this is the anecdotes in that piece by the cut where he, she, I know you wrote about this, I think, but where they saw the two palm trees in the backyard of their Montecito mansion and they knew they had to buy it because they were entwined at the bottom.
[01:19:00]  And she tells the reporter, my husband, she only calls him my husband.
[01:19:03]  My husband looked at me and said, my love, they're us.
[01:19:09]  Oh, there are so many gems in this piece.
[01:19:12]  One of my other favorites, which I didn't make it into the column, was, you know, she has Harry up the road at the, you know, the multi-millionaires' house up the road fixing her sprinklers.
[01:19:22]  Oh, right.
[01:19:23]  Yeah.
[01:19:23]  Like, like, I don't, I don't think this guy has ever even used an ATM until he moved to America.
[01:19:30]  I mean it.
[01:19:30]  Like, I don't think there are many things he can do for himself.
[01:19:35]  You know, there's, there's this moment.
[01:19:38]  They only talk about how he's joined a polo team.
[01:19:41]  Anything else?
[01:19:42]  Great.
[01:19:43]  Great.
[01:19:44]  Yeah.
[01:19:44]  I mean, there's this moment where, you know, she was gone the day before doing this photo shoot, which she couldn't do in her own mansion.
[01:19:52]  She had to borrow a mansion for it.
[01:19:54]  God knows why.
[01:19:55]  And he says to her, you were gone for 10 hours yesterday.
[01:19:58]  You know, like he was clearly just rattling around hapless and helpless.
[01:20:02]  And my other favorite was the school run.
[01:20:06]  Another lie.
[01:20:08]  This great detail she's gotten there where these two mothers waiting for their kids to do a double take.
[01:20:13]  And it doesn't seem that it's because they can't believe the Megan Markle is in their presence.
[01:20:18]  It's because they probably never see her at pickup.
[01:20:22]  It's probably the nanny.
[01:20:24]  And then, of course, there's a different way.
[01:20:26]  She's the homeless guy, right?
[01:20:27]  Oh, right.
[01:20:28]  The homeless guy who I love how you talk about how, yes, what are we teaching little Archie?
[01:20:31]  Because they stopped and gave some homeless guy a backpack with like some supplies in it.
[01:20:35]  Go ahead.
[01:20:36]  Like a puny, like, you know, granola bar because, you know, you can only eat healthy and organic, even if you're homeless.
[01:20:42]  Like, don't give them a full meal.
[01:20:43]  Don't give them a gift card or some cash or, you know, anything usable, but, you know, like a backpack she has, her security guy.
[01:20:51]  Dear, it's, it's so good.
[01:20:53]  It's so good.
[01:20:55]  Pay attention, Archie.
[01:20:56]  When one is a child or when one grows up and one wants to help somebody who's suffering, send your security.
[01:21:01]  You send your staff right out there.
[01:21:04]  And then you come home to your Tyler Perry gifted grand piano.
[01:21:09]  Like the name dropping of the celebrities who I knew before I met my husband.
[01:21:15]  You say in your piece.
[01:21:16]  Oh, so relatable, right?
[01:21:17]  Like she doesn't get why we can't stand her.
[01:21:19]  Oh, my goodness.
[01:21:20]  She did it with Serena Williams, too.
[01:21:22]  The bulk of the podcast was making sure that we all understood that she befriended Serena before she ever knew Harry, right?
[01:21:31]  So, you know, it's such a, she doesn't sort of realize how much her slip is showing, right?
[01:21:38]  The level of insecurity.
[01:21:41]  I just read this amazing quote by Marlon Brando.
[01:21:43]  He called, he once called Bob Hope a barrel without a bottom.
[01:21:48]  And I think Megan Markle is our barrel without a bottom.
[01:21:53]  It is a bottomless pit of need that no amount of podcasts or Netflix deals or magazine covers will ever fill.
[01:22:04]  That's the thing.
[01:22:04]  She's not interesting and she's not special and she's never accomplished anything of note in her life beyond becoming backup girl number 40 for Howie Mandel.
[01:22:16]  The only thing that makes her interesting is the fact that she married Prince Harry.
[01:22:21]  And it's the thing that she is most embittered about, angry about.
[01:22:26]  She spends all of her time now criticizing the royal family, which is the only reason anyone gives a damn about her, right?
[01:22:34]  And I think she's run out of material, quite frankly, you know?
[01:22:38]  She's always alluding to, well, there's things I might say, you know, the way the piece ends, she says like, you know, I'm quiet until I'm not, you know, I've been, she, after keeping anything.
[01:22:51]  Yeah, she alluded.
[01:22:52]  She's been keeping a journal.
[01:22:53]  I mean, I think that the royals had her number pretty early on.
[01:22:57]  I think they probably limited her access to anything of real, you know, the only thing she's got is whatever relational difficulties exist between the brothers, you know.
[01:23:11]  And I also thought it was pretty great when the palace sort of refuted that claim that she made in the Oprah interview about Kate making her cry, you know, and she did this, the thing that she always does.
[01:23:24]  And she's never as delicate about it as she thinks she is.
[01:23:26]  She's, you know, I couldn't possibly talk badly about my sister-in-law, but just let me talk about her.
[01:23:31]  Like, let me criticize her just for a minute.
