The Megyn Kelly Show - 20230116_biden-lawyers-find-more-docs-vaccine-safety-signal
Aired: 2023-01-16
Duration: 01:35:44


=== Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show (04:01) ===

[00:00:15]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:27]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:28]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:00:30]  Happy Monday on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
[00:00:34]  We've got a couple of MLK stories to bring you later.
[00:00:36]  One, an homage, and one, the story about an attempted homage out of Boston, which I'm sorry, but if you have not seen the statue that they unveiled in Boston Common, it was meant to honor Dr. King and Coretta Scott King and OMG.
[00:00:56]  What a misfire.
[00:00:58]  We'll get to it.
[00:00:59]  But we begin today with the news of more classified documents being discovered at President Biden's home over the weekend.
[00:01:06]  Discovered not by the FBI, but conveniently by Mr. Biden's lawyers.
[00:01:12]  It's a perfect story to kick off our first National Review Day here on the Megan Kelly Show, where we will bring you some of the National Review regulars you know, but now appearing together.
[00:01:23]  Today, we kick it off with Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief, and Charles C.W. Cook, senior writer.
[00:01:28]  You can find all of their work when you become a National Review Plus subscriber.
[00:01:34]  That's NR Plus.
[00:01:35]  Rich is always pushing this on the editors.
[00:01:37]  I went ahead and did it, and he is right that it does help you avoid the annoying ads and all that.
[00:01:43]  Like you can get right to the content, and it's actually relatively inexpensive.
[00:01:48]  So check out NR Plus, become a member.
[00:01:50]  You and I can be in the same club as we take in some of the smartest writers and thoughts in America today.
[00:01:56]  Welcome back, Rich and Charles.
[00:01:58]  Great to see you.
[00:01:59]  Hey, how are you doing?
[00:02:00]  Thanks for having me.
[00:02:02]  So we were preparing for today, and we actually did a little deep dive into some of your backgrounds, you guys, because it's kind of fun.
[00:02:09]  And this is the first time, Charlie, that I found out what CW stands for: Charles Christopher William Cook.
[00:02:18]  So many names to choose from.
[00:02:19]  Why, why so many?
[00:02:21]  Well, because when I first moved to America, I wrote under my name Charlie Cook, which is what most people actually call me.
[00:02:29]  And of course, there's a famous pollster called Charlie Cook, and people were mightily confused.
[00:02:34]  I kept getting emails saying, Well, hang on a minute.
[00:02:36]  I thought you were a pollster, right?
[00:02:38]  Why are you so right-wing?
[00:02:39]  And the emails he got were a lot less polite than that.
[00:02:42]  So I thought that it might be good for him and good for me if I made my name so different that we couldn't be confused.
[00:02:50]  I like that.
[00:02:51]  So, do new people call you Charles and sort of people who know you well call you Charlie?
[00:02:56]  Yeah, and people will say, Can I call you Charlie?
[00:02:59]  And I say, That's fine.
[00:03:00]  And occasionally, people follow it up, they push it a little further and say, Can I call you Chuck?
[00:03:03]  But I draw the line there.
[00:03:05]  No, no, no, that's that's a hard pass.
[00:03:08]  There's a street in Greenwich, Connecticut called Poor Chuck.
[00:03:12]  And we met a guy who lived on it, and he's like, Why?
[00:03:16]  Why would they name my street Poor Chuck?
[00:03:19]  I used to live there, or literally poor, like no money, poor.
[00:03:24]  I think it might be spelled with one O, but you pronounce it Poor Chuck, which is just not ideal, not ideal, just like the NLK standards.
[00:03:31]  I had no idea what I see what CW stood for.
[00:03:34]  I worked with Charlie for a year.
[00:03:36]  So, Megan, this is why you are the foremost journalist among us here.
[00:03:41]  It never occurred to me to ask.
[00:03:42]  I thought it was concealed weapon.
[00:03:45]  I like that.
[00:03:46]  So, my son, my eldest child, is Edward Yates because my dad was Edward and Doug's dad.
[00:03:53]  His name was Manley Yates, but he went by Yeats.
[00:03:55]  So it's a tribute to our son's grandparents, his granddads.
[00:04:00]  But he goes by Yates.
[00:04:01]  And so it's fun to have the first letter.
[00:04:04]  You can always mystify people.
[00:04:05]  What does the E stand for?
[00:04:06]  Excellent.
[00:04:07]  You can have fun with that for the rest of your life.
[00:04:08]  So maybe every time you'll come on, we'll come up with a new CW for you, Charles C.W. Cook.
[00:04:12]  In any event, we've never interviewed Charlie Cook.
[00:04:14]  So you're the only Charlie Cook we really know and love.

