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Nov. 22, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:40:11
20221122_legacy-media-discovers-hunters-laptop-and-warnock-
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Violence Before Bodies Get Cold 00:08:26
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
The left and Democratic leaders continuing to place blame on conservatives before the motive is even known in connection with this Colorado nightclub shooting.
I mean, this happens every time.
Every time.
Nancy Pelosi going as far as to accuse people who supported Donald Trump's presidency for the deadly shooting.
They can't even respect the dead for two minutes.
I mean, before the bodies get cold, they want to pin it on politics.
Can we wait and see?
Because this guy pulled guns on and threatened to bomb his own mother a year ago.
So it's possible he had some mental health problems that were unresolved.
You know, it's a situation similar to the Nancy Pelosi attack on her husband by this guy who was clearly a lunatic, whose most recent writings seemed out there and aligned with QAnon, but we're talking about a mentally unwell person.
So we're going to dig into that in one second.
Also, two years after Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes laughed in President Trump's face when he brought up Hunter Biden's laptop scandal during an interview in 2020, the channel has finally authenticated the laptop as, in fact, Hunter Biden's.
Can you believe this?
I mean, not only are they late, right, two years late, but they're like a year later than even the New York Times and some of the other left-wing press.
What took them so long?
Now they break it like breathlessly.
It's authenticated.
Wait, I thought Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes said it couldn't be done.
Well, how do we have to talk to Leslie Stahl?
How on earth did it happen?
Plus, we've got the backstory on an epic fight that took place on ESPN over the weekend that the channel was hoping to bury.
Who better to discuss it with than Clay Travis?
He and his Al Cake reporters would not let the burying happen, and he has been proven right.
Clay is also co-host of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, and he joins me now.
Clay, great to have you back.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Great to be with you, Megan.
I think I saw you before election season, before school season out in Utah.
And certainly there's been a lot of craziness since then.
So, but everything's going well here.
Kids are home.
If you hear people screaming and yelling in the background, it's Thanksgiving week.
And so they might be fired up playing their video games or watching the World Cup.
So just FYI in advance.
Well, I'm kind of hoping for a signing now.
So fingers crossed.
All right, before I do want to talk to you about Thanksgiving and plans, but before we get to all that, let's talk about what's happening with this shooting out in Colorado.
Horrendous shooting.
They've updated the death and injury toll.
As of today, five killed, at least 19 injured.
That's down from a reported 25 injured.
One survivor was shot seven times.
And the only reason we have so survivors, according to what I read, are the heroes, at least two people inside the club who stopped the gunman before the police got there, including a war vet from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Who, I mean, it's crazy, the bravery.
And it does always remind me of the Mr. Rogers look for the helpers.
You know, when you're feeling so down about these events, just look for the helpers.
The helpers are not in the mainstream media who truly, before the bodies were even cold, they jumped to this is right-wing inspired violence.
This is because of the Republicans.
This is because of Trump, because of Matt Walsh and the Daily Wire folks who have been outspoken about drag queen shows for children and the mutilation of minors.
And so somehow, because this is a gay club, LGBTQ, this is their fault.
It's a pattern.
We've seen it so many times, Clay, so many times, Clay, but it still is alarming and it's deeply immoral.
Yeah, Megan, I think of all the things that the media covers.
The one that we probably cover the worst and get the most wrong and continue to create the most antipathy out there in the general public and certainly among the, as you said when you started, the people who are already mentally unstable is mass shootings.
So a couple of things.
One, everybody is opposed to mass shootings.
Okay.
This isn't some situation where there's one side advocating for them.
And I just always want to focus on this to begin with.
We should never say the names of mass shooters.
I think I've also seen you tweet and talk about this as well.
This is something I've been on.
This has been my policy for 15 years.
If we want to praise the people who take out the mass shooters, the heroes who show up, I think all of the energy and effort should go there.
I think the number one thing that we could do to make mass shootings less common is not make these guys famous.
Second part of this, we have a problem with violence in this country right now.
Murder and violent crime is skyrocketing all over the country.
No matter where you're listening to us or watching us right now, there probably is an incident of late that you can point to.
This is symptomatic of that.
And you know, Megan, if we eliminated every single mass shooting in America, do you know that 99% of murders would still occur?
So I think this is a failure of the media.
I understand why it's sensational and why everybody rushes to want to cover the mass shooting.
But when we cover those mass shootings, we ignore what's happening in many cities across the country every single weekend, where there are killing fields, literally, and young kids overwhelmingly end up the victims.
And I'm saying kids defining it all the way up to college age, 20, 22 and younger, 24 and younger.
These guys are just not being stopped.
And I think the real story here is this is continuing to be the fallout from the George Floyd incident, when in May of 2020, our national media, by and large, just decided that cops were evil.
They needed to defund the police.
There was something major wrong with the way that we protected people in this country.
And unfortunately, there are tens of thousands of people that I really believe would still be alive if we were allowing police to do their jobs.
But my big thing here is we can't use these mass shootings as political related issues when even if we eliminated all of them, we'd still have 99% of the murders going on.
But if you look at the mass shootings, Clay, if you look at the mass shootings, and I agree that the media completely ignores what's happening in Baltimore, what's happening in Chicago, what's happening in Philadelphia, they don't care.
They only care about these things because they can look for what they think is a political motive.
Or in any case, even if there's not even arguably a political motive, they can look for the guns.
Get rid of the guns.
It's the problem.
That's the problem.
And they always ignore the mental health issue.
They may give it a little like nod of the head.
But this kid obviously had severe mental health problems.
And it's coming out today that, well, it came out yesterday, but in 2021, he confronted his own mother with a bomb threat, threatened her with a homemade bomb, multiple weapons and ammo.
He was arrested following a long standoff with deputies so bad that they had to evacuate the nearby homes.
No explosives were found, but they were very fearful.
And there were several weapons that this kid had and was considering using against his mom.
CNN obtained exclusive videotape of some of that moment.
You can hear the shooter ranting.
This is, again, June of 2021 in this incident with his mother.
Listen to this.
This is your boy.
I've got the f ⁇ ing shits outside.
Look at that.
They got a beat on me.
You see that right there?
F ⁇ ing sh ⁇ got their rifles out.
If they breach, I'm going to blow it to holy hell.
Okay, so what was he mad at then?
Reportedly, he was mad is his parents were going to move out of town.
His grandparents were going to leave the state and move to Florida.
And he was angry.
I mean, this is clearly an unwell person.
But listen to the way the geniuses over on the CNN morning show today were talking about this guy's grandfather and how, I mean, clearly the intimation was this may have been behind this kid's thinking.
Well, just let the investigators, we journalists are trying to piece together a profile of this suspect, why he, maybe learn why he did what he did.
Gun Access and Grandfather's Rage 00:11:43
We've learned that his grandfather is an outgoing California state assemblyman by the name of Randy Vopal.
He has been a silly man since 2016, but he recently lost his reelection bid.
This is the father of the suspect's mother, Laura Voepel.
Randy Vopal attracted attention when he compared the January 6th attack on the Capitol to the Revolutionary War.
Here's what he said.
He said, this is Lexington and Concord.
First shots fired against tyranny.
Tyranny will follow in the aftermath of the Biden swear-in on January 20th.
Now, he later tried to walk back, saying he didn't condone the violence that took place that Wednesday at the Capitol.
And it's not clear at this point what kind of interactions this 22-year-old suspect had with his grandfather.
Right.
Which is why you shouldn't be reporting on it.
Also, Megan, this is just part and parcel of the larger context that the CNNs, the MSNBCs, the New York Times, the Washington Post bring to bear.
They legitimately believe if you voted for Donald Trump, you are evil.
And they believe that Donald Trump is Hitler.
He is evil personified.
He is the Antichrist, effectively, if they believed in the Bible.
They called him the Antichrist.
And so as you break all this down, it really is the motivating factor to so much of this coverage.
And Megan, the thing I've always said from the get-go is if there wasn't bias in media, there would be a ton of positive Donald Trump stories that ended up not being true, right?
Like you would, somebody would have said, hey, Donald Trump saved eight kittens from drowning in the Potomac River, and then it comes out that it's not true.
Every single thing in the media that has been wrong about Donald Trump for the last, you know, eight years has all been biased against him.
You would, if you were just incompetent, sometimes you would be biased in favor of him.
And I think this is their fevered dream, Megan, that they just, they really are convinced.
I mean, and it makes sense in some, they're deranged in the way that they think.
But if you thought, and they truly do, that Trump is Hitler, then anything they can do to attack Trump and anybody who voted for him is justified because they legitimately believe that he is Adolf Hitler.
I really on January 6th to them is as evil.
I mean, January 6th is any, any, you know, this guy had controversial views on January 6th.
That's what motivated the grandson.
The grandson must have been driven by it.
And what's even more egregious about the CNN clip is if you continue watching it, Caitlin Collins, who's one of the anchors, says to the reporter, well, there are reports that the grandfather hadn't been in touch with the grandson, that they were estranged, and that he hadn't spoken to him in 10 years.
In 10 years.
So that, okay, so A, yes, kudos to her for raising that.
But B, no kudos to CNN for continuing to report the information in the first place.
So you knew.
So what you're telling us is you know there was no connection between them.
They were estranged and they hadn't spoken in 10 years.
And you still raise this?
Why?
Why?
It's disgusting and it's emblematic of what we're seeing on all the media channels right now.
Narrative over facts, Megan.
As you well know, you skew whatever you can to fit your preconceived narrative and the preconceived narrative of CNNs of the world is that we are under existential threat from attack at any moment from these evil Donald Trump supporters who were involved in January 6th, and they're all complicit.
And that's where we are.
And so, and the other thing about these mass shootings is the only ones that get covered are the ones that fit the narrative.
If there is a mass shooter, a Bernie Sanders supporter, you know, tried to kill the guys during the softball game.
It kind of vanishes from all the discourse, right?
The reality is, I used to work on Capitol Hill, Megan, back when I was in college.
You know what my job was when you could still send mail to Capitol Hill?
I opened every single piece of mail that arrived in the congressman's office and filed it.
Oh, yeah, I was the lowest person on the totem pole in Congressman Bob Clement, Nashville area congressman back in the day.
And Megan, there was a crazy drawer inside of the congressman's office, the front desk there.
And you would be stunned how often we would get letters that were like ransom note letters that you see in movies with like each individual letter cut out from a newspaper, spelling something out.
