The Megyn Kelly Show - 20230207_disastrous-biden-poll-numbers-don-lemons-new-meltd

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Feb. 7, 2023 - The Megyn Kelly Show

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Chaos at the Border 00:15:13
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
	President Biden will deliver his State of the Union tonight.
	Are you excited?
	No one is.
	They're always boring, and they're going to be extra boring under this president.
	That's just the way it is.
	Some of his invited guests include the parents of Tyree Nichols, Paul Pelosi, and Bono, and a bunch of people who have been dealing with cancer, which if memory serves, Joe Biden was supposed to have solved by now.
	Remember when President Obama put him in charge of the cancer moonshot?
	This is some new poll numbers are not looking so good for President Biden.
	I mean, not at all.
	And this is the fallout from the Chinese spy balloon continues.
	Wait until you hear how our trusty press secretary tries to explain this.
	Oh my God, it's the best soundbite of the day.
	Joining me now are friends from the Fifth Column podcast, which is available at wethefth.substack.com.
	Michael Moynihan, Matt Welsh, and Camille Foster.
	Welcome back to the show, guys.
	Thank you for having us.
	State of the Union.
	So the Daily Mail put together a little, a helpful little list of the words, like the bingo that we should be playing tonight as we listen.
	And here's just a couple of the things that you have to drink or put down in your bingo card.
	January 6th, as my mother would say, Chinese spy balloon, a gaffe, the Amtrak story.
	I love that.
	Malarkey whispers into the microphone, shouts, coughs.
	Putin, come on, man.
	Yes, that was one of them.
	My predecessor, meaning Trump, of course, extreme MAGA Republicans, my son Bo, Ukraine, when in God's name, Jill, or I married a teacher, infrastructure, classified documents, and so on.
	I love this.
	We're going to be hammered before like the first 20 minutes if we drink every time we go to stuff.
	We're leaving some out, though, right?
	He's going to build the economy from the middle out or the ground up.
	He's always directionalizing the economy in some very helpful way because trickle down doesn't work.
	He will probably remind us again.
	I like Come On Man a lot.
	You can take that from the bank.
	Come on.
	Do they have, I'm not kidding around?
	That one's that's a yeah.
	Yeah, you must be there.
	That's God.
	I'm not kidding around.
	I don't know about you, but like I have the same president, the same feeling with this president as I had with the last one, which was whenever you can tell they're going off prompter, you're like, yes.
	It's a white experience.
	You're more likely to laugh when the previous guy, who I wasn't the world's biggest fan of, but like when he goes off script, you're like, okay, you know, put on a seatbelt.
	Here we go.
	Whereas Biden, if he goes off, you're like, oh, no, you have this sort of, it's like watching your six-year-old play cello at the school recital.
	It's just like, please, did you just like keep the bow off the string?
	You don't play the cello, Matt?
	No, it's theoretical.
	Yeah.
	No, it's true.
	Like when you see your kid run down the hill when he's like three and he's running and you're running downhill and you're like, oh, is he going to make it?
	Joe Biden is like a child running down a hill.
	I think that's probably a good place to start.
	I did, I had this great benefit, Megan, that I don't watch cable news.
	Not because I protest against it or anything like that.
	I just don't have it, so I don't watch it.
	But when I travel and I'm currently in a hotel now, I do watch it.
	I watch it at night.
	I watch it in the morning when I wake up.
	And I was watching MSNBC, which is one of the most hilarious channels.
	I don't know if you've ever seen this channel.
	It's great.
	They just make up the weirdest stuff.
	And they're still on the, everything was about Trump, by the way.
	I thought Trump was still the president when I was watching this because like the Chirons at night, the Kyron's Mario is all about Trump.
	But when they got to the thing about Joe Biden, it was just in Gen Socky was there.
	And it's like, what does Joe Biden have to do to correct the opinions of stupid Americans?
	Because there's some kind of, you know, the poll numbers aren't great.
	People don't have the most confidence in this president, most confidence in the economy, et cetera.
	But they're all wrong.
	So why are these stupid Americans not getting it?
	And what does Joe Biden have to do to make them get it?
	Which I found to be one of the most condescending and stupid things I'd heard in a long time.
	So that's the report from the MSNBC world.
	By the way, are you in Florida doing something with Ron DeSantis?
	That is none of your business, Megan Kelly.
	I don't know.
	I'm promoting it on Twitter.
	That is a lie.
	Did you get some press release?
	It's all over Twitter.
	I'm like, is that our Bible Moyan?
	Oh, is it on Twitter?
	Oh, good God.
	Yeah.
	You know, look, they asked me to come down and talk about media stuff and I will never say no for a free trip to Miami.
	And yeah, it was a very nice, interesting experience.
	Awesome.
	I just finished.
	I just got back.
	How did it go?
	Are you ready to vote for him?
	Well, I mean, I'm interested.
	I mean, if he runs for president, I don't know.
	He dodges that even in private.
	But I find him to be an impressive guy.
	And, you know, I don't have any sense of who I'd be voting for in 2024, but it would be great to have a Republican who is as bright as he is.
	I mean, regardless of what you think of him, you know, with degrees, I think from Yale and Harvard, but he, even when he's wrong about things or I think he's wrong about things, he actually has a pretty good handle on the issue.
	And I can't imagine that being the case if I was sitting down at a roundtable with Donald Trump.
	And who is a Gen Xer?
	I'm pro Gen Xers.
	I think he's younger than me.
	I think he's terrifying.
	Yeah.
	I think he is too.
	But I just feel like I love Gen X. Of course, I'm part of Gen X, but I just feel like we're sort of the no bullshit generation.
	We're like, just stop the nonsense.
	Just stop.
	Stop being a snowflake.
	Stop complaining about shit that doesn't matter.
	And yet we haven't crossed over to sort of, you know, true boomer territory where it's like, huh, where am I putting?
	Where's my matlock?
	If you want to hear a great defense of Gen X, I just went online a couple of days ago.
	Brett Easton Ellis, the author of American Psycho, in an interview in which he was saying why Gen X was the greatest generation and these more recent generations have ruined America.
	It's really, really funny and very, very good.
	I do want to hear that.
	And Ron DeSantis is 44, just to really scare you.
	Oh, that looks good.
	So he is older than me.
	Yeah.
	It's the way I feel when I watch NFL football.
	I'm like, oh my God, every single one of these men is younger than I am by a lot.
	Like I could be their mommy at this point.
	That's terrifying to me.
	They just always seem like such manly men.
	Like those are the big men.
	And now it's like, oh my God, there's like my little boys.
	Is this a transition to an Army Hammer story?
	I know you're desperate to get there.
	We're Army Hammer.
	But first, I want to say on State of the Union.
	Okay, I don't know why Bono's going.
	There will be a Dreamer going.
	Like if he's going to highlight immigration, and I know you guys are libertarians, so you're pro, you're more pro immigration.
	He's going to go to the dreamer, right?
	Really?
	And ignore what's happening right now at our southern border.
	I mean, this will be really interesting to listen to how he handles.
	This is a crisis in his administration, a true crisis.
	And was he going to spend time highlighting the dreamers?
	He came to New York City where I live and Moynihan sometimes lives close to.
	And Megan, you're not that far recently.
	And he didn't visit any of the migrant centers where there's, I mean, there's a lot of chaos in New York City and there's a lot of tumult and upset.
	And Eric Adams is making points out of it.
	He didn't visit that and see what's going on.
	It would seem to be a thing that a president of the United States might want to do.
	So it's to bring a DREAMer.
	And I don't like the branding of DREAMer because it just feels so cloying and manipulative.
	I'm in favor of legalizing more people and having more of a legal pathway.
	But having a Dreamer at the State of the Union is a pretty 2013 move, 2011 move.
	And also it points to the uncomfortable fact that the Democrats had majorities in both houses and the presidency the last two years.
	What were they doing for the DREAMers then?
	You know, was there some legislation that I missed about that?
	So it's a really odd thing to do when border crossings are at an all-time high and the communities on the border are really, really severely impacted.
	And the people there are changing their politics because of it, as Moynihan has found out, traveling down to southern Texas.
	So yeah, that's a pretty odd play for him to do, even if I'm more in favor of liberalized immigration.
	Let me give you the numbers and then you take it, Camille, the latest numbers, fiscal year 2022, more than 2.3 million encounters along the southern border.
	I mean, I remember when we used to freak out at the prospect of 1 million.
	That was like a lot five-alarm fire territory when we talked about it on Fox.
	More than 2.3 million last year alone.
	December numbers were 251,000 in change.
	November, 233,000 in change.
	Again, it wasn't so long ago that if it got to 100,000, we were like, oh my God.
	And even Obama administration officials were saying true crisis at those at those numbers.
	And now we're double.
	And he's going to talk about a dreamer.
	Well, I mean, at this point in the Biden presidency, you would expect the state of the union to focus on all of his various legislative accomplishments, all the things he's getting done for the American people.
	And the reality is that talking about the immigration issue and the situation at the border, which is untenable.
	I mean, even for people who are generally in favor of less restrictions, who want to see the immigration system improved in ways that make it easier for people to come here.
	I mean, we have not done a great job of that.
	I just met someone who was a Ukrainian refugee who's been in the country for a little over a year, who was desperately trying to get legal so that she could work in this country because she's been stranded here.
	She was here at the time the war started, could not go home for obvious reasons.
	And knowing people, being relatively well connected, it still took about a year for that to be straightened out.
	This seems like the sort of situation where we're committing so many resources.
	You would expect that to be fixed, but that doesn't work well.
	The inflation, the Inflation Reduction Act hasn't been terribly successful in some important respects.
	You can't say it with a straight face.
	You have to do the same thing.
	That's true.
	I mean, you're supposed to be talking about achievements here.
	And I just think that apart from some kind of like Jedi mind tricks, like the president is going to have to try and frame things in as affirmative and positive a way as possible.
	And that probably means ignoring certain things that are inconvenient because they are still conspicuously wrong and broken, especially things that he was denying for the longest time, like immigration.
	There's no crisis at the border, like inflation.
	There's no inflation.
	It's just, you know, transit.
	It'll be fine.
	It'll be fine.
	Toughen up.
	Until it's not.
	You're so right, God.
	That's such an interesting point.
	Like immigration would be on the list of ignore for the love of God, ignore.
	There's no good news there for us.
	If you're one of his advisors, and yet he appears to be getting ready to go there.
	Why else is a dreamer coming?
	You use the people in the audience that you've brought to make a point.
