The Megyn Kelly Show - 20230425_tucker-and-lemon-firing-fallout-and-dark-brandon-r
Aired: 2023-04-25
Duration: 02:06:15


=== Tucker Pulled Off The Air (10:55) ===

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[00:01:17]  FIKEN presenterer et superenkelt regnskapsprogram for alt det regnskapsgreiene til bedriften din.
[00:01:25]  Det var jo enkelt.
[00:01:26]  FIKEN, et superenkelt regnskapsprogram.
[00:01:32]  Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
[00:01:34]  Your home for open, honest and provocative conversations.
[00:01:38]  Everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
[00:01:45]  Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
[00:01:47]  It has been a wild 24 hours since we were last together.
[00:01:51]  Joe Biden made it official.
[00:01:52]  He's running for re-election.
[00:01:54]  Dark Brandon is back.
[00:01:55]  And the firing of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon on the same day continues to cause heads to explode.
[00:02:02]  We're learning a bit more about the details behind at least one of those.
[00:02:06]  So we're learning a bit more about the facts in New York.
[00:02:06]  But I'mma миллиwig.
[00:02:06]  Because of the fact that he wants to be on the right side of the video we're having trouble doing it, But if you're learning through the future, I think he doesn't good to see those Maisel ones in your life better.
[00:02:06]  Actually, both of those.
[00:02:08]  We're going to get to it all with a great lineup of guests, including the man who some say is at least partly responsible for Don Lemon's demise.
[00:02:16]  I want to, I think, break some news for you.
[00:02:19]  Tucker Carlson hasn't actually been fired.
[00:02:22]  He's still an employee of the Fox News channel.
[00:02:25]  What happened was Suzanne Scott called him, she's the CEO, on Monday morning and said he was not going to be allowed to do any more shows and that he had been kicked out of his company email.
[00:02:41]  And now they're going to have to negotiate an exit.
[00:02:45]  Some reporting to me suggests that she said it's going to be an amicable parting.
[00:02:52]  Right, isn't it?
[00:02:56]  Completely catching Tucker off guard.
[00:02:58]  But Tucker's not fired.
[00:03:00]  That's my information.
[00:03:02]  That he still needs to negotiate the exit, and that right now he's not free to launch a podcast or a digital show or negotiate with other employers at all because he's still under contract.
[00:03:14]  They pulled his show off the air.
[00:03:16]  They also fired his executive producer, Justin Wells.
[00:03:20]  And though he tried to find out why, they wouldn't tell him.
[00:03:24]  They refused to tell him why.
[00:03:26]  I mean, to me, that's just so disheartening.
[00:03:29]  He's been at the company for years.
[00:03:32]  He'd been in the prime time for seven years and saw Fox News through one of the most difficult times in its history.
[00:03:41]  The immediate era post-Roger Ails, where they didn't know left from right.
[00:03:44]  They didn't know up from down.
[00:03:45]  They really didn't have strong management leading the company.
[00:03:49]  And they had lost two of their biggest stars, Bill Reilly and me, at least at that time.
[00:03:55]  So Tucker takes over.
[00:03:57]  It's a huge order that he was given and he did it.
[00:04:00]  He smashed the ball out of the park and he took a lot of risks and he was heterodox.
[00:04:05]  He was, he pushed against the orthodoxy on so many different things.
[00:04:09]  And typically Fox News liked that.
[00:04:11]  So why?
[00:04:12]  Why now?
[00:04:13]  What was it that led them to treat their number one star with such disdain?
[00:04:19]  I mean, dripping disdain to the point where he can no longer access his email.
[00:04:23]  He doesn't get to tell his own team.
[00:04:25]  He doesn't get to say goodbye.
[00:04:27]  I mean, it's absolutely disrespectful to him.
[00:04:30]  And unlike Don Lemon, he hadn't been immersed in controversy after controversy inside the building against his own colleagues.
[00:04:38]  Yes, the leftist media had been coming after him repeatedly.
[00:04:41]  And in the case of Dominion, to some extent, lawyers, though he wasn't their primary focus.
[00:04:45]  So what was it?
[00:04:46]  What would make your own company turn against you like that?
[00:04:50]  The Fox News audience is clearly mad, and I don't blame them.
[00:04:54]  It'll be interesting to see what the ratings were for the 8 p.m. hour last night.
[00:04:57]  Brian Kilmead hosted it.
[00:04:59]  It's a rotating cast for now.
[00:05:01]  And we'll see what they decide to do.
[00:05:02]  There's not Brian's fault.
[00:05:03]  I mean, here's Brian FYI.
[00:05:05]  Here he is in a moment where he is kind of acknowledging what happened.
[00:05:08]  I'll just play the 14 seconds.
[00:05:10]  It's SOT 21.
[00:05:11]  Hi, everybody, and welcome to Fox News tonight.
[00:05:13]  I am Brian Kilmead.
[00:05:15]  As you probably have heard, Fox News and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways.
[00:05:19]  I wish Tucker the best.
[00:05:20]  I'm great friends with Tucker and always will be.
[00:05:23]  But right now, it's time for Fox News tonight.
[00:05:25]  So let's get started.
[00:05:27]  Kill me's a sweet guy and he's a company man.
[00:05:29]  He's, I'm sure he wasn't thrilled to be asked to do that show and that particular day, but he did it.
[00:05:36]  He's a loyal employee.
[00:05:38]  And Fox News is banking on its audience not leaving it, on its audience being more in love with the Fox News brand than they were with Tucker.
[00:05:45]  And we'll see.
[00:05:45]  We'll see whether or not that's true.
[00:05:47]  But I just think the way they handled it was disrespectful and gross.
[00:05:52]  And I think Tucker Carlson deserved better.
[00:05:55]  And I certainly hope that he uses Brian Friedman, my old lawyer, to get the remainder of his contract.
[00:06:02]  The Wall Street Journal reporting that Tucker was making around $20 million a year and that they will pay him out on his deal.
[00:06:09]  I don't know when it expired, but he was in the process reportedly of negotiating a renewal.
[00:06:14]  So they should pay him out and they should let him out of his non-compete so he can go out there and get his voice on the air now when his audience will most be missing it.
[00:06:23]  Joining me now to discuss both media shake-ups, the one at Fox, the one at CNN.
[00:06:28]  And by the way, NBC Universal fired its headhead honcho as well for an alleged affair with an underling, is the brilliant Victor Davis Hansen, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and host of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
[00:06:42]  Victor, welcome back.
[00:06:44]  I know you've been on Tucker's show many times and on other Fox News shows.
[00:06:49]  Let me just ask you, because I haven't heard it, your reaction to the news about him.
[00:06:52]  Well, I was supposed to go on there tomorrow night.
[00:06:55]  So I had been talking to the producer each week.
[00:06:57]  I go on, and I was shocked because there was no adequate explanation.
[00:07:02]  And he's the lead in.
[00:07:04]  So when you have a lead in that anchors the subsequent shows and he's getting all of this and his audience had gone back up, way back up, then it has to be something egregious.
[00:07:16]  But so far, I mean, there's been leaks that, oh, he said he bought Ray Epps, but and he said that Ray Epps was involved.
[00:07:24]  But Ray Epps said right on the air, you know, we've got to go into the Capitol.
[00:07:28]  You got to go in the Capitol.
[00:07:29]  I orchestrate.
[00:07:29]  All Tucker did was quote him verbatim.
[00:07:32]  And the words speak for themselves.
[00:07:34]  And then these other things about the voting machines, well, we saw that Tucker was pretty critical.
[00:07:40]  So they haven't, and whatever narrative that keeps coming out, there's not any substantial evidence that that narrative is going to convince people.
[00:07:48]  And it's kind of deja vu because I think that, you know, Arizona could be legitimately called or not.
[00:07:55]  That's not the question.
[00:07:56]  But if you're a centerite show and you're the first to call Arizona and you see these radical swings on the board, you might just want to take a deep breath and see what the consensus is before you get out ahead of the pack.
[00:08:09]  So that got people angry and then people doubled down.
[00:08:13]  And I think a rule, and you know better than I do, you don't attack your base.
[00:08:18]  So Tucker has become a spokesman for conservatives who feel that a lot of people are afraid to say things that they know is true.
[00:08:26]  And they tune into him every night for him to be explicit and candid and take the heat for them.
[00:08:32]  And then he articulates something.
[00:08:34]  And it's pretty tough sometimes, but I don't think it's unfair or inaccurate.
[00:08:39]  And so to silence that voice, you're going to get back to, I think they're going to have a large defection from the audience.
[00:08:48]  And I'm somebody who really supports Fox News because I feel there's no other outlet without reach.
[00:08:55]  So they have, I guess what I'm saying, Megan, is they have responsibilities beyond just the corporate level.
[00:09:02]  They have responsibilities to traditional America to offer them an alternative voice if it's done professionally and candidly.
[00:09:10]  And he does that.
[00:09:11]  And to take that away without an adequate explanation is going to, I think, alienate a lot of people.
[00:09:18]  And we've seen that before.
[00:09:19]  And it took months to regain the confidence of their loyal supporters.
[00:09:23]  So that's what I hear.
[00:09:24]  I hear all these people, you know, and as a guest, I don't know what's going on, but people will call you and say, what's going on?
[00:09:31]  And where's our Tucker?
[00:09:33]  And what can we do?
[00:09:34]  And then when you have the left leading up to this, like AOC saying he should be off and he should be silenced and we got to get that guy off and Schumer, everybody was attacking him.
[00:09:45]  And then he's off, it also empowers that leftist narrative that they have veto power over the media in particular.
[00:09:52]  And this follows the FBI with Twitter.
[00:09:54]  And so everybody is saying, why is the left controlling the free flow of information?
[00:09:59]  And why do people on the conservative side allow them to influence?
[00:10:02]  Whether that's true, they influence them or not doesn't matter.
[00:10:04]  That's the impression.
[00:10:06]  So it doesn't, I know, I can't find a world in which I believe that Fox bowed to the AOCs of the world.
[00:10:13]  I think they did, but I can find one in which they bowed to the more establishment Republicans who have also been after Tucker for quite some time and maybe made a decision to move the channel back to that more establishment type programming.
[00:10:26]  I don't know that that's what they're doing, but I could see at least that happening.
[00:10:30]  I will say my reporting also has led me to learn from a source close to the Murdochs that it was Rupert's decision and that it was reportedly a personal decision, that it was not necessarily for any reason other than Rupert's personal feelings.
[00:10:45]  And I don't know exactly what that was based on, but what you're seeing now in places like Mediaite.com, they're reporting that this was a decision made by Lachlan, Murdoch, and Suzanne Scott.
[00:10:54]  And that's not true.
[00:10:55]  This was a decision made by Rupert, as of course it would have to be.

=== Rupert's Personal Decision To Fire (04:10) ===

[00:10:59]  But now I've been told that by a source very well positioned to know.
[00:11:02]  It came from the big, big boss himself.
[00:11:04]  Of course, Lachlan and Suzanne are throwing themselves on the sword because they never want the old man to have to take the responsibility for something like this.
[00:11:10]  And he somehow turned on him.
[00:11:13]  And I don't know why he turned on Tucker because he'd been supporting him through controversy after controversy, which you're going to get if you're in the prime time of Fox News.
[00:11:23]  And you're really going to get if you're Tucker, who's totally fearless.
[00:11:28]  It's interesting, Victor, to me that it happened.
[00:11:31]  And by the way, some reporting that the decision was made on Sunday night.
[00:11:34]  It wasn't.
[00:11:34]  It was made on Friday night.
[00:11:36]  That's my information.
[00:11:38]  Friday night, what happened?
[00:11:39]  Tucker went and gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation.
[00:11:43]  And, you know, it was steeped in messaging we've heard from Tucker, you know, before that night.
[00:11:49]  But I did think it was kind of interesting, his messaging that night about good and evil and with some religious tones in it.
[00:11:56]  Let me give you a sample.
[00:11:58]  It's SOT 20.
[00:12:00]  If you want to know what's evil and what's good, what are the characteristics of those?
[00:12:04]  And by the way, you know, I think the Athenians would have agreed with this.
[00:12:08]  This is not necessarily just a Christian notion.
[00:12:10]  This is kind of a, I would say, widely agreed upon understanding of good and evil.
[00:12:15]  What are its products?
[00:12:17]  What do these two conditions produce?
[00:12:21]  Well, I mean, good is characterized by order, calmness, tranquility, peace, whatever you want to call it, lack of conflict, cleanliness.
[00:12:35]  Cleanliness is next to godliness.
[00:12:37]  It's true.
[00:12:38]  It is.
[00:12:40]  And evil is characterized by their opposites: violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth.
[00:12:50]  So if you are all in on the things that produce the latter basket of outcomes, what you're really advocating for is evil.
[00:13:00]  That's just true.
[00:13:03]  By the way, there's a rhetorical device by Tucker that I love.
[00:13:05]  That's just true.
[00:13:07]  I love that he said it does make you accept whatever he says.
[00:13:10]  And that particular statement is true.
[00:13:12]  But I do wonder, you know, sitting here today, I don't know the answer.
[00:13:16]  What was the last draw for Rupert?
[00:13:20]  Yeah, I don't know either, but I think one of his unique characteristics is that he is willing to attack the corporate right.
[00:13:31]  And so he brings on people like Glenn Greenwald.
[00:13:33]  He brings on people like Robert F. Kennedy.
[00:13:35]  They're not traditional conservatives, not all the time.
[00:13:38]  Sometimes they are.
[00:13:39]  He brings in all of those guests.
[00:13:41]  And then just when you think that he's a, just when you think that he's a mouthpiece, because he's on Fox for a conservative view, he'll attack Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan, who's on the board.
[00:13:53]  So I think in their way of thinking, he can say anything, anytime, anywhere about anyone.
[00:13:58]  And sometimes that can be disturbing, but that's what wins him his loyal audience.
[00:14:05]  And you saw there that he's talking in philosophical terms, historical terms.
[00:14:09]  And so the way he looks at the news, it's not necessarily, if I attack this person, will somebody from the RNC call me up?
[00:14:19]  Or will this person get angry and not say something about?
[00:14:23]  He doesn't care.
[00:14:24]  He's at a point in his life, he doesn't care.
[00:14:25]  And that's liberated him.
[00:14:27]  And people sense that.
[00:14:28]  So they feel that he will tell them what he feels.
[00:14:32]  And what does he feel?
[00:14:34]  He feels that corporate America is joined the woke.
[00:14:38]  And so, and the woke wouldn't have been successful had there not been Romney-like people on the McCain right of the Republican Party.
[00:14:47]  Romney was at the BLF protests.
[00:14:49]  Absolutely.
[00:14:50]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:14:52]  And RNT for they were not willing to stand up for their generations past, the dead who created this country, the values.
[00:14:59]  And the Republican traditional conservative movement wasn't doing that.
[00:15:03]  And yet, the people who were doing it was Donald Trump, and yet he didn't, he didn't come off as a Trump megaphone.

