The Megyn Kelly Show - 20230315_bidens-gay-marriage-lie-and-drew-barrymore-kneels-
Aired: 2023-03-15
Duration: 01:36:47


=== Megan Kelly Show Intro (03:37) ===

[00:00:20]  Today, on the Megan Kelly Show, there's so many things that infuriate me about this clip.
[00:00:25]  So, I imitated the how do you find the courage to keep being the joy with her?
[00:00:31]  It was so cringy, her fake smile, her fake GIA.
[00:00:36]  Like, this is an actress.
[00:00:37]  Drew Barrymore is acting.
[00:00:39]  And what is she acting the part of?
[00:00:41]  Woke, weak white woman praying at the transgender altar.
[00:00:47]  That's what that's her part in this particular role.
[00:00:50]  And then to go on to say, you know, I um, Dylan says, I can't imagine anyone disliking you.
[00:00:56]  And Drew, do you know who sometimes dislikes me the most?
[00:01:02]  Myself.
[00:01:03]  As they're both kneeling on the ground, and then the floor feels safer.
[00:01:08]  Maybe I should do the next presidential debate from the floor.
[00:01:11]  Perhaps I should have been sitting on the floor when I asked Trump or any of these other guys tough questions.
[00:01:16]  How weak is she?
[00:01:18]  To me, it goes back to what we were saying before.
[00:01:20]  Where are the strong women?
[00:01:22]  Where are the forget?
[00:01:23]  Like Maddie said, okay, give me a Nancy Pelosi any day over this pathetic display of, I don't know, what is it? False strength by showing every weakness coming out of your pores.
[00:01:35]  And it may all be an affectation, which makes it even more insulting.
[00:01:39]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:01:51]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:01:52]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live from Montana, where we are in the midst of a snowy blizzard.
[00:01:59]  Day three of my kids' spring break, but I remain at the helm of the camera.
[00:02:05]  It's a good thing, too, because there's a ton of news.
[00:02:07]  A ton is going on right now, fascinating and disturbing.
[00:02:11]  And in some cases, as always with the news, mildly amusing.
[00:02:14]  It is going to be war between Donald Trump and future presidential candidate.
[00:02:18]  We all know he's running, Ron DeSantis.
[00:02:20]  We knew this was coming.
[00:02:21]  Remember when Rick Rinnell came on the show and said, you got to have to put on your big boy pants and get ready.
[00:02:27]  This is not beanball.
[00:02:28]  It's presidential politics.
[00:02:30]  And now we're starting to see the shape of the battle ahead.
[00:02:33]  Plus, our current president, Joe Biden, showing us all sorts of reasons this week for why his staff largely keeps him away from sit-down interviews.
[00:02:42]  And I don't know if you are on Twitter or if you happen to see the screen grab and the clip of actress turned TV Oprah wannabe Drew Barrymore, but it was one of the most cringy interviews you've ever seen.
[00:02:59]  She actually knelt down before TikTok celebrity, trans woman, Dylan Mulvaney, who's literally been on her journey to become a woman for less than a year.
[00:03:12]  She's documenting her 365 days of girlhood, but Dylan never had a girlhood because Dylan is a biological man.
[00:03:20]  Dylan goes on Drew's show and Drew Barrymore literally got down on her knees in front of her.
[00:03:26]  I have so many thoughts about this image and this interview, and we'll get to all of them.
[00:03:30]  With our panel, this is a great day to have National Review Day.
[00:03:35]  Our pal Charles C.W. Cook is here, senior writer and host of the Charles C.W. Cook podcast, and Madeline Kearns, staff writer and senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum, senior fellow and also staff writer at National Review.
[00:03:49]  And you can find both of their work on National Review or through an NR Plus membership, which I highly recommend.
[00:03:54]  Saves you all the nonsense, the ads, and gets you all sorts of fun extras.

=== Florida Politics and DeSantis (13:18) ===

[00:03:57]  Charles, welcome back.
[00:03:58]  Maddie, welcome to the show for the first time.
[00:04:00]  Thanks so much for having me.
[00:04:01]  It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:04:03]  Thanks for having me.
[00:04:05]  I'm having like a little celebrity funning moment.
[00:04:09]  I've never seen Maddie Kearns on camera.
[00:04:11]  Maddie, I've only ever heard your voice and read your stuff on National Review and on the editors.
[00:04:15]  So this is fun.
[00:04:16]  You're so young and you're so bright and you're so brilliant and fearless.
[00:04:19]  So super fun to have our friends who originate from across the pond, but have come to call America home here on the MK Shelf.
[00:04:27]  All right.
[00:04:28]  So let's start with the quote grenade that Trump is preparing to launch against DeSantis, according to Politico this morning.
[00:04:37]  They say he has an extensive oppophile on Ron, quote, de sanctimonious.
[00:04:43]  Sounds like he might be settling on that one.
[00:04:45]  He's officially said he's rejecting meatball Ron.
[00:04:47]  I guess too many of the Italians, which I am part, got upset about that one.
[00:04:52]  So he's rejecting that.
[00:04:53]  Ron de Sanctimonious, it is for now.
[00:04:57]  Here's what they say he's doing: Trump.
[00:04:59]  He's looking deeply into DeSantis' record as a prosecutor, as a member of Congress, and as Florida governor.
[00:05:06]  They have plans to accuse DeSantis of being an extremely lenient prosecutor.
[00:05:11]  I'm quoting there.
[00:05:12]  In cases involving, among other things, child pornography.
[00:05:16]  They have recently conducted focus groups and looked at polling to figure out the best messaging to take on DeSantis.
[00:05:24]  And they are basically getting ready to paint him as Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell-type Republican who the Trump base could never get behind.
[00:05:36]  Charles, I'll start with you.
[00:05:38]  How do you like that line for Trump?
[00:05:42]  Well, I think that you are right when you said earlier that politics ain't been bag and that we get these big fights in primaries and in presidential elections.
[00:05:58]  I do think, though, that there is something different about the way Donald Trump behaves.
[00:06:03]  He is not constrained, even acknowledging the brawl that politics becomes at election time in the way that other candidates are.
[00:06:16]  And as a result, he will probably say all manner of things that are flatly untrue.
[00:06:24]  And I don't think one needs to speculate to assume that.
[00:06:28]  One only needs to look back to 2016.
[00:06:32]  I mean, one of the things that he suggested then was that Ted Cruz's father had killed JFK.
[00:06:42]  Perhaps not true.
[00:06:45]  If I'm DeSantis, I'm going to be struggling to work out how to defend myself.
[00:06:53]  Because on the one hand, you will see criticisms that will probably be echoed across the Republican field and probably echoed in the newspapers as well.
[00:07:03]  And then on the other hand, you're going to get lies and claims that come out of left field and that are quite hard to issue rejoinders to as a result.
[00:07:15]  And this is, of course, Donald Trump's strength at one level, that he doesn't play by the same rules as everyone else.
[00:07:21]  It could also be a weakness.
[00:07:24]  I think that I think I may have said this to you before, Megan.
[00:07:28]  There is a difference between Donald Trump taking on someone, say Jeb Bush, who for whatever reason was already distrusted by the primary electorate and Donald Trump taking on someone who was pretty popular with the primary electorate.
[00:07:45]  Donald Trump benefited in 2016 from the fact that a good number of the people he was running against were not the people that Republicans wanted to represent them.
[00:07:56]  was a prerequisite dissatisfaction there that is not here with DeSantis.
[00:08:02]  And I don't know the answer to this.
[00:08:03]  It will depend on what happens, but I do wonder whether some of those crazier attacks, some of those more transparently dishonest attacks will hurt DeSantis or they'll hurt Trump.
[00:08:17]  It's a good point.
[00:08:18]  I personally am a fan of Ted Cruz.
[00:08:20]  I always joke with him.
[00:08:21]  I'm the one.
[00:08:23]  But I like the guy.
[00:08:24]  I really do.
[00:08:25]  If you get to know him personally, he's actually very funny.
[00:08:28]  He's very clever.
[00:08:29]  He's self-deprecating.
[00:08:30]  Just a Senate persona is different than that.
[00:08:33]  But yes, he wasn't the most popular guy when he was running for president the last time.
[00:08:38]  Same with Marco Rubio.
[00:08:39]  Wasn't really the most popular.
[00:08:41]  They like him, but he wasn't somebody who generated fury, fire and fury among the GOP base in his corner.
[00:08:49]  And now you have DeSantis who has in a unique way, right?
[00:08:54]  In a unique way.
[00:08:54]  But the MAGA base, I think, listens to one man, and that is Donald Trump.
[00:08:59]  And Donald Trump tells them we are now turning on DeSantis.
[00:09:03]  I think they are going to, Maddie.
[00:09:05]  I mean, he's already making the case.
[00:09:06]  Trump is.
[00:09:07]  He lives in DeSantis' state, Florida.
[00:09:09]  And he's already making the case publicly now.
[00:09:12]  For those of you that didn't notice, Florida was doing great long before Ron got there.
[00:09:17]  He says it's not because of the governor.
[00:09:18]  Florida was doing fantastically.
[00:09:20]  You had a governor named Rick Scott who did a very good job.
[00:09:22]  Even Charlie Christ, a Democrat, did a good job, and he had very good numbers.
[00:09:26]  Sunshine and ocean are very alluring.
[00:09:29]  So just remember, Florida was doing really well long before DeSantis got here.
[00:09:35]  Calls him Ron DeSanctus.
[00:09:38]  Yeah.
[00:09:39]  So I think with Trump, he obviously is playing this as he created DeSantis.
[00:09:46]  And because he is DeSantis' creator in a political sense, he also has the right to destroy him.
[00:09:52]  And going back to what we're talking about earlier about introducing so many lines of attack, I think I've mentioned before on the Editors podcast, this concept of gish galloping.
[00:10:03]  It's a debating tactic where you introduce so many lines of attack without any regard for their strength or the merit of the argument that your opponent simply finds it too time consuming to go around putting out all these fires that you've started.
[00:10:20]  It's much quicker to start a fire than it is to put it out.
[00:10:23]  And that's what we're seeing already with Trump and DeSantis.
[00:10:26]  One thing that I do wonder, though, is obviously the Republican strategy in dealing with this from Trump has always been to take the moral high ground.
[00:10:36]  And that has been DeSantis' strategy so far is to say, look, I don't have time to smear other Republicans.
[00:10:42]  I've got better things to do.
[00:10:44]  I've got a state to be running.
[00:10:45]  But I do wonder, given that the Trump base are really interested in the way that Trump plays this and plays politics, I wonder what would happen if DeSantis were just to play nasty, if he were to start saying Donald Trump is a loser.
[00:11:01]  He's a big loser.
[00:11:02]  He lost 2020.
[00:11:03]  He lost Georgia.
[00:11:05]  I don't know.
[00:11:05]  I mean, fighting fire with fire is a risky strategy, perhaps, but I don't see the moral high ground getting DeSantis anywhere.
[00:11:14]  And, you know, Charlie, you remember last time around, Trump has a way of pulling them all in.
[00:11:20]  You know, he doesn't mind fighting from the gutter and he is very effective at getting his opponents to go down there with him.
[00:11:29]  Yeah, and that's true.
[00:11:30]  But I think maybe you and I do disagree on this a little bit, Megan, or at least we anticipate how this plays out differently.
[00:11:36]  Because I think Trump has a bit of a problem.
[00:11:38]  You just mentioned the Florida claim that he started to make.
[00:11:42]  He put out this video the other day where he said what you quoted.
[00:11:46]  Now, there's one factorial problem with it that won't matter in the primary, and there's one that really will.
[00:11:51]  The one that won't matter in the primary, but amuse me as a Floridian, is that he left out Jeb Bush.
[00:11:56]  So he's quoting all of these governors that he thinks did a good job.
[00:12:00]  He leaves out the guy who made modern Florida what it is because he doesn't like him.
[00:12:04]  And he includes Charlie Chris, who really did nothing.
[00:12:07]  That's not going to hurt him.
[00:12:09]  What is going to hurt him is the claim that DeSantis was just one in a long, unbroken line of Florida governors who benefited from the ocean and the sunshine and the palm trees and the orange juice, because it's not true.
[00:12:24]  And Republicans especially know that that's not true.
[00:12:27]  You don't have to like Ron DeSantis or even want Ron DeSantis to be the nominee to understand that his being the governor during COVID made an enormous difference.
[00:12:39]  And I hear Floridians who say all the time, some of them, frankly, are Democrats, they say, what would have happened if Andrew Gillam had won in 2018, which he almost did?
[00:12:48]  Just how different would the COVID experience have been if Florida had a Democratic governor?
[00:12:55]  I think the answer to that is obvious.
[00:12:57]  I think we would have seen much broader lockdowns.
[00:13:00]  I think we would have seen schools close and mask mandates, maybe even vaccine mandates.
[00:13:07]  We certainly would not have seen 850 people a day moving in from other states, predominantly states with Democratic governors and legislatures, New York, Pennsylvania, California, Maryland, New Jersey, because DeSantis made the decisions that he did.
[00:13:27]  And you don't even need to look at this from the right.
[00:13:29]  You can look at it from the left.
[00:13:30]  Who was the person during COVID that the press was the most unhinged about because of the policies that he instituted in Florida that were different from almost every other state, with the exception maybe of Georgia and South Dakota and Texas?
[00:13:45]  The answer is Ron DeSantis.
[00:13:47]  So it doesn't seem to me that that line of attack is going to work.
[00:13:52]  Maybe another one does.
[00:13:54]  Maybe he gish gallops his way to the nomination, as Maddie says.
[00:13:57]  Maybe he finds other ways of undermining DeSantis, whether they're true or not.
[00:14:02]  But that one, I can't see it playing.
[00:14:07]  Well, the other piece of it is DeSantis, as he's been pointing out lately and will continue to, he won Florida the first time by what, 35,000 votes.
[00:14:16]  And then this past time by something like 1.2 million, including turning Miami-Dade County completely red.
[00:14:23]  I mean, those are the kinds of things that I hear from the callers to this show, even diehard Trump fans who will acknowledge we do need somebody who can win on the GOP side.
[00:14:33]  And that kind of, you know, amassing yes votes for the GOP side is attractive.
[00:14:39]  It's attractive.
[00:14:40]  So that's something Charlie Christ didn't do.
[00:14:43]  That, of course, was DeSantis' opponent this last time around.
[00:14:46]  It's something no other Republican governor of Florida has managed to do.
[00:14:49]  It used to be a very tight state.
[00:14:51]  Ron DeSantis is the one who turned it very red, Charlie.
[00:14:55]  That's absolutely right.
[00:14:57]  I mean, again, the last person who did it was Jeb Bush.
[00:15:00]  Republicans really didn't win at all in Florida until 1998.
[00:15:05]  They'd won two competitive elections since the Civil War.
[00:15:09]  There were three Florida governors after the Civil War who were nominally Republicans, but they were helped along in their election campaign by the fact that the opposition party was not allowed to fill the candidate.
[00:15:20]  Since 1998, Republicans have won every single election.
[00:15:24]  People have thought that means that Florida has been a red state for the last 25 years.
[00:15:28]  It's not true.
[00:15:29]  Florida has begun to lean Republican over time.
[00:15:32]  But the elections other than Jeb Bush's re-election campaign in 2002 have been pretty close.
[00:15:38]  Rick Scott, I think he was a good governor.
[00:15:40]  He's now the senator.
[00:15:41]  Donald Trump seems to like him.
[00:15:43]  He won both races by a percentage point or less.
[00:15:47]  And it's worth noting that he won his first election campaign for governor of Florida in 2010, which was that massive Tea Party wave by one point.
[00:16:00]  He almost lost.
[00:16:01]  DeSantis won by 19 points last time around.
[00:16:06]  And it's who he won as well.
[00:16:08]  He won every single education group.
[00:16:12]  He won Hispanics.
[00:16:15]  He won a whole bunch of independents and some Democrats.
[00:16:19]  He won people who had been in Florida for a long time and people who had just moved in to Florida.
[00:16:25]  He did really well for a Republican among younger people.
[00:16:29]  Now, that's not to say that this will translate neatly into the rest of the country.
[00:16:33]  Maybe it won't.
[00:16:35]  But it is to say that you saw a dramatic stand for a certain sort of politics from Ron DeSantis from the point at which COVID became an issue to the point at which COVID faded away, which it has in Florida.
[00:16:53]  And he was then rewarded for that politics with a landslide victory, which is the opposite of what happened to Donald Trump.
[00:17:01]  I think it's going to be really tough for Trump to take DeSantis down on those grounds.
[00:17:07]  He's obviously something different in Florida.
[00:17:10]  If Trump's going to do it, it's going to have to be something else.

