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Dec. 6, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:36:00
20221206_censorship-as-virtue-signaling-and-false-meghan-an
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Georgia Voting Laws and Jim Crow 00:14:42
Sommani, for blind to big beef, because it's a very good thing.
8 x 1,5 liter Cola Zero til 109 kroner, og vi har fast sommerpris på store frossende reker til 119 kroner kiloen, og plukk og mix 3 for 2 på Jakobs utvalgte, både i butikk og levert hjem.
Meny, spiser du bedre, lever du bedre.
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
Your home for open, honest and provocative conversations.
Hi, Megyn Kelly.
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
Oh my gosh, there's so much goodness to get to today, and we have the perfect guests for it all.
Joining me now are friends from The Fifth Column podcast, Michael Moynihan, a correspondent for Vice News Tonight, Matt Welsh, editor-at-large for Reason Magazine, and Camille Foster of Freethink Media.
Guys, welcome back to the show.
Great to have you.
Thank you for having us with us.
All right, so I want to begin with the big news.
You may have missed it.
If you blinked, you may have missed it.
But apparently, our president, unbeknownst to any of us, actually has gone to the southern border.
Yes, indeed, he's gone there.
And the reason we know that is because Karine Jean-Pierre tells us it is so.
Kevin McCarthy says that he invited President Biden down to the border.
How does the president RSVP?
We know the president's never been down to the border.
The possible next speaker says that he wants him to go with him.
So is he going to?
So look, he's been there.
He's been to the border.
And since he took office...
When did he go to the border?
Since he took office, the President Biden has been taking action to fix our immigration system and secure our borders.
He's never been to the border.
She lied.
It was an out-and-out lie.
He hasn't been to the border.
Back when he was running for vice president in 2008, he literally did a drive-by.
I mean, that's like when you say you've been to France, even though you just passed through Charles de Gaulle airport en route to someplace else.
That's not a visit to the border.
He won't go.
We have record immigration numbers now at the southern border, which the media has been sweeping under the rug.
And when confronted directly on why he won't go, she lied and said he's been there.
I wish there was some kind of penalty in American politics for lying.
It just doesn't really appear to be now.
We've just gotten it.
We've gotten it.
Seriously, like this isn't the first time Biden is Biden.
Like he has said in multiple speeches apropos of nothing that the economy was on the verge of collapse when I took over, right?
This is a random thing.
It doesn't really matter that much.
And it's just not true.
It had grown like by leaps and bounds the previous two quarters before he assumed office.
But he could just say that because there's a feeling that of impunity.
And it's kind of understandable.
It's just rotten that there's a feeling like, oh, we could just sort of say that he's been down to the border.
I mean, let's be honest, Kamala Harris already solved the problem last time I checked.
So I don't really know why he needs to go down to the border.
It's the idea that it's only congressional Republicans.
That's true that they and congressional Democrats haven't done squat about immigration for two decades.
And that's a damn crying shame.
But the president has a lot of latitude.
In fact, he's been exercising a lot of latitude about his authority involving immigration.
The story does not end with Congress.
It does not end with the president.
And it certainly does not end or begin with lying about his whereabouts.
It's just so irritating.
They know they can get away with it because nobody in the press is going to fact check them.
She can get away with yet more lies about important matters from the White House lectern.
It drives me insane.
All right, let's go from the southern border to just like a tiny bit north.
I mean, it's along the southern border, but it doesn't actually abut Mexico, and that is the state of Georgia, where big things are happening today.
This is it.
This is the runoff, guys.
Does it feel like a letdown?
I just feel like, I don't know.
I thought it was going to be more exciting than it is.
The Democrats already control Senate.
And I know it matters because like who controls the committees?
I mean, it matters.
It does.
But like, it just sort of feels, maybe I'm crazy, like the wind went out of the Herschel Walker sales.
And like Warnock is probably going to win.
The polls are overwhelmingly with him.
And I'm having difficulty getting really sort of excited about today's results.
Am I alone?
You're not inspired by the candidacy of Herschel Walker, Megan.
I mean, I don't know.
Neither of those guys inspires me.
Well, yeah, I mean, that Raphael Warnock won, but he's going to win.
So that, you know, it's not as much of an own goal as what the GOP has been doing since the midterms.
No, I mean, the wind came out of the sales of it.
Look, it's a very, very simple calculation.
If it was a close match, you know, if this was not, you know, South Korea versus Brazil, you would actually be paying attention to it.
But as you mentioned, those are very widening poll numbers in this runoff.
And, you know, Herschel Walker doesn't look like he's going to win.
And every time I turn the TV on, and you can say that it's the bias of the press, but don't put up a candidate who can, you know, produce stories like this.
But every time I turn the television on, there's a new woman on TV talking about how he abused her.
This is not the kind of person that you want to put up in, you know, and again, it's Georgia that's that's tripping up Republicans.
Didn't I say that they were going to have a line as long as the rockettes of women who would come forward and accuse Herschel Walker if he made it, if they had a runoff?
And indeed, it's happened.
You know, he says he's a changed man.
Raphael Warnock, meanwhile, there's tape out there of him praising Louis Varracon and Nation of Islam, speaking of anti-Semites in the news, right?
It's like, why can't we get better choices?
Why?
I mean, I don't know.
Raphael Warnock allegedly ran over his wife's foot with his car.
Herschel Walker has the rocket line of women accusing him of bad behavior and hurting them and threatening them.
It's like, maybe this is part of the reasons why I can't get excited.
There's no one left to root for.
Why don't one of you guys run?
The hand to your temple.
Yeah.
There must be some reason why good and honorable people who have other things to do that are just better and more respectable than politics refuse to run for office.
I don't know.
It really is, should be very clear to anyone who's paying attention at this point that politics is not about the best of us.
The best of us have not for a while now been the sort of people who end up occupying the White House or necessarily occupying the seats of Congress.
Fortunately, there is much ruin in the nation and most of the things that make America remarkable have nothing to do with who gets elected to office.
So I don't know if that makes you feel better or worse, but it always makes me feel a little bit better when I have to sit through an election day like this.
I just feel like we're functioning despite these people, not because of them, the ones that we're putting in office.
You know, there's like, there's craziness coming up.
We've got a White House lies to us regularly.
Just this whole dust up over the past 48 hours of Donald Trump and his tweet about how we need to terminate the Constitution.
And then even all these Republicans are like, that's bullshit.
We're not, what do you, what?
No.
And then he's like, fake news.
I never said it.
It's like, okay, it's literally in writing.
You did say it.
You wrote it.
And now, and by the way, it's not the first time you've written that.
You've written things just like that in the past on your truth social.
I know you're mad.
I get why you're mad about the Twitter files and what Twitter did to the New York Post reporting on Hunter, but I get it.
But he always goes too far.
I don't know if it's because he needs attention or just because he's a big fan of the rhetorical flourish or because he really wants to suspend the Constitution.
I mean, part of it, Megan, is just that, is that he has never accepted the results of the 2016 election.
We forget that now because it seems so bizarre that the guy who won would insist over and over again that there was massive election fraud in 2016, but he did because he lost the popular vote.
He's mad about it.
And it's not just that he complained about that there was three to five million illegal votes in that election.
He started a whole commission about it and appointed Chris Kobak, who's an absolute clown to head it up.
And this led to all kinds of stuff changing the rules in the census.
It was insane.
He can't stand the idea that the public doesn't love him and he says crazy stuff.
Our friend Charlie Cook over at National Review has a great piece today that just is a couple of paragraphs and just says, aren't you tired of this?
This little cycle, the one that exactly that you, as you laid it out, Megan, aren't you tired of it?
Yeah, we're tired of it.
And also, it's not popular.
It's he can't win majority elections and people who talk like that can't win majority elections.
And that's the only reason why Georgia is close, by the way.
It shouldn't be.
Brian Kemp won easily over Stacey Abrams.
Republican beat the Democrat.
It shouldn't be close in Georgia, but if you're going to have Trump-like candidates for office, you're going to lose.
So this is what's happening in Georgia today.
They're actually running drones over the state of Georgia right now on behalf of Raphael Warnock, trying to get people out there.
Drones with like Raphael Warnock's image and other like, I've never seen that before in politics.
And here's what happened.
Apparently, the state Republicans in Georgia begged Trump not to come to Georgia to hold an in-person rally.
And according to reports, though, who knows, Trump was mad.
Like, what do you mean?
Why don't you want me in Georgia?
I'm the key to his success.
Like, if you, if I go to Georgia, he'll win.
But they were like, please don't do us any favors.
Stay where you are.
Stay in Mar-a-Lago.
And now, and by the way, reportedly, there's a bunch of polling data showing that he would do more harm than good if he went to Georgia to help to try to help Walker.
But now Walker's poll numbers are so low, apparently, that his campaign was begging Trump to at least hold a virtual rally because the Democrats' early voting lead was so big.
You know, that's how they are winning in Georgia now, the Dems with this early voting edge.
And so Trump did some virtual rally ultimately, which is, I don't even know what that is.
Like, did he call people on the phone and say vote for, what is it?
It's too late.
It's like, I don't know.
I just don't think it's going to happen.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but the latest, what is it?
Is it the bets?
But the Democrats' chances of winning the runoff were 89.5% of Walker's 10.5%, according to the tracker, election betting odds, which could be wrong, but probably won't be.
Yeah, there had to be some total fiasco with respect to turnout for the Democrats in order for him to win.
I just can't see it.
And there just does not seem to be a great deal of energy.
I think the fact that Kemp so outperformed him in the last race says a great deal about his prospects.
All right.
So the one piece of good news for the Republicans as a result of this election is still that they did technically win the House, right?
They eked out a victory in the House.
And soon to be, well, speaker, we think, Kevin McCarthy goes on with Maria Bardo-Romo and says, I got a lot planned.
I got a lot up my sleeve.
And here's the first thing.
I've got a piece of good news.
And it actually is a piece of good news.
He says he's convinced President Biden to throw away the mandate that active duty servicemen and women be vaccinated.
So that's great.
Like, that's actually amazing if he, in fact, did that.