=== Romney And The New Base (12:02) ===

[00:15:09]  He was critical of Trump in many ways.
[00:15:12]  So I don't think people could categorize him as easy as they thought.
[00:15:15]  That's what drove his former neoconservative colleagues at the weekly, the defunct Weekly Standard or the Bulwark.
[00:15:23]  They absolutely despised him because he was liberated.
[00:15:27]  He didn't react.
[00:15:28]  Usually when people speak as candidly as he does, and they say something that really hits home, then they backtrack or they tweet, I didn't mean it, or I was misquoted, but he doesn't.
[00:15:40]  And so that made him both a big target, but it gave him enormous credibility and affection for his audience.
[00:15:48]  And I can tell you, just being on his show each week, I'd have people come up and say, they didn't say, congratulations, you're doing a good job.
[00:15:55]  They said, I wish you could tell Tucker what a good job he is.
[00:16:00]  And so he had a loyal audience.
[00:16:02]  And that loyal audience, as you know better than I, I'm not a media person.
[00:16:06]  But that undulated and that wave rippled throughout the entire evening shows, all of them.
[00:16:14]  Oh, yeah.
[00:16:14]  He was, of course, he was a great lead-in for Hannity.
[00:16:17]  If his numbers go down, the entire prime time will go down as well.
[00:16:22]  I will say this: I did some digging and found out from sources who are in a position to know that there is no pending sale of Fox, and they don't even have anybody looking under the hood or kicking the tires right now.
[00:16:35]  But the Daily Mail is reporting that Carlson has told people he believes his show is being taken off the air because the Murdoch children intend to sell Fox at some point.
[00:16:47]  Now, what's interesting to me about that, Victor, is that would make sense.
[00:16:51]  That to me actually would make sense.
[00:16:53]  You've got Rupert right now, who's got four, I think, voting shares.
[00:16:57]  You've got Lachlan, James, Elizabeth, and Prudence, his four older children, each of whom has one voting share.
[00:17:04]  You know, there's a question about who's going to take over.
[00:17:06]  He wants it to be Lachlan.
[00:17:07]  But when Rupert goes, it's unclear how those other three are going to align.
[00:17:14]  James and Rupert, James and Lachlan hate each other.
[00:17:17]  They don't speak.
[00:17:18]  And the two older female sisters are anybody's guests.
[00:17:22]  Elizabeth's been more liberal, but she was also seen with Rupert at a sporting event recently.
[00:17:27]  And Lachlan was there too.
[00:17:28]  So we don't know.
[00:17:28]  It's very much like succession.
[00:17:30]  The reason I raise all of this is if the children are eyeing a sale of Fox News, it might be easier without Tucker for the reasons that we've been discussing.
[00:17:39]  And Tucker, while a juggernaut ratings-wise, was not a juggernaut advertising dollars-wise, because the left was effective in pushing its boycotts of him.
[00:17:49]  You know, I disclosed on the air, I think, yesterday, when I was hosting the 9 p.m., I was told that my show made $100 million a year in advertising.
[00:17:58]  And that was back in 2015, 2016.
[00:18:00]  So it would be higher now if, you know, assuming I'd stayed.
[00:18:05]  Tucker's show, I'm sure, wasn't making anywhere near that because of the boycotts, the nonstop media matters, sleeping giants, boycotts that these advertisers bent the knee to, hobbling the income of that particular hour in a way that is really unfair and gross.
[00:18:22]  And so, but the reason I'm saying all this is I could see some decision by the board or by the Murdochs to say, long term, we can put somebody in there who gets 70% of his ratings and maybe we earn even more money in that hour because the advertisers will come back.
[00:18:36]  And then we can sell the channel and F Tucker and F his audience.
[00:18:41]  We made you and helped you fall in love with him.
[00:18:43]  We don't care.
[00:18:45]  And to me, that's kind of one of my main takeaways.
[00:18:47]  Don't trust them because as soon as you fall in love with somebody, they don't care.
[00:18:53]  Whatever their considerations are, they'll yank the host and they won't even have the decency to tell you why or tell him why.
[00:19:01]  Yeah, well, I think the problem is what you put your finger on.
[00:19:05]  It's not an isolated episode.
[00:19:07]  So the viewer says, this is episodic now.
[00:19:10]  You and Bill left and then there was it was down and then they worked hard to build it up.
[00:19:16]  And then all of the conundrum about the election really spiked Newsmax and they lost about a third of their audience for a while.
[00:19:23]  So there was that second episode and now there's this third.
[00:19:27]  And so what a viewer wants is he wants a predictability.
[00:19:31]  He comes home, he goes to work.
[00:19:34]  He's exposed to woke all day.
[00:19:36]  He hears it everywhere.
[00:19:37]  He looks at the NBA.
[00:19:38]  He looks at the Oscars.
[00:19:39]  It's everywhere.
[00:19:40]  But he just wants a sanctuary, a monastery of the mind that he can relax or she can relax and be reassured she's not crazy.
[00:19:48]  So they go to Fox.
[00:19:49]  But if Fox cannot offer that continuity and that reinsurance because of these periodic radical transformations that also suggest that there are other reasons, maybe they're not or maybe they are about why people leave that may be ideological beyond just the corporate bottom line, then it can't. offer that reassurance.
[00:20:10]  So when you think that, well, maybe the children want to buy it, well, who would buy it?
[00:20:14]  The people who would buy it would be conservative, I think, because the other market is kind of saturated.
[00:20:22]  I don't think there's a market for a Romney, no offense from Mitt Romney, but a Romney or Mitch McConnell station, I don't think it's going to get anybody, left or right, in that cable market.
[00:20:33]  So it's going to be sort of a conservative group.
[00:20:36]  And then when they look at it, they think, well, I know Tucker may not have got the revenue dollars I would need, but that is somebody that is the anchor for the whole evening that does become.
[00:20:48]  Well, just to add to that, Victor, he drives audience and audience matters when you go to the cable subscribers and say, pay us three cents more for the Fox to have the Fox News channel on your lineup.
[00:21:01]  Look at the numbers we draw.
[00:21:03]  So it's not like Tucker brought no value.
[00:21:06]  I'm just saying in the ad dollars.
[00:21:08]  No, it doesn't mean that's for sure.
[00:21:10]  He drove numbers, subscriptions.
[00:21:12]  It would be if I used an old, because I'm an old man, if I said it would be like the San Francisco Giants trading Willie Mays in his prime and then saying buy the Giants now, because of what?
[00:21:24]  And people would say, well, the corporation is not, it's not maximizing its base.
[00:21:29]  So I don't think it would have as much value.
[00:21:32]  If I were the Murdoch children and I wanted to sell it, then I would, if I was angry at Tucker, I would hold my nose and be quiet.
[00:21:41]  And then I would make sure that he had a big audience and support him.
[00:21:45]  And then I would sell it.
[00:21:47]  So I think what I'm getting at, and I'm not informed at all, but it seems to me, and that happens a lot in the corporation.
[00:21:54]  You saw it with Disney.
[00:21:55]  People make decisions and emotional parameters sometimes and they don't think it through.
[00:22:03]  Even the smartest people, Elon Musk said on Tucker's interview, he said, I guess I'm a very smart guy, but I paid $40 billion.
[00:22:12]  I'm glad he did buy Twitter, but he said, I paid $30 trillion, a billion dollars more than I needed to for Twitter.
[00:22:19]  So people make decisions that are not always what they do.
[00:22:23]  And if I were the people at Fox and I'm not, and I own a great deal to go on there with the host, but I think I would just take a cooling off period and then I would have a press release and said there was a misunderstanding and we are going to work through this and Tucker will be on in two or three weeks.
[00:22:43]  I don't know if Tucker would do that, but that's what I would do if I were the older people.
[00:22:46]  I feel, you know, he might, Victor, he might.
[00:22:48]  I think Tucker was truly stunned at the decision.
[00:22:51]  I think he thought they were working toward a contract renewal in good faith and doesn't know where this came from.
[00:22:57]  But you do have the left celebrating this.
[00:23:00]  I mean, it was to the point yesterday where on Twitter, it almost looked like Tucker, God forbid, had died.
[00:23:05]  People were, all the conservatives were posting like, when I was down and out, Tucker invited me to Thanksgiving dinner.
[00:23:11]  When nobody would platform my book because it was too controversial, Tucker put me on.
[00:23:14]  It was like, okay, now take a deep breath.
[00:23:16]  Tucker is alive.
[00:23:17]  He's okay.
[00:23:18]  He's going to be fine.
[00:23:19]  But the left, their messaging was the same in a different way.
[00:23:24]  Like, ding dong, the witch is dead was essentially what they said.
[00:23:27]  We played the view clip clip yesterday.
[00:23:29]  Look at the difference.
[00:23:29]  I mean, so you have somebody like Chris Matthews, excuse me, Chris Wallace, who's on there, who's got from a famous name.
[00:23:37]  He does a good job, but then he is angry and lets it be known that Fox, he feels, is too far right for his professional integrity or something.
[00:23:46]  And so he leaves voluntarily, but maybe there were ratings problems.
[00:23:50]  Who knows the story?
[00:23:51]  There were.
[00:23:51]  But yeah, there were.
[00:23:54]  He wasn't resonating.
[00:23:55]  So he lost his base or his audience.
[00:23:57]  But my point is that when those people leave, they act as if they're not forced out, but it's their own private choice or it's their own volition.
[00:24:09]  But when you have a conservative, they always leave, it seems to me, because people are doing something to them.
[00:24:16]  And that's not good.
[00:24:18]  And Fox, like allowing Tucker to get drawn and quartered in the public square.
[00:24:21]  I mean, just hanging out with the people who are in the middle of the day.
[00:24:24]  Leaking it to Dylan Byers, who broke the story within 10 minutes of telling Tucker.
[00:24:30]  I know.
[00:24:30]  Why would you have Chris Matthews, Chris Wallace's departure done with more calm and professionalism than Tucker Carlson?
[00:24:40]  Because he much better, he better represented your market.
[00:24:43]  He was more loyal to Fox.
[00:24:45]  And I don't get that.
[00:24:47]  And so I think it's reflective that Fox is in a, it's in a difficult position because the Republican Party has bifurcated.
[00:24:59]  And whether they like it or not, we're never going to go back to a John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and John Mitt Romney messaging, you know, a flexible porous border.
[00:25:13]  All we care about is capital gains cuts.
[00:25:16]  We don't, we just have, you know, any type of libertarian trade policy.
[00:25:21]  If China beats us, well, we're going to get more competitive.
[00:25:24]  And that's good.
[00:25:25]  And that's over with.
[00:25:27]  It's now not a party of the very rich.
[00:25:29]  It's a party of the upper middle class to the lower middle class.
[00:25:33]  And I think a lot of people like the Disney people or American Airlines or all of these corporate people can't quite adjust to that yet.
[00:25:43]  Because in some ways, if you look at the congressional districts by income or you look by zip code, it's just overwhelming that the Democratic Party is represented by the very wealthy and they outspin Republicans two or three to one.
[00:25:57]  And so for somebody, somebody in a conservative show has to reflect the new Republican Party.
[00:26:05]  And that's going to be by definition very suspicious of corporatism and one worldism and globalism and all of that stuff at the expense of the people in East Palestine, for example.
[00:26:20]  So if somebody, if Biden or Buttigig won't go to East Palestine, then somebody's going to champion that.
[00:26:26]  And that had traditionally not been a Republican.
[00:26:28]  It is now.
[00:26:29]  So you have to have people in the Fox community that represent that new base of support.
[00:26:36]  It's growing.
[00:26:37]  And sometimes that.
[00:26:38]  Not just that.
[00:26:39]  If I may add, not just that, people who aren't just glomming on.
[00:26:44]  You know, like Tucker was able to give voice to those people because even though Tucker has a privileged background, I would be the first to tell you that.
[00:26:51]  He just got it.
[00:26:52]  He just gets it.
[00:26:52]  He's an avid reader.
[00:26:54]  He's consumed news for long enough that he understands where the factions lie and he's very anti-elitist.
[00:26:59]  I think others over there drafted behind Tucker and would wait for Tucker's messaging before they then change their own messaging.
[00:27:06]  It'll be interesting to see if they can do it without him.
[00:27:10]  Can I ask you, though, about AOC?