=== The Kamala Harris Problem (13:10) ===

[00:17:15]  Meanwhile, I listened to the editors, a great podcast that comes out usually Tuesdays and Fridays.
[00:17:21]  And you were on there and the group, the gang was feeling pretty pessimistic about Republican chances to take the White House in 2024.
[00:17:31]  Joe Biden is pretending, it was not, I think that was the consensus, to do a shift to the middle on certain policies.
[00:17:40]  And, you know, there was an argument Jim Garris suggested because he's got a new chief of staff now.
[00:17:45]  But in any event, Joe Biden is purporting to do some sort of mild shift to the center in advance of 2024.
[00:17:52]  And there was a real question amongst all of you whether a Trump, a DeSantis, anybody on the GOP side can take Joe Biden down.
[00:18:00]  Over in Democratic circles, they're feeling more bullish about Joe Biden.
[00:18:05]  And yet the weak link of Kamala Harris is still there.
[00:18:09]  And the Democrats see it too.
[00:18:12]  And there was an in-depth piece about how the party is pressuring it, some of the pundits and her detractors to get on board.
[00:18:21]  On CNN, they did a big in-depth piece.
[00:18:24]  Democratic leaders want the party to stop its Kamala Harris pylon ahead of 2024.
[00:18:30]  They first point out that Elizabeth Warren, who recently would not say whether she, Kamala Harris should be his running mate, she's now called twice to apologize to Kamala Harris.
[00:18:40]  Harris won't take the call.
[00:18:42]  So those two are fighting.
[00:18:44]  It's fed an ongoing breakdown of accusations and purported misunderstandings between them.
[00:18:49]  Kamala Harris's team describes the incident as pretty insulting.
[00:18:54]  And Harris is trying to, Warren is trying to take the knee and say, oh, she was just trying to like not step on a minefield of getting ahead of a campaign announcement.
[00:19:03]  Okay, sure.
[00:19:04]  So Harris's circle is, quote, infuriated over this whole thing.
[00:19:09]  And they're mad that she's, quote, never gotten the respect or support she deserves.
[00:19:14]  Quoting here, multiple Democratic leaders contend that if people don't start feeling more positive about the next person in line of succession, they might turn away from the ticket entirely.
[00:19:23]  They're urging allies to stop the Harris pylon, if only for Biden's sake or for Democrats' sake or the party's future.
[00:19:32]  Maddie, they think that this is just people being mean.
[00:19:35]  There's a quote in there from some of Harris's defenders saying what this is really about is Americans need to get used to, quote, a black woman in a position of political power.
[00:19:44]  That's the problem of these whiny Democrats and Republican detractors.
[00:19:49]  And it's not weird, awkward, cringy moments where she uses the odd cackle, like just this one.
[00:19:56]  Just pull the latest one.
[00:19:57]  This does the other way.
[00:19:58]  I could have done 10 better, but it's just the most latest one where she's talking about, I don't know being a conservative or misunderstanding what a conservative is when she was a kid, sought for.
[00:20:07]  I'm going to share with you a very simple story, which is that I went home one day and I said, well, what's why are conservatives bad, mommy?
[00:20:15]  Because I thought we were supposed to conserve things.
[00:20:20]  I couldn't reconcile it.
[00:20:22]  Now I can.
[00:20:26]  Is it over?
[00:20:27]  It's in.
[00:20:28]  Okay.
[00:20:29]  So your thoughts on whether it's just these racist, sexist Americans or it's a Kamala Harris problem.
[00:20:36]  It's the Kamala Harris problem.
[00:20:38]  And this has been obvious since 2020.
[00:20:41]  It's easy to forget this now, but during the 2020 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris was universally recognized as a very weak candidate.
[00:20:52]  There were pieces in the Times, CNN, commenting on this very fact.
[00:20:56]  And of course, the problem was Joe Biden wanted a woman of color as his VP, and that narrowed the field and looking at not who's the most qualified politician, who's the most talented politician, but who ticks this box.
[00:21:13]  And ever since, she's been cringy, disappointing, gaffe-prone.
[00:21:19]  I mean, she did that interview in June 2021 about why she hadn't visited the border.
[00:21:26]  And she did another awkward cackle and said, Well, I've not visited Europe, as if that in any way answered the question.
[00:21:35]  And actually, she stopped giving interviews for almost a year after that experience.
[00:21:40]  It was so traumatic for her.
[00:21:42]  And of course, there was another mortifying moment where she confused South Korea and North Korea.
[00:21:49]  I mean, we have a lot of gaffes to choose from for going through them.
[00:21:54]  So you can understand why people in the party think she's not up to the job, why she is a liability.
[00:22:00]  But they also have a point that this is very much a team sport, especially when you currently have the presidency.
[00:22:08]  And given Joe Biden's age, given he is also gaffe-prone and not particularly good at interviews, it is important that people have that unity.
[00:22:19]  And it isn't a good look to have Elizabeth Warren maybe with through a Freudian slip, give the impression that she doesn't really think that Harris is all that.
[00:22:31]  Well, I mean, you don't have to look very far into the Kamala Harris bank of sound bites to find how underwhelming she is, how unimpressive she is.
[00:22:42]  Producer Canadian Debbie pulled one of her favorites, which is just Kamala Harris's obsession with the Venn diagram.
[00:22:48]  I don't, it's just, you can't go wrong going into this bank.
[00:22:52]  Here's a little remember Venn diagrams, those three circles, right?
[00:22:58]  And then let's just see where they overlap.
[00:23:00]  You will not be surprised because I have constructed a Venn diagram on this.
[00:23:04]  Remember those three circles, how they overlap?
[00:23:06]  I love Venn diagrams.
[00:23:08]  So I just do.
[00:23:10]  Whenever you're dealing with conflict, pull out a Venn diagram, right?
[00:23:13]  And so, you know, the three circles.
[00:23:15]  And so I asked my team, right?
[00:23:20]  He sees the Venn diagram of it all.
[00:23:22]  He sees that there are those circles, and maybe people seem that they're a little different.
[00:23:26]  They live in different parts of the country.
[00:23:27]  They may be a different age or different race, but that area in the middle, that overlap.
[00:23:33]  Like, I don't get it.
[00:23:35]  Is she?
[00:23:37]  The uncharitable part of me, Charlie, would say, this is not a very smart person.
[00:23:41]  But my experience as a lawyer tells me you don't get to be the attorney general of the state of California.
[00:23:46]  And I realize her identity issues that helped her get to that post.
[00:23:50]  But, you know, that's a challenging position to hold.
[00:23:54]  And they don't normally put a bunch of morons in it.
[00:23:56]  Like, I genuinely look at her and think, I don't understand why she talks the way she does, why she sounds the way she does.
[00:24:04]  It's probably a slightly less challenging position to get to when you've been sleeping with Willie Brown.
[00:24:09]  I think she's an idiot.
[00:24:12]  I've long thought that she's an idiot.
[00:24:14]  And worse than that, I find her excruciating as a candidate.
[00:24:19]  People in the United States or any free country are allowed to elect idiots, but she's off-pudding.
[00:24:24]  She's not underwhelming.
[00:24:25]  She's off-pudding.
[00:24:26]  That display that you just offered up is baffling.
[00:24:35]  I think she thinks she's cute.
[00:24:38]  I think she thinks it's a cute four-eye.
[00:24:40]  Yes.
[00:24:41]  You're right.
[00:24:42]  And it's not.
[00:24:45]  She talks all the time as if she hasn't read the brief.
[00:24:50]  Someone pointed out to me, she's like the person in the class who hasn't read the book that gives the presentation anyway.
[00:24:56]  And not once or twice, and not on a few topics, but on every topic.
[00:25:00]  She is a terrible, terrible person and politician.
[00:25:04]  In 2019, I wrote a piece saying that I was so thrilled that she had had to drop out of the race because she was precisely the sort of person that we don't want in American politics.
[00:25:15]  She's an authoritarian.
[00:25:17]  She's dishonest.
[00:25:19]  She sees the angles and cynically pursues them.
[00:25:24]  And then, of course, she was made vice president.
[00:25:27]  And I thought, well, got that one wrong.
[00:25:30]  She didn't get her just desserts for her conduct in her political career and her conduct during the primary.
[00:25:37]  But actually, she has got her just desserts because she's wildly unpopular and deserves to be so.
[00:25:42]  She is causing the Democratic Party an endless supply of headaches.
[00:25:48]  And she will continue to do so in the future.
[00:25:50]  In my estimation, it does not especially matter whether the Democratic Party can come together and stop criticizing Kamala Harris.
[00:26:01]  If the New York Times stops running pieces about how she's a liability, if Elizabeth Warren writes a book saying Kamala Harris is the greatest person who's ever lived, none of that matters because Kamala Harris is not going to change.
[00:26:14]  Perhaps in the first couple of months of her vice presidency, you could say it's nerves, it's unfamiliarity with the office.
[00:26:23]  These are trying times or what you will.
[00:26:26]  But we're now closer to the next election than to the last one.
[00:26:30]  And she has not improved.
[00:26:31]  In fact, I think she's devolved.
[00:26:34]  This is not going to change.
[00:26:36]  It doesn't really matter whether a united front is placed before her.
[00:26:43]  She's a liability.
[00:26:45]  She's probably the best thing Joe Biden has going for him in terms of his selection as the nominee in 2024.
[00:26:51]  And if she somehow becomes president, which I don't think will be via election, if it happens, she's going to be a millstone around the Democrats' neck for all the Republican Party's problems.
[00:27:02]  And they are significant.
[00:27:03]  As she said, I am not convinced that Republicans are going to win the next election.
[00:27:07]  I think they're too frivolous at the moment and too divided.
[00:27:10]  But if she becomes the president, the Democrats will have a lot of problems because she's just not up to it.
[00:27:16]  She's not likable.
[00:27:17]  She won't command great support.
[00:27:18]  And after an initial honeymoon, she will sink into the basement of approval rating.
[00:27:23]  I mean, I'm going to get to Joe Biden and whether, you know, what his health problems are.
[00:27:27]  That's why she's so relevant.
[00:27:28]  You know, it's, he's a very old man and doesn't seem to be doing particularly well, notwithstanding that joke of a doctor's report that didn't reveal, you know, the cognitive abilities or the testing that had happened.
[00:27:39]  So people are worried about her for a very good reason.
[00:27:41]  But before I get to that, can I ask you, Maddie?
[00:27:43]  You know, over in the UK, we've had strong female leaders, you know, not to mention the queen, but I'm thinking of people like Margaret Thatcher, who had an air of authority, who, you know, took the helm and instilled confidence, very controversial, obviously, in some circles, especially my Irish ones.
[00:27:57]  But you can't say she didn't project authority, confidence, and just an overall intelligence that you could easily buy into.
[00:28:06]  That is not the case with Kamala Harris.
[00:28:08]  Let's be honest.
[00:28:09]  It's not.
[00:28:10]  And I'm sorry to say it, but it's not exactly the case, in my opinion, with Nikki Haley either.
[00:28:15]  That's another person who I like, who I could get behind.
[00:28:18]  You know, I could definitely puzzle her for Nikki Haley.
[00:28:21]  However, I think she's very undermined by her affect, her voice, the way she projects.
[00:28:28]  It's too weak for my preference.
[00:28:31]  And I think for a GOP base, that will be hard.
[00:28:35]  I mean, it might be hard to lure them over into voting for a woman at the top of the ticket this time around.
[00:28:40]  And I don't think somebody who projects anything other than I'm in command, trustworthy, smart, and a strong leader could do it.
[00:28:50]  What are your thoughts?
[00:28:52]  Well, first, it's funny that you mention Margaret Thatcher because it reminds me of the fact that right-wing women aren't real women because people rarely acknowledge that she was this great female leader.
[00:29:04]  They associate her, especially in the UK, but they associate her with controversy, with certainly strength, but they don't necessarily think of her as being a woman.
[00:29:15]  And I actually think that that is what the end goal should be with female equality and leadership is the first thing people should think isn't, oh, great for a woman, but just she's a great leader.
[00:29:28]  She has the qualities that we need.
[00:29:31]  And certainly part of that is charisma.
[00:29:34]  And I think you're right.
[00:29:35]  I think Nikki Healy underperforms there.
[00:29:38]  I think that certainly all of the progressive candidates that are eligible for this fall short there.
[00:29:47]  I think somebody who was actually pretty good at that was Nancy Pelosi.
[00:29:52]  Lathe her, though many on the right do.
[00:29:55]  I think that she certainly had that seriousness about her and commanded attention, certainly, if not respect.
[00:30:03]  You know who else?
[00:30:04]  And I realize she's controversial, Maddie, but Carrie Lake had it.
[00:30:07]  Let's put aside the election denialism for a second, but just in terms of persona, projection, handling herself in front of a crowd, she had it like Elise Stefanik, rising star on the GOP part.
[00:30:18]  She's got it.
[00:30:18]  It's not like it doesn't exist, but it's whether it exists in the women who are before us right now as potential candidates.
[00:30:25]  Right, exactly.

