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Stormy Daniels Payouts
00:09:19
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| Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. | |
| Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. | |
| Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show. | |
| CNN's Don Lemon denying an explosive story in variety detailing his alleged misogyny towards several female colleagues going back years. | |
| The stories are awful, and they have several women on the record with quotes about him. | |
| The network's response, equally horrifying. | |
| We'll get into it. | |
| Plus, we'll tackle what the Wisconsin Supreme Court election means for 2024. | |
| I listened to the New York Times, The Daily two days ago, and they said this is the single most important election in America this year, and the Democrats just won it handily. | |
| The guys had a great podcast on why and what it means and where the GOP went wrong. | |
| So we'll delve into their analysis. | |
| And by the guys, I mean Ruthless, who are coming on in two seconds, and Dylan Mulvaney scoring yet another high-profile endorsement. | |
| This time, I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear it's Nike, previously so reliable when it came to standing up against the woke mob, right? | |
| Oh, wait. | |
| No, that wasn't them. | |
| Here to break it all down, John Ashbrook, Michael Duncan, Josh Holmes, and the man known as Comfortably Smug. | |
| Together, they are Ruthless, the host of the great podcast, which you must be downloading if you're not already. | |
| And happy to tell you, they were my dinner companions this time last week in Washington, D.C. Great to see you guys. | |
| Oh, great to see you again. | |
| What a blast that was. | |
| I can't believe you were willing to be seen in public with us. | |
| I felt like the bell of the ball. | |
| It was so, it was exciting. | |
| I was like a little, you know, gobsmacked by the celebrity surrounding me at the table. | |
| Certainly. | |
| Certainly. | |
| Got to see Smug without his disguise, quote unquote. | |
| Got to see the real Smug. | |
| And all I could think was, why does he want to cover up that face? | |
| Very handsome man. | |
| Exactly. | |
| We've been saying that for years, Megan. | |
| I'm glad you've taken note of that. | |
| He's a very handsome man. | |
| Oh, we had a lot of fun. | |
| We got to know each other personally because we see each other on the show all the time. | |
| We never get to hang out. | |
| And I want to tell the audience, even more charming behind the scenes than they are on cam. | |
| So if you ever get the chance to spend more time with Ruthless, either via podcast or their live events, do it. | |
| Okay, so let's jump in on, we'll kick it off with Trump. | |
| Then we got to get into what happened in Wisconsin, what happened in Chicago. | |
| Some big electoral events happened this week while we're all focused on the indictment. | |
| But I'm sorry, I've got to start with this. | |
| I don't think I've ever said this before. | |
| We begin today with Stormy Daniels. | |
| She's, of course, at the center of the Trump indictment. | |
| She's the one who took the hush money payout that Trump's alleged to have given. | |
| The payout itself, whatever. | |
| Alvin Bragg's saying it's all illegal. | |
| He couldn't have done the payout and it was a campaign contribution and he should have registered it on his books differently. | |
| And we can go down the line. | |
| But she testified before the grand jury. | |
| And now she's given a sit down to Piers Morgan, which is airing later today. | |
| And I'll let you be the judge on her, how she's going to come across to a jury. | |
| Here's a clip that Piers released in advance. | |
| Would it give you any kind of closure with your time involving Donald Trump to see him in jail? | |
| Specific to my case, I don't think that his crimes against me are worthy of incarceration. | |
| I feel like the other things that he has done, if he is found guilty, absolutely. | |
| Because a bigger problem is that if these allegations against him or whatever else that we don't know yet, he is found guilty or the evidence suggests that he is or whatever, and he doesn't, that it's going to just basically, I mean, it opens the door for other people to think they can get away with doing that. | |
| I mean, it's like listening to Elena Kagan, right? | |
| Sandra Day O'Connor. | |
| One of the brilliant minds of our time and an orator. | |
| I mean, wow, is that well spoken, fellas? | |
| I feel like we just learned something here. | |
| The allegations, allegations. | |
| Yeah, I also like with the crimes against me. | |
| What was the crime against against you? | |
| Taking all of the money? | |
| That was the crime. | |
| You really want to ask a lot of questions about what the crime against her was. | |
| That's exactly right, Dungan. | |
| What are the crimes against you? | |
| Aren't you the one who had an affair with a married man after a lifetime, starring in flicks like Summer Hummer, and then tried to extort the man before he ran for president 10 years after your alleged interlude? | |
| Like, research staff is really top. | |
| They're browsing the stormy catalog before you're going to correct. | |
| I had some volunteers to actually go back and go in depth and actually get some scenes and some click, some clips, clips. | |
| Well, I don't think we will cut away any of that. | |
| Said no. | |
| But it is amazing, right? | |
| Like she's now being, it's Piers interviewed her, but the left is celebrating this woman like she's Joan of Arc. | |
| I mean, they are like her bravery. | |
| She's, I just tweeted this out today. | |
| Is it what magazine is it that featured her? | |
| Hold on a second. | |
| Miranda Devine had it. | |
| It's Vogue. | |
| Vogue does the with Annie Leibovitz shooting the piece does this in-depth glamour, you know, photo spread, pardon the pun, of Stormy Daniels. | |
| I like Melania Trump never got in Vogue, who had been a supermodel prior to her time as first lady. | |
| She never got featured by Vogue, but Stormy Daniels is in there as though this woman hasn't spent a lifetime contributing to the degradation of women. | |
| The key qualification for a feature in one of those outlets is what are you doing for the Democratic Party? | |
| I mean, literally, that's the only thing they care about. | |
| It is a remote. | |
| John, you're not wrong. | |
| Look who, look, Vanity Fair came calling to me after that August 15 debate, right? | |
| That's when they did an in-depth profile of me and I was on their cover. | |
| And I like, you're exactly right. | |
| It's when if you find yourself on the opposite side of someone they hate, you're their cover girl, you're their glamour girl, even if, as I point out, your name is Stormy Daniels and this is the way you've spent your life extorting people, taking payoff monies. | |
| I mean, how could they be so pleased with her? | |
| She did keep her mouth shut. | |
| She didn't come forward after, you know, before the election. | |
| She took the money and then violated the deal. | |
| And by the way, just found a court just found she had to pay Trump's legal fees for a BS defamation case she tried to file against him. | |
| So this is now the left's poster girl for what? | |
| This New York case? | |
| It's just the whole thing is so if you just take like a half step back, it feels like we seamlessly just transitioned back into this bizarre reality show where it's like filled with incomprehensible idiocy. | |
| And like, if you were to tell yourself five years ago that we're having a serious discussion about a porn star appearing on the cover of Vogue and like determining the course of our politics, we'd have been like, what? | |
| Are you kidding me? | |
| But that's like where we're at, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Day-to-day is wild. | |
| It's like a TV show that's really seeing the ratings plummet and they got to bring back a character from season one. | |
| You know, I mean, it is. | |
| It's like we're living, you know, 2017 over again, like Groundhog Day. | |
| Totally. | |
| I mean, I think a little bit of a different take is, I mean, as you mentioned, Megan, she just, you know, the Ninth Circuit ruled she has to pay another $100,000 something to President Trump on top of the roughly $500,000. | |
| So if she was paid by President Trump $150,000 and now has to pay President Trump $600,000, I think it shows yet again, what a successful businessman he was. | |
| Four times his initial investment. | |
| That's another qualification. | |
| And honestly, if you look at her like Twitter feed, I mean, it's you can't if you're under 18, but it's filthy. | |
| And the name she's calling Trump, absolutely filthy. | |
| And he gives as good as he gets, as you know, he's not nice to her either. | |
| But like, this is their star witness, this person and Michael Cohen, his so-called fixer, who's a convicted felon, convicted liar. | |
| I get it. | |
| These are the people Trump chose to have in his orbit, but it's not bad for him that these are his lead accusers. | |
| And the third character in the triumvirate is David Pecker. | |
| Sorry, I actually worked with a man named Harry Johnson. | |
| We talked about this at work at dinner. | |
| Harry Johnson. | |
| David, I don't, why would you keep the last name Pecker? | |
| If we have any listeners whose last name is Pecker, could you call in, why would you keep that last name? | |
| Proud of their family. | |
| Also, kids, it's a long line of Peckers. | |
| Also, I want to know their experience in middle school. | |
| You know, you ran this Taft Empire. | |
| So anyway, this is the cast of characters. | |
| Now, in the meantime, oh, by the way, this is from my team. | |
| It's not just Summer Hummer. | |
|
Gag Orders on Presidents
00:10:50
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| These are some of her greatest hits. | |
| Dirty Minds. | |
| Forbidden. | |
| Happy Endings. | |
| Oh, geez. | |
| King. | |
| Nymphos, Price of Lust. | |
| And we could go on. | |
| So there you go. | |
| There's a little homework for it for you guys. | |
| It's better than saving Ryan's privates, but it's only a half-saved title. | |
| Casabanga. | |
| I don't remember what the question was. | |
| It's irrelevant. | |
| So she's not the only, like the lionization of Stormy Daniels is not the only thing that's happening on the left right now. | |
| You've got people who are losing their minds over Trump remaining a free man after he allegedly, it depends on your view, violated the judge's admonition not to say anything that would lead to incitement or civil unrest. | |
| He didn't want anything, don't make comments that would lead to violence, he said, or civil unrest. | |
| And then Trump went down to Mar-a-Lago and he made the comments about the judge's daughter being a Trump hater and having worked for Kamala Harris. | |
| Alvin Bragg, the DA's wife, sending out mean tweets about Trump and celebrating her husband was going to get him, something to that effect, and then shutting down her Twitter account. | |
| I don't think we're there. | |
| I have to say, I don't think Trump, it wasn't good. | |
| I'm not saying he should have crossed those lines after the judge said what he said, but I don't think he incited violence or civil unrest. | |
| And I think we know that because it didn't happen. | |
| There was no civil unrest, et cetera. | |
| Keith Oberman sees it differently. | |
| Here's just a little sampling because I know you guys love to hear from Keith of how he's reacting. | |
| What more does the defendant have to do, Judge Merchon? | |
| He already threatened death and destruction. | |
| He already reposted an article with a photo of him wielding a baseball bat next to a photo of the head of the district attorney. | |
| And yesterday, as you were warning him, but also as you were bending over backwards to protect his First Amendment rights, as you were saying those things to him, his idiot sons Junior and Fredo were doxing your own daughter on every social media site they could find. | |
| And if you don't put them under a gag order, what exactly does the rule of law mean in this country? | |
| What exactly is the point of having laws in this country? | |
| What exactly, Your Honor, is the point of having judges and district attorneys and cops if their words mean nothing. | |
| And a psychotic, narcissistic piece of shit criminal like Donald Trump can leave your courtroom and get on his private jet and go to his private club and pick up right where he left off, not merely endangering you and your wife and your daughter and the DA and his wife and everybody connected with law enforcement in New York and Washington and America, but endangering, as you yourself phrased it, the rule of law by, | |
| as you yourself also phrased it, making statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest. | |
| What more does Trump have to do? | |
| Pull out a gun on Fifth Avenue and shoot you? | |
| Or say something like that again? | |
| Or inspire one of his brainwashed, gun-fetishizing, hate-filled fascist mob to attack your daughter? | |
