The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220929_ben-shapiro-on-biden-mental-fitness-gaslighting-fb

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Sept. 29, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show

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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show 00:15:15
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
	Our two-year anniversary week continues, and it's been a great mix of shows so far.
	We had Mike Rinder on, one of the top grand poobahs in Scientology before he left yesterday, Father Mike Schmitz to talk Catholicism and his Smash podcast, The Bible in a Year, the day before that.
	And now we are joined today by one of our first guests ever and my old pal from the Kelly file, Ben Shapiro, also known as Digital Media King.
	There is so much news to get to.
	Florida is assessing the massive damage right now from Hurricane Ian, and Ben's down there.
	I mean, that's where his home is.
	And the White House is trying to clean up one of Biden's most absurd moments since he's taken, I mean, I'm sure you've heard it or seen it by now.
	It was like as soon as I got off the air yesterday, everybody was like, oh my God, wait until you see.
	It was terrible.
	It was bad.
	It was bad even for Corrine Jean-Pierre.
	And that's saying something because everything she does is bad.
	But this is especially bad.
	My old pal James Rosen makes an appearance in the montage that we've cut for you.
	There's so much to get to.
	Let's do that.
	Ben Shapiro is editor emeritus of the Daily Wire and host of the Ben Shapiro show.
	Ben, welcome back.
	Great to have you.
	Hey, thanks for having me.
	Congratulations on this year anniversary.
	That's awesome.
	Thank you.
	Thank you for helping make it a success.
	I like the beard and mustache.
	Oh, thanks.
	Yeah, and I just, I finally hit puberty.
	So I really like it.
	My team was like, hey, he's got a beard.
	I'm like, he does?
	I usually listen to your show.
	I don't usually watch it.
	So I haven't seen this, but I like it.
	It's like it's close-shaven.
	It's not like, you know, scraggly professor look.
	It's just like...
	Well, if it gets too long, I turn into a rabbi.
	So it's a, I have to be careful about the length on this thing.
	And you could just wake up one morning and it's happened.
	Exactly.
	I mean, I'm just that much of a man.
	I actually didn't shave for about a day and a half and boom, it was just like that.
	Well, since we are a couple days past Rosh Hashanah, happy new year and holiday.
	There's so much to get to.
	So let's just jump right in.
	The clip of Biden yesterday is, I mean, second to none when it comes to his gaffes.
	So he has an event at the White House and he is, it's about hunger, basically.
	And the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health met.
	And he speaks and he knew, he knew that this Indiana congresswoman, Jackie Walorski, who was a Republican, was the co-chair of the House Hunger Caucus.
	All right.
	And he also knew that this woman had been killed on August 3rd in a two-car crash in Indiana, along with two people who work with her.
	The White House had previously released a statement on this woman's death.
	And apparently there had been some sort of a tribute to her at this event as well.
	So he knew all of that.
	And he gets up there and had the following comments.
	Watch, listen.
	I want to thank all of you here, including bipartisan elected officials like Representative Governor, Senator Braun, Senator Booker, Representative Jackie, are you here?
	Where's Jackie?
	I didn't think she was going to be here.
	Jackie, are you here?
	She was going to be here.
	Jackie's not here.
	She's no longer with us.
	God rest Jackie's soul.
	He hasn't had a gaff this bad since he told the gentleman in the wheelchair, stand up, stand up so people can see you.
	Remember, oh, God, love you.
	Like, it's so bad.
	So then, just to finish the setup, Corine Jean-Pierre takes the incoming and finds her new favorite phrase, top of mind, top of mind.
	Here's she is trying to explain away this moment.
	What happened in the hunger event today?
	The president appeared to look around the room for an audience member, a member of Congress who passed away last month.
	He seemed to indicate she might be in the room.
	So the president was, as you all know, you guys were watching today's event, a very important event on food insecurity.
	The president was naming the congressional champions on this issue and was acknowledging her incredible work.
	He had already planned to welcome the congresswoman's family to the White House on Friday.
	There will be a bill signing in her honor this coming Friday.
	So, of course, she was on his mind.
	She was of top of mind for the president.
	Jackie, are you here?
	Where's Jackie?
	She must not be here.
	No, I totally understand.
	I just explained she was on top of mind.
	I think the confusing part is why, if she and the family is top of mind, does the president think that she's living and in the roof?
	I don't find that confusing.
	I have John Lennon top of mind just about every day, but I'm not looking around for him anyway.
	When you sign a bill for John Lennon as president, then we can have this conversation.
	Okay, go ahead.
	Moments of confusion are happening with the president.
	Excuse me.
	There are Americans that are watching this that are having a sorry.
	What do you think about the Treasury Secretary?
	This is a legitimate question.
	We need to have some.
	I'm sorry.
	Somebody was yelling over you.
	So there are reports that Treasury Secretary Yellen is looking to leave.
	It is not your turn to speak, and you're being rude to your colleagues.
	And let your colleague answer the question.
	Oh, my God, Ben.
	What did you make of it?
	Well, I mean, honestly, Joe Biden making gaffes where it's very clear that all the bats are not in the belfry is not anything new.
	I mean, this is something that he's been doing for a couple of years.
	It wasn't like there was a lot going on mentally with Joe Biden even 15 years ago when he was mostly there.
	Now he's mostly not there.
	And so that wasn't the shocking part.
	And Corrine Jean-Pierre doing this attempt to spin it away is really the shocking part.
	She should have just said he forgot that she died and everybody can see that.
	And he apologizes for that.
	And then everybody sort of moves on.
	It's not as though people can't see what they are seeing, but this constant attempt by members of the White House to spin away the fact that we know that Joe Biden is not all there.
	It really is beyond parody at this point.
	And it speaks to a broader problem in American public life, which is we can't just look at our public officials as the doofuses that they are.
	We can't just look at Joe Biden and say, okay, the guy makes a lot of gaffes.
	He obviously is not fully on.
	The lights may be out in the attic, but there's no one home.
	You can't just say that about the president.
	Instead, you have to try to pretend that he full well knew she was dead.
	He was just calling her out of the audience because he's like Bruce Willis in sixth sense and actually can see into the great beyond, which if he could, then he should ask some financial advice from some folks of the past because obviously his policies have learned nothing from that.
	It's that you're exactly right.
	Her attempt to spin is even worse than what he did.
	And people are like, oh, he should apologize.
	I'm like, I don't.
	I mean, like, he clearly didn't mean any offense to the woman's family.
	He doesn't have the mental facility any longer to even know whether she's dead or alive.
	We can all see that.
	So it wasn't an intentional.
	And even the congresswoman's brother is in the news today saying, basically, he feels bad for Biden.
	He feels sorry for him.
	And there's an element of that, right?
	Was you see this senior citizen really struggling to hold on to his faculties?
	If you can forget for a moment that he's president of the United States, you can have a real moment of feeling sorry for him.
	And then as soon as you remember he's president, you just feel sorry for yourself and your country, right?
	And then Corrine Jean-Pierre comes in and she's agreed to do this job of cleanup in Isle 7.
	And there's never been anyone worse at it than Karine is.
	It is astonishing how bad she is at this.
	And I understand she's historic because she's so historically historic and all the historicity of her historicness, but the reality is that she sucks at this job.
	I mean, she is truly awful at this job.
	Well, you can at least say about Jen Saki is that Jen Saki was capable of spinning.
	I may not have thought that she was telling the truth very often, but at least she was pretty good at the job.
	I remember when Robert Gibbs was press secretary for Obama, and I thought, that guy lies a lot, but at least he's pretty good at this.
	She is just sheerly awful.
	And to a certain extent, I find that almost charming because we're getting a lot of sort of unintentional, not only comedy, but truth, because it's so obvious that she's lying.
	It's so obvious that nothing that she's saying is the case.
	And so when you watch her trying to pretend that you can't have an opinion on Joe Biden talking to the dead unless you signed a bill for a person who has died and then gone on stage and done exactly what Joe Biden has done.
	And this is this is redefining sort of the standard for criticism to a whole new level.
	So basically, unless I'm an 80-year-old. president losing my mental faculties and calling out dead people from on stage, I cannot criticize an 80-year-old president who is losing his mental faculties and calling out the dead on stage.
	So that's what she you're referencing that part where she had the exchange with James Rosen, who was the one who said, I have John Lennon top of my mind every day, and yet I don't walk into rooms looking around for him.
	And by the way, having known Rosen for a long time, that's 100% true.
	The man's obsessed with the Beatles.
	He once told me a story about how he went to see Paul McCartney playing someplace in the DC area.
	And he walked in.
	It was like a radio show promotion.
	And he, James, got to play the very same piano that Paul McCartney had played moments earlier at this radio show, promotion, demo, whatever.
	And he was just weeping, just weeping.
	I'm like, why?
	He's like, these hands touch the same ivories that Paul McCartney.
	And then he took his now wife, then girlfriend to a Paul McCartney concert.
	He talked about he just cried the entire time, cried.
	I said, it's a miracle your wife ever gets in the bed with you, James, ever, ever.
	But my point is, when he says he's obsessed with John Lennon and the Beatles, he means it, but he knows John Lennon is dead and doesn't look around the room for him.
	What point well made?
	Well, you know, again, one of the things that happens here is that Joe Biden does this sort of stuff and we all notice it.
	And then the White House tries to spin it away and then we notice it some more.
	And then the media say, why are you spending so much time on this?
	Why are you even paying attention to stuff like this?
	I mean, let's be frank about this.
	Joe Biden makes these gaffes on an extraordinarily regular basis.
	I mean, this one happened to be particularly egregious, but yesterday there was footage of Jill basically guiding him away from a podium.
	Two days before that, there was footage of Joe Biden at an event walking away from a podium while somebody was still talking to him and looking around as though he's John Trabolton pulp fiction, looking around the room, not knowing where he is.
	And we're all supposed to pretend that none of this is happening.
	It's all this bizarre gaslighting attempt.
	By the way, a lot of this gaslighting is going to go away if the Democrats lose the midterm.
	So in November, if the Democrats get shellacked in the House, if they lose the Senate, then a lot of the calls that we are now making about being accurate about his mental acuity are going to start being echoed by people on the left.
	You saw a little bit of this about four months ago when it looked like the Democrats were really in trouble.
	And then the entire media decided that they were going to pump up this idea that Joe Biden was actually shockingly competent at his job and that he was getting all sorts of things done and Aviator Joe was back in all of this.
	But if he falls on his face again in the midterms, then watch for the calls for him to go to start pretty much five minutes later.
	Okay, but now here's what's interesting about that scenario.
	So what do they do, right?
	Gavin Newsom's like, look at me, look at me in my hair.
	I'll do it.
	But that requires them to totally bypass the first black female vice president in U.S. history who is absolutely going to feel it is her turn to ascend if Joe Biden doesn't run.
	So you've got to bypass her, despite the fact that she's almost almost as bad as Biden when it comes to the gaffes.
	Here's one just from today.
	She's stumbling over herself and can't really understand when to use the term North Korea.
	Watch.
	So the United States shares a very important relationship, which is an alliance with the Republic of North Korea.
	And it is an alliance that is strong and enduring.
	It is?
	I don't even know what she was trying to say, Ben.
	Like, we get this daily from her.
	The important thing is that she finally visited a border, you know, and she made a big deal out of how she was going to visit the border and then, and then she had not visited the border, but she had visited the border.
	Well, now she visited an actual secure border.
	It happens to be the border between North and South Korea.
	But she is amazingly bad at this job.
