The Megyn Kelly Show - 20230411_bud-light-learns-go-woke-go-broke-and-famous-femal
Aired: 2023-04-11
Duration: 01:37:32


=== Bud Light's Cultural Backlash (12:42) ===

[00:00:00]  Sommani for bland big beef burgundy 14.
[00:00:09]  Or include comics 34 by 20 or speech levels, and the money is a very good thing.
[00:00:40]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:01:03]  Heck of a job, Brownie.
[00:01:05]  Great job.
[00:01:06]  You nailed it.
[00:01:07]  We dug into the story here on our team, and the truth is even crazier than what you may have seen.
[00:01:13]  We'll show it to you.
[00:01:14]  Plus, the drama inside the Tennessee State House continues with one representative who was expelled already being sworn back in.
[00:01:23]  And we took a little dive into his past and wait until you see what we found.
[00:01:30]  You're gonna love this.
[00:01:32]  So much happening.
[00:01:32]  So today is the perfect day for the EJs.
[00:01:34]  Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at the Federalist and host of the Federalist Radio Hour.
[00:01:39]  And Eliana Johnson is editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon and co-host of the podcast Ink Stained Wretches.
[00:01:48]  EJs, great to have you here.
[00:01:50]  Good to be here.
[00:01:52]  Good to be here.
[00:01:52]  So I don't even know where I want to start, but I guess I'll just take them in that order.
[00:01:55]  So Bud Light is in the midst of a bloodbath.
[00:01:59]  It's a bloodbath for Bud Light in the wake of its ridiculous marketing person's decision to expand the brand by catering to a segment of the population that is less than 0.01%.
[00:02:11]  They've completely abandoned their actual core base of buyers.
[00:02:16]  And Fox Business has an article posted right now talking about they went out and spoke to various distributors, various bars, various restaurants, and so on.
[00:02:26]  Consumers Nationwide revolted is their headline after this bloodbath against the nation's top-selling beer brand after it stepped recklessly into the culture wars last week with its new spokesperson, TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney.
[00:02:39]  For those not paying attention, this is what happened.
[00:02:41]  This new Bud Light marketing executive, this woke young Harvard grad, decided to completely change the face of Bud Light by creating Bud Light Cans to celebrate trans activist Dylan Mulvaney, who's somehow managed to become the face of womanhood, even though Dylan has a penis.
[00:03:02]  They talked to bar owners and beer industry experts talking about how, and just give you some examples.
[00:03:09]  Filters Bar was one of them in not far from, yeah, it's in Missouri.
[00:03:14]  And Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch is headquartered in St. Louis.
[00:03:19]  Catastrophic decrease in sales.
[00:03:21]  30% in bottle products down over the past week.
[00:03:25]  Drought beer plummeting 50%.
[00:03:29]  Similar stories around the country.
[00:03:30]  Bud Light normally outsells rival products, Miller Light and Coors Light, 25 to 1 at the Braintree Brewhouse in Massachusetts.
[00:03:36]  Not this week.
[00:03:37]  80% of Bud Light drinkers ordered something else.
[00:03:40]  The owner says the 20% who did order Bud Light were not on social media and hadn't heard about the new transgender pitch person.
[00:03:47]  They didn't order it again after they found out.
[00:03:50]  One pub in Hell's Kitchen, a New York City neighborhood known for its large and vocal gay community, reported Bud Light draft sales dropped 58% this week.
[00:03:58]  Bud Light bottle sales were down 70%.
[00:04:01]  Down in Texas, where Bud Light has sponsored a large weekly dart league with 100 plus players each Thursday night, the bar, which typically sells three kegs of Bud Light at the event, sold a total of four bottles this week.
[00:04:15]  Four.
[00:04:16]  Okay, and I could go on.
[00:04:17]  I mean, they continue going across from person to person.
[00:04:20]  So before I play the pitch person on this podcast, talking about her brilliant plan, I feel this is a really empowering moment, Emily.
[00:04:28]  I feel like, great.
[00:04:30]  You know, finally, the go woke, go broke thing is working.
[00:04:34]  And the question is whether they will learn Bud Light and other brands.
[00:04:39]  And it depends on their strategy because sometimes their strategy is they know there is a slice of the population that loves this stuff.
[00:04:49]  You saw this with Nike and Colin Kaepernick.
[00:04:51]  There's a huge swath of the country that absolutely despises what Nike did with Colin Kaepernick.
[00:04:57]  But because there's a small group of people that they could create a very loyal fan base out of, the Colin Kaepernick stuff kind of worked for them.
[00:05:04]  They actually saw sales increase as part of that.
[00:05:07]  Now, they have different fan bases, of course, than Bud Light.
[00:05:10]  It's a really broad company and Bud Light is too.
[00:05:13]  But for the most part, Bud Light drinkers are probably more similar than the Nike demographic.
[00:05:21]  And so is Bud Light's strategy to spend this much so that it gets favorable ratings on DEI ESG scores, that it'll allow it to get better investments.
[00:05:33]  Do they even care if they take a hit in business over a month?
[00:05:38]  Of course, they should care.
[00:05:39]  And their people who invest in them should absolutely care.
[00:05:42]  But at this point, do executives see themselves as people who can sacrifice a tiny bit for the activism that allows themselves to show their faces at the Manhattan Cocktail Party Circuit?
[00:05:53]  That's actually an open question because we've seen companies in the past spend a ton of money just to do DEI PR pushes.
[00:06:00]  They might not even believe in any of it, but that's the strategy.
[00:06:04]  It's like advertising and it's this sort of personal penance.
[00:06:08]  It's this personal thing that they're paying to feel good and to feel like they're virtue signaling and they've bought themselves that virtue signal.
[00:06:17]  So I wonder how much the executives at Bud Light care about these really stark numbers that you just outlined.
[00:06:22]  I hope they do.
[00:06:23]  People who are investing in the business.
[00:06:25]  This is not going to be like the Nike.
[00:06:26]  I don't think, Eliana.
[00:06:27]  This is not going to, this, Bud Light doesn't know who its audience is.
[00:06:31]  They don't know who their consumers are.
[00:06:33]  These guys at the NFL football games who are ordering Bud Light en masse at the, you know, as they watch the Sunday game, the guys who are playing darts down in Texas, you know, you've seen the videos online.
[00:06:43]  They're, they're renting out bulldozers and excavators to roll over huge cases of Bud Light that people are throwing out.
[00:06:53]  They've Nike, yes, Nike, it's a trickier situation because Nike has a large fan base, a large athletic fan base, a lot of black people.
[00:07:03]  And that resonance, that message from Colin Kaepernick may have resonated with them.
[00:07:08]  Okay.
[00:07:08]  So I can see how that they took a bet.
[00:07:10]  That one paid off.
[00:07:11]  There is not a huge base drinking Bud Light that wants to see Dylan Mulvaney celebrated.
[00:07:17]  It's a shoot, a shot, and a miss.
[00:07:20]  I'm with you on that, Megan.
[00:07:22]  The closest analogy I could come up with is when a primary campaign ends and the candidate needs to pivot to the general.
[00:07:30]  If you listen to the Bud Light marketing director talk, she essentially said, we need to broaden the reach and the appeal of this brand beyond our core users.
[00:07:42]  Well, any political candidate would know you can pivot to the center, but you can't lose the primary voters who backed you.
[00:07:52]  You got to keep your base if you want to pivot.
[00:07:54]  Otherwise, the pivot is pointless and you come out behind.
[00:07:58]  You're going to lose that election.
[00:07:59]  And I think the same is true here.
[00:08:00]  You could pivot to the transgenders.
[00:08:04]  You're going to lose your core base who are not a huge fan of that sort of thing.
[00:08:10]  Right.
[00:08:10]  Exactly.
[00:08:11]  Right.
[00:08:11]  Especially right now.
[00:08:12]  And especially with this nasty woman's messaging about how shitty Bud Light's existing base of customers is.
[00:08:18]  She doesn't like the people who buy their beer.
[00:08:21]  She shouldn't work for Bud Light.
[00:08:22]  She should take her story walking and go work for a woke corporation instead of ruining the one that employs her.
[00:08:29]  There was another guy who was the chief marketing executive there for 43 years who got it.
[00:08:34]  He understood who the customer base is.
[00:08:36]  Then for some reason, he either retired or quit or got fired.
[00:08:38]  I don't know what happened to him, but they brought in this woman, Alyssa Heinerscheid, who is now the VP of marketing, who said they really needed to update their fratty and out of touch branding with inclusivity.
[00:08:53]  Here she was three days before the Dylan Mulvaney thing launched, before anybody had seen it.
[00:08:59]  And she still thought it was safe for her to do podcasts and say what she really thought.
[00:09:05]  She apparently didn't see the shitstorm that was about to rain down on her and her brand thanks to her stupid marketing campaign.
[00:09:12]  Listen to her.
[00:09:14]  So I had this super clear mandate.
[00:09:16]  It's like we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand.
[00:09:21]  And my, what I brought to that was a belief in, okay, what does what does evolve and elevate mean?
[00:09:29]  It means inclusivity.
[00:09:30]  You've got to see people who reflect you in the work.
[00:09:34]  And we had this hangover.
[00:09:35]  I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor.
[00:09:44]  And it was really important that we had another approach.
[00:09:49]  So she went this way and went on to say it's essential that the brand attract more female and younger drinkers.
[00:10:00]  Otherwise, there will be no future for Bud Light because this, this, Eliana, is what she thinks women will support.
[00:10:08]  That women want a fake pretend woman who mocks us at every video Dylan Mulvaney releases to be the face of our beer.
[00:10:18]  That's, that's her understanding of what women want.
[00:10:25]  There is something, I think, really offensive about saying that this transgender person, Dylan Mulvaney, who is an adult man, is a spokesperson for women, will appeal to women.
[00:10:40]  You know, and I think, I do think like there, there is a social stigma against saying that because you're accused of transphobia, but it is wrong for adult men to take the place of speaking on behalf of and marketing to women, if that is the point.
[00:10:58]  No, it's absurd.
[00:10:59]  I don't care how much of a social stigma there is.
[00:11:02]  That's a man.
[00:11:03]  We're looking at a man on camera right there.
[00:11:04]  That is a man, a man, a man.
[00:11:07]  At best, it's a trans woman.
[00:11:09]  Dylan Mulvaney isn't a woman and will never be a woman.
[00:11:12]  And I don't care how many surgeries Dylan has.
[00:11:14]  There's only one way to become a woman, and that is you're born into it.
[00:11:19]  And the absurdity of not just Bud Light, Emily, but oil of Olay is now using Dylan Mulvaney as, so what?
[00:11:27]  If I, if I put oil of Olay on my skin, I'm going to get manhair.
[00:11:30]  Am I going to grow a beard like Dylan clearly has in the close-up shots?
[00:11:34]  Because oil of Olay, you can take your story walking.
[00:11:36]  I don't want your brand.
[00:11:37]  You know what?
[00:11:38]  I love my non-facial hairy face, which doesn't have any stubble because I'm a woman.
[00:11:46]  You know, I don't want to pivot to Tampax, but I feel as though I must because Pen Sylvania is also hawking Tampax at this point, which you could not write.
[00:11:56]  I mean, you can't make satire that ridiculous.
[00:11:59]  And so, yeah, I mean, it's completely offensive.
[00:12:02]  Apart from sounding a little bit like I imagine Eliana sounded when she took over the free beacon, that marketing director is hilarious because it's some real millennial bullshit.
[00:12:11]  Like they don't realize how that's going to age.
[00:12:14]  Gen Z is already way more heterodox on this question of trans identity because they've seen a lot of their friends suffer from it.
[00:12:21]  This is like the caricature of a millennial trying to check, trying to connect with young people, like the hello, fellow kids thing.
[00:12:28]  And the other part of this I wanted to mention is that when you have people out there, you know, like Kid Rock shooting the Bud Light cans and everything like this, they're not necessarily always offended because they're just completely, you know, conservative Republicans, although that's absolutely the case.