=== Giving Voice To The People (02:20) ===

[00:27:11]  Because what we hear from the left these days is we're not cancel culture.
[00:27:15]  We're not pro-cancel.
[00:27:16]  There is no cancel culture.
[00:27:17]  There's no cancel culture.
[00:27:19]  I give you AOC in her little online video on Tucker yesterday.
[00:27:25]  Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News.
[00:27:29]  Couldn't have happened to a better guy.
[00:27:32]  I also kind of feel like I'm like waiting for the cutscene at the end of a Marvel movie.
[00:27:38]  And then you see like the villain's like hand re-emerge.
[00:27:43]  Deplatforming works and it is important.
[00:27:47]  Yeah.
[00:27:49]  Deplatforming works and it is important.
[00:27:53]  Here's a wannabe Marxist and every time she's on film, it's either she's posing as if she's a Hollywood celebrity or she's fixing her makeup or she's in some designer dress.
[00:28:03]  She's about as Marxist as, I don't know.
[00:28:06]  She's a big phony and she has zero credibility among American people.
[00:28:10]  And it's innate to the whole woke movement.
[00:28:13]  The woke movement never is, it has no popular support in the sense of 51% want the transgender agenda.
[00:28:22]  They want the six and a half million illegal entries.
[00:28:24]  They love what happened in Afghanistan.
[00:28:27]  They want a blank check in Ukraine.
[00:28:28]  They don't have that support.
[00:28:30]  They do have it in the institutions and the institutions are corporate America, K through 12 academia, Silicon Valley, and they love people like that.
[00:28:40]  But she's not a revolutionary.
[00:28:41]  She's not a, she has no popular support.
[00:28:44]  She's an artifact of a bicostal bankrupt upper middle class wealthy elite.
[00:28:51]  And so that's what she's catering to.
[00:28:53]  But all of these left-wing movements, whether they're Bolsheviks or Jacobin or the 60s, intrinsic to them, they have to be authoritarian.
[00:29:02]  They all are authoritarian because they cannot trust the will of the people because people, whether it's Nicaragua or Cuba or Venezuela or the EU and Brexit, people get sick of it.
[00:29:12]  It's contrary to human nature.
[00:29:14]  And so they have to be canceled culture.
[00:29:17]  And if we had an ACLU like we used to have in the 1950s or 60s, they would have been speaking out against all of these suppressions of free speech on Twitter and everything.
[00:29:27]  But we have none of them anymore.
[00:29:28]  They're all become Jacobin, Marxist Bolsheviks.

=== Lawsuit Claims Are Ridiculous (15:05) ===

[00:29:32]  And I'm not trying to exaggerate.
[00:29:34]  So I think that it's intrinsic.
[00:29:36]  It's part of their DNA to suppress free speech because that suffocates their position, transparency and open debate.
[00:29:45]  You saw that with Don Lemon in his last debate when he was interviewing the presidential candidate, the new guy, and he couldn't debate him.
[00:29:53]  All he had to revert to was, I'm a black man.
[00:29:56]  I'm a black man as a black man.
[00:29:58]  And that was just a retreat into nihilism.
[00:30:02]  He had no arguments because there were no arguments to make that were not based on our superficial appearance.
[00:30:08]  That's incidental, not essential to who we are.
[00:30:11]  I'm sure you're all broken up about, you know, what morning show are you going to watch now, Victor, now that Don's gone.
[00:30:16]  They're very different cases, aren't they?
[00:30:18]  One person walks away with three and a half million audience and the other has basically 150 or 200.
[00:30:24]  And one person is being sued, I guess, by a female who says his cast was unfair to her.
[00:30:33]  I don't want to prejudice that case, but Tucker is not that way.
[00:30:37]  He's never said anything that we're sexist or misogynist on air.
[00:30:40]  Don Lemon has.
[00:30:42]  And it's very funny that he had no audience and he was overtly misogynist.
[00:30:49]  Yet it's Tucker who's being sued or his staff is by women for something that it's not apparent on the air from Tucker.
[00:30:57]  And he's very successful and yet they're trying to collate the two.
[00:31:01]  Tucker is a very good person.
[00:31:01]  It was very brilliant on CNN to kind of package it.
[00:31:05]  Tucker used some nasty words about Sidney Powell, which he admitted to and we're in writing, but it's a different story than you're actually diminishing the chances of one of the first female presidential candidates entirely by saying, you're past your prime because you're 51 years old.
[00:31:17]  That's just the latest example we could keep going on, Don.
[00:31:19]  And his diva-like behavior and abuse of his colleagues and blah, but we could keep going.
[00:31:23]  Victor, thank you for coming on with your input.
[00:31:27]  Thank you, Megan.
[00:31:28]  Coming up, two of our favorites join us with more reaction to the breaking news, Emily Jaszinski and Michael Moynihan with their thoughts on Don Lamont.
[00:31:36]  And we'll show you the reaction from the CNN hosts, his co-hosts this morning.
[00:31:45]  Here with more reaction to the media world shakeup, Emily Jashinsky, culture editor at the Federalist, and Michael Moynihan, co-host of the fifth column podcast.
[00:31:54]  Guys, my read of the various reporting on this, I mean, it's all over the board.
[00:31:59]  Everybody claims to know why he was fired.
[00:32:01]  Nobody knows why Tucker was fired.
[00:32:02]  That's what you can glean.
[00:32:04]  I'll tell you my own reporting, it was Rupert's decision and it was some sort of personal reason.
[00:32:10]  It was Rupert's opinion that he should go, not necessarily because of a sale, but there could be one potentially down the road in the offing.
[00:32:17]  But I'll just give you some flavor.
[00:32:19]  MPR David Spokenflick saying, I've spoken with three people with knowledge of Fox's ouster of Tucker.
[00:32:24]  They say his digital exchanges captured by the Dominion legal team echo the suite of concerns alleged by his ex-producer, Abby Grossberg, that his show's workplace was defined by sexism and bigotry.
[00:32:37]  I don't believe that for one second.
[00:32:38]  I don't believe the Abby Grossberg thing had anything to do with Tucker's ouster.
[00:32:44]  I reject that.
[00:32:45]  Although it's absurd how this woman and her legal team are trying to act like they got him fired.
[00:32:50]  I mean, it's just if you read that, they're like, this is a first step in accountability toward Abby.
[00:32:55]  Oh, come on.
[00:32:56]  If you think he was fired over that, you're nuts.
[00:32:58]  I guarantee you he talked to Abby Grossberg maybe once to say hello to this person when she joined his team and never again.
[00:33:03]  I guarantee you.
[00:33:05]  Okay, Brian Stelter, quoting the Washington Post, dozens of communications from Carlson and other Fox personnel remain out of public view, redacted at the request of Fox attorneys in the Dominion lawsuit, but they've been seen by top Fox executives suggesting that there are far more damaging exchanges in there by Tucker about people in management.
[00:33:25]  That is a possibility.
[00:33:26]  I am open-minded to that, that he said some bad things about executives that tick people off.
[00:33:32]  Daily Beast, Lachlan Murdoch and Suzanne Scott made the call on Friday night.
[00:33:37]  Again, no, it was Rupert to can him in his show.
[00:33:42]  Thanks largely and surprisingly in part to vulgar comments he made about Sidney Powell, as evidenced by the discovery in the Dominion case and Tucker's lawsuit or deposition in which he admitted to calling her the C-word and said he was embarrassed about it.
[00:33:57]  Zero chance.
[00:33:59]  No way.
[00:34:00]  There is zero chance Fox fired him because he used that word about Sidney Powell.
[00:34:05]  It just didn't happen.
[00:34:06]  No, no, I reject that.
[00:34:09]  Okay, let me just move on.
[00:34:10]  Wall Street Journal now, that's owned by Rupert.
[00:34:13]  So now we're getting closer to the possibility of at least what Fox wants the messaging to be.
[00:34:20]  Carlson, whose contract was renewed in 2021, found out he's being let go about 10 minutes before the network announced his departure.
[00:34:29]  Let's see, I had it here someplace.
[00:34:31]  But I think they too were saying revelations in the Dominion lawsuit caught them off guard and so on.
[00:34:38]  So I still don't know the answer, you guys.
[00:34:41]  But let's just spend a minute on this Abby Grossberg, who is alleging toxic work environment.
[00:34:46]  She worked for Tucker, as far as I can tell, one month.
[00:34:49]  She was hired on his team in August, and then she got deposed in September and fired.
[00:34:56]  Fired because as soon as she got deposed by Dominion, she came out saying, Fox twisted my words.
[00:35:00]  They made me work with a lawyer who tried to change my testimony.
[00:35:03]  I'm filing a lawsuit against you.
[00:35:04]  And Fox is like, oh, you revealed a bunch of privileged information.
[00:35:06]  You're fired.
[00:35:07]  Anyway, what's your take on where we stand today, Emily?
[00:35:10]  Start with you.
[00:35:11]  Yeah, that's really interesting.
[00:35:12]  A really interesting point.
[00:35:13]  The idea that these hardened media executives had retreated to their fainting couches after hearing Tucker use the C-word about Sidney Powell is just unbelievable to the point of laughable.
[00:35:24]  Right.
[00:35:25]  Yeah, privately.
[00:35:25]  Exactly.
[00:35:26]  Exactly.
[00:35:27]  And my interpretation of all this is that it's their excuse to get rid of somebody who they found politically to be a problem for them, that they didn't want to sort of be backing the populist message.
[00:35:40]  And I know Victor Davis Hansen talked a little bit about that earlier.
[00:35:43]  I think that's really what it is, is that like Rupert had had enough to your reporting, Megan, and all of this after the Dominion decision snowballs into giving him a really convenient excuse to just say, we're done, it's over.
[00:35:57]  Tucker Carlson obviously had, there are a couple of things where in any normal workplace, you know, if a man is using the C word and it comes out in, you know, discovery or whatever, yeah, you get reprimanded, but this is the top person on their network.
[00:36:11]  Let's not act like a human, a human resources dispute is all Fox needed.
[00:36:16]  That was just a bridge too far for them.
[00:36:19]  Now, you know, he's insulting the executives.
[00:36:22]  Everybody who's worked in journalism knows there should always be a hostile relationship between the business side and the news side that's not unfamiliar to Fox whatsoever.
[00:36:31]  So to act like all of this, you know, this was just the final straw for them, I think is ridiculous.
[00:36:35]  But I do think it's the final straw in terms of having a convenient excuse to get rid of somebody that their sort of politics, they were no longer comfortable espousing or supporting as a network.
[00:36:47]  That's the best guess, the best guess that I have.
[00:36:49]  But it's very strange to see Fox leaking to the media and getting closer and closer to what their perspective is on this, because I don't think it's actually the truth.
[00:36:59]  Here's just the background, as I understand it on this producer.
[00:37:02]  She worked for Maria and she wound up complaining, I couldn't fact check Maria because we were understaffed.
[00:37:10]  Okay.
[00:37:12]  That's no excuse.
[00:37:13]  You're a producer.
[00:37:14]  You can fact check.
[00:37:14]  Fox News has a lot of resources, including this huge resource called The Brain Room, which was fact-checking the Sidney Powell claims.
[00:37:21]  You didn't need to do it yourself.
[00:37:22]  So that to me sounds already like somebody who's got some sour grapes about her experience and is trying to blame somebody else for something she fell down on.
[00:37:30]  Not excusing Maria here, but I'm not excusing Abby Grossenberg for the behavior either.
[00:37:34]  Go call the brain room.
[00:37:36]  They did fact check Sidney Powell.
[00:37:38]  So then here's what happened.
[00:37:39]  She joined Fox News in 2019.
[00:37:41]  She worked for Maria.
[00:37:42]  In August of 2022, she started to work with Tucker's team.
[00:37:45]  In September of 2022, she sat for her first deposition in the Dominion case.
[00:37:50]  Then she filed a lawsuit in March.
[00:37:53]  So what's that?
[00:37:54]  Six months later, March 20th, 2023, she filed a lawsuit against Fox saying, your lawyer tried to strong arm me at that deposition into saying nicer things about the staff than I wanted to say.
[00:38:06]  They made me run cover for people like Tucker.
[00:38:09]  And it was misogynistic because they were trying to hang me and Maria out to dry.
[00:38:15]  And this is a misogynistic place.
[00:38:16]  And I've been taping people.
[00:38:18]  And apparently she's going to air some of her tapes later today on MSNBC.
[00:38:21]  And as far as I can tell, Tucker has never even met this person.
[00:38:26]  So whatever misogyny she was subjected to, I suppose could have been amongst his staff.
[00:38:31]  But Moynihan, the idea that that's what led Rupert to cut ties with Tucker, his number one star, is laughable.
[00:38:40]  I mean, it's laughable.
[00:38:41]  I'm literally laughing.
[00:38:42]  It's laughable.
[00:38:43]  If you know anything about Rupert Murdoch, I mean, even the most sort of baseline stuff about how the man built his empire, you know that he's not a fool and he's not someone that will, you know, crumble to a 20-odd year-old woman who worked there for a month.
[00:38:59]  And by the way, who is taping people?
[00:39:02]  Is that a normal thing?
[00:39:03]  That should one expect to be taped by a new hire who then is going to sue you a few months later for misogyny and various other things.
[00:39:11]  It literally makes no sense.
[00:39:12]  But when, you know, it's a Mugs game to try to figure out why Tucker got fired, right?
[00:39:17]  But one of the things I think is quite revealing about it is when I've been kind of consuming all this stuff for the past 24 hours, it shows you kind of in a way why you can't trust the media.
[00:39:28]  Because I don't think this is deliberate.
[00:39:30]  I don't think people are doing this deliberately, but people are very willing to run the sources who work inside the news corp building, say they know something just to be first.
[00:39:40]  Because you have like mainstream people from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post to the LA Times to every web publication like the Daily Beast giving you a different story.
[00:39:51]  We know this is what happened.
[00:39:53]  And it's all rather different, isn't it?
[00:39:55]  So who does one trust?
[00:39:56]  And now you transpose that to other things.
[00:39:58]  You're like, well, geez, when they're trying to get stories out really quick, I mean, is this what it's always like?
[00:40:04]  Not a lot of fact checking.
[00:40:05]  We're just trying to rush it out there and say, this is why Tucker was hard.
[00:40:08]  Look, I saw one the other day that Tucker quit because he couldn't air a story about this Ray Epps character.
[00:40:15]  I mean, and this was from somebody that I normally trust too.
[00:40:18]  But this is the wild thing about this is that when it's compacted like this and you see the kind of how the sausage is made, you're like, man, that's one math problem with 50 different answers.
[00:40:29]  And that's kind of worrying.
[00:40:31]  Well, that's what's, I mean, to me, it's like this Daily Beast report is the one saying the vulgar comments he made about Sidney Powell.
[00:40:37]  Now, The Daily Beast, that's a left-leaning publication that has zero sources inside Fox who would be in a position to answer why Rupert made this decision, right?
[00:40:46]  So that's probably why they wound up with such an absurd theory that it was the Sidney Powell name-calling that got him fired.
[00:40:54]  The Wall Street Journal is Rupert's publication and their reasoning, they said it was because the executives saw more Tucker correspondence in the course of the Dominion lawsuit than the rest of us saw that ticked off Rupert and other executives.
[00:41:09]  Well, they've been in possession of that for months, for months and months and months.
[00:41:13]  And, you know, all indications were that they were on their way to renewing Tucker's deal.
[00:41:17]  And I know Tucker had a personal meeting with Rupert Murdoch a very short time ago that went well.
[00:41:23]  So, you know, what changed?
[00:41:26]  He had already been alerted to the negative comments, if any, in that, I just don't buy any of these excuses.
[00:41:32]  Something else happened.
[00:41:33]  Something else is going on to explain this termination.
[00:41:36]  And I don't exactly know what it was, but I do want to talk about the absolute meltdown over it in the media.
[00:41:42]  This is a montage that was put together of some of the most extreme reactions.
[00:41:47]  You guys might enjoy watching this.
[00:41:48]  It's SOP 15.
[00:41:50]  The worst thing about it is that Tucker, to me, was always a dumb person's idea of what a smart bigot sounded like.
[00:41:58]  He arguably has done more on cable television to spread the gospel of hate, fear, and paranoia than anyone since radio propagandist Father Coughlin in the Nazi era of the 1930s.
[00:42:10]  And as a result, whoever succeeds Tucker Carlson in Fox's coveted 8 p.m. time slot will be contending with an audience that has grown accustomed to watching the man who curated the most racist show in the history of cable news.
[00:42:25]  This doesn't mean that Fox is going to course correct, are they?
[00:42:28]  Because there's a whole hell of a lot of other people at Fox that need to go also.
[00:42:34]  Okay.
[00:42:35]  That's a good point.
[00:42:36]  Point a hand?
[00:42:36]  Father Cochlin.
[00:42:37]  Same thing.
[00:42:38]  That's what Mr. Rachel Maddow said, too.
[00:42:40]  Yeah, Father Coughlin and Rachel Maddow just did a very bad podcast that references Father Cochlin.
[00:42:47]  So I know she knows what she's talking about because Father Coughlin was a radio priest from Michigan who was a raving anti-Semite.
[00:42:55]  I mean, first he was a big supporter of the New Deal, and then he quite outspokenly said Jews are controlling the world and they're ruining the world.
[00:43:03]  If you think there's a parallel between Tucker Carlson and someone who was effectively like a Nazi, like a real Nazi saying that the Jews controlled the world, that is the wildest thing I have ever seen.
[00:43:14]  I mean, this is an expectation from MSNBC, but Megan, I have a bone to pick with you because when this happened, I said, I have to listen to Megan's show yesterday.
[00:43:24]  So what do I do pottering around the house?
[00:43:26]  I listen to your show and you do something that no one else does that it intrudes upon my life with the fucking view.
[00:43:34]  I have avoided this thing for so long and I only come across it on your damn show.
[00:43:39]  And this woman, I don't even know her name, but she starts singing.
[00:43:43]  not a good butt.
[00:43:45]  Yeah, Anna Navarro, who is like one of these conservatives that was a conservative for five minutes so she can be a conservative on the view.
[00:43:53]  And I thought, I was thinking about this and I said, this is the funniest, most deranged thing in the world.
[00:43:57]  It's almost as if, you know, if Steph Curry was going to be traded from the Golden Strait, people say, oh, he's done.
[00:44:03]  He's out of basketball.
[00:44:04]  No, he's on a different team now.
[00:44:05]  You're not getting rid of him.
[00:44:07]  Three and a half million people watch him and they love him.
[00:44:10]  Do you believe that he's gone?
[00:44:12]  And they're like, no, he won't have any influence.
[00:44:15]  Oh, just like Ben Shapiro has no influence and Joe Rogan has no influence whatsoever.
[00:44:19]  Like none.
[00:44:19]  Well, okay.
[00:44:20]  By the way, because I knew you were coming, I baked this cake for you from today's view, Moynihan.
[00:44:26]  Watch and enjoy.
[00:44:28]  I am stunned because I don't, and I hate that people are comparing Tucker's firing with Don's firing.
[00:44:35]  That's a whole very equivalency.