	So if he tries to take something close to a victory lap on immigration, it's going to be a massive story tomorrow.
	It will be one of the headlines.
	Just to offer this, because we talked about New York City and how these border state governors are sending these migrants up to the Northeast and these northernmost states, which is not great for us since we live here, but I support it because why should the southern border folks have to deal with all of these consequences?
	It's like they're trying to let everybody else feel what they feel and what they're going through.
	But this incredible report out of the New York Post talking about now how these migrants who have been brought to New York City and around are now fleeing.
	That's the word used to Canada.
	They are fleeing to Canada and we are helping them.
	National Guard soldiers have been helping distribute tickets at the Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan.
	Sorry.
	to migrants who want to head farther upstate before crossing into Canada, according to several migrants interviewed.
	And then the piece is incredible because it goes through the interviews that the Post did with migrants sitting at Penn, not Penn Station, at Port Authority.
	That's the bus station.
	There's one guy, one gal, Peruvian native Susie Sanchez Solzarno.
	She's 33.
	She had been put up at the Marriott Hotel in Queens.
	It's amazing how, I mean, like we take such good care of these folks.
	Like they come into the country illegally, but she's in a Marriott that's been using as an emergency shelter.
	But then she's heading north for greener pasture saying, quote, I wanted to live in New York because I thought it would be a better future for my daughters.
	But as the days went by, I saw insecurity, many homeless people, many people who shout and are disrespectful, and many people on drugs.
	I am going to Canada for the safety and future of my girls.
	I only ask God that everything goes well and that Canada is not like the United States.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	Depends on where you go, I guess, in Canada.
	No, I mean, she's not wrong.
	It's a pretty trenchant criticism of New York these days.
	And, you know, I have to say that I have a lot of respect for people who, I mean, it's not them that are making the decision to rack up the Hilton honors points for, you know, six months straight in a hotel, which I find incredibly bizarre.
	But the thing about it is that like when she comes here and says, I expect things to be better.
	I mean, the people that really have a hold America in a high esteem are often the ones that are showing up at, you know, the border or people that are coming to New York.
	I mean, obviously, a lot of these people that came to New York actually wanted to come to New York.
	And that was, there was an interaction for people on the southern border that either had relatives here or actually saw a better future in New York and come here and see the absolute chaos.
	But as far as politically, you know, I, like you pointed out, Megan, I think it's pretty uniform with the three of us, don't like chaos on the border, don't think the right solution to this is everybody run across at the same time, but more of a process that allows more people to work legally.
	But, you know, it's not going to be good for anyone when you see these stories in the New York Post, you see these stories in New York media where people are pulled out of hotels, shockingly, and put into other sort of centers around like the ports and New York.
	And they say, we don't want to go.
	We want to stay in the hotel and we're going to go outside and protest this.
	And the interview that I saw with the person leading the protest was so stunning to me that it's like, this is, I thought he might have been a Republican operative.
	He must have been, must have been like, because he was saying that, you know, look, I, I really, it was really comfortable in the hotel and this just isn't as comfortable.
	So we don't want to go and we're going to protest it.
	And that kind of thing is really shocking to people.
Political Grounds for Protest 00:13:13
	I've seen it.
	It's been sent around with a bunch of people that I've seen on Facebook and other things amongst sort of average Americans who don't think about immigration policy, but they're like, really?
	I mean, you came in here illegally, you're transited to New York by the government, who in most other countries in the world would transit you right back over the border and then put up in accommodations and then says, you know, this is not sustainable.
	We're going to move you somewhere else.
	And there's a protest that the conditions that you're being put in are not nice enough.
	That is really, really bad for Democrats, I think.
	Those kind of images.
	And if Republicans were smart, they would, they would actually exploit that and say that this is this is not sustainable.
	And people are getting very comfortable with the current regime, which is no longer sustainable.
	Did you see that one of the reasons why I was just going to say a friend of mine who's an MSNBC lover, who I saw in Manhattan not long ago, was outraged about this.
	What they were saying, can you believe these migrants who are protesting the fact that we're putting them up on our dollar at these three-star hotels?
	I mean, these are nice hotels that they're at in Hell's Kitchen and elsewhere.
	It's not like luxury.
	They're not at the writs, but they're doing just fine.
	And they're pissed.
	They don't want to go to the centers.
	And by the way, who was at the centers before?
	Abused women.
	We're throwing the abused women out of the shelters so we can house these people and they're still mad.
	Go ahead, Matt.
	One of the reasons why they don't want to go to the centers, specifically in Red Hook, which is not far from where I live yet.
	It's not where I live.
	Red Hook is famously isolated.
	It's kind of hard to get to Manhattan from Red Hook unless you take a weird IKEA ferry.
	And they don't want to do it because they work illegally as bicycle messengers on those little electric e-bikes delivering crap to Kat Temp at all hours of the day.
	And they don't want to have the extra commute hassle.
	Yeah, that's not going to be a good advertisement for anybody.
	It's not a great look to have a bunch of usually working age males alone in often cases, congregated at places and then not either allowed to work or not allowed to work legally.
	It's just a recipe for disaster.
	And yeah, I mean, if I came to Port Authority as my first look in America, I think I'd go to, I might go to Venezuela after that.
	It is, it's pretty trim right now.
	It is America's Venezuela at the moment.
	It's not like seeing Lady Liberty as you come across the ocean.
	That is like, that's a beautiful moment that people can remember forever.
	Port Authority is like, oh my God, help me.
	Just to put some numbers on it again, as of Wednesday, there were an estimated almost 44,000 plus migrants had flooded into New York City since the spring, with more than 28,000 living in 83 hotels and five humanitarian emergency response and relief centers, which are basically hotels, along with the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.
	I mean, it's bad and it's getting worse.
	So we'll see what the president has to say about that.
	Okay, a couple other notations on the guest list for tonight.
	Paul Pelosi, we all know why he's there.
	Republican right-wing rhetoric leads to danger.
	That's what it's going to be.
	The guy who loved BLM and he loved LGBTQ and he was a nudist all over San Francisco, ultimately found his way to QAnon and therefore it's all the right wing's fault.
	The right wing needs to be silenced or we're going to have more Paul Pelosi's, something like that.
	But then here's this one.
	The mother and stepfather of Tyree Nichols, the 29-year-old unarmed black man who died in Memphis at the hands of those five cops.
	Here's what I will say.
	Everybody was outraged about that video.
	It was disgusting.
	But when I saw that his parents were being invited to the State of the Union, I thought, that's not a good idea.
	You know why?
	Because it's still the United States of America and those cops are on trial.
	They're facing second-degree murder charges.
	And it's just, it's not time yet.
	Let's wait until we have a conviction, until they've been given due process.
	And we've had the jury system.
	Like, look what happened in Kyle Rittenhouse.
	You had Joe Biden running around calling him a white supremacist.
	That specific charge was never sustained against Kyle Rittenhouse, nor were the criminal charges against him sustained.
	He rushed to judgment and convicted this guy in the court of public opinion before his trial.
	And I agree what we saw on that tape is horrible.
	And these guys have been disciplined already by their department.
	They've been fired.
	But, and if that's all that had happened, I think we'd be on safer ground.
	But the fact that they're facing criminal charges says to me, the parents should not go to the State of the Union.
	They should not be held up in this way.
	We should let that play out to preserve the integrity of the process.
	Am I wrong?
	It certainly feels like it feels like an odd choice, especially considering the circumstances.
	I mean, one, in the president's defense, I suppose, you know, Terry Nichols is dead.
	He was killed and the circumstances seem disconcerting.
	So expressing publicly your support for the family in this difficult time.
	Okay.
	But as you pointed out, and I think appropriately, we don't know all of the things that happened here.
	We don't know what an investigation might yield.
	My suspicion is that we probably won't learn anything that makes us anything less than sympathetic towards the family.
	But that said, given what this family has been through and the loss that they've suffered and the fact that there is this massive criminal investigation and prosecution that is about to get underway, I'm not sure I understand why they would want to participate in an explicitly kind of political public event like this.
	The State of the Union is not kind of neutral ground.
	It is the president getting uproarious applause from his side and taking shots at the other side on occasion.
	It just seems like a kind of odd fit for an event like this, certainly to me anyways.
	There used to be a tradition.
	I spend too much time reading old State of the Union addresses and comparing comps.
	No, it's fun.
	Everybody sent the flowered bus to go get Matt.
	It's not fun, Matt.
	Richard Nixon in 1971 promised he was going to cure cancer.
	I find that fascinating.
	Then look, Joe Biden could just control V some of this stuff and probably will without taking credit for it, judging on his past history.
	But a tradition up until some point kind of recently was always that the president was talking about issues that had something to do with the federal government, including the way it's operated, something to do with the executive branch.
	He's extolling Congress that maybe the legislative branch should pay attention to these issues that he finds to be a priority and this type of stuff.
	And also what's the report on foreign policy and the things that the executive, the chief executive has kind of direct impact over.
	So what would that look like if he was being serious about being head of the executive branch and the Department of Justice in this case or in other cases?
	It would be something to do, in my civil libertarian heart, would be, oh, okay, we just exonerated or released from jail.
	Actually, Donald Trump did this, someone who shouldn't be rotting in jail for the rest of her life because she violated a drug policy that we have since backtracked from, this type of thing.
	Show apology or show kind of empathy for people that the federal government has wronged in the criminal justice system, or say something very, very specific about how either the enforcement of laws and the priority of it or possible legislation that you could pass would have some positive impact on the way that the criminal justice system is administered in this country.
	And I'm afraid that none of this is like that anymore.
	It's just like this generated headlines.
	I'm going to deliver sympathy for it and make a spectacle of it.
	And that's not really, we should think more about the way governance is done in this country instead of just having this instinct to play politics anytime there's a camera crew somewhere.
	Although you mentioning that reminds me to jump in first and then I'll give you a quick meal.
	But how about the fact that Corey Bush, Corey Bush is inviting as her guest, she's member of the squad for people not familiar, Democrat.
	She's inviting as her guest, Michael Brown Sr., The father of Michael Brown saying the police, she said this to playbook, the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014 is what propelled me and many others into lives dedicated to building a world where Mike would still be here with us.
	A world where his life could not be taken from him.
	A world where Tyree Nichols and the thousands of other black people killed by police could live long, healthy lives full of joy.
	And this is so, this is such a lie.
	It's a lie to bring.
	The father of Michael Brown, who a black attorney general under a black president concluded had charged at the officer that he was having the confrontation with and that his life was taken, sadly but justifiably, by that cop who everybody wrongly said had his hands up and was saying, don't shoot.