=== Why Brands Sponsor Dylan Mulvaney (04:44) ===

[00:12:43]  It's the signal that Bud Light doesn't give a damn about them.
[00:12:46]  It's like CMT last week with the drag performance after the shooting in Nashville.
[00:12:52]  It's a signal that we think you're outdated.
[00:12:55]  We think you're fratty and gross and backwards.
[00:12:58]  And we're trying to move away from that because we don't have respect for you.
[00:13:02]  So even if in some cases it's not like that their politics might differ, you know, somebody who decides not to order Bud Light, it's that they feel like they're, you know, getting like something a slap in the face to the way that we're there from, how they grew up, and the way that people they love think.
[00:13:17]  So it's not even just that like one narrow political issue.
[00:13:21]  It's just this cultural sign that you don't like the people who buy your product.
[00:13:26]  It's so true.
[00:13:27]  And she, this is obviously some woke activist, this woman.
[00:13:31]  She's Harvard, Wharton school grad, 39 years old.
[00:13:36]  Her LinkedIn profile proudly states she is the first female to lead the largest beer brand in the industry.
[00:13:42]  And soon it's going to stay to drive it out of business.
[00:13:44]  I mean, she's going to be fired.
[00:13:46]  I predict right now.
[00:13:47]  This woman will be fired.
[00:13:48]  She'll be relieved of her duty and they'll and they'll make a thing out of it, right?
[00:13:52]  Because they need Bud Light needs people to know that she was, she went rogue and that they were not.
[00:13:58]  Harder for her cause, Megan.
[00:13:59]  Great.
[00:14:00]  Good for her.
[00:14:01]  She can go run for the legislature down in Tennessee.
[00:14:04]  So she went on in this interview to talk about how she thought Bud Light's former marketing strategy was dated and male focused.
[00:14:14]  And she was very proud of one of the Super Bowl ads that she put together.
[00:14:18]  It featured Miles Teller, who was in Top Gun Maverick, and it featured Miles and his wife, whose name I think is Kaylee.
[00:14:27]  Keely, we'll listen to it.
[00:14:28]  Kelly.
[00:14:29]  Okay, Kelly, but it's spelled weird.
[00:14:31]  Anyway, so the ad is all about Miles Teller.
[00:14:34]  It's about Miles Teller.
[00:14:35]  It features his wife a bit, but listen to her describing the ad, Alyssa Heinerscheig.
[00:14:42]  I cast an incredible female choreographer who just brought incredibly positive, amazing energy to the spot.
[00:14:50]  We cast Miles Teller and his wife, Kelly Teller, but it was really crucial to me that if you see that spot, Kelly is Kelly is the heartbeat of that spot.
[00:15:01]  You're seeing this whole experience through Kelly.
[00:15:04]  She's the beating heart.
[00:15:05]  She, I would sort of argue, is sort of what propels you through that experience.
[00:15:09]  And that was intentional.
[00:15:13]  My God.
[00:15:15]  I'm so sick of this nonsense, aren't you?
[00:15:17]  See, the woman, the ad is about the actual one who's famous, but it was through the eyes and the heart of the woman.
[00:15:24]  And it was choreographed by a woman.
[00:15:27]  That is to my credit.
[00:15:29]  That's really what she's saying, Eliana, right?
[00:15:32]  Like, I, it's sort of like the Disney executive.
[00:15:35]  I sneak my secret woke agenda in wherever I can.
[00:15:40]  There are a lot of layers here.
[00:15:42]  First of all, I love the rainbow children's art over it's like coming out of her head in the image.
[00:15:47]  It's perfect.
[00:15:49]  But then even before you said she was Harvard and Wharton educated, you know, my thought was this is clearly a woman who is a product of elite institutions on the East Coast.
[00:15:59]  She is part of the crowd that was certain Elizabeth Warren would be the Democratic Party's nominee in 2020 who uses and who uses terms like Latin X and thinks that the rest of the country thinks and talks the way they do.
[00:16:14]  And if they don't, they're backwards people and who doesn't have the self-awareness to realize they live in an elite bubble and need to check their biases.
[00:16:23]  Look, I'm part of that same kind of elite.
[00:16:25]  You know, I live on the East Coast.
[00:16:27]  I'm a product of the same institutions.
[00:16:29]  I realize I may not have my finger on the pulse of, you know, rural America.
[00:16:34]  I think a little, a little self-awareness would have taken this woman a long way.
[00:16:39]  It's not that hard.
[00:16:40]  You know, if you, if you bother to care, you know, if you read certain publications, if you listen to certain reporters on this show, we take callers.
[00:16:48]  You know, it's like they don't, they don't have their finger on the pulse because they don't care, Eliana.
[00:16:53]  You care.
[00:16:54]  And while you may not be living in rural America, I've listened to you long enough and read you long enough to know you do care.
[00:16:59]  You make an effort to learn.
[00:17:00]  They don't because they think these people are losers.
[00:17:03]  They think they're gross.
[00:17:04]  She's embarrassed that Bud Light is the drink of choice for Kid Rock supporters.
[00:17:10]  She's grossed out.
[00:17:11]  She wants it to be the people who are at Harvard and Wharton who are drinking that product.
[00:17:15]  And she's going to, she's going to change that single-handedly right before she gets her ass fired, which is going to happen again.
[00:17:20]  She's going to have to pry those top shelf liquor martinis out of their cold, dead hand.