=== Don Lemon Blames Women (15:18) ===

[00:44:37]  Equivalency.
[00:44:39]  And just to put a button on it, Don, yes, said some things that were sexist and I think ageist.
[00:44:47]  He apologized for them and received formal training.
[00:44:51]  You know, he has been on the air for a long time fighting bigotry, whereas Tucker has been fomenting bigotry.
[00:44:57]  So there's a big difference there.
[00:44:58]  And yes, he did say some dumb things.
[00:45:00]  And apologize.
[00:45:01]  Tucker never pawns.
[00:45:02]  But I only know.
[00:45:03]  If you're concerned that somebody is a misogynist, why would you put them with two women to do a show?
[00:45:13]  If you feel that concern.
[00:45:18]  It's CNN's fault.
[00:45:19]  The misogyny is CNN's fault.
[00:45:21]  Too dumb for Jerry.
[00:45:23]  I mean, listen, she was raising a good question because according to Variety, he has a long history of misogyny at CNN.
[00:45:30]  Why did they put him with those two co-hosts?
[00:45:32]  But she's too stupid to actually figure out, oh, wait a minute.
[00:45:35]  He actually might have a long history of misogyny.
[00:45:38]  Go read the reports.
[00:45:40]  And the big difference, by the way, that they were, Sonny was talking about there, actually, the really big difference is one is very good at his job and the other is very bad at his job.
[00:45:50]  And it took popular.
[00:45:52]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:45:53]  And it took CNN a really long time to fire the guy who was bad at his job.
[00:45:57]  And Fox News took what seems like a pretty quick opportunity to get rid of the guy who's really good at his job.
[00:46:03]  And I'll let listeners, because they're smart enough to distinguish between what might be the difference there.
[00:46:08]  It could have something to do with their politics, but it's just so funny to hear them cheerleading the ouster.
[00:46:15]  And by the way, we take for granted, like, because everyone here knows that, of course, the media repeats these awful things about Tucker Carlson that are not based in fact night after night.
[00:46:24]  Even if you don't like Tucker Carlson, even if you agree with, you don't agree with him, to smear him as a racist along the lines of Father Cockley, I mean, just unbelievable, but they're repeated uncritically on MSNBC and CNN.
[00:46:37]  And it's just no big deal that you're smearing someone baselessly as an like a virulent anti-semite racist bigot.
[00:46:45]  And it's just a shrug.
[00:46:46]  And they just take their plaudits for it and move on.
[00:46:49]  I want to get back to him.
[00:46:50]  I want to get like virtue signal points for it.
[00:46:52]  I want to get back to Father Coglin one second, but can we just spend one minute, Moynihan?
[00:46:57]  Don Lemon apologized and received formal training.
[00:47:02]  He went to the camp.
[00:47:03]  It's like he went to the camp.
[00:47:05]  He's been re-educated in about 48 hours and now he's fine.
[00:47:09]  Look, the thing about that is like, that's not the reason you should fire Don Lemon.
[00:47:14]  Honestly, you should fire Don Lemon because he's bad at his job, as Emily said.
[00:47:18]  I agree.
[00:47:19]  And it's reflected in the numbers.
[00:47:21]  I mean, it is a false equivalence.
[00:47:22]  3.5 million to what, 200,000?
[00:47:25]  Not the same thing.
[00:47:26]  Literally, a sheer 300,000.
[00:47:28]  That's what his morning show drops.
[00:47:30]  What did he have?
[00:47:30]  The eight o'clock slot?
[00:47:31]  And then he's put into the morning and he can't produce anywhere.
[00:47:35]  If he was producing, I think they'd be a little more forgiving.
[00:47:37]  But the idea that he said something stupid, like, look, cable news is about saying stupid things.
[00:47:42]  Many media exists for stupid things, right?
[00:47:45]  We enjoy it.
[00:47:46]  And Don Lemon has said some really stupid things.
[00:47:49]  And I was reminded the other day, I was talking to my friend and the friend of the show too, Camille Foster.
[00:47:54]  And I said, do you remember when he said that the missing plane was eaten by a black hole?
[00:47:59]  It was like, oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:48:00]  This is maybe Guy is not great at his job.
[00:48:03]  And that was the first indication to me.
[00:48:05]  And by the way, to those dumbasses over at The View, he did not apologize.
[00:48:09]  He sent out a Twitter attempt at an apology.
[00:48:12]  He never said anything on the air apologizing to Nikki Haley or the millions of women that he did offend with that comment.
[00:48:19]  So maybe you need a little re-education.
[00:48:21]  And the camp didn't work because we just showed the soundbite of him dismissing his co-anchor Poppy Harlow on the air.
[00:48:27]  Yet again, she was trying to give a nice goodbye to Vivek Ramaswamy.
[00:48:31]  And she had to jump in, like, no, no, we're moving on.
[00:48:34]  Goodbye.
[00:48:35]  It's over.
[00:48:36]  He's just unlikable.
[00:48:38]  And eventually, CNN got it.
[00:48:41]  I want to give Poppy Harlow an amazing amount of credit because it forced me to watch that clip when he was fired with Vivek.
[00:48:49]  And in the middle of this ridiculous, horrible interview, it's not a good interview.
[00:48:55]  There is a moment where you can see Poppy Harlow picks up her phone and starts texting, which I thought was the best response.
[00:49:01]  You can actually see that she's just like, this is ridiculous.
[00:49:04]  I can't even believe I'm on television with these people.
[00:49:06]  This is ridiculous.
[00:49:07]  I loved that.
[00:49:08]  But, you know, that's a good example of why I should be fired.
[00:49:10]  This is an absolutely awful interview.
[00:49:13]  Emily said, texting Chris Licht.
[00:49:15]  Just putting the sound on.
[00:49:16]  I'm Don one again.
[00:49:19]  Save me.
[00:49:19]  Or Chris Cuomo.
[00:49:21]  By the way, by the way, so Don was off the show for like a week and the ratings went up.
[00:49:26]  Now, this is not a way to keep your job.
[00:49:29]  You can't both be an ass and have shitty ratings.
[00:49:33]  And then when you're off, have the ratings go up and think you're going to keep your job.
[00:49:37]  But his statement yesterday was like, I am stunned.
[00:49:39]  I had no warning.
[00:49:40]  And then we learned today he had plenty of warning.
[00:49:45]  So on the subject of Don Lemon and his co-hosts, here's a little sample of Poppy and Caitlin.
[00:49:52]  I mean, grinning ear to ear this morning when they made their announcement that Don was no longer with CNN.
[00:50:00]  As you may have heard yesterday, CNN parted ways with anchor Don Lemon.
[00:50:03]  In a statement, CNN CEO Chris Licht thanked Don for his contributions over the past 17 years.
[00:50:09]  Of course, Don was a big part of this show over the last six months.
[00:50:11]  He was one of the first anchors on CNN to have me on his show.
[00:50:14]  That's something I'll obviously never forget.
[00:50:16]  I agree with Chris.
[00:50:17]  We wish him the best.
[00:50:18]  Yeah, we certainly do.
[00:50:18]  Don was one of my first friends here at CNN.
[00:50:21]  I'm so thankful to have worked alongside him and for his support for nearly 15 years here.
[00:50:26]  And I wish him all good things ahead.
[00:50:28]  Our priority is you, the viewer.
[00:50:30]  We're grateful you welcome us into your home each morning.
[00:50:35]  You can just tell they're in a good mood.
[00:50:37]  It's a happy day.
[00:50:38]  And there's nobody.
[00:50:39]  I mean, if you read reports in Daily Mail and elsewhere, there's no one shedding any tears that Don has gone.
[00:50:44]  No one.
[00:50:44]  Well, they had also clearly been leaking against Don, both of them, to Page 6 and other tabloids for a very long time.
[00:50:51]  And to your point, Megan, about media just being disgusting, like that is it on a silver platter.
[00:50:55]  That is what you need to know about media exactly.
[00:50:58]  And by the way, I think the first person to give Caitlin a job in journalism was Tucker Carlson.
[00:51:02]  Tucker Carlson.
[00:51:03]  Yeah.
[00:51:03]  Yes.
[00:51:03]  That's right.
[00:51:04]  And by the way, she, Caitlin Collins dumped Jay Suarez, her agent at UTA, because he was Don Lemon's agent too.
[00:51:16]  That happened about six weeks ago, according to the New York Post.
[00:51:20]  And that was a smart move because when you have an agent who's got loyalty to the person you're warring with and not to you, which is the suggestion here, you shouldn't stay with that agent.
[00:51:31]  So this was the writing was on the wall for a while here.
[00:51:35]  And, you know, you can tell that there's nobody there at CNN who's shedding any tears about Don's departure.
[00:51:42]  We'll see what he does.
[00:51:43]  I think it's a totally different situation for him.
[00:51:46]  I think Tucker will have a huge career no matter where he decides to go next and probably be independent.
[00:51:49]  And I don't think Don Lemon will at all.
[00:51:51]  I really don't.
[00:51:52]  I think he's going to be like, you know, we talked about Moynihan when you guys were on last week, the Chris Cuomo Project podcast and how he alleged he bumped up to some next somebody in his car.
[00:52:03]  People jamming it in the streets of Manhattan, just with their tops down listening to Chris Cuomo.
[00:52:10]  The weather's getting warm.
[00:52:11]  How fun is this?
[00:52:15]  Yeah, it was the lesser known Steve Cuomo.
[00:52:21]  That's going to be Don's future.
[00:52:23]  Yeah.
[00:52:24]  Well, look, look, he doesn't have an audience.
[00:52:26]  He's a guy on TV.
[00:52:28]  That's different, right?
[00:52:29]  I mean, you know, it reminded me of is it reminded me of another person who had been fired a long time ago at CNN was, and now I'm forgetting his name, the man who made the supposedly anti-Semitic Rick Sanchez.
[00:52:42]  Whatever happened to Rick Sanchez?
[00:52:43]  I mean, he had a big show that had decent, better numbers than Don Lemon had.
[00:52:47]  And he was fired for, you know, a couple of dodgy comments and never heard from him again.
[00:52:52]  I mean, people aren't clamoring for Don Lemon's opinion on things.
[00:52:57]  I mean, he can barely formulate a sentence.
[00:52:59]  You had a clip before of a guy at MSNBC.
[00:53:02]  And this is like the oldest, most boring thing that one can say is it's a stupid person's idea of a smart person.
[00:53:08]  That's actually a thing that stupid people now say because it's repeated like this mantra.
[00:53:13]  But that's actually ridiculously untrue about Tucker.
[00:53:16]  I mean, I have known Tucker for a long time.
[00:53:17]  I disagree with him on a lot of things these days.
[00:53:21]  We were a lot closer when he was like a fellow at the Cato Institute, referred to himself as a libertarian in an interview with me a long time ago, even tried to hire me at one point.
[00:53:28]  And he's gone much more to the populist right direction.
[00:53:30]  So I disagree with him on a lot of things, a lot of things.
[00:53:33]  But the guy is really whip smart and he's a great writer.
[00:53:36]  And everyone acknowledges this when he used to write for George Magazine, Talk Magazine, Mainstream, The New Republic, incredible stuff.
[00:53:43]  And people don't remember that the most famous thing in George W. Bush's election campaign in 2000 was the Carla Fay Tucker thing, when Carla Fay Tucker, who was on death row in Texas, Bush mocked her.
[00:53:55]  That came out because of a profile that Tucker Carlson wrote and was a very, very good one.
[00:54:00]  And this guy's really bright.
[00:54:01]  He writes all those monologues and everything himself.
[00:54:03]  Don Lemon in that Vivek interview could barely formulate a sentence.
[00:54:08]  He was saying, well, you don't talk to a black man like this.
[00:54:11]  It's like, by the way, Vivek has, you know, pretty dark skin.
[00:54:14]  I guess maybe he's saying a cultural thing.
[00:54:15]  I'm not sure.
[00:54:16]  Is Brown going to be?
[00:54:17]  That is the level of argument that you get from him.
[00:54:19]  Yeah, that's exactly right.
[00:54:20]  And I love the fact that that montage ended with Ali Velshi saying, oh, Tucker built the most racist show on television.
[00:54:27]  I will never forget Roger Ailes used to use Ali Velshi as the example of what not to do on television about why, I think it was CNN at the time he was there, was failing.
[00:54:39]  Like, look at that guy.
[00:54:40]  Look how bad he is.
[00:54:42]  He's such a joke.
[00:54:43]  And here, now he's at MSNBC still getting zero ratings just by running around calling everybody a racist, Emily.
[00:54:50]  And no, that's actually really interesting because I think what Ali Velshi does is a very bad impression of Don Lemon.
[00:54:55]  And it seems like he watched the Don Lemon model of how to anchor on CNN, which is to be excessively smug, but also excessively ignorant.
[00:55:03]  A wonderful combination that is sure to draw viewers night after night.
[00:55:07]  But it works for this like tiny little audience.
[00:55:10]  And you can see that's all they're able to draw in either at MSNBC or CNN.
[00:55:14]  MSNBC obviously gets a little bit more of it because they're willing to at least be slightly honest sometimes and say they're outright liberal, but it is so unit's so unappealing.
[00:55:23]  I can't imagine sitting down at a television set and watching Ali Velchi just condescend to like 90% of the country day after day or Don Lemon.
[00:55:34]  And that's the thing.
[00:55:35]  Don Lemon doesn't have anything to take with him because he's not interesting.
[00:55:39]  And he kind of used to be slightly more interesting when he used to talk about race in a way that he thought would get clicks.
[00:55:45]  And if he, if Tucker Carlson had said any of the things Don Lemon had said back then, he actually would have been canceled maybe.
[00:55:52]  But it's just like he's completely uninteresting.
[00:55:55]  He has nothing worth listening to to say because he's allowed himself to be beaten into this just useless gray vanilla cable TV blob where you just are like a factory of anti-Trump and anti-Tucker and anti-conservative commentary.
[00:56:11]  So that Jason Johnson was in the first part of that clip saying he's like what you were saying, Moynihan.
[00:56:17]  He's like a dumb man's vision of what a smart man sounds like or what a smart bigot sounds like.
[00:56:23]  That condescension.
[00:56:24]  Like if you like Tucker, you're a dumbass bigot.
[00:56:27]  You're stupid.
[00:56:28]  And the only reason you like him is because he shares your dumbass bigotry.
[00:56:31]  That's what he was saying.
[00:56:33]  And to parley on what you said with that comment, Moynihan, what you just said, Emily, about the condescension of Don Lemon, who shares exactly that worldview of Jason Johnson, we pulled just a short montage of some of that, some of that piece of Don, which was a massive turnoff.
[00:56:48]  He used to be more reasonable.
[00:56:49]  That's when I knew him back in 2014, 15.
[00:56:51]  And then he went super woke.
[00:56:53]  And I do believe broke is about to follow.
[00:56:56]  Here's a little bit: 27.
[00:56:59]  The people who ate and abetted Trump are stupid.
[00:57:01]  I've lived in several red states.
[00:57:04]  There are a lot of friends who I had to really get rid of, taking down the statues.
[00:57:07]  Crime is rising as they defund police.
[00:57:09]  Oh my gosh, it's so bad.
[00:57:11]  You voted for Trump.
[00:57:12]  You voted for the person who the Klan supported.
[00:57:17]  You voted for the person who Nazis support.
[00:57:20]  You're not going to get vaccinated.
[00:57:22]  You don't want to social distance.
[00:57:23]  You don't want to wear a mask.
[00:57:25]  Then maybe you don't want to go to the hospital when you get sick.
[00:57:28]  We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men.
[00:57:36]  We have to stop coddling people when it comes to this and the vaccine saying, oh, you can't shame them.
[00:57:42]  You can't call them stupid.
[00:57:43]  You can't call them silly guys.
[00:57:45]  Yes, they are.
[00:57:46]  The people who are not getting vaccines, who are believing the lies on the internet instead of science, it's time to start shaming them.
[00:57:53]  What else?
[00:57:54]  Or leave them behind.
[00:57:56]  Weirdly, Emily, his transition to morning TV didn't really work.
[00:58:00]  They weren't able to forget all that in the new more Republican-leaning CNNs.
[00:58:04]  Weirdly, they had a memory.
[00:58:06]  Just imagine waking up in the morning and drinking your coffee, sipping your coffee, and just being told the entire country is full of racist bigots.
[00:58:14]  Like that's nothing invigorates you for a hard day at the office, quite like being implicated in widespread racism and bigotry.
[00:58:22]  And with him, it's like, I can't even believe some of that stuff is real because, again, it's so, it's such bad journalism that in another era, it would have stopped right away.
[00:58:32]  I mean, people acting like that would have stopped right away, but it was rewarded time and time and time and again at CNN because they just looked past all of it.
[00:58:40]  And his, I mean, with Chris Licht, obviously, I think it's interesting.
[00:58:43]  He hired what Zucker's ex-mistress immediately to do PR for him, Don Lemon.
[00:58:49]  Don did.
[00:58:49]  And I think yeah.
[00:58:50]  And it's so interesting because it shows like he was very much in the Zucker brand, the Zucker mold.
[00:58:56]  And when that was, when the time was up on the Zucker mold, the time was up on Don.
[00:59:00]  Took a little bit longer.
[00:59:02]  No, that's a great point.
[00:59:03]  All those clips were during the Jeff Zucker era.
[00:59:06]  That was primetime Don Lemon who failed as well.
[00:59:09]  That was a disaster of a show.
[00:59:10]  And that's why he was so upset when Jeff Zucker got fired.
[00:59:13]  That's when he went on the air and reminded everybody I'm a black gay man, black gay man.
[00:59:17]  Just in case you forgot who's sitting in this slot, black gay.
[00:59:20]  Thanks to Jeff Zucker.
[00:59:21]  He's the one who put me here.
[00:59:22]  Hint Hand Chris Licked.
[00:59:24]  And Chris Lick came in and is trying to change CNN.
[00:59:26]  And I don't think it's going to work, but good for him for at least trying.
[00:59:29]  And he's dealt with this.
[00:59:32]  He's got to deal with this, this hangover, right?
[00:59:34]  Of like all these nightmare comments and so on and decides to move him out of primetime.
[00:59:39]  Yes, but out the door should have been the next stop.
[00:59:41]  And instead, he moved him to the mornings, which of course was a disaster waiting to happen.
[00:59:46]  Didn't work.
[00:59:46]  The co-hosts hate him, according to the post, and all the stuff.
[00:59:50]  And now, Monihan, what we get, the Daily Beast, I mock their reporting on Fox saying it was about Sidney Powell, but they are of the left.