=== The Mystery Behind Charles Cook (15:16) ===

[00:04:16]  Okay, let's talk about documents because there are a lot of them.
[00:04:20]  It's a whack-a-mole situation now where they're coming out of the ears of everyone Biden knows, every house he's ever lived in, every office he's ever, despite this assurance from the normally totally reliable Corine Jean-Pierre last Thursday.
[00:04:36]  Listen to what she said.
[00:04:38]  Any statement from the special counsel about the second set of documents if the lawyers have completed the ongoing review by the president's legal team last night?
[00:04:48]  Does that mean there are no other locations where documents could be stored?
[00:04:51]  There's no other search underway at this moment in time for documents from vice president.
[00:04:55]  As far as the lawyers, they look through the places where documents could have been stored and the counsel's office release a statement on that.
[00:05:03]  We should assume that it has been completed.
[00:05:05]  You should assume that it's been completed, yes.
[00:05:07]  You said that the search has been completed, but is the president confident that there are no additional documents with classified markings that remain in any other additional locations?
[00:05:15]  Look, I can just refer you to what his team said.
[00:05:18]  The search is complete.
[00:05:20]  He is confident in this process.
[00:05:23]  The search is complete.
[00:05:25]  And we were supposed to be done with all this nonsense.
[00:05:27]  But now we've got five more documents.
[00:05:31]  First, there was his DC office in connection with his affiliation with the University of Pennsylvania, which conveniently gave millions of dollars, got millions of dollars from China after they forged this relationship, the university did, where his documents were apparently unprotected, though he claims locked closet, maybe.
[00:05:46]  He himself said they were in a closet, a locked closet, or at least a closet.
[00:05:52]  Box says, and then box, he said.
[00:05:54]  So we're really not sure what was found there.
[00:05:56]  That was number one.
[00:05:57]  Then came his garage, but fear not because it was next to his Corvette, which apparently he wants us to believe he took pains to protect like it was in a garage.
[00:06:05]  Then one document from inside his home that was post assurances that they had found them all.
[00:06:11]  And now these additional five documents that they found on Saturday, none of which were found by the FBI guys, none of which are found by the, it's like Biden's personal lawyer touching the documents, searching for the documents, looking at the documents.
[00:06:24]  Now it's like a White House lawyer who claims he has security clearance, but that's not true for all of these discoveries.
[00:06:31]  So Rich, where are we on, you know, Document Gate part two?
[00:06:37]  Yeah, well, obviously it's a major embarrassment and it's funny on top of everything else.
[00:06:42]  That's really what gives a political story extra resonance when it's really amusing.
[00:06:48]  And the defense that, wow, these documents were in a locked garage next to my Corvette is a highly amusing thing to say.
[00:06:56]  It's obviously not the standard that we've ever been used to people having for classified documents before.
[00:07:02]  And I wonder who thought initially, oh, we better look in the garage, right?
[00:07:08]  And we've seen that they did that ad where he was backing up the Corvette into the garage in 2020.
[00:07:14]  And you can see like a classic, you know, there's a set of drawers or something that is probably there.
[00:07:19]  But how did they get there?
[00:07:20]  You know, how did they get there when you're supposed to be extra special concerned with protecting classified documents, as we've heard from the White House?
[00:07:29]  So is he going to get prosecuted for this?
[00:07:31]  No, you can't prosecute a sitting president.
[00:07:34]  Are there circumstances that make it different than what Trump did?
[00:07:38]  Yes, but it's going to make it really hard now to go after Trump.
[00:07:42]  I mean, there'd just be no legitimacy to indict Trump for what he did with Biden now and is having a special counsel appointed in his own case.
[00:07:53]  So it's embarrassing and then has this knock-on effect of making it harder to go after Trump.
[00:07:58]  And our colleague Andy McCarthy, you know, former prosecutor, has very good judgment on this stuff, was up to 70% chance Trump was going to be indicted and thinks now that the odds are falling by the day.
[00:08:11]  Yeah, I think there's no chance now.
[00:08:13]  I really, I said it after the disclosure of the second batch of Biden documents.
[00:08:19]  It's done.
[00:08:19]  And now we've had two additional disclosures after being assured that this whole thing is complete.
[00:08:24]  Charlie, the whole thing feels sketchy, doesn't it?
[00:08:28]  It doesn't feel like we're being told the truth, the full truth.
[00:08:31]  It feels like there's some sort of, you know, scratching of the backs between the Biden White House and potentially the Justice Department.
[00:08:38]  But why is Biden still in control of this process?
[00:08:41]  And the FBI is not doing the search.
[00:08:43]  And we're supposed to just take the personal assurances of this guy they brought in to protect Biden.
[00:08:50]  This guy, let me see.
[00:08:54]  It's confusing because he calls himself special counsel to the president, Richard Sauber.
[00:08:58]  But he's basically working for Biden to protect Biden.
[00:09:02]  He's not the special counsel who's been hired to investigate Biden.
[00:09:06]  That's Robert Hur.
[00:09:07]  This other guy, Richard Sauber, why is he the one investigating all this?
[00:09:13]  Well, you're always going to get a lot of weirdness when the executive branch is investigating the executive branch, which is in effect what's happening here.
[00:09:24]  We talk about the FBI and the Department of Justice and special counsels as if they're independent, but they're not.
[00:09:32]  There is no fourth branch of government.
[00:09:33]  There is no free floating agency within our constitutional order.
[00:09:38]  So, of course, Joe Biden is nominally at least in charge of the institutions that are now looking into him.
[00:09:45]  In an ideal world, it would be Congress that was leading this investigation.
[00:09:49]  I think the bigger problem is that the media has been at pains to point out why this is different, which in some ways it is, but also at pains to downplay it at every juncture and to acknowledge and internalize and repeat the idea that everything here is above board when it's not.
[00:10:11]  In the grand scheme of things, I think Biden's infractions here, which are real and which are serious, are probably the least egregious of the big three, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.
[00:10:24]  But that doesn't mean they're not extremely serious.
[00:10:27]  And it certainly doesn't mean that everything here is above board and that Biden has followed all the proper procedures.
[00:10:33]  You just mentioned that the investigation here seems to be primarily being carried out by Joe Biden's lawyers.
[00:10:41]  Well, Joe Biden's lawyers do not have security clearances.
[00:10:45]  They're not allowed to see these documents either.
[00:10:48]  The press was keen, except for, of course, Peter Ducey, to repeat the idea that this doesn't matter so much because the garage in question was locked.
[00:10:59]  But we don't keep, as a country, classified documents in garages.
[00:11:03]  It doesn't matter whether there was a Corvette in there or a Ferrari in there or the treasure of the Sierra Madre in there.
[00:11:09]  We do not keep classified documents in garages, especially garages that open, garages into which Film Cruise and Jay Leno were invited, garages to which Hunter Biden, really the very definition of a security risk, had access.
[00:11:24]  So what bothers me much more than the weirdness around the executive branch is investigating itself is the total lack of interest in the press in all of the lies and smoothed edges that were being offered up from the White House podium.
[00:11:40]  Yeah, and that's also why were they why were they all of a sudden looking for this stuff, right?
[00:11:46]  That's one thing we don't know.
[00:11:47]  His lawyer goes in the pen center and just starts rummaging through a locked closet and find these documents.
[00:11:54]  That's unusual.
[00:11:56]  Why was that happening?
[00:11:57]  And then, of course, there's a matter of not informing the public, right?
[00:12:01]  This happens several days before the election.
[00:12:03]  They, of course, don't make it public before the election because they realize it'll at least cause a bad news cycle, which they don't want right before the midterms.
[00:12:10]  And it takes months and months for the public to know.
[00:12:13]  So, those are a couple threads still to pull.
[00:12:18]  How did that happen?
[00:12:19]  Who made the decision not to inform the public?
[00:12:25]  These are things that remain to important matters that we need to know.
[00:12:30]  Well, and following up on this guy, special counsel to the president, Richard Salber, this is the one who now is looking.
[00:12:37]  He's not the guy who found batch one, as far as I know, or batch two, but he found batch, he found the third.
[00:12:44]  He and he then he found the fourth.
[00:12:46]  So he issues this very strange statement.
[00:12:49]  He says, I have a security clearance.
[00:12:51]  Okay, they say, and by the way, I'm told, I read in the papers, they hired Richard Salber to be, quote, special counsel to the president when they saw the likelihood that we were going to have an incoming GOP house and that he better lawyer up in connection with the investigations that were coming his way in connection with his son, China, Russia, all these dealings that they've been accused of having, Ukraine.
[00:13:10]  So he's there to run interference for Joe Biden.
[00:13:13]  He says, Because I have a security clearance, I went to Wilmington Thursday evening to facilitate providing the document.
[00:13:19]  Remember, batch three was just one inside the home.
[00:13:22]  The document the president's personal counsel found on Wednesday to justice.
[00:13:27]  While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered, passive voice, among the material with it.
[00:13:43]  What?
[00:13:44]  Like they just suddenly appeared behind the single document that was found inside the house?
[00:13:48]  This is intentionally vague.
[00:13:49]  Lawyers know how to be specific in their language when they want to be and they know how not to be.
[00:13:55]  For a total of six pages, the DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them.
[00:14:00]  Okay, again, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with the first document.
[00:14:09]  By whom, right?
[00:14:10]  That raised button by whom.
[00:14:12]  Yes.
[00:14:13]  Right.
[00:14:13]  He's hiding something for a reason.
[00:14:15]  I don't know what it is, Rich, but again, this is fishy.
[00:14:20]  Yeah, no, absolutely.
[00:14:23]  And now, you know, the advantage they have to having a special counsel, which is another embarrassment, right?
[00:14:29]  They're now on equal footing with the guy that they think was uniquely irresponsible, Donald Trump lasted special counsel.
[00:14:34]  Now he has his own special counsel.
[00:14:36]  But the advantage is now it just gives you the ready excuse not to answer anything.
[00:14:41]  So we've already seen this from the White House press secretary.
[00:14:44]  Oh, it's an ongoing investigation.
[00:14:45]  You know, contact the Department of Justice.
[00:14:48]  Of course, you're going to get nothing from the Department of Justice.
[00:14:51]  Yeah, that's ideal.
[00:14:52]  All we're going to get is Corrine Jean-Pierre, who we all know doesn't know anything.
[00:14:56]  And even if she did, couldn't be relied upon to say it in a way that we could understand and take to the bank.
[00:15:01]  Trump, meantime, is truthing.
[00:15:04]  Again, wrong verb, but he's truth socialing over at his website.
[00:15:08]  And here's just a sample of what he's saying.
[00:15:11]  I will skip you all the I did nothing wrongs.
[00:15:14]  That's presumed that he's been saying that.
[00:15:17]  He says, Mar-a-Lago is a walled fortress built with unlimited money with the idea that it would one day be the Southern White House.
[00:15:24]  I didn't know that.
[00:15:25]  I don't know if that's true.
[00:15:25]  Apparently, it was built in the 1920s.
[00:15:27]  I didn't actually factor.
[00:15:29]  I guess that turned out to be true, he writes.
[00:15:32]  In addition to Loxon's strong structural setting, I have security and secret service there full-time.
[00:15:37]  Compare that to a flimsy garage with no security, easy access for anyone.
[00:15:42]  Also, he had them for six years in many different places.
[00:15:45]  I arrived to Mar-a-Lago with the papers as president, Joe, as vice president, and goes on to actually say, Can we just stop these ridiculous investigations?
[00:15:55]  This is all absurd.
[00:15:56]  Like, stop with the not, we have other things to worry about as a country, which I agree with.
[00:16:00]  And then goes on to say, Mar-a-Lago is essentially an armed fort.
[00:16:03]  It's an armed fort.
[00:16:06]  It was built that way.
[00:16:08]  And then goes on to rip on his special prosecutor, Jack Smith, as a Trump-hating political thug versus Joe Biden's special counsel, who is reportedly a nice guy, very friendly with Democrats and rhinos alike, and pretty much liked and known by everybody.
[00:16:24]  He's like, my guy is a Trump-hating lunatic, and his guy is pretty nice.
[00:16:32]  So, look, he's not wrong, Charles, that Mar-a-Lago is probably more secure than Biden's garage.
[00:16:40]  I'm going to Trump was down there with former Secret Service.
[00:16:43]  I mean, with Secret Service as former president.
[00:16:47]  You know, but he's also right because he goes on to say here that there's a difference between a former president and former vice president.
[00:16:53]  A president can declassify and a vice president can't.
[00:16:58]  Well, he's not wrong, but it's irrelevant and it's especially irrelevant to Joe Biden's case because Joe Biden says he didn't know he had them.
[00:17:08]  And if he didn't know he had them, then he couldn't have secured them.
[00:17:12]  So any boasts that Joe Biden makes about how secure these documents are because they were in a garage are purely incidental.
[00:17:19]  In effect, he's saying, I didn't know I had these documents.
[00:17:22]  They were in my garage.
[00:17:23]  Therefore, I lucked out.
[00:17:25]  But again, we don't keep classified documents in garages.
[00:17:29]  The problem was that he had them in the first place.
[00:17:32]  And that's also true of Trump.
[00:17:34]  Yes, it is a good thing that the documents Trump had do seem to have been in a safe inside a fairly secure building, but Trump wasn't supposed to have them.
[00:17:46]  And the more hay that Trump makes, and this is true of Biden as well, out of how secure those documents happen to be, the more it's going to look as if he knew he had them.
[00:17:57]  You really have to pick one.
[00:17:59]  Of course, in Trump's case, he did seem to know that he had them and didn't want to give them back.
[00:18:04]  If I had to guess, I think what probably happened here is that the case against Trump started to proceed internally.
[00:18:15]  The decision was made to raid Mar-a-Lago, which was a real moment, whether it was deserved or not.
[00:18:22]  That was a big change in American practice.
[00:18:26]  And Joe Biden and his team were probably asked repeatedly by Merrick Garland and others, are you sure that you don't have any documents?
[00:18:35]  It's going to look really bad if you end up having documents.
[00:18:40]  And Biden probably said, no, And then it was discovered that he did have some documents.
[00:18:46]  And then the Republicans took the House.
[00:18:49]  And the Biden administration thought, ah, we are liable here to be embarrassed if the Republican House starts looking into, say, Hunter Biden and finds these documents incidentally.
[00:19:01]  They will make hay out of it.
[00:19:03]  We would rather have control of this.
[00:19:04]  And so they dripped the truth out so that it was out of their control.
[00:19:10]  And that was probably smart from a completely amoral political standpoint.
[00:19:15]  That was probably smart because the House investigation into Benghazi discovered the Hillary Clinton document that destroyed her presidential campaign and her reputation.
[00:19:28]  So in one sense, Biden has done this quite well by getting out in front of it.