=== The Corporate Activist Scorecard (15:38) ===

[00:17:27]  It's so true.
[00:17:29]  Here's the thing.
[00:17:30]  You mentioned, Emily, the score, like the DEI scores that these companies, because why?
[00:17:36]  Why is Oil of Ole and Bud Light and Nike, Nike sponsoring Dylan Mulvaney now for fucking sports bras.
[00:17:45]  Okay?
[00:17:45]  I'm sorry.
[00:17:47]  Dylan doesn't have breasts.
[00:17:49]  Dylan's been taking some sort of a hormone that has turned Dylan into some, I don't know what's happening there, but those are not breasts.
[00:17:56]  And Dylan doesn't need any sort of a bra.
[00:17:58]  Never mind a sports bra.
[00:18:00]  The three ladies on this program right now have six boobs between us.
[00:18:05]  And we actually know what it's like to wear a bra.
[00:18:07]  And no one would be inspired to buy one based on non-breasted Dylan Mulvaney prancing around in a Nike sports bra.
[00:18:15]  By the way, Dylan also appears to have an eating disorder.
[00:18:17]  I'm just going to say it.
[00:18:18]  But Dylan is about 40 pounds soaking wet.
[00:18:20]  So this should not be anybody's spokesperson for anything.
[00:18:22]  If there were a woman who looked like that, she couldn't get an endorsement because they'd say she clearly is unwell.
[00:18:27]  Okay.
[00:18:28]  So why are they doing this?
[00:18:29]  You met, you touched on it, Emily, that they get these scores.
[00:18:34]  They get these sort of their CEI or DEI scores, corporate equality index.
[00:18:41]  This is from a New York Post report.
[00:18:42]  A lesser known part of the burgeoning ESG score system, Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance is ESG.
[00:18:50]  And we already knew that a lot of these big investment firms, BlackRock and so on, will look at your ESG score as a company before deciding whether to invest in you.
[00:18:59]  But this is something a little different.
[00:19:02]  It's subsumed inside that movement and it's being pushed by the country's top investment firms.
[00:19:08]  The scores are handed out.
[00:19:10]  Here's the problem.
[00:19:10]  How do you get a good ESG score or a good CEI corporate equality index score?
[00:19:15]  You have to please the human rights campaign.
[00:19:19]  The human rights campaign.
[00:19:22]  That's the organization that was headed by Alfonso David, who was secretly advising Andrew Cuomo on how to bury all the women who are accusing him, right?
[00:19:32]  It's supposed to be like, yay, pro-gay and pro-LGBTQ.
[00:19:37]  And secretly, this guy was like, screw those women.
[00:19:39]  Let's get, let's bury them.
[00:19:40]  All right.
[00:19:41]  So he was forced out.
[00:19:42]  But this is a hard left organization, Emily.
[00:19:44]  So no wonder if they, if you need to get their approval, of course you're going to use Dylan Mulvaney and the like.
[00:19:52]  It's this amazing alliance that's developed over the last couple, last decade, I would say, between the far left sort of activist class and cultural activist class, not economic activist class, but cultural activist class and big business.
[00:20:06]  It's incredible to see their marriage come to fruition.
[00:20:09]  And that's exactly what this is when you have firms like BlackRock and not just BlackRock, but they will actually score companies.
[00:20:16]  You can see it on the human rights campaign website.
[00:20:19]  They score these companies and then that's used for investors to determine where they're steering capital.
[00:20:26]  And this is like incredibly important because it's a great glimpse into how divorced a lot of the decisions these big, big companies make, and especially investment firms make.
[00:20:37]  They're not divorced.
[00:20:39]  They're not in touch with the market.
[00:20:40]  They're completely divorced from market forces.
[00:20:42]  This is not free market capitalism.
[00:20:45]  This is something completely perverted and distorted that prioritizes the opinions of this elite group of investors, DC activists, politicians.
[00:20:57]  And you have really like good luck doing something about this.
[00:21:00]  I mean, some people are trying and you have Vivek Ramaswamy is now running for president out there, like trying to blow the horn and wave the red flag and say this is happening.
[00:21:08]  But good luck.
[00:21:09]  It's not like you can just stop going to that store that you really like going to in your small town because they did something you don't like.
[00:21:17]  It's not a boycott that's as easy and connected as that.
[00:21:20]  It's completely a distorted market system that prioritizes the ideology of people who are completely out of touch and who have this binary where you are either fully culturally progressive or you are necessarily a bigot.
[00:21:33]  We have heard this out of the mouth of the president of the United States who's talked about Jim Crow 2.0 and a Georgia voting law that's not even as strict as his own states and Delaware's.
[00:21:42]  We've heard him talk about Jim Eagle and all of that stuff.
[00:21:45]  If you are not fully on board with their cause, you are a bigot.
[00:21:49]  You will be penalized.
[00:21:50]  And you will be penalized even if you don't proactively support them.
[00:21:53]  Maybe you just quietly support them.
[00:21:55]  No, it has to be proactive.
[00:21:57]  Otherwise you will be penalized.
[00:21:59]  So it's just extortion that has completely shifted the incentive system in the market and in society.
[00:22:06]  It's like, I don't get it because you're right.
[00:22:09]  You can't avoid the companies that take the knee to this human rights campaign and scoring system.
[00:22:14]  They include the top scores go to in the following order.
[00:22:17]  Number one, Walmart, Amazon, Exxon, Apple, CVS.
[00:22:21]  I mean, as much as I'd love to tell him to throw out my iPhone and not get my scripts filled at CVS anymore, I'm not doing that.
[00:22:26]  I'm not stopping using Amazon.
[00:22:29]  So yeah, we're already doing business with those who have been captured by this.
[00:22:33]  And I don't totally understand like how it works because does Walmart really need the money of BlackRock at this point?
[00:22:42]  Like they're making their own money.
[00:22:44]  I don't get why they'd be on the knee for one of these scores in the corporate equality index.
[00:22:51]  The woman who's now running it after they bounced out Alfonso is named Kelly Robinson.
[00:22:58]  She worked as a political organizer, Aliana, for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.
[00:23:03]  She's the one who decides whether a corporation gets a thumbs up or down.
[00:23:06]  Gee, I wonder how that's going to go.
[00:23:08]  She's a black woman who identifies as queer.
[00:23:11]  She said this week she hopes to lead a broad intersectional coalition for change.
[00:23:17]  I am a community organizer through and through, and I kind of look at the fight that's in front of me, I guess, through that lens.
[00:23:27]  Some of the tweets she sent out lately: discriminating against transgender athletes is wrong and a violation of federal law.
[00:23:36]  Trans women are women.
[00:23:38]  That's it.
[00:23:40]  That's the tweet.
[00:23:41]  No, Ms. Robinson, they're not.
[00:23:44]  Sorry.
[00:23:44]  I mean, I, I know I'm being vulgar today, but this, this whole topic is bringing it up.
[00:23:50]  Like trans women really are chicks with dicks.
[00:23:52]  It's true.
[00:23:53]  It's a short, catchy catchphrase, but it's really what's happening.
[00:23:57]  They're not women.
[00:23:59]  They're fake women.
[00:24:00]  They're biological men masquerading as women.
[00:24:02]  And most of them we would get along with and we'd be kind to and we use their pronouns.
[00:24:06]  But this active ass activist class must be defeated and shamed.
[00:24:11]  Those I will fight all day long.
[00:24:14]  And she's one of them.
[00:24:15]  She's one of the people out there who's now influencing these massive corporations, Eliana, and changing the face of the brands.
[00:24:24]  You know, I read the New York Post report with great interest, Megan.
[00:24:27]  And I did think that the missing piece in that report was some kind of reporting indicating how closely these companies watch this index and pay attention to them, and then how they change their actions in order to game it.
[00:24:42]  Because there is a chicken and egg question for me in this.
[00:24:46]  Is Bud Light doing what it did here?
[00:24:49]  And are other companies doing these things because they're staffed like people like the marketing executive from Harvard and Wharton?
[00:24:55]  Or are they doing it from outside incentives?
[00:24:58]  Or are they in fact hiring the people from Harvard and Wharton to game this index?
[00:25:03]  I still think there's a lot we don't know about the causal mechanism here, but part of me does think that the people at the top echelons of corporate America think this way anyway.
[00:25:14]  They don't need to be beaten with a stick or have some outside incentive like this index put on them to behave this way and to lecture others in this way and to try to change their companies.
[00:25:26]  And also they are beholden.
[00:25:28]  We've seen a million times over and over again.
[00:25:30]  They're beholden to the 22, 23 and 24 year olds who fill their ranks from Ivy League schools on the East Coast and from the best schools on the West Coast and who come in demanding this stuff or they face an uprising.
[00:25:43]  So I do think we don't quite know the causal mechanism here.
[00:25:47]  Whole thing, right?
[00:25:48]  Exactly.
[00:25:48]  I mean, all I know from the post report on those on those companies, they say the 20th anniversary edition of the CEI Corporate Equality Index now includes over 1,200 participants and more than 800 top scorers.
[00:26:01]  And then they go on to list that they say this means employers at over 1,200 companies agreed to have their policies and benefits analyzed by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.
[00:26:10]  And that includes those five that I just listed.
[00:26:14]  Now, this could be and probably is if it's been going on for 20 years, something that began with, are you hiring gay people?
[00:26:20]  Are you providing, you know, spousal or partner benefits for people who are in a gay relationship or marriage or, you know, committed relationship, whatever.
[00:26:27]  That's, I can understand that.
[00:26:30]  This has morphed into something very, very different.
[00:26:34]  And the Bud Light partnership with Dylan shows it, right?
[00:26:38]  It shows just how far it's swung.
[00:26:40]  We are not yet at the point where America's behind that.
[00:26:44]  Two-thirds of the American people do not agree with this Kelly Robinson that trans girls should be allowed to play trans sports.
[00:26:55]  The majority of Americans are against that.
[00:26:58]  And even of the percentage that say they're in favor, I'd love to know what they would actually do if it were their daughter, right?
[00:27:05]  I mean, it's like one thing when you tell the pollster, it's something else when it's actually your kid.
[00:27:09]  So I don't know, but it's a real problem.
[00:27:10]  And I think the Bud Light moment is going to be an important one because that in particular, they misjudge the fan base that you got Kid Rocks fans out there.
[00:27:18]  They're not going to be quiet.
[00:27:20]  You know, Travis Tritt, he got rid of all the Bud Light on his tour.
[00:27:24]  He said he knows a lot of other country Western stars, country music stars who are doing the same, who are just not being public about it.
[00:27:31]  It may not be the same as Oil Volay because most women who use Oil Volay are not on Twitter all day or TikTok or even aware of what the hell the brand is doing with Dylan.
[00:27:41]  By the way, is TikTok's audience really like those women?
[00:27:44]  You know, like, is it, aren't they more like with the, I don't know, the bum bum cream founder?
[00:27:49]  I'm not sure.
[00:27:50]  I'm not exactly sure they're using.
[00:27:52]  Anyway, it leads me to my next question, which is speaking of the TikTok influencers, Emily.
[00:27:56]  Now, this is apparently Joe Biden's reelection plan.
[00:27:59]  We are being told that the White House is trying to curry favor with this group of influencers.
[00:28:05]  They're teaming up with TikTok influencers to help tout Biden's record on social media, that his digital strategy is an army of influencers is the way Axios says it, because he needs to sort of connect with young people.
[00:28:22]  It doesn't seem entirely stupid to me because his numbers with young people are great.
[00:28:30]  He definitely does better than most Republicans with young people.
[00:28:35]  And it's just like when you look at these, the lists of some of these influencers in the Axios report, just deeply, deeply unserious political commentary.
[00:28:44]  One of them is like a current NYU student.
[00:28:46]  And I watched one of the videos.
[00:28:48]  It was like unbelievably dumb.
[00:28:50]  But at the same time, you can say there's a case to be made that Republicans, conservatives are just completely behind the curve on this and should have their own influencer army of people going out to, you know, say, vote Trump or whatever it is, making dumb videos to get people to vote for Trump, because maybe there's an argument that works with people on TikTok.
[00:29:12]  Maybe there's an argument that you can like inject yourself into the discourse more easily if you use TikTok.
[00:29:16]  I don't think anybody should be using TikTok, period, but that's another conversation.
[00:29:20]  So I actually see maybe there's an argument that they're just being smart.
[00:29:25]  And they're also talking about bringing influencers in for potential daily White House briefings, which I don't think that's super smart, but maybe conservatives should be doing something similar.
[00:29:38]  And Joe Biden just gets it.
[00:29:39]  But at the same time, when I watch these examples, they're so cringy.
[00:29:43]  I don't know if they're actually going to work.
[00:29:46]  The thing is, Eliana, I say they're great.
[00:29:47]  They're not great.
[00:29:48]  I mean, the young people want Joe Biden replaced.
[00:29:50]  If you ask them who they want to be the Democratic nominee, they say someone else, someone other than Joe Biden.
[00:29:55]  But when it comes to the issues, they support him way more than they support the Republican Party.
[00:30:01]  Abortion's been a huge motivator for the young vote.
[00:30:04]  These social issues, you know, social and cultural issues like we're discussing, young people tend to lean more left.
[00:30:10]  There was just a poll out over the weekend that showed that.
[00:30:13]  That was one of the areas in which liberals were beating conservatives.
[00:30:16]  Democrats were beating Republicans by some three points.
[00:30:18]  So he's trying to gin up that base, especially as we see some of his core constituency, namely Hispanics and some black voters, migrate over to the Republican Party.
[00:30:32]  Absolutely.
[00:30:34]  The best part, the best detail, I think, from that Axios piece that Emily alluded to is that they're considering having a briefing room for influencers, a special briefing room and a special briefing for these influencers.
[00:30:47]  But I think Biden is trying to do a little bit of a two-step here ahead of announcing his reelection, which in itself is interesting that he hasn't announced, he hasn't actually announced yet.
[00:30:57]  The first is you do see him tacking to the middle on some issues.
[00:31:00]  He vetoed that the crazy DC crime bill where the counts, the DC city council had overridden the mayor's veto and crime in the District of Columbia is out of control.
[00:31:12]  And Biden came in and supported the veto of that bill.
[00:31:17]  That was an interesting move.
[00:31:18]  And he rebuked the far left flank of his party in doing that.
[00:31:23]  At the same time, you do see him courting, you know, Dylan Mulvaney has cozied up to the Biden administration.
[00:31:29]  The Biden administration has used Dylan Mulvaney to get his message out.
[00:31:33]  They're trying to do both of these things at the same time because the vote of these young people who are the most unreliable voters, but are ardent supporters of the Democratic Party is incredibly important to what is likely to be a pretty close election from where we see it now.
[00:31:49]  Biden is weak on the Democratic side and young people like the rest of the Democratic Party would rather not have Biden atop the ticket.
[00:31:57]  But Republicans aren't exactly sitting pretty either.
[00:32:01]  Their leading candidate is under indictment in New York.
[00:32:04]  Whatever you think of the merits of the indictment, it's a pain in the butt to deal with that.
[00:32:09]  And the rest of the field isn't, you know, right now looking like a bunch of a bunch of rock stars who are ready to defeat Biden.
[00:32:17]  Well, and that's, I mean, there is a real question about whether abortion is going to be the game changer in the next election, you know, whether what happened in the 2020, 2022 midterms is going to happen again when we get to the next presidential race.
[00:32:32]  We have not yet had a presidential election post-Dobbs.
[00:32:36]  And, you know, I heard my pals over at Commentary this morning talking about this, Emily saying, you know, you got Ron DeSantis who is about to sign a bill changing the abortion statute in Florida from, I think, 15 weeks to six, six.
[00:32:50]  And I understand, you know, the pro-life audience is like, keep going, but it'd be nice for the pro-life audience, I'm sure, to win elections.
[00:32:58]  And this could actually seriously impact Ron DeSantis' ability to do that on the national level.