I never knew how many crazy people there were until I started opening congresspeople's mail.
My point on this is people are crazy in every respect.
You mentioned earlier that Nancy Pelosi attack.
The guy was a nudist with BLM signs in his front yard who lived in Berkeley.
I don't think that's the fertile ground for Donald Trump supporters.
The guy was just crazy, right?
He probably had all sorts of crazy ideas.
We have underrated crazy in this country, and crazy is a motivating factor.
And here's the other thing: you can't stop crazy, right?
Like if somebody is truly insane, they're going to behave in an insane manner.
And every single one of these guys who's a shooter, whether they're Democrats, Republicans, they don't really have coherent political philosophies most of the time.
But Megan, every single one of these guys has a long history of crazy before they act, whether it was Uvalde, whether it was, hey, what happened to that story?
Remember Waukesha, the guy who tried to just drive through the Christmas parade a year ago, killed all those people.
Daryl Brooks just got found guilty.
I apologize for mentioning his name because I try to avoid doing it too.
But the narrative didn't fit there, right?
So we just kind of pretended that story didn't exist.
But all these guys are crazy and neither political party has a monopoly on crazy.
And I just wish we stopped pretending that they did.
Well, why?
Why?
I mean, sometimes you can stop crazy.
You know, that's why some of these red flag laws could make sense.
Some of them are really draconian, but some of them make a lot of sense.
If you see a person who's identifiable as severely mentally disturbed, they should not be getting a license for a gun.
But in this case, something even weirder seems to have happened.
He clearly had guns in that June 2021 incident that we just played the tape from.
You can see them in the video.
And he was charged at the time.
He was booked on two counts of felony menacing, three counts of first-degree kidnapping at the time.
But there is no public record, Clay, that prosecutors moved forward with the charges, according to the Associated Press.
They point out that there is no indication these charges were raised against him following through or followed through on.
I don't know why.
So there is a question about why he was allowed to keep the guns after that behavior and why no charges were pursued against him.
Even if the mother said, I don't want you to charge my son, that's irrelevant.
We've seen that in domestic violence cases a lot.
The woman says, don't prosecute.
And the prosecutor says, oh, I'm going to.
So what happened here?
There may have been a law enforcement failure.
Oh, I'm sure there was.
Because oftentimes there are.
If you remember the Charleston shooting where the kid walked into the church filled with black parishioners and shot, I think eight people.
That guy should have never been able to buy the gun.
If you remember what just happened at the University of Virginia, the awful story about the walk-on football player who killed three of his teammates, they've had to shut down the University of Virginia's football season.
It's awful.
It's a devastating story.
That guy should have never had access to guns either, which is why one of the arguments out there of we need more gun laws oftentimes doesn't necessarily apply to the facts in question, because most of the time or very often, the people who have access to the guns have behaved in a way or have a record that would prevent them from actually being able to purchase those guns.
And there's a failure.
And one more thing.
I think there's a lot of parent failure on these stories very often, Megan, because if you have a child and you know that they are psychologically unstable, the amount of time that we are, this happened in the Buffalo shooting, the grocery store shooting, the amount of parents who seem to turn the other way and allow their children who may have violent tendencies and certainly have mental health issues to obtain guns is really through the roof.
And just as a parent, I know you got young kids too.
When some of these guys are 18, 19 years old, and a lot of them are young teenage or early 20s actors, actors living at home with their family, there's a lot of parental failure that often goes into these people having guns in the first place, especially when they're behaving violently and behaving in a manner that you know they do not have the mental capacity to be able to handle regular life, much less life associated with weapons.
That's so true.
You know, I'm a Yankee by birth and my upbringing, my whole life in New York State for the most part.
And it's not, I wouldn't say I grew up in a definitely not a hunting family or a gun family.
But as I've gotten older, first for security reasons and then just for interest and leisure reasons, I've gotten more interested in firearms.
And just this past weekend, our friends took us to a shooting club and it was actually really fun.
It's a proper place to shoot a gun.
Obviously, everything was safe when we were taught the proper safety procedures.
And we really enjoyed ourselves.
And our friend was telling us that his dad taught him how to shoot and he taught his son and his daughter how to shoot.
And he actually feels a lot more safe knowing that his children know how to behave around a firearm, like they know all the safety protocols, but still they lock up their guns.
Their kids are older now.
So I can understand that having a gun in the house, even when you have a child and sort of getting that out of the way and teaching them safety procedures and they don't have access to it and it's kept locked.
But the first sign that your kid is mentally disturbed, I'm sorry, but you got to take extraordinary measures to make sure he or she can never access the gun, especially when it's a kid, a boy between the ages of 18 and 26.
You can profile him very easily.
You know who it's going to be.
It is not going to be a 13-year-old girl.
It's going to be a boy.
And when you see the signs, you got to get rid of the guns.
You got to get rid of his access to them.
There's no doubt.
And look, I grew up in the South.
So I grew up around guns.
And what I would just look at as I've gotten older is the goal is to remove all guns from society, right?
So anybody who says, oh, we just want gun safety, which look, their goal, and I don't begrudge it.
I just wish they would be honest about it on the left wing in this country is to remove all private weapons from citizens.
And I totally understand all the people out there who are saying, you're not going to take away my rights.
When Ukraine got invaded, what's the first thing they did, Megan?
They started handing out guns to every single person, every man between the ages of 18 and 60, I think, is who had to report so that they could help to defend their country.
There are a lot of people out there who believe that the single most important right that we have in America is the right to bear arms.
I actually think it's the First Amendment, but I certainly respect everybody who wants to defend their constitutional right to continue to have weapons.
And they understand, I think, better than anybody, the NRA and the people who are most committed to the rights of gun owners understands that the goal is not to somehow come up with gun safety and say, hey, we're happy.
Law School and Ukraine Guns 00:04:35
Like I would analogize it this way, Megan.
The reason that I oppose all these desires to rename sports teams is because it never ends, right?
It continues, right?
If you could, like you, let's say you and me, we're like, hey, we're reasonable people.
We'll sit on one side of the table.
All the people that are offended by team mascots and names and everything else, let's just negotiate this out.
All right.
We'll give you a couple of mascot names and can we just put this thing to bed forever?
And we never have to debate whether this is appropriate or inappropriate or anything else.
No, they would never agree because the progressive agenda on issues like these don't end.
It really is a slippery slope.
They derive their political power from constantly needing something else to be attacking.
And that certainly applies, I think, for guns as well.
Oh, I think about my Syracuse Orange.
How long before they decide somehow orange is offensive?
It's offensive to Trump.
Well, the orange is a little bit overweight, Megan.
And, you know, it could be fat shaming that the orange is quite plump.
It definitely could be fat shaming.
Now, Abby just brought this to me.
So I just want to show this to you, Clay.
Look at this.
I mean, that's me, right?
This center there, dead on.
Oh, boom.
There you go.
Bullseyes.
That's my husband.
That's my husband over there.
He also, he was, that's what he was aiming for.
So he was also dead eye, bullseye.
He's he, for the general public, you should know he is very experienced with the guns.
So don't mess with us.
I appreciate it.
I thought the funniest thing you said in a long time was the I'd rather my husband have a one-night stand than cry.
I read that.
I didn't hear it live, but I read that article and legitimate the headline legitimately legitimately made me laugh.
He came on last week because he just started.
He came on last week and because he just launched a podcast called Dedicated with Doug Brunt.
And we talked about that.
And he said every friend he knows was texting him like, yo, Duggar Hall pass.
I love that he's got a podcast.
My wife said, you know, she's finishing law school right now.
But she said when she finishes law school, she may decide to start her own podcast that's just called I Hate You, Clay Travis, where she just talks about all the reasons that I drive her insane.
I was like, you know what?
People probably would love listening to that podcast.
She's pretty funny.
We could love hate law degree if she doesn't immediately try to divorce me and save money on legal fee.
She can do the podcast instead.
Good for her for going to law school at this point.
I love that.
I love law school and I love it.
We met in law school.
She did the first year of law school.
She was like, oh my God, I hate this.
I never want to sit in front of a computer, do all this research and everything else.
But then, you know, the boys are all, we've got three boys and they're all in school now.
And so when they finally got back to school, she was like, hey, you know what?
I'm really kind of interested in based on what I do and what the family does now.
We have a lot of legal related issues and she's way better at it than I am.
So anytime there's a contract to read, I'm like, will you just read this?
And like, I'm, my eyes roll back into my head, even though I've got the lawyer.
I just hate reading contracts and like thinking about all the things that can go wrong.
She's really good at it.
And so I was like, you should, you know, you should go back and get your degree.
So she'll graduate in May from Vanderbilt and finish her law degree, which is a really cool story.
Are they trying to indoctrinate her into woke thinking?
Because Vanderbilt's been in the news for a lot of that.
You know what's wild, Megan, is she has kind of a perfect window into how much law school has changed in the last generation, right?
Because I graduated 04.
We started Matt in 01.
So she will graduate a little bit over a generation after she started.
So she obviously is a mom and things are a lot different now than when we were in our 20s and we were in law school.
But she's got some pretty incredible stories just about the culture and how things have changed.
Remember, she had to wear masks, right?
Like the law school, like many schools out there, kept kids in masks for, you know, basically two years worth of law school.
I mean, we're going to be graduating this year, law students who spent the first two years of law school either remote or wearing masks, which is really kind of crazy to think about for anybody, you know, being integrated and being sort of involved with your classmates and the conversations and everything else.
It's just kind of wild to think about the isolation that these kids went through compared to what a typical college or law school experience would have been like.
Definitely.
Well, good for her for going back and getting it done.
I'll be looking forward to your arguments, hearing the reports on your arguments after she may rule the day.
I wanted to point out one other thing before we move on subjects.
Hunter Biden Tapes Interfere With Election 00:14:40
Glenn Greenwald, he's been posting on Twitter and referencing back to some earlier reporting that he has done on this.
But he's pointing out that, remember the Pulse massacre?
Another massacre that we were told was driven by anti-gay animus.
And I confess that I moved on from this.
There's so many mass shootings.
It's like almost hard to keep track of all of them.
But he pointed out that actually the reporting would ultimately show that the Pulse attacker had no interest in choosing a gay bar, that all the evidence showed it, but that the media didn't report it because it played on stereotypes about Muslims.
And the narrative that that guy was about killing gays helped the LGBTQ groups raise money.