And so we're very excited and we're celebrating it.
And then back to Corrine Jean-Pierre.
She comes out and she's like, well, That was before he spoke to the Pentagon and we really need to keep people safe and pulled the rug out from under Leader McCarthy's first big victory and basically said, I couldn't really tell if it was a hard no or if it was just a probably not.
But the first big, big victory of the McCarthy era seems not to exist.
So what should they do?
Because that actually would be a very popular thing for the president to do.
And his poll numbers are not very good.
Geez.
I mean, what do you do?
I mean, first, very briefly on Georgia, I just want to say that it does prove once again that the filthy politics of it all, when Joe Biden said that the Georgia voting laws were creating Jim Eagle, which was Jim Crow times two, it was Jim Condor or something.
It was some large bird preceded by Jim.
That turns out not to have been true.
And the thing with Corinne John Pierre, I have no idea what to believe in that when it comes to the back stuff, because as you hear in the clips that you showed previously, this is a person who's supposed to be enlightening the public, not doing battle with the press.
Her job is to enlighten the public and be that kind of sort of transportation of Joe Biden's confused ideas to the American people.
And she refuses to answer a question squarely.
I mean, the border thing, she's answering five different questions and saying, well, it's kind of none of your business.
And so when you establish this for so long, every time I watch this woman's press conferences, I start banging my head on the table.
So I have no sense of what is actually happening when I listen to her speak and her recapitulation of what the White House's ideas are.
So I don't even know if that's true.
I mean, the vaccination thing is lunacy.
It's an easy victory for Republicans because there is no science at this point.
I mean, keep in mind, I walked by a bar this morning.
Shocker.
I wasn't drinking this morning.
I walked by the bar, man.
I tried to go in, but they were closed.
And it said, you have to be vaccinated to come into this horrible, dingy bar.
And it's just still up on the wall.
And I was like, do they realize that we had this when we thought the vaccine was preventing transmission?
We haven't, we've known that that's not true for well over a year now.
And where are we?
We're still fighting these.
These are the people that believe the science, right?
We're always talking about believing the science.
These are just now boring political battles that you could grant not even just McCarthy a victory here.
It's just, you know, the ease of, you know, running a military, of having to have everybody vaccinated when that really doesn't matter anymore.
It seems like an easy victory, but I mean, they're going to make a political battle out of absolutely everything.
This is like such a no-brainer.
I mean, it's so stupid.
And by the way, we will 100% catch way more diseases from the disgusting faucets on the sinks and such places than we will from anybody breathing their COVID breath on us.
You know, honestly, it's like, it's such a quandary what to do.
Pandemic Politics and Public Trust 00:16:39
I now have my hands sanitized.
And I'm not a big hand sanitizer person.
I'm not one of those people who's like spraying myself with it every place, but the public restrooms, this is the place where we need the hand sanitizer because touching the toilet flusher, touching the sink faucets, you know, the issue for Megan.
Yes, I, it's, I'm really, and like, then I want to use my foot to flush the flusher.
I don't want to touch the flusher.
But then I, I'm like, what am I doing for my fellow humans?
I don't want to touch my foot to the flusher.
What if the next gal comes in and she uses her actual hand?
So you've got to have the hand sanitizer.
What they need is the automatic door.
What you need to like hit it with your elbow.
So the door opens and closes without a hand to hand.
Megan, where are you hanging out?
These are the places that I hang out where you leave with diseases.
You have money.
What are you doing?
I need new friends.
The hand sanitizer right in and outside of the door.
The automatic kind.
You put your hand under and you just do this and you never have to touch anything.
You don't have to touch the faucets.
It's disgusting.
And I'm thinking about it, frankly, because of the airplanes.
The airplanes are at, those are the worst.
I don't even know what that water is that comes out of there, right?
Like they give you the little, the toothbrush sometimes, like on an overnight flight.
Do not put your toothbrush under that water for the love of God.
I'm going through this with my kids.
I'm like, no, no, take your bottle of water in there.
Anyway, sorry, I digress.
Here's the actual quote.
Here's what, here's what, and that's not a quote, but here's what KJP said on the vaccine mandate for the active duty guys.
She says, well, McCarthy raised it.
He raised it with President Biden.
So clearly they had a conversation, but the president told him he would consider it, but also made clear that he wanted to consult with the Pentagon.
And since then, as we've all heard, the Secretary of Defense has recommended retaining the mandate.
And that's because the COVID vaccination requirement was put in place to keep our service members safe and healthy and prepared for service.
She does not explain how this vaccine does any of that to the point that you guys were just raising.
Okay, so that's that.
Meanwhile, over in LA.
I don't have any doubt that she, that Biden actually made that promise.
No doubt whatsoever.
How many times have they had to walk back the things that Biden says in public?
Of course, we're going to assassinate Vladimir Putin.
We have to remove office.
Well, remember, he even said on 60 Minutes that the pandemic was over.
You know, Biden, I think, sees where we really are on this pandemic.
It's his crazy cabal around him of woke leftists who won't let go of any of this stuff.
And some of them live not just in DC, but out in LA, where they may soon reimpose the indoor mask mandate.
Can you believe?
Can you believe this?
Who would live there with these lunatics running the city?
They say they're at medium in terms of the, you know, the spread right now.
And that means they're at 185.
The weekly rate is 185 per 100,000 residents.
And if it goes up to just 200 cases per 100,000 residents, that's high.
And they will reimpose the mask mandate and people will follow it.
They will put the damn masks on and they will mask up their kids and they will comply because they're good little citizens, good little boys and girls that do what the governor, the whatever mayor tells them to do.
It's stomach turning.
Like, can you imagine putting a mask back on pursuant to a city mandate?
No, but it's already happening, by the way, in New York City, in LA.
If you go to, you know, where I am right now and go to the Whole Foods, about 50% masked.
It's just, it's the virtue signal of people who live in these neighborhoods.
I mean, they don't, but they don't need to be told.
And they would happily accept that mandate, I think, if it happened to California.
I mean, California, you have bigger problems than the spread of something that is seasonal and is going to tick up around these times every year.
I had it about a month ago.
You know, in California, you're more likely to be stabbed by a deranged hobo when you're walking down in Venice Beach than you are getting, you know, something that, you know, everyone survives, provided you're not grossly overweight or, you know, elderly.
So, no, this has nothing to do with science.
It has everything to do with politics.
It has everything to do with sort of fan service for the people who vote for very progressive politicians.
Let's just say who they are in places like New York City and LA.
I mean, there's no secret or mystery to it.
It should be noted that Los Angeles led the country, as far as I saw recently, in population loss over the past year.
A lot of different factors that go into that.
But I'm sure if there are people who don't like to live that way, don't like to follow those kind of dikts, then they skedaddle, which they have done from New York City as well.
There's no reason for this.
And they've done this a couple of times already in both Los Angeles and the state of California.
They've gone up.
They've threatened.
They've said it's going to happen.
We're going to reimpose mandates.
And then at the last minute, they kind of blink.
It's almost as if they want to let you know that they still could.
They still want to.
Just get yourself ready for that at some point.
It's astonishing.
We had a mask mandate on toddlers here in New York until May 2022.
I still can't get over it.
California, they put yellow tape on playgrounds.
They put sand on skate parks.
They pulled people out of the ocean to the forest science.
The vector of transmission, the beach in California.
We can't let this go.
The same people did this stuff and are still pushing these policies.
And the vaccine on the military, who do you want?
Who do you think fights the wars?
Are they the people who follow the order in my neighborhood in Brooklyn that you only find in bookstores?
That's the only like mask requirement that people still take seriously in bookstore.
That's weird in Brooklyn.
No, it's the type of people who don't follow mandates are the ones who are probably going to pick up a gun and maybe defend the country.
It's ridiculous.
There's no science behind it.
New York State threw this out in court, the vax mandate on state employees and government employees.
We should do that for our military, considering that we have a manpower shortage in this country, a labor shortage across all sectors, but particularly ones involving muscles.
Yeah.
And also because we're fighting a proxy war with Russia right now, and we got a president who continues to say provocative things about Taiwan.
Like, now's the time we want a strong, robust military that's ready to go, not sitting on the couch at home, 100% healthy, but not vaccinated.
I will say this.
A lot of this is happening because of, you know, who?
Our everyone's favorite bureaucrat, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who thank God is retiring this month.
It's finally happening.
I was worried he's going to back out, but he's actually going forward.
I mean, not that he's going to be replaced by somebody who doesn't share all of his worldviews, but he's just a villain in my eyes.
And he gave an interview.
It was like his exit interview and was asked the quintessential exit interview question.
And listen to how he answered.
This is Saudi.
Is there a moment of your career that you wish you could do over?
You know, Yasmin, no.
And I know there are going to people are going to respond to that who say, well, what does he think?
He's perfect.
Absolutely.
I'm the first to admit I'm far from perfect.
But when you say do over, you know, I really can't see something that I would do completely over.
Really?
Not the school closures, like none of that.
The abuse of children, all the learning loss.
You have no regrets about that now that all the information has come back to you.
No, he doesn't.
He really does think he's God.
Yeah, the thing that I worry most about with respect to the pandemic is the degree to which there's just been a lack of official introspection about what went right and what went wrong, what policies made sense and what policies didn't.
I mean, from a public health standpoint, it was an absolute debacle at the state level across most of the country and certainly at the federal level, without a doubt.
And there just aren't serious conversations happening about what works and what doesn't, about what is efficacious and what's not.
It's the reason why he's still being asked questions about whether or not it might make sense to shutter schools again.
Should we even entertain this?
The answer is absolutely no.
Like we shouldn't have done it to begin with.
We now know that.
And going forward, what do we do the next time around?
How do we go about assessing our risks?
This is not the last time we'll have to deal with a pandemic sort of situation.
And it seems to me that the only thing that we have at our disposal is the new playbook that we've developed, which includes lockdowns and masking, whether or not it's efficacious.
And when available, vaccine mandates, which run against a lot of the concerns that plenty of people have and a lot of just confusing messaging throughout the pandemic about what the vaccines can and can't do.