=== Changing Minds on Biden (11:54) ===

[00:30:26]  Yeah.
[00:30:26]  Carrie Leakey is a great example of this.
[00:30:28]  I mean, she was very telegenic.
[00:30:30]  Like, I mean, I hate to pretend that looks don't matter, but they do, unfortunately.
[00:30:35]  You know, it's part of being charismatic.
[00:30:37]  That applies to men as well as women.
[00:30:40]  And Charlie's made this point before in the podcast that it helps if you are tall, if you're a man.
[00:30:46]  It gives you stature.
[00:30:48]  It gives you presence.
[00:30:49]  And yeah, these are things that are relevant.
[00:30:52]  And unfortunately, we're in short supply of them.
[00:30:56]  So on the Joe Biden front, Charlie, I know you and the guys over there and the gals at National Review have had some concerns about his ability to serve right now, never mind a second term, but fear not, because Flotus, Dr. Jill Biden, doctor, would like you to know he's accomplished feats that even 30-year-olds could not accomplish.
[00:31:16]  Here she is talking about his recent trip to Ukraine, Sat 6.
[00:31:22]  What do you say to those people who say maybe he's too old to be president?
[00:31:26]  many 30-year-olds could travel to Poland, get on the train, go nine more hours, go to Ukraine, meet with President Zelensky.
[00:31:40]  Charlie?
[00:31:42]  So literally every single one of them could do that.
[00:31:46]  This is a weird tick that I've noticed with people around Joe Biden.
[00:31:51]  I was trying to find this the other day and I couldn't, but there was some incident about six months ago where a reporter asked someone in the White House, you know, is the president too old to serve?
[00:32:05]  And instead of saying, no, he's not too old to serve, which is a fine answer, not convinced it's true, but it's a fine answer.
[00:32:12]  This person said, he astonishes us with his stamina.
[00:32:17]  We can't stay out in the sun like he can.
[00:32:19]  We can't stay up as late as he can.
[00:32:21]  This person was about 35, which isn't true.
[00:32:25]  I don't understand the need to move from, yes, he's able to serve as president to he is more accomplished and more able to serve as a president physically than a young person would be.
[00:32:40]  What does Joe Biden mean when she says what 30-year-old could do that?
[00:32:45]  And it's also the examples are great.
[00:32:47]  I mean, she says, what 30-year-old could get on a plane, let alone Air Force One, which has a bed on it.
[00:32:52]  What 30-year-old could get on a train?
[00:32:55]  What 30-year-old could sit in a meeting?
[00:32:58]  I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous.
[00:33:00]  If you go back in American history, you'll find examples.
[00:33:04]  John Quincy Adams comes to mind of Americans doing that when they were 17.
[00:33:08]  My grandfather grew up in an orchard on a farm, you know, walked halfway across North Africa in his mid-20s fighting the Nazis and then in Italy fighting Mussolini.
[00:33:23]  Like, of course, younger people can do this stuff.
[00:33:25]  That's not the question at hand.
[00:33:28]  And I think it really does betray a certain insecurity.
[00:33:33]  It's the answer that you give when you are aware that the question has something to it.
[00:33:39]  It is overcompensation.
[00:33:42]  It is a hyperbolic pretense in the face of a genuine concern for this campaign.
[00:33:50]  And I honestly don't say that with any glee.
[00:33:53]  It is not nice to sit and watch anyone, let alone the president of the United States, obviously slow down in the way that President Biden has, not just since he was a senator or vice president, but while he's been president.
[00:34:07]  But we can still see it.
[00:34:09]  And no amount of pretense that he is Superman is going to change that.
[00:34:15]  I have a theory.
[00:34:16]  I think she's secretly thinking about the Biden children.
[00:34:18]  I think she's thinking about Hunter.
[00:34:20]  The daughter's had some troubles.
[00:34:22]  She's like, there's no way any normal 30-year-old could accomplish any of this.
[00:34:26]  Yeah, that's interesting.
[00:34:28]  Yeah, there's a way.
[00:34:29]  All right.
[00:34:29]  So next I want to get to Joe Biden did sit for an interview.
[00:34:33]  And Joe Biden appears to have made up more stories about his youth and why they give him a particular insight into what it's like to be president and also how evil the Republicans are.
[00:34:43]  We'll have that right after this.
[00:34:44]  Quick, quick break more with Charlie and Maddie on our National Review Day show.
[00:34:52]  Joe Biden decides to sit down for an interview.
[00:34:54]  Not this time with 60 Minutes, certainly not with Fox News during the Super Bowl halftime show, but with the Daily Show, with the comedy show, The Daily Show, which had a substitute host.
[00:35:05]  I don't think they found a new host since Trevor Noah left.
[00:35:08]  And here is a guy.
[00:35:10]  I think he used to work for the Obama administration, didn't he?
[00:35:13]  I can't remember.
[00:35:15]  His name is Cal Penn.
[00:35:16]  Yeah, he did.
[00:35:16]  He did.
[00:35:17]  So he takes aim at a couple of things.
[00:35:20]  And let me just start with this one, where he's talking about his epiphany, his epiphany on gay marriage, Joe Biden's epiphany.
[00:35:27]  It was set up by the interviewer, which is why it came back into the news.
[00:35:31]  And we'll start there.
[00:35:32]  Here it is.
[00:35:34]  I'm curious what your evolution was like on marriage equality and what the federal government might be able to do to protect LGBTQ Americans, especially trans kids who are dealing with all these regressive state laws that are popping up right now.
[00:35:52]  I can remember exactly where my epiphany was.
[00:35:55]  I remember about to get out of the car and I looked to my right and two well-dressed men in suits kissed each other.
[00:36:02]  And I never forget, I turned and looked at my dad.
[00:36:05]  He said, Joey, it's simple.
[00:36:07]  They love each other.
[00:36:08]  It's just that simple.
[00:36:11]  Maddie, it's just that simple.
[00:36:13]  He had this epiphany.
[00:36:14]  He had it back in the 1960s.
[00:36:17]  And that has been his truth ever since.
[00:36:22]  That simple in that like the rest of the world, he had an understanding of marriage being between a man and a woman until it became politically unsustainable to have that position.
[00:36:34]  And this is reflected in his voting record.
[00:36:37]  This is reflected in his rhetoric.
[00:36:39]  It's not abnormal because that's how everybody spoke in the 90s and before.
[00:36:46]  So it reminds me actually of the way that quite often transgender identifying individuals will create this fantastical history for themselves in which they knew they were a member of the opposite sex at age four.
[00:36:59]  And yet they knew this, but they went on to live a completely, to borrow a word, heteronormative life until middle age.
[00:37:08]  So an example of somebody who does this is Richard, now Rachel Levine, who discovered at age four that he was really a girl, but then went on to marry a woman and father children and decide that he was no longer a woman around 50.
[00:37:23]  So it's just fantasy.
[00:37:26]  It's sheer fantasy.
[00:37:27]  Now, why does he say it?
[00:37:29]  Well, he says it because it conveniently glosses over the fact that he has had this unexplained evolution in his thinking.
[00:37:39]  And the easiest explanation of the evolution is that it's not actually based on thinking.
[00:37:45]  Joe Biden goes with the winds.
[00:37:47]  He goes with whatever, wherever the Democratic Party is going, he's there.
[00:37:52]  And this is especially evident on the transgender issue.
[00:37:56]  I seriously doubt that he even really understands what people are claiming, what's being disputed.
[00:38:02]  He was once asked how many genders are there?
[00:38:05]  And he said, at least three, which fair enough, it covers him, covers him from making some sort of dreadful faux pas in the activist's eyes.
[00:38:16]  But, you know, I don't think this is really something that's particularly close to his heart, but he knows what's expected of him and what he's supposed to say.
[00:38:25]  He knows that it's popular.
[00:38:26]  He knows this is what the young folks are talking about these days and what they feel passionate about.
[00:38:32]  So there he is, old Uncle Joe, just talking about loving each other and being nice.
[00:38:37]  And he wants to claim the moral high ground, like he saw the truth before anybody, Charles.
[00:38:43]  And David Harsani of the Federalist had a great take on this, which he says, he goes, okay, so he had an epiphany after seeing two well-dressed men kissing in 1961 working class Wilmington, Delaware, but then voted for the Defense of Marriage Act as recently as 1996.
[00:39:02]  He writes, this, of course, never happened.
[00:39:05]  He says, as I've noted before, Biden is a practitioner of the George Costanza school of, it's not a lie if you believe it.
[00:39:14]  He says, we're probably a year away from Biden telling media about the time he dated a drag queen named Hedda Hare in college because his dad had told him, Joey, gender is just a social construct.
[00:39:25]  One does wonder whether there's any true word in that little statement he just gave the Daily Show.
[00:39:32]  Yeah, well, there's two problems with it.
[00:39:33]  The first one is that it's a lie.
[00:39:36]  And I think we should dwell on that for a moment.
[00:39:38]  Joe Biden is a pathological liar.
[00:39:42]  Joe Biden lies and lies and lies.
[00:39:44]  He lies about things big.
[00:39:46]  He lies about things small.
[00:39:48]  And the fact that Donald Trump is also a pathological liar and a worse one does not change that.
[00:39:53]  I think Biden gets away with a lot of his lying, which is a character he's exhibited for 40 years, because Donald Trump, who was his opponent last time around and maybe next time, is also a liar.
[00:40:05]  But he shouldn't.
[00:40:06]  One of the things that was promised by the Biden camp in 2019 and 2020 was, I will bring truth and honor and decency back to the presidency.
[00:40:16]  Well, he hasn't.
[00:40:16]  He just lies all the time on all manner of issues.
[00:40:20]  This is a lie.
[00:40:22]  In 1960, two well-dressed men kissed each other and his father, who was born in 1915, said to him, ah, you know what, Joey, that's just love.
[00:40:32]  This is not true.
[00:40:33]  And as she pointed out, it's not true because it was subsequently affirmed by Joe Biden over and over again that marriage was between a man and a woman.
[00:40:43]  And not just as recently as 1996, but after that, there are clips of Biden on television in the 2000s saying that it's settled that marriage is between a man.
[00:40:55]  Here's at the 2008 vice presidential debate asked if he would support gay marriage.
[00:41:01]  Biden unreservedly answered in the negative.
[00:41:03]  This is quoting from National Review.
[00:41:05]  No, no.
[00:41:06]  I didn't hear anything about the Joey and the two well-dressed men in 1961.
[00:41:11]  So it's a lie.
[00:41:12]  But the second reason that it matters is that it's totalitarian.
[00:41:16]  It is a totalitarian approach to history that requires whatever changes that we make now.
[00:41:23]  And look, I'm in favor of gay marriage.
[00:41:24]  I've been in favor of gay marriage for a long time to be post-rationalized, to have the building blocks of history filled in and the insistence made that things have always been this way.
[00:41:39]  So instead of saying that he changed his mind, and he was relatively early, he changed his mind before Barack Obama did publicly.
[00:41:47]  He was after Dick Cheney, which always gets missed out, but he was really early for an elected politician.
[00:41:53]  Instead of saying, I was one of the first people who changed my mind, he has to pretend that he's believed this since 1961 and that his father has believed this since 1915.
[00:42:05]  Obviously, that isn't true.
[00:42:07]  And it matters that it isn't true.
[00:42:10]  If you look at someone like Rob Portman, who changed his mind on gay marriage, when he was asked why, he said, because of my son, which is true.
[00:42:18]  That's how a lot of people change their minds on stuff.