And he goes through in a great post he did in July of 2021 entitled The Enduring False Narrative About the Pulse Massacre Shows the Power of Media Propaganda.
He goes through in great detail about how that shooter was about avenging what was happening with strikes and otherwise other warfare against Muslims.
And he was angry and he wanted revenge, but nobody would report it.
And he included this quote.
You have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq.
This is him making clear what his motivation was.
Have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq.
They're killing a lot of innocent people.
What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there?
You need to stop the U.S. airstrikes.
They need to stop the U.S. airstrikes.
Okay, this went down.
A lot of innocent women and children are getting killed in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan.
The airstrikes need to stop and stop collaborating with Russia.
Not a single survivor reported this guy saying anything derogatory about LGBTQs, but that's been the enduring narrative.
So we just need to like take a breath before we jump on the, you know, hate crime.
And I'm very open-minded to this being a hate crime.
If it was, we should call it out.
But just the audience needs to be aware of the manipulations that go on.
All right, let's talk about Hunter Biden and CBS.
Can we?
Speaking of manipulations.
I don't know if you're aware, but the Hunter Biden laptop story was real.
And it was verifiable at the laptop.
This is so fun.
We have to rerun it.
Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes right before the election.
I think this was October 2020.
Look at this.
I think it's one of the biggest scandals I've ever seen, and you don't cover it.
Biggest.
You want to talk about it.
Well, because it can't be verified.
You want to talk about insignificant things.
I'm telling you.
Of course it can be verified.
Excuse me.
They found the laptop.
Leslie.
Leslie.
What can't be verified?
The laptop.
Why do you say that?
Even the family hasn't the family on the laptop?
He's gone into hiding for five days.
He's gone into hiding.
He's preparing for your debate.
Oh, it's taken him five days to prepare.
I doubt it.
I doubt it.
Okay, not verifiable.
All right, stay with me.
Uh, I give you CBS NEWS yesterday morning on Hunter Biden.
Two years later, and we commissioned an independent forensic review to determine its authenticity.
The laptop data we had analyzed showed no evidence it was faked or tampered with.
You're confident, based on your analysis, this is Hunter Biden's data and that it's real.
Yes, CBS NEWS approached the lawyer for the computer repair shop owner to cut through the noise.
We've always had uh, one clean copy and obtained a copy of what he says.
They provided the FBI under subpoena.
Then we went to Minneapolis for an independent analysis.
Just the sheer volume of what we're dealing with.
It would be difficult uh, if not impossible, to fabricate Hallelujah clay.
So somehow they managed to verify it.
This is just.
Uh, I sometimes want Megan I.
I would like to be able to go to a hundred or 200 years from now and read the way that history chronicles this era that we're living through right now.
Um, because there are just so many things that Donald Trump was right about that were clearly covered up, and I I just I i'll just use this as an example Megan, the people who claim that they care about independent truth and journalism.
Democracy dies in darkness across the top of the Washington POST, all the news that's fit to print across the top of uh, the NEW YORK Times Msnbc CNN, the obsession with Trump.
My argument and I would love to see whether history truly vindicates this or not is that the decision not to allow the Hunter Biden laptop and Joe Biden's potential involvement in that to be discussed shared, rigorously debated, as a part of the election of 2020 is the single greatest rig job that has ever existed in the modern era, right in like my life,
or probably your life that we've ever seen in presidential politics.
Because, given the fact, based on the the vote tallies that we know if 40 000 votes had been changed right, 40 000 people changed their minds really 20 000 people, but 40 000 votes total 20 000 people changed their minds in Wisconsin, Georgia and in Arizona then Trump would have been reelected president.
I don't think there's any doubt that if the Hunter Biden laptop story had been covered, like it should have been, by an honest media, that Trump would have won the 2020 election.
And so everybody wants to talk about the rig job that goes on in our democracy, in peril, and all those things.
This is, I think, the single greatest evidence, but it actually benefits Democrats.
So they tend to not pay attention to it.
And in terms of taking two years to verify and authenticate this laptop, it's indefensible.
You know, they just went and found some random person in Minneapolis.
They could have done this before.
And this.
To me, it calls into question everything surrounding our FBI, the independence of the Department OF Justice.
If we need a special counsel for Trump, which I think is probably the right call actually um, how in the world can Hunter Biden be investigated by the Department OF Justice that his father is in charge of?
Uh, it's all just a house of cards when you start to, that's exactly right clay.
So I I want to mention the special counsel one second.
But um, the the fact that CBS are.
It's a joke that this took two years.
A joke.
Yeah, as I said, even even the NEW YORK Times and the Washington POST came around well prior to CBS in finally saying yeah, it's verified, it's Hunters.
Um, and the fact that they wouldn't even allow any discussion of it because we were one month before an election two years ago, is absolutely absurd.
But so it takes them two years.
But here's what you do.
All right, giving them every benefit of the doubt.
Here's what you do.
You come on the air and you say, when this first broke, president Trump confronted our correspondent, Leslie Stahl, asking for us to report on it.
Truth be told, we laughed in his face.
One of our most respected correspondents told him it was not possible to verify the laptop.
Two years later, we've been proven wrong and we apologize to our audience and to the former president.
That's the only way you come back from what they did, something they didn't even attempt and would never attempt, because they know their audience is not going to hold this against them.
Megan, here's what's important.
Some people would say, okay, why does this matter?
One, I think it truly did swing the election.
Two, imagine how CBS would have covered in october of 2020 exact same story, but everything that Hunter Biden was alleged to have done.
Donald Trump Jr did it all right.
I just want everybody to think about how that would have been covered.
And then the third part of this, that that I think is like so massively important.
Here is what you just hit on, there's no accountability.
And as a result of there being no accountability Megan, just a few months ago there was a study that came out and over half of people in America believe the Hunter Biden laptop story is fake, it that it's not real, that there's no basis to it, that it's all disinformation and as bad as CBS was.
There's no accountability there Megan, what about the 51 national security experts who put their name to a letter saying that this had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
Credit Miranda divine, the NEW YORK POST, the incredible work that they did on this story two years ago.
They got it all right.
But how about the fact that none of those so-called national security experts have been held accountable?
How about the fact that nobody in the media, by and large, even demands that they answer for what they did, which was a transparent ploy to get Joe Biden in the White House, even though there was zero evidence that this was Russian disinformation?
And if you just spent a little bit of time and I did it right, this stuff was all over the internet, you can go there.
If you just spent 10 minutes looking at this footage, you would have been like hey, you know what?
I don't think the Russians manipulated these hooker videos with Hunter Biden I.
I don't think that the Russians manipulated uh, all of this crazy super detailed uh data that's out there.
I mean Hunter Biden basically recorded everything.
He's crazy, uh.
Meanwhile, clay it's not like these tapes surfaced of like Ivanka Trump doing this stuff, somebody who's, as far as I can tell, led a very upstanding, respectable life right, Hunter Biden himself has been putting out videos like this and pictures like.
We're well aware of his issues with prostitutes, weird sex and drugs, notwithstanding this laptop.
So I mean it's, it's really not that big a stretch.
Um no, you're absolutely right, it's.
It was a dereliction.
It could have potentially interfered with the election.
I don't know in terms of scope, but it's deeply wrong what they did and yeah, no accountability whatsoever with the election.
Megan is just what 150 million or so voted.
Is it crazy to think that if this story had been covered as aggressively as it, as it should have been, that 20 000 of those 150 million people may have changed their mind about how they voted?
I mean, that's a pinprick right, this election was a pinprick election one way or the other.
That that seems reasonable to me.
I don't think it's crazy to make that argument.
We'll never know uh, but you're absolutely right.
If this had been Donald Trump Jr and there was somebody called the big guy, uh who happened to be his dad, by the way who, in our imaginary scenario, had previously been the vice president, exploiting his connections for himself and his son as opposed to for the good of the country, the media would have been all over it.
All right, stand by Clay, because we're squeezing a break.
And then there's much, much more to discuss.
I have these great sports stories that i've been dying to talk to you about.
There's a breaking news on Tom And Giselle, which we'll get to, and then crazy crazy, crazy ass fighting over at the SPN, which Clay is going to explain to me what is happening.
Stand by.
We'll be right back.
Before we move on to the fun stuff, let's talk about the special counsel for one second.
So Merrick Garland, this very partisan, in my view, AG, appoints a special counsel saying it's necessary to complete the investigation on Trump on Jan 6th and on Mar-a-Lago documents from the White House because he's now announced for president.
And I understand that this would be me investigating my boss's rival.
So I'm going to appoint a special counsel.
I get it.
Fine.
I have no problem with that line of reasoning.
But the reality is the special counsel works for and reports to really Joe Biden.
I mean, none of these people exist without Joe Biden.
He's in charge of the executive branch.
These people exist.
The attorney general, the DOJ, they exist because of Joe Biden.
They answer to Joe Biden and this guy answers Joe Biden.
So it's all a sleight of hand.
And to pretend, I guess we have to pretend that this guy's going to be this impartial arbiter in deciding whether to go after Trump is to engage in magical thinking.
100%.
And if you decide that that is true, and I do believe it's true, I mean, I've been screaming that there's no way Merrick Garland could investigate Donald Trump independently when he's the chief political rival of his boss, aka Joe Biden, the president of the United States.
Same thing is true for Hunter Biden, right?
The idea that Merrick Garland could be in any way heading up a Department of Justice, conducting a true investigation into Hunter Biden is frankly impossible as well.
And I'll just say this, because I know we'll probably get into it a little bit.
The analogy that I would make about both Donald Trump and Joe Biden is they're like heavyweight boxers in the 12th round of a fight.
Both of them are holding each other up, right?
Joe Biden seems to only be in 2024 to the extent that he gets to run against Donald Trump.
And I think Donald Trump, to a large extent, wants the rematch with Joe Biden.
And I think many Americans out there are like, man, we should just not have a president over 75 years old, Megan.
If you could go back and rewrite the Constitution and say, hey, the president has to be up on election between 35 and 75, I kind of wish we had an upper age limit instead of just a lower age limit.
I understand the lower age limit.
The idea was, hey, we don't want someone super powerful handing off power to his 18-year-old son as a default, you know, sort of president when somebody else is pulling the strings like a king would.
But this is craziness to me that we could end up with 82 versus 78 for the future of the nation.
My God, why not 92?
Why not 98?
How far can we push this?