=== Biden Trump and January 6th (11:11) ===

[00:19:33]  But in another sense, this is the byproduct most likely of the decision to go after Trump, which I have a problem with, not because I don't think Trump is guilty.
[00:19:42]  I think he is, but because we don't tend to prosecute people who are guilty of these sorts of crimes and because we didn't prosecute Hillary Clinton, even though there was a strong case against her.
[00:19:54]  And so what we're probably going to see here is nothing.
[00:19:58]  We're going to see Biden skate and Trump skate and Hillary skate.
[00:20:02]  And there is a poetic justice to that, in my view.
[00:20:05]  Yeah.
[00:20:06]  Yeah.
[00:20:06]  I agree.
[00:20:06]  It's bizarre, though, Megan.
[00:20:07]  If you think about it, the best things that have happened to Trump the last six months politically have had to do with his illegal possession of classified documents.
[00:20:15]  One, the raid itself, which was a huge boon to him.
[00:20:19]  And now the discovery that Biden was guilty of essentially the same offense has elevated Trump and given him all this material, the truth social about everything else has been bad.
[00:20:29]  You know, his announcement speech was a fizzle.
[00:20:31]  You fell asleep during it.
[00:20:32]  You know, the Kanye dinner, all that.
[00:20:34]  But his possession of classified documents has worked out for him.
[00:20:37]  It's the gift that keeps on giving.
[00:20:38]  You know, I agree.
[00:20:41]  I agree with most of what you just said there, Charles.
[00:20:43]  And the thing is, neither one's going to be prosecuted.
[00:20:46]  I totally agree with that.
[00:20:47]  I think they were going to indict Trump and this has completely saved him.
[00:20:49]  I mean, because just putting aside the nitty-gritty of the investigation, indicting a former president is A ⁇ on the scale of mega bombshells in the news world and the political world.
[00:21:02]  It's never been done before.
[00:21:03]  To do it to Trump after two impeachments and all the rest of it would have been extremely unsettling to the nation, which any attorney general would factor in, right?
[00:21:13]  And it is ultimately the AG's call.
[00:21:16]  To do it under these circumstances, where yes, Trump went one step beyond what Joe Biden did.
[00:21:22]  He filed an affidavit through a lawyer saying, we've given you everything when in fact it looks like they haven't.
[00:21:28]  He hasn't had the chance to fully defend that charge, but that's the allegation.
[00:21:32]  That's not enough.
[00:21:34]  That's not going to win the hearts and minds to where people are like, that, well, that's an egregious step too far.
[00:21:39]  Get him.
[00:21:40]  When Joe Biden appears to have done pretty much everything short of that and also didn't have any power to declassify.
[00:21:46]  I will say this.
[00:21:47]  Trump's not wrong about his special counsel's wife.
[00:21:52]  His special counsel's wife worked as a producer on Michelle Obama's documentary, Becoming.
[00:21:56]  I didn't know it was a documentary.
[00:21:57]  That was just her book.
[00:21:59]  She twice donated to Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign.
[00:22:02]  This is from Newsweek.
[00:22:05]  And let's see, there's more.
[00:22:08]  I guess she's made very public statements about Trump, making clear she does not like him.
[00:22:13]  So not totally wrong there.
[00:22:15]  Here's the question, though.
[00:22:17]  I said at the beginning of this mess with Trump, Rich, that I really believed they were so excited about these documents, not because they put such faith in the National Archivist, right?
[00:22:27]  Who, by the way, needs to be going back.
[00:22:29]  Where's the smart reporter to say, did you make this request of President Obama, President Clinton, President Carter?
[00:22:35]  How far back have you gone to make sure Trump's not being singled out as the one ex-president who has inappropriate documents?
[00:22:41]  Who's going to ask that of KJP?
[00:22:42]  Somebody better do it, ASAP, because maybe they've already done that.
[00:22:46]  Maybe they already collected those documents.
[00:22:48]  Let's find out how many presidents have done this so we have a better perspective.
[00:22:50]  Okay, anyway, they started this nonsense in earnest, I believe, with so much firepower fired at Trump from the DOJ because they were interested in Jan 6.
[00:23:00]  They wanted to know what was down at Mar-a-Lago on that subject, which is their favorite subject of all.
[00:23:07]  And then it expanded into Trump behaving badly in a way where they got even more excited.
[00:23:11]  But you guys had a piece recently about, it was called, it's by the editors, the Biden Documents Mess.
[00:23:19]  And you pointed out the difference between these two investigations, these special counsels who are looking into Trump and Biden and how the one looking at Trump has this wide berth of things he can look into and is charged with looking into.
[00:23:34]  Not so in the Biden case, whereas it could be.
[00:23:36]  Can you explain?
[00:23:38]  Yeah.
[00:23:39]  So clearly, January 6th is the crucial background to what's been going on with Trump, not just with regard to the search at Mar-a-Lago.
[00:23:50]  Andy McCarthy, by the way, has the same theory you do, Megan, that it was a broad search because they're rummaging around hoping to find documents related to January 6th, but because they really want to prosecute him, indict him for January 6th.
[00:24:02]  But that's really hard.
[00:24:04]  He didn't incite violence.
[00:24:05]  Once you get this into a prosecute... prosecutorial realm, you got to look at everything with not just whether it was immoral what Trump did, whether it was wrong, but whether it was technically illegal, right?
[00:24:20]  And just on the speech he gave that day on January 6th, he said, let's peacefully march to the Capitol.
[00:24:26]  That's a get out of jail card right there.
[00:24:28]  Now, it doesn't mean he wasn't reckless, he wasn't wrong, but if you want to nail him to the wall for January 6th in a criminal sense, it's really hard.
[00:24:37]  It's going to rely on novel theories and it's going to be an attenuated case.
[00:24:41]  So then like, oh, aha, we got him on something else, which clearly is illegal.
[00:24:46]  There's some aggravating factors there because it doesn't seem as though he was completely forthcoming.
[00:24:51]  He obstructed this investigation.
[00:24:53]  So we'll nail them for that in order to get him for January 6th.
[00:24:57]  So that's not how the system's supposed to work.
[00:25:00]  You don't go hunting for an offense to try to nail someone for just because you think he did something wrong in a separate case.
[00:25:08]  I mean, that's un-American.
[00:25:10]  It's unfair.
[00:25:12]  But I think that accounted for the attention and focus on this.
[00:25:17]  And they thought they were getting there.
[00:25:19]  And now the revelations over the last week have abolished that as well.
[00:25:25]  And I just don't think unless he literally shoots someone on Fifth Avenue that you should be indicting a former president, right?
[00:25:32]  These are, you got to make the case against him politically.
[00:25:36]  You need to beat him in an election.
[00:25:38]  You can't short circuit that by indicting him, which is basically the fantasy they've been under, living under since the beginning, right?
[00:25:46]  This is the whole walls closing in, 2017 type thinking, which they've never let go of.
[00:25:55]  The reaction in the media to what the Republicans have said following the drip, drip, drip.
[00:26:03]  What would you expect them to say?
[00:26:04]  What would you expect them to say?
[00:26:06]  Is predictable.
[00:26:07]  We are literally seeing the Republicans pounce headline come back, guys.
[00:26:13]  It's crazy.
[00:26:13]  I'll give you a couple examples.
[00:26:15]  I'm sorry to even cite Jennifer Rubin or the Washington Post to you, but bear with me.
[00:26:19]  She says Republicans have rushed forth to scream foul Vanity Fair.
[00:26:23]  Republicans already feasting on the documents.
[00:26:25]  CNN, Poppy Harlow, Republicans now pouncing on Biden for these documents.
[00:26:30]  CNN headline, see how Republicans downplayed Trump classified documents, but pounced on Biden.
[00:26:35]  And that leads me to NPRs out front or up front this morning, up first.
[00:26:41]  Sorry, forgive me.
[00:26:42]  I listened to it this morning and of course heard this.
[00:26:46]  President Biden's classified document troubles are piling up.
[00:26:50]  His lawyers announced they had found more files at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and congressional Republicans pounced.
[00:26:57]  Well, we don't know exactly yet whether they broke the law or not.
[00:27:00]  I will accuse the Biden administration of not being transparent.
[00:27:03]  Why didn't we hear about this on November 2nd when the first batch of classified documents were discovered?
[00:27:10]  That's the chair of the House Oversight Committee, Representative James Comer, pouncing.
[00:27:14]  You heard him pouncing.
[00:27:15]  Wasn't that a pounce, Charles?
[00:27:17]  That was definitely a pounce.
[00:27:19]  Although I would note that MPO and others are now behind on their game, because as we learned from the Washington Post this week, the new verb at the margin is thrust.
[00:27:28]  Republicans thrust things now into the culture wars or the public consciousness or the news cycle.
[00:27:35]  So pouncing is very much last year.
[00:27:37]  Oh, wait a minute.
[00:27:38]  And I listened to your, to the editors on Friday, and didn't you make an analogy about this?
[00:27:42]  Like somebody coming up your driveway.
[00:27:43]  Do you remember?
[00:27:44]  You said something that really worked for me on this.
[00:27:46]  Oh, yeah.
[00:27:47]  Yeah.
[00:27:47]  Well, the way that they talk about Republican reactions is if somebody had come up my driveway with a gun and attacked me, I'd fought back.
[00:27:55]  And then they said, why is Charles Cook committing violence?
[00:27:59]  Well, I'm his attacker.
[00:28:02]  It's also amazing.
[00:28:04]  They're not aware that pounce has become a joke, right?
[00:28:06]  And they're still using it unironically.
[00:28:09]  Yes, that's exactly right.
[00:28:10]  Yeah.
[00:28:11]  Of course, you know, naturally, we're going to get that kind of reaction from that.
[00:28:14]  I guess we shouldn't be particularly surprised.
[00:28:16]  Though it's not just Republicans, listen to David Gergen.
[00:28:18]  You probably saw this over the weekend, former Clinton senior advisor, talking about this matter on MSNBC.
[00:28:25]  How big a mess is this for the Biden administration?
[00:28:28]  CNN?
[00:28:28]  It's very, very big, not legally, but politically.
[00:28:31]  It's a very, very big deal.
[00:28:33]  You know, this is a president who was marching upward for the first time in his presidency for all sorts of reasons to believe that he could now present himself.
[00:28:42]  The fears that people like me have about how old is he and can he govern well, those fears would be dissipated if he were able to stay on that track.
[00:28:50]  But I don't think sitting there huntering down now, they're just acting like it's not out there is a good strategy.
[00:28:56]  They're just going to have, they're going to get cream doing it.
[00:29:00]  Well, what do we make of that?
[00:29:02]  What's going on there?
[00:29:03]  Is that old Democratic guard trying to push for new blood in the party or is that honest analysis?
[00:29:10]  Well, David Gergen, you could say it's not just Republicans or it's not just Democrats.
[00:29:14]  I mean, he's been on both sides during his long career.
[00:29:17]  I mean, I believe it was Ronald Reagan was telling jokes about how long David Gergen had been in Washington and sort of establishment figure in the 1980s sometime.
[00:29:30]  So he's very much an old hand.
[00:29:32]  And I think that's pretty good analysis, right?
[00:29:36]  I mean, this is embarrassing.
[00:29:39]  It hurts Biden.
[00:29:40]  I don't know to what extent Biden had momentum, but certainly he was helped by the midterms.
[00:29:45]  And then you have this story.
[00:29:47]  It's not going to sink his presidency.
[00:29:48]  It's not going to destroy his presidency unless there's something kind of unimaginably bad that we're not aware of.
[00:29:56]  But it's an embarrassment and it makes it harder to go after Trump, obviously.
[00:30:00]  And creates this sense.
[00:30:02]  Trump and Biden are locked in this symbiotic relationship, right?
[00:30:06]  They're both not very popular figures.
[00:30:09]  They're both in their 70s.
[00:30:11]  They both have special counsels appointed to investigate them.
[00:30:15]  They both mishandled classified documents.
[00:30:18]  And when either makes a misstep, it's better for the other one.
[00:30:24]  I would prefer to get out of the Biden-Trump embrace and find someone who doesn't have a special counsel on them and hasn't mishandled classified documents, at least not yet, and is a little younger.
[00:30:37]  But they both seem, well, Trump's running again and Biden seems set on running again.
[00:30:42]  And this may be what we're looking at.

=== Martin Luther King Legacy Today (02:48) ===

[00:30:45]  They both have a long list of weird and disturbing allegations made against them by a number of women, so many of whom I've interviewed on both sides.
[00:30:54]  Can't we do a little better than this?
[00:30:56]  Apparently not, because here we go again.
[00:30:58]  Charlie and Rich stay with us.
[00:30:59]  Up next, we're going to show you this MLK statue.
[00:31:02]  And oh my God.
[00:31:03]  All right.
[00:31:03]  Stand by.
[00:31:08]  On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, America honors one of the most impactful men in our history, whose legacy continues to inspire.
[00:31:16]  I wanted to bring you some of his powerful words from a lesser-known speech titled, What is Your Life's Blueprint?
[00:31:22]  We've all heard the I Have a Dream speech, which continues to inspire a lot of us, though has become weirdly controversial in some circles.
[00:31:28]  But What is Your Life's Blueprint was from October 26, 1967.
[00:31:34]  And he delivered the speech to high school students in Philadelphia.
[00:31:36]  This is four years after the I Have a Dream address and just a few months before his tragic death.
[00:31:44]  Here are some highlights of the speech published on the Beacon Press YouTube channel.
[00:31:48]  Number one in your life's blueprint should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your own worth, and your own somebodiness.
[00:32:07]  Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you are nobody.
[00:32:15]  Secondly, in your life's blueprint, you must have, as a basic principle, the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor.
[00:32:36]  Finally, in your life's blueprint must be a commitment to the eternal principles of beauty, love, and justice.
[00:32:58]  Don't allow anybody to pull you so low as to make you hate them.
[00:33:06]  But we must keep moving.
[00:33:08]  We must keep going.
[00:33:10]  If you can't fly, run.
[00:33:15]  If you can't run, walk.
[00:33:18]  If you can't walk, crawl.
[00:33:21]  But by all means, keep moving.
[00:33:25]  My goodness.
[00:33:27]  We don't have somebody like that today.
[00:33:28]  We don't have somebody who can inspire everyone.
[00:33:31]  Such a powerful message.