=== Moral Superiority in Othello (02:53) ===

[00:42:21]  They see people around them.
[00:42:23]  They come up against new circumstances.
[00:42:25]  They're convinced by arguments.
[00:42:27]  Or maybe they just go along with the majority and don't want to be bullied.
[00:42:30]  But they acknowledge that at one point they thought one thing and at another point they thought another thing.
[00:42:35]  That's normal human change.
[00:42:38]  Now, that doesn't mean it's right.
[00:42:39]  I know Maddie and I disagree on this.
[00:42:40]  Maddie makes a great case against, but it is how people evolve as they get older on one or other issues.
[00:42:48]  And the fact that he has to change history so that he was always on the right side of an idea that frankly did not occur to most Americans until about 2001 and that did not appeal to most Americans until about 2015 is creepy.
[00:43:05]  It is of a piece with rewriting books or airbrushing people out of photographs.
[00:43:13]  It is a weird totalitarian instinct that we should resist as a culture.
[00:43:19]  You know what?
[00:43:19]  It kind of reminds me of the whole Blackface scandal that caught me up at NBC, where I was saying back when I was a kid in the 70s, people would do this, not caricature of Blackface, but wearing darker skin color or tinting their skin to dress up as like Michael Jordan or Michael Jackson or somebody they admired.
[00:43:40]  And when that all blew up, you had all these people on the left, including Justin Trudeau, who had done it so many times he couldn't remember, come out and say, no, it's always been wrong.
[00:43:50]  And everyone has always known from the beginning of time how wrong it was.
[00:43:55]  It was like, well, then why did you do it all those times?
[00:43:57]  Like, why can't we say in today's day and age, we recognize it's wrong and it's offensive.
[00:44:02]  But there was a long period of decades in which people were putting it on TV, opening the Oscars and Blackface.
[00:44:07]  Like, why must the left go with this?
[00:44:09]  We've been the only ones in on the truth.
[00:44:11]  And everybody on the other side of us has been confused and terrible, you know, all along.
[00:44:17]  There are versions of Othello that were filmed in the 1940s and 50s, starring extremely famous, extremely accomplished actors.
[00:44:26]  None of the reviews for those movies said this is inappropriate.
[00:44:31]  As we all know, no white actor should play Othello because it involves putting makeup on his face.
[00:44:36]  Now you would not see that.
[00:44:38]  Now, whether or not it's right or wrong that you would not see that, whether it would be offensive for a white actor to play Othello is a separate question.
[00:44:44]  But now there is a general social prohibition against doing that.
[00:44:48]  We know it wasn't there in the 40s and 50s because the people who saw Lawrence Olivier or Austin Wells doing Othello did not say, oh my goodness, look at what he's doing.
[00:44:57]  They said he played it beautifully.
[00:45:00]  So yeah, I mean, this, this is part of the same thing, which is that any social change, both good and bad, has to be flattened such that we convince ourselves that it was always the case and it's not.