It's great.
All right, let's switch to sports.
There's a headline today.
Tom Brady removes family photo with Giselle Bunchen from his Twitter profile after she is spotted with a new man.
This is from shefinds.com.
I oversold that as breaking news.
I wouldn't really call it breaking news, but it does further confirm the divides in the marriage, which we knew.
She's apparently dating or at least spending a lot of time with her jiu-jitsu instructor.
And now he's changed the Twitter profile.
And I've been, you know, I'm fascinated by this whole thing, Clay.
I really have my doubts about whether this marriage truly collapsed because he chose to play another year of football.
I don't believe it.
Tom Brady Removes Family Photo 00:08:32
I don't believe it.
There had to be bigger problems behind the scenes.
I don't know what they were, but I don't accept that.
What do you think?
I just, I hate this for the kids, right?
I wish they could have waited until the kids got to be 18 years old.
I think their kids are, you know, 12 and 13 or something like that.
And it just seems so emotionally attackable by Giselle that they get divorced and then she immediately basically makes it known that she's dating this jiu-jitsu instructor.
I understand why Tom Brady would be angry.
I mean, it just feels like an emotional attack by her.
And I don't know what could have possibly caused this relationship to break up.
Let me just say, unless there's more to the story, what if this is the land of speculation?
He was the first offender and his real offense was not another year of football, but sort of a thing on the side.
I think probably that would have come out because I think it's almost impossible.
It's when Nick Sabin has that great line, Alabama football coach, he says to his players, he's got a lot of 18-year-old players and everything else.
You just got to make good decisions in life.
He's like, for instance, he said, if I was going to have an affair, the only person in America, this was like several years ago.
He's on tape saying this, which makes it even funnier.
He's like, the only person in America I'd have a fair with is Hillary Rodham effing Clinton because she's probably the only person who'd keep her mouth shut about the fact that she was having an affair with me.
And I just don't buy, like, unless Brady's having an affair with like somebody equally famous as Brady, it's hard for me to believe that it wouldn't come out, right?
That that story.
One night with this gal or that guy.
I just, I don't know.
I'm not even getting paid to tell her story about hooking up with Tom Brady and blowing up the Giselle marriage.
Like I, you're right.
It does feel like she's angry.
And a lot of the coverage has been she's angry because he went back to football.
That doesn't make a lot of sense, I think, for most people out there.
After all, you married a football player.
It's like you can't be angry at someone for doing what their profession has always been.
But when I saw that she was dating the jiu-jitsu instructor, this on the report, I just said, like, she is furious.
And this is all about trying to drive Tom Brady insane.
And I just feel bad because they got kids involved, right?
Like, and I also feel like, why did the paparazzi get her like immediately down in Costa Rica?
You know, are they hanging out down in Costa Rica waiting?
She clearly released it.
Yeah, agree.
Okay, so that's that.
Now, let's talk about sports coverage.
I don't know most of these guys, but I'm sure you know all these guys.
Before we get to ESPN, let's start with Fox Sports.
Skip Bayless and San and Shannon Sharp had such an I've like never seen anything like this on regular news anchor TV.
But let's just show the audience what happened between these two guys.
Listen in stop four.
All you do is go back to talk about when he was a rookie one seven game.
I'm going to talk about what I want to talk about because I got the floor.
Baker Mayfield is dead last in 2022 at QBR.
Blah, blah, blah.
He's dead last.
I don't care, blah, He's 57.8.
He's 33 in completion percentage.
You gonna let me talk because if you'll stay on point on court, right?
I'm about to stay on point.
You're not going to get on point until I'm done talking.
Okay, all right.
That's right.
I'm going to spew it.
Baker hate.
Spew it.
He's talking about my Twitter followers.
That's what I know.
I got it.
And I'm going to continue to go.
He's 180.
Tell me when it's my turn.
Okay.
What is happening?
That's their show.
They yell at each other about sports.
This is even more intense than usual.
Look, I love the good argument.
I don't take my arguments that seriously.
Look, I will tell you exactly what I think, but if you disagree, whatever, like, let's go have a beer.
This is like Skip Bayless, I think, is defined by what his sports opinions are.
And so if you disagree with him, I think it really gets him at the essence of his being.
Like, and by the way, they're arguing about Baker Mayfield, who is a quarterback right now for the Carolina Panthers, but is like the, you know, 38th best quarterback in the NFL, you know, 28th at best, like not a very good.
This is not a very high-end sports argument.
Like even Baker Mayfield's wife would not argue about Baker Mayfield's quarterbacking ability that aggressively, I don't think.
So there are a lot of guys that like, you know, the schematic of two guys argue about sports works, but that's a more intense argument than generally generally happens.
Okay.
I'm glad to hear you confirm that because as somebody who never watches that stuff, I was like, what is that?
Even for the debate show format, this is crazy.
So I thought people would enjoy it.
Yeah.
So you're right.
So much passion.
And as you point out, for somebody who's like the 38th quarterback, why?
What?
Like, don't worry about it.
Very insignificant issue, even in the world of sports, which isn't known for being freighted with significance.
Okay.
Now, they are not the only ones.
Something interesting happened over at ESPN.
Now, this is Ben Watson and Peter Burns who get into the initial tussle here.
We're going to show what happened first, where Peter Burns makes a comment, one of those snide remarks about Ben Watson's wife.
Here's what happened.
45-20.
By the way, did you not get the memo on the suits?
We all went dark today.
You're like Easter service.
Y'all kind of leave me out.
As long as I get the text from my wife that says I look good.
Send me the text, man.
Send me the text.
That's not the one she sent me.
Okay, so that the one guy said, what's his name?
Peter Burns.
Yeah.
Said it's not the text your wife sent me.
You know, it's what's like I've heard millions of guys say something like they're like, oh, you know, that's what she said or your wife, whatever.
This caused a problem because when they came back from break, here's what the set looked like.
Welcome back to the Farm Rich halftime report.
Just you and I here, Takia, not sure what happened to Peter Burns or did you have him keep your wife's name out of his mouth?
Huh?
We'll see how Peter Burns is with that smart mouth in the second half.
So Peter Burns left and Ben Watson left.
And then you see Ben Watson sort of saunter back in post the time he was supposed to be there, was clearly very angry.
And then here's where it gets really interesting.
All right, I guess he was offended.
Whatever.
Okay.
ESPN then appears to have lied about it, right?
Yeah.
Yes.
He's right.
So what happened?
So first of all, I want to get your opinion on this.
You're obviously been married a while.
The joke that he's making is that, you know, Peter Burns, in my opinion, like saying, hey, your wife doesn't like your outfit either.
Like, it's not a very serious, like, to me, joke.
And the fact that he would react as he did, to me, is Will Smith-like, right?
Like, when Will Smith got up and backed Chris Rock over what was a fairly innocuous joke, to me, what it told on was, man, their relationship is in rough shape, right?
Because if a guy feels compelled to me to defend his wife's honor to that extent, it's like you got some major insecurities in your relationship, right?
So that's my takeaway.
Like, would you be offended by that?
You saw the clip, and there are a lot of women listening right now, too.
There are several women who responded in the comments when I shared that and were like, man, I'd be more embarrassed that my husband made a big deal about this than I would be about a relatively minor joke.
No, and even if the joke, I took the joke as your wife's texting me about my luck, which I also didn't find offensive.
It's a joke.
Obviously, she didn't.
He's nudging it like, yeah, your wife likes me.
Whatever.
What man hasn't?
It's absurd.
You can't be this much of an eggshell.
Voting For Herschel Walker Campaigns 00:16:06
Yeah, I agree.
So I think the way he reacted, the guy who had the joke made, was worse.
Then ESPN lied and tried to say, Megan, oh, this was all one bit.
We planned this as a joke to go viral, but they got caught then in the lie because now the guys have come out and apologized for their behavior.
So ESPN tried to cover up this clip, which made it even worse by saying, oh, this was all planned.
There's nothing to it at all.
It's absurd.
It's like, how ridiculous.
Why didn't they just say tensions run high?
You know, I said to my team on the bright side, testosterone is back.
Hey, guys, don't work at the White House.
We know that for sure, right?
Happy to see that.
Alexi and Real Men.
But yeah, you got to let some of that stuff roll off your back.
And ESPN 100% lied, as those guys have now made clear.
Clay Travis, always a pleasure, my friend.
Happy, happy Thanksgiving.
You're spending it with your family and friends, I assume.
I am.
I can't wait.
Same to you and your family and everybody out there watching and listening as well.
Hope you all have great Thanksgivings too.
Lots of love.
Let's do it again soon.
For sure.
Appreciate it.
All right.
We're coming right back with a deep dive into Georgia and the runoff race, why it matters with Eric Erickson, a man who knows.
We are watching Georgia as early voting in the runoff election between Senator Raphael Warnock, the Democrat, and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, starts this Saturday.
Both candidates are now in a final sprint to capture votes.
Joining us now to discuss the latest in both the Georgia runoff and much, much more is host of the Eric Erickson Show, Eric Erickson.
Welcome back to the show.
Eric, it's great to see you.
You too.
Thanks for having me.
Oh, yeah.
It's wonderful to see you.
Okay, so I think a lot of people have been like, well, it doesn't matter because it's 50-50 in the Senate now.
So who cares about Georgia?
But it does matter because you get one wobbly senator like a Joe Manchin on Team Dem.
And you can completely change the future of, you know, proposed legislation, of proposed confirmation of judges.
And so the bigger the Democrats margin, the better off they are.
So the Republicans should care, and I believe do care about this runoff.
So where do things stand right now?
Because the Libertarian guy's out.
So now it's just the Dem and the Republican running against each other.
So what is the conventional thinking that whatever percentage the Libertarian guy got, is that likely to go GOP or likely to go blue?
You know, no one really knows this time.
The 2021 runoff where the Republicans lost, it was the first runoff Republicans had lost since the 90s in Georgia.
Really, it kind of did something to them psychologically.
Now they're not very sure.
The numbers say the Republicans have more votes in Georgia than the Democrats, but Herschel Walker underperformed Brian Kemp by 9% in virtually every county in the state.
So can you get people to cross the threshold?
Rand Paul actually came on my radio show out of Atlanta yesterday to try to make the case to libertarians that if you have the 50-50 Senate, all of the committees are tied.
So the Republicans have more power than if the Democrats win the seat and get to 51, suddenly the Republicans don't have a tie split on the committees, urging Libertarians to get out.