There should be some serious conversation about whether or not it makes sense to overpromise, to be overconfident, or if it's appropriate to hedge some of your recommendations and to be a little bit more transparent and to just be honest, which is one of the things that Mr. Fauci has acknowledged he hasn't been completely honest at different points during the pandemic.
How about your lies, your many lies that you've admitted that you told us that undermined faith in public health?
How about the attacking the great Barrington declaration doctors who had a really smart proposal early on to focus protection on those who most needed it, the most vulnerable?
And instead, you embarked on a campaign to ruin them.
The school closures we mentioned.
How about funding gain of function research in the COVID Wuhan lab with a bat lady?
Was that something you'd like to have back?
I mean, this guy, this is our problem.
No, no regrets.
I didn't know that.
No bat lady do-over.
Oh, man, this is a strange one.
I thought he was going to say bat lady do-over.
You know, Camille, I think Camille's right.
We've been talking about this on the fifth column, which is America's best podcast, if you were unaware.
And we've been going through this quite frequently.
Is that, you know, the things that we knew or we thought we knew.
And, you know, I'm one of those people that has happened to be around other parents who were wearing these obnoxious t-shirts that said, I believe the science and the science was different the day that the guy bought the t-shirt and the day that he was wearing the t-shirt.
And the thing about it was, is that we never went back and actually had conversations about what was true and what wasn't, what worked and what didn't.
There was at no point did we ever have a conversation about we have to stop washing our groceries.
We have to stop doing this to our hands all the time with hand sanitizer.
People were obsessed.
You couldn't get hand sanitizer anywhere.
And then all of a sudden that went away.
And that was kind of like a campaign of people being both frustrated and kind of, you know, assuming that that was true.
But there was nothing from the government.
And it goes beyond, and I say this because it goes beyond the school closures, which, you know, no one in the country where I used to live, Sweden, very, very progressive, very, very government intervention friendly, shall we say, country, didn't close their schools for a second.
And maybe you want to go back and look at that.
But all of the things that we thought were true, including things like you have to take, you have to get vaccinated because you can't, or you can't come into this restaurant, you can't come to work, you can't come to a concert.
Well, why, pray tell?
Because you'll spread the virus.
Now, at what point did the government come out and say, and Karine Jean-Pierre has a great little platform there and say, you know what, we thought that was true.
Cut us a little slack.
We're all figuring this out at the same time.
But it turns out to no longer be true.
Find me an example of people doing that.
They do not.
You have to figure this stuff out on your own.
So it becomes this kind of melange of like misinformation, old information, outdated information.
And, you know, if Anthony Fauci wants to go backwards and look at anything, I'd say that he could probably do everything, every single thing that we mentioned.
And some of that stuff, by the way, I'm not going to give him a hard time on because he didn't know.
But when the science changed, the messaging didn't.
And that is really, really important.
What's crazy about Fauci, though, is he did know.
He knew a lot of it.
All these old clips that have surfaced of him saying like, you really do have to watch it because if you've had something like the flu and you develop natural immunity, then you might not want to get a vaccination because those two things could interfere and blah, blah, blah.
Like he actually understood a lot of the dynamics that would wind up playing out in COVID.
He just decided to deny it all once he was placed in this role.
Go ahead, Matt.
Yeah.
And he also, let's never forget, was part of the cabal early on in the pandemic, who said, oh, yeah, masks actually don't work because we're worried that you're going to buy them all up.
We're going to have a shortage.
And that's, I mean, the CDC's own guidelines stretching back 10, 15 years ago about what to do in a pandemic, they underscore over and over again.
The most important thing is to level with the public, including about what you don't know.
Absolutely.
And because they're going to need to believe that you are credible in order to follow your recommendations when you say, oh, crap, this one's really important.
You got to do this.
And they stress this.
I mean, it's as important as anything else in their recommendations and their playbook and how to do it.
And they botched that from the beginning.
From February 2020, they botched it again in March 2020.
And they continue to do it now.
It is a shame and we won't learn.
And in the process now, we've developed an entire set of skepticism about the efficacy of vaccines in all kinds of ways.
We're going to see vaccine mandate rollbacks in schools and elsewhere.
Maybe some of them are appropriate, maybe not.
I would tend to think that most of them would not be appropriate rollbacks.
But people now have lost faith and it's completely understandable.
It's an own goal that they've lost faith in the public health authorities, many of whom, like Fauci, like Rochelle Walinski, changed their tune.
Like they said one thing at this crucial moment, Walensky said famously that you should keep schools open in July 2020 and then change their tune once other people got their fingerprints on it.
And unless until we have that reckoning, that you're not going to rebuild that faith.
And we're kind of in a bad spot for the next pandemic.
And by the way, you know, they seem to cater on the left and Fauci and this administration to their most fearful constituent.
You know, they think of the person who I saw on the Upper West Side, literally in a hazmat suit during COVID.
I tweeted it out.
I mean, there's evidence.
There's picture evidence.
And they cater to that guy, not to reason, not to science, not to developments in facts and science and so on.
No, to the most fearful person amongst their base.
And that brings me to the Twitter story.
Okay.
We saw the Matt Taibbi Twitter files.
He added additional color to what we did know, which is Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden reporting by the New York Post without facts.
It claimed it was Russian disinformation obtained through a hack, potentially, none of which was true and none of which they had any good faith basis to believe.
They just decided it.
Magic Wand decided it and then suppressed a story right before a presidential election.
We all know the real reason.
That's not being said.
They did it to help Joe Biden.
That's what the real reason is.
They never really believed it was disinfo.
They did it to help Joe Biden.
And the guy responsible for those decisions, like the head of the Twitter censorship unit, his actual title is he's now former head of Twitter's trust and safety department.
And he did oversee this decision, this particular decision to suppress the New York Post's reporting.
He sat down with Kara Swisher over on her podcast on November 30th.
His name is Yoel Roth.
And I heard this on Ben Shapiro's show and went back and listened myself.
And my God, the guy, first of all, he said, yeah, okay, maybe it was a mistake to censor that story.
Yeah.
But it was very difficult to initially verify it.
That's why.
You made no effort.
You made zero effort, zero effort, zero whatsoever.
And by the way, let's not forget when Twitter censored it.
It was before those alleged intelligence officials came out and said, oh, it looks like disinformation.
Twitter went before those guys.
This guy, Yoel Roth, who absolutely knows nothing, decided it was disinformation before General Michael Hayden did.
So then she follows up and asks him about, was it the right decision to ban Donald Trump from Twitter?
Now this one, this one he stands behind.
This was absolutely the right one.
And they get into January 6th.
This is all speaking on the fear factor, okay, that washes over huge portions of the Democratic base.
Social Media Moderation Failures 00:11:44
Listen to this exchange.
Donald Trump.
That one I don't think was a mistake.
January 6th.
So it starts on the 6th, but it also starts prior to that.
The events of the 6th happen.
And if you talk to content moderators who worked on January 6th, myself included, the word that nearly everybody uses is trauma.
We experience those events, some of us as Americans, but not just as Americans or as citizens, but as people working on sort of how to prevent harm on the internet.
My God.
Moynihan, thoughts?
Do you have an extra 40 minutes?
Trauma.
I love this.
This is a word that has been, I was actually talking to a friend about this this morning.
We saw this in another context.
It is, there's a certain generational thing where people abuse this.
And I hope they understand that in other countries, I mean, you know, let's do the throat clearing that January 6th was an abomination and horrifying and a dark day for America.
I don't like Chuck Schumer compare it to Pearl Harbor or anything like that.
But trauma, trauma for whom?
For you?
And Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.
If you look out into the great wide world, there's all sorts of news stories happening in lots of countries, which are far more like actually traumatic than something happening with a bunch of Yahoos that are trying to storm the Capitol and overturn the election, which was never going to happen.
But the other thing about this is I stick by the Donald Trump banning.
Does anyone ever stop and think about how useless it is?
That it's just virtue signaling?
Because Megan, we start talking about this at the top of the show.
Donald Trump had this little epistle the other day about shredding the Constitution.
And it was in some language that resembled English.
It was kind of like a hybrid of English and like some sort of Sasquatch language.
And I saw it.
I don't have Truth Social.
It was everywhere on Twitter because people take screenshots of it and put it on Twitter.
What are you trying to do?
Are you trying to suppress the bad information?
Because we need that information.
The man has actually said he's going to run for president in 2024, and he was previously the president.
What is the idea here?
That, well, no, no, no.
I just want to signal me, random guy that works at Twitter in the trust and safety and protection and trauma division that I don't like these ideas in the trauma ward.
We are very, very upset about them.
We have to get them off.
It's like, well, you're not going to suppress them, are you?
I mean, Alex Jones got banned.
And I've interviewed Alex Jones, as you have, Megan.
I think he's a nut.
I think he's a performance artist.
I think he's a ludicrous person in so many ways.
And he did an interview with Kanye or Yi or whatever his pronouns are and Yay.
And sorry, Camille.
And I saw it everywhere, despite the fact that he's been banned from YouTube and banned from Twitter.
And it's like, you can't contain this kind of information.
So for the ridiculous Harris Wisher to be up there with this ridiculous guy saying, how do we sort of contain all this information?
You can't.
It's called the fucking internet.
And you are doing this for yourself.
You're doing this so you look good.
You're not doing it like the New York Post story.
And this is a, you know, I'll knock on Republicans a little bit here when they say, much like Democrats said that, you know, Hillary Clinton wouldn't have would have won the race in 2016 if it hadn't been for these Facebook ads that Russia took out.
The sort of inverse of that is now that had people known about the Hunter Biden laptop, Donald Trump would have lost.
I think that's patently absurd.
But also that information got out there, number one, because there's all sorts of alternative news outlets.
I think that the Twitter stuff is absolutely absurd.
It wasn't.
It was in the post.
It was on the front cover of the New York Post.
It's absurd and Orwellian that they're shutting down a New York Post news story.
By the way, the idea that you can't verify something, how many Russiagate stories could you actually verify by tunneling into the Kremlin, going through the files into seeing if this stuff was true?
Verification happened when nobody from Hunter Biden's office returned a call to say, that's not my laptop.