	That was a lie, and even very well-known black commentators have come out since Jonathan Cape Part saying, i'm sorry, that was a lie and I shouldn't have pushed it.
	I should have been more questioning.
	By the way, Eric Holder's conclusions was based on the testimony they they were based on the testimony of five black witnesses who watched it like to now.
	Like what is she doing?
	She's just.
	She never misses a chance to race bait.
	Sorry, go ahead, Camille.
	No, I mean, the conflation of all of these victims as if they are one and the same case is like it's old hat at this point, but it is also extremely disappointing and distressing.
	If you're someone who actually wants to see reform happen, it's.
	It simply isn't the case that doing this has been enormously successful and, as Matt was talking, I remember the George Floyd Um Criminal Justice Reform Act that was.
	Or the George Floyd Policing Act that Joe Biden was pushing during his 2021 state of THE Union um, and at that point he called for us to pass this next month and of course it didn't get passed um and it is back in the news again.
	So I suspect, to the extent there is this kind of activity taking place, it may get another mention, um in the context of of this case but, you know, would it have actually kept Terry Nichols alive?
	I don't know um, would it uh have had any impact in the situation involving Mike Brown?
	I think what probably would have had more of an impact for Mike Brown towards his advantage is, you know, not walking in the middle of the street and not slugging a police officer who tries to stop him, like that would probably have saved his life.
	And talking about things honestly and candidly and respecting facts is important, and I I certainly think it's incumbent upon lawmakers to do that is the flattening of all of these into one case is what makes people not trust both the media and the narrative in general about police violence.
	Because if you, if you flatten, you know, the Tyree Nichols thing, which is an absolutely hideous tragedy and you're right Megan, I mean, that's obviously prejudicial in the way that the president is actually bringing uh his parents.
	I understand the instinct, but I don't trust the instinct.
	I understand the instinct because I feel terrible for these people, but I don't trust the instinct when there's somebody who's there um, anytime something like this happens to make political hay of it.
	And one thing we're forgetting about was that in Kenosha, Joe Biden visited the family of Jacob Blake.
	Jacob Blake was armed and we don't remember that Jacob Blake was armed.
	We found out at the beginning that Mike Brown had his hands up.
	That wasn't true.
	We found it being the Jacob Blake thing, he was going to assist somebody.
	He was literally there to break up a fight.
	That was the initial story.
	Turns out that he had like a no-contact order with a woman that he sexually assaulted.
	And he was armed with a knife because there was one angle where you actually saw that.
	But Joe Biden went and visited the police because the narrative was being served, and the narrative is the most important thing.
	So if you flatten all of these things, and we saw this, and I know that you talked about it, Megan, after the Tyree Nichols thing happened, the number of people, I mean, we shouldn't be surprised after, you know, the Atlanta thing, the Colorado shootings, the Atlanta shootings, the Pulse Nightclub, that it doesn't, the truth of this doesn't matter, provided it serves the narrative.
	And the Tyree Nichols thing was just, guys, you can allow this to be a hideous miscarriage of justice from what we can see right now.
	I don't know what happened.
	And, you know, a lot of these facts are not known and things change.
	But that can be true without race being involved.
	But that's not what people want in certain segments of the media is to focus on this.
	So we have five black cops that are arrested, fired, and the number of stories, tweets, you know, things that I saw on social media recycled from CNN and MSNBC, et cetera, focused on the race of the victim, but not the perpetrator, because that wasn't important because they had inhaled the fumes of white supremacy and it had overtaken them.
	So these kind of stuff.
	Evan Jones openly saying now you only look at the race of the victim.
	That's it to determine whether it's racism or white supremacy.
The Balloon Awareness Gap 00:09:37
	Like, what?
	How does that work?
	That's going to be a hard thing to adjudicate in the future then.
	I mean, it's everything then.
	Wow.
	Right.
	It's absurd.
	I mean, so basically, whenever somebody who is black gets killed at the hands of police, or I suppose anybody else, it's racism.
	That's it.
	It's a black person.
	They died in the hands of police.
	It's racism.
	Like that thinking people understand there is more to the inquiry than that.
	And this case is a good example of it.
	You know, we'll find out what was wrong with those cops.
	I'm going to go ahead and venture.
	It's not the white supremacy built into the system of policing.
	One of the two of them had only been cops for a couple of years that led to this.
	In any event, okay.
	So a lot more to get to.
	There's so much news.
	We're going to touch on Chinese spy balloon.
	We're going to touch on Tom Brady.
	And I really want to have a moment about what the hell's happening with Madonna.
	More with the fifth column right after this quick break.
	All right, guys.
	So the Chinese spy balloon, it's down.
	The Chinese are purporting to be very angry that we overreacted and shot down their civilian weather balloon that was not doing anything nefarious whatsoever.
	Joe Biden looks a little feckless in having said, I told him to shoot it down.
	And I was told, no, not until it gets over the Atlantic Ocean, which, of course, he's the commander in chief.
	So all these things are percolating.
	And at the same time, his administration is going, Trump did it.
	Trump told Trump.
	They had three balloons.
	They had two balloons.
	They had balloons, just like we did.
	Then the Trump administration official started denying it.
	All the Intel people were like, I would have known.
	I would have known.
	No, Now it looks like maybe there were balloons during Trump, but we just didn't know about it because the guy who runs NORAD, you know, I know NORAD from War Games.
	Remember that whole thing?
	Yes.
	That guy is out there saying, basically, the way I read it is, shit, there were some that we missed.
	Here's a little of that soundbite, too.
	Every day, as a NORAD commander, it's my responsibility to detect threats to North America.
	I will tell you that we did not detect those threats.
	And that's a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.
	Wow.
	Domain awareness gap.
	That's a good one.
	That's the most stoned-sounding NORAD director I've heard in a long time.
	Every day, it's our duty.
	Where am I?
	I'm going to start saying I have a domain awareness gap when I don't know something.
	Like with your wife, you know, you do it like with your wife.
	Honey, you said you were going to do the laundry.
	Don't make a woman.
	You could blame me.
	It's not my fault.
	So that's disturbing.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So thank you to the Chinese for helping us become more aware of where we have these gaps.
	But if you were wondering how it was that the Trump administration didn't know about the balloon and, you know, then the Biden administration found out about it after they took office, look no further.
	Corrine Jean-Pierre has the answer.
	Listen.
	How is it possible that this administration discovered at least three previous balloons that flew over the U.S. under the previous administration, but Trump officials didn't know it was happening?
	Yeah, so look, I think that, and we've talked about this before, about how when the PRC government surveillance balloons transited the continental U.S. briefly, at least three times, as you just mentioned during the president's prior administration.
	And once that we know of the beginning of this administration's, but never for this duration of time, as we know, this information was discovered prior to the administration left.
	But the intelligence community, as I said, is prepared to give briefings to key officials.
	But this is something, this is something, sorry, post, but this is something that they were not aware of, as we just laid out.
	Got it?
	What?
	Is that cleared up for you?
	Has anyone ever seen the great old SNL sketch, The Chris Farley show, where he interviews Paul McCartney?
	That's what it's like.
	He's like, you know, like, you were like in the Beatles.
	That was a lot of words.
	And I literally have no idea what she just said.
	No idea.
	Did anyone, Matt, Camille?
	But we've been talking about it.
	We've talked about it before.
	She always says that at the beginning of her answers when she's panicking.
	We've talked about this.
	We've gone over this.
	We've briefed on this.
	Like, that's her placeholder for, I don't know what the hell I'm about to say.
	I have no idea how to answer this.
	That was truly incomprehensible.
	The tell is usually the word look.
	When you start that way, when you say look, that means you have no idea what you're talking about.
	But the thing I got is that there were some trans balloons.
	She said something about trans balloons.
	That's what we have.
	Who knows?
	I don't understand the culture anymore.
	They transited.
	She said transited.
	She held on transfer because she couldn't figure out that word.
	But I did see her again.
	This is my going back to cable news.
	I saw her on this morning and I was like, man, this woman, like, it just seems like she's stoned all the time.
	Like, she has no idea what she's talking about.
	Like the NORAD guy.
	The NORAD guy.
	At least he had some fun little phrase that he introduced to the English language.
	When I see her on TV, I'm just like, isn't the one thing that you have to do in this job is to lie well?
	That's the only thing you have to do.
	You can lie, but you have to do it well.
	She's in a panic.
	She didn't know the answer.
	And whenever she doesn't know the answer and it's not in her little note card, you know, binder, she's in a full free fall.
	And we all have to experience that with her.
	It's very uncomfortable.
	But on the subject of balloon gate, what do we make of where this is landed?
	Because, you know, it's not exactly a spike the ball moment for Joe Biden on the day of his state of the union.
	Yes, they're like, oh, I think he's going to spin it.
	I think it won't go into Camille's ignore, ignore column.
	I think he's probably going to sort of try to take a victory lap on it, like brought it down, kept everybody safe.
	You're welcome.
	Joe Biden talking about balloons, though, like brings up to mind that Disney movie with the old guy and the house going away.
	Yeah, I don't think that's the comparison that you want.
	Joe Biden talking about the balloons and now who keep us safe from the balloons.
	I tried really hard to care about this because I don't like the CCP.
	I don't want them to have any victories or anything, but there are satellites and they're up there and they use those to look at us.
	And the balloon floating overhead, I mean, I don't like it.
	We should do something about it.
	But I can't get excited about this.
	If they did ignore it, it wouldn't shock me.
	I think that what this whole thing proves is that we needed the balloon.
	America needed to argue about the balloon.
	We need like the congresspeople from North Dakota saying, you know, my territory is unsafe.
	We got to shoot down the balloon.
	We just needed a balloon to get excited about.
	If we had a really good press secretary, she would be out there saying, look, wasn't that fun?
	Didn't we have fun?
	That was pretty great.
	Did you see that picture?
	It looked all weird.
	That was fun.
	Yeah, she's lying.
	He's taking the pictures of like the roof of Stuckeys.
	Nobody has fine.
	But like, honestly, this is the great non-story because it's not Trump's fault and it's not Biden's fault.
	There are balloons that the Chinese have, like, they have, maybe they have great balloon technology and we don't know about it.
	Okay.
	We then lunched in that little out and they shot it down with an F-22, which, by the way, what did that sidewinder missile cost?
	What, like $70 million?
	They couldn't do it if you couldn't get us out any other way.