Brian Kemp for the first time is on the campaign trail going everywhere with Herschel Walker.
He's kept his ground game going, handed it over to Mitch McConnell to run the operations on the ground.
We actually had a door knocker come to our house two days ago or Saturday, not Sunday.
Had door knocker come on Saturday.
We didn't have any during the general election and they're coming for Herschel Walker.
So maybe they can get people across the finish line.
But then Warnock has ads all over the state with Brian Kemp voters and prominent Brian Kemp supporters saying vote for Warnock.
Character matters.
The knocking on the door is interesting because one of the criticisms of the Republicans in this past midterms was they have no ground game.
They didn't work the early vote.
They basically just try to inflame people and then don't do very much to actually get them to the polling stations, which is the most important part of the whole process.
So that's interesting to hear they're getting a little bit more aggressive on that.
Do we, in this election, in this runoff election, is everyone allowed to vote?
This is what I'm trying to ask.
Or is it just the people who voted the last time?
Because it's a general election, anyone who voted last time or people who didn't vote, it's considered a continuation of the election, so to speak.
So really anybody can vote right now.
If they're registered to vote, they can go vote.
Oh, really?
So you can expand the universe because I was told it was the opposite, that only the people who voted three weeks ago would be allowed to vote now.
No, in Georgia, runoff's considered an extension of the election.
So whether you have or have not voted in the general, you're able to vote this time.
The caveat is in primaries, if you have voted or not voted, that is a termination for primary runoffs.
But for general election runoffs, you can go vote.
Oh, okay.
Well, that's, I guess, good news for Herschel Walker because he could expand the universe and he needs to expand the universe of potential voters.
So you mentioned Warnock and his approach.
He is running on a couple of things.
He's not Trump and he has character.
Let's take a look at his Trump ad.
This is Sat 9.
We must all work very hard for a gentleman and a great person named Herschel Walker, a fabulous human being who loves our country and will be a great United States Senator.
Herschel Walker, get out and vote for Herschel, and he deserves it.
He was an incredible athlete.
He'll be an even better senator.
Get out and vote for Herschel Walker.
I'm Raphael Warnock, and I approve this message.
That's unbelievable.
That's a Warnock ad.
It is.
And, you know, it's going to have an impact.
People kind of forget if you go all the way back to 2016 in the metro Atlanta suburbs, Cobb, Gwinnett, Clayton County, Marco Rubio won those, not Donald Trump.
Basically all the counties Atlanta touched.
Donald Trump didn't do well.
And 60 to 70% of the vote in this runoff is going to come from those counties.
So that's actually an effective ad in the Atlanta suburbs.
Walker underperformed Kemp.
Every Republican in the state Donald Trump endorsed other than Herschel Walker lost.
He's not very popular even among Republicans of the state.
So that ad will have an impact.
Okay, the other ad hits Herschel Walker on character.
And I am dying to describe it.
I'm following your tweets.
I've been following your coverage of Herschel ever since the scandals broke.
So I'm looking forward to this discussion.
But here's the next Warnock attack on Herschel Sat 10.
My parents taught me that there's nothing more important than your name.
Character is what you do when nobody's watching.
It's about doing the right thing simply because it's the right thing and doing it over and over again.
It's an amazing thing for the people of your state to say that we want you to represent us.
That's not simply a vote.
It's a sacred trust.
They're counting on me to be thinking about them and their families.
And that's what I'm committed to doing every single day.
Now, you had been saying that the Herschel Walker character attacks were bad, that they were going to have an effect.
And I confess to you, I had my doubts because I thought more Republicans in Georgia would say, I don't love it, but it's not going to stop me from voting for control of the Senate.
And that turned out to be very wrong because of this, you could see it in the split vote, how they liked Kemp.
And as you point out, he underperformed 9% than Herschel did, than Kemp.
And so they did care.
And there's nothing that's happened since then to change the caring.
So why would the Republicans feel optimistic about Herschel doing better this time around, especially with ads like that from Warnock reminding them character matters?
They're a little more optimistic.
And first of all, I got to correct myself because I looked it up during that commercial.
This was part of the change in the election law where you do have to have voted in the general to vote in the runoff.
So I was wrong on that.
I want to clarify.
You've got to vote in the general.
The Republicans are a little more optimistic this time because one of the problems Warnock had in the general that didn't get him across the finish line was the Democratic ground game broke down.
Stacey Abrams funded the Democratic ground game across the state for everyone, including Warnock.
She's now out of the picture.
Her ground game broke.
It didn't work.
I mean, the Republicans won every single statewide race and even picked up a few seats in the state legislature.
They were expecting to lose.
It's one of the few bright spots for the GOP nationwide.
So now you've got Brian Kemp's ground game still fully operational.
The Republicans think they can turn out the vote.
I'm still not sure.
And the reason why, and the reason I knew that was a problem was my kids go to a very small Christian school, very Republican as well.
And I'm in a very evangelical church with people who are still to this day mad at me that I didn't support Trump in 2016.
And my wife and I both kept encountering people who are like, I don't know that I can vote for Herschel.
Have you seen the ad about his ex-wife?
And they never mounted a good response to that ad.
They said they had one.
They never mounted it.
They didn't have the money, apparently, to get it on air.
And that's had a lingering effect.
I mean, when you have the man's ex-wife on television, granted, they cut him out of the picture.
Herschel Walker was actually there with her in the interview, but you hear her talking about his abuse, holding a gun to her head, quoting him.
It really had an impact on Christian evangelical women.
And in fact, if you look at the vote, the odds are Walker would have won except for white evangelical women not voting for him.
Oh, fascinating.
So how do those women, I mean, do you think those women voted for Trump?
Because he did not, as far as I know, you know, well, I don't know.
There was an allegation in his divorce from Ivana Trump that he allegedly raped her, something that she would later take back.
But it was different from the Herschel Walker situation where he admitted, Herschel Walker admitted doing these things and just said, I was, I was sort of, I was out of my mind and I've gotten help since then.
So how could those women have voted for Trump and not for Herschel?
I think they voted for Trump in 2016.
And then you saw this shift in 2020 where about basically 27,968, I think is the precise number of people who voted in Georgia in 2020, but refused to vote for president.
We saw about the same number this time refused to vote in the Senate race.
They skipped over and voted straight for Brian Kemp over Abrams.
I do think that after 2016, there is a segment of the population, particularly of evangelical women, who began to kind of get tired.
And they really wanted to start voting for people who vote for someone as opposed to against someone.
I might be married to someone like that who just she's tired of having to vote against the evil of two lessers and would really like someone to vote for.
And I get that sentiment more and more from even women who call my show.
They're just kind of tired of having to say, I've got two bad candidates, pick the less bad one.
They're like, I'm just tired of picking.
Yeah, yeah, I hear that.
So what's what's the strategy then for Herschel Walker?
Yes, he gets the bear hug from Governor Kemp.
That's good because he had been stiff arming him for all, throughout the whole campaign leading up to the midterms.
Kemp was like, oh, no, that's your problem.
I'm not dealing with that.
So now he gets the bear hug.
That should be helpful.
But on the other side, you got Obama going down there to rally for Warnock, get the Dave Matthews banned.
Those things don't move numbers, but whatever.
So like, I'm just still struggling to figure out what the game plan is to get a bigger turnout for Herschel Walker this time.
It is, it's base mobilization.
If you talk to Republicans, they will tell you there are more of us than there are of them.
Maximize them, find people who voted enthusiastically for Walker and just keep rounding them up, get him to early voting.
The problem here, honestly, is much like what Republicans have seen nationwide.
With the exception of the Kemp campaign, no one really ran an early vote campaign for the GOP this time.
That Kemp did it and is now trying to do it for Herschel Walker might help him, but there's just not a level of enthusiasm.
I actually on Sunday nights have a group of guys who come over.
We just sit on the front porch, watch football, and smoke some cigars.
And all of them voted for Herschel Walker in the general election.
And I said, I mean, who's going to go vote in the runoff?
And nobody was really enthusiastic about doing it.
They're all like, yeah, I guess I will.
When is it again?
But no one really was enthusiastic.
The sentiment that I get so much is we did what we needed to do.
He didn't, he came up short.
That's not on me.
That's on him.
I still think Republicans can win this.
There are more Republicans than Democrats, but I don't know that Republicans are really willing to admit that there is a candidate problem here, much like there has been in other races that they've got to really overcome with voters.
And the Walker campaign really had some brilliant opportunities in the general to push back on the Warnock attacks against him on character.
And they just never did.
And from what I hear, it was a money issue more than a lack of willingness issue.
And I think that money issue is still plaguing them.
Right now, you've got multiple senators claiming to be fundraising for Herschel Walker, including Rick Scott at the NRSC.
And 90% of the money that you raise actually goes to those candidates, not to Herschel Walker.
So he's struggling against even Republicans claiming to be fundraising for him who aren't actually giving him money.
Well, wait a minute.
Was there not?
I don't live in Georgia, but was there not an ad by the Walker campaign showing that Raphael Warnock was accused of his ex by his ex-wife of running over her foot in his car?
And he denied it, but I'd be making that ad.
They ran it for about two weeks.
They ran out of money and couldn't keep it on air.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, it was all over.
It was all over the internet, but they ran out of money and couldn't run it all over Georgia.
In fact, it was interesting.
You knew there was a problem towards the end when you had the Georgia, Tennessee game right before the election.
And there were lots of Warnock ads.
There were lots of Brian Kemp ads.
There was one Herschel Walker ad and no Stacey Abrams ad.
You kind of knew which campaigns had the money and which didn't.
Okay, so Stacey Abrams, that's where I wanted to go next.
How much of a depressant will that be to the GOP vote?
I mean, I've got a brother who lives in the Atlanta area.
And honestly, like we were raised in a Democratic household, but he's so had it with the crazy, you know, far left stuff that's being handed down in Georgia and by proposed by people like Stacey Abrams.
And I know he's not alone.
So she must have been a motivator for the GOPers to come out.
Like the one thing we don't want is a governor Abrams and maybe less motivated by the Senate race in which both men have serious problems in their past with women.
But, you know, no one's crazy.
No one, like even Warnock is running more in the middle than Stacey Abrams.
She sounds like she could be a member of the squad.
So that's not good for Republicans, though, because she's, she's a motivator for the GOP base.
Yeah, very much so.