=== Justin Pearson's New Movement (08:44) ===

[00:33:06]  There's a big difference, especially for young women between 15 and six weeks.
[00:33:13]  It's going to be really interesting to watch how the different Republicans handle that question.
[00:33:16]  And Ron DeSantis, another issue young voters care about a lot is climate.
[00:33:20]  I mean, that's one of their biggest priorities if you look at polling.
[00:33:23]  And DeSantis is actually kind of interesting as a Republican, a little heterodox as a Republican on climate issues.
[00:33:29]  But then on the abortion question, yeah, I have a different perspective on what's moral versus what's politically expedient.
[00:33:35]  And there's just no way that six weeks is politically expedient.
[00:33:38]  But the one way that can be, if Republican candidates want to stand by that, is to be completely unapologetic and bold about it, because I work with young people a lot.
[00:33:49]  And what they're missing, and they sort of have this fuzzy concept of it, is moral clarity.
[00:33:56]  And if you talk to them about that, they've been brought up in this totally postmodern world.
[00:34:01]  And when people come to them with something that is clear, you know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is pretty good about this.
[00:34:07]  She's very bold and confident in what she believes is right.
[00:34:12]  She's not like wishy-washy.
[00:34:14]  That's really attractive to young people.
[00:34:16]  And Republicans often sort of take the left's bait and muddle their message on these different things.
[00:34:22]  So if you're going to do it, you better be prepared to not apologize, to defend it, and to be completely shameless about it.
[00:34:30]  And there's an argument.
[00:34:31]  I mean, I can see Ron DeSantis doing that, but it's much, much more difficult.
[00:34:35]  There's no question about it.
[00:34:36]  That is huge with young voters, though, because they just, it's why Ben Shapiro is so like extremely popular with young people.
[00:34:43]  Even a lot of young people on the left listen to Ben Shapiro because they want to know the best argument and they want to know something that's sort of rooted in research and truth, because right now it's just truth is relative.
[00:34:53]  Everything is what you feel.
[00:34:55]  Like the Bud Light executive, I just did this.
[00:34:58]  This was important.
[00:34:59]  And so to come with that sort of grounding is really helpful.
[00:35:04]  I love AOC should have business cards made that just read dumb but certain.
[00:35:10]  That's a great calling card.
[00:35:12]  That nails it.
[00:35:13]  Sums her up perfectly.
[00:35:14]  All right.
[00:35:14]  When we come back, I have got to show you this video of one of those Tennessee lawmakers, the so-called Tennessee III.
[00:35:21]  And I'll ask you whether he is having a hilaria Baldwin moment.
[00:35:27]  There's a tease.
[00:35:28]  More with the EJs coming up.
[00:35:29]  Sommeren er bedre med meny, og denne uken får du blant annet 2x180 gram Big Beef Burger til 49,90, 8x1,5 liter Cola Zero til 109 kroner, og vi har fast sommerpris på store frossene reker til 119 kroner kilo, og plukker mix 3 for 2 på Jakobs utvalgte, både i butikk og levert hjem.
[00:35:47]  Meny, spiser du bedre, lever du bedre.
[00:35:50]  Fiken presenterer et superenkelt regnskapsprogram for å sende faktura fra bedriften din.
[00:35:57]  Det var enkelt.
[00:35:58]  Fiken, et superenkelt regnskapsprogram.
[00:36:13]  I have to say, I'm not miffed at all about what the Tennessee legislature did to those guys and that gal.
[00:36:20]  Fine, you broke the rules, you were rude, you obstructed debate because you didn't get your way.
[00:36:24]  You took the bullhorn, you're out of here.
[00:36:26]  I have no sympathy.
[00:36:27]  Um, now one of them's back in because that's the way the protocol works: that some city group gets to decide who fills the vacant seat, and they put him back in.
[00:36:34]  I think that was Justin Jones.
[00:36:36]  There's Justin Jones, and there's Justin Pearson.
[00:36:38]  So, Jones is back in.
[00:36:39]  All right, fine.
[00:36:40]  I mean, the left is talking about this truly like these guys are Martin Luther King Jr.
[00:36:44]  I mean, it's crazy the way they're making stars out of them.
[00:36:47]  My team told me that they went from something like 20,000 followers on Twitter to 240,000,000 followers on Twitter.
[00:36:53]  You're seeing all these media people talk about one of them marched through the streets with about a thousand people, like that's how it's done.
[00:37:00]  This is democracy in action.
[00:37:02]  Oh, come on.
[00:37:03]  It's like, okay, nothing's going to change in Tennessee.
[00:37:06]  There's not a single Tennessee voter who voted Republican last time who's now going to vote Democrat.
[00:37:11]  You're kidding yourselves if you think otherwise.
[00:37:13]  That's my take on it.
[00:37:14]  But here's the best find of the day.
[00:37:16]  Okay.
[00:37:18]  And I'm going to tell you where I found it because I got it off of Twitter and then my team looked into it, but I want to give credit to the gal who called it to my attention online.
[00:37:25]  Justin Pearson is one of the faces of the new movement.
[00:37:30]  All right.
[00:37:31]  He's one of the ones who took the bullhorn and went up there and yelled to the congregation, or I mean, I should say the legislature, and got the people riled up in the balcony.
[00:37:39]  And this guy has become a star.
[00:37:43]  So, this is Representative Pearson, who says, We're now way more powerful than the NRA.
[00:37:49]  And we won't say whether he's going to break the rules of decorum again once reinstalled on the floor of the Tennessee legislature.
[00:37:56]  But he is also a preacher.
[00:37:58]  And we have video of Justin Pearson.
[00:38:02]  And by the way, he sounds exactly the same.
[00:38:04]  I could give you five clips of him sounding exactly this way on the floor of the Tennessee legislature.
[00:38:07]  But we pulled a clip of him preaching about this whole thing.
[00:38:11]  Take a look.
[00:38:12]  Let us go into the house of the Lord.
[00:38:16]  I'm so glad to be in the house of the Lord with you this morning.
[00:38:20]  Would you mind going ahead and praying with me now, Mother God?
[00:38:24]  Create a God, loving God, holy God.
[00:38:26]  The movement lives or dies in Memphis.
[00:38:30]  The movement lives or dies in Memphis.
[00:38:33]  The movement for justice lives or dies in Memphis.
[00:38:37]  The movement for democracy lives or dies in Memphis.
[00:38:41]  Let them expel.
[00:38:43]  Let them kick out.
[00:38:44]  Let them do what they must.
[00:38:46]  There's a promise.
[00:38:48]  The Sundays resurrection is on the way.
[00:38:53]  Okay, that was Sunday.
[00:38:55]  Just a few years back in 2016, here was Justin on camera speaking to potential followers at Bowdoin College.
[00:39:06]  Hey, everybody, I'm Justin J. Pearson, and I'm running for president of BSG.
[00:39:11]  Dissenting voices, voices that may be more liberal or more conservative, in order that we can reach a point of sort of the radical middle, where conversation and dialogue happens and growth happens.
[00:39:25]  Can you believe there was Peachy Keenan on Twitter, by the way?
[00:39:30]  Can you believe?
[00:39:31]  Emily, I'm sorry.
[00:39:32]  He's a faker.
[00:39:33]  He's a faker.
[00:39:34]  This is what our society does to young men who said how he sounded like Obama in the original video, right?
[00:39:41]  And now he sounds like Jeremiah Wright.
[00:39:46]  Yes, it's a fine line between Obama and Jeremiah Wright.
[00:39:49]  Except, Megan, back in the day, Obama had to dissociate himself from Jeremiah Wright.
[00:39:54]  And now this guy becomes Jeremiah Wright to get popular.
[00:39:57]  We've gone in the wrong direction.
[00:39:59]  And guess what?
[00:39:59]  Followers.
[00:40:00]  Yeah, he's getting a decent amount of engagement on social media.
[00:40:04]  And what's amazing, this is a classic case of what we at the Federalists refer to as Selma envy.
[00:40:09]  One of our writers, Hans Feeney, came up with that, where it's just this deep desire to be a part of something meaningful and purposeful in a world that has none of it.
[00:40:18]  So you just LARP, you put on a costume, you act instead of actually doing something of similar substance.
[00:40:26]  This is stupid.
[00:40:27]  This is substanceless.
[00:40:28]  They put on this like, I mean, they could call it an act of civil disobedience, but it was just a superficial bullhorn protest that democracy's greatest cheerleaders have suddenly decided is totally democratic to disrupt democratic proceedings.
[00:40:44]  They were punished.
[00:40:45]  I maybe would have censored them before kicking them out, but like you, Megan, I'm not miffed by it.
[00:40:49]  It doesn't bother me that much that they weren't just censored and instead were expelled.
[00:40:53]  That's the political gang game that everybody plays.
[00:40:56]  And to see the most sanctimonious people now championing these guys is unbelievable, but in some respects, totally believable because when you have nothing real of substance to cling to, you just create nonsense and act like you're part of something more important.
[00:41:13]  And in a sense, I mean, it's hilarious.
[00:41:15]  I usually try not to laugh when you're playing SOTS, but I could not help it.
[00:41:18]  Just burst out into laughter on that one because the contrast is so stark and incredible.
[00:41:23]  At the same time, though, it's really sad because there's so many people looking for meaning who have to find it in stupidity like this that's doing nothing to help the world.
[00:41:33]  He's a faker.
[00:41:34]  He's a poser.
[00:41:35]  He's the male Hilaria Baldwin.
[00:41:38]  I need to see it again.
[00:41:38]  Can we see a little short versions?
[00:41:40]  Let's play 2016 Pearson first.
[00:41:43]  Hey, everybody.
[00:41:44]  I'm Justin J. Pearson, and I'm running for president of BSG.
[00:41:48]  Dissenting voices.
[00:41:49]  Voices that may be more literal.

=== Kamala Harris Pivots to Trans Safety (04:04) ===

[00:41:51]  Okay, that's good.
[00:41:51]  Now let's play a little preacher, Pearson from literally last Sunday.
[00:41:57]  Memphis, the movement for justice lives or dies in Memphis.
[00:42:01]  The movement for democracy lives or dies in Memphis.
[00:42:05]  Let them expel.
[00:42:07]  Let them kick out.
[00:42:08]  Let them do what they must.
[00:42:10]  There's a promise that Sunday is a resurrection and on the way.
[00:42:18]  He wants a Bowdoin.
[00:42:20]  I mean, he's in a blue blazer at Bowdoin.
[00:42:25]  His next job will be at Bud Light.
[00:42:29]  Harry could get a job at the human rights campaign, maybe.
[00:42:32]  This is absurd.
[00:42:33]  This is the person like, oh, I'm a leader.
[00:42:36]  Oh, okay.
[00:42:37]  Wait.
[00:42:38]  Right after I finish with chess club and American musical theater.
[00:42:43]  So we've learned a little bit more detail on Kamala Harris and her little speech down in Tennessee.
[00:42:49]  She went down there and getting all sorts of plaudits from the press for, you know, it was a day, a game day call.
[00:42:57]  And her staff, they didn't know which plane to take.
[00:43:00]  And it was so exciting.
[00:43:01]  They'd been thinking they were going to have a day off thanks to Good Friday, but no, they had to go support the boss as she went down there for this, you know, making history.
[00:43:08]  And now it comes out.
[00:43:11]  Okay, this is in, I'm trying to find the site.
[00:43:13]  Political.
[00:43:13]  Political reports.
[00:43:15]  Listen to this because, you know, she went down there.
[00:43:17]  She met with the Tennessee III, but she did not have time to meet with the families of the six who were killed at the Christian school in the first place.
[00:43:24]  That was just a bridge too far for her because the focus needed to be on race.
[00:43:28]  That was what her speech was about.
[00:43:29]  It was about race and it was about guns and the people who were actually killed by the trans activists with the gun.
[00:43:36]  She didn't care.
[00:43:37]  So here's what Politico says.
[00:43:40]  Worth noting.
[00:43:42]  Although some conservative commentators have criticized Harris for not meeting with the families affected by last month's shooting at Nashville's Covenant School, a White House aide tells Playbook that the families were invited to Kamala Harris's speech, which was at one of those historically black community college or historically black colleges.
[00:44:03]  So she didn't even have it.
[00:44:04]  She had it at college.
[00:44:06]  And she invited, apparently, the families of the six to come listen to her rant, but they couldn't make it.
[00:44:13]  So this, I mean, the fact that Politico would offer this like that's a real thing, like screw you and your invitation to the grieving families that they need to get off of their couches and come to you.
[00:44:25]  They need to come to you.
[00:44:27]  It's offensive, but this is what she needs to celebrate for her last minute decision and taking control and how she threw out the speech that the staff gave to her, Eliana, because she just wanted to keep it simple.
[00:44:39]  And if you watch her speech, she was fired up for the first time.
[00:44:42]  We saw an actual genuine, authentic Kamala because it was about race and wokeism and all that crap.
[00:44:49]  And while looking for credit for saying to the families, you come to me and maybe I'll maybe I'll pat you on the head.
[00:44:56]  I love that she wanted credit for her nimbleness and agility and just hopping on that private plane and getting down there and putting herself in the middle of the action all the while, you know, not being able to fit into her busy preaching schedule, a meeting with the families of the victims affected by this school shooting.
[00:45:18]  It is all, I think, very on brand for Kamala Harris, who was one of the first candidates, if not the first, to drop out of the 2020 primary.
[00:45:26]  And is the reason I think as many Democrats as do support Joe Biden's bid for reelection because they fear they will be left with Kamala Harris if Biden either takes a misstep and trips or anything happens to him or declares he's not running because she is not a nimble political actor.
[00:45:51]  This has definitely become a political issue for the left.
[00:45:54]  They love this.

=== Ignoring Real Gun Violence Victims (03:30) ===

[00:45:55]  And I think one of the reasons they love it, of course, Emily, is they don't want to talk about the fact that a trans person went in there and murdered six Christian people, including three nine-year-olds.
[00:46:05]  We immediately had to pivot to how the shooting by a trans person put trans people at risk.
[00:46:12]  The real victims here were the trans people.
[00:46:14]  Everybody's concerned about transgender people in Nashville.
[00:46:18]  Not a word about the fact that maybe the Christians in Nashville and Christian schools are the people who were the victims here, that they are at risk, that they were targeted for a reason.
[00:46:29]  Got to remember, you know, the real victims here are the transgender community of Nashville.
[00:46:35]  And the real villains, of course, are, as always, Republicans.
[00:46:39]  Right.
[00:46:39]  And I think that's why this is such a pathetic LARP because, and it's just stupid, because at the end of the day, the substance here, we're not even talking about it because the media is so easily distracted.
[00:46:49]  Like you dangle a shiny object in front of it and they're like a baby.
[00:46:52]  They can't stop themselves from, you know, paying attention to that instead of the substance, which here is that the vast majority of gun violence in this country is illegal gun violence that does not look at all like what happened in Nashville.
[00:47:07]  The bills at hand have absolutely nothing to do with the vast majority of gun violence and gun deaths.
[00:47:14]  And the Tennessee three don't actually want to deal with policies that would really start taking a chunk out of those problems.
[00:47:22]  They don't want to talk about that.
[00:47:24]  They don't want to deal with any of that.
[00:47:25]  So they're doing what's easy and they're just going to play act and they're going to latch onto something so that they can have their Salma envy and pretend to be doing something that is deeply meaningful and substantive because they can't actually latch onto anything difficult because they don't really have the courage.
[00:47:43]  They don't have the courage to take on the political issues that would actually matter.
[00:47:47]  So they're pretending and they're acting like people in the past in our history that did have courage to make themselves feel courageous and like they have something real when they absolutely don't.
[00:47:59]  And that's where I think this is just absolutely a tragic statement on the country because when you peel back the layers, there's nothing there.
[00:48:07]  Yeah.
[00:48:07]  To me, it's infuriating because it's like your anti-gun agenda.
[00:48:10]  And I am not some gun activist.
[00:48:12]  I mean, if they passed an assault weapons ban tomorrow that the Constitution would allow, I'd be fine with that.
[00:48:17]  I'm like, I'm not some big gun enthusiast.
[00:48:19]  It's just I recognize the futility of that lane.
[00:48:23]  All right.
[00:48:23]  There's 400 million guns in America, the vast majority of which are automatic weapons and semi-automatic guns.
[00:48:30]  And even if you take out all the AR-15s, you're not going to get rid of the most lethal handgun.
[00:48:35]  And so what are we doing this for?
[00:48:37]  You're still going to have homicidal maniacs who want to kill.
[00:48:39]  Why can't we fucking focus on that?
[00:48:40]  Why can't we focus on mental illness?
[00:48:42]  Why can't we fortify soft targets like schools?
[00:48:44]  Why can't we do what we know will work?
[00:48:46]  And people like these guys who lose in the debate on the House floor, who were allowed their say, but lost Bear and Square, who then try to hijack the debate, ought to be kicked out.
[00:48:57]  Zero problem with what the Tennessee legislatures did.
[00:49:00]  And if he does it again, he should be booted a second time.