	It was kind of cool because somebody posted a video on Twitter from like Hilton Head in South Carolina of the balloon being shot out of the sky.
	And that was our first victory since the Korean War, which wasn't even the victory is debatable, given that we have no idea how much information about us was transmitted back to the Chinese.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I feel like it is a deal.
	I really wish they'd taken it down earlier before it got all the information on us.
	And who knows?
	And there's a reason the Chinese already have the satellite.
	There's a reason they sent the weather balloon.
	I think they believe they could obtain more info.
	And the experts are saying, yes, they could have.
	Getting down a little lower is helpful.
	Meanwhile, you got it like part of me almost admires the damn chutzpah of the Chinese because not only are they playing the victim here, you know, like, how dare you?
	How dare you?
	But there's two.
	There's another one, one down over Latin America right now.
	They're like, weather there too.
	Weather.
	Yeah.
	The weather, the wind.
	Like they just never admit it.
	Screw you.
	You don't know anything.
	That was totally legit civilian aircraft.
	That's all they had to do.
	That's all they had to do.
	Just we don't know what you're talking about.
	Balloons?
	Balloons?
	That doesn't make any sense.
	Don't touch it in Nicaraguan Air Force.
	It's like, yeah, they're not going to do anything.
	But it is, it is, I thought I saw that again in America's greatest newspaper, the New York Post.
	I saw that headline that they were mad about this, that we shot down their balloon that was hovering over South Carolina.
	I'm sorry, what do you expect?
	Like, no, no, that's our balloon.
	Just don't.
	That's air rights.
	We have the air rights up there.
	I suspect that if there was a balloon hovering over Beijing, they'd probably shoot it down too.
	So come on, guys.
	I like Matt's idea of like Kareem Jump here just bringing us all together on the balloon somehow.
	If I had been her advisor, I would have been like, here's your first line.
	Go out there and be like, F the balloon.
	F.
	We won.
	We won.
	Like the newspaper article, we won.
Polls Show Vulnerable President 00:09:02
	It would finally bring Joe Biden's approval rating above 50%.
	You know, yeah.
	Can we spend one second on that?
	I just actually had my team pull the polling because the polling this week and lately, oh my God, it's you would have thought after the midterms, things would have gone up for him.
	You would have thought that, you know, in terms of, do they want him to run again?
	Do Democrats want him to run again?
	No, you would have been wrong.
	Washington Post ABC News poll.
	62% of all Americans say they would be disappointed or angry if Biden were to be reelected.
	Not just to say angry, angry.
	42% approval rating, terrible.
	58% of Democrats want to nominate someone else.
	I mean, that's, that's a big number, a big, big number.
	58%.
	It comes on the heels of another poll in which that was, this is AP polls that said 22% of adults say he should run again.
	That's down from 29 before the midterms.
	37% of Democrats, so it kind of mirrors this poll I just said, want him to seek a second term, right?
	And all the rest do not.
	So you got 37% who want him to seek a second term.
	And this one says 58% of Democrats want somebody else to run.
	So those dovetail nicely.
	They don't want him.
	The Dems don't want him.
	The country doesn't want him.
	Oh, and by the way, that Washington Post poll shows him losing to Trump, both with likely voters and with registered voters.
	Wow.
	What do you think?
	It's surprising.
	I mean, it's surprising, especially because, I mean, it's the person of Joe Biden is what it is.
	I mean, we elect presidents on personalities so much.
	And the fact that Joe Biden and the media didn't want to touch this and didn't want to talk about, you know, the cognitive question, but it's apparent to everybody that I talk to and everybody I know, people who aren't interested in politics, they make jokes about it, right?
	But you have a president here who can plausibly say, we just got through a pandemic.
	And let's be totally honest.
	And I'm not saying the presidency, I'm saying this.
	The job numbers are very good.
	These are good job numbers.
	And, you know, he was being saddled with very high gas prices.
	Again, this is not his doing, but the gas prices are down.
	And one would imagine that there would be some goodwill that voters would extend to him because of those two numbers, right?
	I mean, the feelings of insecurity are still quite high.
	And that's, again, it's a perception thing that he's losing on that front.
	But you would expect at least a little bounce, but it's not only not a little bounce.
	When you have people in your own party who don't want you to run for reelection, good Lord.
	I mean, I'm thinking, you know, LBJ in 1968.
	I mean, that I won't accept the nomination.
	But I mean, it's absolutely baffling to me that it's that bad.
	I think it's just a tool to defeat Donald Trump, right?
	He was a normie Democrat who wasn't talking the usual, at this point, really crazy crap of whatever Beto O'Rourke was talking about and some of the other candidates on the trail.
	He seemed like he was more centristy and kind of, we know Joe, he's full of malarkey, but that's what he does.
	He's a stock character.
	Once you don't worry about Trump winning again, his utility vanishes.
	And you notice that he's old and out of touch and repeats the same stories over and over again.
	The only way I think that, and of course, you should never make predictions in politics, but I'm going to anyways.
	I think the only chance that Biden would have to win re-election is if the Republican Party was stupid enough to appoint or to nominate Donald Trump.
	So I think that means they're going to, because if Republicans have a chance to be really stupid, they're like, I can, you mean, I can be really stupid?
	Let's do it.
	Take it.
	Well, the lack of actual Republican candidates who've already declared their intention to run at this stage is actually a little bit weird.
	Like I would expect there to be slightly more action.
	You have Nikki Haley, who it sounds like is planning to announce formally very soon.
	But the only person who has taken to the field to say, yeah, I'm going to be the guy is Donald Trump at this point.
	No, no, remember John Bolton?
	Remember Boynhan?
	Oh, John Bolton.
	That's right.
	We talked about it.
	How could I forget?
	Boynians say, good afternoon, Bangkok is where he announced it.
	Yes.
	He was like in a library in Scotland and he's like, I think I'm right.
	It's like four people.
	They're like, running for what?
	But I don't want to stop going.
	Yeah, that was, that was, is that official?
	Is he made that official?
	Yes, it's official, my friend.
	God, keep up.
	Oh, God.
	I don't know why you're not getting jokes.
	So we've got two.
	I got those too.
	And you would think there'd be more, but you're, but what?
	Trump is just taking up all the all the room.
	It's not clear.
	Either that or Republicans just don't want to be president.
	I mean, you've got a incumbent president who is vulnerable, at least with respect to the perception of him, who doesn't really seem to be able to move the needle in his direction.
	And where are the Republicans eager to take advantage of this and run and sort of seize the mantle of the party?
	It's just not clear.
	I mean, the only guy is there's some guy down in Florida who, as right now, has yet to declare his intention to run, although everyone kind of wants him to.
	And I think also, Camille, that it's a it's a function of they don't want to make this same mistake as last time against Trump.
	Trump won because the field was crowded last time, among other reasons, but it definitely contributed to it.
	You kind of want to consolidate around one or two people and give it a good run.
	And DeSantis looks strong.
	He's doing a lot of stuff I don't agree with, but he looks strong and he's making, he's doing the things that you would expect someone would do to try to compete in a Republican presidential primary.
	Let's put it that way.
	And has a pretty good record on COVID and the economy down in Florida that I think has a chance and on education as well, that has a chance to resonate with people.
	So I would suspect that outside your odd John Bolton, Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeos or whoever, that people are expecting DeSantis to run and they're hoping that he beats Trump so that they don't have to.
	Yeah, exactly.
	They all want to be the last man standing because you can win against him in a two-way race, but not in a multiple candidate field.
	By the way, Biden would be 86 if he were to win a second term at the end of that second term.
	He would be 86.
	He's already the oldest president to hold office.
	Most Americans, according to these polls, believe Biden has not created more jobs, not improved roads and bridges, not made electric cards, more cars, more affordable.
	41% of those polled by Washington Post, ABC News say they are not as well off financially since Biden became president.
	That is the highest percentage to report such a sentiment under any president since ABC News began polling this in 1986.
	So yes, he had a good jobs report this week, but the bottom line is people aren't feeling it.
	And he can get up there and spin all he wants tonight.
	But either you feel it or you don't.
	And the words spoken from a lectern by a president in a whisper, in a shout, shaming you or not, aren't going to change it.
	They're not going to move those poll numbers either.
	Yeah.
	And I mean, inflation is the issue that I think that Democrats would be very silly to say, well, and I've seen this quite frequently, where they're saying, well, you know, the rate of inflation has slowed.
	That's not inflation has been reversed in any way.
	The rate of inflation is slowing.
	If you go to the grocery store, you're still seeing a visual, and it is very, very clear that things are more expensive than they were 20 years ago.
	When someone asked you that poll question or 20 years ago, two years ago, when they asked you that question, it's in everybody's mind that like meat, for instance, is outrageously expensive.
	Eggs, and now, I mean, there's avion flu, there's the war in Ukraine.
	There's all these factors.
	And I'm not blaming anyone or anything, but I'm just saying visually, when you see that stuff, that's when you answer that question.
	I think that, you know, life is not as easy as it was in sort of Trump times or even before that.
	It reminds me of like somebody, your boss says to you, I'm going to dock your pay.
	I'm going to start docking your pay by, you know, 15%.
	And then six months into it, he says, I'm going to dock it by 12%.
	Don't you feel happy?
	You're like, no, I'm still upset.
	I want my full paycheck.
	I'm having difficulty making ends meet.
	And anyway, we'll see and hear how he spins tonight.
	Somebody joked online that maybe when Nancy Pelosi was behind Donald Trump for that one state of the union and tearing up documents, it was actually Joe Biden's classified documents from his earlier time as vice president.
	We'll see whether Kevin McCarthy has any antics tonight behind Joe Biden or whether he's just a polite, classy guy.
	I have my own guess on how that's going to go.
	Stand by because we got to get to Tom Brady and his underwear, Madonna's face, and they mentioned Army Hammer.
Hormones and Early Puberty 00:15:15
	This is a fascinating case, legally and otherwise.
	We'll get into it.
	Okay, so big dust up in Oklahoma.
	Yesterday, these videos are all over Twitter and elsewhere today as protesters.
	Did you know that there's now Trans Lives Matters?
	We had Black Lives Matters for a while, BLM.
	Now there's TLM, Trans Lives Matter.
	They are protesting on Oklahoma State Capitol as of yesterday because they went into the interior rotunda and got, it reminded me of those Wisconsin union protests back in like 2011.
	It's kind of like scenes, those scenes reminded me of that.
	Inside, very upset about a, there's a couple of new bills that are being proposed by the Republican governor there, Kevin Stitt, as well as others in Oklahoma.