I mean, Brian Kemp, people don't appreciate it.
He won a majority of the Hispanic vote, a majority of the Asian vote, a third of black men.
He really dominated the race against Stacey Abrams.
It was remarkable what he did.
And a lot of it had to do with her as a candidate.
She was deeply alienating.
Now, she was never actually going to win the race.
Kim was very popular, did a very good job handling COVID and the economy.
The moment she lost the race, though, was back in February when she posed for a picture with a bunch of kindergartners and they were all in masks and she wasn't.
And that kind of set the stage for the rest of the election.
The worst.
That was one of the worst pictures of Democrat hypocrisy.
She ended it for about a week before she apologized.
She dogmatically refused to apologize for it.
And that just did untold damage for her.
And so you're right.
She's not on the ballot now.
It really is a base mobilization effort.
And Warnock's voters are more enthusiastic for him than most Republicans are for Walker.
PAC Funds And Legal Battles 00:15:10
Wow, December 6th.
And now they are going to be allowed to early vote this Saturday.
There was a question about that.
A legal challenge was filed by the GOP, but the Democrats prevailed and the early voting will commence beginning this Saturday.
Is the rule the same in Georgia as it has been nationally, which is the early voting tends to benefit the Democrats?
Yeah, it does.
Now, Republicans in the last week of early voting tend to show up more.
And so, like, for example, in this general election, the Republicans actually outpace the Democrats a little bit.
It's a question of the margin.
Democrats show up in large numbers early, Republicans later in early voting.
The question is how many Republicans will go do it.
A little difficult too, because it is starting the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
People are going to be out of town coming back into town.
You'll probably see a bigger Republican surge later in the week.
But again, they're going to have to rely on Kemp's ground game because the National Republicans and the state Republican Party have not done anything.
One of the untold stories here is that the state Republican Party has so alienated itself from Brian Kemp and the entire state GOP that donors are now not giving money to the state GOP.
Giving it to a leadership pack set up by Brian Kemp.
It doesn't help that the state party chairman tried to find primary opponents for Brian Kemp and every other statewide elected official.
Because those, this was because of the whole split with Trump trying to find votes in Georgia and trying to boot Kemp.
And he didn't, he hates Kemp.
And so the Georgia GOP was splitting too, the Kemp backers and it really was.
The chairman won't resign.
And so instead of trying to force him out, Kemp's just set up a leadership pack.
And all the donors who would go to the GOP are now going to Kemp.
Wow.
It's amazing that that worked.
So let's talk Trump.
Well, before we do, before we talk about his effect on this, do you want to offer a prediction?
I don't know if you want to, but will you?
You know, I honestly, I don't have a good read of it.
My sense is that Warnock probably wins.
The polling seems to suggest that the polling is not very good, though.
There's just a greater enthusiasm for him than the GOP right now.
If Herschel Walker wins, Brian Kemp needs to get a lot of credit for it, given his ground game effort.
I do kind of think Kemp would like Herschel Walker to win at this point, just so he can give more of a big middle finger to Donald Trump that Kemp can do things that Trump can't do.
All right, let's talk Trump because the thing that we're not talking about yet is one of the reasons Raphael Warnock is a senator is because Trump told people to stay home and not vote in that last election where these Democrats were running against Republicans and control of the Senate was in the balance.
And Trump, you know, infamously after he lost and refused to accept it, spoiled the vote in Georgia like a kid who took his ball and went home and wanted everybody to leave the party with him.
And a lot of Georgians did.
They did walk out and they did refuse to vote, or at least that's the narrative.
And that's why we have two Democratic senators from the state of Georgia, one of whom is now battling to keep his seat, Raphael Warnock.
So Trump's not doing that this time.
So what effect is that likely to have?
Well, you know, the Republicans still have to get their head back in the game.
You know, I've said the number so many times I can give it to you.
There were 700,000 people who voted in the general election in 2020.
Precisely 427,205 of those 700,000 were Republicans who voted in the general and never showed back up in the runoff.
427,205.
The Republicans know who those people are.
And if they can try to mobilize them, assuming they voted in the general and get them out, they've got a numbers game that can matter.
They're trying to put that loss behind them.
And again, this is the first time Republicans lost runoffs in Georgia since the 1990s.
It was kind of a big red flag for Democrats when Republicans started winning runoffs in the late 90s that they were surging as a party in the state.
If the Democrats run this one and they win it, it's kind of a sign again for the Republicans that Democrats really are growing in the state.
They need to do something.
Kemp maybe can get them to turn out.
Trump certainly is going to turn out a lot of suburban Atlanta against Herschel Walker.
Right.
Trump gets him to turn out in a different way.
Now, but we're hearing reports he's angry.
Who knows?
I always do a Trump report with an asterisk when it comes from the mainstream, right?
But especially Rolling Stone, which hates him.
But they're reporting that he's very angry that he hasn't been asked to go to Georgia, that he really feels that he would rally that base.
If you want to get the base out, he's the man to do it.
But he's reportedly being told, please stay where you are.
Please don't come to Georgia.
Yeah, look, everyone I know who has come into contact with his advisors or him have advised him to please don't come to Georgia, send money, not him.
I don't believe Rolling Stone's reporting, but I do know that he has been told you would do more harm than good if you went to Georgia.
He also doesn't want to come into a state if Walker might lose and have the Republicans pin that loss on him as well.
So he's got some incentive to stay out of it and just send money.
The problem is he's not sending that much money.
He spent more money trying to defeat Brian Kemp than he spent on anything else, including beating Liz Cheney.
I think he spent a total of $15 million trying to help his candidates out of 100 million raised.
He spent 15 nationwide on candidates in the general election.
Spending some more of his money would be good, particularly since he can't spend his super PAC money on himself for 2024.
Spending it now as best he can would probably earn him some goodwill.
What about the Twitter announcement that he's coming back on?
Elon Musk has allowed him back on Twitter.
He's already running his own social media platform, Truth Social, and he has said he doesn't see the point of rejoining Twitter.
But I saw you tweet out when they allowed him back on.
There goes Georgia.
Why do you think that?
Yeah, look, if Trump comes back on Twitter, suddenly all the news stories go back to being about him.
I don't think it's a coincidence that in August after the Mar-a-Lago raid, you saw the Republican generic ballot collapse as Trump became the central focus of the news again.
He comes back on Twitter and starts tweeting.
He becomes the central focus of the news.
The media, of course, want him to be the central focus of the news.
I think that stirs up those suburban voters in Atlanta who don't like him.
If he stays off Twitter, I think that's actually a good thing.
And frankly, he does want to build True Social, have their S PAC and their SEC filings for IPOs and the like.
Might as well stay there and try to grow that site.
The interesting thing is he announced, was it last week?
Was it last Monday?
A week ago, yesterday.
And he's done absolutely nothing.
Yeah.
What's he done?
Usually you kick off your campaign.
He like barnstormed the nation.
You did the rallies.
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing, which I think supports the theory that this was an attempt to get on the record as a candidate before the DOJ makes up its mind.
Yeah, so I've got two views on that.
One is, yes, he wants to be a candidate before that happens.
And the other is, I don't think it's a coincidence that he started openly talking about this within 24 hours of the political report that Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire, was deciding to align with Ron DeSantis.
And I think he wanted to get out and try to stop the pivoting of billionaires away from him for 2024.
It's a money game for him.
He doesn't like to spend his own money.
He'd like to spend other people's money.
So get out there, declare you're a candidate, open your funds so everyone can give you donations.
And also, you got to keep in mind, he did raise that $100 million for Save America PAC, and you can't spend money in a leadership pack on yourself.
So the only way to redirect those funds is to get donor permission to redirect them.
And you have to have a presidential fund in order to direct them into.
So he had to do it and might as well make a big splash of it.
So you think he's trying to get the money that was donated to his PAC that was supposed to be spent on other people transferred into his presidential campaign so it can be spent on him?
Yeah, I think so.
You can spend legal fees out of a super PAC on yourself, but you can't spend campaign funds to promote your candidacy from a super PAC like that.
You have to start your own presidential fund, your own candidate campaign committee, and then you can move the money.
You just have to, it's a very simple process to get donor permission, and then you just move the money over to the new fund, but you have to be a declared candidate before you can do that.
Well, so that plus his ongoing legal battles, if he's allowed to use the money for legal battles, would explain why he wasn't spending it during the midterms on all these Republicans in very tight races.
Right.
And the RNC, I guess, a month or so ago signaled that they could no longer pay for his legal fees.
So he needed to do something, move it all into a presidential campaign fund, and you can do it all.
Keep in mind, your legal fees that you pay for out of your super PAC aren't related to prosecution and investigation.
They're related to other legal matters about campaigns.
So if he wants to cover the costs out of his campaign fund, he had to announce he was running for president and move the money over there.
This is also interesting.
I hadn't even considered any of this as the angle for why he announced because the RNC is not allowed to pay the legal bills of anybody once they have declared because they're supposed to be neutral amongst the many candidates who might be trying to get their nomination, the GOP nomination.
So at the point at which Trump declares he can no longer get the RNC's money, but the RNC had already told him the money is done prior to that.
And he, so he doesn't have a lot of money.
I mean, he doesn't, and he doesn't like to spend his own money.
So he doesn't have that much money that he wants to spend on his own legal battles.
The RNC shut off the spigot and he's got a pot of money sitting there, but he can't use it for any of these fights unless he gets it pushed into a presidential fund.
Yep.
That's it.
That's so interesting.
That explains a lot.
Finance rules.
They're cumbersome and confusing, but the bottom line is you put it in your presidential account.
You can spend it on pretty much anything, including paying yourself a salary.
Wow.
So Eric is a lawyer in addition to his many other talents.
I should tell the audience, just in case they're wondering how you know all this.
That's really interesting and it makes perfect sense.
And he definitely is going to need money for his legal defense, as it looks very much like he is going to get indicted by the special counsel who was just appointed.
Do you disagree?
You know, yeah, I think he probably will because these people have no humility.
It'd be good for the country if they just moved on.
I mean, even the Trump administration moved on from Hillary Clinton.
They should move on from Donald Trump.
Can I ask you something?
So I had a bunch of boys at my son's school come help me with the prep for the midterms.
It was fun.
It was fun for them.
It was fun for me.
And these are young, young guys.
You know, they're 17 years old or so.
And we talked a little bit about the DOJ and the possible indictment of Trump.