=== Reminding Everyone Who Is Black Gay (15:54) ===

[00:59:56]  And I'll bet you they have some good sources at CNN.
[00:59:58]  And this is what they report on Lemon.
[01:00:00]  His fate had been sealed for weeks.
[01:00:03]  People with knowledge of the matter told us.
[01:00:05]  Because remember, he claimed in his statement yesterday, I was blindsided.
[01:00:08]  I had no idea this was coming.
[01:00:10]  His fate had been sealed for weeks.
[01:00:12]  And he was keenly aware of his coming exit, calling around over the last week for a crisis communications specialist to help out.
[01:00:21]  He ultimately decided, as Emily just pointed out, on Allison Gallist, who previously ran comms for CNN and resigned from the network two weeks after former CEO Jeff Zucker was fired for not disclosing his relationship with her.
[01:00:33]  Well, I mean, come on, Allison Gallist was also forced out of CNN after she'd been humiliated.
[01:00:38]  She'd been promoted up the line at PR over other deserving women at a time when she was screwing the boss.
[01:00:44]  So yeah, that can lead to problems if you stay in your post and then try to run comms.
[01:00:49]  That's who he hired.
[01:00:50]  So he knew it was coming.
[01:00:51]  His feigned indignation yesterday was an act.
[01:00:54]  And CNN has already said, we wanted to talk to you directly.
[01:00:57]  We would have let you say goodbye on the air.
[01:01:00]  Instead, you threw a hissy fit with your little Twitter statement.
[01:01:02]  Like, I can't believe this.
[01:01:05]  Yeah.
[01:01:06]  You know who else knew it was coming?
[01:01:08]  Anyone who read the New York Post.
[01:01:11]  Everyone's like, has he not been fired yet?
[01:01:13]  I can't believe he hasn't been fired yet.
[01:01:15]  I love, by the way, that montage because it has one of the greatest, you know, three-second clips where he says, we really have to stop the demonization in this country.
[01:01:27]  You know, the problem is white people.
[01:01:30]  Did he actually just say it like that?
[01:01:32]  Is he that unaware of what he just said?
[01:01:35]  It's like that person probably shouldn't be on TV.
[01:01:38]  But like Chris Lickt, like, look, I actually appreciate the fact that he's, I mean, I don't think he's been successful at it so far, obviously, because you don't put Don Lemon from a failing show at eight o'clock into the morning show.
[01:01:48]  I mean, like, if you have bad players in the team, you don't shuffle them to different positions.
[01:01:52]  You trade them.
[01:01:53]  You get new players.
[01:01:53]  And I think that's probably what they need to do at this point.
[01:01:56]  But, you know, look, I appreciate the idea of trying to make CNN kind of trend a middle path because in the past, when I was in a hotel room, and that's essentially like, you know, the only time I watch cable news, I would turn on CNN because I just, you know, was, you know, my job is to be a jerk about politics.
[01:02:15]  And I want to hear someone talk about it, you know, down the center.
[01:02:18]  I would turn on CNN.
[01:02:20]  But look, there's after Donald Trump, there's diminishing returns of that kind of constantly beating the drum about how psychotic his supporters are, how psychotic he is, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:02:32]  I think the reason that people like someone like Joe Rogan is that it's contemplative.
[01:02:37]  It's long.
[01:02:38]  We were told a long time ago, like when you're doing a podcast, make it quick.
[01:02:42]  People have very short attention spans in the internet error.
[01:02:44]  And it turns out people like three hours of Joe Rogan because he has interesting people on.
[01:02:48]  He asks very probing, searching questions.
[01:02:50]  He's willing to be wrong about things.
[01:02:52]  You see a guy with Don Lemon, he is so sure about himself in such a clumsy, dumb way.
[01:02:57]  That's like off-putting to a lot of people.
[01:02:59]  Partisans love it, I guess, but that's not the recipe for like a successful TV show.
[01:03:04]  I don't think it's so true.
[01:03:05]  And what is it?
[01:03:06]  Like often wrong, never in doubt.
[01:03:07]  And Tucker is the opposite.
[01:03:10]  I would say sometimes wrong, always in doubt.
[01:03:13]  Tucker is so self-deprecating when he talks about himself and the many things he's gotten wrong and the many times he's learned from his mistakes.
[01:03:20]  You fall in love with the guy.
[01:03:21]  I mean, you see he is not what the media tells you he is.
[01:03:25]  And yet, back to Father Coughlin, look, listen to Rachel Maddow.
[01:03:30]  She's lost her mind.
[01:03:32]  Somehow she managed to rope in Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Tucker into this montage.
[01:03:43]  You'll see it.
[01:03:44]  Watch.
[01:03:45]  Something like a quarter of the entire population of the United States was listening to him on the radio every week.
[01:03:54]  Until they weren't.
[01:03:55]  His name was Father Charles Coughlin when he started explicitly telling his followers, I choose the road of fascism.
[01:04:03]  That was awkward for his bosses at the church.
[01:04:06]  The next closest sort of long shadow of that guy's influence was this guy who in the late 1980s started an AM radio career.
[01:04:16]  At his height, he really seemed like his potential was limitless until it didn't.
[01:04:20]  Then after him, there was this guy who also built a fast-growing audience.
[01:04:25]  And at the Fox News channel, he was their fastest-growing star, which they must have been very happy with at Fox News until they weren't.
[01:04:33]  Then it was this guy.
[01:04:34]  This guy actually was the biggest host that Fox ever had.
[01:04:38]  He was the most dominant voice in right-wing television ever until he wasn't.
[01:04:44]  Now there's this guy, their latest, biggest thing.
[01:04:49]  And he's out today as well.
[01:04:52]  He's been fired.
[01:04:53]  Over time, whoever the dominant figure is gets smaller and smaller and smaller over time.
[01:04:58]  Dominance inside conservative media doesn't tend to cross over into any other kind of major influence.
[01:05:08]  Ugh.
[01:05:10]  Right.
[01:05:11]  Oh, now, why is that, Rachel?
[01:05:13]  Because you lefties control the media and you control Hollywood, you control sports, and you're trying to take over corporate America.
[01:05:22]  But when voters go to the polls, the country's 50-50.
[01:05:26]  So you can dismiss conservatives in this country as powerless all you want, but there's a reason they took back the House.
[01:05:35]  And there's a reason they could very well take back the Senate and possibly the White House next time around.
[01:05:40]  And your people will not always be in control.
[01:05:42]  And by the way, you step down from your show.
[01:05:45]  You only do a show on Monday nights now and are far less powerful with your voice than you ever were before too.
[01:05:51]  Just the smug, disgusting satisfaction.
[01:05:53]  And to compare those conservative giants, Emily, to Father Coughlin is absolutely disgusting.
[01:06:00]  She's shameful.
[01:06:02]  I was surprised she didn't hit for the cycle and bring Hitler in too, actually, because it seems like that's where she was going with it.
[01:06:07]  And again, like this stuff gets repeated on primetime MSNBC.
[01:06:11]  Nobody has to apologize.
[01:06:13]  And of course, Tucker was subject to how many boycott attempts by really well-funded, well-coordinated left-wing groups that pulled advertisers, were successful at pulling advertisers off the air.
[01:06:23]  People are not doing that to Rachel Maddow.
[01:06:25]  And if they did, it wouldn't be covered positively in corporate press like it was every time someone came after Tucker.
[01:06:30]  And by the way, Tucker and Rachel Maddow previously used to have pretty nice things to say about each other.
[01:06:35]  They were both at MSNBC at the same time.
[01:06:37]  He gave her her start.
[01:06:38]  I think he gave her her first on-air appearance.
[01:06:41]  And what's interesting about that is it's such a sad case study in the arc of American media because Rachel Maddow, like Tucker, used to be very thoughtful, contemplative.
[01:06:50]  The word Michael used is perfect because also, Megan, you mentioned how he's self-deprecating.
[01:06:55]  He actually was always self-deprecating.
[01:06:56]  He was just at the Heritage Foundation on Friday night talking about how he completely changed his views on a lot of things when he realized that he was wrong.
[01:07:03]  And he did that on a show night after night.
[01:07:05]  Rachel Maddow still hasn't said a word about what she got wrong during the Russia Collusion hoax that I'm aware of in really serious contemplative fashion.
[01:07:13]  And so you used to have way more thoughtful, good faith interactions in American media.
[01:07:19]  You used to have Buckley, William F. Buckley, bringing Gore Vidal on, hosting debates between Phyllis Schlafly and Betty Friedan or whoever it was.
[01:07:27]  And that used to be a fixture of American media.
[01:07:29]  We used to really appreciate that.
[01:07:31]  But now you can never envision Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow sitting down hashing out these conversations.
[01:07:37]  Why?
[01:07:38]  Well, it's not the fault of Tucker Carlson.
[01:07:39]  It's the fault of Rachel Maddow and everyone who controls these corporate media networks believing that Tucker Carlson is a racist, saying that he had the most racist show ever on American television, repeating that uncritically on all of these platforms, New York Times, NBC, doesn't matter.
[01:07:55]  And that's the problem is fundamentally they are the roadblock to that healthier media and they're trying to profit off of it and it's not working.
[01:08:02]  Yes, it's so well said.
[01:08:04]  I just like the amount of hatred by people on like the hard left is coming out right now and it's absolutely disgusting.
[01:08:13]  You've got to go, you know, to the Father Coughlin place in the wake of Tucker being fired.
[01:08:18]  Like that's that's where you want to go.
[01:08:20]  Even Keith Oberman was saying similar things, comparing Tucker to a Nazi.
[01:08:26]  He also, for good measure, decided to tweet about me because I said Tucker is going to be better off without Fox and said something to the effect of, you got fired from Fox and NBC.
[01:08:35]  What would you know about it?
[01:08:36]  So first of all, you misstate the circumstances of my departure from NBC, sir.
[01:08:39]  That's all I'm allowed to say about it.
[01:08:41]  And as for Fox, there were widely reported facts that I was offered $100 million to stay there.
[01:08:47]  But the record's very clear that I left voluntarily because I wanted to raise my family, something you don't know anything about, because no one would marry you and you have no children.
[01:08:55]  You have a cold, lonely life in which you become a bitter, bitter man, something I wouldn't know anything about because my life is joyful and I've managed to raise my own children.
[01:09:04]  And someday, I hope you have that pleasure, but I don't have high hopes it's going to happen.
[01:09:09]  But Moynihan, the left job?
[01:09:11]  No, no, he's got a podcast.
[01:09:13]  What he does have is a podcast that nobody's listening to that we crush.
[01:09:18]  So in any event, but the bitterness, and that brings me to Joy Reed, who is equally angry.
[01:09:24]  She's got to be the next to go.
[01:09:25]  I mean, we'll see.
[01:09:26]  But here was her messaging on Tucker's fall.
[01:09:30]  No grand sendoff for Tuckham's.
[01:09:33]  No final show for him to sign off with his viewers.
[01:09:36]  It's almost hard to believe that just months ago, Tucker wielded so much power.
[01:09:42]  Kevin McCarthy traded him 40,000 hours of exclusive January 6th footage in his hostage deal to become speaker.
[01:09:51]  Yet today, Tucker has officially achieved something that I don't think anyone else in our industry can claim.
[01:09:58]  Being let go by all three major cable news networks.
[01:10:02]  MSNBC, yes, he used to work here.
[01:10:04]  He arguably has done more on cable television to spread the gospel of hate, fear, and paranoia than anyone since radio propagandist Father Coughlin in the Nazi era of the 1930s.
[01:10:18]  Doesn't she hate gays?
[01:10:20]  Isn't that the person who had a hold of the money?
[01:10:22]  No, no.
[01:10:22]  Megan, I'm not going to let you spread misinformation about an account that was brutally hacked.
[01:10:29]  We still haven't found a perpetrator.
[01:10:30]  OJ's looking for the hacker.
[01:10:32]  But yeah, she was hacked to say that she didn't like gay people.
[01:10:36]  Like, look, actually, Joy Reed, I think I had done a radio thing with her on Sirius, you know, maybe eight years ago, and she was a very different person.
[01:10:43]  I mean, she was a person of the left, but this cartoonish thing, it was quite funny.
[01:10:49]  They accused Tucker of this.
[01:10:50]  And, you know, I, again, have to reiterate when what Emily was saying at, you know, Tucker at Heritage said he changed his mind when he realized he was wrong.
[01:10:58]  I think the things that he says he was wrong about, he was actually right before, he's probably wrong about now.
[01:11:03]  But the thing I like about Tucker is that, you know, I can have that debate with him.
[01:11:08]  I'm sure if I ran into him, we could have like a spirited discussion about it.
[01:11:12]  And that echo chamber of Jory Reed's show and on MSNBC, I'll give you an example of this.
[01:11:17]  I saw an episode of Tucker's show that made my veins pop.
[01:11:21]  I was so annoyed by it.
[01:11:22]  But he had a guest on and they were talking about American foreign policy.
[01:11:25]  And look, it was a no, it sounded like Noam Chomsky on Fox News.
[01:11:29]  But you know what?
[01:11:30]  I was actually happy about it.
[01:11:31]  I'm like, oh, we'll talk about it on the fifth column.
[01:11:33]  I'm glad that this is being aired.
[01:11:35]  I'm not somebody who wants views to be suppressed and they say, oh, nah, nah, nah, Tucker's gone.
[01:11:42]  The ideas aren't going anywhere.
[01:11:44]  You have to win on the battlefield of ideas rather than saying, well, he's gotten fired.
[01:11:48]  It's all over.
[01:11:49]  Where do those 3.5 million people go?
[01:11:51]  And by the way, that montage of people saying, oh, you know, he's done.
[01:11:55]  These people disappear.
[01:11:57]  Well, that's partially true in the sense that, you know, a band that was popular in 1980 and playing stadiums is probably playing clubs now.
[01:12:04]  And that does happen, but not now.
[01:12:08]  I mean, you think that if Tucker is going to take this audience, going to leave it, he's going to have more people.
[01:12:13]  I saw this article in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning, like, oh, he's all done.
[01:12:17]  He had this huge audience.
[01:12:18]  And look, they just, you know, axed him, good luck, Tucker, buy same thing.
[01:12:23]  You don't think that he could parlay that like Ben Shapiro into a much bigger audience?
[01:12:28]  You can do this stuff on demand.
[01:12:30]  You don't have to watch it at eight o'clock.
[01:12:31]  You don't have to TiVo it or whatever the hell people do now.
[01:12:34]  You can just call it up.
[01:12:35]  He's going to have like, you know, he's got three offers.
[01:12:38]  What?
[01:12:38]  You know, Ben Shapiro has made one.
[01:12:40]  Glenn Beck has made one.
[01:12:41]  All these conservative networks, Newsmax, Chris Ruddy made him one.
[01:12:45]  He's not going to be without a home.
[01:12:47]  And he's going to have a big audience because someone like Tucker, as I said before, in comparison to Don Lennon, Don Lemon, they have an audience that follows them because they're following Tucker.
[01:12:57]  Look, the thing is, Tucker will probably have fewer people over the age of 65 watching him.
[01:13:03]  That's true.
[01:13:04]  Sure.
[01:13:04]  The digital world is much younger than the cable news world, but he will have huge numbers, just like I do, just like you guys do.
[01:13:13]  Millions of people watch this show every week, millions of people.
[01:13:16]  And that's power.
[01:13:19]  And while Rachel Maddow may not be watching this show or the fifth column or the Federalist, millions of other people are taking in these products voraciously because they're looking for alternate voices to the ones they hear like hers on MSNBC.
[01:13:33]  And frankly, like the things they're hearing on Fox News that they've been hearing forever.
[01:13:38]  The thing that made Tucker special was he was different.
[01:13:40]  Now they're back to the same.
[01:13:43]  You know, it's, I like a lot of these guys.
[01:13:44]  I'm just saying it's an old formula.
[01:13:47]  It's not the way of the future.
[01:13:48]  And so just because Rachel Maddow doesn't hear Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly doesn't mean they don't still hold enormous influence, especially Glenn, who's got a whole media empire that he built.
[01:14:00]  It just shows their little liberal elite circles, Emily, that they never leave, that they think these people have just washed up and gone away.
[01:14:06]  Oh, right.
[01:14:07]  Like, okay, sure.
[01:14:09]  Yeah.
[01:14:09]  Don Lemon, by the way, that montage, he sounds like someone who's never met an actual Trump supporter in the wild that isn't like a CNN person who he's having on a show to dunk on.
[01:14:19]  I think that's an important point.
[01:14:20]  And also this idea, this argument that Fox News is tantamount to mind control, right?
[01:14:25]  Like it has manipulated millions of boomers into pulling the lover for Trump and becoming racist populists is like completely wrong and also completely insulting.
[01:14:36]  It also tells you what they think of their own audience, by the way, that they are just manipulating your feeble minds with their propaganda, that that's what television is.
[01:14:44]  It's where you do mind control and it's just like clockwork orange.
[01:14:48]  You can change the entire country and turn them all into like completely stupid sheep with your propaganda on TV.
[01:14:55]  That's not to say it isn't powerful, but if anything, Tucker was following the audience.
[01:14:59]  He learned like a lot of people did and like a lot of people didn't in 2016 that there was some stuff going on between the coasts and that people had different ideas, for instance, about American foreign policy than the neoconservatism, the Republican Party, wouldn't breathe a word against.
[01:15:14]  And you would rarely hear disagreement with on a place like even Fox News primetime, you know, Bill Reilly, Sean Hannity, and he picked up on that and learned from it.
[01:15:23]  And so it's, if anything, he's the one that was following the audience.
[01:15:27]  So you can bet a whole lot of people will follow him in ways that they're not going to follow Don Lemon or that they wouldn't follow Rachel Maddow.
[01:15:34]  So last question.
[01:15:35]  What does this mean for Fox?
[01:15:37]  You know, they've weathered storms in the past.
[01:15:40]  Tucker's a unique talent and the audience is mad.
[01:15:43]  So what do you think, Moynihan?
[01:15:45]  What does this mean for Fox?
[01:15:47]  I mean, it can't mean anything good in the short run.