=== Stereotypes in Transgender Discourse (14:56) ===

[00:45:15]  Right.
[00:45:15]  And but not that it was always the case, just that the enlightened people, Maddie, they understood it.
[00:45:21]  They got it.
[00:45:22]  And the other people, presumably Republicans, never got it because they didn't have a dad who said, love is love, Joey.
[00:45:28]  There's a moral superiority baked into the whole act.
[00:45:32]  Yeah, I mean, it's the fundamental misunderstanding of human nature in order to absolve yourself of any part in anything wrong ever.
[00:45:43]  It's basically you're totally sinless and there's other people out there who are sinners and they need to be recognized and shamed.
[00:45:51]  And you see this in the way we now judge history as well.
[00:45:55]  It's not the case that historical figures were like all of us, a mixture of good and bad, a mixture of a product of our environment, but also our own individual choices and the ways that we overcame our environment or in some ways succumbed to our environment, good or bad.
[00:46:11]  We don't look at that complexity of human psychology anymore.
[00:46:13]  We just say, that person over there was racist.
[00:46:16]  Let's tear down his statue.
[00:46:18]  Let's honor and revere this other person who was an activist, but like overlook all the complicated, morally controversial things they did.
[00:46:27]  But I think what is fundamentally at root of that is arrogance.
[00:46:31]  It's a moral arrogance.
[00:46:33]  It's thinking that you yourself are above it all.
[00:46:38]  You're better than other people.
[00:46:40]  You don't do anything wrong.
[00:46:41]  You've never judged anyone in a way that's harsh or critical.
[00:46:45]  And it makes you feel good to find these other people and shame them makes you feel good.
[00:46:50]  That's why they do it.
[00:46:52]  Like all that sort of kind compassion that Joe Biden shows for his son Hunter, who's so troubled, that the Democrats applaud him for.
[00:46:59]  He has none of that compassion for America, for its natural evolution.
[00:47:03]  And in his case, Maddie, it's even more offensive because I think we all agree it's an act.
[00:47:08]  It's a lie.
[00:47:10]  He doesn't actually have these, you know, oh, you know, the poor gay people, love is love.
[00:47:15]  He came to it perhaps organically, but he did not feel that way for the vast majority of his life, including all the way up to 2008.
[00:47:22]  So it's actually an act in his case to get votes.
[00:47:26]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:47:27]  And I think most people can recognize that as what it is.
[00:47:32]  But unfortunately, this is the currency now that in order to get anywhere, you have to play this game.
[00:47:39]  In fact, we have a really interesting situation playing out just now in Scotland.
[00:47:43]  I understand this is probably of limited interest to your peers, but there are two candidates to replace the first minister.
[00:47:50]  And one of them is a Muslim and one of them is a Christian.
[00:47:54]  And they both oppose gay marriage, but the Christian's been on about it, honest about it, and the Muslim hasn't.
[00:47:58]  And everyone is fine with that.
[00:48:00]  They don't care because they just want you to say the things you're supposed to say.
[00:48:05]  Right.
[00:48:05]  It's disturbing, even though everybody knows what's true.
[00:48:08]  That's actually one of the things that's interesting to me about that Drew Barrymore clip is how fake it was.
[00:48:13]  I'm going to get to that.
[00:48:13]  It's like, I'm dying to talk to you guys about it.
[00:48:16]  When we come back, I'm going to take a quick break.
[00:48:17]  I want to talk about what else Biden said because he tried to shame, similar theme, tried to shame those who think there aren't a million genders, shame those who think we shouldn't be allowing the mutilation of children under the age of 18 as bad people, as sinful people.
[00:48:33]  All right, so now we're playing the Catholic or the Christian card.
[00:48:36]  We'll pick it up there and then we'll get into the rest of it, the Drew Marry among them.
[00:48:40]  Charlie, Maddie, stay with us.
[00:48:41]  Don't go away.
[00:48:42]  And remember, you can find the Megan Kelly Show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East.
[00:48:47]  The full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel.
[00:48:50]  Go to youtube.com slash Megan Kelly.
[00:48:52]  If you prefer an audio podcast, you can get it for replace you get your podcasts and check out our full archives while you're there.
[00:49:03]  So Joe Biden went on in this interview with The Daily Show to take a shot at people who do not support transition, gender transition treatments for children under the age of 18.
[00:49:15]  Here's what he said.
[00:49:16]  What's going on in Florida is, as my mother would say, close to sinful.
[00:49:22]  I mean, it's just terrible what they're doing.
[00:49:24]  It's not like, you know, a kid wakes up one morning and says, you know, I decided I want to become a man or I want to become a woman or I want to change.
[00:49:33]  I mean, what are they thinking about here?
[00:49:38]  They're human beings.
[00:49:39]  They love.
[00:49:40]  They have feelings.
[00:49:40]  They have inclinations that are, I mean, it just, to me, is, I don't know, it's cruel.
[00:49:50]  Matty Kearns, what a dishonest synopsis of this problem.
[00:49:54]  Completely disingenuous.
[00:49:57]  Yeah, I mean, as if anybody doubts that these children have feelings, they love, they feel whatever.
[00:50:03]  That's not what's at debate here.
[00:50:05]  The debate is about whether it is clinically appropriate to put them on a path to irrevocable harm.
[00:50:14]  I mean, it is harmful.
[00:50:16]  Now, you might make the case that transition is the harms of transition are necessary to overcome this other harm of feeling distressed.
[00:50:25]  There's very little evidence to suggest that's the case, but you might make that argument, but it is definitely harmful.
[00:50:31]  It is going to render the child infertile.
[00:50:34]  It is going to have serious effects if they want to have a normal adult sex life at some point.
[00:50:40]  I mean, these are really huge decisions.
[00:50:43]  And you see this debate play out with much more honesty in Europe with liberals saying, actually, we should really be more cautious here.
[00:50:52]  And he just glosses right past all of that and makes a categorical moral judgment that this is close to sinful.
[00:51:01]  I do think it's interesting that he's saying it's close to sinful.
[00:51:06]  You're not really allowed to say anything sinful anymore, but he didn't receive any backlash for this, I assume, because it is okay to say things are sinful when it happens to overlap with what the secular religion deems to be sinful.
[00:51:22]  So you have this very strange use of religious terminology here in making this moral judgment.
[00:51:30]  You know, part of the what's annoying about the soundbite, Charles, is kids are waking up and saying, you know what, I'm a different gender.
[00:51:38]  That's part of the problem right now.
[00:51:39]  Transgender, gender dysphoria used to be something that we recognized was a real issue.
[00:51:45]  They used to call it a disorder where a kid from birth, from the first days of being able to think, would later say he felt confused about the body that he was in, right?
[00:51:56]  Typically was affecting young boys who can remember very early childhood memories where they were convinced they were girls and have this actual thing called gender dysphoria.
[00:52:04]  What's happening in today's day and age, as documented by Lisa Lippmann at Brown, by Abigail Schreier and Irreversible Damage and others, is it has become a social contagion where your totally female daughter at age 16, instead of cutting or resorting to anorexia to deal with the pressures of youth and teenage and coming of age, decides instead she's not in the right body.
[00:52:26]  And you know what?
[00:52:27]  She's a boy.
[00:52:28]  And instead of farming that out or, you know, threshing it out and looking at whether it's true, we just start calling her by a boy's name and advising she take hormones or cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers, et cetera.
[00:52:40]  So he's actually wrong in the way he's talking about it.
[00:52:43]  And the way in which he's wrong is actually really part of this problem.
[00:52:47]  We should not be giving cross-gender hormones to a girl like that.
[00:52:51]  We should not be just knee-jerk saying, oh, you know, she didn't just come up with this.
[00:52:55]  We should actually be probing what's truly at issue.
[00:52:59]  Yeah, he's wrong in both parts of his answer.
[00:53:02]  He's wrong, as you say, in pretending there's no social contagion.
[00:53:05]  There very obviously is a social contagion.
[00:53:08]  And in fact, there would be a social contagion, even if you were sympathetic to the underlying trend.
[00:53:13]  Bill Maher pointed out that the difference in the rates of this between San Francisco and rural Ohio suggests that this is something that people have picked up.
[00:53:27]  Do you also look at who it is that says their children are transgender?
[00:53:33]  It's not randomly distributed.
[00:53:35]  You see people who say, I have two or three transgender children or transgender activists suddenly have children who are transgender.
[00:53:43]  There is very obviously here a social contagion effect.
[00:53:47]  The other reason his argument is absurd is that it is a non-sequitur.
[00:53:53]  He says, well, these are people.
[00:53:55]  Yes, they love.
[00:53:57]  Yes.
[00:53:58]  The question is whether or not we should permit or even encourage children, minors, people who are not made, not made available to them the full range of choices that adults enjoy.
[00:54:12]  The question is whether we should permit irreversible surgeries.
[00:54:18]  You can acknowledge that a child is a person or that they live and love and laugh, that they bleed when pricked without, for example, thinking it's a good idea to give them a handgun.
[00:54:32]  That question is one that we set as a society.
[00:54:35]  We have rules on how old a person has to be before they can buy a gun or carry a gun that are not affected by our understanding that those children are people that they love.
[00:54:48]  We have rules on when people are permitted to drink alcohol.
[00:54:53]  Again, my children are people.
[00:54:55]  My children are capable of living and laughing.
[00:54:59]  I don't give them a whiskey at six o'clock in the evening.
[00:55:02]  It is a total non-sequitur.
[00:55:05]  It's really an attempt to get around the key issue here, which is, is this an appropriate medical treatment or not?
[00:55:13]  Now, we have that debate for adults, and I have my own views on it, as I know Maddie does, but there is a difference between a 20-year-old saying, I'm going to go into surgery to change myself in much the same way as they might say, I'm going to get a tattoo on my face, and a child doing it.
[00:55:30]  We do not allow the same rules to apply in most areas to children.
[00:55:36]  We don't allow them to borrow money.
[00:55:38]  We don't allow them to join the army or vote or smoke or drink or carry firearms.
[00:55:44]  And I don't see this as right.
[00:55:47]  And I don't see this as being different.
[00:55:49]  The reason that we don't do that, and contracts is a great example of this, is that we don't imagine in most circumstances that minors are able to consent in any meaningful way.
[00:56:00]  And that is the core question here.
[00:56:03]  I'm with Maddie on this, but even if I weren't, the issue of consent is crucial because some of these kids are five, six, seven, eight, 10.
[00:56:11]  So yeah, they can love.
[00:56:12]  They love their parents.
[00:56:13]  Yeah, they're human beings.
[00:56:14]  Yeah, I'm sure they're friendly and they smile, but they can't consent.
[00:56:18]  That's the only question that needs debating.
[00:56:20]  And it is very interesting to me that he completely declined to do so and instead pretended that what we were debating whether or not the children in question are human, which is really, I don't think, disputed by anyone.
[00:56:33]  No, it's infuriating.
[00:56:35]  I mean, I had a debate with somebody who I respect on Twitter the other day who is, there was a lamentation that California has just introduced similar legislation saying that it was from a Democratic senator saying a DeSantis style bill was just introduced in California to require teachers and counselors to inform parents of a kid IDs as a gender, not on their birth certificate.
[00:56:56]  And a social worker who I follow and like said, this is inappropriate.
[00:57:02]  I mean, I'm sort of the first defense.
[00:57:04]  If a kid comes in and tells me that he's transgender, you know, yes, I try to encourage them to talk to their parents about it, but if they don't talk to me about it, then they're just going to live in silence and suffering.
[00:57:13]  And I completely disagree.
[00:57:15]  I support this legislation 100%.
[00:57:18]  If my kid went into a school social worker and said something about thinking they were in the wrong body or transitioning and the school didn't tell me, I would sue them with every, I would use every dollar I have to sue the school, to sue the social worker, to get people protesting outside, to get the legislation changed if it needed to change, to publicly humiliate them.
[00:57:40]  I would go crazy on them.
[00:57:41]  This is deeply wrong.
[00:57:42]  You may not have secrets with my child about self-harm, which is what this is.
[00:57:49]  It's in the same category to me, Maddie, as my kid going in there and saying, I'm suicidal.
[00:57:53]  I'm thinking about hurting myself.
[00:57:54]  That's where this is.
[00:57:56]  That's what you're going to cut out a huge piece of your forearm and create a fake phallus.
[00:58:00]  That's what you want to do.
[00:58:01]  And you're talking about it openly.
[00:58:03]  And no one's going to tell me.
[00:58:04]  Oh, we'll see about that.
[00:58:07]  Yeah, there's an interesting difference in the way this particular aspect of the transgender debate has played out in the US versus the UK.
[00:58:15]  In the US, it's very much been that mama bears saying over my dead body, you know, you'll have to, you want to transition my child behind my back.
[00:58:25]  Like you just wait.
[00:58:27]  I'm going to bring hell down on you, as you just articulated very well.
[00:58:32]  In the UK, it's interesting because the emphasis is less, we're less of a rights-based culture in some respects.
[00:58:39]  And this conversation has been much more about child safeguarding.
[00:58:44]  And it is deeply creepy and deeply sinister to be having conversations, keeping mommy and daddy in the dark deliberately at school, especially when you're getting to that area of your sexed body and potentially overlap with sexuality or whatever it is.
[00:59:05]  It's deeply sinister and I honestly think like there there should be if we could blend these two narratives, these two ways of fighting back.
[00:59:14]  It's yes, fundamentally the parents rights.
[00:59:17]  I 100 agree and support that, but it is also so creepy.
[00:59:22]  Like who do these people think they are what?
[00:59:25]  Like, what weirdos that they they want to take on this right of children that they aren't related, to talk to them about deeply personal things, about their bodies.
[00:59:35]  I mean we, we train children to be suspicious, um and and cautious against adults who do that, adults who who encourage them to to turn away from their families, to turn away from their mom and dad, and adults who want to talk to them about things that are not appropriate for them to be talking to them about different, perhaps if you're, if you're seeing uh, a doctor, but again, only if you have that parent there.
[00:59:57]  So I I really think the whole thing is just bizarre and i'm i'm surprised more people don't say outright how, how sinister it really is there's, they're starting to.
[01:00:07]  I mean, slowly but surely, they are the groomer yeah so yeah, the groomer thing.
[01:00:11]  So this leads me to.