=== Olivia Nuzzi and Stormy Daniels (12:03) ===

[00:49:26]  All right, so Stormy Daniels continues to be lauded by the media.
[00:49:33]  A normally good reporter, Olivia Nuzi, writes a very bizarre article about Stormy in New York magazine.
[00:49:43]  I'm not sure what went on here.
[00:49:44]  I'd actually love to talk to Olivia about what the hell went on here.
[00:49:49]  The title is How Stormy Daniels Sees It Ending.
[00:49:53]  The article begins with Stormy performing a tarot card-like reading for Olivia.
[00:50:00]  This is from the piece.
[00:50:01]  Daniels doesn't claim to be a fortune teller.
[00:50:04]  Nobody can predict the future, she said.
[00:50:06]  We all have free will, but she can for sure identify Fortune's fool.
[00:50:11]  She raised her hands and pressed the empty space between her palms.
[00:50:14]  She spoke quietly.
[00:50:16]  What can you tell Olivia about Donald Trump?
[00:50:20]  She waited for a moment.
[00:50:22]  Nothing.
[00:50:23]  What the fuck?
[00:50:24]  She said, That's weird.
[00:50:26]  She was having trouble connecting to the realm of the spirits.
[00:50:30]  She shuffled the deck again.
[00:50:31]  There.
[00:50:32]  Between her palms, the force field of energy swelled.
[00:50:35]  She dealt the cards.
[00:50:36]  As if by magic, the room shifted.
[00:50:39]  My ears began to ring.
[00:50:41]  This is Olivia.
[00:50:42]  Tension spread across my forehead.
[00:50:45]  My eyes filled with tears.
[00:50:47]  I looked across the table and met the dealer's gaze.
[00:50:51]  She was crying too.
[00:50:53]  The cards confirmed what she already knew.
[00:50:57]  And then here's how she goes on to describe what happened.
[00:51:00]  Okay, this is what the cards read and why they cried.
[00:51:03]  First, she saw the past.
[00:51:05]  This is the unity card, she said.
[00:51:07]  It's normally very beautiful.
[00:51:08]  It means everything is connected, but not today.
[00:51:10]  When the card landed on the table, it was upside down.
[00:51:13]  Reversed, it means everything's coming apart.
[00:51:15]  Next, she saw the future.
[00:51:17]  Have you ever watched Harry Potter? She asked.
[00:51:19]  This is the golden snitch.
[00:51:20]  It is chaos, fucking chaos, energetic chaos.
[00:51:23]  This is the outcome.
[00:51:24]  Shit going crazy, potential for good, but needs to be harnessed.
[00:51:28]  Olivia writes, I was bewildered by the wave of emotion that seemed to wash over both of us at once.
[00:51:33]  Why did we cry?
[00:51:34]  Because it's real, she said.
[00:51:36]  It's chaos and death and destruction.
[00:51:39]  For clarity, she drew one more card.
[00:51:41]  She inhaled sharply.
[00:51:43]  The worst card in the deck, she said, the sickle.
[00:51:47]  The image was a sharp curved blade.
[00:51:49]  Sudden shock, trauma, wounds.
[00:51:52]  Think of a sickle.
[00:51:53]  You slice everything apart.
[00:51:54]  She shook her head and waved her hand over the cards.
[00:51:57]  This isn't good, she said.
[00:51:59]  It's not good.
[00:52:01]  She threw her face into her hands.
[00:52:02]  To me, she said, this is the perfect combination for a riot or a civil war.
[00:52:12]  What's happening?
[00:52:13]  Eliana, I'll start with you.
[00:52:15]  As somebody who is the editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, what's happening?
[00:52:19]  Olivia is not a crazy person.
[00:52:22]  She's normally a very good, sound writer.
[00:52:26]  To me, I think this is sort of part of the madness of living under the Trump era with some touch of Trump derangement syndrome and being in the presence of this woman who is being treated as a deity by many in the left wing right now as the single woman who's going to bring down Trump.
[00:52:45]  I think that's one explanation.
[00:52:47]  It does also seem like there's a little bit of tongue-in-cheek going on here because hearing you read that, it's pretty clear to me that Stormy Daniels is out of her mind.
[00:52:58]  And there is a comical aspect to the fact that this woman has caused Donald Trump so many problems.
[00:53:04]  He really has been this Teflon figure in American politics.
[00:53:08]  And there is something sort of humorous about the fact that this lunatic is the person who is casting this long shadow, not only over his presidential bid, his first presidential bid, where he paid her off, but now his second presidential bid where he's tied up in court with her.
[00:53:27]  I mean, talk to her.
[00:53:28]  She's not the world's greatest genius, as you can tell from Olivia's reporting.
[00:53:32]  And my sense is that's kind of the upshot of this piece.
[00:53:35]  Also, you can tell if you've watched Summer Hummer, she's not.
[00:53:41]  Sorry, we did a deep dive into her movie history.
[00:53:48]  So, but Emily, I have to say there's something a little strange to me about Olivia crying with Stormy Daniels over tarot cards.
[00:53:55]  And I do think it is, Olivia is definitely of the left.
[00:53:58]  She is a good reporter.
[00:53:59]  She's a great reporter, but she is of the left.
[00:54:01]  And I do think what this reveals is just the deep trauma that people feel on all things related to Donald Trump, people who hate him.
[00:54:11]  I think that's as good of an explanation as any.
[00:54:14]  It's also, I think, an interesting example of how, like, when you're, they're crying in the moment, but when you read what Olivia wrote down, this is just like nonsense.
[00:54:24]  It's so general.
[00:54:26]  It's a civil war.
[00:54:27]  It's just like so incredibly general that it could be absolutely anything.
[00:54:32]  You can just slot it in there.
[00:54:34]  And it's a, I think the horoscope of how, see you right, of how smart people can get sucked into really stupid things.
[00:54:42]  I don't know.
[00:54:43]  I'm not going to like venture to guess about Olivia's faith background or anything.
[00:54:46]  I think that's typical more in general now when people are sort of untethered from something deeper and more meaningful.
[00:54:52]  But I also, I mean, Olivia's interviewed her before and I assume has like some sort of pre-existing relationship that goes back to like at least 2018.
[00:55:00]  So maybe it's also a little bit of like the new journalism, you're connecting with your, connecting with your source, but it's just a really weird emotional thing that I wouldn't write about.
[00:55:12]  Honestly, I honestly wouldn't write about because I don't really think it's that interesting so much as it's just strange.
[00:55:17]  I don't think we learn anything that moves the ball forward from this conversation.
[00:55:21]  I don't think it's particularly entertaining.
[00:55:23]  So much as it is, makes you, you know, sort of question anything that comes out of Olivia's past.
[00:55:29]  Say, I don't think it's interesting and entertaining, but perhaps not for the same reasons others do or that were intended.
[00:55:35]  Yes.
[00:55:35]  She goes on to say this.
[00:55:37]  This one jumped out at me for reasons you'll understand.
[00:55:40]  She's speaking about what it's like to be, you know, on the other side, the wrong side of Donald Trump, writing about it.
[00:55:46]  Few people know what this is like, and the few who do stick together.
[00:55:51]  Kathy Griffin, Mary Trump, and Eugene Carroll, that's a woman who's suing Trump, have all remained in close contact, sharing an understanding of this particular type of traumatic chaos.
[00:56:05]  Quote, I would say strange bedfellows, but I don't want to, Mary Trump joked.
[00:56:10]  It's like the weirdest incarnation of Charlie's Angels ever.
[00:56:15]  Mary Trump admires Daniels for her strength in the face of these strangest of circumstances.
[00:56:19]  Quote, it's not just that she's handled it well, but that she's handled it very intelligently.
[00:56:24]  You can't tear down a woman who has no fucks to give about this.
[00:56:28]  Kathy Griffin, quote, history will see her not just as an adult film actress first, but as a warrior.
[00:56:38]  She's a real cog in the wheel of his attempt to climb to fascism and goes on from there.
[00:56:44]  Eliana, I have to say, so to me, as soon as I see a quote of Mary Trump, I tune out.
[00:56:49]  As soon as I see anything involving Mary Trump, I click off.
[00:56:52]  Mary Trump knows nothing about anything.
[00:56:53]  She barely knew Trump.
[00:56:54]  And she's been treated like the biographer of that Trump book, Art of the Deal, like she's been his psychiatrist for 50 years.
[00:57:01]  It's she like this woman is a glommer who just wants to see her face on TV.
[00:57:05]  That's what's obvious.
[00:57:06]  They treat her like she knows everything.
[00:57:08]  She's Melania.
[00:57:10]  So, okay, their strange bedfellows.
[00:57:12]  What, Kathy Griffin, who held up the decapitated Trump head?
[00:57:16]  She's in the same club as Mary Trump, who hates Trump and E. Jean Carroll, who sued him.
[00:57:22]  You know what?
[00:57:23]  It is possible to be on the wrong side of Donald Trump and to not be his number one fan and to move on with your great, beautiful life and to not harbor your bitterness and let it ooze out of every pore and to actually be fair when talking about the man and not just suffer interminably from Trump derangement syndrome.
[00:57:42]  I can tell you that personally.
[00:57:44]  Some of us are mature enough to get beyond petty political squabbles and to move on in this world.
[00:57:50]  Maybe that's what these three women have in common, that they are not capable of that, that they've chosen to mire themselves in this toxic stew of hatred, which biases every single thing they say.
[00:58:00]  And that's why they get all this airtime talking about their hatred for Trump.
[00:58:04]  To me, it's sort of their seances, Megan.
[00:58:09]  There might actually at this point be a little voodoo doll of me there, Emily.
[00:58:14]  Too real.
[00:58:15]  I don't know.
[00:58:16]  But anyway, to me, this like it underscores everything that's wrong with the media because they're celebrated for their little club, as opposed to the recognition that these are Trump haters.
[00:58:25]  And aren't you just admitting that the number of features you do on them undermines your attempt to paint yourself as objective?
[00:58:34]  Oh, this is ridiculous.
[00:58:37]  The idea that I got crosswise with Trump and now I'm a victim.
[00:58:41]  I mean, nobody knew Mary Trump's name before she came forward and made herself a celebrity and established her identity as a Trump foe.
[00:58:49]  The same is true of Stormy Daniels.
[00:58:51]  Nobody knew who any of these women were.
[00:58:53]  And the result of becoming Trump's foe is you get profiled in New York magazine and you get to be on every cable, television news show, and you get a contract here and a contract there.
[00:59:02]  What a load of garbage.
[00:59:04]  Give me a break.
[00:59:05]  I will say I appreciate Olivia including information about Stormy Daniels' weird doll, Susan, who was featured in an episode of Kelly's Court.
[00:59:17]  We'll get you the episode number.
[00:59:19]  We took a deep dive on Susan.
[00:59:21]  We were hot on this trail.
[00:59:22]  All right.
[00:59:23]  Long before Susan became a household name.
[00:59:27]  I'm so proud.
[00:59:29]  Okay, she writes, across the room on a small high chair in the corner was Susan.
[00:59:37]  Sometimes I love the news cycle.
[00:59:39]  Go to YouTube, people, and look at the pictures that we are putting on the board.
[00:59:43]  A doll possessed, Stormby said, by the spirit of a child from the 1700s.
[00:59:50]  A friend of another child who had died of cancer.
[00:59:53]  Before Daniels read the cards, she handed me the doll.
[00:59:56]  Its eyes startled me.
[00:59:58]  Blue and alive.
[01:00:00]  As we processed her reading, she nodded over to the corner.
[01:00:04]  Susan's crying too, she said.
[01:00:09]  This is the woman who's going to be the chief witness in the Alvin Bragg case against Donald Trump, Emily.
[01:00:18]  I sense trouble ahead.
[01:00:21]  You might think it's all, it's weird how so many of these conflicts come back to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougall because the left has latched onto them as their excuses to build these like insane, disproportionate cases against Donald Trump.
[01:00:37]  Now, it is though amusing, just from an outsider standpoint, that these women are giving Donald Trump such a headache.
[01:00:43]  And I mean, I just, I find it absolutely hilarious that someone who has a doll named Susan that is apparently crying, you can sense this doll crying along with you while you're doing horoscopes with a reporter, that this is the person at the center of Donald Trump's so far.
[01:01:00]  Actually, at the center of an unprecedented moment in American politics, she is not the hero we need, but truly the hero that we deserve at this point.
[01:01:10]  It's so deeply unserious.
[01:01:13]  Susan could be a witness at the trial.
[01:01:14]  Susan could be the surprise gotcha.
[01:01:16]  Susan saw it all.
[01:01:18]  She witnessed.
[01:01:20]  She saw everything that went down.
[01:01:23]  She probably has more credibility than Michael Cohen.
[01:01:25]  I'll give her that.
[01:01:26]  So in any event, that's kind of fun.
[01:01:29]  I was into that story.