	So there's a bunch on the table, all of which these protesters object to.
	I'll give you a little flavor.
	Can we turn the sound on on these tapes or no?
	But so you can see what's happening.
	And for the listening audience, I mean, it's wall-to-wall people inside of the Oklahoma State Capitol building, standing room-only crowd on the balconies and elsewhere, chanting at the lawmakers.
	Here are the things.
	All right, that's enough of that.
	Here are the things that they are proposing.
	Okay, I can kill the sound.
	Hello, my people.
	That they are protesting.
	There's one proposal to ban state funds from being used for any sort of gender reassignment care or surgery for kids under 18.
	I'm totally in favor of that.
	One would ban anyone under 18 from receiving gender reassignment surgery or, I think, hormone treatment.
	One would raise that age to 26, saying you shouldn't be doing either of those things on kids until they're basically fully cooked, until their brains are fully, you know, have reached adulthood.
	And a doctor who does it would face criminal prosecution and lose his license or her license.
	And then they're kind of all over the board.
	One would lower the age to 21.
	So it's either at 18 at 21 or at 26.
	Let's ban kids from receiving hormones and or surgeries and so on.
	This is obviously one of the most conservative states in the union, but it's not the only state pushing legislation like this.
	And I got to tell you, just yesterday on this show, we had a detransitioner, Chloe, who thought she was trans as of around 11 or 12.
	By age 15, a doctor performed a double mastectomy on this girl.
	She was put on hormones, of course, cross-gender hormones and so on.
	And by 16, she realized, oh my God, wait, I'm a girl.
	I'm never going to be able to breastfeed my future child.
	What have I done to myself?
	Why didn't anybody stop me?
	Why didn't my doctor say, wait, could be something else?
	She was on the spectrum, is on the spectrum, and had signals from that misinterpreted.
	And now she's angry.
	She's upset.
	She's only 18 years old.
	And she was saying, I firmly believe that these things, the hormones and the surgeries, should not be made available to minors who are not in a position to really understand what they're doing to themselves.
	What do you guys make of it?
	I want to congratulate you, Megan.
	We've tried as a podcast, as individuals, to not talk about this for six and a half years.
	Finally, succeeded in making us, but Camille, I think you're about to say something.
	So, what were you going to say?
	Yeah, so maybe you have.
	Yeah, thank you.
	And it's not entirely true that we have to talk about this.
	We've got Jesse on the podcast, and we talked about it.
	Yeah, he's great.
	You know, I know, and it was uncomfortable then, too.
	I like to go to the place that hurts.
	Yeah, but this is this is this is the thing.
	I mean, it seems to me that it probably shouldn't be so uncomfortable.
	I mean, what makes it uncomfortable is the rather insane culture that we live in at the moment.
	Everyone, everyone I've ever talked to has sympathy for people with gender dysphoria.
	They're compassionate towards them, they're concerned about it.
	In general, the people who I talk to who are thoughtful and who are concerned about young people receiving medical treatment in these contexts are generally worried that young people will be forced into or pressured into, or even in general, with a bunch of good people surrounding, make a decision that they might come to regret years later.
	There are all sorts of prohibitions on things that children can do.
	You can't, I'm not even sure if it's a 13 or 14-year-old, if you can go get your ears pierced on your own.
	Maybe at 16, you're not able to do that.
	You're certainly not able to drink or buy cigarettes.
	So, to the extent that there's some conversation about whether or not, you know, to limit state funds that are being directed towards this or something else, there are genuinely thoughtful conversations that could be had about the risks and the benefit and the concerns that one might have.
	And we forego all of that in service of kind of the kind of activists insisting that anyone who is expressing concern about this or asking questions is by definition transphobic.
	I think that is incredibly unhelpful.
	And I think blanket prohibitions are almost certainly unhelpful too, depending on the specific things that we're talking about.
	But again, it's just there, there seems to be no willingness to allow people to try and have careful, thoughtful conversations about this, appreciate that in general, we all want the best for one another and want the best for young people.
	And that's where I think most of these conversations are coming from.
	I think there are very few people who are genuinely bigoted and who just don't care about trans people or don't want to believe that trans people exist or some of their lives matter absurd mischaracterizations of the position that I think a lot of sensible and reasonable people have, where they're just uncertain about some of these practices.
	I got to say, I think that's a parent of a 14-year-old girl.
	The idea that she would have any idea about making a life decision that major is just ridiculous.
	Just ridiculous.
	If she like rolled down here and say, Yeah, I'm going to, can you chop these off and call me Dale from now on?
	I would laugh at her.
	That's a horse.
	Of course not.
	Dale's a good name.
	What a name to choose to be more creative.
	I mean, Dale.
	That's where we draw the line.
	That's my new pseudonym.
	No, I don't believe in any of these.
	I used to be open-minded to this.
	And having done a lot of shows on this now, I am 100% against cross-gender hormones and surgical treatments for minors.
	It's they are too young.
	There is no such thing as informed consent.
	And disturbingly, nine times out of 10, you have an activist or ideological parent or doctor, either the surgeon or the psychiatrist or both/slash therapist who are pushing it on them as opposed to digging deeper to find out: are there other root causes that have led you to feel like you're in quote the wrong body?
	It's the system is not trustworthy.
	And therefore, it, no, I don't trust it to handle any children, any child whatsoever.
	18 is the minimum.
	I mean, I could be persuaded on the 26-year-old thing, but for sure, 18.
	Well, you can talk about this and have an opinion on it because you have done a number of shows and devoted a lot of attention to it.
	The thing about it is, I hear people talking about it.
	And one of the reasons that I refrain from talking about it is actually not because, well, I shouldn't say not only because I'm terrified of some of the people in the activist class there.
	It's a much more, shall we say, vigorous activist class for that particular issue.
	If you can look at people like J.K. Rowling, who from the pre-Web them, Moynihan, we need to fight them.
	We don't speak for trans people.
	Like your trans viewer that you told me about last time, that's a great person.
	I'm sure that's a lovely person.
	I just this person is not represented by those lunatics.
	No, I mean, I understand that, but for me, when it comes to the specific things about it, and you know, look, maybe you're right.
	Maybe I should get educated on this, but you know, you have a lot of stuff to pay attention to, is that it is actually a scientific and a medical question, too.
	I mean, the instinct that one has is that as somebody with an 11-year-old daughter, you know, much like Matt, I mean, she can't make any decisions about anything, much less something that would be something that you'd carry with her for the rest of her life in such a series as like, I'm changing my gender.
	That seems wild to me.
	But, you know, when somebody says, let's ban X, Y, and Z, there is, and as you pointed out, Megan, there are medical issues here when you're talking about hormones and the rest of what the side effects of these hormones are and everything.
	So, yeah, that's the thing that one has to kind of know about it before they start talking about it.
	And people tend not to.
	But I saw an interesting study the other day, and I can't remember who tweeted it, but it was about college campuses and whether people felt free about discussing certain issues on campus.
	And some of them are fine.
	And the one that people felt, you know, the least free to discuss was trans issues by a lot.
	It's very successful.
	It's very successful.
	I mean, you've seen what I thought was.
	It's wonderful to be on the other side.
	I want you guys to know, and I want the world.
	It's wonderful to not be afraid of those people.
	Do not be afraid of those people.
	We've had trans people on this show, absolutely lovely people who do not feel that those people represent them, who feel that those people are giving trans people a bad name.
	So screw the activists.
	I don't listen to them and neither should you.
	Sorry.
	Okay.
	Go ahead.
	Go ahead, Moynihan.
	Yeah, I just lost my job, Megan.
	I don't know if you're talking about it.
	I'm kind of kind of rough.
	I don't know if I need any more money.
	Yeah, no, I mean, honestly, though, this is the thing.
	I mean, I'm talking the activists in this particular issue are so deranged in the way they treat people and the way they try to destroy people's lives that when I first saw the J.K. Rowling thing, I thought this was going to be pretty fringe.
	And then when I saw everybody who's doing, I think it was HBO that had some, you know, Harry Potter anniversary thing and didn't invite her to the roundtable.
	Yeah, if you had asked any people, like ask everybody in America, do a poll of Americans, people over the age of 18, actually try over the age of 30 would be interesting.
	If her initial tweet about what it is to be a woman is true or false, you would get a 94% hit rate.
	So in that sense, Megan, you're right.
	I mean, I mean, everyone, except for this very vocal and very loud minority, has a kind of uniform opinion about this.
	And there's nuances to it all, right?
	But it is terrifying the way people who, I mean, particularly in England where you can get arrested for an errant tweet.
	So that stuff is kind of scary too.
	Well, I'll tell you this.
	If you wait, I mean, the people who advocate, oh, they say they have to have it right now.
	Of course, they always drop that or they'll commit suicide line on you.
	And Chloe yesterday was saying that was used on her parents too, and it was BS.
	And she objected to that language.
	And so did the others in this new Daily Caller documentary called Damaged, which is worth your time.
	It's only an hour and it highlights 5D transitioners.
	But in any event, if you wait past 18, no, you can't forego puberty if you wait.
	Of course, you're going to hit puberty before 18.
	However, I'm sorry, but the most famous trans person in America after probably Laverne Cox and Caitlin Jenner is this Dylan Mulvaney, who is everywhere, who was a biological man up until I think less than two years ago, and then decided that Dylan was going to be a girl, in Dylan's words.
	And this is Dylan at the Grammys because Dylan interviewed Joe Biden.
	Look, now this is a biological man right here who just had the facial feminization surgery.
	I don't know what else Dylan has done, but this person did not have hormones before 18.
	They did not have sex reassignment surgery before age 18.
	And so the whole argument of like, you've got to get into the body, you've got to forestall male puberty and all that.
	No, you actually don't.
	Modern medicine has come so far that you can do that to a biological man.
	Most people wouldn't even know that that's a biological man.
	So you don't have to get it while the kid is still a minor and as you point out, you know, can't make any decisions on their own.
	I see that they're doing this with kids in the single digits.
	They're now putting them who face early puberty on hormone blockers or puberty blockers so that they can, I mean, I was thinking about this, guys, just as a transition.
	We were playing the game five seconds.
	Do you know that game, five seconds, is a board game?
	It's very fun if you have kids.
	And basically the way it works is you've got five seconds to pull the card.
	I think it's a British game.
	We might have gotten it overseas because it's got a bunch of London references in there, UK references that none of us knows.
	And you've got five seconds to name three things, like name five things you see in the daytime sky, right?