=== Sexism in the Barbie Clip (07:54) ===

[01:00:12]  It's not about the kids but uh, the Drew Barrymore thing that i've been teasing.
[01:00:16]  I don't know if you guys saw this.
[01:00:17]  I don't watch that show it's.
[01:00:18]  It's amazing to me.
[01:00:19]  It's.
[01:00:19]  It's gone up in the ratings since she launched it but it's only got like a million and a half viewers.
[01:00:24]  I mean, every show on FOX in the prime time or early prime completely trounces this and I guarantee you the budget is 10 times any of those FOX NEWS shows.
[01:00:33]  Like the amount of money that they pour into a program like this for such little returns baffles um.
[01:00:39]  In any event, she had on Dylan Mulvaney, who's been quote a girl for a year and has been documenting Dylan's quote 365 days of girlhood, which Dylan isn't happy having because Dylan's not a girl and never had a girlhood.
[01:00:56]  Dylan is a grown biological man who's now declared that Dylan is trans.
[01:01:01]  Um, Dylan has had the facial, the feminization surgery and been very public with this transition, very popular on social media.
[01:01:09]  So goes on the Drew Barrymore show and I would submit to the audience that what is most bizarre here.
[01:01:15]  Dylan is the normal one.
[01:01:18]  Dylan is not behaving to me in any particularly odd way.
[01:01:22]  Drew Barrymore is, and to the listening audience.
[01:01:25]  Please go to youtube later and click on this point.
[01:01:28]  We are what one?
[01:01:29]  112 an hour, 12 into the show, so you can slide forward and take a look at this video for yourself.
[01:01:35]  Here it is to meet you I really am.
[01:01:40]  This is um, it's very personal for me in a world where we're all trying to figure out who we're supposed to be.
[01:01:49]  The risk yes bravery, I do think that there was so much that came up this year that I had no idea that I was going to have to figure out in womanhood.
[01:02:00]  So much of my audience is a younger demographic and I sort of would love to show transness in a way that we haven't seen it before.
[01:02:08]  Where do you find the strength to keep being the joy?
[01:02:13]  Well, I think having my chosen family and the people that I love to take care of me.
[01:02:18]  It's interesting, because I look at someone like you and I can't imagine anybody disliking you.
[01:02:24]  Oh please, do you know, do you want to know ironically who uh, dislikes me the most sometimes?
[01:02:31]  Who myself?
[01:02:32]  Oh, me too oh, and.
[01:02:36]  But I guess we're way back in now, like You've asked me, like, what I would do to combat the hate, right?
[01:02:47]  Yeah.
[01:02:48]  But what do you do?
[01:02:49]  Okay, that's a great question.
[01:02:51]  Now, I see.
[01:02:51]  You've been doing it a little longer than I have.
[01:02:53]  Another thing that you're making me realize is to not carry on in spite of others.
[01:02:58]  I'm sorry.
[01:02:59]  I just realized that I'm sitting on the floor with Drew.
[01:03:02]  It's crazy to be doing this.
[01:03:04]  Thank you for joining me on the floor.
[01:03:05]  The floor always feels safer.
[01:03:07]  It feels nice.
[01:03:09]  Oh my God.
[01:03:10]  There's so much to go over.
[01:03:12]  To keep being the joy.
[01:03:15]  That was the cringiest part of it.
[01:03:17]  Oh my God, I can't.
[01:03:18]  And for the listening audience, what made the clip controversial is Drew Barrymore got down on her knees and seemed to be praying at the transgender altar of Dylan Mulvaney, which as an image, I'll start with you again on this, Maddie, encapsulates a lot of what is driving actual biological women nuts about this whole evolution,
[01:03:43]  which is trans women are coming into our locker rooms and our sports and our bathrooms and our colleges and so on and taking over, taking over.
[01:03:54]  And we as women are expected to take the knee and just be thankful and say, you know, we appreciate what you're doing to us.
[01:04:04]  And anything else means you're a bigot.
[01:04:07]  Yeah.
[01:04:08]  What I see when I look at that clip is I see a man dressed like a Barbie doll and a woman bowing before this man dressed as a Barbie doll.
[01:04:19]  So there was a, there was a time in feminism where people said, oh, like we need to get away from these stereotypes.
[01:04:26]  You know, it's much more to being a woman than being a Barbie doll.
[01:04:30]  Well, you know, I can get on board with that.
[01:04:32]  That's that sounds reasonable to me.
[01:04:33]  But now it's not just the Barbie doll thing.
[01:04:36]  It's like a man underneath the Barbie doll costume.
[01:04:39]  And this is what, this is the pinnacle of being an authentic female.
[01:04:43]  And we're supposed to get on our knees.
[01:04:45]  I mean, you know, it's just infuriating.
[01:04:49]  It's just so obviously sexist.
[01:04:53]  And it's ridiculous as well that Drew Barrymore thinks that this is what the culture moment calls for.
[01:05:02]  If you think of all the issues women face today around the world, I mean, women in the West are doing pretty well.
[01:05:07]  I mean, they might be coming for our bathrooms and our sports, but all things considered, we're doing pretty well.
[01:05:13]  But there are women around the world who are not.
[01:05:15]  They are suffering.
[01:05:16]  They're not allowed to go out the house without males in their families accompanying them.
[01:05:22]  They're not allowed to expose their hair.
[01:05:24]  They're not allowed to vote.
[01:05:25]  They're not allowed to go to school.
[01:05:26]  There's serious stuff happening out there.
[01:05:28]  And a real women's rights movement, a real feminism would be talking about that.
[01:05:32]  They would not be kneeling before a male in a Barbie costume.
[01:05:36]  It's ridiculous.
[01:05:38]  Charles, there's so many things that infuriate me about this clip.
[01:05:42]  So I imitated the, how do you find the courage to keep being the joy with her?
[01:05:48]  It was so cringy, her fake smile, her fake GIA.
[01:05:52]  Like, this is an actress.
[01:05:54]  Drew Barrymore is acting.
[01:05:55]  And what is she acting the part of?
[01:05:58]  Woke, weak white woman praying at the transgender altar.
[01:06:04]  That's what, that's her part in this particular role.
[01:06:07]  And then to go on to say, you know, Dylan says, I can't imagine anyone disliking you.
[01:06:12]  And Drew, do you know who sometimes dislikes me the most?
[01:06:18]  Myself.
[01:06:19]  As they're both kneeling on the ground.
[01:06:22]  And then the floor feels safer.
[01:06:24]  Maybe I should do the next presidential debate from the floor.
[01:06:28]  Perhaps I should have been sitting on the floor when I asked Trump or any of these other guys tough questions.
[01:06:33]  How weak is she?
[01:06:35]  To me, it goes back to what we were saying before.
[01:06:37]  Where are the strong women?
[01:06:38]  Where are the, forget, like Maddie said, okay, give me a Nancy Pelosi any day over this pathetic display of, I don't know, what is it?
[01:06:47]  False strength by showing every weakness coming out of your pores.
[01:06:51]  And it may all be an affectation, which makes it even more insulting.
[01:06:56]  Yeah, when I was born, the prime minister was Margaret Thatcher and the queen was Elizabeth II.
[01:07:02]  And I assumed, as any child does, that women were in charge of everything because my mother was at home as well.
[01:07:08]  So it's quite the transition from that assumption to watching that clip.
[01:07:13]  I mean, I think Maddie raises a really interesting point, which is that, you know, that is a man in a dress, but it's a man in a dress who is trying to emulate the most stereotypical conception of a woman imaginable.
[01:07:31]  If you watch Tom and Jerry and they want to introduce a love interest for Tom, that's what the woman looks like with the red lipstick and the dress.
[01:07:39]  And this is a repeated theme.
[01:07:42]  We saw this right from the beginning with Bruce Jenner, who became Caitlin Jenner and had that photograph on the front of, I forget which magazine it was, that really came out of the 1950s.
[01:07:57]  So it's a weird reinforcement of stereotypes that many feminists spend a long time with good reason, I think, trying to get rid of.

=== James Patterson and Alex Cross (07:51) ===

[01:08:07]  What bothers me more about it overall, though, is the extreme therapy culture that that reflects.
[01:08:14]  Now, I'm not against therapy.
[01:08:16]  I think some people really do need therapy.
[01:08:18]  There's lots of great work that therapists do.
[01:08:20]  But the idea that in all circumstances, you should love yourself and follow your dreams and do whatever you want to do is crazy.
[01:08:31]  I mean, there are circumstances in which you should be encouraged to be yourself, but you don't want to encourage Charles Manson to be himself.
[01:08:38]  And you don't want to encourage somebody who has been deeply self-destructive to be himself and love himself.
[01:08:44]  And you don't want to encourage somebody who needs to make profound changes to his lifestyle because he's hurting other people or damaging his own interests to be himself.
[01:08:54]  And what we just saw was this claim in effect that whatever it is that somebody says that they are, that will not only be good for them, but it should be celebrated in the most saccharine possible way by other people.
[01:09:09]  And I just don't think that is true.
[01:09:12]  I don't think that it is good for our culture to have that as a norm.
[01:09:18]  I don't think that this absolute obsession that we have with safety, which okay, in that circumstance was manifested by some preference for the floor, is good.
[01:09:27]  Life is risky.
[01:09:28]  Life should be risky.
[01:09:29]  People should have new experiences and go out on a limb.
[01:09:33]  I don't think that it is a good thing in every circumstance for people to tell everyone in the world, a big studio audience and the entire TV viewing audience and their audience on the internet that they sometimes hate themselves.
[01:09:49]  It's just oversharing.
[01:09:51]  So that whole thing was this kind of to the to the extreme therapy culture that we need less of, not more.
[01:10:00]  I was worried I wasn't going to be able to get this in, but quickly, I have two things I need to hit with you guys.
[01:10:04]  Hugh Grant took a beating for an interview he gave on the red carpet at the Oscars to Ashley Graham, who is a model who was trying to do red carpet interviews.
[01:10:15]  And Charles, I've got to ask you about this.
[01:10:18]  Was he being rude or was he being British?
[01:10:22]  Watch this.
[01:10:25]  What's your favorite thing about coming to the Oscars?
[01:10:31]  Well, it's fascinating.
[01:10:36]  The whole of humanity is here.
[01:10:37]  What are you most excited to see tonight?
[01:10:40]  To see?
[01:10:40]  Yeah, well, I know that you probably watched a few of the movies.
[01:10:43]  Are you excited to see anybody win?
[01:10:44]  Do you have your hopes up for anyone?
[01:10:49]  Not, not, no, no one in particular.
[01:10:51]  Okay, well, what are you wearing tonight then?
[01:10:54]  Just my suit.
[01:10:55]  So tell me, what does it feel like to be in Glass Onion?
[01:10:59]  It was such an amazing film.
[01:11:00]  I really loved it.
[01:11:01]  I love a thriller.
[01:11:03]  How fun is it to shoot something like that?
[01:11:05]  Well, I'm barely in it.
[01:11:06]  I'm in it for about three seconds.
[01:11:08]  Yeah, but still, you showed up and you had fun, right?
[01:11:11]  Almost.
[01:11:14]  I've been dying to ask you about this.
[01:11:17]  I don't think that it's British per se.
[01:11:20]  I'm not even sure it's that rude.
[01:11:22]  I tell you what, I think it is.
[01:11:23]  I think it's somebody who has been doing this for a long time, who has enough money not to care anymore, reaching the point at which he just could not bring himself to answer questions that he thought were pointless and just letting it go.
[01:11:37]  That's what I saw.
[01:11:38]  I saw someone who was saying, I just can't be bothered anymore and no one can do anything to me.
[01:11:44]  There was a piece in the Washington Post positing that, you know, Brits are raised to be self-deprecating.
[01:11:50]  They don't like the spotlight on them.
[01:11:51]  You know, she's trying to be like, you were in Glass Onion.
[01:11:53]  And he's like, no, I was only, I was barely in it.
[01:11:55]  And who are you wearing?
[01:11:57]  And the instinct is not to be like, oh, I'm wearing Christian Dior or whatever, but just to be like, I don't know, my tailor, whatever made it.
[01:12:03]  And that it's being misinterpreted by American audiences as, oh, he's such a jerk, as opposed to, you know, the Brits, they're not all mushy and overly therapized, as you were just pointing out, like a lot of us Americans.
[01:12:18]  Yeah, a bit of both.
[01:12:19]  I mean, you're right.
[01:12:20]  That is a British instinct.
[01:12:23]  But I think he took it to an extreme because he doesn't care anymore.
[01:12:27]  He does not give a flying fig.
[01:12:30]  All right.
[01:12:30]  Let's end on this.
[01:12:31]  My pal and husband, Doug Brunt, made some news on his podcast the other day, which actually was very interesting.
[01:12:37]  We've been covering how they revised Roll Dahl, right?
[01:12:41]  And they took out words they found offensive of books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
[01:12:46]  You can no longer call Augustus Gloop fat.
[01:12:49]  That's now too offensive for modern day audiences, according to the publisher.
[01:12:53]  Then they went after 007 and took out racial terms and other allegedly offensive terms.
[01:12:59]  Then they did the same thing to R.L. Stein, you know, the Goosebumps author.
[01:13:04]  So bit by bit, they're coming after authors of great and beloved American stories and British stories in the case of 007.
[01:13:11]  And now they're coming for James Patterson.
[01:13:13]  So Doug has a podcast called Dedicated with Doug Brunt, and he has on great authors.
[01:13:17]  He's having Imore Tolls next week.
[01:13:19]  He had on James Patterson.
[01:13:20]  He had on Lee Child, you name it.
[01:13:22]  They're all doing it.
[01:13:22]  It's great stuff.
[01:13:23]  And James Patterson was talking about Alex Cross, which is one of his most famous characters.
[01:13:27]  It's a cop, and how not only is he not getting an audience on pretty much any other TV show than those on Fox, they won't book him on MSNBC, even though he's like the number one best-selling author in the world.
[01:13:42]  But Amazon is now making a movie and they're insisting that they change this main character to be sounds like more of a jerk or more.
[01:13:54]  Well, I'll let James Patterson describe it.
[01:13:56]  Here's the exchange.
[01:13:59]  It reminds me a little bit of what happened with Live PD on AE, which similar to your book is just showing cop stories.
[01:14:05]  It's not really pro-cop.
[01:14:06]  It's not anti-cop.
[01:14:07]  It's just showing cop with no filter, really.
[01:14:10]  And he canceled the show in the height of some of these media stories where it just seemed like anything associated with cop, like we just don't want to put it on the screen.
[01:14:21]  We don't want to talk about it because it just seems kind of third rail-ish.
[01:14:25]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:14:26]  Listen, we're filming Alex Tross now for Amazon.
[01:14:29]  And even there, once again, there's this, They're trying to make Alex a lot more wounded than he should be.
[01:14:41]  And I think it's going to be a really interesting show, but they're so overly sensitive and not necessarily in a good way about the job of, and Alex is, he is a good cop.
[01:14:56]  He's a good family person and whatever.
[01:14:59]  But it's even there, it's...
[01:15:03]  They want to make him a little more accessible or a little more flawed or how do you mean?
[01:15:07]  A lot more flawed.
[01:15:08]  A lot more flawed.
[01:15:09]  Because he's a cop.
[01:15:12]  And so now they've come, Maddie, for James Patterson and Alex Cross.
[01:15:17]  Well, it goes back to what we were discussing earlier with the need for having moral certainty with yourself as the good guy and somebody else as the bad guy, right?
[01:15:27]  It can't be that we're all a bit of both.
[01:15:29]  It can't be that we all have this internal struggle and we're trying to we're trying to be good and and and therefore you have to have this narrative.
[01:15:36]  And there's certain things that are good and certain things that are bad.
[01:15:39]  It's very threatening, I think, to progressives when these seem to be challenged.
[01:15:44]  And that's why they go for history.
[01:15:45]  That's why they're going for children's books.
[01:15:49]  That's why there's this great concern with controlling anything that might touch on one of these moral narratives.