=== Separate Spaces for Women Sports (12:30) ===

[01:01:30]  Now, before we leave the topic of controversial women, can we spend a minute on Megan Rapino, who has decided to weigh in on whether biological men, trans women, should be able to compete in female sports.
[01:01:43]  All right, Megan Rapino, one of the stars of the USA team, soccer team, women's soccer team.
[01:01:50]  And she decided, along with Sue Bird, who's a former Olympian professional basketball player, to sign a petition trying to stop the Protection of Girls and Women in Sports Act.
[01:02:03]  They've decided, now that they're on the bench, Eliana, and not playing, to ruin sport for my daughter and yours and everybody else's out there.
[01:02:14]  They've decided you're a bigot if you don't think that biological men should participate in sports like soccer.
[01:02:21]  Okay, sure, that would be totally safe.
[01:02:24]  Like Megan Rapino would have ever given up her spot to a transgender player.
[01:02:29]  And like she wouldn't have objected if she had to play a transgender player on the other team from Brazil or some other country who would have kicked the you-know-what out of her.
[01:02:38]  This is where I've drawn the lawn of my line of my swearing in professional play.
[01:02:44]  Any professional male player, biologically male player, could absolutely crush the female player across from him, both athletically and physically, and it would be a danger.
[01:02:52]  But she wants my daughter to go out there, who is a soccer player and happens to love people like Megan Rapino, because I don't inject my politics on sports athletes who she admires.
[01:03:01]  She'd sick that person on my daughter in a New York second just to bona f her woke credentials and make herself look laudatory in the eyes of her colleagues.
[01:03:11]  It is amazing.
[01:03:12]  Like we've really come full circle on the feminism thing where we had the movement in the 1960s and 70s.
[01:03:20]  And now today's feminists are arguing that really we need biological men competing in women's sports.
[01:03:27]  And the, you know, the troglodyte right-wing position is to say, no, this space should be reserved for women.
[01:03:34]  You know, that's an argument that feminists once would have made.
[01:03:38]  And Megan, I'm sure you and I are old enough to remember and maybe Emily, there was a huge deal about Title IX and carving out space for women's sports and having a separate space for women to compete in athletics that was separate from men.
[01:03:53]  And now the women who, because of these rules, have risen to the height, to the heights of fame in this country, to the top of their professions, are re-erecting those boundaries to say, we, no, we're going to put men back in and take away the space for female athletics that allowed us to reach the fame and fortune.
[01:04:19]  It's true.
[01:04:19]  And, you know, Megan Rapino and Sue Bird, from what I can tell, have a lot of medals and a lot of money.
[01:04:26]  And you know what they don't have?
[01:04:27]  Daughters.
[01:04:28]  So they can take a seat because those of us who do and need to worry about their safety and their fair play object to your desire to push men into women's sports.
[01:04:40]  And I don't give a damn and most people don't what you call me or others who feel as I do.
[01:04:45]  I will fight you.
[01:04:47]  I will fight you tooth and nail as you try to endanger my child and take away her fair shot at a medal, at winning, at the wonderful feeling of crossing the finish line first or winning in a fair game, which Megan Rapino benefited from and Sue Bird benefited from.
[01:05:06]  But again, to assuage their own colleagues, their own fan base, they now want a different rule.
[01:05:12]  They want a different rule for my kid than they had to play under.
[01:05:15]  It's disgusting.
[01:05:16]  And by the way, what does this act do?
[01:05:19]  It seeks to clarify Title IX by classifying athletes by biology.
[01:05:23]  That's it.
[01:05:24]  It seeks to say sex, meaning male or female, means what we think it means.
[01:05:29]  It doesn't include what you identify as, Emily.
[01:05:31]  I think they ought to be ashamed of themselves.
[01:05:34]  They should be.
[01:05:34]  It's completely regressive and backwards.
[01:05:36]  And as Eliana notes, it's not just sports that the women's movement, the second wave of feminism fought for.
[01:05:42]  They fought for separate spaces in general.
[01:05:45]  They fought for women's bathrooms.
[01:05:46]  They fought for women's locker rooms.
[01:05:48]  They fought for women's categories like best actress, best female artist, all of these things so that women would achieve.
[01:05:56]  And, you know, maybe they don't make perfect sense in the actor-actress category, but when you're looking at things like separate spaces, women's shelters, these are accomplishments for the women's movement that are now being completely yanked away by people whose success is built on a fair system.
[01:06:12]  And one question I always make sure to ask anytime I interview an athlete who's, you know, Riley Gaines, last time I talked to her, when I talked to the two Connecticut track athletes who've been on the losing side of this and still on the field.
[01:06:27]  Right.
[01:06:27]  Yeah.
[01:06:27]  Every time I talk to them, I ask them one question.
[01:06:29]  Are people's scholarships being affected by this?
[01:06:32]  Because the left purports to care about income inequality.
[01:06:35]  They purport to care about the middle class.
[01:06:37]  But actually what this does is take elite interests and then subjugate working class girls who are getting or middle class girls who are using scholarships to get an education so that they don't have to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt because of the government's dumb subsidies, subsidies the left has supported for years.
[01:06:54]  So is completely regressive on so many different layers.
[01:06:58]  safety, fairness, financially, just you can keep going down and it's completely backwards.
[01:07:05]  But people like Megan Rapino have absolutely no incentive to stop saying this nonsense, anti-woman stuff because the media cheerleads them.
[01:07:15]  That small group of people in the media believe the exact same way.
[01:07:18]  And it puts them at odds with the rest of the country and just sows further division instead of allowing us to just turn the page on the stupid, stupid backwards chapter.
[01:07:27]  You mentioned Riley Gaines.
[01:07:29]  Of course, very much in the news, given what happened to her at this San Francisco State University, she complained about it.
[01:07:35]  Of course, you know, she was physically assaulted by a trans woman.
[01:07:39]  She says, and we saw the mob attack her and chase her into a room where she had to stay for three hours.
[01:07:45]  They were threatening that she wouldn't be released without money being paid to them and so on.
[01:07:49]  She tweeted about it.
[01:07:50]  And Eliana, the woman who runs the university, who spoke out about it, blocked Riley Gaines on Twitter.
[01:07:59]  She blocked her.
[01:08:01]  I mean, the absolute cowardice of the people running our universities.
[01:08:08]  Oh, Megan, don't get me started.
[01:08:10]  I will.
[01:08:13]  Get her started.
[01:08:16]  It is not limited to athletics.
[01:08:20]  The same people who are running Bud Light Marketing are running our universities.
[01:08:24]  Okay.
[01:08:25]  You know, at the Free Beacon, we've spent the past three, four years reporting on these controversies that have overtaken the top law schools in the country who are producing the best federal judges, Supreme Court justices, Yale Law School, Stanford Law School.
[01:08:38]  We've gotten a close-up look at who the administrators are at these schools.
[01:08:42]  It just happened at Stanford Law School where an administrator there got up, took the mic from a federal judge, and asked the federal judge, who was an invited guest of the Stanford Law School, to consider whether the juice was worth the squeeze of the harm that he was causing by hurting the feelings of transgender activists in the audience.
[01:09:02]  And by the way, they took issue with the fact that this federal judge had denied the motion of a transgender defendant to be called by female pronouns.
[01:09:14]  They were incredibly aggrieved by this and shouted the judge down as a result of this.
[01:09:18]  And the Stanford University administrator intervened on the behalf of these protesters.
[01:09:23]  That is who's running.
[01:09:24]  Can I just say, can I just add something to that?
[01:09:26]  And the transgender inmate that the judge refused to acknowledge the chosen pronouns of, if memory serves, was a convicted pedophile.
[01:09:35]  And yet this is the poster child for the activist cause.
[01:09:39]  You will call the pedophile by the pronouns of choice or you will be shouted down at Stanford law.
[01:09:46]  Keep going.
[01:09:47]  And you will sit in jail with the pedophile or you will sleep next to this man at a women's shelter after you were just abused by a man.
[01:09:56]  And that's exactly what you're running from.
[01:09:58]  It's just so progressive.
[01:10:00]  Right, exactly.
[01:10:01]  Sorry, Eliana, I interrupt you.
[01:10:02]  Keep going.
[01:10:04]  No, but those are the people who are running the country's top universities who are blocking Riley Gaines on Twitter.
[01:10:13]  And it's no wonder that to see the quality of and the way of think ways of thinking of the people running our university who, again, I'm going to come full circle here are the same people who are in senior management positions at top corporations and companies across the country.
[01:10:31]  There is Harvard University graduate, the Bud Light marketing woman.
[01:10:36]  Exactly.
[01:10:37]  There was an article not long ago, early April.
[01:10:40]  This is dated April 2nd.
[01:10:41]  New York Post at the lower level, not yet college, was happening more and more in high schools.
[01:10:46]  And Project Veritas under James O'Keefe did a great job of calling attention to some of this.
[01:10:50]  Massachusetts school superintendent candidate says his job offer was rescinded after he addressed two women on the school's committee in an email as ladies.
[01:11:00]  He emailed two women and began the email with ladies and then went on from there and they rescinded his offer.
[01:11:07]  It was a microaggression, you see, Emily.
[01:11:10]  And you're not allowed in their weird Massachusetts world to refer to two women as ladies.
[01:11:17]  Like I don't know people who would be offended by that.
[01:11:21]  I think I may have called you gals ladies at some point in this podcast.
[01:11:25]  It doesn't.
[01:11:27]  Who in their right mind finds that kind of thing so offensive that they pull a guy's job offer?
[01:11:34]  Well, and it's the same thing.
[01:11:36]  You can't say guys.
[01:11:37]  You can't say ladies.
[01:11:38]  You can't use gendered terms at all.
[01:11:40]  And if you look back at universities, you can find this stuff as long as like 10 years ago.
[01:11:45]  This was like the university.
[01:11:46]  I forget I shouldn't say because I forget the specific case study, but one of the universities put out this insane guide back in 2015 that sort of blew people's minds.
[01:11:54]  But even then, it had already been happening for like at least five years.
[01:11:58]  These microaggressions had started to become really mainstream.
[01:12:01]  And some of these theories had started to sort of move from the fringes of academia into the bureaucracies where they were being taught as the only acceptable sort of guide and manual to interpersonal relationships at the universities.
[01:12:13]  All that is to say, this isn't going away anytime soon.
[01:12:16]  There were a bunch of articles just last year about the so-called vibe shift.
[01:12:20]  And I bought into it a little bit and I still do, you know, that there is, at least on this, the surface level, there is something changing.
[01:12:26]  Like you have Bill Maher going on rants against wokeness and you have all of these people that are increasingly comfortable sort of speaking out against the far left excesses of it.
[01:12:36]  But the problem is you have a generation of people my age and a little bit older and a little bit younger who have been taught nothing else.
[01:12:44]  They've been taught this is the bedrock of interpersonal communications, interpersonal conduct.
[01:12:49]  And so that's imported into the workforce now.
[01:12:52]  And it's not, you can't just pull it up.
[01:12:54]  It's like deeply rooted into their concepts of what's right and wrong because the universities, you know, first of all, they got rid of truth.
[01:13:02]  You know, it all became relative or truth was a white supremacist concept, another thing that's actually taught at certain universities.
[01:13:08]  So once you get rid of all of that bedrock, they planted this new foundation really, really deep.
[01:13:13]  And you can't just, you know, say there's a vibe shift and it'll go away.
[01:13:16]  It is going away a little bit, but it's never going to go away for a very, very long time.
[01:13:21]  It's going, we're going to be dealing with this for decades to come, not just years to come, because this is very deeply rooted in their sense of self, their sense of morality.
[01:13:29]  We're in big trouble for years to come because it was happening under everybody's noses.
[01:13:34]  This is why the two frontrunners for the GOP nomination are the most outwardly unwoke, anti-woke warriors in GOP, in the GOP field, right?
[01:13:48]  I mean, and Vivek, you mentioned Vivek, he's definitely anti-woke too.
[01:13:52]  He's not one of the frontrunners, but I'm just saying, like, there's no accident that he was attracted to the GOP and is running as a Republican.
[01:13:58]  They're sick of it, Eliana.