	And again, it turns out that when you pick people based on their historic characteristics as opposed to on their quality, and those are not mutually exclusive, I'm sure that Joe Biden could have found somebody who was both black and female and also competent.
	That would have been a lot better than picking Kamala Harris, who is black and female and historic and also not competent at all.
	That really has come back to bite her.
	And it will be fun to watch the sort of internacing warfare in the Democratic Party should Kamala Harris be sort of made the heir apparent because Gavin Newsom is not going to go quietly into that night.
	I don't think Pete Buttigieg will either.
	I think that you're going to get a massive battle inside the Democratic Party.
	And Joe Biden was essentially the band-aid placed on all of that intersectional warfare inside the Democratic Party because he had the gloss of Obama upon him.
	But if he goes, then there's going to be some real questions inside the Democratic Party.
	I know everybody wants to focus in on the possibility of Trump versus DeSantis on the right side of the aisle.
	But if Joe Biden goes, it's going to get very, very ugly on the left side of the aisle.
	Very, very quickly.
	And Carrie Jean-Pierre and Kamala Harris really, they both are in a similar position where it was very open that they were selected based on certain criteria and they're falling down on the job.
	And it just goes to show you how if you're going to make the selection based on criteria, you better find somebody who's absolutely capable.
	Otherwise, you're totally undermining the very groups that you purport to be wanting to promote, right?
	You've set them up to fail.
	They should have taken Katanji Brown Jackson and put her in the VP role because I guarantee you she's smarter than Kamala Harris and could have done a better job of it.
	Okay, let's talk about the midterms because you mentioned it for one second.
	So there was this ABC News poll that came out earlier this week showing it's tightening that the Republicans are doing better.
	I mean, it's tightening from where it was when the Democrats made a little run for it in late in the summer.
	And it was pointing out that historically, if you have a president whose approval rating is below 50%, then his party will lose about 14 seats.
	Sorry, above, above 50%.
	His party will lose about 14 seats in the midterms.
	If it's below 50%, historically, they'll lose around three dozen, around three dozen seats.
	If that's the case here, the Republicans have way more than they need to actually take control of the House back.
	And Joe Biden's approval rating at best right now is 39.
	It's about 39 according to that poll, 39%.
	At best, the highest I've seen lately has been like 42 when he was really making a run for it.
	It's nowhere near 50 is the point.
	So it does look more and more like it's going to be a bloodbath.
	Maybe it won't be quite as bad as it would have been in June when we had $5 gas, but it's going to be bad.
	And what do you think the odds of that are?
	Like, well, how do you like the Democrats' chances of losing the House?
	And what do you think is going to happen in the Senate?
	Because everybody, all the smart people I listen to are like, it's going to be within like one seat.
	You know, it could be a lead.
	I very rarely make a 100% guarantee, but I 100% guarantee the Republicans are going to take the House.
	Just structurally speaking, it is almost impossible for them not to take the House.
	They only have to pick up a few seats in order to do that.
	And right now, even sort of the low-end estimates from Nate Silver or from the folks at the New York Times are suggesting the Republicans are going to pick up anywhere from about 15 to 20 seats.
	So it would be an absolute shock if Republicans don't pick up at least that number.
	The idea of a 60-seat swing like we've seen in the past, I think that that's largely been taken off the table because there's already been this great ideological sort in terms of congressional districts.
	So thanks to the redistricting, thanks to the fact that there are more kind of pure red seats versus pure blue seats, there aren't nearly as many crossover seats as there once were, you know, seats that, for example, would have voted for Biden, but now are shifting into the Republican category.
	That said, the House, it's pretty clear that the Republicans are going to win the House.
Trump's Path to Re-election 00:10:41
	As far as the Senate goes, I'm a little bit more optimistic than I think most of the prognosticators are about the Republican chances in the Senate.
	First of all, I think Adam Laxalt is going to win his seat in Nevada over Cortez-Masto.
	People aren't paying as much attention to that particular race as they should be.
	There's a lot of talk about Warnock versus Walker in Georgia because Walker is a fairly weak candidate.
	I think that because the Stacey Abrams campaign is really falling down on the job and Brian Kemp is going to clean her clock in Georgia, I think Walker probably wins that seat, which I might not have said a few months back.
	I also think that people are already giving up too early on the Federman Oz race simply because Fetterman is not healthy.
	And that's a real problem for him.
	The fact that that race centralized on Oz is just a demonstration of the power of the media, given how radical Federman is, because Fetterman really is like almost left to Bernie Sanders in a state that is certainly not Vermont.
	And so the possibility that Fetterman loses that seat, I'm going to say that he still has, you know, sort of a, I would say, a 60% shot at winning that seat, but I don't think it's anything like what you're seeing right now, where people are saying it's a 90% shot that he wins that seat.
	Arizona looks very dicey for the Republicans, but Democrats already hold that seat.
	I think Ron Johnson is going to hold his seat in Wisconsin.
	So again, if I had to ballpark it right now, I think that I would put it like 55, 45, the Republicans actually take the Senate.
	And that's a shift from where I was, I would say, even a few months ago.
	All right.
	So even though you're not necessarily in the business of prognosticating, let's do spend a minute on the Republican side and on Trump DeSantis.
	The latest poll shows now that at least in Florida, where you've moved from California, DeSantis is up with Florida GOP primary voters, which is somewhat of a harbinger.
	He's got, it's 48 to 40 now, DeSantis over Trump, as the preference for Republicans in Florida.
	And in January, it was exactly the reverse.
	I think it was 47 over 40 in Trump's favor, right?
	So you've got a 15-point swing there in favor of DeSantis.
	And it has many asking, is Trump's influence starting to wane?
	Are Republicans ready to move on?
	What do you think?
	I mean, I think that when you talk to most people who like Trump, even people who are really fans of Trump, and listen, I voted for him last time around.
	If he's the nominee this time around, I assume I'd vote for him again.
	The fact is that Trump is an extraordinarily tiring person to defend if you're on the right side of the aisle, because when his pitch in 2016 was basically they're attacking me because they're attacking you, I think that that held a lot of weight.
	I think a lot of people saw that Trump had been very popular with the left for literally years.
	I mean, they're giving him Emmy awards, and then all of a sudden they hate his guts and they say, why is that happening?
	Well, it's probably because he's now defending us.
	And so he's taking the bullet for us.
	Well, since 2020, because Trump has been so focused in on the 2020 election, the idea has been you're supposed to sort of take the bullet for him.
	He's asking of you that you go out there and you talk about the election and say, forget about what you think about it.
	You should make this like the number one priority is talking about the election.
	And most Republicans are like, I don't really want to talk about that as my number one priority.
	My number one priority is stopping what Joe Biden is doing right now.
	I don't think Trump did himself any favors when he essentially handed two Senate seats to the Democrats in Georgia.
	I don't think Trump is doing himself any favors right now when he raises a vast quantity of capital and then does not expend it on many of the candidates that he's helped boost to victory in a lot of these Republican primaries.
	I'm talking like JD Vance in Ohio or Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania or Blake Masters in Arizona.
	And then they look at DeSantis and DeSantis took what was a very purple state and he has turned it almost bright red.
	And he's very effective in terms of how he's governing.
	He's very effective at taking on the media.
	He doesn't have the pizzazz of Trump because nobody in, I think, human history has had the pizzazz that the President Trump has.
	He's just a magnetic figure in a way that no politician of my lifetime really is.
	On the left, you might say Obama, but that's probably it.
	But again, I think that if you are a Republican who's just looking to beat the Democrats and you change policy and you want an executive who actually knows how to govern, see, it's not that Trump was horrible at governing.
	It's that the man had never held a governmental position in his life.
	He came in and he has an executive branch of 2 million people.
	And so the question is, who do you fire?
	DeSantis spent years in Congress.
	Now he's the governor of a major state.
	And so if he comes in, he's going to come in with like a game plan on day one in a way that Trump really had to sort of feel his way through.
	Plus, DeSantis is just a much more disciplined campaigner.
	I mean, he only talks about the things that he wants to talk about.
	And so he provides the Democrats, I think, with a lot less fodder to attack.
	It doesn't mean they won't attack him.
	They've tried it.
	But that's, I think, precisely the point is that unlike a lot of other Republican candidates in the past, you know, I remember when Scott Walker was a frontrunner in 2016 for all of five minutes or Tim Paulenti.
	Remember, there's a lot of talk about these candidates who sort of blew up on the launch pad with DeSantis because he's gone through the wars over COVID with the media where he was made like public enemy number one by the media and then he stood up to it or when he went to war with Disney.
	Or now, I assume after this hurricane, there will be attempts to suggest that he's responsible for whatever human suffering happens in the state of Florida.
	Because of all that, I think a lot of Republicans have faith that DeSantis can fight back.
	So I'm not super shocked to see people, even people who are warm toward Trump, thinking, okay, well, you know, I love Trump, but I'm kind of ready for something new.
	Maybe somebody who's a little bit more disciplined, who I don't have to spend time, mental space on with regard to his Twitter feed.
	Believe it or not, the Lincoln Project will be part of, we think, the next election cycle.
	It's amazing to me.
	Like, how can it possibly be?
	I thought they were dead.
	I thought they were like, they're like the cockroach that keeps coming back.
	And it's to the point now where I think is it, Netflix that is now releasing a documentary on the Lincoln Project Showtime.
	Okay, done by, if I'm not mistaken, as I looked at it, Fisher Stevens.
	Remember that guy?
	Actor, I guess now director?
	He used to date Michelle Pfeiffer, which is like your ones, any man's greatest claim to fame.
	In any event, he was doing a documentary on the Lincoln Project and I think getting ready to lionize them and show everybody, you know, what badasses they are and how they helped take down Trump.
	And then Biden won the election.
	And then while his cameras were rolling, they imploded with a child molestation scandal.
	Like one of their main guys was accused of grooming young men online and sort of threw his Lincoln Project affiliations and so on.
	And then everybody at Lincoln Project claimed that they didn't know anything about it.
	And it got very dicey, very fast.
	And they went from this organization raising, I think it was like $90 million to this scourge.
	But they're still alive and claiming to be coming back.
	Here's just a little bit, Ben, from the promo of this Showtime piece.
	I'm dying to know what you think about this.
	Listen: Just trying to pee law about 4%.
	Once you've had a turd in the punch bowl, it's not punch anymore.
	It's shitwater.
	People aren't going to tolerate any more of this.
	We knew that if we buy these Fox News spots, eventually he was going to see them.
	Weaver and Schmidt or losers.
	The Lincoln Project has raised $90 million.
	We have the opportunity to help save the goddamn country.
	Joseph R. Fiden is elected the 46th president of the United States.
	Did you see the article this morning?
	It's brilliant.
	It's in the New York Times.
	We're going to have to have a talk about John.
	I talked to victims as recently as the menu.
	Lincoln Parkinson said it was shocked, calling him a predator, a liar, and an abuser.
	I started to get suspicious about where did the money go.
	More people will have to resign.
	It's falling apart.
	Oh my God.
	I literally cannot talk about it.
	Can't even tell you why I can't talk about it.
	It's not about ideology.
	It's about money.
	It's about power.
	Why were we trying to cover it up as if it didn't matter?
	I feel like I'd become a victim of what I was fighting against.
	I don't have any good answers, except I kind of got into being a gunswinger.
	The old philosophy was just when?
	We got there ugly.
	I freely admit it.
	Is making money out of an outrage machine helping democracy?
	Or is it hurting it?
	Nobody cares.