=== Silicon Valley Bank Risks (15:44) ===

[01:15:59]  Yeah.
[01:15:59]  And they also changed Peter Pan, the new Disney version of Peter Pan.
[01:16:03]  Charlie's got, now we don't have lost boys.
[01:16:05]  We have lost boys and girls.
[01:16:07]  They've taken out the offensive.
[01:16:09]  I mean, there's nothing that they won't try to scrub or in the case of a cop narrative, make darker in order to fit their narrative.
[01:16:17]  Yeah, well, I think that's very important, though, because if little girls grow up thinking that they are unable to live on a magical island fighting pirates, then maybe they won't progress in life.
[01:16:29]  Maybe they'll need to sit on the floor for any difficult conversations.
[01:16:34]  Let's do that the next time you guys come on.
[01:16:36]  We'll see.
[01:16:36]  We'll see if we're any better, if we're stronger in our commentary and willingness to take on these tough issues.
[01:16:42]  You guys, thanks so much for being here, Charlie and Maddie.
[01:16:44]  What a pleasure.
[01:16:44]  We'll talk to you again soon.
[01:16:46]  And see you soon at the NR big hullabaloo in March.
[01:16:49]  Okay.
[01:16:50]  We're going to be right back with an author who's got big plans to fix some of the big issues in America today and somebody who knows quite a bit about treasury and banking because he used to work at Treasury.
[01:17:00]  We're going to talk about the latest on SBB Bank and the fact that the Dow is now down about 700 points.
[01:17:06]  What does that tell us?
[01:17:07]  Stand by.
[01:17:11]  From the crisis at our southern border to banks going belly up to issues with Russia and China, there's a few issues going on in this country.
[01:17:18]  And our next guest has written a book that attempts to address them all, all the big ones.
[01:17:23]  Dave McCormick is a graduate of West Point.
[01:17:25]  He served in the Treasury Department under George W. Bush.
[01:17:28]  He's a former CEO of one of the world's largest hedge funds.
[01:17:31]  And he ran against Dr. Oz in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat, which was ultimately lost to the Democrat John Fetterman in Pennsylvania.
[01:17:40]  His new book, Superpower in Peril, a Battle Plan to Renew America is out this week.
[01:17:46]  And Dave joins us now.
[01:17:48]  Dave, welcome to the show.
[01:17:49]  And thanks for having me, Megan.
[01:17:51]  Yeah, the pleasure is all mine.
[01:17:53]  Lots to go over.
[01:17:54]  You're the perfect person to kick off the discussion on Silicon Valley Bank with, former Undersecretary of the Treasury, also life in a hedge fund.
[01:18:03]  So you understand the financial industry very well.
[01:18:06]  Right now, the Dow's down in the mid-500s.
[01:18:10]  It was 700 a minute ago.
[01:18:11]  What happened?
[01:18:12]  I thought we fixed it.
[01:18:13]  I thought, you know, we swooped in, we saved it, and this is going to stabilize everything.
[01:18:19]  Yeah, well, unfortunately, well, again, thanks for having me.
[01:18:21]  And thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about the book Superpower in Peril.
[01:18:25]  You know, the Silicon Valley Bank crisis, you really understand it.
[01:18:30]  You have to step back a bit and put it in context.
[01:18:33]  And what's happening here is really a result of excess in policy.
[01:18:38]  We've had excessively low interest rates for more than a decade, and we've had extremely high spending, particularly over the last two years under Joe Biden, like $19 trillion of incremental commitments and spending, 40% increase in discretionary spending.
[01:18:53]  That's created huge pressures on inflation.
[01:18:56]  And the Federal Reserve reacted by raising interest rates.
[01:18:59]  And that's the context for what we're dealing with.
[01:19:01]  And what happened is banks that had assets on their balance sheets, those are now underwater because they were holding long duration.
[01:19:08]  And that's created a lot of pressure.
[01:19:10]  And with Silicon Valley Bank, and a mismatch between assets and liabilities, with Silicon Valley Bank, what you had is a terribly, terribly managed bank, terrible with risk management.
[01:19:21]  What happened here was obvious.
[01:19:23]  It should have been avoided.
[01:19:24]  Management was not paying attention.
[01:19:25]  The board was not paying attention.
[01:19:27]  And the regulators, the San Francisco Fed was also not paying attention.
[01:19:31]  So failure on both fronts.
[01:19:33]  And the way the governments responded is deeply problematic because despite the words not using the words bailout, that's in fact what's happened.
[01:19:40]  It was totally appropriate that the FDIC stepped in.
[01:19:44]  They fired management.
[01:19:46]  They should have tried to sell it.
[01:19:48]  They failed to do that.
[01:19:49]  They killed the equity holders.
[01:19:51]  They killed the credit holders.
[01:19:52]  But what they did is they gave protection to the uninsured deposits.
[01:19:56]  And that was really a problem for two reasons.
[01:19:59]  First, the guy that was the landscaping guy that had $10,000 owned to him from Silicon Valley Bank, he just lost that $10,000.
[01:20:08]  But the millionaire venture capitalist that lives down the street, all his deposits were protected.
[01:20:12]  So there's an inherent unfairness here.
[01:20:14]  Wait, how did the landscaping guy lose his money?
[01:20:16]  Because he was already insured for $250,000.
[01:20:18]  No, the landscaping guy lost his money because he was a creditor.
[01:20:21]  So the bank owed him money for doing the landscaping.
[01:20:24]  Oh, he got wiped out.
[01:20:27]  The depositor got protected.
[01:20:29]  And the second problem with it is moral hazard, which essentially means that this is an invitation for more risk-taking.
[01:20:35]  And what they just demonstrated is that they'll likely protect the uninsured deposits around the country.
[01:20:42]  There's $8 trillion of uninsured deposits.
[01:20:45]  And that's why you see the markets reacting unfavorably.
[01:20:49]  There's a lot of questions, a lot of uncertainty.
[01:20:52]  And I learned the hard way in the treasury and through a life in business, very hard to predict what's going to happen.
[01:20:59]  And policy needs to be swift and conclusive and hopefully bring confidence.
[01:21:04]  And so far, this hasn't done that.
[01:21:06]  What's annoying to me about it, and I understand the arguments in favor of doing it.
[01:21:10]  It is kind of an essential bank, as it turns out.
[01:21:12]  And it would have affected a lot of regular folks if they let it fail and didn't ensure the deposits over 250.
[01:21:19]  I get that argument.
[01:21:20]  But what's annoying is we're rewarding their risk-taking, whereas other banks were more responsible, accurately predicted the interest rates would go back up and invested accordingly, hedged their bets accordingly.
[01:21:32]  And they're now basically having to foot the bill.
[01:21:35]  They're getting punished because it's that sort of insurance fund that they all pay into that's now been depleted thanks to Silicon Valley Bank.
[01:21:42]  They're getting punished.
[01:21:43]  They have got to pay for this bank's mistakes in taking a much riskier strategy.
[01:21:48]  And that risky strategy has been rewarded by this bank.
[01:21:52]  And so thus it leads more banks to say, what the hell?
[01:21:55]  I'm going to be riskier too because now I know the FDIC is going to have my back just as long as I can say I'm essential to the flow of banking too.
[01:22:04]  My collapse could really hurt somebody.
[01:22:06]  So it's rewarding somewhat reckless behavior and it's punishing banks who took a better approach.
[01:22:13]  And here's the last piece of it.
[01:22:15]  I understand the bank didn't go down because it was woke, but there was a lot of attention being paid to woke issues by people who should have been mining the company's books.
[01:22:27]  And I'll just give you a couple of examples that are hitting lately.
[01:22:30]  Board of directors, only one member had a career in investment banking.
[01:22:34]  They needed somebody like you on their board, Dave.
[01:22:37]  Instead, they had one person who was an investment banker.
[01:22:40]  That person only joined in September.
[01:22:42]  The rest were Obama-Clinton mega donors who are very open about the tears they shed when Trump was elected.
[01:22:48]  One mega donor had to go on some retreat to Japan where she prayed at a Shinto shrine.
[01:22:55]  She was so distraught.
[01:22:56]  These are the, and then there's all sorts of quotes about how they're very concerned about how you've got to get the right diversity into this company and every other company, how it's not enough to just report the numbers.
[01:23:08]  Instead, we need to demand a deep look at company culture.
[01:23:11]  We need to hold management teams accountable for real change.
[01:23:14]  Change on your investment strategy?
[01:23:16]  No.
[01:23:17]  Change on your number of black people there, number of LGBTQ people there, number of, oh my God, they were focused on the wrong things, Dave.
[01:23:26]  I couldn't agree more.
[01:23:28]  I think that what you see here is a bank that absolutely lost sight of its mission.
[01:23:32]  And just to give you an analogy of the woke issue that I think it represents, if the Army lost a battle, would you say that they lost the battle because of wokeness?
[01:23:44]  I'm not sure.
[01:23:45]  But what you could say is that they released their climate strategy before they released their warfighting strategy.
[01:23:49]  And that's what happened with Silicon Valley Bank.
[01:23:52]  And so it was terribly managed.
[01:23:53]  And the management team plus the regulators were hugely full.
[01:23:58]  The only thing I'd add to what you said is that, yes, the other banks are paying the fees, but we're really paying the fees because those fees will be passed on to customers of banks.
[01:24:08]  So taxpayers will ultimately bear the burden of this.
[01:24:11]  They'll just bear it down the road.
[01:24:13]  They're not going to bear it immediately, but the banks will pass that along.
[01:24:16]  And ultimately, we as taxpayers are going to suffer because of the mismanagement and poor oversight by the Silicon Valley Bank and the regulators and the San Francisco Fed.
[01:24:27]  And the people cheering the bailout or whatever you want to call it, yes, some are honest brokers and having a genuine belief that this is going to help save people down the line not connected with Silicon Valley Bank.
[01:24:38]  But then there are people like Gavin Newsom, who today comes out, of course, he was a big cheerleader for the bailout.
[01:24:44]  It turns out he has never mentioned while cheering on this bailout, at least three of his wine companies are held by SVB and the bank president sits on the board of his wife's charity.
[01:24:57]  He's been praising the decision by the feds to intervene.
[01:25:00]  He never mentioned any of this.
[01:25:02]  He did not disclose any of these conflicts.
[01:25:05]  And I, you know, it's unseemly and it makes us feel like we've been had.
[01:25:11]  I completely agree, Megan.
[01:25:12]  And the thing that I want to highlight here is that this is a little bit of a canary in the coal mine.
[01:25:18]  And what's coming is going to be highly challenging for working families and for the American economy.
[01:25:27]  And the people that have benefited from the policies we've seen over the last decade or so are going to be fine.
[01:25:32]  And what I mean by that is all this monetary policy has essentially helped all the people that have assets.
[01:25:37]  So if you had a house or you had a lot of money, you got richer, a lot richer over the last 10 years.
[01:25:42]  Everybody that had assets, it wasn't they were geniuses, they just got richer.
[01:25:46]  That's like 10% of Americans.
[01:25:47]  90% of Americans don't have assets.
[01:25:50]  Two-thirds of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
[01:25:53]  And over the last decade, real incomes have stayed flat and they've suffered.
[01:25:57]  Inflation kills them.
[01:26:00]  And a recession puts their families at risk.
[01:26:02]  And that's what we're, that's the environment we're in because of the excessive spending and economic policies of the Biden administration.
[01:26:09]  So what's ahead, unfortunately, and I think this is, we're seeing the beginning of it, is we're going to have continued inflation.
[01:26:16]  And that inflation hurts working families and hurts people on fixed income.
[01:26:19]  And we're going to have the Fed rising, raising interest rates.
[01:26:22]  And those interest rates moves to offset inflation are going to put the economy in recession, which is going to be tough on Americans.
[01:26:29]  And we can go to the source of this.
[01:26:31]  There's lots of people that had a hand in it, but the policies of the Joe Biden administration over the last two years have made a challenging situation much, much worse.
[01:26:40]  And that's what lies ahead.
[01:26:41]  This banking crisis is just the beginning of it.
[01:26:44]  Well, for much of that time, he's had the support of both bodies of Congress.
[01:26:48]  Now he's lost the House, but he does maintain control of the Democrats of the Senate.
[01:26:52]  However, it's interesting that both Dianne Feinstein and John Fetterman, who now holds the seat that you once ran for, are out.
[01:27:02]  So it's now a 49-49 split.
[01:27:04]  The Democrats still control because Kamala Harris casts the deciding vote.
[01:27:07]  Right now, it's getting a little tough, tougher for the Democrats than expected.
[01:27:12]  And can you explain?
[01:27:14]  I'm sorry, go ahead.
[01:27:15]  Yeah, go ahead.
[01:27:16]  No, I was just going to say, can you explain why?
[01:27:18]  Why won't the Democrats just admit John Fetterman can't do the job?
[01:27:22]  Why wouldn't they admit it before they ran him?
[01:27:25]  Now that he's got the job, why don't they just sub in somebody?
[01:27:29]  There is a reason, a strategic reason why they don't want to sub in somebody to do the job for him.
[01:27:34]  He's been in the hospital for over a month.
[01:27:37]  Well, you know, this sort of gets to the motivation of why I ran and what the challenges are.
[01:27:42]  On John Fetterman, listen, when somebody's family's going through that, and Bob Casey, for that matter, the first time we've had two Democratic senators in Pennsylvania for 76 years.
[01:27:52]  But on a human level, you wish their families well.
[01:27:55]  You pray for them to get better.
[01:27:56]  But on the John Fetterman case, it's certainly totally legitimate that we would ask questions about what should have been shared with voters prior to him actually running and winning, because this is very, it's unfair to Pennsylvanians that they don't have a senator representing them.
[01:28:11]  And in both cases, John Fetterman and Bob Casey, I think their policies and their positions represent where the Democratic Party has taken our country in a very progressive, radical direction.
[01:28:23]  That's led to the purpose of my book, which is I'm essentially, my book, Superpower and Parallel, is talking about America's in decline economically, national security-wise, spiritually, we're at risk of losing the America we know.
[01:28:38]  And the essential thesis of the book, which addresses your question, is that a decline is not inevitable, but neither is renewal.
[01:28:47]  It depends on what we do.
[01:28:48]  And this book is meant to be the what we do book.
[01:28:51]  And it essentially argues for educating our people, confronting China, and securing the country.
[01:28:56]  And the reason the Pennsylvania Senate seat is so critical is it's a purple state.
[01:29:01]  It's a harbinger for the direction of the country.
[01:29:03]  It's probably necessary to win the presidency, but it certainly in the last cycle was necessary to win the majority.
[01:29:09]  We should have won the majority.
[01:29:10]  And that's why the Democrats are so focused on keeping it, because if they lose Pennsylvania, then they likely lose the majority.
[01:29:17]  And if they lose the majority, then we're going to have an opportunity to turn the country in a completely different direction.
[01:29:23]  And that's why it's such an important race and an important fight.
[01:29:26]  And that's why it's gotten so much attention.
[01:29:30]  Isn't it also the case that if they put somebody in, if they subbed it, let's say they said Giselle Petterman is going to serve now, it could be because he can't.
[01:29:37]  That seat would be in play in two years, as opposed to in six years if he could just fulfill the term.
[01:29:44]  Absolutely.
[01:29:45]  If depending on the timing, there could be a special election as early as November of this year or November of next year.
[01:29:53]  And the special election doesn't even require primaries.
[01:29:56]  It has the parties on both sides select their candidates.
[01:30:00]  So this is high stakes, high stakes for the country, high stakes for Pennsylvania.
[01:30:06]  You know, one of the issues that people are discussing right now, and I know your book gets into China quite a bit, and I appreciate that and the border crisis.
[01:30:14]  Tucker Carlson reached out to all the GOP candidates suspected and declared for 2024, including DeSantis.
[01:30:22]  And DeSantis came out and asked their position on Ukraine.
[01:30:24]  And DeSantis came out and said he sort of started to sound a little more like Trump, like it's a territorial issue.
[01:30:31]  That's a territorial dispute.
[01:30:34]  And that's definitely not how Joe Biden sees it or how a lot of Republicans see it, where they see it's our strategic interests are definitely involved in what happens between Russia and Ukraine.
[01:30:44]  So there's a real debate there.
[01:30:46]  But what DeSantis is focused on is more China.
[01:30:49]  And he sees Ukraine as a distraction from the bigger rising threat to America, which is China.
[01:30:54]  So as somebody who studied it and has just written a book about all these issues, what do you make of his position?
[01:30:59]  And what do you think about it?
[01:31:01]  Yeah, well, first of all, we have to start with our leadership in the world is being challenged over and again because of Joe Biden's weakness.
[01:31:08]  We saw it in Afghanistan.
[01:31:09]  We saw it in Ukraine with the Nordstrom 2 and the invitation to Putin.
[01:31:15]  And we saw it just recently with the Chinese spy balloon.
[01:31:18]  So it's happening over and over again.
[01:31:20]  And that creates much more risk in the world because America's leadership is unsteady.
[01:31:25]  I'm someone who, and the book argues this, that America's strength at home is, and America's strength and leadership abroad are two sides of the same coin.
[01:31:35]  We can't be the exceptional America we want to be at home without doing tough things at home, but we also have to advance U.S. interest around the world.