=== The Dalai Lama Scandal (15:04) ===

[01:14:00]  I think normal people are sick of this.
[01:14:03]  Ladies, and you're fired.
[01:14:06]  You lose your job opportunity.
[01:14:08]  You get blocked as a biological woman who gets physically attacked for sending out a tweet about what was done to you.
[01:14:16]  The university statement apologizes to your attackers.
[01:14:21]  A trans person shoots up a Christian school, including three nine-year-olds to death, and the left turns it into a story about how the trans community is under attack.
[01:14:33]  They're sick of it.
[01:14:36]  Megan, it goes so far beyond not being able to say, hey, guys, or hello, ladies.
[01:14:42]  While you were talking, I just Googled the Stanford Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, which when this got news coverage, Stanford had to pull it back.
[01:14:51]  But don't say basket case because it originally referred to one who has lost all four limbs and needed to be carried around in a basket.
[01:15:00]  Don't say committed suicide.
[01:15:02]  You must say died by suicide.
[01:15:04]  Don't say cripple.
[01:15:06]  You must say person with a disability.
[01:15:08]  Don't say handicap for the same reason or handicap parking space.
[01:15:12]  Cannot use any of these terms.
[01:15:13]  This is a list.
[01:15:14]  It's like a new dictionary.
[01:15:15]  Okay.
[01:15:16]  Literally a new dictionary.
[01:15:18]  George Orwell is like turning over in his grave right now.
[01:15:21]  But it goes so far beyond the gendered language.
[01:15:25]  Oh, he can't say go off the reservation.
[01:15:26]  Can't say crack the whip.
[01:15:28]  Can't say abusive relationship.
[01:15:30]  Need to say relationship with an abusive person and on and on.
[01:15:34]  Fancy rule of thumb.
[01:15:35]  Fancy rule of thumb.
[01:15:36]  Rule of thumb.
[01:15:37]  Master veterans.
[01:15:38]  Minor attracted persons.
[01:15:40]  Oh, yes.
[01:15:40]  Minor attracted person leads me perfectly into my next segment.
[01:15:44]  And that would be the Dalai Lama.
[01:15:47]  Oh, my God.
[01:15:49]  So the Dalai Lama, I think this happened in Tibet, is over there in some sort of a ceremony.
[01:15:56]  And I mean, literally, I don't think I've ever done any Dalai Lama news.
[01:15:59]  It's like he talks to Oprah and other people who call him the spiritual leader, whatever.
[01:16:04]  And the next thing you know, these children are going up to the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader, and we can play you the clip.
[01:16:12]  He kisses this young boy and then in English, he sticks out his tongue and he asks this young boy to suck his tongue.
[01:16:30]  It's absolutely disgusting.
[01:16:33]  I will never look at this man the same again.
[01:16:35]  I am done with the Dalai Lama.
[01:16:37]  Not that I had any relationship with him, but this is sick behavior.
[01:16:40]  I don't care what I don't, this is not defensible.
[01:16:42]  And yet we are seeing some defense of it.
[01:16:46]  The dispatch today, which is, you know, Jonah Goldberg's publication, Steve Hayes, they put it in their newsletter as presented without comment.
[01:16:55]  Why?
[01:16:56]  Why?
[01:16:57]  Fucking comment.
[01:16:58]  It's disgusting.
[01:16:59]  That's pedophilic behavior.
[01:17:02]  That deserves a, you're disgusting, and somebody needs to investigate whether you've done more behind closed doors.
[01:17:08]  That's not presented without comment.
[01:17:10]  What are you doing, Jonah Goldberg?
[01:17:12]  It got worse.
[01:17:14]  Today, over on CNN, a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, Jay Michelson, said the following.
[01:17:24]  Listen.
[01:17:26]  Jay, you've met the Dalai Lama many times.
[01:17:29]  Have you sucked his tongue?
[01:17:31]  I have not.
[01:17:32]  The Dalai Lama is a very playful human being.
[01:17:35]  And we may see this in a weird, kind of gross, sexualized way.
[01:17:41]  But this is about as sexual as a bowl of plain rice.
[01:17:44]  There is nothing sexual, erotic, or erotic happening in this encounter.
[01:17:48]  As you can see by the reaction of the people who are there, this was clearly something that was at best, you know, insensitive to how this would be seen by a large swath of the world population.
[01:18:00]  But it seems clear from the video.
[01:18:01]  And look, I'm biased.
[01:18:02]  I mean, the Dalai Lama is one of my spiritual heroes.
[01:18:05]  I have met him.
[01:18:06]  Being in his presence is really one of the most powerful experiences I've had in my life.
[01:18:12]  Oh my God, Jay, snap out of it.
[01:18:14]  Sometimes we get disappointed by our spiritual leaders.
[01:18:16]  Take a look at what we've gone through in the Catholic Church, for God's sake.
[01:18:19]  That was disgusting and it's inexcusable.
[01:18:22]  I can't believe, Emily, that people are out there.
[01:18:25]  I can't believe the CNN panel didn't stand up and walk out saying, what's wrong with you?
[01:18:29]  You're sick too.
[01:18:31]  I can't believe Alison Camerada joked about it, honestly.
[01:18:34]  Did you suck his tongue?
[01:18:35]  I mean, that really was not funny in any way whatsoever.
[01:18:38]  I'm embarrassed for him to have said that on television.
[01:18:41]  Going to age very poorly because, as you said, Megan, there needs to be an investigation into whether something deeper has happened behind closed doors because this looks like something that is extremely alarming.
[01:18:51]  It should be a red flag.
[01:18:53]  I don't know what mechanisms exist for an investigation like that to happen, but it's just like there's no good explanation for it.
[01:19:01]  There's no way to frame that and say, Well, maybe this, well, maybe that.
[01:19:05]  It's not sexual at all.
[01:19:06]  I mean, what are you talking about?
[01:19:08]  There's a child involved.
[01:19:10]  To sit back in your little comfy chair on a CNN panel and make that determination for the child is just like a really, really disgusting place to go.
[01:19:21]  And again, I suspect it may not age well because maybe there's more that we're going to learn under the surface of this.
[01:19:26]  It makes absolutely no sense.
[01:19:28]  There's no way to sugarcoat what happened there.
[01:19:30]  And I think a lot of things should be called into question because of it.
[01:19:33]  Maybe it's an aberration.
[01:19:34]  Maybe this is one, a one-off.
[01:19:36]  Maybe, but I just have a hard time believing that and at least think that somebody should be digging deeper now because if it is a one-off, that's very, it seems to me that would be an exceptional case.
[01:19:49]  How dare he try to normalize this obviously sexual encounter between the Dalai Lama and this young boy?
[01:19:57]  It was an exploitation by the Dalai Lama of a young boy who didn't know any better.
[01:20:02]  And you could see the boy looked uncomfortable when the Dalai Lama asked him to suck his tongue.
[01:20:07]  I'm told that in Tibet, it is usual, it is common for people to stick their tongues out at other people.
[01:20:13]  It doesn't mean what it means over here.
[01:20:15]  That's not an unusual practice as it is here.
[01:20:18]  Sucking somebody else's tongue, I'm told, is not usual at all.
[01:20:22]  And what the Dalai Lama did was inarguably inappropriate, Eliana, to the point where the Dalai Lama had to come out and apologize.
[01:20:29]  The international community was horrified by what they saw there.
[01:20:33]  It's stunning to me that there's any hesitancy to call it out for what it is.
[01:20:42]  I think that's the key thing.
[01:20:44]  This is something that the Dalai Lama has already come out and indicated wasn't right.
[01:20:49]  And what raised my spidey sense was if this is something that he's comfortable doing in public, it does raise some questions about what is happening in the places that we can't see because it is a very strange and abusive thing to do to a child in the public eye.
[01:21:07]  But apparently he didn't anticipate the blowback of that.
[01:21:10]  And that raises, I think, a lot of other concerning questions.
[01:21:15]  I feel like this is too close.
[01:21:18]  Anybody who defends this, you're getting us closer and closer to the normalization of the exploitation of children.
[01:21:25]  And that is just a hard line we don't cross.
[01:21:29]  Jonah, I'm sorry.
[01:21:31]  I like Jonah.
[01:21:32]  I like the dispatch.
[01:21:32]  I'm one of the founding contributors to the dispatch.
[01:21:36]  It's not that I agree with all of his positions, but I like his newsletter.
[01:21:39]  You don't know the answer to this problem is not presented without comment.
[01:21:44]  The answer is you comment, you condemn, and you make sure we of the sane and rational minds hold a hard line against this kind of behavior, or you get more of it, Emily, or you get more of it.
[01:21:56]  We are seeing tiny buds of this on far corners now in our discussion, though.
[01:22:05]  I'm seeing more and more of it.
[01:22:06]  What was the term that you used?
[01:22:08]  The minor attracted people.
[01:22:10]  That's becoming a thing quickly.
[01:22:13]  It's quickly.
[01:22:14]  It's actually probably on that Stanford list.
[01:22:16]  You can't say pedophile.
[01:22:17]  You have to say minor attracted people.
[01:22:20]  Right.
[01:22:20]  And so I just, I went back and looked at what I was referring to from 2015.
[01:22:24]  It was at the University of New Hampshire, and they said you couldn't use the word American.
[01:22:27]  And that caused all kinds of consternation at the time.
[01:22:30]  But look at how quickly that's moved to now, very seriously.
[01:22:34]  There is a push from academics and folks can Google this.
[01:22:38]  They're very serious academics with some traction in leftist fringe circles who are now making some of the same arguments we saw made about gender identity, but in minor attracted persons language, where they're sugarcoating and attempting to destigmatize pedophilia in an effort, they say, to help people better deal with it and thus eradicate it, get it out of the, get it, you know, make people less likely to act on it, which is a ridiculous and disgusting argument.
[01:23:07]  We've already seen the results, the fruits of those efforts in other corners of society.
[01:23:11]  We have run this experiment.
[01:23:12]  We know it is a horrible idea.
[01:23:14]  Not only does it sound like a horrible idea on its face, it's illogical, but in practice, it will not work.
[01:23:19]  It will not work.
[01:23:20]  And it'll, again, bring us to just examples exactly like this one.
[01:23:25]  And I think, by the way, when your sort of faith isn't rooted in this idea that people are bad, inherently fallen, that we are all sinful, it makes it really easy to get caught up in looking at someone like the Dalai Lama, who you've had really profound spiritual experiences with, as he was saying, and just not believe it.
[01:23:43]  You don't believe it because you have way too rosy of a perspective on human beings.
[01:23:47]  And that's true of a lot of academia.
[01:23:49]  It's true of a lot of the media.
[01:23:50]  They just don't understand human nature.
[01:23:52]  They think they can cure it somehow by changing to these totally Orwellian, to Eliana's point, terms like minor attracted persons that destigmatize something that deserves intense stigma.
[01:24:04]  A healthy society stigmatizes pedophilia.
[01:24:07]  Yes.
[01:24:08]  Okay, so that leads me to what's going on in the UK.
[01:24:11]  I have to do a quick break and then we will discuss this naked education that's being foisted on kids over in the UK two minutes away.
[01:24:20]  Stand by.
[01:24:20]  More with Emily and Eliana after this.
[01:24:25]  Over across the pond, the UK's Channel 4 has decided it would be a great idea in the spirit of sex education and talking openly with teens and tweens about what's coming their way through puberty, et cetera, to put a bunch of naked adults in front of them so they can check out the naked adults' normal bodies and just everyone's going to be super normal.
[01:24:54]  Here's a clip.
[01:24:55]  Sod 11.
[01:25:02]  I couldn't look at them.
[01:25:03]  I don't even think my cat's even got that much hair.
[01:25:08]  You're giggling quality.
[01:25:09]  I'm always the one that giggles.
[01:25:12]  How do you feel?
[01:25:13]  I feel fine.
[01:25:14]  Casual, not even popped.
[01:25:18]  I mean, I've never been in a room with four naked people.
[01:25:21]  They've never been in a room with four naked people.
[01:25:23]  Maybe Dr. Alex has.
[01:25:25]  I'm not sure.
[01:25:27]  Elliot, you've got naked people standing in front of you.
[01:25:30]  Yes.
[01:25:31]  This is a new thing.
[01:25:31]  A new experience.
[01:25:32]  I'm guessing it probably is.
[01:25:33]  Yeah, it is, man.
[01:25:35]  Oh, my God.
[01:25:36]  Look at that kid.
[01:25:37]  I guess you can get on beginning at age 14.
[01:25:41]  For the listening audience, they were fully grown adults, male and female, completely butt-naked right in front of the kids, full frontal nudity, standing there, just lined up against one another, four of them, I think.
[01:25:54]  And they say the show is about body positivity.
[01:25:57]  The program aired in Britain last week.
[01:26:00]  They say they're going to discuss things like the first topic was body hair, talking about when they developed pubic hair, how much they shave, and so on and so forth.
[01:26:15]  Emily, thoughts on whether this is going to encourage body positivity and or anything else.
[01:26:23]  I have no idea what the consequences of this will be other than completely messing up these children like traumatically, even if they seem like they're just nodding along happily.
[01:26:33]  Because when you think about it, one of the more disturbing elements is how many layers of sort of bureaucratic control something like this has to go through until it hits the public.
[01:26:42]  Think of all of the production, the people who commissioned this, the parents of the children, everyone who just said, yeah, this is a good idea, let's go ahead with it.
[01:26:54]  And then it hits the public.
[01:26:55]  I mean, so many people had to be behind that effort and nobody thought to say, maybe let's pause.
[01:27:02]  Maybe people did and they got kicked out and were unsuccessful.
[01:27:05]  But think about all of the people who were just comfortable participating in this.
[01:27:09]  It's really hard for children with developing brains to process the consequences of this at the moment.
[01:27:16]  We all know that.
[01:27:17]  They might think something is fine and cool and edgy in the moment 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road, which we're not even thinking about.
[01:27:25]  As an adult, you look back and realize that your brain wasn't fully developed and that that really had an effect on your relationship with the opposite sex's body or your relationship with sexuality in general, because it's ab normal.
[01:27:38]  It's not normal.
[01:27:39]  It shouldn't be normalized.
[01:27:41]  And these poor kids are now blasted all over the internet forever having this experience.
[01:27:47]  It's true.
[01:27:47]  Like what parent would put their child on set, like two feet away from some random stranger's naked penis and let that be their first exposure to a naked man or a naked woman.
[01:27:59]  And by the way, that doesn't even account for the children at home who are channel surfing, looking for Britain's Got Talents latest performance and stumble across naked people, Eliana.
[01:28:15]  I don't really know where to begin with this, except with the parents and what the hell were they thinking here.
[01:28:21]  There is something so, there is something sort of pornographic about it.
[01:28:25]  And I don't know, like call me old school.
[01:28:28]  You know, when I was growing up, it was before everything was on the internet, but it was like kids used to like sneak Playboy magazines behind lockers and like, you know, that would, that's good enough.
[01:28:39]  Like this is not, you know, the real, the real nuts and bolts of sex are never weren't learned in sex education in sixth grade.
[01:28:48]  Okay.
[01:28:49]  And so I really do question the benefit of like all of this adult teaching children about this stuff.
[01:28:55]  That's just not, it is not a reflection of the way the real world works.
[01:29:00]  Can I tell you too, like I've seen enough b-roll of those ugly naked bottoms.