| Trump is in contempt of court right now. | |
| Jail him. | |
| He is, in fact, in contempt of America. | |
| He is always and will forever be in contempt of America. | |
| America means nothing to him. | |
| Your words mean nothing to him. | |
| The law means nothing to him. | |
| He will understand only punishment. | |
| Punish him. | |
| Debbie Murphy really fell in love with that clip. | |
| I like caught a clip on this. | |
| We went on for three minutes. | |
| He's upset. | |
| This guy is melodramatic. | |
| I mean, he missed his calling. | |
| He really should have been a high school drama teacher. | |
| I mean, I've never in my life listened to a clip where a guy overacted more than that. | |
| Probably mixing a comma too. | |
| I mean, it's like one run-on sentence of exclamation points. | |
| I think it's the example of literally spitting mad Holmes. | |
| Yeah, I mean, he just like threw a piston somewhere in his head a few years ago, and it has just gone so far off the road. | |
| Imagine the kind of person, by the way, that just wakes up in the morning, they pour a cup of coffee, and you're like, Yeah, I'm just going to throw Oberman on for a couple hours. | |
| Just get a nice, you know, like relaxing day started. | |
| I think something that he said is very critical, though, is he repeatedly says that, oh my goodness, this is another example of the threat of violence. | |
| You know, people could die. | |
| This has now become a standard part of the Les toolkit of any disagreement with them is people are going to die. | |
| This is going to kill people. | |
| Specifically, the irony of this situation is for well over a year now, there have been protesters, a violent, you know, enraged mob marching around the homes of our Supreme Court justices day and night. | |
| You know, they're outside of ACB's house shouting that she's a murderer and she has school-aged children in her home. | |
| That doesn't concern them at all. | |
| Now, when it's brought up by numerous news outlets that this judge in New York's daughter worked on Biden and Kamala's campaigns and proudly presents herself as being, you know, a previous director on Kamala's campaign. | |
| She now runs a Democrat campaign firm. | |
| Maybe that could be germane. | |
| How is it germane, though, to shout that ACB is a murderer and terrorize her children for over a year? | |
| Well, yeah, I mean, the idea that Donald Trump should have to abide by a gag order during a political prosecution is just fundamentally ridiculous and unenforceable. | |
| The guy's running for president of the United States. | |
| The idea that he's not allowed to talk. | |
| I mean, I don't know how you could possibly ask that guy or any person who's running for office under an indictment that's clearly a political prosecution and be like, no, you can't say anything about that. | |
| And Don Jr. Was posting an article. | |
| Like these were articles. | |
| These were news reports about the DA's daughter working for a Democrat consulting firm working for Kamala Harris. | |
| He didn't dox her. | |
| I mean, like, this is public information. | |
| And the idea that Donald Trump doesn't get to use public information in his own defense is just ridiculous. | |
| Well, it's completely absurd. | |
| But also, if you look at the timeline, right? | |
| I mean, when they scheduled this thing for December, they're within spitting distance of the Iowa caucus. | |
| The idea that a guy running for president can't defend himself about a very public allegation that's going on that the DA honestly made very public is insane. | |
| And you're right. | |
| It's totally unenforceable. | |
| I feel like that's the most irresponsible part of this is like acting as though you could put gag orders on a guy running for president of the United States. | |
| It's nuts. | |
| And honestly, like he didn't really, he didn't violate the judge's admonition. | |
| Like you may not like it, but this DA has crossed a line no one crossed before in nearly 250 years. | |
| So of course the reaction is going to be, why did he do that? | |
| Could it be political? | |
| What has he said in the past? | |
| What are the political biases of Alvin Bragg and those he surrounds himself with who are in his ear every night? | |
| Yes, it's relevant. | |
| Now, with respect to the judge, he's overseen another whole case against Donald Trump, and Trump hasn't gotten very favorable rulings. | |
| And he's allowed to say, I think he's a hack. | |
| I think he's a partisan animal. | |
| Like that, he is allowed to say that. | |
| And I think his daughter's evidence of that, of the family politics. | |
| And this is what I'm up against. | |
| He said it in more frank terms than I just did, but I don't think he did cross the line. | |
| Makes me squirm a little, but no more so than Alvin Bragg's indictment did. | |
| That's for sure. | |
| While we're on the subject of the left's reaction, right? | |
| We've talked about Stormy, we've talked about Olbermann. | |
| And now I want to talk about the media. | |
| So I, after the show on Tuesday, as Trump was in this hearing, was driving up to see my mom. | |
| And she lives in upstate New York in Albany. | |
| So I'm going up a suburb. | |
| I was going up to see her. | |
| And I'm trying to get, you know, the right channels. | |
| And I'm listening and I'm sort of scrolling across this channel and the other, whatever, hear all the different reactions on the right and the left. | |
| And by the time I actually got to my mother's, I was in the midst of listening to Nicole Wallace on MSNBC because I couldn't believe my ears. | |
| Naturally, I don't watch or listen to this show. | |
| However, in this context, I got a piece of it. | |
| So I got, I'm like, I got to turn this on, Ma. | |
| So I turn it on. | |
| And this is just a sampling. | |
| This clip, like the Keith Oberman clip, could have gone on for three minutes. | |
| We kept it to about a minute. | |
| But this is what was happening in the four o'clock hour of MSNBC as Trump was being indicted. | |
| Listen to this. | |
| He's going to take off in his plane, fly to Mar-a-Lago, blah, blah, blah. | |
| She's over there with her pen. | |
| I can't wait to hear what she's underlined to August you about the IRS as though you, you know, have a direct line to them at the end of the day. | |
| You have to check it so that. | |
| Yeah, I exactly hear. | |
| So they can either come after you and erupt you. | |
| I'm sure Fox is waiting with it. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Of course. | |
| Would that be admitted? | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| That's what's called. | |
| So his whole, I don't know anything about it. | |
| But he says, he says, can't you pay cash? | |
| I mean, he's involved in the, he's involved in the, they call it a scheme. | |
| It's really hard to say. | |
| They do it in 20s and 10s. | |
| Oh, my God. | |
| Who is the gremlin at the end of the table? | |
| I don't even know who that is. | |
| I don't know who that is. | |
| But man, just laughing and having the time of their lives. | |
| Downright giddy. | |
| So unprofessional. | |
| They enjoy. | |
| This has become a hallmark of how the left wants to act is they want to humiliate their opponents. | |
| They're enjoying and reveling the fact that, you know, they're essentially just making a mockery of the Constitution. | |
| And now they have the power to just punish their political opponents. | |
| It's like PBS had some articles saying that, you know, there are actually many countries around the world who try at former presidents. | |
| And they give the examples of like Venezuela, like third world elections. | |
| Sure. | |
| You know, maybe I should model ourselves after places that have had their governments collapse a few times. | |
| Yeah, Burma's had a little trouble over the years. | |
| Maybe we should model it over that. | |
| It's incredible, but it's very key because they want to show they have absolute control, whether it's with the corporations, whether it's the institutions of school, higher learning. | |
|
Punishing Political Opponents
00:05:09
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| And this is another example of, yes, they have the ability politically to make their opponents suffer and they're going to exercise it. | |
| Everyone knows it's widely known that this case is extremely thin. | |
| There's no grounds for it. | |
| This district attorney has over 50% of the time turned felonies into misdemeanors. | |
| And this is an example of him turning a misdemeanor to a felony. | |
| And there's a very specific reason for that because it's politically motivated. | |
| Turning it into a felony, the justification of which is that these alleged crimes were in service of another crime, which they do not name. | |
| An unnamed crime in the indictment, which is the felony. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| And so I think it's important for listeners to understand that they revel in violating the rules. | |
| Like they, they, they're, you can't, they're shameless. | |
| You cannot convince them they're wrong by showing them the truth. | |
| They know they're not telling the truth and they don't care. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Think about it. | |
| Like this is a sad day. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Go ahead, Ashbrook. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Well, I was just going to ask. | |
| I mean, you're obviously the legal expert among us. | |
| And if you look into your crystal ball, I mean, how do you see this playing out over the next, you know, year? | |
| I think they have the grounds, very solid, strong grounds to get this dismissed on the papers. | |
| But I don't think the judge is going to have the courage to do it because he's an elected official. | |
| New York State Supreme, which is what we call our trial courts here, is an elected judgeship. | |
| And he's, you know, in a Democratic community, you know, I believe that Nicole Wallace and Keith Olberman are also Manhattanites. | |
| That's Trump's jury pool right there. | |
| That's Trump's jury pool. | |
| Okay. | |
| So this, this borough of Manhattan went almost 90% for Joe Biden. | |
| And this judge was elected in this borough to sit on the trial court. | |
| And so you tell me who's going to have that kind of a steely spine to throw out the case against Donald Trump on the papers. | |
| He's going to look for any excuse he can not to do that, punt it to the jury. | |
| Again, a jury pool like those two and say, oh, the jury had its say. | |
| But I think if Trump gets to this point where he gets to file an appeal, he may also have a trouble on the immediate appellate court, which is another elected court. | |
| But once he gets up to the New York State Court of Appeals, that's our highest court, he'll win. | |
| He'll win because there is no case on the papers. | |
| If you follow the law, we went in depth on it yesterday in a podcast. | |
| I have to tell you, I'm actually really proud of. | |
| I really hope people go back and listen to it because we really broke it down for people with an election law expert, guy who used to head the FEC under Clinton. | |
| They're not some hard partisan guy. | |
| And what he essentially said was, unless you can prove that this so-called campaign expense that Alvin Bragg is basing this all on, you know, the payoff to Stormy, unless you can prove that that's an expense, not just that Donald Trump would never have made in the absence of the election, but that no one would ever make in the absence of an election. | |
| It's not a campaign contribution. | |
| In other words, some people try to use a $2,000 payment for a fancy suit that they wear to a presidential or a senatorial debate as a campaign expense and they have the campaign pay for it, right? | |
| Then they don't have to pay for it out of their pocket. | |
| They say, oh, I never would have bought a $2,000 suit for the debate. | |
| That's campaign expenditure. | |
| And the FEC says, nice try, but no, unless no one would ever buy this suit under any circumstances, you can't make that argument. | |
| And of course, somebody would buy that $2,000 suit. | |
| So he was saying very, very small field of things that qualify as a campaign expenditure, like setting up field offices, hiring a campaign manager, hiring a speechwriter to write your campaign speech. | |
| Yes, now we're there. | |
| But hush money in a multitude of instances can be paid for things having nothing to do with the campaign. | |
| So it doesn't have to do with, even if in Donald Trump's mind, he was doing it to pay her off so he'd win an election, irrelevant. | |
| The payor or the payee state of mind, irrelevant. | |
| It only looks at Zoom out in any circumstance. | |
| Could somebody have paid the monies for these for a non-electoral purpose? | |
| And if the answer is yes, it's not a campaign contribution. | |
| There's my two-minute synopsis of what the experts said. | |
| So that's the law. | |
| So he should win on the law, but the politics are as big, if not a bigger factor. | |