=== America as a Superpower (05:04) ===

[01:31:43]  We have to fight for U.S. interests around the world.
[01:31:45]  In the case of Ukraine, I think for Russia to invade Ukraine is of huge significance to American interest.
[01:31:53]  I don't think we should support the Ukrainians because of their fight for liberty, which I admire and respect.
[01:31:59]  I think we should support Ukraine because it's critical that they find their way to continued independence in the face of Putin's aggression.
[01:32:09]  Now, I think we need to do it carefully.
[01:32:11]  Those people that are worried about corruption of our money or worried about U.S. troops getting drawn in, listen, as a soldier, I'm a graduate of West Point, 82nd airborne combat veteran from Iraq.
[01:32:22]  No one knows more about the worries associated with sending young men and women into combat than me.
[01:32:27]  So we need to be very careful, but we need to stand strong, in my opinion, with Ukraine because it's in our interest.
[01:32:33]  And I don't respectfully agree with the governor about the distraction with China.
[01:32:39]  I think it's the opposite.
[01:32:40]  I think to fold and look weak, in this case with Russia, enables China's aggression, encourages China's aggression.
[01:32:48]  And the pact between China and Russia, I think is very, very much in line to challenge America's primacy in the world.
[01:32:54]  And that's what my book, Superpower in Peril, talks about.
[01:32:57]  It says China has a plan for global domination.
[01:33:01]  What's our plan?
[01:33:02]  We don't have a plan.
[01:33:03]  We have no plan.
[01:33:06]  You're so right about this.
[01:33:07]  Every piece of news you hear about the Chinese is about how this is all part of their long-term plan.
[01:33:11]  They're just getting more vocal and more bold about it.
[01:33:14]  Used to be more on the down low.
[01:33:15]  Now it's kind of out there.
[01:33:17]  And one of the things that jumped out at me in your book is what they're doing in Latin America, which I confess I was not paying any attention to, but whoa.
[01:33:23]  I mean, some of the stats there were stunning, including, I'll give a couple.
[01:33:28]  China is quickly overtaking or quickly rising to overtake Washington in nearly every field in Latin America, including in trade, in security, in tech, in diplomatic relations.
[01:33:38]  China has a physical presence in 25 out of 31 Latin American countries, and nearly 30% of its global lending goes to Latin America.
[01:33:45]  Trade between China and Latin America also grew 26-fold over the past 20 years and increased from $12 billion to $315 billion.
[01:33:56]  We need to be paying attention to this.
[01:33:58]  I feel like we have no long-term plan, Dave.
[01:34:01]  Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
[01:34:02]  That's honestly the premise for the book.
[01:34:04]  I started writing the book before I decided to run for office, but the motivation for both was the same, which is, you know, we're at risk of losing America's leadership.
[01:34:12]  Our superpower is in peril.
[01:34:14]  And the thing that I highlight in the book, I agree with everything you said.
[01:34:18]  It's a comprehensive economic national security strategy.
[01:34:22]  But America's leadership in the world has always been predicated on technological leadership.
[01:34:27]  We've always been on the forefront.
[01:34:29]  And there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago that if you haven't seen, it's worth reading.
[01:34:34]  But there was an Australian think tank that did an analysis of the top 44 technologies in the world for economic and national security well-being.
[01:34:44]  So satellites, robotics, artificial intelligence, and so forth.
[01:34:47]  44 of them.
[01:34:48]  This independent Australian think tank said that China is in the lead in 37 of those.
[01:34:53]  So if you think about, and these technologies are zero sum, if you are the leader in the world in telecommunications through 5G, that's a dominant position from a national security perspective and from a economic perspective.
[01:35:06]  So my book is devoted to this idea that listen, we have to get on our front foot and compete and block and serve as a true adversary for China.
[01:35:17]  And that's going to require a comprehensive whole of nation strategy.
[01:35:21]  I'll say it in 10 seconds.
[01:35:23]  We need to build muscle at home, but confront China abroad and decouple in strategic ways that support America's remaining the global superpower.
[01:35:33]  And if you want to see the ways, then again, it's called Superpower in Peril, a battle plan to renew America by Dave McCormick.
[01:35:40]  Dave, before I let you go quickly, how about that challenge against now sitting Senator John Fetterman?
[01:35:46]  Are you going to get back into it?
[01:35:47]  Because the GOP insiders are saying it's McCormick or no one.
[01:35:51]  You're their guy.
[01:35:53]  Well, my wife is insisting I get a job sometime soon.
[01:35:56]  So I got to figure this out.
[01:35:57]  But at this point, you know, I obviously have a motivation to serve.
[01:36:01]  I wouldn't have run if I didn't.
[01:36:03]  And sadly, I lost by 900 votes.
[01:36:05]  So I'm thinking about it.
[01:36:06]  And I want to find a way to serve.
[01:36:07]  Whether running for the Senate is the right way or not, I'm not sure, but I'm thinking and praying about it.
[01:36:12]  I'm sure you're seeing opportunity, as they say.
[01:36:15]  It's a great read and it's actually very helpful on a lot of the issues that are in the news, smart takes on where we go from here.
[01:36:21]  Again, it's called Superpower in Peril, a Battle Plan to Renew America by Dave McCormick, and it is out this week.
[01:36:29]  Thanks so much for being here.
[01:36:30]  Thank you.
[01:36:31]  Thanks for having me.
[01:36:32]  All the best.
[01:36:33]  And we'll be back tomorrow.
[01:36:35]  More live from Montana in the snowstorm.
[01:36:37]  An update for you on all things bent.
[01:36:43]  Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
[01:36:45]  No BS, no agenda, and no