=== Fox In Real Trouble Now (04:37) ===

[01:15:51]  They haven't been great and talent developments.
[01:15:54]  I mean, they've had a lot of the people that have been there for a long time and some of them are great.
[01:15:59]  I mean, like my friend Greg Gutfeld, who, you know, I think Roger saw this actually at a show called Red Eye that was on at 3 a.m.
[01:16:05]  And at that point, by the way, at 3 a.m., he was beating CNN and then I think the nine o'clock and eight o'clock spots at 3 a.m.
[01:16:12]  And I used to do that show all the time.
[01:16:13]  And Greg was obviously a talent.
[01:16:15]  And now his show, which is what, 11 o'clock or something like that, is beating all the late night comedy shows because it's not, it doesn't feel like you're being lectured to in school and it's a little looser.
[01:16:25]  But, you know, if they, if they could manage to kind of get somebody else like Greg, I mean, I know some people have suggested Greg move over, but that show is way too successful for them to throw it out the window and have him try to inhabit that eight o'clock spot.
[01:16:38]  And I know that Roger really liked him, but I think there's a lot of, you know, young people out there.
[01:16:42]  I would say if they want to kind of, you know, be back in the game in a way, and I think they're going to be out of the game for a little bit with this because Tucker was their biggest, biggest property.
[01:16:51]  I mean, the five being the second one.
[01:16:53]  I think you look outside to where the other people are, where the kind of internet people are and say, who are the great talents here?
[01:16:59]  And maybe try to just, you know, call someone up from the minors and just give them a spot in the big show like, you know, NBC did with Conan O'Brien in like 1992.
[01:17:09]  That is what I would do if I were Fox at this point.
[01:17:11]  Not sort of recycle somebody from inside.
[01:17:14]  What they're up against is they don't have Roger anymore, who is a great talent scout and a great talent developer.
[01:17:19]  And he, I said this yesterday, but he told me that Gutfeld was the only one he could put in for O'Reilly when O'Reilly's out and get a number.
[01:17:26]  But now you're not going to pluck him from his show and turn him into the new O'Reilly, the new Tucker in his solo position.
[01:17:33]  That would be a waste.
[01:17:34]  They might try some harebrain scheme of moving his 11 o'clock show to eight.
[01:17:38]  Remember when I left the nine, remember for the, for the short term, they moved the five to 9 p.m.
[01:17:43]  That was their first move and it didn't work because it's weird.
[01:17:47]  It's weird.
[01:17:48]  So they got smart and they moved it back to five.
[01:17:51]  That was when they had that show with like Eric Bowling and other people on at five, the independents.
[01:17:56]  I can't remember what it was.
[01:17:57]  Anyway, then they got rid of that show.
[01:17:59]  They moved the five back to five and Tucker went to nine.
[01:18:02]  And then O'Reilly got fired and they moved Tucker to eight.
[01:18:06]  So I don't know.
[01:18:08]  Like their history isn't so great at being able to figure out, oh, there's a slot.
[01:18:12]  This is exactly how we should fill it.
[01:18:14]  I don't think the answer, if they can't, anybody cares what I think is moving Gutfeld's current show to 8P.
[01:18:20]  Though I do think if they hadn't launched that evening show, he would have been the next best choice.
[01:18:24]  He would have been a great choice to put in that slot.
[01:18:26]  Now, I don't know what they're going to do because they don't know how to develop talent.
[01:18:29]  Emily, I'll give you the last word on it.
[01:18:31]  Yeah, I was just saying, I think, you know, these are all holdovers from the Ailes era and in the post-Ales era.
[01:18:37]  It's, you know, a real struggle, I think, for Fox News.
[01:18:39]  And I also to find someone that's actually capable of holding that hour.
[01:18:44]  And I think one of the biggest situations here is like, if this is indicative of a pattern at Fox News of them for legal reasons, whatever, clamping down on populist voices that make people in the C-suite uncomfortable, then they're in a really difficult, then they're actually in, I think, business trouble.
[01:19:00]  And you sensed how deep they thought the business trouble was just in the their.
[01:19:04]  They were worried about competition from Newsmax in One America after that Arizona call.
[01:19:08]  I mean it was strange to see how panicked they were about that stuff.
[01:19:12]  So if this is indicative of a pattern that continues, I think they're in real trouble.
[01:19:15]  If they find someone Tucker-esque um, they might not be able to put up the same numbers, but it will show that they have a commitment to giving voice to, to sort of populists and real conservatives around the country and can still continue down the same path.
[01:19:28]  Um, but if they're, if they're not committed to that, I think they're in serious business trouble it's.
[01:19:33]  It's one of those things, like I learned from 17 years at FOX.
[01:19:38]  Yes, the relationship between the host and the audience is important and they did a good job, back in that era at least, of picking people who would resonate with the FOX NEWS audience.
[01:19:45]  But one of the things that makes you watch FOX NEWS you may not even know it is the flashy graphics, the pace of the programming, the story selection.
[01:19:54]  You know the content you're getting and the reporters who will come on and update you on.
[01:20:00]  You know what they've been out covering.
[01:20:01]  All of that is part of the FOX NEWS machine and it explains a lot of the success.
[01:20:05]  And it will still be there.
[01:20:06]  It'll still be there at eight o'clock too.
[01:20:09]  So I think the smart bet would be on FOX NEWS.
[01:20:12]  Um, they've done it before.
[01:20:13]  They could do it again.
[01:20:14]  The audience is loyal.
[01:20:15]  They don't know why they love FOX and find it so compelling, but they do um, but I think for sure short, short term probably, the audience is going to make them suffer.
[01:20:23]  Uh, and try to send them a message, not quite Bud Lightesque, but some sort of message.

=== The Flashy Fox News Machine (14:12) ===

[01:20:28]  Uh guys, thank you so much for coming on.
[01:20:29]  Great to see Emily.
[01:20:30]  You too, Michael.
[01:20:34]  Joining me now, author of the brand new book Capitalist Punishment, how Wall Street is using your money to create a country.
[01:20:41]  You didn't vote for Vivek Ramaswamy.
[01:20:44]  He's also a 2024 GOP presidential candidate.
[01:20:46]  Vivek, great to have you back.
[01:20:48]  Welcome back to the show.
[01:20:49]  It's good to be on, Megan.
[01:20:50]  How are you good?
[01:20:52]  So we almost covered this exchange last week because it was so contentious and unpleasant, but in the end we have had enough of Don Lemon and so has CNN, apparently.
[01:21:03]  Um, so you went on CNN because you've said very openly, you'll go on anywhere you're running for president, you'll talk to anybody, and it didn't go particularly well.
[01:21:12]  Here's a little bit about you.
[01:21:14]  Challenge of Don challenging you on your appearance at the NRA, and Don Lemon takes issue with your opinions on this issue because you're not a black man.
[01:21:26]  You said something about American history and race and I guess you're not allowed to opine on that unless you have black skin.
[01:21:31]  According to Don Lemon, here was a bit of that.
[01:21:34]  Your telling of history is wrong.
[01:21:37]  You're what you're saying was wrong.
[01:21:40]  The Civil war was fought.
[01:21:41]  You're making people think that the Civil war was fought for black people, only for black people to get guns and for black people to.
[01:21:46]  The Civil War was fought for black people in this country to get freedoms a noble mission.
[01:21:50]  Black people secured their freedoms after the Civil War and is a historical fact done.
[01:21:54]  Just study it.
[01:21:55]  Only after their second amendment, rights were secured.
[01:21:58]  You are discounting the reconstruction.
[01:22:00]  You're discounting a whole host of things that happened after the Civil War when it comes to African Americans, including.
[01:22:05]  The whole reason that the civil rights movement happened is because black people did not secure their freedoms after the Civil War and that things turned around.
[01:22:13]  People what tried to change the freedoms that were supposed to be rights and they actually got.
[01:22:18]  The NRA played a big role in that, but today, down the front, That's a lie.
[01:22:24]  That's not.
[01:22:25]  The RA did not play a big role.
[01:22:26]  This is just historical fact, but not historical fact.
[01:22:29]  We didn't even include the best part where he basically says, you know, he basically suggests he has a higher claim to the argument because of skin color and went on to diminish you.
[01:22:40]  I don't know what kind of race you are.
[01:22:42]  I don't know what your back.
[01:22:43]  I mean, it was actually really offensive the way he ended that interview with you.
[01:22:48]  And then his colleague came on.
[01:22:51]  Actually, we have this cut too.
[01:22:52]  His colleague came on to try to give you a nice goodbye.
[01:22:55]  And that upset him too.
[01:22:56]  Here's more.
[01:22:57]  The part that I find insulting is when you say today black Americans don't have those rights after we have gone through civil rights revolution in this country.
[01:23:04]  You are sitting here telling an African American about the rights and what you find insulting about the way I live, the skin I live in every day.
[01:23:11]  Here's where you and all the freedoms that black and white that black people don't have in this country and that black people do have.
[01:23:17]  Well, here's where you and I have a different point of view.
[01:23:18]  I think we should be able to express our views regardless of the color of our skin.
[01:23:21]  We should have this debate without me regarding you as a black man.
[01:23:25]  Without me regarding you as a fellow citizen.
[01:23:27]  And you're sitting here, whatever ethnicity you are explaining to me.
[01:23:30]  Whatever ethnicity I am.
[01:23:31]  Whatever it's like to be black.
[01:23:33]  Whatever ethnicity I am.
[01:23:34]  I'll tell you what I am.
[01:23:34]  I'm an Indian American.
[01:23:35]  I'm proud of it.
[01:23:36]  But I think we should have this debate.
[01:23:37]  Black, white doesn't matter.
[01:23:38]  I think we should have this debate.
[01:23:40]  If you do it, you should do it in an honest way and in a fair way.
[01:23:43]  And what you're doing is not in an honest and fair way.
[01:23:45]  We appreciate you coming on.
[01:23:46]  With due respect, Don, I look forward to continuing that conversation.
[01:23:49]  Thank you for the conversation.
[01:23:50]  Thank you.
[01:23:50]  Thank you so much.
[01:23:50]  Thank you, Papa.
[01:23:53]  That you were explaining what it's like to be black in America.
[01:23:56]  That's not what happened.
[01:23:58]  You were not trying to speak on behalf of black people.
[01:24:00]  You were talking about America's history.
[01:24:03]  And the reason I go through that exercise, Vivek, is they are, there are several reports out today that that was the last straw for CNN management.
[01:24:11]  If you watch the longer clip go on, you will see Poppy Harlow trying to give you a nice goodbye, saying we'll talk about China the next time you come on.
[01:24:20]  We'll get more into depth into your policies.
[01:24:22]  And Don Lemon clearly wanted to move right on saying, and goodbye.
[01:24:26]  It's over.
[01:24:26]  You know, move on.
[01:24:28]  So what do you make of the fact that you may have had a role in CNN's ultimate decision to get rid of him?
[01:24:35]  I think I did.
[01:24:36]  And I think that that's a net positive.
[01:24:38]  Look, I actually want to be really clear about this.
[01:24:40]  It all comes down to what the mission of your organization is.
[01:24:43]  If CNN's mission is to advance a woke progressive orthodoxy, Don Lemon is a perfectly fine host to have on air to cut off guests, to tell people they can't speak based on the color of their skin, because that does represent a worldview that exists in the country.
[01:24:58]  So if that's aligned with your mission as an organization, that's a perfectly sensible decision to keep that person.