=== Playboy Pages and Teenagers (07:07) ===

[01:29:04]  I don't need to see any more of that.
[01:29:06]  So it also has like, it has the weird effect of, and I realize, yes, there's Playboy.
[01:29:11]  Doug used to tell me that he and his buddies would steal the Playboy off of whatever their dad's or somebody's dad's, you know, trunk.
[01:29:17]  And they used to text, I guess Playboy was always 88 pages.
[01:29:21]  And they used to just text each other, not text, but like call or say to the other person, 88 pages.
[01:29:26]  And then they'd know that somebody had gotten their hands on a Playboy.
[01:29:30]  That's the American way.
[01:29:31]  That's the old-fashioned way.
[01:29:32]  That's the way it should happen.
[01:29:33]  But as a young girl, I never saw a male naked body until it was by choice in an appropriately sexual situation where, you know, I was intentionally seeing the male naked body.
[01:29:47]  I wouldn't want to see that fat, hairy, disgusting man in front of me as representative of what my future held.
[01:29:53]  I'd probably go asexual.
[01:29:55]  You're like depriving these young people, Emily, of the opportunity to discover all of this for themselves in what can be a totally magical, great, exciting, nerve-wracking, but fulfilling setting.
[01:30:09]  Why do I want to look at somebody's disgusting cellulite ridden backyard with a hairy front?
[01:30:15]  I don't want to see that as my future if I'm a 14-year-old girl sitting there.
[01:30:20]  Really quick, Megan.
[01:30:22]  I think like this stuff is supposed to happen in private spaces.
[01:30:26]  And so much with social media and other things in our culture is dragging out what was once happening in private spaces out into the public.
[01:30:34]  And this is not only in a classroom, but then broadcast on television.
[01:30:38]  And it is not right.
[01:30:39]  Like private things, including sex and the discovery of sex, should be private.
[01:30:44]  And it really should be left to parents to decide.
[01:30:46]  You know, some parents don't talk to their kids about this stuff at all.
[01:30:49]  Other parents talk to their kids about it all the time.
[01:30:51]  It should be up to parents how to educate their children about this, but like keep it private.
[01:30:58]  Thank you.
[01:31:01]  I wonder what Camille Polly would say about this because, you know, the wonderful philosopher, art critic, writer, because to your point, Megan and Eliana, this stuff is typically done in private.
[01:31:11]  It's human nature.
[01:31:12]  There's a reason for that.
[01:31:14]  And there's something about the mystery of sex that's incredibly powerful and intoxicating for men and women.
[01:31:25]  And to completely demystify sex.
[01:31:27]  Polly has written about when Hollywood had the code and how Hollywood movies were so much sexier when they had to obey different rules because they really had to work to make sexual dynamics appealing and interesting and entertaining and intriguing.
[01:31:42]  And when you demystify all of that, she's written about the Kardashians, for example, just being completely bare butt, all of that stuff.
[01:31:50]  You're really taking the mystery out of sex in a way that's harmful, not just to the culture, but for people who later have to experience it.
[01:31:58]  And for kids, first of all, to see this, like this is just on another level of insanity, obviously, and danger and all of that.
[01:32:07]  But just imagine growing up in a culture that has demystified sex to this point where you're seeing basically bare butts.
[01:32:14]  Lizzo just posted a naked photo.
[01:32:16]  When you're seeing all of this, you're inundated with it.
[01:32:19]  Our relationship and younger people's relationships with sex and sexuality are absolutely going to be hurt by this for a long time in the future.
[01:32:29]  So can I give you a defense of it, Eliana?
[01:32:32]  There was an op-ed published in the UK's Independent by a woman named Katie Edwards.
[01:32:38]  She writes, We can all get puritanical about it and say that there's never an appropriate context for teenagers to see naked adult bodies.
[01:32:44]  Teenagers is like as if they're all 18 and not 14.
[01:32:47]  And there is a difference as the mother of a 13-year-old.
[01:32:50]  Significant between those.
[01:32:52]  We can willfully block out reality and pretend that teenagers are innocents who know nothing of real naked bodies or issues around sex, sexuality, and consent.
[01:33:00]  But seriously, who are we kidding?
[01:33:01]  Our kids are taught that child-sized waists alongside large, perfectly smooth, round buttocks are not only normal, but desirable.
[01:33:11]  No wonder body dysmorphic disorder is increasing among teenagers.
[01:33:15]  That's the reality for kids today.
[01:33:17]  That's what's considered normal.
[01:33:19]  Naked education might be a bit of a gimmick.
[01:33:21]  It might not even be, it might not be everyone's cup of tea, but isn't there something positive to be gained in having conversations about real bodies, body image, sex, and consent?
[01:33:31]  Isn't it important to discuss how many of the normalized body grooming behaviors, such as women's removal of body hair beyond the head and eyes, have been imported from pornography and what this means for young people's sense of self-worth?
[01:33:46]  Did you know that you were shaving your legs because of the patriarchy?
[01:33:49]  Did you understand?
[01:33:50]  That's what it happened.
[01:33:51]  That's why, anyway, forget that last bit of feminist offering, but what about her defense of real bodies?
[01:33:59]  They're already seeing the fake Kim Kardashian bottom out there like it's real and it's a lie.
[01:34:04]  Why not show them real people and disabuse them of those notions?
[01:34:10]  Well, the article posits that this would be an interesting discussion to have.
[01:34:13]  And I think that that's fine.
[01:34:15]  You know, it's a fine discussion to have.
[01:34:17]  But I don't think I object to the idea that to combat body dysmorphia and to realize that the idealized version of the female body is not exactly what each one of us.
[01:34:28]  And I say this as, you know, I'm not Stormy Daniels over here trotting around, you know, but that like you don't need to see people naked to realize that.
[01:34:40]  I think it's sort of a ridiculous argument.
[01:34:42]  And there's plenty of conversation to be had without trotting out four naked adults in front of children.
[01:34:47]  And she said, like, oh, let's not pretend 14-year-olds are so innocent.
[01:34:51]  Nobody's pretending that.
[01:34:53]  Like, it's totally, I think it is for each parent to decide how permissive they want to be with their kids.
[01:34:59]  But like, you know, your husband, Megan, was texting 88 to his friends.
[01:35:04]  Like, of course, this is what the kids are doing and what they've always been done.
[01:35:07]  But there is a certain propriety that like they've got to sneak behind their parents' backs to do it.
[01:35:12]  And that this is not, this is not a society sanctioned thing.
[01:35:16]  It happens behind closed doors.
[01:35:18]  And, you know, both when you discover it in the pages of Playboy and when you really do it.
[01:35:24]  Like we don't sanction people having sex in parking lots and office buildings.
[01:35:27]  Yeah.
[01:35:28]  And also like the weirdness, the normalization, Emily, of having a naked man stand in front of your minor child.
[01:35:34]  You know, like we, we don't need to normalize inappropriate behavior.
[01:35:40]  Yeah.
[01:35:40]  Like you, it's, it's the same thing as saying, yes, you should have a discussion with your child as you feel best, not a TV station, but you should have a discussion with your child about sexual norms as opposed to letting them watch Hollywood.
[01:35:53]  Fine, fine.
[01:35:53]  But that's like saying you should just put your kid and take them to watch people have sex.
[01:35:59]  It's like that's the equivalent of that argument.
[01:36:02]  It is idiotic and stupid, let alone the fact that you're rolling cameras and broadcasting this to a national, now international audience.
[01:36:09]  And it's just stupid and wrong.

=== Normalizing Inappropriate Behavior (01:19) ===

[01:36:12]  Right.
[01:36:12]  I'm going to have to ask Doug exactly how they communicated 88 pages because he, like I grew up in the 80s before texting.
[01:36:17]  So it must have just been like phone call, must have been like alert, red alert, 88.
[01:36:22]  Was it always 88 or was just their favorite, their favorite edition of, I don't know, I'll find out.
[01:36:28]  I'm sure he remembers perfectly, Megan.
[01:36:30]  He does.
[01:36:31]  He does.
[01:36:32]  Great to see you, ladies.
[01:36:34]  It's been a pleasure.
[01:36:36]  Thanks for having us.
[01:36:37]  All right.
[01:36:37]  Now, I want to mention to you that tomorrow we're going to be joined by Sam Harris for the full show.
[01:36:42]  You heard him mentioned earlier this week.
[01:36:44]  He got in trouble for saying whatever needs to be done to get rid of Trump is worth it.
[01:36:48]  We'll talk about that so much more.
[01:36:50]  Excited to have it back on the program.
[01:36:52]  We will see you then.
[01:36:56]  Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
[01:36:58]  No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
[01:37:30]  Mani, spice dubra, lever dubbed.