That's where you start reporting it.
That's exactly right.
And by the way, they weren't worried about verifying Sarah Palin's emails when they reported those after they'd been hacked.
They had absolutely no problem verifying that.
It made her look bad.
Print.
That's it.
So who are they kidding?
They have no moral high ground.
I don't know whether it would have changed the election.
I find it very hard to believe.
The stuff about Hunter and the big guy being corrupt, now we're talking, right?
If the media had done its job and really framed the story properly, not Hunter Biden's deeps and his prostitutes and his drugs, like he's a hot mess loser.
That's not going to change hearts and minds before an election.
But he's a corrupt jerk who brought his dad in on all of his shady business dealings and we're about to put that guy back in the White House.
And by the way, Hunter will be there right alongside him.
That could have given some people pause.
We'll never know.
That's the bottom line.
We'll never know.
And that's because of them and guys like this who are swimming in their trauma, their trauma.
It's their own politics and their own politics of fear.
These are the people who are running our social media sites, our government.
To me, it's so disheartening.
I just, I look at them like, would you, would you man up?
You know, who hasn't been abused on the internet?
Who the hell hasn't been through, you know, attacks or harassment?
I mean, I'm sure you guys have felt it.
I certainly have been through it.
You live to emerge out the other side and you're fine.
Would you just grow a pair?
Yeah.
Moderation is like completely worthwhile.
This is a necessary function on social media platforms.
What you want is moderation that is thoughtfully transparent, that is consistent, that is actually practical and useful.
It's not only, as Wentihan correctly pointed out, that people are reposting this stuff.
They're posting supercuts of the worst elements of the interview.
The most incendiary comments are the ones that you guys are a fire hose of.
Fire hose with tens of thousands of retweets because that's engagement.
They want that.
They permit it to happen while at the same time, they're sanctioning people for sharing links, locking their accounts and telling them in order to get it unlocked, you have to delete this link.
None of it made any sense whatsoever.
And none of it was keeping anyone safer.
And at the same time, from a moderation standpoint, there's so much genuinely dangerous and genuinely problematic content that they're having a very difficult time wrapping their hands around.
So I think it's vitally important that we're having good content moderation, but it's also really valuable to have Taibbe out there doing some actual reporting on this to get some transparency with respect to the kind of decision-making that's happening at Twitter.
Well, that could be Twitter.
It's happening elsewhere as well.
And let me ask you a follow-up.
Users want to know how this stuff works.
Let me ask you a follow-up, Camille.
Do you think these guys are worried about what's going to happen to Matt Taibbi with the shitstorm that's raining down on him by these leftist reporters who think he's some sort of a turncoat, sort of some sort of a traitor for doing his job, for actually reporting news?
I mean, Glenn Greenwald was asking this the other day, like, oh, are they going to hold themselves accountable?
God forbid something should happen to Matt, who's taking it like a level of incoming for just doing reporting that is truly breathtaking.
The standard only applies one way.
You can rain down as much of a shitstorm on a conservative or somebody.
Taibbi's a liberal who's just heterodox.
Those people are all totally fair game.
He's doing his job.
Like his job is to report the facts.
It doesn't matter where you happen to get these facts from.
You don't turn down a source because you say, oh, I'm sorry, you're the richest person in the world.
I can't take this useful information and provide it to the public.
And it was so deep horror to watch people poo-pooing his reporting in real time before they'd had even an opportunity to look at all of the stuff he'd amassed.
And it sounds like there's going to be additional reporting, that there may be some more details.
Is it the most incendiary thing in the universe?
Absolutely not.
But is it frustrating to learn that the federal government and various members of various members of government, members of different bureaucracies, people who are running for office are having these back channel conversations with major social media providers and telling them, oh, that account is problematic.
Oh, those tweets need to be taken down.
And the response from these social media companies is, we'll get right on it, already taken care of.
That's a little bit of a problem.
Their defense.
Their defense on that has been, oh, well, he wasn't in the government when he, when it was the campaign that was working with Twitter.
Okay, so that doesn't, whatever.
We have free speech principles that we'd like to uphold, particularly if you want to be president.
And so, no, it may not be a violation of law, but it's a principle that we happen to hold dear.
But secondly, who are we kidding?
You think this stopped once he got into office?
I don't know what happened with respect to suppression of Hunter Biden stories, but I do know that number one, on Ashley Biden's diary, he sicked the FBI on James O'Keefe for considering reporting it.
Okay, that was this president while in office sicking the DOJ on somebody who reported on his daughter's diary.
All right.
Didn't even report on it, just got it, like had access to it.
He didn't release it, right?
And secondly, we watched them from the White House podium talk about the disinformation dozen and how they'd been working with the social media companies to silence the people who, unfortunately for them, wound up on the White House list.
There was obvious coordination, state coordination.
Let's look at what they did to parents who they decided to label as domestic terrorists.
We know that there was coordination with the White House to set that whole thing up.
Then he sicked the DOJ on those parents.
This White House has been crossing lines legally since before it even got into office when it was when Joe Biden was running to become president.
Don't don't gaslight us with the, oh, he was only running for office because this is a pattern with him.
Yeah.
And the disinformation attempts to have a disinformation czar, to have the surgeon general, the surgeon general out there, like leading a disinformation task force, at least sounding the biggest alarm.
This is what we need to do.
The problem right now with COVID, the reason why it's not licked is all that is Alex Berenson.
So we need to like breathe heavily on the neck of Twitter to make sure that Alex Berenson doesn't have an account.
He's back on Twitter now, thanks to Elon Musk.
That is chilling.
It is literally chilling speech.
It is the government, which the federal government, which has Twitter and all big social media companies in its regulatory crosshairs.
It can pull you up on Capitol Hill and give you like a little show grilling at any time that it wants to.
And it has a lot of business there.
And right now, both parties in different ways are lining up to try to regulate and crack down on social media for different reasons of their own.
So there's all kinds of reasons for these companies to want to be responsive to a federal government or a surgeon general or anybody who breeds on them about how disinformation is deadly.
It's killing people.
Remember, Joe Biden said that Facebook is killing people.
And that's like a normal thing, you know, to say.
No, it's not.
Facebook is not killing people and nor is it tipping elections or anything like that.
What we have is that people all over America, sadly too many of us, not on this necessarily conversation, but too many normal Americans don't have trust in Americans, by which I mean they seek to try to suppress people to block their ability to spread messages because they worry that if they are exposed to this one little message, it's going to produce a political outcome in particular that they don't like.
It is a stupid and illiberal idea when we have billions of ideas right now just zipping back and forth all the time in real time.
Facebook Killing People Claims Debunked 00:04:09
We live in a free country.
It's great, right?
There's some problems.
Yes.
But it's great that we can express each other, express things to each other freely.
And the problem is that everyone is worried about that.
They think that it is the thing that's going to cause the problem.
It's not.
And we need to get over that.
And it's the free-flowing exchange that is helpful.
We cut down, we cut short so much COVID debate, scientific debate in this country through political pressure and peer pressure.
It's shameful.
It set us back.
A lot of people ties the two segments together.
Fear.
And by the way, Alex Barronson, he actually got back on because he sued Twitter.
That's how he got back on Twitter.
He sued them and unearthed the documents of the Biden administration pressuring Twitter to boot him off of it and wound up.
There's more to that story.
We had him on recently.
But your point about we live in a free country.
And I said, let's enjoy it while we can remind me of a quick story before we go to break.
My daughter, Yarli, was younger.
She was like eight, nine.
And we went to the planetarium in New York and she had her little jumper on.
You know, it's like a skirt.
It's like a one, a one, one piece.
It's got a skirt at the bottom.
And she put her feet up on the seat in front of us.
And I said, Yards, you know, that's not very polite.
You should take your feet down.
That's not, that's not polite.
And that's, that's not ladylike.
And she said, well, I'm not a lady yet.
Let's enjoy it while we can.
Same for the country.
Oh, dear, you're in.
All right, stand by.
Got to take a break.
Be right back with the guys from the fifth column who stay with us for the entire show.
Many speakers.
Guys, Kirsty Alley died.
I was so sad, right, to see it.
She was only 71.
Her children released a statement saying she was such a fierce fighter.
It was a quick illness.
She had cancer.
They reported today in the news it was colon cancer.
Apparently, it came on quickly and took her life.
It's hard to believe.
So young and just such a force of nature.
Somebody, I'm sure, I don't know.
Camille, you seem too young, but you other guys seem closer to my age that we grew up with.
How am I supposed to take that?
Was that good matter?
Are we okay with that?
He's like 20 years older than us.
I think white cracks as well.
Yeah, why exactly?
Jesus.
Now, I watched her on Cheers and everything and was a fan.
And the one thing that I will say is that I want to implore all Americans to do something is just to walk away from politics for a little bit sometimes.
And so you don't have to do that kind of caveat when you're saying something about somebody who just passed away.
I didn't always agree with her.
You know, we agreed to disagree.
It's like, who cares about her politics?
I don't care if she was a Scientologist.
I don't care if she was a Trump supporter.
I'm neither.
But she was a person and her kids wrote a very lovely thing about her on Instagram.
And just be respectful.
I just want to give a shout out to the Look Who's Talking series, which is unfairly overlooked.
Yes.
And it was John Travolta's first comeback before Pulp Fiction that's underrated.
It was great.
What about North and South?
Do you remember North and South?
I think she might have met her husband, Parker Stevenson, while doing this.
Oh, God.
This is like this old Civil War.
Yes.
Mini series, right?
Yes, mini-series.
She was so young, totally gorgeous.
And Parker Stevenson, who she later married, is in it.
That's not the same as the news of war, is it?
Yeah, you and so we're not the same age, Megan.
Thank you very much for dropping the winds of war with from 1975.
Remembering Thornbirds and Kirstie Alley 00:02:09
Have you seen the Thornbirds?
Because speaking of the Thornbirds, you're not a man of Chamberlain.
I didn't know he was gay, by the way.
Did you know he was gay?
I did not know that.
I didn't know.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Nothing wrong with that.
I just had nothing wrong with that.