	They care about what we did in 20 and what we're going to do in 22 and 24 and beyond.
	Here's the key.
	There's nothing noble about us, but we're useful.
	Right now, right now, we got to tweet that up.
	And if you really believe this is a fight for democracy, I see a civil war coming.
	And if you believe it's an existential fight, this is the year we are going to take back America.
	You need every useful son of a bitch you can get on your side.
	Okay, that literally ends with that line and somebody holding a rifle, pointing it out into the sky at some target.
	I mean, if the Republicans, the actual Republicans, not the fake Republicans at the Lincoln Project did that, can you imagine the reaction?
	Like they're calling for civil war.
	They're calling for violence in the street.
	And just the mere fact that this group is being promoted, lauded from the look of it and back, never endingly back, Ben.
	What do we make of that?
	Well, I mean, the strange new respect phenomenon is really a big one.
	This idea that you were basically a failed Republican operative and then you decided to start some sort of group that the left finds pleasing.
	And so they dump tons of money into you, like $90 million into you.
	And then you humiliate yourselves because we have no idea where the money went and we have no idea what your leadership was doing or what they knew and when they knew it with regard to John Weaver and his alleged grooming scandal and all of the rest of this.
	And now the fact that they are back and presumably will raise tons of money on the base of this.
	Like you can see the arc of how the left wants to think about the Lincoln Project here.
	It starts off with, man, these guys are heroes.
	They took down Trump.
	First of all, the Lincoln Project did not take down Trump.
	I mean, let's just be real about this.
	The Lincoln Project wasted an extraordinary amount of money and paid themselves vast salaries to generate ads that were watched online and drove zero votes.
	Like the only people who cared about the Lincoln project were a bunch of Democrats who were going to vote against Trump anyway.
	There's not a single Republican who watched the Lincoln Project and went, oh man, now I'm going to go vote Biden.
	That did not happen.
	Okay, so it starts off with this false narrative and then they go to the actual scandal.
	And then you think that's where it's going to end.
	Okay, well, this is about how this group was kind of a scam group all along and now they're in.
	And then it's like, no, no, no, but Trump is such a threat that even people who seem to maybe have covered for ephibophilia, maybe people who have scammed people out of millions.
	Well, we do need them because Trump's just that bad.
	And, you know, that is sort of the element.
	If we're talking about support for Trump, the thing that drives more support for Trump than any other thing is the feeling that his enemies are even worse, is this belief that the people who are out to get him are people who are also out to get you and that they are, they can literally get away with anything.
	There are no limits to their behavior because they are so focused on stopping the big bad orange man that we need them in our corner.
	That attitude is going to get Trump re-elected to the presidency if that becomes sort of the theme of the left here.
	And we've seen it in so many departments.
	I would definitely want to talk to you about what the FBI is doing to this pro-life activist with 20 to 30 people raiding the guy's home for an alleged skirmish he had with a 72-year-old man outside of an abortion clinic.
	How did 30 FBI agents show up at your house with guns drawn?
	That's our FBI today.
	And there's another FBI story breaking today.
FBI Raids on Pro-Life Activists 00:08:43
	I'm going to pause it here.
	I'll go easy in a quick commercial break and then I want to pick it up there with what they're doing.
	And an extraordinary moment from your new colleague, Jordan Peterson, sitting with Piers Morgan as he becomes the subject of more attacks because he has the nerve to stand up for young men, which is a sin.
	You're not allowed to do that in today's day and age.
	Ben stays with us for the whole show.
	But first, we're bringing you another of our memorable moments from our first two years of shows.
	This one's a recent clip, but it was so funny.
	We had to throw it in the mix.
	It's from when our pals at the Ruthless podcast were here in June, episode 338, and a certain Washington Post reporter was blasting her own colleagues on Twitter.
	Listen, there was a co-worker who put out this string of tweets where he was like, okay, everyone, just like calm down at the Washington Post.
	He's a journalist there.
	He's like, everybody, just calm down.
	Jose, right?
	Yeah, Jose.
	Jose Real.
	And then she quote retweets him and she's like, how dare you?
	How dare you tell me to calm down?
	Like, don't you realize this is just more abuse for me?
	And then she gets the blue checks to come after him.
	He has to delete his account.
	This guy's, but first he's like, Hispanic and gay.
	Stop it.
	Yeah.
	And that doesn't work.
	And Megan, all he's saying is like, can we just be kinder to each other?
	Yeah.
	Like, that's the offensive thing he said.
	Super offensive.
	And so she's like, here's how I'm kicking off Pride Month.
	I'm going to get the only, he says I'm the only like gay Mexican reporter at the Washington Post or something.
	She's like, happy Pride Month.
	So she sends a mob after him.
	That was amazing.
	What a crazy good story.
	Okay, let's talk about what's happening with the FBI because I find this really disturbing.
	So there was a pro-life dad who was recently arrested in a crazy SWAT-style raid.
	Now, his wife and he are, to a lesser extent, are speaking out.
	His name is Mark Hoke.
	Hauk.
	He's a Catholic pro-life activist from Pennsylvania.
	He was arrested by the FBI last Friday in front of his wife and seven children.
	Here's what happened.
	He went outside of an abortion clinic.
	It was a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia.
	He was on a public sidewalk, which you're allowed to be.
	And he had some altercation with a, this is back in October of 2021, in which he pushed a 72-year-old man outside the clinic after he was verbally harassing Hauk's 12-year-old son.
	So this guy, Curtis, or Mark Hauk, got upset that this 72-year-old man was engaging directly with Mark's 12-year-old.
	And he defended his son, pushed the older man.
	The man fell, had a scrape, literally just a scrape.
	Local law enforcement looked into it and said, we're not prosecuting this.
	This is like a, this is nothing.
	This is a small skirmish.
	It's nothing.
	And moved on.
	Then in May, Mark Hauk receives a target letter from the DOJ accusing him, saying that he's being investigated by a grand jury for violating the Freedom of Access Clinic Entrances Act, which he did not do.
	He didn't obstruct any entrance, just had a skirmish.
	It makes it a federal crime to use force with the intent to injure, intimidate, and interfere with anyone because that person provides reproductive health care.
	Okay, that's not, again, that's not what happened.
	But notwithstanding that, they sicked the FBI on him.
	And when they found out that the DOJ was looking at him, the grand jury had been convened, his lawyer contacted the DOJ and said, we will surrender him.
	We can work this out.
	You know, we'll bring him right in.
	That's what any lawyer would do.
	And didn't get a response.
	And next thing they know, his house gets raided with his seven children watching.
	His wife spoke to Tucker, I think, last night.
	Here it is.
	It was devastating.
	I mean, as you can imagine, it's, I mean, it's hard to even express the victimization and, you know, how traumatized we all are due to this unnecessary thing that happened to us.
	How many FBI agents with guns would you estimate showed up at your house?
	It had to have been 20, 25, 30.
	I mean, we have a large property.
	My entire front yard, you could barely see it.
	It was covered with at least 15 big trucks and cars.
	How are your children doing?
	I have to ask.
	You know, it's hard to tell.
	The older ones, we can talk.
	We can cry.
	You know, we've had some counseling.
	We have more counseling to do.
	And the little ones, they're scared.
	They're scared.
	There's a lot of crying.
	His lawyer Ben saying this is a gross abuse of power meant to intimidate pro-life and other Americans who are speaking out about these divisive issues.
	I mean, it is amazing the amounts of resources the DOJ and the FBI will pour into something like this, an altercation that had nothing to do with blocking people from actually going into the clinic, particularly medical professionals.
	But apparently the FBI and DOJ have very little time to spend on the vast spate of bombings and burnings and defacing of churches, pro-life pregnancy centers.
	All of that is just random events that are happening.
	The rather disparate treatment of various crimes is shocking coming from Merrick Garland, the DOJ, and the FBI.
	And again, this is not the fault of individuals.
	We keep saying this, and it's true.
	It's not the fault of the low-level FBI agents, agencies like the FBI, but the higher-ups at these places are extraordinarily political and they know where their bread is butter.
	And this is one of the big problems in general with the executive branch and the way law enforcement is done.
	We saw this with Barack Obama and the IRS.
	All that has to happen is that there's sort of a vague guideline given by the people at the very top.
	And then it's, you know, who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?
	And suddenly you have a bunch of people in the executive branch who are rushing to do that sort of work.
	There doesn't need to be an explicit order to intimidate people who are pro-life.
	All you say is that pro-life people everywhere are engaged in some sort of extremist activity.
	And suddenly you have events like this that suddenly pop up on the radar.
	And it comes just as Miranda Devine over at the New York Post issues an exclusive report today about the FBI.
	Another guy, he's 27 years old, Stephen Friend is his name.
	He says he's a whistleblower, 12-year veteran of the FBI, and a SWAT team member.
	And he was just suspended last Monday.
	Why?
	He was stripped of his gun and his badge, escorted out of the FBI field office in Daytona Beach, Florida, after complaining to his supervisors because he said he did not want to participate in a SWAT raid that he believed violated FBI policy against a January 6th subject who was accused of a misdemeanor, of misdemeanor charges.
	He said, by the way, this guy said he was not a Trump supporter.
	He did not vote for Trump, either one of the last elections, but he thought this was absurd that they were going to unleash the FBI SWAT team on some January 6th defendant who may or may not have had anything to do with January 6th, accused of misdemeanors, saying, I have an oath to uphold the Constitution.
	I have a moral objection, and I want to be considered a conscientious objection.
	The complaint that he filed, the whistleblower complaint with the DOJ Inspector General, was obtained by the New York Post.
	He says he was removed from active investigations into child sexual exploitation and human trafficking to work on J-6 cases sent from DC.
	He was told domestic terrorism was a higher priority than child pornography.
	He said the D.C. field office is manipulating FBI case management protocol, farming out J-6 cases to field offices across the country to create the false impression that right-wing domestic violence is a widespread national problem that goes far beyond what happened on Jay 6th.
	He was listed as the lead agent in cases he had not investigated and in which his supervisor had not signed off, all in violation of FBI policy.
	FBI denies it and says he's got a grievance because he was losing his security clearance and had espoused beliefs which demonstrate questionable judgment and an unwillingness to comply with rules and regs.
	So this is not, and by the way, 30 FBI agents are now standing up for this guy saying he was a model agent.
	So it's a pattern.
	Yep.
	I mean, again, if you look at the history of the FBI, the truth is that it's not particularly shocking that the FBI has now been politicized from the left.
	I mean, if you go all the way back to the foundations of the FBI in the early 20th century, you saw the FBI was embroiled in controversies surrounding going after communists in the 1920s and communists going in the 1950s.
	And now you see that they've been essentially weaponized on behalf of the Biden administration to go after the people who Joe Biden has so subtly termed MAGA Republicans.
Weaponized Heartbeat Ultrasounds 00:11:17
	This idea that everyone I disagree with is part of a broader extremist movement is really egregious.
	And we've seen these sort of whistleblower complaints being made over the past couple of months that the FBI is essentially broadening the scope of J-SIC's investigations to now include anybody and everybody who is tangentially involved in sort of MAGA Republican politics.
	And we're getting into very risky territory.
	I mean, the FBI runs up almost routinely on serious Fourth and Fifth Amendment violations.
	And once they become weaponized on behalf of a political point of view, they rely on the American people's trust.
	Once that trust is gone, it's not going to be restored by activities like this.
	It just is going to make the calls for their curtailment significantly louder.
	Well, here's the thing.