| And that's why, John, he's in trouble. | |
| Well, that'll teach you to listen to the Megan Kelly podcast every day. | |
| I mean, good Lord, that was excellent summary. | |
| I feel like I actually got a full download now of exactly how this thing is going to play out. | |
| But I mean, look, the thing that I worry most about here, Megan, is the precedent that this sets going forward, right? | |
| We have been resistant for the history of our country of prosecuting the previous president, right? | |
| Granted, there haven't been allegations that have given rise to it in most occasions, but you know, like Ford pardoned Nixon, for example. | |
| And the reason you do that is because you don't want to live in a banana republic where political opposition is constantly using the long arm of the law to try to put down their opponents. | |
| But going forward, to me, it's impossible to see how an enterprising young attorney general conservative, for example, if they have any case to make against Joe Biden or Hunter Biden or anything else, they're going to bring it. | |
|
Abortion Ballot Referenda
00:13:48
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|
| They're going to bring it. | |
| And this is going to go on in perpetuity. | |
| The problem with this at the very outset is it's the weakest dang case in the world. | |
| If you're going to break that precedent, you better damn well make sure that you've got fire in addition to smoke. | |
| And he doesn't even have smoke. | |
| This is going to be a huge problem that will set a terrible precedent. | |
| I'm not sure how we undo it at this point. | |
| So here's my question for you guys as the political analysts. | |
| Was this a good week for the Republican Party wanting to take back the White House and the Senate in 2024 or a bad week? | |
| Yeah, I don't think it's a good week for some of what I just explained. | |
| But politically speaking, I mean, look, we also had an election in Wisconsin that was in the backdrop of all this on Tuesday. | |
| It didn't go so well for Republicans, right? | |
| There's a myriad of reasons for that. | |
| The old man's got himself worked up and he'll be able to talk about that with more detail. | |
| I just think anytime that we're stuck in this tabloid version of lawmaking and news, we're in a bad spot as a party. | |
| Because if you look at the policies themselves, and Wisconsin's a good example of this, but even the exit polls in 2022, people want conservative policy. | |
| They deeply believe in the economic policies that the Republican Party put in place under Trump. | |
| And they believe that conservative governance going forward is exactly what they want. | |
| And they're still not voting Republican. | |
| Yeah. | |
| If you look at Wisconsin, for example, there were two tough on crime questions on the ballot. | |
| They both. | |
| Wait, wait, Duncan, just set up Wisconsin for the audience because we haven't talked about Wisconsin at all yet in the Supreme Court race and why you're talking about ballot initiatives. | |
| Yeah, sure. | |
| So Daniel Kelly was the Republican. | |
| This Janet P., I don't know how to pronounce her last name. | |
| Proto-Saywitz, Proto-Saywits. | |
| Proto-Sowitz. | |
| Proto-Saywitz was the liberal judge in the race. | |
| And Janet won by 11 points in this special election. | |
| I mean, she was not like, well, you know, I'm going to use the law for liberal good. | |
| She was basically like, no, I'm going to overturn abortion laws and throw your election laws out. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And so the conservative judge, this Daniel Kelly, lost by 11 points. | |
| But in the backdrop of that, there were three ballot questions on the ballot as well, statewide for every voter in Wisconsin. | |
| There were two that were tough on crime, one on cash bail and went on pretrial detention. | |
| They won by 66, 67% of the electorate, but two-thirds of the electorate was like, yes, we like those conservative ideas. | |
| There was also a looking for work requirement to getting welfare. | |
| If you're able-bodied and you don't have kids and you want to receive welfare, you have to prove that you're looking for work. | |
| That won almost 80-20, 80-20. | |
| These are like rock-rid, conservative policies. | |
| And the voters of Wisconsin were like, yes. | |
| And then they pulled the lever for a liberal judge. | |
| Now, why is that? | |
| There's a couple of reasons. | |
| I mean, I think we've done a really bad job messaging on the issue of abortion. | |
| I think when Donald Trump is going into a courthouse in Manhattan, he sucks up all the oxygen in the room, not to mention the fact that this Daniel Kelly guy was endorsed by him in 2020. | |
| He went along with the fake electoral scheme for Donald Trump, which suddenly now every independent voter is completely turned off by all of that. | |
| And so they're not even, you can't even persuade those people. | |
| So you've locked in the fact that you're going to lose. | |
| He was endorsed by Donald Trump in 2020, lost by 11 points. | |
| Now, Donald Trump, who he didn't, who didn't get his endorsement in this 2023 race, is saying, oh, well, you know, if only Dan Kelly, you know, had gotten my endorsement, wanted my endorsement, he would have won. | |
| Bullshit. | |
| It's absolute bullshit. | |
| Donald Trump sucks up all the oxygen and the base loses focus. | |
| The Republican Party is adrift and we lose racism. | |
| We'll continue losing until that changes. | |
| Simple as that. | |
| It's so telling. | |
| So it's basically those two same things that haunted the Republican Party on the ballot the last time, which is election denialism and abortion. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, and we talked a little bit about this previously, but we also have just a base turnout problem in midterms and special elections in that, you know, sometime about 2017, the base of the Republican Party changed from a largely suburban base with a 75, 76 percent turnout percentage to a largely rural party. | |
| And on paper, one for one, it makes perfect sense. | |
| It's just a swap out of voters. | |
| But when you look at special elections and midterms, the propensity of those voters is like 55, 56%. | |
| And what you saw was in the Wisconsin election, those suburban voters that we're talking about here all supported all of those conservative policies on the ballot question. | |
| Yes. | |
| But they are still, as they were in 2022, very shy about backing anything close to the Republican Party. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I mean, that's really my long-term fear here. | |
| Like, look, this case in New York is obviously a joke, and I don't think it's really going to end up being anything. | |
| It's going to be obviously a distraction for the Republican Party, and Donald Trump's going to raise a lot of money on it. | |
| But then you're going to have stuff like the Georgia case or like the Mar-a-Lago documents case. | |
| And there's going to be a lot sort of swirling there constantly in the news cycle. | |
| And if the Republican Party is more interested in defending Trump from all of these allegations than winning on the conservative issues that 80% of Wisconsinites agree with us on, we're going to lose again. | |
| We just are. | |
| And like you said, yeah, it's going to dominate the conversation in a way that it doesn't allow for those other issues to be ferreted out. | |
| But before we go back to the Trump thing, Ann Coulter, she's not a Trump fan, but she is a Republican fan. | |
| I love this story about Ann Coulter. | |
| I saw her one year. | |
| It was 2012 because it was the Republican National Convention in 2012. | |
| And I saw her, and I know her loosely. | |
| And I said, Ann, how are you doing? | |
| And she goes, I'm great. | |
| I'm in a sea of Republicans. | |
| She was so happy, you know? | |
| So she, she is, of course, conservative and Republican through and through. | |
| She's got stories back to her middle school years of how hard, hard she was charging on the right. | |
| She's like, for the love of God, stop with the overzealous abortion restrictions. | |
| Would you just let, you know, understand your audience in states like Wisconsin and stop making like the reason they think that liberal judge won, again, proto-Saywitz, is because after Roe fell, there was this old provision that kicked in from the 1800s that basically outlawed abortion and essentially outlawed it. | |
| And so, you know what? | |
| I know a lot of conservative leaning women who would have gone to the polls and voted for that liberal judge to say, today, I'm voting liberal because that is an issue that is important to me. | |
| Maybe I only want a six-week ban. | |
| Maybe I want a 15-week ban, but I don't want an entire ban. | |
| And I will fight. | |
| I'll march in the streets to stop an entire ban. | |
| I got a daughter, college age, you know, a son. | |
| I don't want that. | |
| And so, but the Republican Party has, let's face it, done a piss-poor job since Dobbs of coming up with a national strategy, which means state by state. | |
| You know, you can't go one uniform policy like just banned, banned, banned everywhere. | |
| That's, that's not going to work. | |
| 50, you know, state by state. | |
| What are the politics in each state? | |
| What will be acceptable that won't drive voters to the left side? | |
| And they didn't do it and they're still paying the price. | |
| Am I wrong? | |
| Well, I think that's part of it. | |
| You know, it is obviously the politics of every state matters. | |
| And, you know, with the issue kicked back to the states, we have to be better at messaging the issue of abortion in all these states. | |
| I think that's absolutely true. | |
| But like, look at a guy like Brian Kemp. | |
| You know, he gets attacked by Donald Trump. | |
| They try to run a primary opponent against him. | |
| Kemp wins by 50 points in that primary, goes on against Stacey Abrams, very, very well-funded general election candidate who had a huge PAC slush fund, raising millions and millions of dollars for. | |
| He had a very restrictive pro-life bill. | |
| And then he won by nine points in Georgia, a state that we can't seem to win anymore. | |
| So it is, I think you hit the nail on the head with you have to know your state and you got to be able to message this issue and speak honestly about our position on the issue of life. | |
| It's as simple as that. | |
| Well, the other complicating factor in this, and we saw this in 2022 post-Dobbs, and you saw it again in the Supreme Court race in Technicolor, is that it is a very mobilizing thing for liberals. | |
| And the entire abortion issue is probably the most, the biggest driver of financing to campaigns on the Democratic side that there is in politics, right? | |
| I mean, we're talking about millions and millions and millions of dollars in small dollar increments that flow in to anything that looks like a referendum on the issue of abortion. | |
| And a lot of our candidates get really flat-footed with that. | |
| The complicated factor with this in Wisconsin is, you know, this guy's not a great candidate for starters, but when you get out spent seven to one because of the dynamic I just explained, it's a pretty tough road, right? | |
| And then, but the thing is that the reason that people need to be paying attention, I mean, okay, it's what people might be like, it's a Wisconsin court race. | |
| Who cares? | |
| But it's actually huge. | |
| It's huge that she won and that the Democrats are now going to be in charge of this court. | |
| You correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is it means the redistricting that the Republicans did that led to them winning elections like Trump winning in 16 is going out the window. | |
| It's going to now go in the other way to help Democrats win election. | |
| I mean, I heard speculation on the left that the Republicans will be lucky as a result of this if they win another election at all in Wisconsin in the foreseeable future. | |
| Is that too much? | |
| It really, yeah, it really depends on how they ultimately present what they're trying to do. | |
| But things as common sense as voter ID are in jeopardy with this particular judge. | |
| Redistricting, as you mentioned, yeah. | |
| I think any sort of voter integrity at this point, this lady has basically said during her campaign that she's going to try to take out. | |
| So, yeah, I mean, if you, if you believe that an election that's conducted fairly is one that benefits Republicans, which I happen to believe, then yeah, this is going to be a real bad thing for Republicans because it's certainly opening a Pandora's box. | |
| A left-wing group has already announced that the day after this new judge is seated, they're going to present a case to have the lines redrawn for redistricting. | |
| And those lines would effectively remove two Republican members of the House from the state of Wisconsin. | |
| They're already making a move on this. | |
| It's very much in focus for what they want to accomplish. | |
| And she said, Smug during the campaign, the lines are wrong. | |
| They're unfair. | |