[01:25:03]  But what Chris Licht, the new CEO of CNN, who I've met, who I've had an open exchange and dialogue with, you know, a number of weeks or months ago, if he means what he says, and it sounds like he does, that they want to be moved towards being a more open platform for diverse views, then I don't think that type of host actually makes sense in that organization.
[01:25:22]  So to me, it's not just about cancel culture in the other direction and saying that, hey, Don Lemon, it's a good thing he's fired.
[01:25:27]  The question is, what's your purpose as an organization?
[01:25:29]  And if CNN's purpose is to air multiple different perspectives on air, then I think that you can't have TV hosts who tell guests, whoever they are, that they can't speak or express an idea about post-Civil War Reconstruction history in America without thinking about what their skin color or race is first.
[01:25:47]  The good thing about me making is I didn't take particular offense to that exchange.
[01:25:50]  I actually found it really useful.
[01:25:51]  I'm glad we did it.
[01:25:53]  It was a little bit awkward to be on set in the Larry David sense of awkward, but that's okay.
[01:25:58]  I can handle that.
[01:25:58]  That's not a problem for me.
[01:26:00]  I think it's actually really important that we surface some of these dogmas and unspoken expectations that have otherwise been simmering beneath the surface of American discourse.
[01:26:10]  I'm all in favor of actually speaking those hard truths.
[01:26:13]  Let those boil over.
[01:26:15]  I think we need to do that as part of our, let's just say, national self-therapy to get to a place where it's not the way that other guests might have approached it to say that, well, because Don Lemon is black and we're talking about a sensitive issue relating to the history of African Americans in this country, I'm going to tread around that differently.
[01:26:31]  I did not.
[01:26:32]  I spoke to Don Lemon the same way I would have if he were white or any other race.
[01:26:35]  It doesn't matter.
[01:26:36]  But what was amazing was he had the nerve to call you out on that as though it were improper that you, as a brown skinned man, didn't have a working knowledge of U.S. history when it comes to American black people enough to opine on it while sitting across from a black man.
[01:26:56]  I mean, that there was some sort of racial hierarchy that would have required you to defer to his opinions about America's history, about historical fact.
[01:27:08]  So that is what the theory of intersectionality, as you well know, is all about.
[01:27:12]  There's a hierarchy of whether you're an oppressor or whether you're oppressed.
[01:27:16]  And if you're lower on that hierarchy according to that set of rules, you have to either step up and stand up and speak or step back, as they say in their language of the woke movement, to step back and not speak to give the person of the lower rung on that ladder the chance to speak.
[01:27:31]  I reject that worldview.
[01:27:32]  I think we're all co-equal citizens.
[01:27:34]  Everyone's voice and vote counts equally in the open debate and marketplace of ideas.
[01:27:39]  But in the case of Don Lemon, I was on set with him, Megan.
[01:27:41]  I could tell you what I actually saw happening was that his head exploded a little bit when there were two conflicting ideas that I brought to the fore.
[01:27:49]  And I didn't want to talk about the NRA speech particularly.
[01:27:51]  They're the ones who brought it up.
[01:27:52]  They put an excerpt of my speech up, asked me to respond to it.
[01:27:55]  So I did.
[01:27:56]  The two conflicting ideas were, one, if you're in Don Lemon's headspace, civil rights are a good thing.
[01:28:02]  Second Amendment rights are a bad thing.
[01:28:04]  That's just an ossified worldview.
[01:28:06]  And part of what I taught him, it's part of history.
[01:28:08]  It's part of American history.
[01:28:09]  We just got to go study it, is that actually the civil rights of Black Americans were never secured until they actually enjoyed Second Amendment protections.
[01:28:18]  In fact, part of the Black codes that were passed in the Reconstruction era were designed to take guns and gun ownership rights away from Black Americans.
[01:28:26]  That's not an accident.
[01:28:28]  The Dred Scott decision, which preceded the Civil War, Chief Justice Taney famously and ignominiously said that part of the reason Black people couldn't be citizens in this country is because it would give them the right to own guns.
[01:28:40]  So this is fundamental stuff, even in Supreme Court doctrine.
[01:28:43]  So I was exposing that history, but that made Don Lemon's head explode because to him, Second Amendment bad, civil rights good.
[01:28:50]  And I'm committing some sort of cardinal sin by mixing the two together.
[01:28:53]  But it's just a fact of history that actually one was fundamental to securing the other.
[01:28:57]  And so the audience should know that Vivek went to, in addition to his success on Wall Street and so on, went to Yale Law School.
[01:29:03]  I mean, he graduated from Yale Law School.
[01:29:04]  So you know the law.
[01:29:05]  You were prepared for a debate or a discussion on that.
[01:29:07]  But the irony is if he actually expected you to cede the arguments to him because he's a black man and you're not, he shouldn't have had you on the show.
[01:29:16]  He should have just looked into the camera and offered his own opinions on all these matters.
[01:29:20]  He invited you to be interviewed on his program and then got upset when you actually offered your view and explained why you made the claims about gun rights and so on.
[01:29:32]  And so his intersectionality approach doesn't work.
[01:29:35]  If you want that, go be a pundit.
[01:29:37]  Don't be an interviewer on a national cable show.
[01:29:41]  Yeah, I tend to agree with you on that, Megan.
[01:29:43]  And my whole point is I actually go to these forums precisely because right now there's two alternatives.
[01:29:48]  I present a third.
[01:29:49]  Alternative number one is you go on there, but you have to actually follow the orthodoxy.
[01:29:53]  You have to effectively bend the knee, quietly without saying it, acknowledge that when you're talking about certain subjects to people of a certain race, that you have to tread around it.
[01:30:01]  I don't do that.
[01:30:02]  Option number two is you do that.
[01:30:03]  You come out looking like a villain, which is how they're ready to portray you.
[01:30:07]  I pick a third path.
[01:30:08]  Let's be dignified.
[01:30:09]  Let's actually stick to our arguments without compromising on our principles, but do it unapologetically in a way that surfaces the actual tension underneath that implicit assumption that other people don't talk about.
[01:30:20]  And I think it would be a mistake here to just focus on Don Lemon.
[01:30:23]  I mean, he's, I think, look, I think there's better models for how to succeed in your career as a journalist in staying close to the truth than following Don Lemon's path, but it's not all about him.
[01:30:33]  He's representing a worldview.
[01:30:35]  I mean, take Congresswoman Ayanna Presley of the squad.
[01:30:38]  She's not a journalist.
[01:30:39]  She's in Congress, but she basically said the same thing, even more concisely than Don Lemon did a couple of years ago when she said, we don't want any more black faces that don't want to be a black voice.
[01:30:50]  We don't want any more brown faces that don't want to be a brown voice.
[01:30:54]  That's an exact quote.
[01:30:56]  I don't fit her description of what counts as a brown voice because I reject the premise that your skin color ought to predict anything about the content of the ideas you're allowed to espouse.
[01:31:06]  That is true racism.
[01:31:07]  That is definitional racism to say that I can predict something about the content of your ideas based on the color of your skin.
[01:31:14]  And yet that's become quietly accepted in much of mainstream culture in America.
[01:31:19]  I will say, Megan, though, I'm optimistic.
[01:31:21]  I think the fact that we're having this conversation on the back of CNN making the decision to actually remove Don Lemon from air, hopefully replace him with somebody who's a more thoughtful journalist.
[01:31:30]  I do think I'm actually quite optimistic that we're a domino effect, a hair's trigger away from a national revival that rejects this woke orthodoxy that's been an assault on American excellence.
[01:31:42]  You saw it from Netflix about a year ago after the Dave Chappelle controversy.
[01:31:46]  I think this is a good move that Chris Licht has taken at CNN.
[01:31:49]  I think if we keep our optimism alive, right, I think a lot of that woke wokeism that has infected institutions over the last several years, people are hungry for something new.
[01:31:57]  I think it's up to conservatives in this country.
[01:31:59]  This is why I feel called to do it, to lead the way with an affirmative vision of our own, not just being victimized by the victimhood culture, but by actually leading the way with our own vision.
[01:32:09]  Well, we've heard people like Joy Reed explicitly say about black people in America who have heterodox views on this whole wokeism.
[01:32:16]  They're skin folk, but not kinfolk.
[01:32:18]  That's, you know, that's how they dismiss anybody who sees things the way you do, but happens to be a black man or a black woman.
[01:32:25]  It's absolutely disrespectful and it's racist.
[01:32:28]  I do want to ask you, first of all, did you have that conversation with Chris Licht, the new head of CNN, took over for Jeff Zucker after that exchange with Don Lemon on the air?
[01:32:37]  It was before.
[01:32:37]  It was beforehand.
[01:32:40]  I thought it was my place to leave them be.
[01:32:43]  I think there was a lot of discomfort after that.
[01:32:45]  And they were very respectful of the people who had booked me right after I was off air, but I left that.
[01:32:49]  Well, let me show you the ending.
[01:32:50]  Let me show the audience the very, very last part where he, Poppy tried to save it.
[01:32:55]  I mean, this is what you do when you're a co-anchor.
[01:32:57]  I've been there with something tense happens.
[01:32:59]  You try to diffuse the tension a little, keep things nice with the guest before they leave and say nice goodbye, which she attempted to do.
[01:33:05]  And he was clearly irritated by her.
[01:33:07]  And he always lets his irritation show.
[01:33:09]  This is one of the reasons why that morning show is a disaster.
[01:33:12]  They have record low ratings.
[01:33:14]  And his co-hosts very clearly can't stand him.
[01:33:18]  But here was his last parting remark in the whole exchange to Poppy.
[01:33:24]  We appreciate you coming on.
[01:33:25]  With due respect, Don, I look forward to continuing that conversation.
[01:33:28]  Thank you.
[01:33:28]  The conversation.
[01:33:29]  Thank you.
[01:33:29]  Thank you, Poppy.
[01:33:30]  We'll talk about China.
[01:33:31]  Yes, you come back.
[01:33:33]  Oh, thank you.
[01:33:34]  Much to say on declaring independence from China.
[01:33:36]  Something you can add.
[01:33:37]  Thank you.
[01:33:37]  Thank you.
[01:33:42]  So we can move on now, please.
[01:33:44]  And so the reports are that they've had it between his reported diva moments and his sexist remarks, the Nikki Haley thing.
[01:33:53]  There's a report this morning, I think it's in the Daily Mail talking about how so many staffers at CNN were actually really ticked off and offended by saying, you know, Nikki Haley's pastor prime.
[01:34:03]  Sorry, a woman's pastor prime when she's out of her 20s, 30s, maybe at age 40, and on and on.
[01:34:08]  There's lots of examples of Don Lemon not liking women.
[01:34:10]  He doesn't like women.
[01:34:12]  That's my opinion.
[01:34:13]  It seems pretty clear.
[01:34:14]  He blames everything on women.
[01:34:15]  Anything goes wrong on the set, an interruption?
[01:34:17]  It's the woman's fault.
[01:34:18]  Trust me, that's his MO.
[01:34:20]  Blame the woman.
[01:34:21]  And so I do wonder.
[01:34:22]  Megan, there's a funny connection there, just to briefly draw it.
[01:34:26]  So he's a man who feels particularly totally free to talk about when women are or are not in their prime and to criticize women for being women, but somehow believes that if you're not black, you can't actually even make a comment about post-civoral history.
[01:34:37]  So there's a certain rich irony in that if you observe it.