No, wait, we're up against a hard break, so I'm going to save my Kirstie Alley soundbite until after this quick break, because we have to play just a couple of things with her and a memory or two.
So continuing with Kirstie Alley, for those who don't know her, who are like Camille, so young.
Let's take a little walk down memory lane.
Cheers, you got to understand, people who weren't around watching it at the time, was like it was the thing to watch when there were only three things on television.
I mean, we all watched Cheers.
It was like you would set your alarm so that you were making, you were like, it was, what it was at eight o'clock or on Thursday nights, and you would watch Cheers.
You had an appointment with Sam Malone, and you'd go to a little bar where everybody knew your name.
And Kirstie Alley came in as sort of the new manager of Cheers when somehow Sam lost ownership of the bar.
And she was sort of, she began as this buttoned-up figure who always had this sort of weakness.
This she was way more frail than she outwardly projected.
And you fell in love with her really quickly because she tried to be so tough, but you could see she was kind of a hot mess.
And our producers put together just a little bit of a montage of some of her work.
Here's Kirstie Alley.
I'm the wife of a plumber.
We're gonna have a whole bunch of little plumbers.
And the horrible part of it isn't he's too good for me.
I mean, Mrs. Santry.
And my name's Mrs. Sam.
I think I'm beginning to see you in a whole new light.
Disagreeing Politically Without Bitterness 00:07:30
Why don't you tell me what you see?
You have a really weird face.
Your eyebrows are growing together like a big, old, ugly caterpillar.
Oh, look, they're cutting the cake.
Sam, just because I put my work before my social life does not mean I don't have boyfriends.
I have boyfriends.
I could pick up that phone and have a dozen dates for Friday night.
Yeah, but could you get one as great looking as I am?
Blindfolded, gagged, and with both hands tied behind my back.
We were just talking about a party Friday night.
Let me see.
My choices are: I'm a boozy slut or a complete idiot.
I'd go with the idiot.
I already did.
Oh, such good stuff.
She was amazing.
And she, honestly, like you mentioned, look who's talking and you know, many, many other films and television shows that made her a household name.
And then, you know, yesterday when it was announced that she would, she had died, she would have been just universally celebrated, as you point out, you know, Moynihan.
You don't have to do the thing.
But I'm sorry to do it.
Here's just a couple of, here's some color on what you were hearing.
Okay.
Kierce Alley became a Trump-supporting COVID-conspirating nightmare of a person before she died.
I'm not even sad.
Then, again, I liked her in Cheers on Veronica's closet.
She seemed ballsy and bold, great hair.
Then she seemed odd.
Scientology odd.
Then she became a Trump-loving idiot.
I'm sorry she died.
I wish cancer on no one.
No doubt she'd be missed by those who loved her.
Oh, okay.
We had to point out she became a Trump-loving idiot.
Like, why can't people It reminds me of something that Roger Ailes once said to me, you know, about how he knew that when he died, nothing but terrible things would be written about him.
He knew.
And so any good he did in his life, he just did it because he genuinely wanted to do good.
He didn't do it because he thought it would wind up reflecting well on him in his obit.
And the truth is that if you are right-leaning, right-of-center, center with heterodox views, a leftist Hollywood person who voted for Trump.
That's how your obit will sound.
That's how people will talk about you when you're gone.
And it's really, there's something really disgusting about it.
It's unseemly.
Particularly when it's not your business, right?
I mean, I don't mean it's not someone's business to pay attention, but that's not the business she was in.
The thing that happened was Twitter.
The thing that happened was the internet.
And now we had a megaphone and we could actually talk about the things that interested us and talk about the things that we were thinking.
Christie Elliot didn't run for office.
She wasn't, you know, running for local council and she wasn't a national political figure, but she did talk about politics in the way that everybody talks about politics when you see that on Facebook or you see that amongst your family and friends.
And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that.
The problem is if we start kind of bifurcating the country into those we agree with and disagree with on that, and everything becomes politicized.
I won't go to this pharmacy because I saw the pharmacist online.
He was talking about some political view that I disagree with.
It's just a very poor way to live.
And it's, you know, you're poorer for cutting off people who you disagree with.
I mean, like, look, I think that the documentary that HBO had about Scientology was fantastic.
I think the whole thing is a very bizarre, bizarre cult.
I didn't begrudge her for being in it.
I'm kind of fascinated by it.
But particularly when she dies, I'm not going to say, here are your religious beliefs.
And I'm going to start questioning them now in wondering if that has any effect on your death.
It's just a very dark way of looking at the world.
And they wouldn't have been doing that if not for the Trump support and some of the COVID questions she raised.
Go ahead, Matt.
Correct.
I mean, are we going to say that about John Travolta?
Are we going to say about Beck, one of my favorite musicians?
Is that going to lead his thing?
Probably not because they didn't support Trump.
I recall like 10, 15 years ago, the Tea Party's getting off the ground.
The drummer of the Velvet Underground, Beau Tucker, right?
Not the world's most popular band, but super influential.
People who love the Velvet Underground famously said the 5,000 people bought their first record and they all started bands.
And she was a drummer.
She was great.
And just like this strange, polite woman from, I think, Nebraska or Kansas.
And she was spotted at a tea party rally.
And my God, so many people were so like foundationally upset that the drummer on a 1968 record that they revered used their First Amendment rights to go and show up at a rally.
It shows that people who are like standard issue Democratic voters are used to having the culture on their side.
They have no practice of enjoying art from people with whom they disagree.
Come into our world.
You don't have to agree with me politically.
I mean, God knows I don't, but come into our world of being outnumbered and then you could just enjoy the art for what it is and you don't care what their politics are.
Moyhan loves Billy Bragg.
They don't have the same politics.
That's fine.
No.
Under a Billy Bragg Bragg regime, I would be in a camp.
Camille loves Kanye or just yay, yay now.
What about that?
I know you've been, I've been listening to you guys and I know you're very disappointed in Kanye's latest comments, behavior, however we want to sum up what's happening.
I've been worried about him, both, both things.
Yeah.
So what about that?
Because, you know, we've had a lot of debates in general on whether you can separate the man from the music, the man from the art.
I think you can.
I mean, I guess it's a case-by-case basis.
It depends on just how, how much it's in your head.
But I don't, do you think anybody's going to stop listening to Kanye or to Ye music because of all this?
I don't know.
I suspect some people may say so.
You know, he wasn't making much in the way of new music that was particularly stellar.
Some of his more recent efforts have only been okay.
But some of the classic stuff, it's hard to imagine people abandoning that altogether.
The poster over my left shoulder is, I mean, this is his catalog up until the last two albums.
So I'm that big a fan and I don't expect that poster is coming down anytime soon.
But I've had a lot of practice disagreeing with Kanye on a range of important issues and not always endorsing or being excited about his private personal conduct.
But I can still appreciate his music.
I can still draw something from it.
And I think we were talking on the podcast recently and Winahan said something that really resonated with me about kind of the crisis of certainty that we have in our in our politics and in our polity right now, this sensibility that we can't even break bread with.
We can't imagine talking to people who disagree with us in a serious way because we know so with such confidence that these people are rotten and corrupt down to their very cores.
And that is deeply unhealthy.
That's certainly not something that I want any parts of.
There are very few people on the planet who I imagine are so deeply corrupt that I simply couldn't even talk to them.
And I don't think people who disagree with me about politics domestically here in the United States are generally of that ilk, whatever direction our disagreements happen to manifest in.
Female Morals in Modern Media 00:15:23
I have to say, being a lawyer helps practice that skill.
You know, even last week, I had on Jose Baez, who's Casey Anthony's lawyer.
He's the guy who got her acquitted.
I mean, he is the guy who got her acquitted.
And we had some spicy exchanges on a couple of issues.
And then we moved right on.
And we kind of talked about other cases.
The temperature came right down and we forged forward because I think lawyers are in practice of getting heated, you know, fighting over something that matters and then putting it aside immediately and moving on with your life and not demonizing opposing counsel.
In fact, usually when I was practicing law, you'd have beers with opposing counsel.
The nine times out of 10, you're taking a deposition in some small town.
You go in, you fight, you know, you call the judge, you tell the other person this guy's an asshole.
And then the deposition ends and you go out for dinner because you're the only person the other person knows in this entire small town.
You know, like we need more people to get practiced at that, where you can hate the argument, you can fight the argument, but you don't have to hate and fight the other person all the time.
Isn't that the lesson we learned from cheers?
Sam and Diane and then Sam and Kirsty, but more Sam and Diane.
They are different people that come from different worlds.
I presume they vote for different humans and that's fine.
It's not a big problem.
Just go.
I mean, if we're going to go down the list of Kirstie's hits that taught us that lesson, hollow.
How about North and South?
That was, it was his name, Patrick Swayze.
I always, we saw it like within the past two years.
Don't, don't, and then there was like a sequel, which I don't recommend.
But Patrick Swayze was the guy from the South who was off the plantation and his dad was a slave owner.
And then the guy, I can't remember his name, the actor, he's less of a household name who played the guy from the North, who was his best friend.
And they were split by the war.
Okay, anyway.
So yeah, rest in peace, Kirsty Alley.
I appreciated her outspokenness, the laughs she gave me and my family over the years.
And she did take a political beating online and I appreciated her temerity in the face of that too.
She will be missed.
Okay, let's talk about some other things happening in media as the media pounces on her.
Some crazy stuff is going on.
Touched on this yesterday.
ABC News is in the middle of a scandal with its two anchors who host the third hour of GMA, Amy Roebach and TJ Holmes.
And they originally took, she was just off the air after the scandal broke that they'd been having an affair, which is scandalous because they're both married to other people.
And according to the Daily Mail, which has been following these guys for like six weeks, two months maybe.
I mean, the length of pictures is like, how do they not know they're being followed for this long?
But anyway, they took just her off the air or she just took herself off the air on Thursday after the story broke.
He anchored.
Then Friday, they both appeared together, didn't acknowledge it.
Then Monday, they were pulled off the air by the president of ABC, saying this is too much of a distraction for our staff, for our viewers, and so on.