| The lines need to be redrawn. | |
| And that was another thing. | |
| It was extraordinary to hear this judge, who's supposed to be nonpartisan, supposed to be a nonpartisan election, coming out and saying something like that explicitly. | |
| So we know what we're going to get. | |
| Well, and they've been playing the long game on this, this Wisconsin fight for a while. | |
| I mean, it's not just that they won the general election. | |
| They picked their general election opponent. | |
| Liberal groups spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to boost Daniel Kelly in the Republican primary so that he would win because they already knew the guy lost by 11 points in 2020. | |
| They had beat him again, right? | |
| And so Republicans, you know, if you're listening to this, you got to wake up to what's going on in our Republican primaries when the left is trying to pick the person who wins our primary. | |
| There's a reason why. | |
| Yep. | |
| Yeah. | |
| This was not the first instance of them doing that, by the way. | |
| They did that to the tune of 13 races last cycle. | |
| They spent over $50 million trying to pick a Republican governor's opponent in Illinois. | |
| They tried to pick the Republican candidate in New Hampshire. | |
| They tried to pick the Republican candidate in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Michigan. | |
| And these are all races where Democrats ultimately won. | |
| And it worked. | |
| It works. | |
| 13 to know. | |
| I mean, that's the top line of it. | |
| Every time they did it, they got exactly who they wanted and they beat the hell out of them. | |
| Just remember every time you hear on the media from these Democrats about how the sanctity of democracy and how there's these radical extreme MAGA elements that are going to destroy democracy and usher in fascism, that they raise millions and millions and millions of dollars to make sure those candidates that they say those things about win primaries. | |
| Bingo. | |
| And are the worst possible representative of what they say they want. | |
| Right. | |
| And that's what they spend their money. | |
| They just make a mockery of the entire system. | |
| And then they have the ball to be like, we're undemocratic. | |
| Of course, it's dishonest, but it's effective. | |
| You know, and really like as guys who advise Republicans running for office, should the Republican Party be doing the same thing? | |
| Oh, hell yes. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| It's not a novel strategy. | |
| You guys probably all remember Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos from 2008 when he told everybody to vote for Hillary so that they would have a fight in the Democratic primary for president. | |
| I mean, so it's something that we have known that we should be doing. | |
| We need to be doing more. | |
| Well, we just need to be a lot more active in primaries in general, whether they're Republican primaries or Democratic primaries. | |
| Like these campaigns don't start in the middle of July in an election year, as we pretended that they did in 2022. | |
| Just gross mismanagement of a whole bunch of different electioneering systems within the Republican Party. | |
| But I just think we have to be much more aggressive all the way through. | |
| They just have to be, because if you leave anything to doubt at this point, Democrats are going to exploit it and we're going to get the same results. | |
|
Losing Great American Cities
00:07:19
|
|
| Yeah, we're in the aftermath of Dobbs right now. | |
| And it's, you know, I know a lot of people who are pro-life are saying it's worth it. | |
| It's worth it. | |
| The ground's going to settle eventually and the Republicans will be listened to in a more fair way. | |
| But right now, with abortion on the ballot in the way it is, it's going to be a lot of GOP losses unless they get a better, better message. | |
| You can't have a total ban of abortion in a state like Wisconsin. | |
| And the voters just said so. | |
| We didn't even get to Chicago or the absolute meltdown going on right now in San Francisco when it comes to crime. | |
| We're going to pick it up there with the guys from Ruthless right after this. | |
| There's a court officer, I believe, who enters before him, doesn't hold the door open for him. | |
| And the former president actually has to push the door open for himself, which is probably the first time he's had to do that in quite some time. | |
| That alone, knowing Donald Trump, will stick with him in a way, just a symbolic way of noticing that the difference, the lack of pomp and circumstance, the lack of sort of, you know, service being provided for him. | |
| What, I mean, what an idiot. | |
| That's going to stick with him. | |
| That was Alyssa Farrah from the sound of it with her insightful political analysis. | |
| That's going to stick with him. | |
| They didn't open the door in the courtroom. | |
| My God, it passes for political analysis, but it's truly Trump derangement syndrome. | |
| That's being masqueraded around his political analysis. | |
| That was just for fun. | |
| Let's go to Chicago. | |
| Chicago, my God, I have to say I'm sad. | |
| I'm sad for the city I spent five years of my adult life in. | |
| I thought when they booted Lightfoot and my friend John Cass, who's written so beautifully about what's happening to his beautiful city time and time again, check it out at John Cass News. | |
| They had a relatively moderate candidate right there for the taking, which, you know, the hope was that this guy could have taken Chicago back to the Mayor Daly years. | |
| That's when I lived there, when you could eat off the sidewalks. | |
| They were so clean. | |
| It was a well-oiled machine. | |
| And instead of going with this moderate candidate, Paul Vallas, they elected what the editors over at National Review are calling a dream candidate for National Progressives, Brandon Johnson. | |
| This is their description. | |
| African-American lobbyists for the powerful and radical Chicago Teachers Union. | |
| In addition to his nominal duties as Cook County Commissioner, which fund the Cook County CTU, Chicago Teachers Union, funded 90% of his campaign. | |
| He promised to immediately raise $800 million in city taxes, not just on high earners, but on tourists and commuters who live outside of the city. | |
| In an election fought primarily on the issue of crime, the murder rate in Chicago has skyrocketed since 2016. | |
| Johnson was a candidate whose most moderate position was retreating from his original position of defund the police to a no additional funding for police stance that he regards as a compromise. | |
| Instead, he wants to hire social workers to replace the missing police manpower in Chicago's most crime and gang-ridden communities. | |
| Oh my God. | |
| I've actually gone right into the heart of some of those communities a number of times. | |
| And most recently, while I was at NBC to do an in-depth piece on this wonderful nun who's trying to help these communities with social programs and help some of the moms who are grieving their sons who are in prison or their husbands who got shot and so on. | |
| No social worker is going to do it. | |
| Okay. | |
| Little boys who are eight are being shot in their living rooms. | |
| Moms have their children have their children on all on their stomachs trying to dodge crossfire that happens in the late afternoon. | |
| Just to get to this nun's community center to go meet with her for counseling session. | |
| You have to be afraid for your life. | |
| No social worker is going to be able to go in there and make one damn bit of difference. | |
| But nonetheless, this city guys has elected the dream candidate for national progressives, Brandon Johnson. | |
| My God, what do we make of it? | |
| I think we're sort of at the precipice of losing most great American cities, to be honest with you. | |
| Megan, I am truly depressed about it because you just rattled off the statistics. | |
| I don't think if you can live, if you live in Chicago, you're unaware of the fact that it is entirely a different city that you feel unsafe in, right? | |
| I mean, that's just to state the obvious. | |
| It's like San Francisco, same thing, right? | |
| When you can't have a Walgreens downtown because it gets looted twice a day, you know, maybe you should change your policies. | |
| But the progressive infrastructure in all of these cities is so strong that it just overwhelms any amount of common sense that anyone could effectuate on any of it. | |
| And so election after election, this same thing happens, right? | |
| Occasionally, you get something where they get thrown out. | |
| Occasionally, people will walk back a touch from the whole defund the police deal. | |
| But what they mean is that they don't want to enforce the law. | |
| That's what they mean. | |
| I mean, that is the core of their ethos as it applies to all policing within a city. | |
| Like they believe that not enforcing the law is somehow a civil rights issue. | |
| They've become entirely captured by the ideological project of the left irrationally against their own self-interest. | |
| I mean, it makes as much sense as Bud Light, you know, an American working class beer making transgender Dylan Mulvaney a spokesperson. | |
| Like they know it's not in their best interest, but they do it anyway because they're committed to an ideological project. | |
| It's, I think it's obviously tragic. | |
| But don't you think? | |
| I mean, I really do believe that we are on the precipice of losing these cities. | |
| Sure. | |
| And I think a lot of it is that, you know, when you speak about the progressive machine that exists in these cities, New York and Chicago, it's when they propose that they want 800 million more raised, they know that's not going to stop crime. | |
| They know that the social workers that they hire is the same thing that they do in all institutions where they'll bring in as many left-wing ideological people to, you know, make sure that the idea DEI essentially is, you know, from top to bottom in every single organization that controls any budget. | |
| So it's basically just a payoff. | |
| It's a it's a patronage system that exists within these left-wing cities. | |
| And that's why they do it is because the money's that great. | |
| Is you know, my friends have no qualifications, but they're ideologues like me. | |
| So why don't we just have the taxpayer give us all their money? | |
| That teachers union. | |
| That's who's going to get the money. | |
| And then look at San Francisco. | |
| Look what happened today. | |
| The creator of Cash App. | |
| How did you guys hear? | |
| You guys hear about this? | |
| Yeah. | |
| This horrific, disturbing murder happened early Tuesday morning. | |
| He's a top Silicon Valley entrepreneur stabbed to death in San Francisco. | |
| He's just 43 years old. | |
| They think it may have been a random attack. | |
| Really uncertain at this point, too early to tell. | |
| But that city was once one of the crown jewels of America. | |
| And now it is a criminal hellhole. | |
| I would never go to San Francisco. | |
| I don't want to step foot in that town. | |
| And most normal people don't either. | |
|
CNN's Internal Toxicity
00:15:46
|
|
| It's completely heartbreaking. | |
| And my understanding is he had just moved his family to Florida because of the state of San Francisco. | |
| And he just went back for a quick business visit and this tragedy occurred. | |
| Oh, man. | |
| But it's just, I hate to be so blackpilled about it, but I don't know what you can do, right? | |
| I mean, can you have any more evidence of a problem and still not do anything about it than this? | |
| I don't know. | |
| I think you can, right? | |
| Because we've seen criminal, crime was one of the main issues, if not the main issue in Chicago. | |
| And still they elected this guy. | |
| It was tight. | |
| It was, I think, 52, 48. | |
| And my heart goes out to the 48 right now. | |
| They must feel so disheartened that their city is not only going to remain on this Lori Lightfoot path, but double down, triple down. | |
| It's going to go even farther left. | |
| And it's just depressing. | |
| San Fran, Chicago, New York, not to get started on the deeper blue, like Baltimore and so on. | |
| Standby, Ruthless, we'll do some fun next. | |
| We mentioned Dylan Mulvaney. | |
| We're going there and we'll get to Don Lemon. | |
| Apparently, according to Variety with a long history of misogyny, didn't I say this? | |
| I said this. | |
| We'll get to that in one second. | |
| So back in February, I was out in Vegas for a business slash pleasure adventure out there and met some of my girlfriends and did sort of a bit of public appearance and so on. | |
| And the story about Don Lemon and Nikki Haley broke. | |
| You know, women are past their prime when they're, you know, 30s, maybe 40, maybe 40. | |
| And this is in response to Nikki Haley. | |
| So women everywhere on the left and the right, and a lot of men too said like, you're an idiot. | |
| It was, it wound up going into the speech of the best actress winner at the Oscars who said, don't let anyone tell you that you're past your prime. | |