=== Keep Moving Forward Always (10:25) ===

[00:33:33]  It resonates with most of us as much today as it did back in 1967 as we remember MLK's lasting legacy.
[00:33:41]  There's a reason we pause once a year to remember him.
[00:33:45]  Back with me now, Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cook of National Review.
[00:33:48]  So beautiful, so inspirational, and sadly, so forgotten, right?
[00:33:54]  In the way that just the so-called movement for equal rights and justice has pursued, has continued today.
[00:34:04]  It doesn't bear any resemblance to that.
[00:34:06]  I mean, he had the temerity in that speech to talk about have a basic determination to achieve excellence.
[00:34:12]  You would be told you were racist if you said that to a group of children of color today to try to have the nerve to tell them to achieve excellence, as opposed to talking about how they're really going to be hampered in their effort to do that because they were born into a racist society.
[00:34:27]  What do you make of it?
[00:34:28]  Charles, you've written beautifully about your love for this country, how you fell in love with America.
[00:34:33]  What do you make of MLK's legacy in it and what's happened to it all these years later?
[00:34:39]  Well, I think one of the greatest things about the United States is that it came with an instruction manual, which most countries don't.
[00:34:49]  That instruction manual is in a few places.
[00:34:51]  You have the Declaration of Independence, you have the Constitution, you have the Federalist Papers, and then you have the second edition of the instruction manual in the Civil War.
[00:35:04]  But it's an instruction manual, nevertheless.
[00:35:07]  It's quite difficult in a place like, say, Sweden to ask the question, are we living up to our national creed?
[00:35:15]  Because there isn't one.
[00:35:17]  That's not to say the Swedish aren't good people or that it's not a nice place to live, but there's nothing you can really grab onto.
[00:35:24]  And Martin Luther King grabbed pretty hard and correctly onto a set of promises.
[00:35:34]  He called it a promissory note that had been limited in its application.
[00:35:40]  Where I have a big problem with the American left's historical analysis and modern political output is that it insists, and it must be said much the same way as did many Confederates, that America is either built on sand or built on a lie.
[00:36:01]  But I don't think it is.
[00:36:02]  And if you listen to Martin Luther King's speeches, neither did he.
[00:36:07]  What he thought at root, like Frederick Douglass before him, at least in Frederick Douglass's later years, was that America was built atop a beautiful set of presuppositions, but that they had been assiduously denied to certain people.
[00:36:25]  He was right.
[00:36:26]  They had been, and it needed intervention to fix.
[00:36:30]  But that intervention came and was made possible only because of the integrity of the underlying ideas.
[00:36:39]  And I think when people try to strip away all of that scaffolding, they're actually pushing Martin Luther King over with the rest of the edifice, because if he wanted people who were non-white, not just blacks, although blacks had obviously been very much more oppressed than everyone else, to fall heir to the promises of the founding, there has to be a promise of the founding.
[00:37:06]  You know, Rich, it occurs to me that back during MLK's time, the Civil Rights Act and so on, the people most ardently opposed to him were racists.
[00:37:15]  And today, the people most ardently opposed to his message today are racists, but they style themselves as anti-racist.
[00:37:25]  And yet their message bears a striking and disturbing resemblance to the ones we heard from king detractors.
[00:37:32]  Yeah.
[00:37:33]  So when you played that clip, that voice, whoa, what resonance, right?
[00:37:38]  That's the voice that changes the world.
[00:37:40]  It's not just Martin Luther King's voice.
[00:37:42]  It has such resonance in part because it has a foundation in this great tradition of African-American Christianity in this country, which is one of the most amazing stories in this country.
[00:37:51]  You know, people who are brought over here in the most horrific circumstances possible and the transatlantic slave trade, whipped, humiliated, enslaved, and they pick up Christianity.
[00:38:08]  And it's an oral Christianity, right?
[00:38:10]  Because no one wants them to read.
[00:38:13]  Many of them are illiterate.
[00:38:14]  So it's a tradition based on preaching and based on music.
[00:38:19]  And Martin Luther King was very much in that tradition.
[00:38:23]  And it was a Christian advocacy.
[00:38:26]  You know, he talked in that clip about never let anyone make you hate them, right?
[00:38:32]  Because that's terrible for you, not just for them.
[00:38:36]  And that was the power of the civil rights movement.
[00:38:38]  It basically said under Martin Luther King's leadership, you're going to spit on us, you're going to disrespect us, you're going to jail us, and we're going to love you anyway.
[00:38:48]  And that was extremely powerful.
[00:38:49]  And that was the other wing of it.
[00:38:51]  Charlie hit very eloquently on the going back to the Declaration of Independence and American ideals, but also that Christian element was hugely important.
[00:39:01]  And then to get what you're asking about, Megan, I would say a couple of things.
[00:39:04]  One, he had every reason in the mid-1960s to quit on America, right?
[00:39:10]  To think America was fundamentally corrupt, right?
[00:39:13]  This is an America of segregation and deep injustices, but he believed in America and thought it could be redeemed.
[00:39:20]  And today, when in terms of racial justice and all sorts of other metrics, we're in a much better place ever in the entirety of our history, perhaps in the entirety of human history compared to any other societies.
[00:39:33]  People want to quit on America because a wrong pronoun might be used or microaggression might be committed.
[00:39:43]  And they don't believe in America.
[00:39:45]  They don't believe in its ideals.
[00:39:47]  And they've twisted themselves into being in, as you point out, in this position where they're the racialists, where they can't get over race, where they want people to be judged on the basis of race and iniquities to be committed.
[00:40:02]  in the name of race.
[00:40:04]  And that's just perverse.
[00:40:06]  Martin Luther King was a man of the left.
[00:40:08]  You know, he wouldn't, I doubt very much if he's still with us today.
[00:40:11]  He'd agree with Charlie and I, with Charlie and me on many political issues, but it's hard to believe he would be on board this kind of woke racialism that's so pervasive now in so many of our institutions.
[00:40:25]  It certainly does.
[00:40:26]  His message, you heard it there, so empowering and optimistic.
[00:40:30]  You know, don't let them tell you you're nothing, basically.
[00:40:34]  Don't you tell yourself you're nothing.
[00:40:36]  And today, the messaging is so very different.
[00:40:39]  It's why there are so many black and brown families standing up to the messaging being handed down to their children in class.
[00:40:47]  Like, how dare you tell my child he's less than or he should feel less than or he can't, he can't do the math or he can't do the thing because of some imagined social inequity that we deny he's suffering from, right?
[00:41:02]  It's not to say it's not in any case, but to paint with such a broad brush.
[00:41:06]  He was the opposite of that.
[00:41:07]  And that's why, Charles, so many as part of this woke movement are moving on from him.
[00:41:11]  They're rejecting the of the, you know, my dream is to see the two children who be judged not by the content of their or not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
[00:41:20]  They don't believe in that.
[00:41:21]  They don't believe in the colorblindness.
[00:41:22]  They want to go back in a way to before King, and they're doing it at their and at the country's peril.
[00:41:29]  Yeah, I think there's a couple of problems with it.
[00:41:32]  The first is, as Rich noted, that there is far less reason to criticize or dislike or even give up on the United States now than there was in the 1960s.
[00:41:47]  And yet you see people doing it in a way that Martin Luther King did not, and that is perverse.
[00:41:55]  The other side of it is, I think, a fashionable cynicism, a self-aware fatalism.
[00:42:08]  And you see this from people such as Tanehisi Coates, who essentially said in his book and many of his other writings that the United States had an original sin, which I think is true, but that there was no redemption for it.
[00:42:27]  Not what Martin Luther King said, which is this original sin exists, but that it can be forgiven or overcome, but that nothing has changed and nothing can change.
[00:42:40]  And in the case of Tanehisi Coates, he wrote this in a book that was nominally addressed to his son.
[00:42:46]  I think this is one of the worst things you could possibly tell a child.
[00:42:50]  And I think it's a preposterous thing to tell a child when it was written, which was in the 2010s.
[00:42:59]  This is a backsliding of sorts.
[00:43:02]  And it's different in intensity and it's different in intent, but it is no less pernicious than backslidings that we have seen in the past from white supremacists who believed that there was something intrinsically wrong with people who were not white and they could never escape from it.
[00:43:24]  Whatever they did, it didn't matter.
[00:43:27]  The content of their character didn't matter.
[00:43:30]  Their work ethic didn't matter, that they were different and always would be.
[00:43:36]  And this is a philosophy that should be rejected by absolutely everyone, partly because it is grotesque in and of itself, but mostly because it's not true.
[00:43:49]  Shifting gears, Rich, they decided to do an honor, create this statue to honor Dr. Martin Luther King and his wife, Coretta Scott King.