The reporting is that not only were they having an affair while married to other people, they were going out on double dates with the spouses.
You know, like, well, this adds another element for sure, that her older children that she had with Andrew Shu, her husband, star of Melrose Place, would babysit TJ Holmes's younger children.
You know, his wife is reportedly devastated and so on.
So you can see how this got sticky quickly for the news organization because two of these people are employed as morning news anchors and as the morning news anchor.
You know, it's all about the female audience in particular and how they view you.
Then it came out yesterday that he was reportedly, this is according to page six, I think, the Daily Mail broke the story, but then page six and the Daily Mail reported yesterday, he was having another affair prior to Amy Roebuck with a GMA producer who fell in love with him.
That woman was married.
He was still married while he was having this affair.
Then it came out in page six late yesterday.
He had a third affair with another ABC staffer, reportedly.
So it's starting to feel a little Matt Lowery, except for the power dynamic, which matters legally and ethically.
It matters if it doesn't sound like he was in a superior position to any of these women.
And now they're stuck with a real decision to make over to ABC, which is, can anybody come back?
Can she come back?
She didn't have three affairs.
She reportedly just had the one.
They're leaving the spouses.
Can he come back?
Do they both come back?
Do they both get filed?
Like, what happens?
And it's interesting because to me, it's 2022 America.
It's not 1960.
It's 2022.
You know, a lot of people have marital issues and make bad choices.
But there's an extra element here of his repeat behavior, the standards we hold men to, the standards we hold women to on morning television.
What do you guys make of it?
I mean, it's none of anyone's business, to be honest.
But I mean, I don't, I might have a kind of outlier position here in the sense that I don't think that either of them did anything wrong that anyone who watches or listens to that show, I don't know the show, I don't, to be honest, why they should care about it.
I mean, their spouses, obviously, they can say they did something wrong, or maybe they had an arrangement.
We don't know that.
There are people that have such arrangements.
I mean, I...
Well, the husband has just deleted all of Amy Roebuck's pictures from his Instagram.
So I'm guessing he's not too thrilled.
I would imagine not.
You know, it's bad press too.
And, you know, the three affairs is impressive.
But is there a threshold for affairs?
Like, you can't come back in the air after four.
But three is five.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm asking for a friend because, you know, is that a friend on this panel?
No.
No, never have I been in a situation like this.
I got to five and they were like, you're good.
Like, don't push your luck, Monahan.
But the thing about it is I think there's an extra layer that's added onto this.
And it's regardless of whether or not these things are okay or they're legal or they violate some sort of company policy.
It's just the general air that kind of has been hanging heavy after the Me Too stuff.
Is it any interaction between people at work?
And if you have ever worked in media and if you've ever worked in television, you know, as, you know, Megan, I know this very well, is that you spend all your time at work.
You spend all your time on the road.
These things end up happening.
Half the people that I know who have gotten married, they have gotten married because they met at work.
But there has been a kind of chill about this stuff recently.
Now, I know this is obviously a different story, but it has that thing that's always a part of it in the post-me too thing because you're looking for power dynamics.
You're looking for this.
Because even if there was a power dynamic, maybe somebody falls in love with somebody that is much their junior.
And should we not allow that?
Should someone have to sacrifice their job in order to maintain a relationship?
The only thing that is different here is the repeat offense kind of thing and the fact that they were married.
But I don't know if that's a violation of policy.
Like you have to.
But there's one other element.
There's one other element to it, which is the morals clause.
And I raised this with our legal panel yesterday.
Sure.
You know, television news anchors tend to have a morals clause in their contract that says the company can fire you if you do anything that brings the company into disrepute or yourself into disrepute because the ratings are based on your relationship with the viewers at home, with the audience at home.
And that's why they, now that doesn't mean necessarily, it depends on the actual way it's written.
So for sure, GMA can fire them from GMA for no reason.
I mean, like pretty much you can pull any a company never guarantees you have this role forever, you know, or even for the contract, but they have to pay you.
But if you violate the morals clause, they don't have to pay you.
And, you know, there's a good argument, at least if we were in 19, even 80, we don't have to go back to 60 or 50.
You go to 1980, 1990, there'd be, there'd be no question that this would qualify as a violation of the morals clause.
But we're in 2022.
And I just don't know.
I just don't know if an extramarital affair would even would even get there under our sort of present day, anything goes in the bedroom and elsewhere society standards.
And if so, if they did violate it, you got to turf them both, right?
Because even post-MeToo, you can't just fire the guy.
TJ Holmes happens to be black, which also doesn't really help.
You can't just fire the black guy and you can't just fire the woman, right?
Like both these people are in protected categories.
So the GMA is in a pickle.
I just, I see how the head of GMA and the head of ABC has got a real decision to make.
I will tell you, if it were me, if I were running this company, you have to worry about more than just these two.
I would say, given he's a serial fish off the peer guy, while he knows he's a face of ABC News, which is not okay.
And given that she, you know, she's in morning television, they're a female audience, relationship with a female news anchor, very important.
I'd say no one's coming back to the third hour of GMA.
You guys are not fired.
You're going to be correspondents.
She does 2022, I think.
But we're going to have to find new hosts of GMA.
And you know what?
We'll be fine because no one's indispensable.
So it's cycling, you're saying cycling them out of their positions at GMA, but not axing them entirely.
That I can I can see.
I mean, you know, you say it's 1980 versus 2022.
We do realize today that earlier we were talking about how Herschel Walker is on the ballot today to maybe go to the Senate.
I mean, if you're going to let him in the Senate, maybe they can tell us what's happening, you know, with the new, I don't know, but I don't even know it's on GMA.
I literally don't.
No, neither does it.
But yeah, like, I imagine the third hour.
I mean, I did the third hour of the Today Show.
It's usually very lighter.
It's very much lighter.
It's fun.
But the thing that was always said to me was it's an all-female audience and the relationship with the with the women watching it reigns supreme.
And I remember Roger saying back in the day, like he didn't want any of the female, he wanted the female anchors that he hired to be, he always say, I want a guy you can have a beer with and a woman who you want to sleep with.
That's sort of his short form, but not too much.
Not too much because he didn't want women at home thinking that you were going to steal their husband.
And that's like you can times that by 100 for morning television anchors who have an all-female audience.
Is this guy attractive?
I mean, ladies like TJ.
Of course he's attractive.
TJ's attractive.
Yeah, maybe they don't think they have a chance.
He does a lot of stuff.
I don't know.
I think, I think I put the question to the two of them and say, look, can you keep it together?
Can you both be on set together?
You know, is this going to be okay?
If they say yes, even if they're going to carry on, okay.
Let it ride.
I don't imagine there is anyone who is not going to watch this network anymore because these two are continuing to be the hosts of this show, even if they never talk about it.
Just kind of a gentle kind of brush of the hand on set occasionally.
I don't know.
I mean, that's back to the 2022 versus 1950.
Don't join Nika or don't say those names here.
Sorry.
Wow.
I mean, look, Megan, you, I, and Camille worked in the same building for a while, and Moynihan is no stranger to television and that building as well.
Um, imagine, close your eyes, imagine.
Um, if uh, just since there's morals clauses in the world, uh, how would you assess the median morals of the on-air talents at the people that you've worked with?
Spicy news.
No, no, no, I'm not talking about it.
I can only judge myself, Matt, and it's really disgusting.
And so, thank you for pointing that out.
I hadn't been thinking about it personally, but I'm not sure.
Speaking of hand sanitizer, yeah, I need a hand sanitizer, and I'm going to nullify my own contract in about five minutes.
Well, if I just transition the morals clause, not the people, I want to make that clear.
I think it's a, it's a weird thing to have.
It's a, it is 1950s.
It's strange.
If they can fire you for an extramarital affair, you need a better morals clause writer.
You know, you need to have your lawyer tighten up your morals clause because that, I mean, really, I'm like, okay, fired.
But I understand the position.
Again, back to the morning TV thing.
Okay.
Transitioning now to another couple that had an affair.
And at least one of them was currently in the TV business and then the other one was trying to break in.
Believe it or not, I'm taking you to a place you did not see coming.
And that is a place involving Keith Olberman and Katie Tur, who I know you guys told me the last time you like.
Keith Oberman is doing a podcast, which I have a pal over in Australia, Paul Murray, who sends me Keith Oberman clips.
I love this guy.
Every once in a while, he goes on a rant and it's kind of entertaining.
You know, he's a terrible man, not Paul, Keith.
And they're entertaining at times.
Well, this was just a weird one.
Those two had a relationship with Keith when Keith Oberman was a, like, I think he was pretty much a household name at this point.
And she was just trying to break into the business.
And they lived together for three years.
And that was some 15 years ago.
Well, he's, to my knowledge, never spoken about it before, but he's ready to now because he did a like 15 minute diatribe on her on his podcast going off.
What, what upset him?
What was the trigger?
She was in the news with her current husband.
She was never married to Keith, with her husband, who works, I think, at CBS, because the husband got a vasectomy and they decided to go public with his information.
And honestly, to Keith Oberman's credit, he was like, why the hell do we care?
Like, why do you feel the need to go report that to the news station so you can get your face in the papers or something else in the papers where they're talking about your vasectomy?
And then it just led him down a lane where he just decided to tell about 25 secrets about Katie Tur.
The segment is called something like Secrets I Said I'd Never Tell, which is like, well, that's a great name for a segment, but it really makes you a terrible person.
But here's just a little bit of what he said.
On January 22nd, 2017, Katie Tur of MSNBC asked me to write her Trump book for her.
She was serious and there are receipts.
So all this time, I have remained silent about the nearly three years she and I lived together and the eight years after that during which I remained her good and loyal friend.
And I have remained silent, even though the day she moved into my place in New York, she expected a New York TV station would hire her with no experience and no audition tape.
And I have remained silent about how her father, whom she has never stopped trashing, sent her $10,000 worth of cameras and editing equipment to help her get started.
And I have remained silent, even though she sent me nearly all of her scripts for her NBC news stories, including her Trump campaign coverage in 2016.
And I edited nearly every one of them.
And several times I had to completely rewrite them for her.