| This is a 60-year-old woman. | |
| He got criticized by Corine Jean-Pierre at the White House podium. | |
| He got criticized from Anna Quinlan, famed left-wing, amazing writer. | |
| She's written so many great books. | |
| And of course, people like me and women on the right as well. | |
| And Nikki Haley spoke out. | |
| I go down the list. | |
| This was not his first foray into misogyny. | |
| There had been a list, a considerable list prior to that moment from him saying that one of Bill Cosby's rape victims should have just bitten down to prevent herself from being orally raped because that's really that reflects the power and physical dynamics between a rape victim and her rapist. | |
| What he said to Essie Cup on the air when she forgot her words. | |
| Oh, is that your mommy brain? | |
| That's your mommy brain, right? | |
| Essie Cup was noticeably, visibly irritated and said, no, Don, I just forgot my words. | |
| We could go down the list. | |
| So at the time, I said this on the air, on the air. | |
| Watch this. | |
| This is a pattern of him diminishing. | |
| I'm telling you, look into it. | |
| If any reporter worth their salt would actually do some digging, call CNN. | |
| Do it. | |
| Call their HR right now. | |
| Find out whether he's got a history of harassing his female colleagues. | |
| We did, by the way, call CNN and asked about whether there's been any history of problems with Don Lemon and women at CNN, and they ignored us. | |
| It blew us off. | |
| You're not going to be able to avoid it forever. | |
| Like if he's got some history, we're going to find out about it. | |
| And then you're going to look stupid. | |
| By the way, Chris Licht, I know you're new. | |
| You should look into it right now. | |
| Before you give him another pass. | |
| Okay, can I tell you? | |
| And now Variety dropping this article by Tatiana Siegel. | |
| Don Lemon's misogyny at CNN exposed malicious texts, mocking female coworkers, and diva-like behavior. | |
| And I just want to tell you, this is what we actually went to CNN and asked at the time, because this ain't my first rodeo. | |
| I have been through these things with men who have a series of patterns against women many, many times. | |
| And I've called it out on the left and the right repeatedly. | |
| Check the record. | |
| So I asked the following questions, my team of CNN at the time. | |
| This is what they blew off. | |
| Has Don Lemon ever been the subject of a human resources complaint by a female anchor or correspondent? | |
| Has he been accused of harassment or other improper behavior by any CNN employee? | |
| How are such complaints, if any, resolved? | |
| Has he faced any disciplinary action or demotions in the wake of any such complaints from the beginning of his employment with CNN to present day? | |
| And they blew them all off. | |
| Okay, I guess those weren't relevant. | |
| But Variety forced them to respond on some of this stuff because I didn't even touch on the harassment he's been doing or I don't know what word you'd use. | |
| I'd say harassment, but just mistreatment of his female co-anchors, which has been making news for months now. | |
| He forced at least one of them crying into the bathroom. | |
| One ran off the set, upset. | |
| He keeps interrupting. | |
| He keeps getting upset that he's getting interrupted. | |
| He refused to go to break one time so that he could correct one of his female co-anchors interviews and try to lecture her on how it ought to be done. | |
| I mean, it's just, it's been ongoing. | |
| So it's very clear. | |
| So now Variety takes this deep dive. | |
| And there are many instances. | |
| All right. | |
| Soledette O'Brien is on the record. | |
| Nancy Grace, someone close to Nancy, gives an incendiary quote. | |
| I'll get to all of this. | |
| But here's the first story. | |
| Kira Phillips, who was at CNN for years and now is at ABC Digital, in 2008 was Don Lemon's co-anchor. | |
| They had a show that they shared. | |
| And this is from the piece. | |
| Tensions between the pair kept mounting. | |
| By the way, that's exactly what's happening right now between Lemon and his two co-hosts, female co-hosts, Poppy Harlow and Caitlin Collins, which is the first show he's co-anchored with a woman since Kira Phillips. | |
| Now we know why. | |
| Tensions between the pair kept mounting. | |
| A producer and a newsroom supervisor had to pull Don Lemon off the air during a commercial break because of the anchor's provocative antics. | |
| Kira Phillips was on assignment in Iraq. | |
| And while she was there, it was a high-profile gig that Lemon coveted. | |
| He vented his disappointment at being passed over by tearing up pictures and notes on top of and inside of Phillips' desk in the news pod they shared. | |
| I mean, that's, if that's true, that's crazy ass like single white female behavior, right? | |
| Like that's like, what? | |
| According to two sources who worked there at the time, I should say here, Don Lemon denies this and I'll read his denial in full. | |
| One night while dining with members of the news team, Kira Phillips received the first of two threatening text messages from an unknown number. | |
| So now it's elevated from ripping up photos and documents and leaving them on top of her desk, her photos and documents, to text messages that are threatening from an unknown number on her flip phone, warning, quote, now you've crossed the line and you're going to pay for it, end quote. | |
| Phillips was visibly rattled and quickly enlisted CNN's higher-ups to identify the sender. | |
| She's like, who's my crazy ass stalker? | |
| Remarkably, reports Variety, the texts were traced back to Lemon, according to these same sources. | |
| A human resources investigation was launched. | |
| And while the findings were never disclosed to the growing pool of staffers who are aware of the situation, Lemon was abruptly pulled from his co-anchor duties with Phillips and was moved to the weekends. | |
| It was a demotion by any objective measure and understood to be some kind of disciplinary action. | |
| It appears to be the last time he was paired with a female anchor until his most recent assignment on the morning show with Poppy and Caitlin. | |
| Phillips declined comment. | |
| And now here's the capper. | |
| A spokesperson for CNN said to Variety, quote, Don says, Don says as if CNN must rely on Don's word to know whether this happened. | |
| Don says the alleged incident never occurred and that he was never notified of any investigation. | |
| CNN cannot corroborate the alleged events from 15 years ago. | |
| What? | |
| What sign of an HR hellhole is this? | |
| No, keep going, Duncan. | |
| I missed it. | |
| What'd you say? | |
| It sounds like a real top-notch news gathering organization. | |
| They can't corroborate anything. | |
| Their own stuff. | |
| They can't, you know, we really tried. | |
| We couldn't find any reporter to corroborate any of this at a news station. | |
| You know, like, think about that. | |
| I mean, the guy, the intimidation that you listed out there and it's gone back, what, 15 years? | |
| I mean, he shouldn't be Don Lemon. | |
| It's guys like Don Corleone. | |
| But Don says. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Don says problems. | |
| Don says it's not true. | |
| Like you can't find any other people at CNN who were there and on that team from 15 years ago. | |
| Where are your HR records? | |
| Because this is the reason why companies keep HR records for this very right. | |
| Like this is how you know if you have a problematic employee. | |
| You check the HR file and you figure out, oh my God, holy shit, maybe we shouldn't pair him with Caitlin Collins and Poppy Harlow unless we've really assured ourselves he's had no interim problems with women. | |
| Oh, wait, check the record. | |
| He's had a lot of them. | |
| He's said a lot of controversial things about a lot of his female colleagues. | |
| If you read this piece, my main takeaway is no one likes Don Lemon. | |
| No one. | |
| There's no person. | |
| Like the women who are quoted in here are all like, he's a prick. | |
| He's a jerk. | |
| He's been a jerk for a long time. | |
| And this incident for CNN just be like, oh, the records don't, you know what? | |
| If the records don't corroborate, you can't find any records on this, then let's figure out whether Kira Phillips has an NDA because she must not have one, right? | |
| You can't find the records. | |
| Let her speak. | |
| CNN, will you go on the record right now and say, Kira Phillips, if you signed an NDA in connection with this incident, you may speak publicly about it because we have no information suggesting that it happened or that you were gagged, right? | |
| I don't know what the truth is there, but I'd love to find out. | |
| Let's see if they do that, right? | |
| Let's hear. | |
| CNN, you'd love to speak. | |
| You spoke to Variety. | |
| Speak to me. | |
| Answer my questions. | |
| I'd love to know your answer. | |
| I have a sneaking suspicion CNN's being a little coy with this and that old Don Lemon's on his way out. | |
| And Ashbrook talks about this all the time in media reports with regard to Democrats. | |
| And I think with media hosts, it's the exact same. | |
| And that is when the media starts writing these stories about somebody, the calls coming from inside the house. | |
| Like when you see a hit piece on a Democrat, it's because it benefits another Democrat. | |
| When you see, you know, a story about a CNN host, it's because CNN is trying to get rid of him. | |
| I think that's a very astute observation. | |
| I mean, obviously, the guy's ratings are terrible. | |
| They've moved him around. | |
| Nothing seems to work. | |
| And this has been going on internally for 15 years. | |
| And Megan, you know, as well as anybody else, these major media organizations can be very tough on the inside. | |
| And for somebody to have that sort of track record and have that many women talking about how horrible he is to work with, I think what Duncan's saying might be right. | |
| Maybe they're just looking to offload. | |
| You should say so. | |
| I mean, what do you have to do to get fired around there? | |
| It's incredible. | |
| This dude, I'm beginning to think he has naked pictures of Chris Lickt. | |
| Like, how in the world? | |
| First of all, he had the most horrible show on television that practically nobody watched. | |
| And then recall, remember he was advising a subject of the news of how to handle the news and that Jussie Smollett. | |
| Yeah, right. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know what that was? | |
| That's that's detailed in here that she goes back through that. | |
| And it's worse than I remember. | |
| She writes, Some colleagues question his journalistic ethics in 2021 when disgraced actor Jesse Smollett testified in court that Jussie first learned that Chicago police doubted his story about being the victim of this MAGA-inspired attack after receiving a text message warning him from Don Lemon. | |
| That's how Jussie first found out the cops doubted him. | |
| Don Lemon warned him. | |
| And they quote a Washington State University journalism professor, Ryan Thomas, saying, Involving yourself in a story invoking a public figure, whether to warn, advise, or coach is as clear and bright and flashing an ethical red line as it gets in journalism. | |
| A freshman journalism student would clearly recognize the problems inherent. | |
| That's just one on the long list. | |
| I'll give you a couple of others. | |
| They say he called one of his producers fat to her face, that he mocked Nancy Grace on the air by mimicking her in a way that shocked fellow colleagues. | |
| Grace declined comment, but a person close to her told Variety, quote, she thinks he's an ass, and that he was always, quote, rude, dismissive, and really unfamiliar with the news content being discussed. | |
| Then a witness to the incident said that was the beginning of when you knew he was volatile and didn't say good things about women. | |
| Then Soledad O'Brien. | |
| She was chosen to host Black in America, that docu-series on CNN. | |
| He reportedly wasn't happy, quote, from a colleague. | |
| He always wanted to be front and center on anything high profile, especially involving race. | |
| O'Brien, who was not present, tells Variety, quote, Don has long had a habit of saying idiotic and inaccurate things. | |
| So it sounds pretty on-brand for him. | |
| It's first time in my life I say, go solid Edco. | |
| I totally agree with everything you just said. | |
| Yeah, the guy spent the last 10 years trying to be front and center on everything in the network. | |
| And it turns out he's actually front and center on its decline. | |
| I mean, he is the worst host on television. | |
| And I'm just, I'm blown away that he's still around. | |
| And especially with all of this news, you got it. | |
| You got to think. | |
| I really think that Michael's onto something. | |
| Yeah, I think that's a good point. | |