	And you're like, oh, a bird, whatever.
	My kids had a dispute over whether the moon was there.
	Anyway, so I said to my nine-year-old, he got the question, name three things with a tail, which is pretty easy, but in five seconds, the pressure's on.
	And my nine-year-old, who could be transitioned in half the states in our union, said, bunny, rabbit, snake.
	Now, my point is, they cannot be trusted.
	And they're not good decision makers.
	And we've lost our minds as a society in even talking about this at those ages.
	You know, I seem to remember that there was a time not so long ago where the national trans conversation, when someone would suggest, well, you know, children are being transitioned.
	There are some of these hospitals that are performing these procedures on children, where someone would say, no, no, that isn't happening anyway.
	Yeah, that's not a thing.
	And seamlessly, like we've become, we were at the place where, okay, well, they're going to prohibit it for children.
	And it's like, no, no, no.
	Oh, my God.
	It's an outrage.
	This can't possibly happen.
	And I've seen this happen in a couple of places where the public debate and the public rhetoric seems to suggest one thing and you're assured that this thing isn't happening ever anywhere.
	But then it seems that, no, it is in fact happening.
	Again, I feel torn about this, probably because I don't read about it a great deal.
	I'm maybe less nervous about this sort of topic than I ought to be.
	But it's just really hard for me not to get to a place where we can, to want to get to a place where we can talk about this thoughtfully.
	Like got kids.
	They could have any number of problems.
	If they had body integrity disorder and they believed that their left arm didn't belong to them, I, as their father, probably would not advise searching a surgical, searching for a surgical remedy for that.
	Surgery can always carry all manner of horrendous risks.
	And a gender reassignment surgery, one that includes hormones that you may have to take for the rest of your life, that is a profoundly huge decision for any adult to make, let alone a parent to make on behalf of their children.
	We should all be thoughtful about this kind of thing.
	And I just hope that we can get to a place where we can be sane about these issues again.
Backlash Against Accusers 00:15:32
	Me too.
	Like the Europeans are now.
	There's some of these Scandinavian countries.
	They're all coming around to like, whoa, hit the brakes.
	This is, wait a minute, we've lost our minds.
	All right.
	So to me, there's cause in that fight to push back.
	I don't care if people are offended.
	You know, it's like I'm beyond caring about their offense.
	We have to fight to protect children.
	And I think that some of the pushback we've seen in response to another movement, like the Me Too movement, has been very valid and worthwhile too.
	It's one of the reasons why Time's Up collapsed because they decided to go political and they only believed all women who were accusing Republicans.
	That was their secret slogan at Times Up.
	And they imploded because they wouldn't help people like Andrew Cuomo's accuser or Joe Biden's accuser.
	And that brings me to the case of Army Hammer.
	So Army Hammer, I don't know if he was like A-list, but he was getting there star in Hollywood, very good-looking guy, actually descended from the Armenhammer family.
	You know, it's kind of crazy.
	And he got me too'd right out of the industry in 2021.
	And it happened because this one woman with whom he did have an affair, he was married, came forward to say that she had been assaulted by him and raped by him.
	And then there was a cascade of women who came forward saying not that they'd been raped by him, but that he was a disturbed guy, that he was into cannibalism is what they were saying.
	No one alleged that he ate them, but he certainly made a lot of very weird, disturbing comments about wanting to.
	Like there was a thing with wanting to eat all these women's ribs, like actually put barbecue sauce on their ribs and eat it.
	Like really weird, not normal stuff.
	And the one woman came out.
	And of course we had, you know, Q Gloria Allred, who came in to save the day.
	Do we have that, you guys?
	My team?
	We don't have it yet.
	Okay.
	Well, in any event, Gloria Allred came out with the accuser, you know, sad, sad accuser who was raped by Army Hammer.
	Well, long story short, he has now, this is Army and the accuser.
	He's now given an interview to Airmail, which is fair.
	And I don't, are you guys following Airmail?
	It's interesting into it.
	It is very interesting.
	By Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley?
	I can't remember the name.
	It's real, I just paid 80 bucks to subscribe to this thing on an annual basis because it's good.
	They're doing good reporting on Idaho too.
	He gave an interview to them.
	And it turns out this woman who, upon whose allegation, you know, all the rest came forward and like his ruination in Hollywood was based is extremely sketchy to be charitable.
	And guess what?
	Gloria Allred dumped her.
	And when Gloria Allred won't represent you, you got no case.
	And has that the media hasn't covered?
	And this woman has refused to sign a statement under penalties of perjury, an affidavit or a declaration backing up the claim she's making online against Army Hammer.
	So when the, you know, whatever, when it, when push came to shove, she wasn't willing to put it under oath.
	And there's a real question about his point is we did have sort of rough sex, but it was all by design.
	We'd been together for four years having an affair.
	And he's got all these texts of her.
	Her texts to him are so filthy and vulgar and seeking out, I mean, despicable treatment from him that I can't, I mean, I've got a potty mouth and even I cannot read these on the air.
	So I know you guys have been are up to speed on the airmail reporting, the Army Hammer thing.
	So what do you make of all of this?
	Because they exposed some things about the other accusers too, that the media has been very loath to even touch.
	And this guy's career is completely in ruins.
	It reminded me of a couple.
	Well, the first thing I would say is that you said jokingly that, you know, he didn't actually, no one accused them of actually cannibalism.
	Absolutely not true.
	In the piece, his wife, his ex-wife, picks up on internet rumors that there was a remains of someone found in California that was close to where his friend had a house.
	And in this report that she made people in the Cayman Islands produce about his mental state, she said that there were multiple murder investigations, possibly.
	I mean, this is how far and crazy this went.
	And of course, his wife is colluding with the accuser because she wants custody of the kids.
	And it's just in black and white.
	By the way, people, if you're doing this, why are you texting it?
	Don't ever text it if you're trying to get away with this stuff.
	It exists on two computers and two phones.
	So that is interesting to me.
	But what I found really fascinating about it is that I said this to Matt the other day, who was on the Bill Maher show when this kind of came out.
	And I think Bill kind of defended him.
	And I thought there was something a bit fishy about it and didn't know exactly what, but there was something a bit off about it.
	And the act of, you know, not defending somebody, but doing investigative journalism on this topic has been so verboten that Jamie Kirchik, who deserves a ton of credit for doing a 9,000 word piece.
	Jamie's a brilliant guy.
	He's a friend of ours.
	But, you know, Jamie doing that, it took somebody I like Jamie, by the way, who just doesn't really care and is a real tough, hard-nosed journalist.
	God bless.
	When you look at what happened to Dan Abrams, something happened to Dan Abrams, but Dan Abrams published.
	Well, I'm going somewhere interesting.
	Was he accused of cannibalism?
	He's a friend.
	No, he wasn't accused of guilty, but he's joking, Dan.
	I know you're a lawyer.
	Don't assume that.
	I'm just kidding.
	Just kidding.
	No, his website, MediaIte, published Matt Lauer's defense of himself.
	And that was considered, no one read it because when you read it, it's actually kind of interesting.
	You're like, oh, there's some nuances to this.
	There's some wrinkles to it.
	There's two sides to it.
	The button thing that everyone knows about this, everybody knows one thing about the Matt Lauer story is that he has a button in the inside of his desk that locks people in.
	That's not true.
	But yet everybody knows it.
	And he discusses that and other things.
	And he got, you know, Abrams got a ton of crap for this, just for allowing him a platform to say, here's my side of the story.
	There shouldn't be his side.
	And then there's the guy from, I think it was Ian Baruma, who was the editor of the New York Review of Books, who published this guy's Canadian guy, Janesh something, a Canadian media figure, who had been accused of all sorts of sexual assaults and crimes.
	And he got fired for publishing that piece.
	Was the piece good?
	I don't know.
	I didn't read it, but he was fired for publishing it.
	So the fact that this happened so many years later, it sense to me is that the kind of fog is lifting a little bit.
	But there was nobody, if you said, I have a defense, not even a defense, but I have the other side.
	I have Army Hammer's side.
	Not a lot of people are going to publish that when it happened in 2000, 2001.
	And now it seems slightly different because that piece is really interesting.
	And you can think, as you said, Megan, that, you know, it's kind of weird, the stuff that he's texting, right?
	It's not my type of thing.
	It's 100% weird.
	Yeah, it's like BDSM stuff.
	But as somebody in the piece said, somehow producer is like, you hear this word in other places, kink shaming.
	You know this phrase, right?
	Apparently, that's what we're doing here, kink shaming.
	But that is not okay in other contexts, but it was here because it's just, you know, it's a weird feeling.
	Well, because he also comes out and says that he was the victim of child sex abuse when he was younger and that, and it went on for a year.
	And it was, I think, a member of the clergy.
	And that that's what led to his need for domination and control in sexual encounters.
	Like it was a defense.
	But now he's not, he seems to be taking responsibility for much of his bad behavior.
	But again, it's sort of not an excuse, but an explanation for some of these very bizarre practices he's into.
	But I mean, I will say, because we talk about this on the college campus situation all the time, how these guys get tried in these kangaroo courts that are run by, quote, victims advocates.
	Oh, what a shock.
	It doesn't come out their way.
	And then when they, and they don't even have a right to full discovery, thanks, Joe Biden, because he's reimplementing the Obama policies right now.
	And then when they get their hands on a text message from the girl or a letter she's written to somebody else, the colleges don't even care.
	They're like, oh, you were found guilty.
	This actually happened with a guy at Amherst, I think, who came out with text messages with the girl showing like, oh, I totally did him.
	I loved it.
	You know, I brought him over.
	Nope, they didn't care.
	Too bad.
	You've already been found convicted.
	You know, move on.
	You're a sex offender.
	And in this case, Airmail lays out how this alleged accuser, the Gloria Allred client, sent Hammer after the alleged rape.
	And I'm not going to read this, but I'll just give you a flavor because I know people are like, read it.
	The following text.
	And she writes, helplessly horny.
	This is after her alleged rape.
	And I just need to tell you, because it's been so long since last time, I've been blanking more so hard and screaming, my leg's going to be effed in ballet.
	I'm dying to send you pics of just disgusting things and hear you breathing in my ear.
	And I can't say the rest, but it's filthy.
	This is a filthy, filthy text by any standard.
	This is after her alleged rape.
	This would have been really useful to see.
	This is why I'm guessing that and her refusal to sign this warrant statement, the police in LA moved right on.
	There's no charges against Army Hammer and there won't be.
	But the sad thing is the media moves right on too.