And I have remained silent, even though six days after my emergency appendectomy in 2007, she started punching and slapping me with real intent to do harm because the living room wasn't clean enough in our place.
And how exactly do you even try to defend yourself against a woman 125 pounds lighter and a foot shorter than you?
Is it over?
Michael Avenatti's Caustic Twitter Rants 00:14:36
What?
Oh my God.
God.
Bitter party of one.
What a disgrace.
I mean, that man has been a disgrace.
And I'll just say this.
I've heard things about Keith Olderman over the years.
And I wouldn't say them.
It's not my place to say, but I would imagine he'd want to be careful about stuff like that.
But what is the purpose of this?
What is the purpose of denouncing an ex-girlfriend?
By the way, did that not sound like Keith Oberman?
Did he sound like Keith?
He's an old, old person.
That is an old man.
Okay.
If you listen to the list of grievances, he's like, there was an article about it in the New York Times.
The New York Times reported that they reached out to me for an interview and I didn't respond or declined to participate.
None of that is true.
I contacted the New York Times reporter and said, did you reach me?
Did you text me?
Did you email me?
No.
I said, none of what you reported is true.
She said, well, I asked Katie Tur if she would ask you to participate and she told me you said no.
And he was like, Katie Tur clearly didn't want Keith Olbermann to be consulted for this thing.
And he, I mean, his level of outrage over these minor slights is, it's just disproportionate.
I don't know what's happened there, but it's something it's like, it's very train wrecky to watch an ex, both of these people are public figures, go public with this list of grievances and try to take down a woman who's clearly moved on.
She's married to somebody else.
Her career's fine.
His career seems, I don't know.
I mean, this podcast is very entertaining.
I'm sure it's doing, I don't know how it's doing.
I don't know, but bitter, bitter, bitter.
I mean, yeah, there's something terribly ironic about pushing grievances and while insisting that, you know, you, you kept these secrets for a very long time and you're chastising her for talking about a medical procedure in public while you're just airing all of your dirty laundry.
She asked me to help her write a book.
Okay.
I don't, I certainly don't want to dismiss claims that you've been attacked, that there was some sort of domestic violence in your relationship.
The fact that you carried on in relationship afterwards and were very friendly until you decided not to be.
Like, this is just really strange.
It's like a bizarre sort of thing.
He's a mean guy.
He really is a mean guy.
And there's just, look, he said some nice things about Stuart Varney.
So I should temper my criticism because I don't really know Keith Olbermann at all.
I just know that when he makes headlines on Twitter or on a show, it's nine times out of 10, it's he's being absolutely caustic about somebody with whom he was once close.
You know, it's like, it's one thing to have strong opinions about the news.
God bless.
That's what he gets paid to do.
It's quite another to be going after people personally with your, with your microphone, people you used to live with, people you used to love.
Anyway, the whole thing is awkward, but that's our business.
That a lot of people in politics and the media are constantly guilty of projection.
And for a long time, Keith Olbermern's signature segment was called What?
The worst person in the world.
Yes.
And it was always him at the end.
That was the twist.
The big reveal.
All right.
I'm going to nominate somebody else for today's worst person in the world.
And that, you won't be surprised to hear is Megan Markle, the Duchess of Duplicity.
Wait until you hear what she did with her latest trailer.
It's already full of bull.
It's full of lies that she's already gotten caught in.
They haven't even released part one.
It comes out on Thursday.
That's next, guys.
Stand by.
Before we get to Megan and Harry and the many, many lies that have already been told in their trailer.
It's bad when your trailer is full of duplicity.
Can we spend one minute on Michael Avenatti?
Former darling of the left-wing press.
I mean, darling, because he kept going after Trump.
He represented Stormy Daniels.
He was a dog with a bone when it came to Trump.
He was on every single CNN show, MSNBC show, you name it.
Well, he has just been sentenced to 14 years in prison.
14 years for embezzling millions from his clients and for obstructing IRS efforts to collect payroll taxes from his coffee-side gig.
He was also ordered to pay $7 million in restitution.
He pleaded guilty in June to stealing money from his clients, including one who's a paraplegic.
This sentence will run consecutively with his combined five-year sentence he got in New York for stealing from Stormy Daniels and for, for extra good measure, extorting Nike.
Now, just in case you don't have it in your head how Brian Stelter talked about him as a presidential candidate or how he was built up into a hero by the media, here's a little flashback, SOT 10 to Anna Navarro and how she viewed Michael Avenatti at the time.
Lately, to me, you're like the Holy Spirit.
You are all places at all times, right?
I mean, you, I do.
I see you all over cable news.
I see you, you know, there is a seat available if you want to be a co-host at the view.
You might be with people here you can pitch.
Oh my God.
The Holy Spirit, like the Holy Spirit.
There was a good question.
Zero skepticism about him, the claims he was making about Stormy, about this.
Remember that Julie Swetnik character he claimed had witnessed Brett Kavanaugh at some party where there was a gang rape going on that he didn't participate in, but he was there.
Lies.
I called that out on NBC in great detail and listed Julie Swetnick's long history of questionable behavior.
And he accused me of being a turncoat on women because I didn't support them all.
That led to some ugly exchanges.
But he came on my show while I was at NBC.
All right.
And I just want to take you back.
This is how it went.
He was trying to say poor Stormy, poor Stormy.
You know, she signed this non-disclosure agreement and she took the money, but she's been silenced unfairly.
She really wants the world to know about her relationship with Donald Trump, but they're unfairly silencing her.
It's like, well, why did she take the damn money then?
Right.
So this is how that went at the time when everybody else is lionizing him, patting myself in the back.
Just FYI.
Here's how it went when he came on my show.
This is the nonsense that they expect the American people to believe.
But that doesn't answer why.
Why do you care?
That's a political matter for these people to care about.
But like, why would you, why would Stormy Daniels be leading the charge on whether that payment violated the election law?
Because, and I mean, this is the honest to God truth.
This is a principled woman at this point.
She wants the truth.
She wants the truth.
Now they're laughing at you.
No, but they're, but, but you know what?
They made.
Come on, they're saying, come on.
She's so principled that 11 days before the election, she had information about the possible next president having an extramarital affair with an adult film actress, and she shut up about it in exchange for just over 100 grand.
Yeah, and I think she's providing an explanation as to why that is.
Because she wanted the money.
She wants the truth to be known to the American people.
And why'd she take the money?
Why didn't she just talk 11 days before the election?
You'd have to ask her that.
I don't have an explanation.
Come on.
She wanted the dough and now she wants to keep the dough while violating the agreement.
Which, whether you like Michael Cohen or Donald Trump or not, doesn't seem fair to them.
Megan, she doesn't want to keep the dough.
We've offered to return the dough.
What's stopping me?
Two weeks ago.
It was two weeks ago.
It's very simple.
You take out the piece of paper and you write $130,000 and then you mail it.
That's great.
He's a bad lawyer.
That's amazing.
Oh, I didn't see that.
That's so good.
Just NYI.
It was less than three weeks after that point at which NBC and I suddenly parted ways.
But in any event, mysterious.
Yeah, mysterious.
So in any event, it's really the end of their love affair with him, but it's yet like the Twitter thing, like the suppression of Hunter Biden.
It's yet another massive mistake they made in judgment.
Let's don't even get started on Jussie Smillet.
Another massive mistake in judgment for which there's no accountability, right?
They just brush right past it.
I bet they won't even be reporting that he just got sentenced to 14 years in prison and that he's not the Holy Spirit and he's not going to be president.
And once again, they were wrong.
And why were they wrong?
A good faith mistake?
No, because their ideology led them to fall in love with a charlatan because he was saying negative things about Donald Trump.
It's an amazing.
Yeah, it's an amazing thing that, you know, soon after the election, and I remember this very clearly, the number of people saying, and I was probably one of them, saying, I cannot believe we elected a kind of low-rent TV star, you know, camera hog to be to be president.
And then all the people in the media decided that they wanted that again.
They hated that so much.
And then Michael Avenatti, I mean, I mean, Chris Saliza, go look up Chris Saliza, who recently departed from CNN.
You know, Chris Lick's first great decision is firing him.
But he had a column, you know, President Michael Avenatti, you know, never say never.
And it was all this wish casting about maybe he will be our president.
So this man who was going after the TV star, who is a bit shady and loves women and all the wrong ways, maybe we'll elect this guy, Michael Avenatti, who is pretty much the mirror version of that, but worse than the fact that he's stealing from paraplegics.
He's stealing from porn stars.
He's stealing from everybody.
He's trying to shake down Nike.
And this stuff was like, if you see the, and go look this up, people.
Go on to Twitter and see some of the exchanges that people have posted with Michael Avenatti, who had sent direct messages to people who had criticized him.
And they were this gloating, like, you're a loser.
You're never going to make.
And people posting these, and it's like, see you in 14 years, buddy.
And there's something kind of hilarious about it.
But we fall in love with charlatans because the guy was like, you know, reasonably good looking and he was on TV and he was saying the right things about Donald Trump.
That's the point.
Beware anyone who is absolutely perfectly servicing your own need for political fanfiction.
They are the one who seems like they can go against your enemies better than anybody else.
Most likely, they are doing that in such a way to enrich themselves, possibly and even probably at your expense.
They just are going to mash that donate button.
Go scare yourself by watching the Lincoln Project documentary that was recently on Showtime.
Talk about people who absolutely was wish fulfillment for Democrats who hated Trump.
All of these guys who've been working in Republican politics for a thousand years combined and been involved in all kinds of absolutely scummy behavior turn on a dime and they make tons of money, creating generational wealth, in their words, based on other people's sense of political hatreds.
I'll just add to all of that that 14 years is a long time for someone who didn't punch anybody in the mouth.
We locked people up for too long in this country, even absolute scumbags like Michael Avenatti.
Libertarian to the end.
I'll say this about Avenatti.
I, well, on NBC, you know, people don't, whatever, they may not remember all this, but I was very defensive of Brett Kavanaugh, and I could see that the claims against him were bullshit and called that bullshit.
Christine Blasey Ford, she was a tougher case than everyone else who came after her, right?