| You know, I read the article and there was a part where it said that Lemon would always make sure everyone knew how litigious he was, saying that he'd won a lawsuit against Tower Records, that he'd won a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department. | |
| And so I think he's kind of used that, you know, R of I sue people frequently to keep himself safe. | |
| And Chris Lick, fearful of that of like, okay, what kind of, you know, lawsuits, what kind of problems would I face trying to get rid of him, knows that and says, you know, maybe if we have an article like this appear, it can start making the case for why this guy needs to go. | |
| Yeah, if his intimidation fails in person, he'll get a little wine drunk, go to Cricket Wireless and buy a burner so he can send threatening text messages to you. | |
| Like, what if he, if he sues Variety, the first person who's going to get subpoenaed is Kira Phillips. | |
| And then we will know one way or another. | |
| And then CNN will have to check its records because it will be under subpoena and it will have to find out, you know, what's in that file. | |
| And we all know what's going to be in there. | |
| I mean, come on. | |
| They didn't throw that record out if they've got that. | |
| Hold on one second. | |
| Okay. | |
| Now we're seeing. | |
| Oh, okay. | |
| From the New York Post. | |
| CNN's Don Lemon is reportedly weighing a possible lawsuit over the report in Variety. | |
| A source close to Lemon said that he's outwardly playing it cool and that CNN's defense of the anchor in the press shows that they are standing behind him. | |
| We'll see. | |
| We'll see. | |
| If he sues Variety, we're going to hear from Kira Phillips and then we'll know one way or the other. | |
| And we're going to report through those records. | |
| Let me read you his response in fairness to Don. | |
| He says, okay, in a statement delivered to Mediaite, which was writing up her report on behalf of Don Lemon, a spokesperson strenuously denied wrongdoing. | |
| The story, which is riddled with patently false anecdotes and no concrete evidence, is entirely based on unsourced, unsubstantiated 15-year-old anonymous gossip. | |
| It is amazing and disappointing that Variety would be so reckless. | |
| A CNN spokesperson issued the following statement on the allegations against Lemon. | |
| The Variety story provides no actual proof. | |
| Hello, CNN. | |
| You are the ones who would have that. | |
| Whatever. | |
| The variety story provides no actual proof and instead relies on anonymous sources and unsubstantiated claims from 10 to 15 years ago. | |
| CNN is unable to corroborate the alleged accounts. | |
| Again, unable, unable or unwilling. | |
| I love that. | |
| We happen to have absolutely no evidence presented in this article. | |
| Frankly, we've withholded. | |
|
Jeffrey Toobin Witch Hunt
00:06:37
|
|
| And I also love that every one of his colleagues is like, well, I couldn't comment on the record on that. | |
| But as a person close to myself, I can say I just think he's a complete asshole. | |
| There's something particularly funny about CNN after years and years and years of trying to get Donald Trump with bullshit, now complaining about anonymous sources. | |
| The stuff just incorporated. | |
| It's really a shame that Variety would do something like this. | |
| Some might even call it a witch hunt. | |
| I don't feel bad for Don Lemon. | |
| I feel bad for Caitlin Collins and Poppy Harlow. | |
| I feel bad that these two young women have been placed next to this guy where CNN definitely knew all or some of this and didn't have a thought for their well-being or their future careers. | |
| And if you look through the list of this, I mean, like, may I refer you to what happened to MK Hamm, who came on the show, Mary Katherine Hamm, and talked about how she was told she was made to go on the air to talk about everyone's Me Too problem from, you know, Bill O'Reilly, then crossed over to the CNN world, Jeffrey Toobin jerking off and not losing his job at CNN and all the Me Too problems up and down the board there and elsewhere. | |
| And then when she said something on Twitter about Toobin, they benched her. | |
| They benched her for shooting inside the tent. | |
| It's like, wait a minute, why don't you want to shoot inside the tent at Jeffrey Toobin? | |
| That's the real question. | |
| They benched her and ultimately she separated from CNN under less than favorable circumstances. | |
| So that's what happens to MK Ham, who had the nerve just to send out one tweet about Jeffrey Toobin. | |
| But this guy can just stick with the stuff that we know, right? | |
| That we've reported even before the variety report. | |
| He can get away with murder. | |
| And then they put him with the two female colleagues and sort of say like, well, you know, we're going to put him through a re-education training. | |
| Remember that? | |
| It was going to be like half day re-education training. | |
| How's that going? | |
| Yeah, it's just ridiculous. | |
| I don't think anybody wants to shoot anything anywhere with Jeffrey Toobin inside the tent for that matter. | |
| Avert your eyes, at least. | |
| No, exactly. | |
| Which, by the way, did you remember how they handled that when he came back on the air? | |
| Yeah, it was awesome. | |
| And they had him sit there and recount kind of like moment by moment what he had actually done to find like that was the most uncomfortable four minutes in television I've ever seen. | |
| They did that to Allison Camerada. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And that was another sin that they did to her. | |
| That was the point I was going to make is they put Allison Camerada next to him to help him recount all of this. | |
| I mean, my God, to say you've got a real short-sighted view of how that may impact somebody's career is a real understatement. | |
| The report, I, again, I don't know anything about this, but the report suggests that Lemon had a very close relationship with a guy named Phil Kent, who was then Turner Broadcasting System Chairman and CEO. | |
| And that would have been a level above the CNN CEO. | |
| And so that guy is the one who brought in Jeff Zucker. | |
| And so Lemon, you know, how close was the friendship? | |
| I know they say that he was appearing at like basketball games with him and so on, sporting events alongside him in the Turner box. | |
| And so if he's tight with that guy who hired Jeff Zucker and then Jeff Zucker ran cover for him all these years, was the one who put him in prime time. | |
| And we know now that Jeff Zucker had his own Me Too issue going with an underling, having an alleged affair with a staffer. | |
| Our reporting put it had started years ago. | |
| And you can't, as the CEO, have a, have an alleged romantic affair with a, with an underling. | |
| You can't. | |
| Every promotion becomes suspect and so on. | |
| Anyway, they're all compromised over there. | |
| You know, it's like, this is, it's such a toxic stew. | |
| Media is a disgusting, toxic stew. | |
| I say that every day. | |
| I much rather broadcast from my third floor like I'm doing now. | |
| Incidentally, I think those HR files are in that dude's fireplace. | |
| The one connection to all of this mess, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Who's who's fireplace? | |
| The guy, the guy, the chairman guy who hired us friends with, yeah. | |
| I mean, that's the guy who's like, hey, no, I don't see any problems. | |
| What's the problem? | |
| I'll tell you what, if there's one more incident with Caitlin or Poppy, he's done, is done. | |
| And if I were Caitlin, by the way, there was a report recently that Caitlin had to fire the shared agent that she and Don both had, right? | |
| Because she felt reportedly that this guy was looking out for Don's interests and not for hers. | |
| And so you can see, I mean, I just feel like these women were like lambs being fed to the slaughter. | |
| And it's happened time and time again. | |
| And frankly, it happened at Fox with Roger Ailes time and time again and Bill O'Reilly, where like the company has knowledge that someone is a problem. | |
| And they always side with the problem, especially if the problem has power, has money, has something they can hold over you, or the threat of a litigation, whatever it is that they're using. | |
| And the women, up until the Me Too movement, always lost, always lost. | |
| Then Me Too was totally an overreach and got disgusting and weird and political. | |
| We started just emerging with scalps without any probing and facts. | |
| And it fell apart thanks to the left, frankly, and what they did to Kavanaugh and Time's Up and how dishonest. | |
| And now we're in this position where like, we're kind of back to where we started. | |
| We're like, we've, the progress has kind of been eroded. | |
| The Me Too movement has been exploded. | |
| And women really have nowhere to turn because you can leave the set in tears after having been screamed at by this guy, who I bet does have a long HR personnel file. | |
| And they just kind of say, re-education training by not good enough. | |
| No, it's ridiculous. | |
| And if you put yourself in the shoes of somebody like Poppy Harlow, who I actually do not know her personally, but I'm familiar with her career and she's done every difficult, shitty job on air that you could do, like every feature, any time of day. | |
| She's done the weather. | |
| She's done everything and she's worked her way up. | |
| And here she is sitting at a table with a guy who just gets a pass after pass after pass. | |
| And I just putting yourself in her shoes, it's got to be demoralizing that like this guy gets away with everything. | |
| And here I am just busting my tail on a daily basis. | |
| And, you know, the network has its ideological bents. | |
| And there are a lot of reasons why people aren't watching it as much anymore. | |
| But I mean, that is internal toxicity is just one of the Achilles heels of major broadcast media in this country. | |
| And I hate to be even more cynical about it. | |
| But like you were saying, Megan, you know, these accusations have been going on for 15 years. | |
| It's only now that we're really hearing about it because he doesn't rate anymore. | |
| He can't get ratings. | |
|
Jill Biden White House Visit
00:10:34
|
|
| They don't know where to put him. | |
| And so now the media will turn a page on him and he will be, you know, well, we didn't know. | |
| We just, we didn't know. | |
| And it's like they knew and they didn't care. | |
| And now they can because it's convenient. | |
| I know, I feel like, look, it's, it's hard to root for somebody to lose their job, especially because I was treated unfairly by an employer. | |
| Not over anything like this. | |
| Good God. | |
| I mean, like, this is a crazy pattern he's got. | |
| But I just think, why? | |
| Why are they so determined to save this guy? | |
| Right. | |
| Like this kind of a pattern. | |
| Like you tell, like, I'm interested in knowing exactly what's behind the knee-jerk effort to protect it. | |
| Chris Cuomo was fired for less than this. | |
| He was definitely fired for less than this, right? | |
| So not even close. | |
| I mean, they got rid of four or five people for way less than this. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| So moving on, because I have a couple of other things I want to get to. | |
| And number one is Dr. Jill Biden has stepped in it. | |
| Dr. Jill, Dr. Jill. | |
| Now, I don't really follow sports as people know. | |
| So like I haven't weighed in on this whole dust up with LSU and Iowa and the star players and they were kind of doing face-off, facial, whatever signals, rude signals to one another. | |
| To me, that's like sports, whatever. | |
| I find it hard to get upset about these two women going at it with the facial, whatever, the hand signals. | |
| Go for it. | |
| You know, women can be, we can be bitches too. | |
| We can be unsportsman like. | |
| We can do, we can do all the things that the men can. | |
| However, I do think it's interesting what's happening between the star from LSU and Dr. Jill. | |
| Dr. Jill Biden did something so stupid. | |
| She's so stupid. | |
| LSU won and they're supposed to go to the White House, like all the winning teams. | |
| And instead, she said, yes, you should come, but also Iowa too. | |
| And then people were like, that's because Iowa's white. | |
| And then people were like, well, that's because I was Iowa, first in the nation caucuses. | |
| You're thinking about 2024. | |
| I don't know why she said it, but her team seemed to be saying everyone gets a trophy, right? | |
| Like, it's just that's sportsman-like to invite the winner and the loser. | |
| And then the star player Angel Reese from LSU had the following response. | |
| She was not happy and said the following in SAP 13. | |
| I don't accept that apology because of it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You said what you said and you met me. | |
| I said what I said. | |
| And like, you can't go back on certain things that you say. | |
| I mean, you felt like they should have came because of sportsmanship, right? | |