	It turns out that this Mr. Hauck may have been wasting his time outside of that Planned Parenthood objecting to abortions because there's really nothing there but a clump of cells, as many on the left will tell you.
	And there's definitely not a heartbeat.
	Just ask Stacey Abrams.
	If you go to the doctor, and I know you've got three kids now, right?
	I'm trying to keep up.
	I've got three kids as well.
	If you go to the doctor, you hear that little heartbeat at six weeks.
	It's all fake news.
	And it's not just fake news, but it's fake news designed by you, Ben.
	The cabal of men who are trying to control women's uteruses and their decisions over their own lives.
	We have this.
	It's on tape.
	Here it is.
	Stacey Abrams.
	No such thing as a heartbeat.
	There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks.
	It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman's body and waste with them.
	A manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman's body.
	I mean, God, you guys have been at this for a long time.
	When did you get together and come up with this plan?
	I got to tell you, the patriarchy is unbelievably clever.
	Not only did we come up with ultrasound machines that actually fake the heartbeat.
	It's like a laugh track on friends or something.
	We actually fake the heartbeat.
	We're so clever that we somehow got you women to accept that if men commit crimes and call themselves women, these are now female crimes.
	I mean, that's how good we are at this sort of stuff.
	It's amazing.
	Men are so good at this sort of stuff that we can literally compete for one day as a woman and become the best women at everything.
	So it's not particularly shocking that we're clever enough to come up with machines that fake young ones believing that cardiac polar activity, which is what you're hearing at essentially six weeks, that that is, we're deceiving you.
	It's not in fact a heartbeat.
	By the way, what she says scientifically here is absolute nonsense.
	She suggests that the ultrasound is capable of essentially faking a sound for electrical activity.
	That's not what an ultrasound does, as the term ultrasound might convey.
	It's actually using sonar.
	And the basic idea of an ultrasound is that it is measuring a sound that is coming from the fetus.
	The notion that there is no heartbeat because the heart has not fully developed, what you're hearing when you hear the baby's heartbeat at six weeks is not a heart developed in the way that your heart or my heart is currently as an adult.
	You're not hearing the valves opening and closing, for example, but you are in fact hearing fetal cardiac activity, which is the definition of a heartbeat.
	In the same way that if you said that a fetus has brain activity, but it's not the brain activity that you'd have as a 20-year-old, both of those things are still true.
	And so she's basically falsifying that.
	And then she's adding on top of that fake news, the insane conspiracy theory that basically ultrasounds were created by pathetic men in order to control uteruses of women.
	Again, we're amazing at this, I got to say.
	I thought we were supposed to be against conspiracy theories.
	We weren't supposed to like Q and we're supposed to be called, well, you know, we, the Democrats, are supposed to be this party that brings in people of reason to say, no, we reject crazy theories about, you know, pedophile rings being run out of pizza parlors in the DC area.
	Okay, great.
	Most of us normal people, Democrats, are not say, yeah, that's bullshit.
	But what this is lunacy, and nobody on her side is calling her out on this.
	And by the way, it's not just Stacey Abrams because no sooner does she say that than Planned Parenthood, which for years was defining on its website this whole situation as follows.
	At five to six weeks of pregnancy, a very basic beating heart and circulatory system develops.
	A very basic beating heart.
	Now they've changed it to, it sounds like a heartbeat on an ultrasound, but it's not a fully formed heart.
	Be aware.
	Be aware.
	Okay, that makes me feel a lot better.
	I guess that's going to give us the permission we need.
	Anyway, it's just, it shows you how the left works together, right?
	I mean, like she says it, Planned Parenthood goes along with it.
	And now we're all supposed to believe clump of cells, clump of cells.
	Yeah, well, Webster's dictionary, I'm sure, is going to now redefine heartbeat to make sure that it doesn't fit their particular definition.
	You see this over and over, is that the left will make some sort of weird linguistic or illogical move.
	And then really, really quickly, the entire culture will just snap into place and repeat all of this.
	You saw this, for example, when Maisie Hirono suggested that Amy Coney Barrett was some sort of horrible homophobe for using the term sexual predilection or whatever term she used.
	The idea there was that you're not allowed, sexual preference, I think, was the term she used.
	They redefined that to now mean homophobic because Maisie Hirono, who's an idiot, suggested it was homophobic to use a term that had been used in common parlance in the United States for several decades.
	The shift in time is pretty astonishing to watch from the left.
	I will say this, when one of them moves and moves sort of outside the army here, the entire army just immediately swivels to follow.
	And that's particularly true of Stacey Abrams.
	I am amused by the idea that Stacey Abrams, by the way, who is made, as you will recall, the leader of the elected universe, you remember in Star Trek, that she is still getting her ass kicked by Brian Kemp a second time.
	Undoubtedly, she will accept the results of the election this time the way she did not last time.
	Yeah, exactly right.
	Well, it is interesting, though.
	I mean, I like to see the debates about language sort of thrown back on the people who are forcing us to have them.
	You know, I mean, this was an embarrassment for Stacey Abrams because you had all these doctors coming out online saying, you're absurd.
	You're an absurd person.
	You actually don't understand anything you're saying about ultrasounds or cardiac activity.
	I mean, here's just one that I pulled.
	This is a pretty shrinker who wrote, the cardiac muscles in the, I'm trying to read my own writing.
	They begin to, I can't read or said, they're moving inward and they're outward.
	And that's how you define a beat.
	That's what he basically says.
	Anyway, you had many, many doctors saying you don't know what you're talking about.
	And now you have a situation in Virginia that's not totally dissimilar, where you had under the last Democratic governor, Governor Blackface, Ralph Northram, who came out and said, we're going to let schools not tell their parents if kids turn out to be trans.
	So kids can come in.
	They can say, I'm no longer a boy.
	I'm no longer a girl.
	Don't tell my parents.
	I want to go by different pronouns.
	And we want it written in that the teachers can't say anything to the parents.
	Now, the new governor, Youngkin, the Republican, has said, I'm going to reverse all that.
	The students there had this massive walkout, like a thousand students walked out to protest his bigotry, Glenn Youngkin's bigotry.
	And truly, all he's saying, all they're saying with the new reversal of the old laws is the parents need to be involved.
	That's it.
	They're not saying can't do it.
	Saying we just need to hear from your parents.
	And again, it's bigot, bigot, bigot.
	Yeah, I mean, this is truly an amazing thing.
	What Youngkin said is, if you oppose what I'm attempting to do here, essentially you want to cut parents out of the loop, but that is precisely what the left would love to do.
	They want to socially transition your kid at school without informing you of what is going on.
	Teachers who have known your kid for approximately 37 seconds, and they are going to now dictate to you as a parent exactly how you should raise your child, especially when your child is going through something as troubling and difficult as gender confusion.
	Now they are going to simply mainstream that gender confusion.
	They're going to give people, you know, essentially the dint of heroism for engaging in this sort of behavior.
	And they're going to say that you are right.
	Your parents are wrong.
	We can't even tell your parents because your parents might be abusive, right?
	So now you've also planted this thought in the head of kids that your parents actually hate you and are abusive if they simply want you to engage in watchful waiting.
	Or if they say, well, you know what?
	I'm sorry that you're having this sort of emotional trouble, but that does not mean that you ought to move on toward measures that are likely to sterilize you and mutilate your body.
	The fact that the left is pushing this so hard is truly an astonishing, astonishing thing.
	And there's no way to see it other than as an attack on parenthood, as an attack on the family, as an attack on traditional roles.
	All around the world, I mean, this is not just the United States issue right now.
	All around the world, there is a backlash to the sort of radical social policy that the left has promulgated here.
	You're seeing it everywhere from Italy to Hungary to Poland to Sweden.
	And in the United States, there is no immunity in the body politic to moving to the right on this sort of stuff.
	There's a reason that Glenn Youngkin is now the governor of Virginia.
	So people in the kind of gleaming ivory halls of academia or people in the White House may think that this amounts to good policy, but there are very few people in the United States who actually agree that this amounts to good policy.
	And the harder the left pushes on this, the more the pushback is going to grow.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So that's exactly the point I was trying to get to, which is, you know, Northrop goes in there and quietly changes the policies to say, you don't have to tell the parents.
	Don't involve the parents if the students don't want the parents involved.
	People, that doesn't make headlines because the left likes it.
	They just keep it quiet.
	It happens.
	You have to find out the hard way as a parent that this has gone on.
	I know this because there's a family in New York that was at Trinity School, which has been all over the news lately because there was that woman caught on tape by one of James O'Keefe's operatives saying she wanted to get a serial killer to come in and kill the white boys.
	Didn't much care if they were conservative or liberal, just white boys.
	She would love to see them killed because they're horrible.
	Yes, supposedly tongue-in-cheek.
	Thank God she's been fired.
	So I don't have to take my placard and go protest in front of Trinity, but I was ready to do it, Ben.
	So at Trinity, they have a policy in all the New York school independents, independent schools, that they do not tell the parents.
	All the child needs to say is, I'm now a girl or I'm now a boy.
	Do not tell my parents.
	And they will not.
	So that's the situation in Virginia schools.
	We're in public schools.
	So Youngkin comes in as the corrective just to restore normalcy.
	He's not saying you can't do it.
	I mean, looking at his regulations, he's saying students should be referred to by their names and protons in their original records unless a parent approves the use of an alternative.
	Students or schools may not encourage teachers to conceal information about a student's gender from their parents.
	There should not be secrets between a minor and a teacher who has no biological connection to said minor.
	It's utter insanity.
	And again, it's just another example of the left's routine.
	It's not happening and it's good that it is.
	So you point out that this is a trend and this has been happening in schools all over the nation.
	And then what the left said, that would never happen.
	Are you really suggesting that we would socially transition a child to school and not tell the parents?
	Like, yeah, that's exactly what we're suggesting.
	Like, you're right.
	It is happening and it's very good that it is.
	And you can't stop us from doing this sort of stuff.
	This is a form of child abuse.
	It's a form of kidnapping.
	And if somebody were to approach my child who is confused and then to reinstill that confusion and place my child in direct opposition to me, that is an act of abuse.
	It is the most egregious thing that you can do to a child.
	It's the most egregious thing you can do to a parent.
	And the fact that you have people on the left who want the state not only to sponsor it, but to essentially mandate it in many cases is an act of true societal sickness.
	It really is perverse.
	The fact that so many educators all over the spectrum have picked up on this sort of thing and done it does not speak well for our education system.
	It's the reason why we need universal school vouchers.
	If you send your kids to one of these schools and they're doing this, get your kid the hell out of there right now, like today.
Men, Masculinity, and Military Service 00:15:34
	Yeah.
	It's truly contrary to what we teach our children, which is there's no secrets between you and a grownup.
	If any adult tells you he wants to have a secret with you, the first thing you need to do is tell mom and dad.
	That's how groomers operate.
	Real groomers who are looking to molest your children do exactly that.
	It's a secret.
	Don't tell mom and dad.
	They wouldn't understand how good this is going to feel or how evolved you are.
	And so I realize this is in a different lane, but it's not that far away.
	So you can't have teachers telling students that they can have secrets from the parents, period.
	All right.
	Ben staying with us.
	Don't forget, folks, I want to tell you today's Thursday.
	My weekly conversation with you, I send out an email on Fridays.
	We'll go out tomorrow.
	The American News Minute gives you all the news you need to know in one minute or less.
	Our listeners, our viewers are timing us and we're passing.
	Plus, we'll have the latest trouble my Strudwick got into.