	And there's a difference between having a fetish and having some issues in the bedroom and being a rapist.
	Yeah, it's, you know, reading Jamie's piece, which is, which is very good.
	I mean, Jamie's good at his job, so I'm not surprised, but it did remind me a lot of the Amy Cooper situation that I did some reporting on and the difficulty of being a person who has your background, who's facing this wall of indictments.
	And in his particular case, there are all of these women coming out of the woodwork, kind of pointing an accusatory finger at him.
	They're not all saying the same thing, which is very important.
	But in a moment like that, there's no interest in differentiating.
	And I could only imagine that even if he had brought these text messages forward to show them to a journalist, that they, in some instances, and I could tell you, like this certainly happened with the Amy Cooper thing, they're not even interested in publishing material that conflicts with the dominant narrative that is out there right now.
	And, you know, apart from finding someone like Jamie, a year removed from the original drama, you might not really have an opportunity to tell your own story.
	And this is a guy who had some resources, who had some means, who had a profile and wasn't able to do that.
	These things, not only does it happen, as you were just pointing out, Megan, to celebrities, it can happen to kids who are in college.
	It can happen to anonymous individuals.
	And it's the reason why we ought to always reserve a bit of judgment, exercise some skepticism and ask thoughtful questions here.
	I mean, the fact that this woman would not swear to an affidavit is a massive deal.
	And the fact that no journalists reported on this at all at the time is horrendous.
	And it says a great deal about the state, the horrible state of the national prestige news media.
	It's constantly.
	I've interviewed so many Me Too victims or accusers, right?
	There's a distinction there.
	So many.
	And I am happy to let them tell their stories if I think that if I have reason to believe that they're in good faith, right?
	Which is sort of the standard as a journalist.
	But I would put any guy accused of Me Too behavior in front of me just like that.
	And I mean, if I could go down the list and tell you all the ones I've tried to get, you know, please, please come talk to me.
	They're terrified.
	It's not just of me, it's of putting their story out there because it's just going to result in a whole other wave of backlash.
	And I'm sure some of them are innocent.
	You know, not all of them, but some of them are.
	But we've gotten to the point now where it's just better just to go under a rock and never reemerge.
	Go ahead, Matt Walsh.
	Due process is not just a legal concept.
	It's a way of thinking, just like free speech is not just about what the government does vis-a-vis the First Amendment.
	It's a cultural ethic and ethos.
	And it's one that we should always have in journalism and we should also always have in society.
	Is as we're about ready to pass judgment or say something about someone that has that, do you know enough about the facts of the case to say with confidence?
	You don't have to try it in a court of law necessarily, but are you just generally being fair?
	That used to be a journalistic, basic kind of 101 situation.
	But I think really starting with the Me Too movement and then going into the racial reckoning after George Floyd killing, then that went away in a hurry.
	We know, I mean, just between the three or four of us, how many people do we know who have had their lives at least temporarily, if not in a significant way, derailed by false accusations having to do with just those two events?
	The shitty media men list.
	I know people who are on that list.
	And I mean, it's shocking that Moynihan wasn't on that list.
	We've been absolutely tried.
	All four of us tried.
	Can't volunteer yourself.
	I was like, why?
	Unfair.
	There are people whose lives were absolutely ruined by being on a completely anonymous, like no consequences to add someone's name on public list that went that shot through the internet like out of a cannon a few years back.
	That's horrible.
	That is just absolutely in violation of any kind of concept of due process.
	And I think we're going to look back on these little spasms and go, what the hell?
	It's going to be Salem witch trial situation.
	It's going to be satanic panic in the 80s and early 90s.
	People are going to say, what?
	We lost control of our faculties at that moment.
	And we did.
	And thankfully, there's been a pretty good rash of recent journalism.
	And it is interesting that this is an airmail, right?
	This is Graydon Carter, longtime New York editor, excellence, the former editor of Vanity Fair.
	Who comes into a little bit of side eye in this piece?
	Vanity Fair.
	Their biggest article from 2021 was a pylon on Army Hammer.
	So it's kind of significant that you see these people who are independent journalists.
	They're podcasters.
	They're on Substack who maintain these traditions of due process and kind of fairness and intellectual curiosity.
	And increasingly, they're not welcome at the traditional centers of so-called journalistic excellence.
	I'm glad to see this piece out by Jamie.
	And hopefully we'll see a lot more.
	Oh, it's so true, Matt.
	It's so delightful to be released from those chains.
	You know, it's like, I love the society that is getting built outside of the traditional media channels.
	It's got so many great people and they have such different characteristics.
	Like this airmail is this in-depth, really interesting print reporting.
	But by the way, so far, what I've seen on there is excellent writers too.
	It's not just enough to report.
	Like the spin, like turning a phrase and really bringing you there is, it's sort of an act of beauty when you read some of these pieces.
	So I love that.
	Love what Barry's doing, the free press, what you guys are doing.
	Love what we're doing here.
Plastic Surgery and Midlife Crisis 00:08:30
	It's like, I find it so enriching and more meaningful and more truthful, more uplifting, more just, it makes you a smarter person, makes you a happier person, makes you a better person.
	Who thought we could get that out of any sort of media entity?
	Right.
	It's just something's collapsing and something else is rising.
	And all hail the Phoenix because things are getting better in the media world.
	Fifth column is part of that.
	And they stick around for the probably the most fun block of the show when we get to.
	I got a lot on my list.
	I want to get to Tom Brady in his underwear.
	I want to get to J-Lo and that moment she had with Ben Affleck.
	Leonardo DiCaprio is dating like, I don't know, she, I don't even know if she has numbers on her age.
	She's so young.
	Gonna try to get to all of it.
	Stand by.
	Guys, I'm just getting word from my producers that there has been yet another Don Lemon meltdown over on CNN just now apparently like openly berating.
	Yeah, on air, openly.
	We're cutting it.
	We'll have it for you in two minutes.
	Oh, great.
	Oh, man.
	His co-host, Caitlin Constant.
	My God, it's getting like he's starting to lose it.
	All right, put a pin in that because I'm coming back to it just as soon as we have the tape for you.
	Before we get to that, I don't know if you watch the Grammys.
	I know there are a lot of headlines.
	You mentioned satanic panic, Matt Welsh.
	That's what a lot of people are having as a result of Sam Smith, but I don't care about that.
	I don't want to talk about that.
	I want to talk about what happened in Madonna's face.
	What happened to Madonna's face?
	I'm sorry.
	I don't mean to be ungenerous to Madonna, whose music I liked for many, many years.
	But this to me is a sickness that she's gone this far.
	We're going to put it on the board any second now, that she has gone this far in her, what?
	In her desire to say, stay youthful, to hold on to youth, to stay provocative.
	Yes.
	Megan, can you tell your producers that they put up a picture of W.C. Fields and not Madonna?
	I thought it was Marilyn Manson.
	That is Marilyn.
	Is that who that is?
	Marilyn Manson.
	Oh my God.
	I'm sorry, but this is a sickness.
	This is an unwell person who we featured at the Grammys the other night.
	And I don't know if it says more about her, about our society, about celebrity, but it's disturbing me at the core because I really hoped she's about, I don't, I don't know how old she is.
	She's in her 60s.
	So I'm going to say she's 10, 12 years older than I am, that I would be in a better place when I got to my 60s than Madonna is.
	She's 64.
	Yeah.
	So she's 12 years older than I am.
	I really hope that I would be in a better place.
	You know, like, I'd like to think when I'm 64, I'm not going to give a shit what people think about the way I look or my age.
	I'm just going to be like full-fledged F and me, you know?
	This tells me she's a sick person who needs some help.
	What do you guys think?
	How do you even walk out of the house looking like that?
	I mean, the whole purpose of the surgery is to look better and younger.
	And that, I don't even know what that is.
	Do you know what happens if you put some of that filler in there?
	And then you need more.
	Then you're like, I need more, I mean, I get the fact that Madonna made her career on, I mean, remember, one of the biggest things for her was always to be the provocateur.
	And she had the sex book.
	Do you remember that book?
	Yeah.
	It came in like, you know, it was like a metal book and it costs $50 because you couldn't reproduce it on the internet at the time.
	And it was in this Mylar wrapping and it sold a ton, a ton.
	She made a fortune off of that.
	And their entire career has been, you know, utilizing that.
	And it's kind of sad that one thinks that they have to try to, but there's no, I'm trying to find somebody of that age who was very famous for being beautiful, who's had a ton of work and still looks amazing.
	It just never works.
	I don't know why people keep doing it.
	Jane, Jane Fonda, with whom I had my famous dust up over plastic surgery, because she's talked about it a million times.
	That's why I thought it was okay to ask her.
	But she does look awesome.
	Her plastic surgery.
	I actually interviewed her a year ago.
	She looked amazing.
	Yeah.
	She does.
	I forgave her for the Vietnam thing.
	I was like, fine, you look great.
	It's forgotten.
	No, you don't.
	This is a sickness.
	This is not about plastic surgery.
	There are tons of Hollywood celebrities who get plastic surgery who look awesome.
	This is something else.
	You've got to work on yourself on like who you are inside.
	No amount of filler or eyebrow shaving or lip plumping is going to do it.
	And I just, you can see the illness on the outside now with her.
	And I'm sad because I hope she gets it under control.
	Okay.
	Let's move on to Tom Brady, who seems a little listless to me since his retirement announcement two minutes ago.
	Why did he post this on the internet?
	It's him.
	You know, if you had Giselle in her bathing suit, this looks like something you'd yell at your teenage son for sending around to his girlfriend.
	Like, why is he posting pictures of himself in his little tiny?
	Underwear?
	Somebody said he lost a bet.
	Somebody said he was promoting this underwear.
	I don't know, but Tom Brady doesn't need to promote underwear.
	He's worth billions of dollars, or hundreds of millions at least.
	Like what's why anyone thoughts did?
	Didn't his divorce situation just get like resolved, or something like that?
	Yeah, is this not him advertising?
	I mean, some people can go on Tinder or whatever else.
	Tom Brady perhaps doesn't want to do that.
	He just wants to make it clear, hey, still looking great.
	I may have retired, but I got it.
	In case you're wondering, I am gonna yeah, i'm gonna keep.
	I mean, i'm very married and happily married, but i'm gonna try a picture like that.
	See what happens.
	Maybe my instagram will pop.
	I yeah, i'm unfollowing you, but that's fine.
	Number one, you're one less follower, but I do want to call out uh, the host of this, uh great program, Megan Kelly, for being a sexist.