| They can have that spot. | |
| Like, we'll go to the Obamas. | |
| We'll go and see Michelle. | |
| Go and see Barack. | |
| So she says, we'll go to the Obamas. | |
| Jill Biden, her spokesperson, kind of tried to take it back. | |
| Like, oh, never mind. | |
| Iowa won't come. | |
| It'll just be you guys. | |
| And even the star of Iowa, Caitlin, help me out. | |
| Clark, Clark. | |
| Clark. | |
| I could only get Collins in my head. | |
| Clark said, we should not go. | |
| The White House trip is for the winners and we didn't win. | |
| So good for her. | |
| And so Angel Reese has now revealed that they also rejected seeing Jill Biden come to their locker room before the game. | |
| And there was a real question about whether LSU would go to the White House at all. | |
| Angel Reese said, we're talking about it. | |
| We'll see. | |
| You know, we may not go. | |
| They were mad. | |
| And here's Shannon Sharp, who had a bit of a freak out over the whole thing that is kind of interesting. | |
| Listen to him. | |
| That's the part of winning a national championship. | |
| We get invited to the White House. | |
| The losers don't get anything. | |
| This is not a participation award. | |
| Number one trending topics. | |
| What was, it wasn't an LSU one. | |
| It was Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark. | |
| Yep. | |
| And so she's a doctor. | |
| If she didn't know, she should have known. | |
| Does Dr. Jill Biden understand how this looks? | |
| She, White America? | |
| Yep. | |
| The losing side is white America. | |
| Come on, Dr. Biden. | |
| You know better than this. | |
| Did you forget who helped put your husband in the White House? | |
| You're going to find out a very serious lesson in 24. | |
| You'll be like a Kentucky Adobe freshman. | |
| You'll be one and done. | |
| You see, I probably got it. | |
| I tell you what, he'll drop another 5% if you do this. | |
| Oh, boy. | |
| Now he's talking your language. | |
| He's getting into electoral politics. | |
| Go ahead, John. | |
| It's not a participation award. | |
| I mean, you work your entire season long hoping that you can win. | |
| And what you get is to go to the White House, no matter who the president is. | |
| Sometimes there's politics involved, and some people don't want to see Trump. | |
| Some people don't want to see Obama. | |
| Whatever. | |
| You work, you earn it. | |
| You get that trophy. | |
| You get to go to the White House. | |
| And I bet you, Jill Biden and her team saw all of the Twitter activity praising Caitlin Clark right around the right around the game. | |
| She had a couple of big nights and she's a great player. | |
| But and they thought that, okay, well, we invite Iowa too, and then we'll get the plaudits on Twitter and we're going to have everybody's going to be happy. | |
| Well, she just screwed up. | |
| She really did. | |
| I mean, the backdrop to all of this is not totally unimportant, which is Caitlin Clark in this Iowa team had a real special run. | |
| She is an incredible player, I might add. | |
| But they also had this incredible boom to ratings for the first time in the tournament's history. | |
| The women's tournament was routinely getting higher ratings than NBA games, right? | |
| Which doesn't normally happen. | |
| And in large part, that was because of Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawke guys. | |
| They go into this game. | |
| I think a lot of players from a lot of teams resent the heck out of the fact that this one player on Iowa is getting all the attention and all this mass media attention in the process. | |
| And so they sort of made a point of going after her. | |
| And after the game, typically when you see everybody celebrating and enjoying their teammates on a huge accomplishment, the star player at LSU is in the face of Caitlin Clark. | |
| And so I bet you that Joe Biden looks at this and she's like, oh, well, let's just have a, let's just get along type moment, right? | |
| Me recall like the beer summer, but it's basically that kind of like ridiculous thinking. | |
| It's pandering is what it is. | |
| Pandering pandering, but without looking at how that looks to the outside world who'd been actually going through this entire emotional process with the players as they were watching, right? | |
| Right. | |
| So, I mean, she just could not have been a worse mistake. | |
| Which is just awful. | |
| I doubt the people advising Dr. Jill Biden had played competitive sports in their life because they would understand that this is like pandering of the worst kind. | |
| And yeah, I mean, it is like the beer summit, like they're going to heal America, you know, black athlete, white athlete, and elevate these women's voices at the White House. | |
| That's not how it works. | |
| Like, you know, do that. | |
| If you want to do that, do that during the context of a political campaign. | |
| But so, I mean, I think it was incredibly cynical. | |
| It was a mistake and a very cynical pandering mistake. | |
| But you got to tip the hat to Caitlin Clark because her response to that was exactly right. | |
| Right. | |
| We didn't win. | |
| The other winner goes to the White House. | |
| Like her response, that's good sportsmanship. | |
| She is a star. | |
| It was just to me, it was like, she was so go ahead, Smug. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I think that, you know, the problem here is Dr. Jill Biden tried to just like, you know, call an audible and say that this needs to be done instead of sticking to the standard playbook of inviting a women's team and Dylan Mulvaney to talk about. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| Dylan will definitely be there. | |
| We don't know whether LSU will show up. | |
| Wait, can I tell you, though, I thought it was such a fail by Jill Biden because Dr. Jill, I love how Shannon's like, she's a doctor. | |
| She should know better. | |
| But it was such a fail, such a fail by her because what we had here was actually a great moment for women. | |
| The women's NCAA tournament was dominating male NBA team playoffs and games. | |
| And it was, but like by a lot, right? | |
| Like 10 million viewers, something crazy. | |
| So it was, and I personally, I almost kind of liked the fierceness of the women, like with the face thing. | |
| And like, I part of me was like, yeah, sick them, you know, like back and forth. | |
| Like, you know, women can be fiery and they can get pissed off and they can have low moments. | |
| Not like the greatest moment of sportsmanship, but I get. | |
| But the point was simply like, I didn't feel offended. | |
| I felt like, yeah, I get it. | |
| Your heart's in it. | |
| You're fierce competitors. | |
| And so we turned off that tournament thinking, like, yes, freaking, you go. | |
| Women's sports, this is a great moment. | |
| They're not the most popular. | |
| So this was a new chapter in their narrative. | |
| And then what do you have? | |
| You have one of the most visible women in America with like her weak need, like this, this, the female stereotype of like, there are no winners or losers. | |
| We're all getting a participation trophy. | |
| Yay. | |
| No, we need fierceless fierceness at this moment. | |
| We need the little hand face. | |
| We need a little bit of that angel resass and the Caitlin Collins, like, or we're not Collins, whatever her analysis name is. | |
| Yeah, Clark, like, I rise above it all. | |
| Losers don't go. | |
| I'll be the winner next year, right? | |
| Like, and then you have Jill Biden, like, everyone group hug. | |
| It was just, it was just popping the balloon. | |
| It's insulting. | |
| It's insulting because those girls earned the eyeballs. | |
| They earned the audience because the competition was that great. | |
| The score, the stories, the background stories were that great. | |
| And everybody wanted to watch because you had two great teams going at it. | |
| And that's what people saw. | |
| I mean, it was exactly what sports is supposed to be. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And it's not like John Ashbrook's Cincinnati Bengals got to go to the White House when they lost the Super Bowl. | |
| Salted. | |
| Is it not violent? | |
| A little salty. | |
| It's like a sports fan, Megan. | |
| Like, this is this, you could become a sports fan here with that kind of intensity. | |
| You know, I only cover sports when it crosses over into my lane of news. | |
| That's generally my approach. | |
| And this one crossed over to my lane. | |
| And I started watching and I was like, what am I feeling? | |
| I don't know anything about anything. | |
| I'm just going to watch the story play out. | |
| And after a week of this, that's where I landed. | |
| The women on the teams did nothing wrong. | |
| They were pretty fierce and pretty awesome and good for them for making this headway. | |
| Dr. Jill Biden, another fail, do better. | |
| But they should go to the White House. | |
| And now they're saying that the team is going to go to the White House. | |
| And hopefully everybody will behave well, be classy. | |
| Right now it's time to put it behind you and be above board. | |
| I'll leave you with this because I know you got to go. | |
| This is the New York Post today. | |
| Oh, God. | |
| Lemon. | |
|
Trump News Cycle Dominance
00:14:11
|
|
| Do you see this? | |
| That headline is Lemon Harang with a preacher. | |
| They are second to none. | |
| How would they think of it? | |
| Putting it in a museum. | |
| CNN, the most busted name in news. | |
| Co-workers on load on Don Anchor is a sexist diva. | |
| Okay, so we'll keep following that and let you know whether there are any updates. | |
| You guys, always great to talk to you. | |
| Oh, so fun, Megan. | |
| Thanks for having us. | |
| It's a blast. | |
| To be continued. | |
| I'm taking your calls right now. | |
| Good week or bad week. | |
| Trump, the GOP, America. | |
| Want to kick it off with a couple of emails we got in our MK mailbag. | |
| You can email me at Megan, M-E-G-Y-N, at MeganKelly.com. | |
| And go to MeganKelly.com. | |
| By the way, if you want to sign up for our American News Minute, it comes out every Friday. | |
| So you can email from me tomorrow. | |
| And it's always super fun. | |
| Jeanette writes in, when Trump announced his candidacy for 2024, I groaned. | |
| But for our country to continue to exist, this political persecution has to stop. | |
| And I believe Trump's the only person on the planet who has what it takes to handle this. | |
| I am more in his corner now than I ever was before. | |
| Joe writes in, this is the first time I've donated to Trump's campaign, and I would do the same to Biden if he was in Trump's shoes. | |
| There's a total double standard that is taking place, and it is not good for our republic. | |
| Lastly, Bob writes in about the gag order. | |
| There isn't one, but the possibility. | |
| On the point of threatening a judge, maybe you can. | |
| I'm thinking about Chuck Schumer talking about Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and the lack of law enforcement against people at the justices' homes. | |
| Good point, Bob. | |
| Yeah, very good point. | |
| All right, let's get to some callers. | |
| Let's see, the lines are lighting up. | |
| And we'll go to Marvin down in Florida, where the top two GOP contenders happen to live right now. | |
| Hi, Marvin. | |
| What's on your mind? | |
| What's on my mind is that I love Donald Trump. | |
| He cannot win. | |
| And the Republicans must win in 2024. | |
| Why can't he win? | |
| Because he doesn't have a positive outlook. | |
| He doesn't speak the way forward. | |
| He only speaks of revenge of what they've done to him. | |
| Yes, they've done lots of things to him. | |
| But you know what? | |
| He has to move forward. | |
| He has to present a positive message. | |
| And I don't believe that he can do this because it's not within him. | |
| You think he's going to have grievance. | |
| We love Donald's. | |
| We love Donald. | |
| But I want to tell you in Florida, we love Ron DeSantis also. | |
| And he's Donald in a different kind of package. | |
| And I have a little concerns about him being a Bush and aqua Roe protege somewhat or them helping in his campaign. | |
| But we must win 2024. | |
| Do you agree? | |
| Well, I mean, the Republicans, if they lose 2024 and they don't recapture the Senate, I mean, I just don't know. | |
| Like, look what's happening with the legislation that the left is pushing. | |
| I don't know when it could ever be reclaimed. | |
| I don't know how much of the country, how different we're going to look if they ever do manage to. | |
| All these electoral changes they've done on the vote and the mail and now the redistricting in place like places like Wisconsin that's about to happen. | |
| You need a winner. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Smarter than people and I have said Trump could win it now because he's the only one who knows how to and he's got so much support within the GOP. | |
| But I don't know if those independents who rejected him in 20 are gettable. | |
| That's the big question. | |