	And trust me, it's a doozy.
	Speaking of a doozy, I'm getting ready to go to school today.
	Got the kids out in the car.
	I'm like, what is that?
	What's that smell?
	I look in another huge dump in my living room.
	I don't even know when he did it.
	It didn't even seem like it was fresh.
	I have no idea how long it's been sitting there.
	And that didn't even make the newsletter.
	It didn't even make it.
	It wasn't good enough.
	You can sign up now at megankelly.com.
	You can email me there, meganmegyn at megankelly.com.
	So I'm really looking forward to this next discussion.
	Something extraordinary happened with Jordan Peterson when he went on the Piers Morgan show last night.
	And I've been watching Jordan for a long time and just what's being done to him.
	He's just like everybody's favorite punching bag when it comes to young men because he's been one of the few people speaking to young men and what's really bothering them, what's on their minds over the past few years.
	And he gets it and he's not afraid to identify it.
	And he's become like really important to huge numbers of people, not just in Canada where he's from, but here the Daily Wire just struck up a partnership with him, which I think is great.
	It's good for both parties.
	And I'm told you and Jordan are actually going to speak in Jerusalem together on October 6th.
	That's pretty cool.
	So there's this movie making news for all sorts of bad reasons.
	It's called Don't Worry, Darling.
	And it's being made by Olivia Wilde.
	And she's got Chris Pine as a star on it and Harry Stiles and this woman, Florence, is it Pooh?
	Pew?
	Pew.
	I know.
	P-U-G-H.
	Okay.
	And this is a man-bashing film from what I've been told.
	I haven't seen it.
	So I'm just reading the write-ups.
	It's got some sort of a Me Too theme and it's not, doesn't look favorably on men.
	And the villain in the movie played by Chris Pine, she says, Olivia Wilde says, is based on Jordan.
	He stars as Frank, the founder of a utopian 1950s community in the desert known as the Victory Project.
	Turns out this project has dark secrets.
	I don't, I can't give you spoilers because I haven't even seen it.
	But she told Maggie Gyllenhall, Olivia Wilde did, that this was based on Jordan Peterson, this quote, pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community.
	I mean, the nerve of Olivia Wilde to refer to Jordan Peterson as a pseudo-intellectual as though she knows anything.
	I mean, literally anything.
	Okay, but just pause there.
	Wilde then explained, incels, I-N-C-E-L, are basically disenfranchised, mostly white men who believe they are entitled to sex from women.
	And they believe that society has now robbed them, that the idea of feminism is working against nature and that we, meaning women, must be put back into the correct place.
	Then she says, this guy, Jordan Peterson, is someone that legitimizes certain aspects of their movement because he's a former professor.
	He's an author.
	He wears a suit.
	So they feel like this is a real philosophy that should be taken seriously.
	And once again, I mean, as somebody who's listened to a lot of what Jordan said, listen, can I just tell you as an aside, when I was at NBC when 12 Rules for Life came out, and I had so many people bring it to me, be like, let's get him.
	And I was like, okay, what's this about?
	It's saying, do you see some crazy lunatic saying terrible things?
	And then I actually read it and I was like, this is brilliant.
	There's like almost nothing in here that I disagree with.
	Like, I don't want to fight with him.
	I want to learn more from him.
	And then I subscribed to his website, started listening to his lectures.
	I'm like, there's so much good stuff in here.
	So this woman clearly has not listened to anything about Jordan Peterson, only the negative things.
	But it bothered him.
	It bothered him.
	So he goes on with Piers Morgan.
	Piers asks him about it last night.
	What do you make of it so far?
	I mean, look, the basic idea here from Olivia Wilde and so many other people is that anyone who speaks to young males is by necessity bad because young males are bad.
	The idea is if you have a bunch of men who have been sort of left behind by the modern, the postmodern bargain, the postmodern moral bargain, which says that men have no role as fathers because after all, a woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle.
	Men don't have a role as protectors because after all, men are mostly toxic.
	They're not there to protect women and women don't need protection at all.
	Men are not supposed to be responsible.
	And this, by the way, is what gives men purpose.
	If you deprive men of their entire purpose and then those men feel left out and left behind and they get angry, then the idea is you try to speak to those men and you say, no, you do have a purpose, actually.
	You have dragons inside you that require slaying, right?
	And that requires you to actually man up and do your duty and undergo struggle, which is Jordan's main message.
	I mean, this is what he says over and over and over, is that men do have toxic masculinity inside them.
	And you have to battle that with being a gentleman.
	You have to battle that with more powerful masculinity.
	And that message to the feminist left is anathema.
	You're supposed to ignore young men.
	I've talked to Jordan about this extensively, obviously.
	Jordan and I are very friendly.
	And when Jordan and I talk about this, the thing that he can't get over is this idea from the left that he is doing something deeply bad and deeply wrong by reaching out to men who feel disenfranchised.
	Like, what are we supposed to do?
	Just shear the fact that they are disenfranchised, shear the fact that they feel adrift and lost.
	I mean, the entire liberal project was supposed to be about quote unquote marginalized communities.
	So now there's been an attempt to quote unquote marginalize a bunch of young, particularly white men, because they're not members of the victim group.
	And then if they have complaints about the way that their lives are going to basically say, well, you deserve it.
	Jordan is not justifying the complaints.
	He's not saying, well, you know, you guys have a point.
	What Jordan is saying is buck up, right?
	Pick yourself up, go do something useful.
	He's not saying that, you know, the quote, quote unquote, incel community, that these people are justified in their belief system and they're justified in the rage.
	He's saying you need to become a better person, a stronger version of yourself to go out and face the vicissitudes of life.
	And this is what draws the ire.
	This is what makes people so crazy.
	It is a really shocking example of how the left purports to be incredibly sympathetic to people.
	But in reality, if you don't fall into a category that they wish to cultivate as sort of a political subgroup, they hate your gods and they actually wish to see you suffer in an enormous number of ways.
	I mean, there's an article, by the way, in Canada from the CBC in which they're going after me in sort of a similar fashion, only to the extent that they actually said in there that it was rhetoric like mine, this sort of pro-toxic masculinity, anti-woman rhetoric, viewing women as objects.
	And I thought to myself, like, literally, anybody who is just right of center is considered that, even an Orthodox Jew.
	I mean, if you're going to accuse people of objectification of women, I have a feeling you're going to come up short on that one.
	But Jordan is like the apotheosis of this.
	He is their number one white whale on this stuff.
	Yeah.
	Oh, my God.
	It's true.
	And I used to live in a building that was all Orthodox Jewish families.
	And we used to go to Shabbat dinner all the time.
	And I love the ceremony.
	It was like the way Jewish men would treat their wives and like revere their wives at these.
	I'm like, we got to adopt some of this stuff in Catholicism.
	We need more of this.
	But it's absurd.
	I listen to you all the time.
	I never heard anything even close to the line on sexist.
	You, by the way, wound up quitting Breitbart after Michelle Fields was treated so badly for them.
	You've stood up for women repeatedly.
	It's absurd.
	Okay, we have the Jordan clip on Piers, at least the audio of it.
	Let's listen.
	Are you the intellectual hero to these people?
	Sure.
	Why not?
	You know, people have been after me for a long time because I've been speaking to disaffected young men.
	You know, what a terrible thing to do.
	That is.
	I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice.
	It's making you emotional to talk about.
	Oh, God, you know, it's very difficult to understand how demoralized people are.
	And certainly many young men are in that category.
	And you get these casual insults, these incels.
	What does it mean?
	It's like, well, these men, they don't know how to make themselves attractive to women who are very picky.
	And good for them.
	Women, like, be picky.
	That's your gift, man.
	Demand high standards from your men.
	Fair enough.
	But all these men who are alienated, it's like they're lonesome and they don't know what to do.
	And everyone piles abuse on them.
	Yes.
	And honestly, Ben, I was looking at the numbers.
	In 2019, men accounted for 80% of all suicide deaths in America.
	80 percent.
	And they also, the studies also show that a majority of American men who die by suicide have no known history of mental health problems because they don't talk about them.
	They don't, it's not that they don't have any mental health problems.
	They don't talk about them.
	And when they do try to talk about them and like Jordan Peterson, listen to Jordan Peterson, subscribe to Jordan Peterson, or anybody else speaking out about these issues, they get attacked.
	They get featured in an Olivia Wilde movie as some sort of demon.
	So screw her.
	As somebody who is at the inception of the Me Too movement, I think I can say what those of us who were there at the beginning, and by the way, Olivia Wilde, you were not one of them.
	Okay.
	You were not there.
	It was about just stopping men from making sexual favors at the office a condition of advancement.
	Everyone agrees with that.
	Men agree with that.
	Women agree with that.
	It was never meant to bastardize men writ large.
	That's what people like her are doing.
	And it's having a serious negative effect.
	I mean, the irony with regard to Olivia Wilde, of course, is that the only person who created an unsafe, apparently work environment for her employees was Olivia Wilde.
	The reports are that Florence Pugh, who's one of the actresses on the set, was very upset with the fact that Olivia Wilde, who was in a long-term relationship with Jason Sudeikas, had taken up with one of the stars of the film, Harry Styles, in the middle of filming.
	And Florence Pugh was really, really uncomfortable about it on set.
	That didn't bother Olivia Wilde one iota, but she's very upset with Jordan Peterson.
	Again, the idea here is that men are the font head of evil.
	Men have no role to play in society.
	We deprive men of purpose.
	We deprive them of meaning.
	And then we're surprised when they're disaffected, when they act badly.
	Again, there's no excuse for men acting badly, but you have to give them paths towards success.
	Nick Eberstadt is a really, really good data scientist over at American Enterprise Institute.
	He has a brand new book out talking about the single most devastating thing that's happening to the American economy and the workforce is huge numbers of relatively young, relatively healthy men who are just dropping out of the workforce.
	And there's a vast gap that's appearing right now.
	Huge numbers of men who have basically not just quiet quit, but actually quit, who have gone on disability, who are having a significant impact on the economy.
	And that is because a lot of men are feeling left behind.
	And guess what?
	None of it is making society any happier.
	Men are not happier.
	Women are not happier.
	I'm failing to see what exactly is the social bargain that has made broad swaths of people so much happier when traditional masculinity was done away with.
	And I understand that the left's vision of traditional masculinity is men beating their children with belts and men smoking at the office while having an affair with the secretary and then leaving the little wifey at home.
	But that is not what traditional masculinity is about.
	And I speak as a deeply religious person.
	The goal of traditional masculinity is to take toxic masculinity and that aggression and channel that in positive directions.
	I mean, the message that Jordan promotes, which is the same message that you promote, is the same message that I promote for young men is take on responsibility.
	Take on the burden of responsibility.
	It will make you stronger.
	It'll make you better.
	And even in that clip, Jordan is being ripped by Olivia Wilde is somehow anti-feminist is saying women should have high standards for men.
	And now we have to give men a path to meet those high standards as opposed to ripping them for being men or suggesting that the best way for them to overcome their toxic masculinity is to somehow feminize themselves, get in touch with the feminine aspect of themselves.
	Be not who God made you to be.
	Instead, become what the left would want you to be, which is some sort of androgynized version of a man.
	That is not, I dare say, and just based on personal experience with my wife and my three children, I dare say that I do not think that there are very many women who are out there who are desperately looking for an androgynous man who's jettisoned all of his masculinity.
	I just don't think that's a particular road to success.
	Not at all.
	Well, it does dovetail into your own experience recently because you were making this point quite sanely, cogently on the military and masculinity.