[01:23:33]  And then I'm going to pull back, you know, and the real story, and I think this also came from Bower's book, is that she was bullying Charlotte, who is at the time was three, Kate and William's daughter, who was going to be a bridesmaid.
[01:23:49]  She was bullying her because she wasn't up to snuff, I suppose.
[01:23:53]  And Kate cried and then went over with a peace offering.
[01:23:57]  She went over to the apartment that Megan shared with Harry and brought flowers.
[01:24:02]  And Megan took the flowers, threw them in the trash and slammed the door in Kate Middleton's face.
[01:24:08]  I mean, that is a version of offense I find much more credible.
[01:24:13]  Me too, because she thinks if we just know her again, like we're going to like her.
[01:24:17]  Okay, show me the friends who know you, who have stuck by you.
[01:24:20]  Who's still in your life?
[01:24:21]  There's not even a family member.
[01:24:22]  They're all gone.
[01:24:23]  Everyone who knew you either fled from you or they were dumped by you because they weren't famous.
[01:24:28]  They weren't Tyler Paper, Peter Perry.
[01:24:31]  They weren't Oprah, Gail, all these people who she didn't know at all, who she had at her wedding.
[01:24:35]  George Clooney, I'm sure they were really tight, right?
[01:24:37]  Like the people who did know her jumped ship.
[01:24:40]  And on the subject of the lies, I thought the one you were going to mention earlier, that she claimed she can't have this life in London of dropping her children off at school, which she conveniently brought the cut reporter to, because, quote, I would have 40 photographers taking photos in a press pen if I wanted to drop Archie at school in the UK.
[01:25:00]  Meanwhile, my friend Dan Wooden, who has broken tons of news on them, says William and Kate drop off and pick up their three kids, including the future king of England, literally every single day.
[01:25:13]  And there's not one photographer there.
[01:25:15]  There's certainly no press pen.
[01:25:17]  And another news outlet in the UK reports that it's literally just the first day of school where two photogues are allowed to take a picture.
[01:25:25]  The royals know what's going to happen.
[01:25:26]  And then they distribute those photos.
[01:25:28]  If anybody else ever shows up to take a photo of the kids, there isn't a single UK paper that will print it.
[01:25:34]  But she wants us to believe she's like a Beatle who can't.
[01:25:40]  Right.
[01:25:40]  And to your, the Beatles.
[01:25:44]  Her whole bit about, I didn't know who Prince Harry was.
[01:25:48]  I never heard of the queen mother.
[01:25:50]  You know, it's like in this day and age, you know, it's like, it's so reminiscent of Yoko Ono.
[01:25:55]  That was her whole thing.
[01:25:56]  You know, I never heard of John Lennon.
[01:25:58]  Who are the Beatles?
[01:25:59]  Yes.
[01:26:00]  And she also broke up the band.
[01:26:02]  Yes, yes, yes.
[01:26:03]  So, I mean, you know, that's, and you're completely right about Megan not understanding why she's not liked, why, let alone beloved, you know, and I don't think it's any accident that her podcast drops and then the cut cover story is published two days before today, the 25th anniversary of Princess Diana's death.

=== Stepping on Diana's Anniversary (01:41) ===

[01:26:28]  That's exactly right.
[01:26:29]  She wanted to be in the news.
[01:26:32]  She wanted to step on Princess Diana's anniversary.
[01:26:35]  She wants us to think she is Princess Diana, which is never going to happen.
[01:26:38]  Instead of, as you write in your piece, what she really is, a Kardashian.
[01:26:42]  And by the way, you undersold your comment earlier, which I read out loud to my husband.
[01:26:46]  I thought it was so funny.
[01:26:48]  This is Maureen.
[01:26:49]  Again, the name is Toddler and Tiara, Megan Markle, still throwing tantrums about royal family.
[01:26:54]  You write, her self-regard runs in direct opposition to her waning relevance.
[01:26:59]  She clearly has no real friends left or even decent publicists because anyone with an iota of common sense would say, you know, Megan, it's probably best not to compare yourself to Nelson.
[01:27:13]  Exactly right.
[01:27:15]  She has no friends.
[01:27:17]  She has no people.
[01:27:18]  And there's a reason for that.
[01:27:20]  Yes.
[01:27:21]  And, but, you know, the upside is we get gems like that.
[01:27:26]  You know, there was dancing in the streets of South Africa when I married in, and I'm most reminiscent of Nelson Mandela.
[01:27:35]  Who else?
[01:27:35]  Who else?
[01:27:36]  She's got to become a better liar.
[01:27:38]  Like, keep it vaguer.
[01:27:39]  Don't say it was the one South African cast member because the Daily Mail is 100% going to go find that guy.
[01:27:47]  I know liars always, that always trips them up, the addition of unnecessary details.
[01:27:52]  You're so right.
[01:27:53]  Maureen, what a pleasure.
[01:27:54]  Please come back.
[01:27:55]  Oh my God, so much fun.
[01:27:56]  Thanks for having me, Megan.
[01:27:57]  All right, till the next time.
[01:27:59]  We'll be bringing you Michael Knowles tomorrow.
[01:28:01]  Don't miss that.
[01:28:02]  And we'll talk to you then.
[01:28:05]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
[01:28:07]  No BS, no agenda, and no