=== Royal Family Controversy Explained (13:10) ===

[00:43:59]  And it's from a moment.
[00:44:00]  I'll show you the photo.
[00:44:01]  This is the photo for the YouTube audience that you, for the listening audience, it's Dr. King and his wife embracing.
[00:44:06]  He's got his arms around her and she has hers around him.
[00:44:08]  They unveiled, this is right after he learned he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
[00:44:12]  So they wanted to do a statue.
[00:44:13]  They hired Hank Willis Thomas to sculpt this sculpture that would wind up in Boston Common, sitting on the 1965 Freedom Plaza, which honors 69 local civil rights leaders who had come through.
[00:44:26]  Okay.
[00:44:28]  This is what they came up with.
[00:44:30]  It was meant to just be the arms and the hands of the hug.
[00:44:33]  What it looks like, I'm just going to say it, is a giant penis being held by two hands.
[00:44:40]  Look at this.
[00:44:41]  YouTubers, I'm sorry, but that looks like a giant penis right there.
[00:44:45]  I'm sorry, it does.
[00:44:47]  Guys, it does.
[00:44:49]  Does that, I mean, you tell me what that looks like.
[00:44:51]  Look at this one.
[00:44:52]  Look at over there on the screen left, on the bottom of the screen left.
[00:44:55]  Okay.
[00:44:55]  You see it as well as I.
[00:45:00]  This is why you need to run stuff by people close to you and your spouse, you know.
[00:45:06]  What do you think of the design, honey?
[00:45:08]  Look, it looks like a schlong dear.
[00:45:10]  No, it does.
[00:45:11]  Yeah, it does.
[00:45:11]  It looks like a schlong.
[00:45:12]  And then you take that on board and you change the design.
[00:45:16]  But the deeper story here is we've lost the capacity to create public beauty.
[00:45:20]  There's no piece of public art in the last 50 years that has been beautiful or uplifting.
[00:45:27]  I mean, it's just amazing.
[00:45:28]  Michelangelo could do the David 500 years ago.
[00:45:31]  And now 500 years on with all sorts of technical advance and what have you, that's all we can do.
[00:45:39]  And there's one unveiled in DC, the National Monument that's less vulgar, but is also equally ugly of MLK.
[00:45:47]  So it's amazing we just can't create a finely crafted, uplifting to the back of it.
[00:45:56]  Like, I see maybe at the front.
[00:45:58]  Apparently at the end of the day, there's a lot of like confused faces.
[00:46:02]  It's like an enormous penis.
[00:46:04]  How are we?
[00:46:05]  And I love this tweet from Stephen F. Hayward, which I retweeted, who tweeted this picture out and said, I am calling for a complete and total shutdown of modern art until we can figure out what the hell is going on on the Trump thing.
[00:46:22]  Charles, what do you make of it?
[00:46:25]  Well, I think to Rich's point, there is this strange idea.
[00:46:29]  And I can remember first hearing this and just thinking, this is not true, that beauty is entirely subjective.
[00:46:38]  And it's not.
[00:46:39]  I grew up in Cambridge, England, which has a lot of really old, beautiful buildings, especially around the university.
[00:46:45]  And some of them have these 1960s concrete add-ons.
[00:46:50]  And people come from all over the world, all different cultures, not just Europe, but they come from South America, they come from Asia, and they love the old building and they hate the concrete appendage.
[00:47:02]  And I think the average person looks at this sculpture and says, that's horrible.
[00:47:07]  I don't think it is true that every single person sees it differently.
[00:47:10]  And I don't think it's true that this is somehow informed by the world in which we lived in or pressure.
[00:47:17]  I think it's horrible.
[00:47:18]  I think we can all see it's horrible.
[00:47:19]  I think most people are going to assume it's horrible.
[00:47:21]  And there would just be a handful of people pretending it isn't real.
[00:47:24]  Just a handful.
[00:47:25]  Nicely done.
[00:47:26]  Coretta Scott King's cousin has spoken out, Seneca Scott, saying this is a massive masturbatory homage to my family that looks more like a pair of hands hugging a beefy penis than a special moment shared by the iconic couple.
[00:47:42]  He says, This is insulting.
[00:47:44]  It's $10 million wasted to create a masturbatory homage.
[00:47:47]  And he says, This is sort of wokeness gone wrong.
[00:47:51]  Now Boston has a big bronze penis statue that's supposed to represent black love at its purest and most devotional and goes on from there.
[00:47:58]  Jesse Kelly, hat tip to him, he had the best reaction of all, which he says, in all seriousness, I don't mean to mock the MLK sculpture.
[00:48:07]  Every man wants to be remembered this way.
[00:48:13]  We'll be right back with some cleaner content in one second.
[00:48:31]  I promised a cleaner version when we got back, but I need five minutes that's unclean before we get to that.
[00:48:37]  There's no way this segment is going to have as much penis in it.
[00:48:39]  At least I hope not.
[00:48:41]  Oh, Rich, look how you underestimate me.
[00:48:46]  Charles, I've been dying to ask you about the Mary, the Harry and Megan media tour, the controversy with the royal family, and in particular, since you are a Brit, I needed you to explain what the hell we are listening to here in this excerpt from Prince Harry's book, Spare.
[00:49:07]  Hello.
[00:49:08]  My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized.
[00:49:14]  The last place I wanted to be was Frostnipper's Dan.
[00:49:17]  I've been trying some home remedies, including one recommended by a friend.
[00:49:21]  She'd urged me to apply Elizabeth Arben Cream.
[00:49:24]  My mum used that on her lips.
[00:49:25]  You want me to put that on my Todger?
[00:49:27]  It works, Harry.
[00:49:28]  Trust me.
[00:49:29]  I found a tube, and the minute I opened it, the smell transported me through time.
[00:49:34]  I felt as if my mother was right there in the room.
[00:49:37]  And I took a smidge and applied it down there.
[00:49:42]  Oh, my God, Charles.
[00:49:44]  Wow, I think you should be asking Dr. Freud instead of me about that segment.
[00:49:50]  I don't know how that got through editing without them asking him, Are you sure this is the series of associations you wish to make?
[00:49:58]  I will say, I had forgotten this, having lived in America for 10 years, but Todger really is one of the great words in the English language.
[00:50:05]  It's one of those words you only get in England.
[00:50:10]  I actually am starting to wonder, joking aside, whether he needs help.
[00:50:17]  Yeah, like I'm not a fan of the children.
[00:50:19]  I don't think they've behaved well, but the excerpts that I'm hearing from this book, I mean, we've all heard that one because it's so egregious, but the excerpts, including him suggesting that he was born to become an organ donor for his older brother, if the case need arise.
[00:50:41]  Someone asked why, if that were the case, he hadn't been forced to donate his hair to Prince William.
[00:50:48]  I think he is damaged.
[00:50:51]  And, you know, one of the problems that many celebrities seem to have, especially nowadays, is that they work out these issues in public.
[00:51:03]  And they're often encouraged to do so.
[00:51:06]  We saw this recently with Kanye West, who's clearly damaged or going through something.
[00:51:14]  And the same is true of Harry, but the business model he's chosen for himself, if I can call it that, is one that rewards anything that is salacious or aggressive or a bit unusual.
[00:51:30]  So for the foreseeable future, the incentives are all going to be to produce more content like that, not less.
[00:51:36]  It's crazy, Rich.
[00:51:37]  He's come out now and said, I have enough of me for another book easily that my original manuscript was 800 pages.
[00:51:44]  And this book was only 400 pages, and all of it was stories about my brother, some about my father, but mostly about my brother, the future king of England.
[00:51:51]  He clearly wants to take down the royal family, though he denies it.
[00:51:55]  And this example of the Todger is so interesting to me because it reveals a complete lack of dignity and shows to me, it's one of the many examples, though, that shows we, so many of us had been blaming Megan Markle for sort of tearing him out of the royal family and wokeifying him.
[00:52:13]  Harry is an unwell man.
[00:52:15]  No normal person, never mind, man, would read a passage that way, the way he, you know, the intonation on it, write about it in the first place.
[00:52:24]  You want to do a tell-all.
[00:52:25]  Okay.
[00:52:26]  What kind of a man would share a story like that that's about his intimate parts so so openly and with detail and with the word cream associated?
[00:52:36]  I'm just sorry, but most men would have every instinct, which is correct, to say there are some things that are too personal and not for public consumption.
[00:52:44]  Yeah, I mean, writing it as one thing, then reading it.
[00:52:48]  How?
[00:52:48]  How could he do that?
[00:52:50]  And, you know, he needs help.
[00:52:51]  He's supposedly getting help, right?
[00:52:53]  He's in therapy.
[00:52:54]  I think one of these stories, I haven't followed the Harry Megan drama extremely closely, but I think one of them isn't, you know, there's some leak against him supposedly from the royal family.
[00:53:02]  He went and talked to his therapist about it.
[00:53:04]  So he's in therapy, but this is just an industry now of self-exposure.
[00:53:11]  And the more titillating and embarrassing, the better, right?
[00:53:16]  There's only one reason we're talking about it, right?
[00:53:18]  Because it's humiliating to him.
[00:53:22]  It's perversely funny, right?
[00:53:26]  But we're giving it publicity and people have talked about it and they'll watch the documentary and they'll buy the book because of this kind of material.
[00:53:35]  And further to your point, you know, we have tended to blame her, but he's an adult.
[00:53:43]  He's a troubled adult, but he could say no.
[00:53:46]  He could go away with some dignity, but he doesn't want to do it because there's a mint in this.
[00:53:53]  There's fame and riches in this kind of self-abasement.
[00:53:56]  And that's something new under the sun, right?
[00:54:00]  You wouldn't have been able to publish this 50 years ago.
[00:54:02]  If you had, you would have been laughed out of the building and that would have been the end of it.
[00:54:06]  But now it's a key to a kind of startup.
[00:54:11]  I would just add one thing.
[00:54:12]  Where is his dignity?
[00:54:13]  Where is his dignity?
[00:54:14]  Go ahead, Charles.
[00:54:15]  No, I just said, yeah, I think in another sense, this represents an overcorrection as well.
[00:54:20]  And if you go back and read accounts written by the royal family 70, 80 years ago, they wouldn't have admitted in public that they were upset about the death of a child.
[00:54:34]  If you had said, how do you feel to a member of the royal family who had just suffered a genuine tragedy?
[00:54:44]  They would have said, I'm fine.
[00:54:46]  Now, I'm not endorsing that.
[00:54:47]  I don't think that's a particularly healthy way to live.
[00:54:50]  But whatever objections you might have to the classic British stiff upper lip or suppression of emotion that you would see in the royal family, and this is one of Harry's themes, implicit and explicit, that is too far the other way.
[00:55:07]  That's not how you correct that flaw.
[00:55:10]  And in fact, if you are a member of the royal family who still has a sense of duty, you're probably more likely to go in the other direction and say, well, to offset what Prince Harry is doing, we're going to have to stay quiet.
[00:55:27]  So, Charlie, an influencing point here, right, was the death of Diana, where you had this kind of overly sentimental part of our culture represented in her death and the outpouring of grief, almost toppling the whole affect of the institution of the monarchy, right?
[00:55:45]  Because they weren't willing to play ball in that way, but they eventually got their equilibrium.
[00:55:55]  But that was sort of the right, that was the sign of kind of the new way of thinking and feeling in our culture, right?
[00:56:03]  Yeah.
[00:56:04]  Well, and then they too didn't handle it well, right?
[00:56:06]  Because they were under such criticism at the time, the queen was for not saying anything or doing anything or lowering the flag on Buckingham Palace, which she addresses in this book, saying they never...
[00:56:16]  That was the stiff upper lip.
[00:56:18]  Yeah, but then they overcorrected because the queen actually was coming under some fair criticism at the time.
[00:56:23]  And what do they do?
[00:56:24]  They parade the boys or the grieving sons around in front of us, which was wrong.
[00:56:27]  I mean, now we see that in retrospect, that was wrong.
[00:56:29]  That was a lot to put these young kids through.
[00:56:32]  One good point he had in his memoir was there was, you see the video of the well-wishers handing the boys flowers.
[00:56:39]  He was only 12.
[00:56:40]  And then he took the flowers and then he would have to put the flowers with the collection of flowers that was accumulating on the gate by Buckingham Palace, almost as if he was there to help others in their expression of grief.
[00:56:54]  Like he would be the deliverer of the flowers to his mother's memorial.
[00:56:59]  And that was a good point.
[00:57:00]  You know, I mean, they weren't used correctly.
[00:57:03]  They should have been behind closed doors.
[00:57:04]  We shouldn't have been able to see those boys for a long time after that.
[00:57:06]  In any event, I will say this.
[00:57:08]  That was a legit complaint.