	And the reaction, of course, because you're you, was over the top and saying you didn't get it.
	And it was a similar situation as what we've just been discussing.
	We've got the clip that I don't even want to say got you in trouble because you're in trouble all the time.
	It's not even trouble anymore, but got some backlash.
	Here it is.
	The people who tend to fight wars are typically very patriotic, very male people.
	I mean, I'm sorry to break it to you, but this has been the truth about military warfare for literally all of human history.
	And the institution of traditional masculinity has been core to that idea.
	But we're a society that doesn't believe in traditional masculinity.
	Traditional masculinity is an opponent because traditional masculinity requires roles.
	It says that men are supposed to protect, men are supposed to defend, men are supposed to be strong, men are supposed to be fathers and husbands.
	These are apparently very bad things now.
	You're not supposed to say these things.
	Okay.
	So, Pete, you've got people like The Intercept, somebody, and Tom Nichols, just the worst.
	He writes for The Atlantic, suggesting, oh, the super masculine, unwoke Russian military is getting its ass kicked.
	So Ben doesn't know what he's talking about.
	You're right.
	It's an army of women in Ukraine that's defeating the Russian military.
	They're all women.
	Who knew?
	It's like the woman king in Ukraine.
	There are no masculine men in the Ukrainian military.
	In fact, Ukraine is famous for its extraordinarily progressive gender policies.
	I'm sorry, but this baseline notion that a quote-unquote feminized military is a better military.
	I'm not saying the ideal military is the Russian military.
	The Russian military is obviously a second-rate military.
	And by the way, it has been for nearly all of human history.
	They're just a very, very large military, but that doesn't mean they're a very effective military.
	But when you actually spend any time, I noticed one thing that they didn't do in any of these critiques is actually go talk to frontline soldiers in the American military and actually go talk to frontline soldiers in the British military or the Israeli military or any other effective military on planet Earth.
	Because one of the things that you will find when it comes to effective frontline militaries, and I spend an awful, disproportionate amount of time hanging out with both military people and ex-military people, is that these are not people who disparage masculinity.
	These are not people who believe that masculinity ought to be done away with.
	This doesn't mean that the height of masculine, I mean, I literally say in that clip that the goal of masculinity is protective, right?
	That masculinity is about, evolutionarily speaking, protecting family, protecting hearth, protecting home.
	And you need those traditional roles in order to foster exactly that sort of attitude.
	I failed to see where I said that traditional masculinity and the masculinity we need is sort of this ultra macho, Vladimir Putin riding a bear shirtless kind of stuff.
	I love the jump from what I said to what we actually need is sort of Hulk Hogan masculinity.
Why Men Dominate Frontline Combat 00:09:39
	That's not what I'm saying at all.
	What I'm saying is that our military right now, the story that I was talking about and that isn't available in that particular clip, the one that Media Matters put out there is the part where I'm talking about what actually happened, which is the military basically now saying that they should not use terms like father and mother on forms.
	And I was saying, well, if your society disparages the role of father, the role of protector, the role of husband, then what exactly are men doing in the military?
	And disproportionately, it is men who join the military.
	I'm sorry to break it to everybody, but it turns out that well over 90% of people who are in the military and pretty much everywhere on earth, at least in battle positions in the military, are men because men are aggressive, because men are not opposed to violence as much as women are, which is why also 99% of people in prison for violent crime are men.
	Like pretending that men and women don't exist and that warfare has not traditionally been fought by men and currently is not fought by men and that therefore undermining masculinity has no effect on warfighting or morale is absolutely absurd.
	And everyone knows this.
	But if you say the perfectly obvious these days, everybody goes berserk.
	I mean, it's insane to me.
	There's another clip of me that went viral over the last couple of days in which Media Matters found a clip of me.
	And this is a shocker.
	I was talking about Virginia bathroom policy, in which I said boys should go pee-pee in the boys' room and girls should go pee-pee in the girls' room because boys should not be in the girls' room just because they are girls and girls should not be in the boys' room because they can't use the urinals, right?
	And this, and somehow this is now considered everything is now controversial because the goal of the left is to change the meaning of words and then attack you based on their changed meaning of the word.
	So when I say masculinity, when I say traditional masculinity, what you're supposed to hear, according to the left, is men engaging in me too type predations.
	That's what you're supposed to hear.
	And so if I defend masculinity, I'm defending Harvey Warn Weinstein.
	When in reality, I say string Harvey Weinstein up.
	And also you need traditional men in the military.
	You know, I'm the military one, it bothers me because I very much would love to be like, yay, you know, pro-women, we can do everything.
	We can't do everything and men can't do everything.
	And I'm sure there are some women who are tough and full of grit and can get out there.
	And I've met some of them in, you know, Marine training camp.
	But I mean, if we're talking about generalities here, generalities, would I rather have an army full of men or a Marine Corps full of men or full of women?
	If I had to choose one gender, of course I'd go with men.
	I would go with men.
	And I was making the point just the other day that they told me down at Camp Lejeune that the women tend to be better like snipers, which I know Rob O'Neill is going to yell at me for, but they do.
	Apparently, they're very good at like controlling breathing.
	And there are certain skill sets that women have an advantage over men on.
	But the vast majority of the military skills involve strength, endurance.
	A man has a larger heart.
	He has larger lung capacity.
	All the things that give men the natural advantages help make them better soldiers in most of these tests they have to face.
	It doesn't make me a sexist pig for F's sake.
	You know, it's like, I am a woman.
	I have a daughter.
	I don't want disadvantages for her or for me.
	But let's be real.
	Let's be real.
	And again, we're not, I'm not, what I was saying there is not even talking about something that for sure is true, which is there are physical dichotomies between men and women, which is why most firemen tend to be firemen as opposed to fire women.
	It turns out that women who are generally smaller than men have a harder time carrying a 300-pound obese dude out of a burning building.
	Like, yes, all of that is true.
	Also, it happens to be that the male instinct, which is evolutionary in nature, I know that everybody on the left pretends that they love science.
	As long as we are looking at evolution, men, males, tend to have a protective mechanism encoded in their DNA.
	And pretending that it doesn't exist or undermining that, pretending that males don't have any of these roles or that they should be dissuaded from having those protective roles, that it's bad for them to do that because it's somehow sexist or it's somehow tapping into that toxic masculinity is incredibly bad for men.
	It's incredibly bad for the military.
	It's incredibly bad for society.
	I don't understand why any of this is remotely controversial.
	I'm not even saying women shouldn't be in the military if they want to be in the military.
	I'm just saying that when you undermine the idea of traditional masculinity, or when you say that it's somehow a violation of womanhood to claim that a very, very basic role of a woman is to be a wife and to be a mother, just as it is a very basic role for a father to be a husband and to be a father and to be a provider.
	Like these are not controversial statements.
	And only in a society as sick and stupid as ours would they think it is.
	Because that's the thing we're doing to, we're doing it to women too.
	There's no question that we have thousands of years of evolution that make women caretakers.
	Not all of us, not everybody, I get it.
	Not everybody's got the gene.
	It happens.
	Like I know women who are super, super over the top with it and women who are like, oh, my one friend has a great story about how their first baby was born and she and her husband were lying on their bed and the baby kept crying, kept crying and kind of looking at each other, waiting for the other one to get him.
	And her, the baby was a girl.
	And he looked at her and goes, you know, I really thought you'd be more maternal.
	And she goes, I know, right?
	And she just rolls over and goes back to sleep.
	So it's, it's, of course, a rule, but it has many exceptions.
	But we're kidding ourselves if we, this is why, you know, women, yes, to recover from the birth, but also are given the maternity leave that tends to be a lot longer than the paternity leave, except if you're Pete Buddha Judge.
	But we're, we're denying reality if we suggest that there's not an instinct that's been cultivated over thousands of years that makes us certain, a certain way for women in a certain way, if we're men as a rule, but with exceptions.
	All the data demonstrate this, by the way, literally all of them.
	I mean, when you look at the most gender equal societies on earth, if you're talking about Sweden, if you're talking about Norway, well, one of the things that you find is that women tend to go into the STEM fields less often in those areas than they do in some developing countries where basically if you're a woman, you can get the highest paying job and that highest paying job is in STEM.
	Go into STEM.
	But if you have the option to pick which job you want to go into, women in very socially equal societies tend to go into jobs they want to go into.
	And those tend to be jobs that deal with people, jobs that tend to deal with caretaking.
	That's not the end of the world.
	That's kind of a beautiful thing.
	I mean, I'm not sure why it is that we're supposed to pretend that men and women are identical.
	And I'm waiting for the evidence to pour in that women are massively happier when they buy into this bizarre notion that men and women are identical or that their interests are absolutely identical.
	One of the great lies that the feminist movement told is that women can do everything simultaneously.
	No one can.
	The one finite quantity on planet Earth is time.
	And that time is not infinitely divisible.
	You have to actually make decisions and trade-offs, which is why, for example, my wife, the doctor, who is in a STEM field, right?
	She works a couple of days a week because she likes taking care of the kids.
	Even when she was in medical school, she took maternity leave twice because we wanted to have kids and she wanted to be home with those kids.
	I took off like a week.
	That's because she wanted to do that.
	Now, it doesn't mean that I'm not getting up with the kids at six o'clock every morning.
	I am getting up with the kids at six o'clock every morning and she usually sleeps another half hour, 45 minutes.
	That's the way that our marriage works.
	But the simple, weird idea that women are supposed to be identical to men, and that you cannot say that there are traditionally masculine roles and traditionally feminine roles, and that there are people who break those, right?
	And you can have exceptions, but there has to be a rule in order for there to be exceptions.
	And when you destroy the rule, you don't make the world a better place.
	You make the world a significantly stupider place.
	Yeah, I was giving an interview, a public interview recently in front of, I don't know, a few hundred people.
	And I was making this point, this very point about STEM, about how it's great that we've expanded now girls' access to STEM education for the girls who want to become scientists.
	And that's awesome.
	However, there are a lot of girls who don't want to do that.
	And then these two sort of uber feminist young people, these women started to boo me.
	And I turn around, I'm like, be quiet.
	What do you, who are you booing?
	What do you think you're doing?
	What is controversial about what I just said that not all women want to go into STEM?
	It's a fact.
	Deal with it.
	And by the way, you're all of about like 14.
	So go and live a little bit before you come back and boo somebody like me who's actually been out there, right?
	So I didn't say that last part, but I thought it.
	But my point is, it's not controversial to say that a lot of women don't want to go into STEM.
	I hell no.
	I went to curriculum last night for my son, my seventh grader, and we went in a math class.
	And truly, I was like, is anyone else hot?
	It's hot.
	I'm like, I was breaking out hives just looking at the shit he's doing, Ben.
	Like, I don't want to do math and I don't want to do science.
	And that's me.
	That's fine.
	I would have been freaked out if I had a school that kept shoving me into STEM.
	Yeah.
	Again, this idea that if there is a disparity, that therefore there has been discrimination, that if women choose to take more time off from the workforce to take care of kids than men do on average, which is true, or that women tend to do different majors than men, which is true, or that women prefer certain types of jobs to others.
	Like you don't see a lot of women who are dreaming at age 12 of working on an oil derrick.
	This tends to be something that dudes tend to want to do, like picking up heavy machinery and using it like that.
	That tends to be sort of a male characteristic.
	And it's true, by the way, in primates, right?
	If you look at primate studies, what you will see is that from very like baby ages, young primate males will turn everything into a weapon or a machine, and young primate females will turn everything into a baby as a generality.