Because she had no proof, but she had a story that she was willing to tell and she could tell it consistently, unlike everybody else who came after her.
But it was very clear that there were problems in all those claims, and I pointed them out.
However, I think Michael Avenatti thought that he was coming to yet another sycophantic interviewer because the Friday before he came on, I had interviewed Michael Cohen's lawyer.
And Michael Cohen was being accused of interfering with the election by buying her silence 11 days before Trump got elected.
And I gave that guy a very hard time, equally hard.
It didn't go well for that guy.
I remember Hannity tweeted out like that guy needs to be fired after that interview.
And so it didn't go well for that guy.
And so Avenatti thought he was coming on with like somebody who probably didn't like Trump because, you know, Trump had come after me and all that stuff and walked right in.
And I wasn't unfair with him.
I was fair with him.
I asked him tough questions.
But think of what could have happened.
Think of what could happen in general if we had a media that was just hard on both sides, you know, that just gave him a hard time on his claims, that gave whatever, the Twitter guy a hard time in his stupid trauma claims and whether they wound up in a good decision that that pushed back on these people that they instead lionize.
You know, it's just that, what do they say?
The definition of regret is the difference of what is and what might have been.
And I feel that way about our media.
They just, they so disappoint me.
People like Avenatti, like I'm, I'm disgusted by my industry.
I'm sad about what they've become.
I don't trust them.
I feel the way Victor Davis Hansen does in the barn burner of a piece he just posted, just talking about the many media sins that have led people to just turn off.
They've just turned up.
They don't trust the media anymore.
And for good reason, right?
It's it's all related to the stuff I was just listing.
Yeah, without a doubt, I mean, we've, we've talked many, many times about the polling on public trust in various institutions and the media in particular.
And one of the things that I've highlighted in the recent weeks is the delta between the people who trust the media, who generally tend to be left of center, which is somewhere like 60, 70% say, yeah, no, we absolutely trust it.
And everyone else, independents and conservatives alike, who are down in the teens or the low 20s and have just been there consistently.
I mean, the numbers have been going down consistently and they've stuck in the gutter.
And I think it has everything to do with the perception of bias, with the perception of just rank in curiosity on the part of many people, particularly in kind of elite media, elite media circles.
Harry and Megan Oppression Narrative 00:06:50
It is very hard to do good work in a circumstance like that, where you already know the answers to the questions that you plan to ask and you already know the questions that you would never in a million years ask because you want your guy to do well.
It is bad for business and ultimately it's going to be bad for the people that you favor, that you like, and certainly bad for your industry.
It's not just a matter of kind of making mistakes.
It's making a bunch of systematic errors in these kind of predictable ways over and over and over again and never, ever, ever going back to say, I'm sorry, we did wrong.
We're going to get it right.
That's right.
And Michael Knowles was saying yesterday, and the mistakes are all in the one direction, too.
Okay, last but not least.
So do we call them the Markles?
The Windsors, the Sussexes.
I don't know what we call them.
Megan's, the losers, the attention desperate liars.
They, through Netflix, have released yet another trailer.
I guess the first one didn't generate enough attention.
Yet another trailer for their upcoming Netflix special.
And already, the number of people coming forward to say what's in there, it's just in the trailer, is false is kind of stunning for a one-minute trailer.
I'm just going to give you an example.
We played it yesterday.
You can find it online.
One, there's a picture of poor Harry dealing with the terrible media who's like overly intrusive in his relationship with Megan and Harry.
He's got his hand up to the camera, like, stop.
Well, it turns out that was a picture of Harry and his old girlfriend, Chelsea Davey.
It was taken years ago.
I didn't even know Megan Markle.
So misuse.
Here it is.
Misrepresented as evidence of how the press badgered Harry and Megan.
No, it wasn't.
They have one picture of the media swarming them.
You know, poor Harry and Megan, they've gotten it so bad.
There's so much attention against them.
Actually, that was a picture of the press swarming someone named Katie Price, who had been accused of a model, who had been accused of like some sort of mild crime.
And she's a big star, and the press was hounding her, not Megan, not Harry.
Same thing for another picture in which the press was hounding the people at the Harry Potter premiere, like J.K. Rowling and the stars, not Megan, not Harry, neither of whom was in any version of Harry Potter, right?
Taking all these, but this is their evidence that the press has been so intrusive and unfair to them and overwhelming into their lives.
Last but not least, there's a picture of them of the intrusive press, according to Harry in this, taking a private photo of them with their baby.
And his line is like how bad the press is and how intrusive they are.
Well, the guy who took the photo tweets out, this is absolutely ridiculous.
The guy's name is Robert Jobson.
And he says, this photograph used by Netflix and Harry and Megan to suggest intrusion by the press is a complete travesty.
It was taken from an acclaimed photographer at Archbishop Tutu's residence in Cape Town.
Only three people were in the accredited position.
Harry and Megan agreed to the position.
I was there.
He was one of them.
And then points out there was no intrusion.
I was part of a three-person UK palace pool.
Nobody else was allowed in.
We shared the words and photos with the UK media with their permission.
All of this now is their evidence about how bad the British press is, how bad they've had it.
And I'm not saying there wouldn't be evidence you could find to show over, you know, an imposition by the British press.
I'm sure it is hard to be the center of that much attention.
But this just gives you a flavor for their, they don't have an adult relationship with the truth, these people.
They don't.
The most charitable reading that one could give that is that editors often pick stock photos and put together trailers without the knowledge of people, but they'll have sign-off on it.
So they should see that and presumably know that, well, that's not that and that's that's not that.
I think the bigger issue here is the absurdity of this idea that the press is intrusive.
Is it intrusive?
It absolutely is.
But guess what?
You chose it.
Well, I didn't choose the hereditary monarchy.
No, no, no.
You have a deal with Netflix.
Your wife has a podcast deal with Spotify worth tens of millions of dollars.
Look at the house they live in in Montecito.
What the fuck have these people ever done?
She was on suits.
He's a ginger weirdo that has a family that, you know, was just born into it.
And you're like, I can't believe it.
And then this guy, he has the gall all the time to say one thing that drives me absolutely crazy.
It drives me crazy.
And please, please, please, people, make sure to never say the press hounded my mother to death.
Your mother was killed by a drunk driver.
The driver of her car was heavily intoxicated and crashed.
Were there press driving behind him?
Yes, I'm sure there were.
That was the life, a terrible life when you marry into that family.
And I, you know, feel terrible for her and what she had to deal with.
But this kind of recasting of everything as just this oppression narrative of these two people that have things handed to them.
Like it's not, she didn't get this stuff because she was opening those suitcases on that show where she was being objective.
Deal or no deal.
Yeah, deal or no deal.
It's like you have a $40 million house in Montecito because you opened the thing in like a skimpy dress.
I don't think that happened.
So where is all this money coming from?
So don't, you can't have it both ways.
Pick one.
And you have picked one.
Stop complaining.
Well, and now, and now tonight in New York, they are being honored by the Kennedy family.
This is one of RFK's other children, not RFK Jr., but Carrie Kennedy, is honoring them for their anti-racist commitment, for all the anti-racism work that they've done.
Harry is literally, as far as I know, the only member of the royal family who's actually worn a swastika on his arm as a fun Halloween costume and been on the street.
Some were sympathetic back in the 30s.
Well, yeah, there could have been some years ago for calling somebody a slur, a racist slur.
And what has Megan Markle done?
She gave the Oprah interview.
That's literally what they're pointing to.
She gave the Oprah interview and said that thing about the unnamed royal member who allegedly was concerned about the, she said concerned.
But Tom Bauer came on the show and reported that there was no concern whatsoever.
It was just a natural discussion between about two people who are of different races getting married.
And what is our baby going to look like?
Right.
And somebody in the royal family being like, what do you think the baby's going to look like?
In any event, different accounts, but for this, she's getting an anti-racism award.
This is her dream.
Again, back to Tom Bauer's book, Revenge.
If you read about her history, oh, she, she desperate, she got so mad at the UN because they wouldn't make her like an ambassador like the other girl from Harry Potter.
Who's that girl?
What's the girl's name from Harry Potter?
Emily.
Yeah, Emily, Emily, yes, from like her.
She wanted to be like her.
And they were like, you haven't done shit, Emma Watson.
They're like, you haven't done shit.
You're not getting the same award as Emma Watson.
Emily Watson vs Emma Watson 00:02:13
You're not getting the same title.
This is what she's been working to do all along.
She doesn't want to do the work.
She just wants to bathe herself in this woke glory.
And what has she actually done to fight racism?
I mean, honestly, she said she wasn't even conscious of the fact that she was half black until she got married to Harry.
Nor was I. I'm sorry to say.
I'm being honest.
I didn't, when I first saw it, I was like, oh, I just thought she was Italian.
I mean, this is the absurdity of race at a certain point of dilution.
It's like, what, what?
What do you, I don't know.
I didn't know she was black.
I didn't know she was fighting it.
She's just a kind of B-list actress.
Sorry.
Yeah.
It's pretty apparent.
Her race is most important to her.
It's indispensable to her.
It's very valuable.
It is a marketable commodity.
But for her race, she wouldn't have this Netflix special and all the money that goes along with it and her Spotify deal, which, you know, good for her.
Make the most of what you've got.
Yeah.
Well, she certainly is.
And she's trying to destroy the royal family who made her all this money, who made her a royal, who made her a household name in the process.
I mean, talk about an ingrate.
You guys, I am not an ingrate.
I am very grateful to all three of you.
Michael Moyer, Matt Welsh, Meal Foster.
Thanks for rolling with the punches.
We went to weird places.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you for the weirdness, Megan.
We always do.
It's always fun.
Thank you.
I know.
Exactly.
All right.
See you again soon, I hope.
All right.
Tomorrow, two of our favorites, Jesse Kelly and Buck Sexton, will be here.
Looking forward to that.
In the meantime, download the show.
Go to Youtube.com/slash Megan Kelly if you'd like to get it visually.
And thanks for being with us.
We'll talk again tomorrow.
Thanks for listening to THE Megan Kelly SHOW.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
Many of the better.
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