=== COVID Vaccine Mandate Mistakes (14:11) ===

[00:57:10]  99% of all the others are not.
[00:57:12]  And here is what it's come to.
[00:57:13]  I retweeted this over the weekend because I thought it was so funny.
[00:57:16]  And it captures his actual complaints in his book so perfectly.
[00:57:21]  Like, I didn't get the right parking spot.
[00:57:22]  My brother's room was bigger.
[00:57:24]  And my dad and my brother can't ride on the same plane together, but me, I can ride on whatever plane I want.
[00:57:28]  My God, shut up.
[00:57:30]  And somebody, it looks like it was made by a group called Belfast Media tweets out a picture of him.
[00:57:35]  And it reads, when I was a child, my father grabbed at my nose, then pulled away with his thumb between his fingers, saying, I've got your nose.
[00:57:45]  I thought I had been badly disfigured.
[00:57:47]  The torment I suffered taunts me to this, torments me to this day.
[00:57:53]  And he has become so absurd.
[00:57:55]  People believed this was real.
[00:57:56]  They thought this was a real excerpt from his book.
[00:58:00]  Yeah, I can almost hear him reading it now that you say it.
[00:58:02]  Right?
[00:58:03]  This Todd didn't get touched when they took that nose.
[00:58:06]  Okay, moving on.
[00:58:08]  So see, we did penis and tajure in that segment.
[00:58:12]  I did underestimate you, Megan.
[00:58:14]  See, let's talk about actual medical dangers, unlike the one expressed in that meme.
[00:58:18]  And that brings me to the vaccine.
[00:58:20]  So there was relatively big news on Friday evening on the Pfizer vaccine and the boosters in particular, the latest bivalent booster.
[00:58:28]  The CDC actually acknowledging a problem with the vaccine, which is rare for them, saying a safety signal had been identified showing an increased risk of ischemic stroke, which is basically that accounts for virtually all strokes.
[00:58:45]  It's the most common form.
[00:58:46]  It's a blockage of the blood to the brain, and they're usually caused by clots.
[00:58:50]  But in any event, an increased risk of stroke in people 65 or older.
[00:58:54]  And now they go on to say, blah, blah, blah.
[00:58:58]  Let's see.
[00:59:01]  The risk is in the 21 days following vaccination.
[00:59:04]  This preliminary signal has not been identified with the Moderna vaccine.
[00:59:09]  Then they go on to say, furthermore, it's important to note that to date, no other safety symptoms have shown a similar signal.
[00:59:15]  And multiple subsequent analyses have not validated this signal and go on to say, nonetheless, we believe we don't think this represents a true clinical risk, but we believe it's important to share this information with the public.
[00:59:28]  And they recommend no change in vaccination practice.
[00:59:31]  Okay.
[00:59:32]  Okay.
[00:59:33]  CNN reporting actual numbers, which were not in the CDC's statement.
[00:59:38]  Of the 550,000 seniors who got the Pfizer bivalent booster and were tracked, 130 had strokes in the three weeks after the shot.
[00:59:48]  Now, my instincts in the COVID are probably the same as yours.
[00:59:51]  If they say it's 130 out of 550,000, it's probably more.
[00:59:54]  Not everybody reports or gets tracked or gets marked down, but in any event, those are disturbing numbers.
[01:00:01]  And here is the headline from New York Times.
[01:00:06]  New York Times, their headline on Friday.
[01:00:09]  Did they make it the headline?
[01:00:11]  No.
[01:00:12]  On Saturday morning, the vaccine was not even on their homepage, that story.
[01:00:16]  All right.
[01:00:17]  It winds up in the coronavirus pandemic section of the online paper.
[01:00:23]  We looked there.
[01:00:23]  No, no, no.
[01:00:24]  We looked there and it wasn't there.
[01:00:25]  What was there was it's time to wear a mask again.
[01:00:28]  Okay, that's what the New York Times wants you to know.
[01:00:30]  Then if you go way, way down, way, way down, they cover the news with the following headline.
[01:00:37]  No increased stroke risk linked to Pfizer's COVID boosters.
[01:00:41]  What?
[01:00:42]  That's exactly the opposite of what the CDC says.
[01:00:46]  The CDC says there's an increased stroke risk with the boosters.
[01:00:52]  And the New York Times, Bayapurva Mandovelli, she's the one who made the mistake on the number of kids who had allegedly been hospitalized by COVID.
[01:01:00]  She said it was 900,000.
[01:01:02]  And in fact, it at best had been 63,000.
[01:01:06]  She's saying no increase.
[01:01:07]  Anyway, you get the gist.
[01:01:09]  A pretty significant stroke risk has been identified and it's being buried by most in the media, including the New York Times.
[01:01:16]  What do you think of it, Rich?
[01:01:19]  Well, just everything having to do with the pandemic, really, is the reporting has been based on a certain point of view and advocacy and what journalists think is good for us and what should happen.
[01:01:36]  So I'm a fan of the vaccines.
[01:01:38]  I think they've saved a lot of lives, obviously.
[01:01:42]  That doesn't mean that they're not downsides.
[01:01:44]  And we should just have factual reporting on these things and a reasonable debate about them.
[01:01:53]  But that's what the other side on these questions opposed and tried to stop from happening over the last two years.
[01:02:02]  We've talked about masking kids, Megan, but you would have no idea unless you really dug in yourself that no other advanced society had the equivalent of the CDC saying that young kids should be masked the way they were in the United States.
[01:02:18]  We were a bizarre outlier.
[01:02:21]  But right before the fever broke on masks, you had Junkins, Glenn Young in Virginia saying, well, it should be the choice of parents.
[01:02:30]  And you had the White House saying he's putting kids' lives at risk, based on zero science whatsoever, just based on a distorted view of what the facts were that they then piled this moral panic on top of.
[01:02:46]  And it's happened again and again.
[01:02:49]  I find this whole, like the sequence of events here is right on brand, Charles.
[01:02:54]  You know, we find out there's a safety concern with one of the vaccine's boosters, Pfizer vaccine booster.
[01:03:01]  And the New York Times immediately rushes to both bury the story and to the extent they cover it, to cover it wrongly.
[01:03:08]  And of course, always in the direction of downplaying the concerns.
[01:03:10]  Again, was not on the homepage.
[01:03:13]  We went to the coronavirus pandemic section.
[01:03:15]  The headline there was, it's time to wear a mask again.
[01:03:18]  And then buried down below in the section that addresses the vaccines, the headline appears, but it is, there is no increased stroke risk associated with the Pfizer booster.
[01:03:28]  Exactly the opposite of what the CDC had said.
[01:03:32]  Yeah.
[01:03:33]  So I'm not particularly alarmed. by the statistic that you noted, 550,130.
[01:03:41]  I'd need to see if there was even a causal link there.
[01:03:46]  I am in the New York Times.
[01:03:49]  Right.
[01:03:49]  But, you know, people have strokes.
[01:03:51]  There's a difference between coincidence and causation.
[01:03:54]  And I'd need to see the study.
[01:03:58]  What I am alarmed by, though, is the headline that you read, because it's indicative of everything that's been wrong with our conversation about this right from the beginning.
[01:04:08]  And I'm afraid this is true on both sides in that the New York Times is clearly unwilling ever to put out any information that could dissuade people from either masking in the early days or now getting the vaccine or the boosters.
[01:04:31]  Because it believes that the American public is full of children who need to be led to...
[01:04:38]  the right decision.
[01:04:39]  And that, broadly speaking, is how the CDC has behaved as well.
[01:04:43]  The CDC has managed us from the beginning.
[01:04:46]  Instead of saying, here are the facts, here is our take on them, or here are the facts, make up your own mind, the CDC has put out misinformation at times in an attempt to nudge people into the behavior that it thought would be best.
[01:05:00]  And as a result, it and the New York Times have lost a great deal of trust.
[01:05:05]  There has been a similar mistake made on the right.
[01:05:07]  Now, what I think should have happened in the early days is that we should have acknowledged that we do not normally live in circumstances such as we did in early 2020.
[01:05:18]  Pandemics like this seem to come along every hundred years or so.
[01:05:22]  We should have recognized that this was not just a flu, that it was serious, but it was also not, you know, zombie inspiring flesh-eating bacteria, and that we were going to get a mitigating factor, probably a vaccine that would by definition be untested, and that we should make allowances for that.
[01:05:43]  Now, the vaccine has been really effective.
[01:05:46]  It is not an accident that the number of people dying of COVID dropped in the way that it did when the vaccine came along.
[01:05:52]  That's not a coincidence.
[01:05:53]  But the vaccine is also not equivalent to, say, the polio vaccine.
[01:05:58]  You get these people who say, well, what are you going to come after next?
[01:06:02]  The polio vaccine?
[01:06:04]  You're going to come to the flu jab.
[01:06:05]  No, the difference here is that this was an experimental vaccine.
[01:06:09]  And it may well be the case.
[01:06:11]  We should have acknowledged this from the start.
[01:06:12]  It may well be the case that it has some side effects and a few of them lethal.
[01:06:18]  But we didn't.
[01:06:19]  And so when conservative correctly said that we should go easy on the mandates, because you don't want to mandate that people take experimental vaccines, make them available, subsidize them if you want to, but don't mandate them, the left pushed back.
[01:06:33]  But the right also made a mistake here in concert, which was in order to attack the mandates to underplay the efficacy of the vaccine.
[01:06:41]  And so you've had this weird push-pull between some people on the right who have said, you know what, the vaccine doesn't work.
[01:06:48]  It doesn't help.
[01:06:49]  It's dangerous.
[01:06:49]  It's killing athletes all over the place.
[01:06:51]  Look at all these young people who are suddenly dying.
[01:06:54]  Not really true.
[01:06:55]  And people on the left who have said the vaccine is perfect.
[01:06:58]  Not only will it save your life, it will stop you getting COVID.
[01:07:01]  It will stop you transmitting COVID.
[01:07:03]  It will make you better looking and taller as well.
[01:07:06]  And this is all nonsense.
[01:07:08]  What we're dealing with is an imperfect world in the midst of a completely unprecedented in our lifetimes circumstance and a vaccine that did pretty well at what it was supposed to do, but is going to have some unfortunate side effects over time.
[01:07:22]  And we can't talk about it because the loudest voices on the left and the right, and it's more complicated than that.
[01:07:29]  There's a lot of anti-vax sentiment on the left as well and pro-vax sentiment on the right, have just decided not to have that conversation in the way adults should.
[01:07:37]  And the result has been this mass.
[01:07:39]  I have to say, I am more skeptical of the vaccines now than you are, and certainly than I was at the beginning, in part because of my lack of trust in any of these public health officials.
[01:07:53]  And I would say that Vinay Prasad, who I do trust online, he's a doctor who's been neck deep in all of this from the beginning and been a real straight shooter.
[01:08:00]  He's pro-vaccine.
[01:08:01]  But he raised some of the concerns in response to this announcement that reminded me of why I'm having this feeling of distrust and questioning.
[01:08:10]  First of all, Marty McCarry of Johns Hopkins comes out and says CDC should make the should make public the raw data set.
[01:08:15]  Exactly right.
[01:08:16]  How many?
[01:08:17]  Exactly.
[01:08:18]  Why did you conclude this?
[01:08:18]  It must have been pretty significant for the CDC to issue this warning.
[01:08:23]  Then Vinay Prasad, he's a hematologist, an oncologist, and professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, Sam Fram, says the following: This administration's vaccine policy has been horrible.
[01:08:34]  They always err on the side of pushing doses.
[01:08:36]  They initially decide the safety signal of myocarditis.
[01:08:40]  They delayed polling JJ in young women.
[01:08:42]  They never banned Moderna in young men.
[01:08:44]  And they rubber stamped kids' vaccines with inadequate efficacy data.
[01:08:48]  Most recently, long after the emergency phase of the pandemic ended, the administration granted emergency use authorization to the bivalent booster down to five-year-olds based initially on mouse data.
[01:08:57]  And let's not forget it was only eight mice.
[01:08:59]  And to this day, supported only by confounded observational studies, right?
[01:09:05]  Not exactly the gold standard.
[01:09:06]  Arguably, this is an illegal action.
[01:09:08]  There is no emergency to justify boosting 20-year-old men who had three doses.
[01:09:12]  He goes on to say: We know very little, but it appears the safety signal of stroke may be identified.
[01:09:18]  He means safety signal like a problem complication.
[01:09:20]  Of course, there's nothing magic about 65.
[01:09:23]  So it may also occur at younger ages.
[01:09:26]  What's the absolute risk?
[01:09:27]  Where is the press conference?
[01:09:29]  Sadly, no further information followed.
[01:09:31]  A sensible FDA commissioner would have held a press conference and stated what was known.
[01:09:35]  Instead of that, you know what our FDA commissioner is doing?
[01:09:38]  Well, he tweeted out a picture of himself here in, I guess, I don't know what it is, a grow house.
[01:09:46]  It's a grow house.
[01:09:47]  It's FDA commissioner Dr. Robert Califf Califf, who is talking about, yay, new controlled environment growing facility in Davis and learning how this new technology can boost the resiliency of our food supply.
[01:10:01]  Off message, buddy.
[01:10:03]  Off message.
[01:10:04]  Like, Vinay Prasad's exactly right, Rich.
[01:10:06]  And we're not going to get any of that.
[01:10:07]  We're not going to get it because the media won't demand it.
[01:10:10]  And if the media is not demanding it, we'll never get answers.
[01:10:14]  Yeah, so more transparency, more facts are better.
[01:10:20]  And, you know, that's true across the board, especially on this.
[01:10:24]  But they've been so motivated by, I think, you know, an understandable goal, getting people vaccinated.
[01:10:29]  I agree with Charlie.
[01:10:30]  I think the vaccines have been a huge benefit in terms of reducing deaths, but they never wanted to let anything interfere with that goal, right?
[01:10:43]  It never made any sense, for instance, that you couldn't, having had COVID wouldn't relieve you from these various vaccine mandates, various places, right?
[01:10:53]  I mean, having gotten it gave you a high level of immunity.
[01:10:58]  So why didn't that count?
[01:11:02]  For the longest time, in some places, even today, it's presumed that being unvaccinated makes you a threat to everyone around you, including vaccinated people, right?
[01:11:13]  If you're unvaccinated and you have other health risks, you're a threat to yourself being unvaccinated.