	That again, what is, I'm just wondering, what's wrong with that?
	Like, seriously, what's the problem?
	Why is it suddenly an act of good to obliterate this and pretend that this is just some sort of cultural overhang that is promoted by patriarchal men, as opposed to maybe men and women are different?
	And maybe that's one of the great beauties of life.
	And pretending that everybody's an interchangeable androgynous widget makes life significantly worse for men and women.
	I keep saying it over and over and I'll keep saying it.
	There is no data suggesting that women today are happier on average than women were in 1975 or 1965.
	The average, in fact, suggests precisely the reverse, that women tend to be a little bit unhappier than they were.
	Well, is that because the workplace is significantly more discriminatory?
	Or is that because we may have given away a few things in the process of gaining a few things?
	And maybe there's a happy medium where women are allowed to work whatever jobs they want to work.
	And also, there are still traditional males who want to marry them and have babies with them and still see themselves in a protective role vis-a-vis their families.
	I want to round back before I leave this discussion on the first half where we're talking about what we're doing to young men and the demonization and what it's doing to them.
Media Ignoring Right-Wing Violence 00:04:43
	And an offshoot of that is what happened to this kid, this teenager who was killed.
	This happened in North Dakota.
	He was a teenager.
	He was killed in North Dakota by Shannon Brandt, a 41-year-old man who killed him with his car after a political argument.
	The man justified his behavior to the 911 dispatcher.
	He's the guy who killed the young man, called 911 and said, I did it because he was part of a Republican extremist group.
	And we had an argument.
	We had a political argument.
	And I felt threatened.
	So he admitted to striking the pedestrian with his car because of this political argument.
	And he believed that his target was calling people to come get him.
	There was absolutely no evidence of that.
	The victim, 18-year-old Kayler Ellingson, was not, as far as we know, part of any Republican extremist group.
	He was unjustifiably mowed down by this man.
	And as far as we can tell, we don't even know whether they actually had any sort of a political argument whatsoever.
	Here's the problem, Ben.
	It's been totally ignored by virtually all the media or when they cover it, they don't note who was killed and what the partisan affiliations were.
	So here's one example.
	Associated Press reported that it happened that there was a, quote, political argument, but did not identify which side each was on.
	Left out that the assailant said he thought the victim was part of a Republican extremist group.
	Now, you tell me if this were the other way around and it was some guy wearing a MAGA hat that mowed down some Democrat, right?
	Somebody who was part of the resistance.
	It would have been mentioned in every state.
	It would have been all over the news and it would have been, and the partisan affiliations would have been everywhere.
	But this story, newsbusters as of 9-21, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, all of them totally ignored this story, not even one second of airtime.
	Well, if it had been reversed, obviously would have been blamed on your rhetoric or my rhetoric.
	I mean, the way this would work is that the left picks on some of the most egregious examples in public life.
	They'll pick a crime and then they'll just wholesale basically say that that's based on conservative rhetoric.
	Don't we need to crack down on this sort of stuff?
	When it happens on the left, we're not even allowed to talk about the incidents itself, let alone start asking questions as to why it is this person's rhetoric seem to mirror so strongly.
	For example, the MAGA extremist talk that we are hearing from the White House, which is precisely what would happen if the situation were reversed.
	And this is not the only story like this.
	I mean, we had an actual journalist killed in Nevada in Las Vegas by a Democrat, allegedly by a Democratic council member or person who had just lost his seat because this journalist was investigating him.
	And in every headline, it doesn't mention the party affiliation of the person who allegedly committed the murder.
	I mean, it's absolute insanity.
	Listen, the most obvious example here is that we have a full-on Senate candidate who is winning right now in Pennsylvania, who admits to having chased a black person in his car and attempted to hold him for arrest with a shotgun.
	And because that person is John Fetterman, a Democrat, this is not even considered a relevant campaign issue beyond like one article in the New York Times six, seven months ago.
	The willingness of the media to ignore stories like this, the desperation, honestly, for the media to ignore stories like this so they can continue to prep the narrative that the only violent people based on politics in America are quote unquote right-wing extremists is absolutely telling.
	Remember what they did to Larry Elder with the alleged story of him taking out his gun and loading it in front of his girlfriend?
	That was all over.
	The LA Times love that story.
	They love to do that.
	It doesn't matter.
	Larry Elder is a black man because he's the black face of white supremacy, as they claimed.
	So they can do stories like that about him, but they're not so interested in the 18-year-old getting mowed down or the journalist, as you point out.
	It's just a disgusting pattern.
	And of course, you know, Joe Biden and all the rhetoric about fighting the extreme MAGA Republicans.
	You're not hearing all that.
	You know, we're not hearing about how toxic that rhetoric was and how it put this 18-year-old in danger where this guy with a hair trigger thought this kid was about to call reinforcements on some argument they may or may not have been having, but it was certainly not affiliated with any extreme groups.
	No, they'll just move on, point the other way, and start or continue sicking the FBI on people who are associated with January 6th or dark MAGA Republicans.
	All right, stand by because there's much much more to get to.
	And I want to talk about Ben's plans for the Daily Wire and for himself and coming up in just a minute.
	First, though, another of our memorable moments, this one's from episode 33.
	That sounds like just such a baby episode.
	Aren't we on like episode 400 now?
	And that's December.
	Is today 400?
	Yesterday was 400.
	So we're at 40m.
	Anyway, this is episode 33, December 2020.
Comparing Trump to Mussolini 00:08:44
	Think of how different the world was even back then.
	Andrew Sullivan joined us for the first time.
	And while we talked about a lot of serious topics, we also spent a little time with Andrew explaining to me what exactly Bear Week in Provincetown was.
	Listen.
	Basically, at some point in the early 2000s, there were enough openly gay men who were also middle-aged who were exhausted because they kept being told they had to go to the gym and stay in shape and to be attractive.
	And they just couldn't be bothered.
	And so they got kind of fat.
	And they have, and so it's basically a bunch of overweight, middle-aged men with beards and back hair who show up to just hang out with each other and eat pizza and drink beer and hang out by the pool and go to parties and just chill.
	And it's, you know, it's, I'll tell you, it is a lovely week.
	People are those bears, the big, fat, chubby, hairy ones, are so mellow.
	They really are.
	It goes on from there and you will laugh.
	I'll never forget.
	I announced that decision on Meet the Press on Sunday morning and then on Monday went back to work in Congress.
	And just the look on the faces of my colleagues who were coming and they're like, they're giving me hugs.
	And they were like, Tulsi, I hope you realize what you just did.
	The Clintons keep a list.
	They will never forgive you.
	Hillary Clinton will be elected president.
	And good luck because you have just written your political kind of this, this is a political death wish.
	And some of this was coming from people who had, you know, endorsed President Obama very early in 2008 and had directly experienced many years of trying to get off of the Clinton shit list, for lack of a better word.
	Love Tulsi Gabbard.
	She was on the show back in February of last year, episode 69.
	A great conversation you should go and check out more right now with my friend Ben Shapiro.
	And Ben Tulsi is technically a Democrat, but she's, you know, more center.
	And she took it on the chin and continues to from the media.
	Another female politician in the news right now who's getting similar media treatment is the woman expected to be the new prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Maloney, who everything I read is a far-right new version of Mussolini.
	I mean, it is like, I'm like, oh my God, she must be truly terrible.
	What is she?
	I don't pay much attention to Italian politics, but I'm like, let's check it out.
	What is she touting that they are so upset about?
	Well, traditional family values, family-oriented social conservatism.
	All right.
	I'm waiting to be offended.
	She doesn't like tons of immigration into Italy, saying it deprives nations and people of their identity.
	Well, if you let too many immigrants in the country, especially the illegal kind, it can be a problem.
	And then here's Politico.
	She is the most far right in the history of the post-Mussolini Republic.
	Oh, and by the way, they're upset that her party criticizes globalists.
	This is also a problem.
	So what do we make of the rise of Maloney in Italy?
	Well, again, I mean, what you're seeing right now is an international backlash against what in the United States you would call wokeness, but is essentially just sort of a multicultural leftism that has taken over a huge variety of countries and elitist leftism that basically suggests that traditional values are passe, that we need to do away with them, that open borders are worthwhile, that anybody who says the opposite is some sort of fascist.
	One of the look, the telling thing here is that Matteo Renzi, who was the former liberal prime minister of Italy, he was asked about this Maloney, and he said, she's not a fascist.
	I don't know what you're talking about.
	But that was ignored in favor of Joe Biden, who today actually came out and said, we have to stand up for democracy by standing up, because if we don't, then what happened in Italy is going to happen here.
	And it's like, oh, you mean somebody who's elected?
	I've noticed that the Democrats very often are using threats to democracy to mean an elected leader in a country, and we just don't like the elected leader.
	So Victor Orban is a fascist authoritarian, despite the fact that he won shock 52% in the last election cycle.
	They won 52% in the last election.
	Typically, by the way, when dictators win elections, it looks more like the referendum that happened in Donetsk Gluhansk under the Russians, right?
	We're talking like 92%, 98%, like Astro levels.
	If you win a 52 to 48 election, essentially, this does not make you an authoritarian.
	If you are like Maloney is in Italy and you want a plurality, not even a majority, this does not make you a dictator.
	If you're the law and justice party in Poland and you control like some of the seats in parliament, but not even a straight up majority of the seats in parliament, this does not make you a dictator.
	The left, it's something to watch.
	It really is.
	The shifting of the language so that being anti-democracy just means being opposed to our agenda, it's an amazing thing.
	And you saw it a lot when Joe Biden gave that speech in front of Independence Hall, where he suggested that all of his opponents were extremist maga Republicans who had to be fought because they were a threat to the Republic, a threat to democracy.
	And he started off by talking about election denial, and then he immediately swiveled into also they oppose things like the Inflation Reduction Act.
	And it's like, okay, well, hold up.
	Are we distinguishing between people who deny election results and people who just disagree with you?
	Or are these all part of the same thing?
	And I think what the left is making clear internationally is anyone who disagrees with us will now be termed a fascist and a threat to democracy itself, which is truly a shocking undermining.
	I wrote a column this week specifically about this because we read the articles about whether it, whether it's Maloney in Italy, or whether you're talking Orban in Hungary, or whether you're talking Bolsonaro in Brazil.
	The descriptions of the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad things that they are doing on a procedural level sound a lot like what Democrats routinely do in the United States.
	Like there's an accusation that Orban has stacked the Supreme Court in Hungary or he's gone to war.
	I think I think the language was that he has been ripping on the Supreme Court.
	I'm like, well, that's Joe Biden every single day.
	So it sounds to me less like you're upset about institutions of democracy being attacked and you're a lot more upset about what the people who are winning are saying about your policies.
	They just don't like those policies very much.
	I saw you had a response to Ellen Barkin, the actress Ellen Barkin, who said in response to this win in Italy, the news out of Italy is frightening.
	It really is 1933, except this time, we are Germany.
	For fuck's sake, vote.
	Hashtag I never forgot.
	So, yeah, she's, I mean, first of all, I would just like to point out to her that if you're going to make a comparison with regard to Italy, I don't know why you would go to 1933 in Germany as opposed to, say, 1923 in Italy, which is actually when Mussolini took over.
	So she's got the wrong country in the wrong dictator.
	Are you going to make a Mussolini comparison?
	You actually have to look at Mussolini.
	That's a totally different country with a totally different dictator.
	So there is that.