| Marvin, thank you for weighing in with your thoughts on it. | |
| Let's go to Jenny in Tennessee. | |
| Jenny, I've got your number. | |
| What's on your mind? | |
| Boy, I bet the guy that just said that I think Trump's message has changed. | |
| I agree with the ruthless guys. | |
| He's not talking about the election any longer. | |
| I think he is talking a very positive message. | |
| But as a Trump supporter, if he doesn't get it, I'm really interested in RFK. | |
| He just got into the mix of it. | |
| And my bet will go for him. | |
| I don't trust DeSantis. | |
| DeSantis wasn't a Trump kind of bombastic guy from the get-go. | |
| He did it because it was a winner. | |
| And if he gets in, I think he's going to resert back to an establishment kind of person. | |
| And I don't, I'd rather have RFK. | |
| I know what you mean. | |
| One great thing about RFK Jr. is he doesn't give a damn what you say about him. | |
| He will stay on his mission. | |
| And he has been that from the get-go. | |
| Because DeSantis has it. | |
| DeSantis went and became a Trump-like candidate because it was a winner. | |
| He did not win that way in the beginning. | |
| Trump had to come on and pull him. | |
| And then he saw that that's what his constituency wanted. | |
| But I think if he got up there, he would go back to the, like you said, call roads-type establishment, and he would not be that. | |
| He would not be the bombastic firehouse that we need. | |
| RFK will. | |
| He took on big pharma and didn't care. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And told the truth. | |
| It's true. | |
| He took on his own party and didn't care. | |
| So he's now for the viewers just. | |
| And so if Trump doesn't get it, and if as the Republicans, if we can't get behind one person, that's why Democrats win, because they will hold their nose and they will put their person in office. | |
| We don't do that. | |
| And so if we don't do that, then I'm putting someone that'll be the truth teller, and that will be RFK. | |
| So interesting, Jenny. | |
| We got to talk more about the RFK junior presidency or the run candidacy taking on Joe Biden. | |
| He's running as a Democrat, which he is. | |
| And if you want to go back and listen to our interview, he explains why. | |
| I had him on a few times. | |
| Thank you, Jenny, for calling. | |
| Let's go out further west. | |
| Howard, in California, what's on your mind? | |
| Yeah, hi, Megan. | |
| Yeah, I just wanted to say the whole thing with Trump right now, being front and center on the news almost looks like it's something right out of the Democratic Party playbook because now all the news and all the major media networks are talking only about Trump. | |
| It's all Trump, Trump, Trump. | |
| Nothing about the fentanyl crisis, nothing about the southern border crisis, nothing about the banking crisis, nothing about the terrible economic crisis overseas or the bad foreign policy decisions that have been made, sending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas to Ukraine and elsewhere. | |
| It's just all Trump, and nothing else. | |
| You're right. | |
| Look at this week, Howard. | |
| One of the big stories, and I'm embarrassed to tell you, we didn't get to it either. | |
| And I want to in more depth, was the spy balloon news. | |
| You know, that the spy balloon, the Chinese spy balloon, was spying on us and managed to collect a fair amount of intel from our military sites, despite what the administration had told us. | |
| All Trump all week. | |
| They're showing his motorcade leaving Palm Desert, Palm Beach. | |
| They're showing his airplane taking off. | |
| I mean, it was just silly because it's all Trump. | |
| We've seen this movie before. | |
| Yeah, they're going to give him hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free advertising. | |
| They're going to help him get the nomination because they know they can beat him, or at least they feel strongly that they can. | |
| And they're worried about other potential candidates that may talk about the issues that they can't beat. | |
| So it's right out of the Democratic Party playbook in my mind. | |
| But as your last listener said, I am also a huge fan of Robert F. Kennedy. | |
| And although I've never particularly voted Democrat, in fact, that's not something that's been in my DNA since my father in his will said, since I have no cash bequest to leave you, I leave you, my children, the proud memory that I never voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. | |
| So you're open-minded now. | |
| Yeah, but RFK Jr. is not your typical Democrat. | |
| He's what a strong, ethical man. | |
| He really is. | |
| I really feel like I got to know him very well in preparing for those in-depth interviews and doing them. | |
| And I'm excited to see him throw his hat in the ring, too. | |
| It's going to make it a lot more interesting. | |
| Howard, thanks. | |
| Thanks for calling in. | |
| Let's head. | |
| Let's go to Stephen in New York, not far from where I am. | |
| Hi, Stephen. | |
| What are you thinking? | |
| Hi, Megan. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | |
| It's such an honor to speak with you. | |
| Oh, thank you. | |
| You know, I just wanted to say, registered Republican, born and raised New Yorker, you know, watching Donald Trump growing up in my life. | |
| He helped build New York City with the woman rink. | |
| He's done some incredible things. | |
| He's gave a lot of people jobs. | |
| And everybody I know got behind that. | |
| We're feeling unheard. | |
| We're feeling unrepresented. | |
| With that said, this was a terrible week for him. | |
| Nobody wants to get arrested. | |
| Look what they did to him. | |
| Family's embarrassed. | |
| You can't even, they say, oh, Melania didn't even show up. | |
| Why would she? | |
| She probably felt terrible for him. | |
| Nobody wants to see that. | |
| So with that said, I had stopped giving, contributing to the Republican Party or to the Trump campaign. | |
| But you know what? | |
| I felt so guilty, I had to. | |
| Doesn't mean I'm supporting, and I'm still on the fence. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| You donated to Trump in the wake of his indictment? | |
| That's right. | |
| I donated to him after stopping, after the whole impeachment and just the chaos. | |
| And not even, you know, has a lot to do with him. | |
| Let's be honest. | |
| He makes some terrible choices. | |
| He's made some terrible cabinet choices. | |
| There's a lot of things, but he's a fighter. | |
| And as much as we like as a New Yorker like Ron DeSantis and the stability, who's fighting? | |
| Who's punching back? | |
| You know, it's really starting to feel, we're starting to feel deflated. | |
| I won't say defeated because we can't be defeated. | |
| I understand. | |
| I understand. | |
| You don't want, you're worried about electing somebody who's going to go into the White House and turn out to be like a Chief Justice John Roberts, who got very squishy despite a lifetime of conservatism because he just saw his role very differently than we anticipated he would. | |
| So I get it. | |
| And Trump is, whatever you say about Trump, you cannot say the man doesn't know how to fight. | |
| He does. | |
| Stephen, thank you. | |
| Interesting thoughts. | |
| Okay, let's go out to David in North Carolina, down to David in North Carolina. | |
| Hi, David. | |
| What are you thinking? | |
| Hi, Megan. | |
| Look, the Democrats have been doing this stuff since they ran Tom DeLay out of the Congress. | |
| The DA in Austin basically prosecuted him for practicing politics. | |
| He did the same thing to Rick Perry. | |
| Local Democrat, liberal DAs have been doing this. | |
| And Republicans, they just stand around and stamp their little feet and write a strongly worded letter and say, oh, what a horrible person you are. | |
| And then we don't do anything about it. | |
| I heard your show with Charles C.W. Cook. | |
| And I think he made the comment, you know, when this happens, you know, it's just tempting. | |
| What did he say? | |
| He said, it's tempting to, you know, turn the tables and do the same thing. | |
| But then, you know, as usual, the National Review crowd, they're going, but you know what? | |
| That's not what we are. | |
| And you know what? | |
| We need to be that. | |
| So give us go, because it's the only thing it'll stop. | |
| Sometimes, low road is the only thing people understand. | |
| You mentioned Tom Delay. | |
| It takes me back David, to when I was uh junior at FOX and they sat me down to cover one of those court proceedings uh, against him. | |
| And the protesters were out there and they sort of hijacked my live shot and the anchor back at the desk said, what are they saying? | |
| What are they chanting? | |
| And I, I remember trying to, you know, be taken seriously. | |
| I was very young at saying um, they are chanting. | |
| Tom Delay is a stinker. | |
| He'll be headed to the Clinker back to you in the studio. | |
| You're right, they've been fighting these fights for a long time, and viciously. | |
| David thanks, thank you for calling. | |
| Uh, let's go to Roxy in Chicago, Illinois. | |
| Roxy oh, i'm sorry for what's happened to your city. | |
| I don't know how you voted, but uh gosh, that was a close election and I don't, I don't like where it's going. | |
| I am uh, it's been a little interesting this past couple months um, but I just want to say that I think that your influence on women is really amazing and I think what you're doing right now is awesome. | |
| Oh, thank you so much. | |
| You sound young, Roxy. | |
| Maybe maybe we're too young to vote. | |
| Uh yeah, just a little bit. | |
| Oh well, thank you so much for calling. | |
| I'm glad you listen and uh, my hat goes off to you because it's not. | |
| It's not the easiest time to be a young woman in America but um, it's still awesome. | |
| I highly recommend staying in our lane. | |
| Womanhood is uh, a net benefit as as you age and you embrace it and you get married and you have kids and all the goodness, or just embrace your career, and I hope if you listen to the show, you know all the goodness that's available and awaiting for you. | |
| Thank you, thanks for calling hon. Okay, so let's go to. | |
| Let's see Jr Jr in Ohio. | |
| Hi Jr, what are you thinking? | |
| I just wanted to talk about Um Trump's comments about the judge and his daughter the other day. | |
| Uh, I think it was. | |
| The initial reaction was somewhat negative, but I think it was a very strategically smart, because he's trying to send a message out to the country that this is really the elites versus everybody else and that this judge, he can make a phone call and get his daughter a job with the vice president or you know, on her campaign or whatever. | |
| The average person can't do that and it sends a signal that he is against the elites. | |
| You know there's a group of people that are on the inside. | |
| He's on the outside and it's very subtle, but it's more than just a personal attack and it's very much consistent with what you've been covering, where we have this distrust of institutions because of covet, because of the lies, because the lockdowns and all these things and and it it breeds a distrust of elites and the currency of, you know, Harvard Pedigree that used to engender trust, that's gone. | |
| I mean, that's a good point. | |
| Large segments of the country that is gone and I think that's a good point, trying to plant that seed. | |
| You know he does a great job of calling out the elites and the establishment and the us against them and they play right into the narrative Jr. | |
|
Calling Out The Elites
00:01:23
|
|
| Thanks for your thoughts quickly before we go. | |
| Jessica, Jessica in Indiana, what's on your mind? | |
| Hey, Megan, thank you for taking my call. | |
| I just had a quick question or sort of what advice would you have for kind of center, center-right women that just graduated college in their mid-20s for finding just a good guy? | |
| Honestly, I have so many girlfriends that are single that don't want to be on the app. | |
| So what advice would you have? | |
| Okay, I've got thoughts on that. | |
| I'll give them to you quickly because we're ending the show, but make all the deposits you can into yourself. | |
| Join a book club, join a music lesson. | |
| Make yourself as full as you can, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and the good man will come. | |
| You will meet him in one of these settings, could be church, could be any place. | |
| Probably not going to be the bar, but the more interesting, strong, dynamic, and fascinating you are, the better man you will attract. | |
| And then we will be talking about how you're going to beat him off with a stick because you have so many great options available to you. | |
| And it's just a question of choosing. | |
| And I hope that happens for you. | |
| More on that in another show. | |
| Jessica, thanks for calling in. | |
| All right, we've got to go because the show's over, but hope you'll tune in again tomorrow. | |
| Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show. | |
| No BS, no agenda, and no | |