=== Supreme Court Leak Conspiracy (13:52) ===

[01:11:21]  You're not a threat to anyone else.
[01:11:22]  But so, all of it has been this grinding wheel just in one direction, and it has created skepticism and distrust among rational actors, including yourself.
[01:11:33]  But we should have an upfront, transparent debate about it.
[01:11:39]  Give people the data and let them argue about it and draw their own conclusions.
[01:11:45]  They won't do it.
[01:11:46]  And there's no sign that they're going to.
[01:11:48]  It's very disheartening, and people are left wondering what's real.
[01:11:52]  Okay, let's shift gears because I have something exciting to tell you.
[01:11:55]  Don't know if you saw this over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal, but here's the headline: Supreme Court investigators have narrowed leak inquiry to a small number of suspects.
[01:12:07]  Oh, okay.
[01:12:08]  I'm excited to see that.
[01:12:10]  I do not have faith in the Supreme Court marshal.
[01:12:13]  I hope one day she makes me eat those words.
[01:12:15]  I really do.
[01:12:16]  I hope she's capable of doing more than yelling, Oye, Oye, and introducing the high court.
[01:12:22]  But she's been on this case for quite some time now.
[01:12:24]  That leak was in May, month five.
[01:12:27]  We are now in month one of the following year, and we don't have the perpetrator.
[01:12:31]  But the Wall Street Journal reports: per people familiar with the matter, investigators have narrowed their inquiry to a small number of suspects, including law clerks, but officials have yet to conclusively identify the alleged culprit.
[01:12:49]  Does that mean they've preliminarily identified an alleged culprit?
[01:12:54]  We don't know.
[01:12:55]  They say, reminding us here that Chief Justice Roberts did not call in the FBI.
[01:13:00]  He gave this investigation to Gail Curley, the Marshal, and that apart from a demand from the investigators in June that the justices' law clerks sit for interviews and surrender their cell phones, not a lot has happened.
[01:13:15]  By the way, that demand prompted several of the three dozen law clerks to seek legal counsel.
[01:13:21]  I'm sorry, but if they wanted my cell phone and I was working for a Supreme Court justice and I were not the legal leaker, I would fork it over immediately.
[01:13:27]  This is not one that I would need legal counsel on.
[01:13:30]  So I do find that a little suspicious.
[01:13:32]  They say Gail's interviews were sometimes short and superficial.
[01:13:35]  I don't know if she did it personally, but they were under her authority, said a person familiar with the matter, consisting of a handful of questions such as: Did you do it?
[01:13:45]  Do you know anyone who had a reason to do it?
[01:13:48]  Go, Gail, go, go, come.
[01:13:52]  Is that a natural question to ask, Megan?
[01:13:54]  In such investigations, did you do it?
[01:13:58]  Do you have faith in Gail, guys?
[01:14:00]  What do you think, Charles?
[01:14:02]  Well, I just think it's really unfair that it's taken this long for the investigation to come close to finding out who did it because it's delayed the culprit's inevitable MSNBC contract.
[01:14:14]  Think about how much money they could have made in the interim.
[01:14:18]  So true.
[01:14:19]  I don't.
[01:14:21]  I do think this is sensitive and difficult.
[01:14:24]  I also think that it has to be resolved.
[01:14:27]  We cannot have an inconclusive at the end of this because this was a flagrant attack on one branch of government.
[01:14:37]  And I use that word advisedly.
[01:14:39]  It was an attack on the authority of the Supreme Court.
[01:14:42]  It was an attempt to intimidate them.
[01:14:45]  Whether or not the intended result was to have somebody fly from California and whether you want to say attempt or pull out of an attempt to kill a Supreme Court justice, I don't know, but that was the result, nevertheless.
[01:15:05]  And if we just get a shrug of the shoulders and while this happens, then the incentives are going to be pretty clear next time that there is a big case that people really care about.
[01:15:18]  And we have them coming up.
[01:15:19]  We have a big affirmative action case coming up this year.
[01:15:23]  You're going to see people saying, well, why not me?
[01:15:28]  And that is the beginning of the end of the role of the judiciary.
[01:15:35]  I mean, there is a reason we give Supreme Court justices lifetime tenures.
[01:15:41]  And that reason is that they're supposed to be insulated from political pressure.
[01:15:45]  They can't be removed except in exceptional cases for impeachment.
[01:15:50]  Well, if they worry that their drafts and their deliberations and their early votes and their internal discussions are going to leak, then they will behave differently.
[01:16:01]  And you may as well, at that point, actually not have the independent judiciary we've relied on for nearly a quarter of a millennium.
[01:16:09]  You know, Rich, the thing is, Chief Justice John Roberts is the one who farmed this out to the Marshal instead of the FBI.
[01:16:16]  And I realize he's the Chief Justice of the United States, but it's not his court.
[01:16:21]  He doesn't own it.
[01:16:24]  He doesn't, you know, he maybe, he's kind of like the acting CEO, but it's not, he doesn't own it.
[01:16:29]  We do.
[01:16:29]  It's our court.
[01:16:30]  And we, the American people, are entitled to an answer as to who did this.
[01:16:35]  He cannot in any world keep this secret or choose somebody who's going to run this investigation into the ground so that it's mysteriously never known who did it because he thinks that's what's in the best interest.
[01:16:47]  What can be done?
[01:16:48]  I mean, already the House, the GOP House is talking about how we're going to do our own investigation, which would be great.
[01:16:53]  I'd love to see somebody who genuinely has a will of getting to the bottom of this take charge.
[01:16:58]  Yeah, they should.
[01:17:00]  I don't know how optimistic we should be that they could get anywhere.
[01:17:04]  If you wanted an answer, clearly you should have gone to the FBI.
[01:17:07]  I don't know the legal in and outs of referring it to the FBI, but John Roberts is supposed to be an institutionalist.
[01:17:14]  And this was an attack, as Charlie said, on the court as an institution, on the court as such.
[01:17:21]  I think it was a leado at the Heritage Foundation not too long ago who said that this, the leak was basically a public advertisement to say, you go and kill one of the conservative justices and you'll block this decision.
[01:17:34]  And lo and behold, you know, a troubled young man who, you know, we can learn more about how serious he was, but he certainly had the materials to carry out an assassination at Kavanaugh's house shows up on his street where he lives.
[01:17:52]  So this is literally a deadly serious matter.
[01:17:56]  And, you know, once you're relying on the court itself to try to track it down, relying on a force that basically what it does is provide security at the court itself and doesn't really have the wherewithal or the experience for a complex investigation like this, you're setting the investigation up for failure.
[01:18:18]  So if it's true that they've actually narrowed it down, that would be great.
[01:18:23]  But I'd unfortunately be shocked if they actually nailed a perpetrator here.
[01:18:28]  I agree.
[01:18:29]  It's eight months later.
[01:18:30]  Get to work, Gail, or farm it off to somebody who can.
[01:18:33]  Give it to the cops in Idaho.
[01:18:35]  They know how to solve things.
[01:18:36]  Like this, I'm so disappointed in the job being done here.
[01:18:40]  And it does make me think they're running cover.
[01:18:42]  I don't think it would be that hard.
[01:18:43]  I really don't.
[01:18:44]  I think you get a qualified interrogator in front of these Supreme Court laws.
[01:18:48]  Do you think, Megan, that Roberts is thinking it's better for the institution just if we don't know and it goes away?
[01:18:54]  Yeah, I really am starting to believe that.
[01:18:56]  And I don't know what that means.
[01:18:57]  Does that mean it links to a justice?
[01:19:00]  Gail is in the unfortunate position of sort of investigating her bosses.
[01:19:03]  Gail is not above the Supreme Court justices.
[01:19:06]  They walk around over there like gods.
[01:19:08]  And what if it led to Chief Justice John Roberts?
[01:19:11]  I don't think he did it, but what if it did?
[01:19:12]  You know, is Gail going to be able to point the finger?
[01:19:15]  It should have been given to an outside group like the FBI, somebody with law enforcement experience and who knows how to ask questions that get to the bottom.
[01:19:24]  I mean, this is not Gail's bailiwick.
[01:19:26]  There's a, I'm trying to look up her, but I had her background in front of me, but it's not that impressive when it comes to investigating a ton of crimes.
[01:19:33]  That's how she wound up in the job she did.
[01:19:35]  And Alito, you mentioned in his heritage remarks.
[01:19:38]  You're not wrong.
[01:19:39]  He came out, this is in October at this event and said, this leak made those of us who were thought to be in the majority in support of overruling Roe targets for assassination because it gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us.
[01:19:58]  That's why the leak, like coming out before the decision was final, it's like one thing.
[01:20:03]  Of course, he's going to put his name to the decision as he did when it's final.
[01:20:07]  But that was different because at that point, he can't be manipulated out of it.
[01:20:11]  He can't be killed out of casting his vote.
[01:20:15]  That's why what the leaker did, one of the many reasons, it was so egregious.
[01:20:19]  And for them to just treat this as like, oh, somebody may have leaked a little thing to the media.
[01:20:23]  You know, no, this is, this is top-level betrayal.
[01:20:28]  I use the term treason loosely, not legally, but what a betrayal by somebody who now could potentially be entering the legal profession and asking whole hordes of people to trust them.
[01:20:40]  Yeah.
[01:20:41]  And, you know, I tend to minimize the extent to which we have civil conflict in this country and people say we're, you know, we're on the cusp of the civil war.
[01:20:52]  All that I think is hyperbolic and way overblown.
[01:20:55]  But God forbid, if that guy showed up at Kavanaugh's house and succeeded, you know, in going in there and harming him and his family, that would have been an inflection point in our society and the legitimacy of our institutions and the kind of conflict we're experiencing.
[01:21:13]  It really would have been a horrible event in every single sense.
[01:21:20]  And the leaker, whether it was his or her intention to do that, and it very well may have been, made that possible, kind of opened up that door.
[01:21:31]  So it's extremely important that this person be found.
[01:21:34]  But, you know, as we've been saying, Roberts chose to go down a path that makes that unlikely.
[01:21:39]  Yeah, I'm really starting to doubt his commitment to getting to the bottom of this.
[01:21:42]  It's been too long and he doesn't have the right team in place.
[01:21:45]  I hope I'm proven wrong.
[01:21:47]  Stand by, guys.
[01:21:47]  Much, much more with Rich and Charlie.
[01:21:49]  After this, we're going to get personal.
[01:21:51]  We're going to talk about them.
[01:21:53]  You don't hear them talk about that much in the editors.
[01:21:55]  Little vignettes here and there, but we're going to talk turkey next.
[01:22:00]  So we were just talking about the Supreme Court.
[01:22:02]  Guess what?
[01:22:03]  We missed the news.
[01:22:04]  Yesterday, President Biden was at this worship service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to join in a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and had a thought about our newest associate Supreme Court justice who he nominated.
[01:22:22]  And here's how that went.
[01:22:24]  Those are the words of Kajan Kajan Katanji Drown Jackson.
[01:22:28]  Oh my God.
[01:22:29]  Our Supreme Court justice.
[01:22:31]  Rich.
[01:22:33]  I can't.
[01:22:35]  Yeah.
[01:22:35]  Yeah.
[01:22:37]  This is why I'll make, you know, I never say what's her name, the White House press secretary's name, because I know I might mess it up.
[01:22:44]  But I guess if you're president of the United States and it's the text in front of you, you got to try to read it.
[01:22:50]  Wait, we need to hear it again.
[01:22:51]  Let's hear it again.
[01:22:51]  Let's hear it again.
[01:22:52]  With inevitable results.
[01:22:53]  Those are the words of Katanji Drown Jackson.
[01:22:58]  Brown.
[01:22:58]  Our Supreme Court justice.
[01:23:01]  Katanji Brown Jackson.
[01:23:02]  It's actually not that hard, Katanji Brown Jackson.
[01:23:04]  It kind of flows if you would just practice it.
[01:23:06]  He clearly doesn't know her at all.
[01:23:09]  Chris Buckley told the story about George H.W. Bush.
[01:23:13]  Buckley was a speechwriter for him, and he wrote into a speech, a reference to Aristophanes, the Creek playwright.
[01:23:22]  And, you know, Bush, having been around the block once or twice, knew he wasn't going to risk trying to say Aristophanes.
[01:23:29]  So he edited it and just wrote in Plato.
[01:23:34]  Yeah, I have to say, if that had been Donald Trump, we'd be getting a quote-unquote think piece tonight on MSNBC about what a racist he is.
[01:23:44]  You're going to be getting Katanji, right?
[01:23:48]  Like, no way would they let him get away with that.
[01:23:52]  You know, I have made embarrassing mistakes in my life in front of audiences, mispronouncing words.
[01:23:58]  I read Arai as Ori once.
[01:24:02]  I didn't know how to say Huawei, the Chinese technology firm.
[01:24:06]  I once stood in front of my school and congratulated a girl on winning the reading prize and asked her what her favorite character was, and then announced it as Hermione instead of Hermione, which was odd because I did know the name Hermione.
[01:24:17]  I just couldn't process it.
[01:24:19]  But the thing is, as you say, this White House has repeatedly screwed up that name.
[01:24:25]  It's not just Biden.
[01:24:26]  Ron Klain kept writing it wrong during the nomination hearings.
[01:24:31]  The press secretary, Karin Jean-Pierre, pronounced it wrong.
[01:24:35]  She also tweeted it wrong over and over again.
[01:24:38]  I think they kept saying Kajanti.
[01:24:40]  And that happens.
[01:24:42]  The problem is, is that when you make a mistake like that in modern America, people ascribe all of these insane reasons for it, one of which is racism or insensitivity or white supremacy or what you will.
[01:24:56]  And I think it's worth laughing a great deal at Biden for this, knowing that had it happened the other way around, we would have had a week-long news cycle about it saying so much about the other side.
[01:25:10]  There's nothing wrong with it per se, of course.
[01:25:12]  We all screw up.