	I mean, just the level of historic ignorance is amazing.
	But what I keep coming back to is that you see left-wing leaders across the world who do fully authoritarian things.
	Like Jacinda Ardern, who is beloved of the left.
	You remember she's the prime minister of Habaton, right?
	She's the prime minister of New Zealand.
	And she completely shut off her little island.
	And we were supposed to believe that this is the best way to fight COVID because she happened to be on an island with like seven people and a couple of sheep.
	And she shut it.
	And this was, this is like the best.
	You locked everybody down for two years.
	You couldn't get in.
	You couldn't get out.
	You couldn't move outside of your town.
	And she was the greatest, Jacinda Ardern.
	Well, she just spoke at the UN and she called for a complete crackdown on dissent on everything from COVID to climate change on the internet.
	She said that the internet creates the ability for wars on truth.
	And so we really need to crack, like that sounds like significantly more of a danger to democracy than, say, Maloney winning an election in Italy.
	But this is the morphing of the language is really an ugly thing.
	And it's something that we ought to watch out.
	It also happens to be true that the left has started to do this routine where they're emphasizing the thematics of, say, the French Revolution over the American Revolution.
	So again, you saw this in Joe Biden's speech, that Independence Hall speech, which, again, I think is a historically shocking and ridiculous speech, but it has some deep themes that are worthy of note.
	And in that speech, he says that the things that America is really all about are equality and democracy.
	Those are the two things that America is about.
	Well, actually, this is a republic, not a democracy, right?
	Here, the mob does not rule.
	And if we are about a couple of things, it would be liberty and virtue and republicanism.
	It would not be about equality and democracy, which was mob rule in the name of mob justice, which really was more like the French Revolution.
	That was the sort of hijacking of these themes and this notion that anyone who opposes me opposes democracy.
	And therefore, they're like the Nazis.
	They're like a dictator and we have to fight them.
Climate Change Intensifying Hurricanes 00:05:37
	I don't know where the limit on that is.
	And this is where you start to get into actual dangerous language.
	When you say that your political opponents are literally, I mean, I'm old enough to remember because I'm more than two years old when Donald Trump was ripped up and down for suggesting that journalists in the United States, members of the press who were left-wing, were enemies of the people.
	Remember this, this is the end of the world.
	It was an attack on the free press.
	Now you have Joe Biden declaring half the American population enemies of the Republic, right?
	Not just enemies, enemies of the Republic itself.
	If somebody is an enemy of the Republic, typically we call them a traitor.
	And that has real consequences to it.
	So they're playing with fire here.
	I want to shift gears a little bit because we're just getting this in from President Biden on Hurricane Ian saying that this could be the deadliest hurricane in Florida's history.
	Quote, the numbers are still unclear, but we're hearing early reports of what may be substantial loss of life.
	The pictures down there are just devastating, Ben.
	I mean, are you in Florida now?
	I am.
	Thank God I'm on the coast that really didn't get hit.
	I'm closer to South Florida.
	So this time it was spared.
	But obviously we have friends and some family over in Naples and the West Coast just got shellacked and it's a disaster area over there, obviously.
	And that tends to be, yeah, it's really bad.
	I mean, you see the pictures and you just, you wonder how there could be any survival in some of these areas.
	The winds, now, now it's a tropical storm, just an update.
	The winds have weakened to 65 miles an hour made landfall on Wednesday as a cat four.
	I mean, a state of emergency, of course, has been, has been declared.
	It may regain, by the way, strength and go back up to a hurricane.
	But it's, you know, Sanibel, Captiva, all these places that a lot of people have gone and you enjoy them as these beautiful vacation towns.
	I mean, I have just gotten absolutely devastated.
	They are leveled.
	And it's just too soon to know the death toll.
	But that's the first we've heard from an official on just how bad we expect it to be.
	My God, our hearts and thoughts and prayers are with them.
	And hopefully DeSantis and Biden have been coordinating so far in a good way.
	I mean, DeSantis was like, stop trying to pit us against each other.
	That's just petty.
	Got lives at stake.
	So to his credit, they do seem to be working together.
	Just to shift it, though, of course, because we're on the subject of the media, so bad.
	You can take it to the bank.
	Don Lemon's going to do something stupid when there's a national tragedy, when there's not.
	It really doesn't matter.
	And it is a day that ends in why.
	So he was trying to cover this as the hurricane was moving in and people were worried.
	You know, I mean, people are dying.
	And he's got, what was the official?
	He's the hurricane center director on with him.
	And here's what happened.
	This guy had to slap Lemon down.
	Watch.
	Can you tell us what this is and what effect climate change has on this phenomenon?
	Well, we can come back and talk about climate change at a later time.
	I want to focus on the here and now.
	We think the rapid intensification is probably almost done.
	Listen, I'm just trying to get that.
	You said you want to talk about climate change, but what effect does climate change have on this phenomenon that is happening now?
	Because it seems these storms are intensifying.
	That's the question.
	I don't think you can link climate change to any one event.
	On the whole, on the cumulative, climate change may be making storms worse.
	But to link it to any one event, I would caution against that.
	Okay.
	Listen, I grew up there and these storms are intensifying.
	Something is causing them to intensify.
	He's an idiot.
	They're not.
	They've been very intense for a very long time.
	We've had much worse storms come through since the 1950s, but he doesn't like to do homework.
	He just likes to talk about his feelings.
	And his feeling is it's getting worse, Ben.
	And therefore, he wants to know whether his environmental agenda can be affirmed as the storm was moving onto Florida.
	I mean, I do love when the big fans of science spend their times trying to rebut actual climate scientists by saying, well, you know, when I was a kid, I remember that the hurricanes were bad, but now, man, they are so much worse.
	Yeah.
	And when you were a kid, all the adults looked like they were eight feet tall.
	It didn't mean they were actually eight feet tall.
	So there's that.
	Also, I mean, the data are actually in and fairly clear, which is that there's been actually a slight decrease in the number of major hurricanes making landfall in the United States over the course of the last century, and maybe a slight decrease in the intensity.
	One of the big problems is that you have what is called the target effect.
	As these hurricanes hit land, because the building and the population has grown, the target that it's possible for it to hit has also grown, which means that it's likely to do more damage.
	I mean, when a hurricane hit 2,000 years ago, it didn't do any damage because there was nobody living there.
	Now you have millions of people who are living along these coasts.
	And so that means that when the hurricane hits, it's going to have a significant impact on human beings.
	What is truly amazing about this is that the media will attempt to now paint anybody who does not attribute this to climate change, the intensity of this hurricane or this hurricane at all, to climate change.
	They will then attempt to say that you are a climate denier.
	But every climatologist will do exactly what that NOAA official said.
	They will refuse to identify any data point with climate change because that's not how you do data.
	You're not supposed to, I mean, this is true because, and you hear it from the left, that very often you'll see people on the right and there'll be a blizzard and people on the right will go, hey, what happened to your climate change, right?
	Where's the global warming?
	And they'll say you can't use any specific event as evidence for or against climate change.
	You have to look at a trend because climate is weather over time.
	It's not a singular point.
	And so when you see Don Lemon doing this, he's actually cutting very much against the science, which is why you see him being roboted by the NOAA guy.
	And all he can fall back on is, well, when I was a kid, I used to live in Florida.
	Well, okay, Florida, man.
	It turns out there's 21 million people living in Florida.
	Do they all have authority?
	And do they all have the same sort of opinions that you do?
Growing the Daily Wire Independently 00:04:01
	That was his lived experience, Ben.
	Yeah, NOAA, you know, national organization.
	What does NOAA stand for?
	NOAA.
	They put out the actual stats and here's what they say.
	The historical Atlantic hurricane data do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming induced century scale increase in frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.
	No increase in frequency or intensity as a result of climate change.
	The NOAA director, National Hurricane Center, he was too polite to actually just shove Don Lemon's nose in it.
	And Don just kept rounding back and kept rounding back because he wasn't humiliated badly enough by the woman on reparations that he just wanted to go at it again.
	And that's where we've landed.
	All right.
	So in the time we have left, let me ask you about the empire that is the Daily Wire.
	You and Jeremy boring, building it, and they have come.
	I love what you're doing with Jordan.
	You've got Candace now as part of the Daily Wire.
	So what's next?
	Because you're doing movies.
	I mean, like, what is there left to conquer?
	Yeah.
	So we have some children's programming that's going to come out early next year.
	We're really excited about that since Disney decided to woke itself and decided to, as they themselves said, inject LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign ampersand politics into children's TV.
	We've decided that we're going to make competitive content so parents can actually feel safe and secure putting their kids in front of the TV for 20 minutes while they do the dishes.
	And so that content is supposed to come out next year.
	We have a doc from Candace about the George Floyd fiasco that is coming out in the very near future.
	We have a couple of movies that are in production right now.
	We have some TV series that are in production.
	And we're always looking to add on new talent and expand because our basic goal here, whether it is Jeremy's Razors, right, which is the razor company that we launched directly to slap Harry's Razors in the face, or whether it's for the products, our goal is to provide alternatives for people who are being deliberately cut out of the cultural conversation.
	And so we're going to continue to grow along those lines.
	We're very blessed.
	We've been able to double the growth of our company nearly every year of its existence.
	And last year was actually no exception.
	And so hopefully we'll keep on that trend line.
	I love watching it, Ben.
	It's so great.
	And it's wonderful that you have independent power now.
	My only fear, I'm not going to make you answer this, but my only fear is don't let anyone acquire you.
	Don't let any big media company that's already dominating one of these spheres acquire you and eat up your independence because we need diversity on the right too.
	For sure.
	I mean, this is one of the reasons, and we openly say this to our subscribers, and you can subscribe over at DailyWirePlus.com.
	And we say to our subscribers that basically all these other companies are funded from the outside.
	We took some seed funding from our founders.
	We're talking like under $5 million in seed funding when we built this company.
	And I mean, it's been widely reported that our revenue this year is going to approach $200 million.
	That sort of growth was all internal.
	We've done all of that off of cash flow, which means that we take the money that our subscribers give us and we use that to produce new content, to produce new growth.
	We do that specifically because we don't actually wish to give up authority over our creation.
	We don't want people on the left grabbing hold of it and diversity, equity, inclusioning our company into something that it opposes, as you've seen with a lot of other quasi-right-wing companies lately who have started to parrot some of the nostrums of the left.
	Yeah, well, you've been amazing on virtually every front, and not just the ones we're talking about, but you guys got involved in the legal front, on the vaccine mandate, and won.
	So there's a very important role that the Daily Wire is playing right now, culturally, societally, legally, and just in terms of entertaining us all and keeping us update, updated on the news.
	Love the whole team.
	Ben, great to see you.
	Thanks so much, Megan.
	Congratulations again on two years.
	Thank you, my friend.
	I've got a special message I am writing for you.
	If you'd like to receive it, go to megankelly.com, sign up for my weekly email.
	It only comes on Fridays.
	And don't miss the show tomorrow because we have Bridget Fantasy back.
	Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no

Chapters

00:00:00 Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show
00:15:15 Trump's Path to Re-election
00:25:57 FBI Raids on Pro-Life Activists
00:34:41 Weaponized Heartbeat Ultrasounds
00:45:58 Men, Masculinity, and Military Service
01:01:33 Why Men Dominate Frontline Combat
01:11:12 Media Ignoring Right-Wing Violence
01:15:56 Comparing Trump to Mussolini
01:24:40 Climate Change Intensifying Hurricanes
01:30:18 Growing the Daily Wire Independently