And I was saying that I think it would be absolute travesty.
I think it would make us feel like a banana republic.
We don't run around indicting our former presidents in the United States of America, even if they've crossed an ethical line and potentially even a legal one.
I mean, it would have to be so egregious and wrong that the whole country was in favor of it.
Otherwise, it just looks like persecution.
Because if you really want to comb the records of people like the Clintons and potentially the Obamas and beyond for legal lines crossed at the end of their term or thereafter, you could find them.
And one of the 17-year-old boys looked at me and said, no, no.
If he broke the law, he should face the same consequences as anybody else, right?
Like if you or I broke the law, we'd get indicted.
Why shouldn't he get indicted?
It sends the wrong message.
And I appreciate this kid's perspective.
You know, he's young.
He's sort of looking at the world more idealistically, right?
Like, no, he broke the law.
He should be held accountable.
I don't know, Eric.
I think to me, I do.
I see the legal argument that he had the right to declassify, that potentially he had some right to at least copies of these documents.
I don't know whether he would win or lose on the merits, but let's assume for this purpose that he broke the law and that it's clear that he broke the law and keeping those documents down there and potentially lying under oath in a declaration that he'd returned them all through a lawyer and when it wasn't true.
Do you think the country could get behind that kind of a prosecution?
No, I don't think so.
You know, Bill Clinton lied and was never charged with perjury and brought in during the investigation of Monica Lewinsky.
Hillary Clinton wasn't truthful when it came to her emails.
It really does look like a tit for dad.
And also, you and I have not had the Justice Department spend multiple years and the Attorney General of New York multiple years investigating us, trying to find something.
You spend that much money on any of us.
They're going to find something.
They clearly were out to get him.
Yeah, I do think there was probably some wrong done.
Is it enough to warrant the prosecution of a former president?
I don't think so.
And I realize there are a lot of people on the left who say, absolutely, bury him under the jail.
Justice denied is justice not served.
Except we actually do have a history in this country sometimes of recognizing that you can't commit justice if you're going to also burn it all down in order to get justice.
What's left of the country if you do this?
And for the greater good, sometimes you got to say, yeah, just go away and we'll leave you alone.
And frankly, I do think if Trump just went away and said, look, I'm out, all of this does go away.
But because he wants to run again, they're hell-bent on stopping him.
All right.
And Eric has a theory on why the DOJ is likely to indict him right after this.
Let's squeeze in a quick break and then we'll come back with why you think they're about to do it.
So, Eric, you think you know why the DOJ is about to indict Trump and it's not because of their moral principles and how deeply offended they are that he kept documents he might not have had, he shouldn't have had down in Mar-a-Lago.
Yeah, look, I got to say, some people still think, oh, the Department of Justice, it's about politics.
It's not.
I mean, they have been rounding up pro-lifers who protested outside abortion clinics in the last few weeks before the election.
They haven't investigated the fire bombings of various pregnancy centers.
They won't enforce the law on protesting outside Supreme Court justices' homes.
This is a very political Department of Justice.
And back in August, I mentioned this earlier, you saw all the Republicans circle the wagons around Donald Trump when the Mar-a-Lago raid happened.
You saw independent voters turn away from the GOP.
The generic ballot collapsed.
And now suddenly you see a lot of Republicans saying, hey, this Ron DeSantis guy, maybe we should go with him and win.
Stan Greenberg, who's the most prominent Democratic pollster, came out Friday morning and said in his polling, if DeSantis ran, not only would he beat any of the Democrats, but he'd win a majority of the Hispanic vote for the first time ever.
And late Friday afternoon, suddenly we may have to indict Donald Trump and get you Republicans to circle the wagons around him again because they're scared to death of Ron DeSantis.
Core MAGA Faithful Circle Wagons 00:04:38
So yes, they want to indict him for all these other things, but really the icing on the cake is this will also get the Republicans to stand by their man and maybe not look at another candidate.
So you've got Cora MAGA definitely rooting for Trump.
You've got the media rooting for Trump.
You've got the DOJ rooting for Trump, the Biden White House rooting for Trump.
And the Democrats just in this past midterm elections spent a bunch of money on Trump-like candidates in the primaries because they, as it turns out, accurately predicted they would be easier to defeat in the general election.
And there is absolutely no reason to think they're not going to press replay on that same approach to the game.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, they literally did pick multiple Republican candidates in primaries by attacking them as being too Trump-like.
So why not try to pick the Republican presidential nominee doing the same thing that people fell for it once?
I mean, was it fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, or whatever.
They're going to try to do this again and this time by making it all about Trump.
Do you think that prior to the midterm elections, I think most Republicans would have been outraged at an indictment of President Trump?
They really would have been angry, whether they like Trump or not.
Post the midterms, do you think the calculation has changed?
A little bit for a number of Republicans.
Yeah, look, I would have been one of the people before the election saying this is designed to shape the election.
After the election, it's hard to make that argument.
If they have reasonable grounds, yes.
Go for it, I guess.
And a lot of the country, half the country, just about is probably going to be deeply upset about it.
If they really, really do think there really is some nefarious law broken, I guess go for it.
There will be some Republicans who are like, just get this over with as quickly as possible.
Don't drag it out.
Remember, you can be in prison, convicted of a crime, and still run for president of the United States.
I do wonder because I think even though a lot of GOPers have switched to DeSantis and are, you know, I don't think those are necessarily the core MAGA faithful, but I think those people, I don't know, they're kind of done with Trump.
A lot, there's a lot of anger toward Trump in the non-core MAGA.
And I'm not sure how loudly they'll object, you know, if he gets indicted.
I got to tell you, the weirdest thing that's happened to me in radio is for the last number of years, if I ever criticize President Trump, I get a massive, angry backlash already.
I can watch the phones light up.
And over the last year or so, it's kind of faded away.
And after the midterms, a lot of the exact same voices, a lot of the exact same people call in and say, yeah, probably time to go to Ron DeSantis and move on from this.
And after his announcement right after the midterms, that did kind of rub a lot of Republicans the wrong way that he wasn't willing to accept responsibility.
So yeah, the core MAGA people, they're never going to leave him.
They love him tremendously.
I kind of understand why, but there's more of the rest of the Republican base.
13% of the Republicans voted Democrat in the midterms, according to the exit polls.
There's clearly a large portion of the party that wants to move to the future.
It's going to have to be a very large portion of the party to get past Trump into primary.
Meanwhile, we've been talking about on the show and whoever it is, if it's not Trump, if it's DeSantis, even if it's Youngkin, who's pretty milquetoast, they are going to Trumpify him.
You know, there was a piece out just, was it yesterday?
What's today?
It's 1121.
Is that today?
Yesterday.
My God, is it 1122?
How did we get to 1122?
Call your turkey people.
Right?
It's thank you.
As somebody who once failed to do that until the day of, that's an important reminder.
The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin, just one of the most hateful people in all of media, has a piece out that reads, beware, DeSantis is as much a threat to America as Trump.
This seems to be their Republican.
She goes on to talk about how he's terrible and he's this, the profile of him is one of a constitutional ignoramus, a bully, and a strong man.
Voters should be forewarned.
So really, you know, it is true that whoever they pick, indicted, not indicted, you know, with Trump's history of tweets or not, they'll trumpify him.
So I joked actually in 2020, the day after the election, that congratulations to Donald Trump.
Your favorabilities in the press will only go up from here.
And poor thing, the next guy will be you as the second coming.
MSNBC Blames Right For Shooting 00:10:56
And it's happening.
Every Republican is redeemed the moment he loses.
Mitt Romney was a racist, and then suddenly it was, he's so much better than Donald Trump.
And now it'll be, well, this guy's a dangerous Donald Trump because he's smart and savvy.
Interestingly enough, by the way, a month ago, Jen Rubin wrote about Ron DeSantis and said that he was a nothing nobody outside of the MAGA right and no one would vote for him outside of the MAGA right.
And yet suddenly he won majority of Hispanics and a significant portion of Democrats.
So if Jen Rubin says something, I swear she is the example of Washington Post clickbait.
You would think Jeff Bezos wouldn't rely on the clickbait of an idiot to boost the traffic of the Washington Post, but they clearly do.
She, when you think Trump derangement syndrome, that's who comes to mind: the Lincoln Project people and Jennifer Rubin.
She's lost her mind over Trump.
Has taken every position under the sun and every position she used to hold when Romney was running for president.
She now holds the exact opposite because of Trump.
It's the weirdest thing, including moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
She was one of the loudest advocates of it when Mitt Romney was running for president.
The moment Trump did it, she's like, this is a terrible decision.
He's evil.
It must be stopped.
All right, let me switch gears and talk to you about Paul Pelosi because I know you've been following this and covering it.
And as I mentioned, you're a lawyer.
Very interesting development in this case.
Body cam footage has now been shared.
I'm trying to say with its NBC Bay Area.
Okay, so NBC currently has Miguel Amader on suspension because he reported that, among other things, Paul Pelosi opened the door for the police when they got there and that he then turned and walked toward his attacker and not toward the police.
And that 22 minutes had passed before he called 911 and there was no understanding of what had happened during those 22 minutes.
Okay, those are some of the things that NBC's Miguel Amiguer reported and they pulled the report saying it wasn't up to their standards without getting specific and then suspended him.
Now, NBC Bay Area, not controlled by the master NBC doing their own reporting, says they spoke with a source familiar with the Pelosi investigation who personally viewed the body camera video recorded by the officers responding to the Pelosi home and that the body cam video shows Paul Pelosi opened the door for police despite what the DOJ put in its complaint against the attacker, which says as follows.
I'm trying to get exactly that SFPD officers responded to the Pelosi residence at 2.31 a.m., that two officers knocked on the front door.
The two officers who approached the door had their body worn cameras activated.
And here's the thing that the DOJ did.
And I missed this because originally the DOJ had said through the FBI that Paul Pelosi opened the door.
But now in their indictment against the guy, the DOJ says the two officers opened the door to see the foyer of the Pelosi residence.
And there was Pelosi and DePop jointly grabbing a hammer.
Okay.
So they've changed their story that the FBI, which is part of the DOJ, the FBI originally said Pelosi opened the door.
Then they change it in the indictment to, no, the cops opened the door.
Then the NBC has to pull its report for saying it was Pelosi who opened the door, among other things in that report.
And now we're back to NBC, the local reporting Pelosi opened the door.