=== Charles Krauthammer Formidable Intellect (04:03) ===

[01:25:13]  Yeah, it's not like he just found her.
[01:25:16]  She's on the Supreme Court.
[01:25:18]  There's only nine.
[01:25:20]  It's not that hard.
[01:25:21]  I would say Neil Gorsuch's name is much tougher.
[01:25:24]  I don't understand it to this day.
[01:25:26]  I get afraid as I get to the end of it.
[01:25:28]  Like, Gors, is it Gorsuch?
[01:25:29]  Is it Gorsuch?
[01:25:30]  It's Gorsuch, but it's a tough one.
[01:25:32]  Okay, somebody who's very good with the word things is Rich Lowry.
[01:25:36]  I think Charles C.W. Cook would agree with me.
[01:25:38]  And now I have had the opportunity to look a little bit into your background, Rich, some of which I did not know.
[01:25:43]  Born and raised in Arlington, Virginia, son of a social worker mother and an English professor father.
[01:25:50]  Okay, this is how we've bonded.
[01:25:52]  My dad was an education professor, went to UVA, where you studied English and history.
[01:25:58]  And then after graduating, worked for Charles Krauthammer as a research assistant before the great William F. Buckley came into your life.
[01:26:05]  So you were sort of born to do what you are doing right now.
[01:26:09]  Am I right?
[01:26:09]  Or were you thinking about a career in baseball?
[01:26:12]  You know, which I know you love.
[01:26:14]  I was.
[01:26:15]  I was until I realized in high school, I couldn't hit a curveball or a fastball.
[01:26:20]  So that ended my baseball dreams.
[01:26:23]  But I really wanted to be an opinion journalist from the first time I discovered Bill Buckley through his show, Firing Line.
[01:26:30]  You know, just incredibly compelling, witty, unusual figure.
[01:26:35]  I hadn't heard of National Review yet until I saw him on TV and heard a reference to National Review.
[01:26:40]  And then I, you know, ran down the local drugstore to try to find a copy as soon as I could.
[01:26:47]  Were you conservative?
[01:26:48]  Were you like an Alex P. Keaton?
[01:26:51]  Yeah, but not yet.
[01:26:56]  I mean, I was inclined that way, but I hadn't thought any of it through.
[01:26:59]  And National Review helped me think it through.
[01:27:03]  But as a young person then, and obviously even more so now, if you're going to be a conservative, you have a contrarian reflex in you somewhere, and you need to be able to defend what you think and what you believe because the tide is flowing the other way.
[01:27:24]  And National Review helped me help army that way.
[01:27:27]  And in high school, at some point, they did some sort of employment survey or something.
[01:27:35]  And they asked, you know, where do you want to, what city do you want to be in 10 years and what do you want to be doing?
[01:27:40]  And I wrote New York City, I want to be working for National Review, you know, as a high school student.
[01:27:46]  So it's been a great blessing to actually be able to do it.
[01:27:48]  I can't imagine what it would have been like to actually work for Buckley.
[01:27:53]  My team pulled a couple of fun quotes from him, such as an interview he gave in 2004 with New York Magazine, to New York Magazine.
[01:28:00]  Interviewer was Deborah Solomon, who asked, Must you be so clever at all times?
[01:28:05]  In response to which he answered, I haven't practiced the alternative.
[01:28:13]  I was blessed to work for two giants, you know, Bill Buckley and Charles Krauthammer, both of whom, you know, I was terrified around for a lot of the time with Bill, because he might give you some important instruction that you literally didn't understand, right?
[01:28:28]  Because you didn't know the words he was using.
[01:28:31]  And Charles was just this, obviously, this formidable intellect.
[01:28:36]  And this kind of, there's an inherent dignity to Charles.
[01:28:41]  There was something big about Charles.
[01:28:44]  And if you're a 21-year-old working for him, you know, fetching his soup for lunch and proofreading his columns, it was a daunting prospect just being around him.
[01:28:58]  You can still get his book, Things That Matter, which is a collection of his best columns.
[01:29:03]  And it's so well worth your time and the read.
[01:29:07]  Charles, how about you?
[01:29:08]  You mentioned you were raised in Cambridge, but you went to Oxford and you fell in love with America from afar.

=== Love for America Grows Stronger (03:24) ===

[01:29:17]  I love your writings on America.
[01:29:18]  You're now a U.S. citizen as of 2018.
[01:29:21]  You fell in love with this girl, America, before you fell in love with your girl, your wife, and created a beautiful family.
[01:29:29]  But what about your conservative leanings?
[01:29:31]  Because the UK is kind of like America in that there's a very large leftist presence that would certainly be trying to get its grips into a young CW, Charles C.W. Cook.
[01:29:41]  Yeah, so I always loved America.
[01:29:44]  I loved America in an entirely pre-political sense.
[01:29:48]  We first went to America when I was three to come to Florida, Disney World, SeaWorld, and the rest.
[01:29:56]  And I said at the time, I want to live in America when I grow up.
[01:30:02]  I'm not quite sure then what it was.
[01:30:04]  Maybe the palm trees and the sunshine and the warmth and probably the idea that everywhere was full of roller coasters, which I love.
[01:30:15]  But as I grew up, we visited America a lot more.
[01:30:18]  We had some family friends in Newport Beach, California, and in Phoenix, Arizona, and we would visit them.
[01:30:26]  And I just loved the place in a way that I can describe in a way that I can't describe.
[01:30:32]  It wasn't political.
[01:30:33]  I didn't have any politics until September 11th.
[01:30:38]  I didn't know a great deal about the world and I didn't want to.
[01:30:42]  I was born in the mid-80s and everything was fine.
[01:30:47]  The economy during my childhood was fantastic.
[01:30:50]  The prospect of Britain being dragged into a war seemed remote.
[01:30:54]  The only wars I'd heard about, the First Gulf War and then Kosovo, we won.
[01:31:00]  I suppose I was an unknowing, unwitting end of history sort of kid, but 9-11 changed that and I started to be interested in the world and in ideas.
[01:31:10]  And then that really went into full flow when I was at Oxford.
[01:31:15]  And I did a whole module on British colonial America.
[01:31:21]  And then I chose to do the revolutionary era.
[01:31:25]  And then I actually wrote my thesis at Oxford on the passage of the Second Amendment.
[01:31:31]  And at that point, I was sold.
[01:31:32]  I remember reading the founders and thinking, well, that's my politics.
[01:31:36]  You know, that classical liberalism is my politics.
[01:31:41]  And really, it still is.
[01:31:44]  So there's an answer that is more informed than comprehensible.
[01:31:51]  And then there was a gut level love of America that I still have.
[01:31:55]  And I've written before that a lot of it sounds irrational.
[01:31:59]  Like if I see a mountain range and you tell me that's in America, I like it more.
[01:32:04]  I'd be moderately disappointed if you said that's in Canada.
[01:32:08]  I can't quite explain why, you know, Patsy Klein or Ray Charles have quite the effect they do on me, but it matters that they're American.
[01:32:20]  And I followed it.
[01:32:22]  You guys did a great Fourth of July podcast this year.
[01:32:26]  And forgive me, what is the name of the older British guy who comes on from time to time on the edit?
[01:32:32]  Andrew Sutterford.
[01:32:33]  Yeah, Andrew.
[01:32:34]  So Andrew made the mistake of saying he thought that the American flag was kind of messy.

=== Irrational Patriotism and Books (03:03) ===

[01:32:41]  It was like mean girls at National Review.
[01:32:46]  That just seems so wrong.
[01:32:49]  It's the most beautiful flag in the world, just objectively.
[01:32:52]  I don't know how anyone can have any different view.
[01:32:55]  But in fairness, Rich, Andrew did design the new Martin Luther King Memorial in Boston.
[01:33:01]  Don't get me restarted.
[01:33:02]  All right, a couple of quick questions.
[01:33:03]  We only have like two minutes left, but so quick answers.
[01:33:06]  Rich, you're married.
[01:33:07]  How many kids do you have?
[01:33:08]  Sexes, how old?
[01:33:11]  We have three kids, older girl, in-between boy, and younger daughter, seven, five, and 20 months.
[01:33:23]  Man, that is like, that's, that's heavy lifting.
[01:33:26]  Godspeed.
[01:33:27]  Charles, you have younger kids, so you're married.
[01:33:29]  You're married and you live in Florida, in Fort Lauderdale, down.
[01:33:32]  No, not Fort Lauderdale.
[01:33:33]  I'm in North Florida.
[01:33:34]  I'm in the...
[01:33:35]  The further north you go, the further south you get, right?
[01:33:38]  So I would say I live in the south near Jacksonville.
[01:33:42]  Okay.
[01:33:42]  You're constantly down at the neighborhood pub and you have two kids with your wife.
[01:33:46]  And how old are they?
[01:33:47]  And what are the genders?
[01:33:48]  They're both boys are six and five.
[01:33:51]  Oh my gosh.
[01:33:52]  I mean, one would wonder, because you're both so well read.
[01:33:55]  So do you spend your entire day reading and just a little bit writing?
[01:33:59]  Because you make so many book references on the show.
[01:34:01]  I'm like, when do these guys have the time to do all this reading, Rich?
[01:34:06]  Well, I just do it whenever there's some in-between time.
[01:34:15]  You know, 10 at night when things are settled down.
[01:34:18]  I'll be sitting at the dining room table with a book and a beer.
[01:34:23]  Yeah.
[01:34:23]  You're not passed out by 10 like most parents of those age children.
[01:34:28]  I wish I would have passed out, but the kids take a very long time to get to sleep.
[01:34:32]  And that's really the only me time for lack of a better phrase, you know, 10 or 11 at night.
[01:34:38]  You got to fight for it.
[01:34:39]  What about you, Charlie?
[01:34:40]  When do you find the time to read all these books and everything you do?
[01:34:44]  I actually read a lot less than I would like at the moment because of my kids, but I did read an enormous amount before I had kids.
[01:34:54]  And I'm blessed to have a really good memory.
[01:34:58]  I absorb books.
[01:35:00]  So I do read during the day, but a lot of the references I make are to books I read quite a long time ago.
[01:35:06]  Oh, you're lucky.
[01:35:07]  That's like Spencer Claven.
[01:35:08]  I had a great conversation with him.
[01:35:09]  He was saying that's his best gift is that he has a great memory.
[01:35:12]  And so he's read a lot, but he remembers it unlike the rest of us.
[01:35:16]  Rich and Charlie, so fun.
[01:35:18]  Looking forward to our new National Review Day and to everybody signing up for NR Plus.
[01:35:24]  It's well worth it.
[01:35:25]  Thank you.
[01:35:25]  In honor of this day.
[01:35:26]  Yeah, I know exactly what it is.
[01:35:29]  Beforehand, okay?
[01:35:31]  Look at Jesse Kelly to design it.
[01:35:36]  Bye, guys.
[01:35:37]  See you.
[01:35:40]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
[01:35:42]  No BS, no agenda, and no