	Um, because you know, women do this all the time.
	Come on Emily, rather chewing everything, everything.
	So when Tom Brady does, I say he's king of the world.
	But yeah, but you know what?
	If I look like that, i'd never put a shirt on.
	I don't look like that and I wear parkas in the summer, but like, if I look like that, oh my god, you would be so good.
	I support him, I salute him, I suppose.
	I think maybe this is a midlife crisis.
	I'm sensing midlife crisis.
	But look, at least he tried the marriage thing.
	He was married to Giselle from 2008 to this year.
	They had kids.
	They seem like loving parents.
	Um, contrast that with another heartthrob, Leonardo DiCaprio, who is now 48 years old.
	He looks almost as bad as Madonna.
	He is bloated disgust.
	You could tell this guy's like partied a little bit too much.
	He's got like the big bloated.
	Look like, step away from the booze.
	And um, he is now dating a teenager, literally a teenager.
	She's 19.
	He's in the news every week for how he won't date anybody past age 25.
	If he does, it makes news.
	And now he's actually gone down to a teenager.
	She could literally be his daughter and I I don't know.
	She's gorgeous and it's okay, great.
	She's a model.
	Of course they all are.
	To me, this is also sad.
	I feel like this guy, from the rate of things, is never going to know the joy of like meeting somebody who he can fall in deep love with and build a family with.
	He's just going to keep banging teenagers for the rest of his life.
	I don't know, maybe there's some version of guy.
	Yeah, more hands up, more power to him.
	You make it.
	You make it sound so horrible.
	I mean, it doesn't strike me as something to emulate.
	I'm a French, French rule adherence right, like uh, the.
	The proper lane is, or at least the uh.
	The no-fly zone for, for me personally is, divide your age in half and add seven years.
	And so for me, my God, that's 34 because I'm an old person now.
	But I think that's a wise course of action towards happiness.
	But at the same time, if you heard Leonardo DiCaprio like talk about climate change and stuff, he's got the mind of a 19-year-old.
	He's like, he's not, he's a terrific actor and he really is really good at playing drunk actors as he did Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, like the amazing smashing his face in that pool full of ice.
	Like he understands the actors hangover in a really visceral sense.
	So he's great at what he does.
	He's not a smart person, evidently.
	So maybe like he's, that's, that's the level of conversation that he wants to have with a 19-year-old hot girl who's never had it had you know to challenge anybody with her wit.
	Right.
	Who's never had it?
	So now that I've ripped on Madonna's looks and Leonardo DiCaprio's looks, I'm going to rip on my own.
	I got my color done yesterday, so I'm extra blonde today.
Co-Anchors Arguing On Air 00:08:08
	And this little piece of hair has been bothering me all show.
	It's been getting in my eye and I keep trying to swish it out of my eye, but I don't want to swish it too far away.
	I don't want it to go out like this, which would really get it out of my eye.
	You want to know why?
	Because I'm very worried that I will look like this guy.
	Team, you may now put up the full screen I asked you to make and you didn't understand.
	For the listening audience, it's Hermie the dentist from Rudolph.
	Yeah.
	Put that together.
	No.
	It's really uncanny.
	It is uncanny.
	All I need is that little hat with the blue and red on it and my little reindeer next to me.
	Megan Kelly dolls.
	Megan, you're just a misfit.
	You just don't fit in.
	Very good.
	I mean, you wore it better, though.
	You wore it better.
	I should not be casting stones.
	I'm not sure if you're a man against anybody, Madonna or otherwise.
	Okay, but I will.
	And that brings us to Don Lemon.
	We have the soundbite.
	For the people who haven't been paying attention, he's already in the news for having had a meltdown against Caitlin Collins.
	There's three anchors, Poppy Harlow, Caitlin Collins, and Don on this morning show.
	It was a promotion.
	It was a promotion from a solo primetime show.
	Don't get fooled.
	He had a meltdown because he said Caitlin Collins was interrupting him.
	However, there's now videotape on the internet that's showing he was all over her.
	He was interrupting her way more.
	He apparently, according to the New York Post and exclusive reporting, screamed at her to the point where she ran out of the studio upset and the staffers around them were upset.
	CNN kind of denied it, but then said, well, it happened two months ago.
	So it seems like something definitely did happen.
	And now this is, and by the way, they haven't been anchoring in the same city.
	They've separated them, which is also a tell.
	Like you're supposed to be in the same studio generally with your co-anchors.
	And that isn't solving it because this just happened.
	Citing the New York Post as a credible source and saying that facts are, it's just, I can't believe that we're here.
	Caitlin, that was a great interview.
	All right.
	Moving on.
	Anyway, well, not moving on because that's, listen, that's a big issue when it comes to the American.
	Hold on, please, with the music.
	That's a big issue when it comes to the American people.
	American people are going to have to suffer through all of this stuff from election deniers to people who don't believe in facts.
	We don't have a shared reality.
	And now it's taken center stage to people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, an election denier, a conspiracy theorist, a QAnon sort of influencer or supporter presiding over the House of Representatives.
	It's a sad day for America when that happens.
	And it's a sad time for us when we have to deal with it.
	Okay, so here's the context.
	You need to understand what just happened there.
	Caitlin Collins is interviewing James Comer, head of Oversight Now, who's doing all the investigations.
	And in that interview, he mentioned something about the New York Post, cited something, referred to the New York Post, and then they rapped.
	And when they tossed back to the studio, Don Lemon was chastising her in that clip for not challenging him on referencing the New York Post.
	Like, how could you?
	No, this is a big deal.
	The nation relies on, you know, whatever, reporting, good reporting.
	And then starts talking about other people who we shouldn't be giving platforms to and so on.
	So he's clearly got an issue with how she did the interview and chose to raise it on the air.
	And then so much so that he staved off the commercial break so he could finish making his point about how she should have handled that.
	Let me tell you, as somebody who has co-anchored with a lot of great co-anchors, no, no guy has ever done that to me.
	No guy has even ever come close to doing that to me.
	And that's not to say that I've never had a disagreement with a co-host on how an interview went or how the rhythm went on the air.
	That is totally disrespectful and out of line.
	What do you guys think?
	My God, like staving off the commercial break too.
	I mean, just that alone.
	I have lived in terror of getting the producer and you're like, got to wrap now.
	It's going to happen here in what, like eight minutes.
	I'm going to see the clock and I'm going to start freaking out.
	But staving that off, staving off the music so you can make your flatulent little points about the New York Post.
	It's very embarrassing.
	You know, like you, you can't, it'd be similar to me say that about like Fox News.
	I can't believe that you are citing Fox News.
	Well, Fox News does journalism every day.
	It's a news organization, regardless of what you think about it.
	What kind of what kind of curious person are you?
	What kind of journalist are you to absolutely denounce an entire news organization that does journalism every single day?
	Oh, and he's so mad about the New York Post, Matt.
	I mean, first of all, the New York Post is a great, a great publication.
	It's highly entertaining and informative.
	And secondly, they're the ones who broke the Hunter Biden story that people on Don Lemon's show and CNN told us was disinformation.
	Don Lemon probably said it too.
	I haven't gone back to check.
	But he's mad at the New York Post because they broke the story that makes him look very silly, small, petty, and unprofessional.
	And so this is him trying to disparage them and his co-anchor in one fell swoop.
	If it is true that Chris Licht, the new head of CNN, wants to take CNN away from the kind of, you know, tumult of Trump coverage, which is very partisan.
	Let's get more to the center.
	I mean, it used to be, well, if you had to watch news, there was Fox on the right.
	There's MSNBC on the left.
	You want the news, you go in the middle, you go CNN.
	Wants to get back to that.
	Don Lemon is in that clip yelling at a journalist, a fellow journalist, because the person wasn't ideological enough.
	You didn't say that Marjorie Taylor Greene was an election denier.
	How many times does Don Lemon think someone has to say that?
	You have to do the throat clearing in front of every person who has questions, you know, stupidly, in my opinion, questions the results of the election.
	I mean, every single time, when is Don Lemon going to be satisfied?
	He's taken that eight o'clock thing, that, you know, yelling, shouting show that he once had.
	And he's trying to do it on a morning show.
	But the other thing is that I have been doing interviews for a very, very long time.
	And it is the lowest form of criticism for someone to say, you should have said this.
	You should have taken this off ramp.
	There's about a thousand off-ramps you can take in any given interview.
	There's about a thousand things you can say in any given interview.
	To say to somebody, why didn't you do this?
	There's like these book reviews that you read to say, why didn't the author write the book that I wanted to read?
	You're so, how dare he mansplain to her how to conduct an interview on the air in front of the audience.
	It's like how, you know, a husband and wife are never supposed to divide and argue in front of the children.
	As co-anchors, you don't argue in front of the audience.
	They don't want to see that.
	They want to see a united front.
	They want to see people who get along, who like each other.
	These people clearly can't stand each other.
	And I got news for you, Chris, Licht.
	You're going to have to break up the band.
	I realized you were finding a soft spot to land for Don Lemon, who you were demoting, in fact, from the primetime.
	This ain't it.
	You got to try again.
	And my suggestion would be to send him right out the door because not only has he had a long history of disinformation and dishonesty, I guarantee you, Caitlin Collins is not the first colleague he has sat across from who he's treated this way.
	The media should do its homework.
	Okay, I'm going to steal the last word on that, you guys.
	This has been a great two hours.
	I really, really enjoyed every conversation we had.
	Thank you, Megan.
	You too.
	Fantastic.
	Thank you.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And keep the fifth column going because, you know, if Moynihan gets fired because of that one discussion we had, I really need him to have a soft landing sometime.
	Oh, I already got fired.
	So I need the fifth column.
	So come subscribe.
	Please subscribe.
	Please, please subscribe.
	Wethef.substack.com.
	They're always worth your time, even when they're not with me.
	They're super fun and informative.
	Great to see you guys.
	We're going to be back tomorrow covering the State of the Union, which is this evening.
	We'll have Charles C.W. Cook from National Review, and we'll have Jeremy Peters of the New York Times as well.
	Love those two together and much, much more.
	Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no

Chapters

00:00:00 Chaos at the Border
00:15:14 Political Grounds for Protest
00:28:27 The Balloon Awareness Gap
00:38:04 Polls Show Vulnerable President
00:47:07 Hormones and Early Puberty
01:02:23 Backlash Against Accusers
01:17:56 Plastic Surgery and Midlife Crisis
01:26:26 Co-Anchors Arguing On Air