What is happening?
You know, damage control.
It's interesting they waited until after the midterm election to come out and say all of this stuff, walking everything back.
What a weird story.
I don't dispute, don't deny Paul Pelosi was attacked.
It appears the guy was nuts, came into the home.
I don't really buy into the weird conspiracy theories that continue to crop up about this stuff, but clearly there was a damage control mode there.
And my personal theory, I don't think it's a conspiracy, is that in the run-up to the election, Democrats were aggressively talking about authoritarian Republicans, cruel, mean, bad, violent.
This happens to Paul Pelosi.
The last thing they needed was to have it turn out that Paul Pelosi opened the door for the police and walked back inside because that would have diminished their ability to talk about the crazy, authoritarian, violent Republicans.
So they quiet the story down until after the election.
And now we get to know the truth.
Very much like, by the way, the Mar-a-Lago raid in August, right after the election turns out nothing of consequence was in the stack of stuff and they think he did it because of ego waited until after the election for these things because they needed a narrative.
It's unbelievable.
I mean, again, I'm still irritated by the New York Times calling me a purveyor of misinformation in connection with this story.
And when you look deeper in the article, my sin was questioned whether all the facts were being revealed by the San Francisco police.
Yes, I did do that.
And I continue to have those questions.
By the way, they listed me as a Republican, which is not true.
I'm an independent, something they refuse to correct as a talk show host.
I'm a journalist, and this is a news program with news commentary, which is how it's classified on the podcast services, which they know because they have their own, The Daily, hosted by a journalist named Michael Barbaro, who does interviews and commentary on the day's news.
They just, they don't deal in facts.
And the reason they included me and many others who had just said something doesn't seem right about this story is because they wanted to get the narrative out too, that this the right wing, which they put me as part of, is evil and says stuff that leads to attacks, whether it's against Paul Pelosi or this situation that we saw, this horrendous nightclub attack down in Colorado.
Their first instinct is to find anybody who they think is right-leaning and blame them.
Right.
I mean, look, I've been figuring out how to cover the Colorado shooting, and it's appalling that the wall-to-wall commentary on MSNBC and even some shows on CNN is that while the right provoked this attack by questioning drag queen story hour, they can't acknowledge the culpability of the actual criminal.
It's got to be Republicans provoked it somehow.
I get the sense they're overplaying their hand.
It's a little bit absurd.
For example, back here in Georgia, Herschel Walker's running an ad with the NCAA female swimmer who was forced to have a boy in the locker room with her.
We have it.
We have it.
Wait, stand by.
Let me play it.
And then you tell me what they're doing with it.
Here it is, Sod 11.
Riley Gaines, a 12-time NCAA all-American.
And I'm Herschel Walker.
For more than a decade, I worked so hard for AM practices to be the best.
But my senior year, I was forced to compete against a biological male.
That's unfair and wrong.
A man won the swimming title that belonged to a woman, and Senator Warnock voted to let it happen.
We're not so afraid to stand up for female athletes.
Herschel Walker stands up for what's right.
Go ahead, Eric.
Well, don't you know he ran that ad after the shooting in Colorado.
So he's glorifying the violence in Colorado and Republicans are to cause because of ads like that, the violence in Colorado, even though the ad didn't come out until after the attack.
It's this bizarre, ghoulish need to blame Republicans for every violent thing in America.
The ad's totally legitimate.
It makes a really good point that someone shot people in a gay nightclub in Colorado during a drag queen time has no bearing on the legitimacy of that ad.
And yet, if you watch MSNBC, it's all tied together.
Well, the other is it's clearly an attempted muzzle on views with which they disagree, this whole thing.
Like Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire has, but he's the one who did what is a woman.
He and many others on the right have said, we object to the mutilation of minors.
We object to these cross-sex procedures on children who are incapable of providing consent.
And for the most part, none of them objects to what an adult does, right?
That's not really the argument coming out of any conservative circles.
And we object to drag queen story hour for minors.
We don't think it's appropriate for schools to shove this kind of sexual behavior in front of the kids.
It's confusing and so on.
Then they take a situation like this, where this club where the attack happened was going to have a drag queen celebration the next day, again, for adults, as far as I understand, and try to say, that's Matt Walsh's fault.
That's because he objects to this thing.
Maybe this person heard Matt Walsh, even if they had, but there's absolutely no evidence of that.
None, none whatsoever, the shooter.
But even if the shooter had heard that, you cannot use a legitimate argument on a very divisive social issue to say you caused violence in the mind of a crazy person.
And therefore you can never voice your objections again because your positions are dangerous.
Yeah, you know, it's the hypocrisy here is no one held Elizabeth Warren to account when she called for Christian pregnancy centers to be shut down and the next day people started firebombing them.
No one held Rachel Maddow or Bernie Sanders accountable for James Hodgkinson's mass assassination attempt on Republicans.
And no one should.
But by God, the moment a Republican says something they don't like, that Republican's words are responsible for the violence of every random crazy person in America.
I do think most Americans understand that, but inside this Democratic bubble where much of the mainstream media exists with them, that seems to be a valid way to go after Republicans.
I don't think not only is it going to work, but I think over time, much like calling everything racist that isn't, you wind up actually doing real damage by people tuning out all the legitimate claims too.
All right, last question.
What are you doing for Thanksgiving?
And what makes it special for you?
Okay.
So normally we have my entire family come here and I do all the cooking.
I do all the cleaning.
You know, I love to cook.
And we're actually going to go take care of my in-laws.
They've been under the weather.
They'll do some of the cooking, but I'll do pies.
And I actually have the best gravy recipe on planet Earth.
And I will be making the gravy and the chocolate pie and the buttermilk pie and the cornbread dressing.
And then my father-in-law does the turkey.
My mother-in-law does the other stuff.
My wife is a master of desserts.
By the way, I've got to say hi to my wife who has no idea I'm doing this.
She's in her car.
I guarantee you listening and had no idea I was going to be on with you.
I didn't tell her.
How is she doing, the beautiful Christy?
You know, she's doing great.
She had her last scans two weeks ago.
Everything is still good.
We do it every three months.
There's really no cure for it, but the tumors aren't growing.
So she has this rare form of cancer in her lungs, but she's doing remarkably well.
She has a Harley and tattoos and a shotgun, and I'm scared of her.
Perfect.
Well, much to be thankful for.
I'm so glad she's doing well and you are as well.
Johnny Depp Kindness On Set 00:03:42
And there was so much like flack thrown your way after 2016 and Trump and that whole thing.
And it's great to see you so successful and just rocking it on all fronts.
All the best to you.
You too.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Yeah, to you too.
All right.
When we come back, a special treat.
My pal Doug Brunt, my husband, actually made some interesting news on his podcast dedicated with Doug Brunt involving Johnny Depp.
That's next.
So my partner in life, Doug Brunt, my husband made some news on his new podcast dedicated with Doug Brunt from what you might consider an unlikely source, Paulina Porskova, the supermodel of the 1990s.
I mean, she was, as he points out in the podcast, one of those people who first name only, that's all that was required.
She wound up marrying Rick Okasich of the Cars, and she's been fascinating to watch over these many years.
He dropped the podcast today, and in their exchange, he asked her about her time acting with Johnny Depp, who you may be aware was absolutely demonized by many in the press and by his ex-wife, Amber Heard, in connection with domestic violence allegations she made and so on that a jury rejected.
But very different thoughts here from Paulina Portskova.
Take a listen.
Your career expands, of course, beyond modeling.
So you've done tons of TV and film.
In 1993, you did a film, Arizona Dream, with Johnny Depp.
And so in 93, he's a year or two older than you.
And maybe you guys were late 20s.
He was 30 or so, something like that, and you were younger.
But in 93, Johnny Depp was like the number one heartthrob in the world as a man.
And you were probably number one as a woman.
Did you guys connect in some way on that level of celebrity and that level of interest coming in that was really sort of sexually charged interest?
We did connect as friends.
And I really, actually, Johnny was the, was a person, one of the first people that taught me what sort of a non-judgment of people around, the people that you work with is like, because we were on the set and the Arizona Dreams was filled with huge movie stars.
There was Faye Dunaway.
There was Jerry Lewis, whose wife I'm playing in the movie.
Lily Taylor, Vincent Gallo.
I mean, it was like a star-studded cast.
And so a lot of egos on the set.
And Johnny, who was the world's biggest heartthrob at that time, did not act like one.
He was really kind.
He was really kind to the electricians and to the crew and to, you know, the.
Could you see it as he walked around, you know, to get lunch or something?
People would be like, oh my God.
I mean, for certain stars like Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, you, like people lose their minds when they get around them.
Again, on the movie set, people know how to be around movie stars.
You know, they don't lose their minds.
And Johnny was so nice.
He was so kind to the people around him that he sort of became everybody's friend.
He was just like genuinely liked by everybody on the set.
And I really took note of this.
I thought, you know, where he went, he created a little calm space around him of gentleness, of niceness, of kindness.
And people really responded to that.
And I thought, I sort of, that stuck.
I was like, I want to do that.
I want to be like that.
You know, and we all.
Did you ever ask him about it or tell him this observation that you'd made?
Cool Choices Behind The Scenes 00:01:22
I don't think so.
I think what I did tell him was that I had a lot of respect for him because he could be off in Hollywood doing really big Hollywood movies.
And instead, here he was in Arizona doing a weird little independent film.
He did make cool choices with his work.
Yeah, and he did John Waters, Crybaby.
And, you know, he made some really interesting, different, cool choices.
And I really respected him for that.
Yeah, he seems like a true artist.
So pretty interesting, right?
We remember how the world lost its mind when Kate Moss took the stand at that trial.
Here's another supermodel talking about her very positive experience with Johnny Depp.
Just kind of interesting to hear the behind the scenes take on who he was when he could have been a complete jerk and wasn't.
You don't hear that about every star.
Anyway, it's called Dedicated with Doug Brunt.
You'll love it.
He's got a great one with William Finnegan from last week that's going on fire, but Paulina dropped today.
Check it out.
You'll love it.
And listen, we're going to be, we'll get back tomorrow with a special deep dive in Alec Baldwin and the latest on that movie set shooting, which I think you'll enjoy.
And we look forward to seeing you then.
In the meantime, download the show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher.
That is the Megan Kelly show.
In addition, dedicated with Doug Brunt.
And check us out at youtube.com slash Megan Kelly.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
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