=== Turning Point For Leadership (08:55) ===

[01:34:40]  That's how the woke are.
[01:34:41]  They have a weird hierarchy that you really have to be immersed in it to totally understand it.
[01:34:44]  So after that moment when they said goodbye to you, Vivek, what was that?
[01:34:47]  What was it like?
[01:34:48]  It's always kind of fun to get a behind the scenes, you know, wrap up of what happened on set after something like that.
[01:34:53]  Yeah, so I had a nice exchange with Poppy.
[01:34:55]  I felt bad for her, to be honest, because I think she had been sidelined in the conversation.
[01:34:59]  She was trying her best.
[01:35:00]  So I told her, look, we'll have conversation, China, later on.
[01:35:04]  I walked off.
[01:35:05]  I was, I went out of my way to really be thankful to the producers and those who were on set as well.
[01:35:10]  I think it was awkward for everyone there.
[01:35:13]  So I tried to do my part to bring a lighthearted tone and say they're doing great work and to keep up the keep up the beautiful set.
[01:35:20]  That's what I think I told them, which is a nice looking set, I guess.
[01:35:23]  And then I left.
[01:35:24]  And you know what?
[01:35:24]  They were very decent about it afterwards.
[01:35:26]  I think they reached out to my people who did the scheduling to effectively apologize for that interaction.
[01:35:31]  But I don't need apologies.
[01:35:32]  I think that this is good, actually, for our country to be able to air this kind of underlying tension in our theory.
[01:35:39]  This is so crazy.
[01:35:40]  It shows the craziness.
[01:35:41]  It's like something to somebody saying to me, like, women didn't actually, they got the right to vote, you know, in 1920, but they didn't actually get their power until 1970.
[01:35:48]  And me saying, no, actually, the data show that in the 1960s, they were really coming of age.
[01:35:53]  And somebody being like, no, actually, the data show that in 1974, that's when it started.
[01:35:56]  And me being like, you're a man.
[01:35:59]  I'm a woman.
[01:36:00]  Shut up.
[01:36:01]  People do that.
[01:36:02]  Shut up.
[01:36:02]  People do say that kind of stuff.
[01:36:03]  It's happening.
[01:36:04]  It's ridiculous.
[01:36:05]  Thank you for calling it out and giving us a good example of how they operate.
[01:36:08]  Now, you mentioned something because crusading against these woke pushes in corporate media, in corporate America, and so on has been a big issue for you.
[01:36:18]  This is one of the reasons why I love what you're doing.
[01:36:22]  There's an update in the whole Bud Light disaster today, which is just, I think, spectacular.
[01:36:27]  So, of course, their stock price fell in the wake of the boycott after they partnered with trans activist or trans person Dylan Mulvaney.
[01:36:35]  And their core audience and core purchasers revolted across America saying, what are you doing?
[01:36:42]  We don't want you dabbling in this stuff.
[01:36:44]  Just serve us our beer.
[01:36:45]  For the love of God, shut up and serve us the beer.
[01:36:48]  And they tried to be quiet.
[01:36:50]  It failed.
[01:36:51]  Their stock price was dwindling and their sales were dwindling.
[01:36:54]  Then their stock price went a little back up.
[01:36:56]  And the people who are against you on the woke stuff, Vivek, said, oh, it went back up.
[01:37:00]  Ha ha ha.
[01:37:01]  But the real question was, how about the sales?
[01:37:03]  How about the sales?
[01:37:04]  The stock's going to do what the stock's going to do.
[01:37:06]  But how are they doing on the sales of Bud Light?
[01:37:08]  Well, now we have an answer to that.
[01:37:10]  And by the way, they saw these numbers before we did, the people at Bud Light.
[01:37:15]  The reading from the New York Post today, Bud Light has suffered a staggering sales hit following its disastrous marketing tie up with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
[01:37:24]  The latest data showing a 17% drop in sales.
[01:37:28]  17.
[01:37:29]  It only went down, I think, 8% or 6% in the first week after the controversy.
[01:37:35]  And now it's almost triple that, the drop in sales and probably going to go up even more.
[01:37:42]  They've now put this, the woman who made the decision, we're told, Alyssa, on leave of absence, though it was clearly not her idea.
[01:37:52]  And I don't think she's ever coming back, as well as her boss also on a leave of absence.
[01:37:57]  And I think this is a huge victory.
[01:37:58]  I'd like to see them fire.
[01:37:59]  I think they're fired.
[01:38:00]  So I'm taking the W.
[01:38:03]  However, I think this is an inflection point in these, in the battle that you've been fighting and yours truly as well to a lesser extent, to get these corporations to stay in their lane and just do their thing.
[01:38:14]  Sell your beer, sell your facial cream, but stop trying to wokeify America.
[01:38:19]  That's what makes America great is that we have a system of capitalism that is insulated, or at least historically has been, from partisan politics.
[01:38:29]  First of all, that makes companies more successful.
[01:38:32]  Bud Light's just one example among many.
[01:38:34]  Megan, that's what the whole book is about, the capitalist punishment book that I'm putting that's out today.
[01:38:38]  That is about why companies are more successful when they are not encumbered by these environmental and social agendas.
[01:38:44]  But there's something even more fundamental than that, Megan, which is that actually Tocqueville, Alexis de Tocqueville, he made this observation about America.
[01:38:51]  We're a diverse, divided, democratic society.
[01:38:54]  We're not supposed to last for more than a couple of generations unless there are these apolitical spaces that bind us together, that literally bring us together.
[01:39:04]  Bud Light is liquid fuel that brings people together at football games, at parties across the country.
[01:39:10]  It's uniting.
[01:39:11]  When that itself becomes politicized, that's really the beginning of the end of the American experiment.
[01:39:17]  If we lose those apolitical sanctuaries that are supposed to hold us together, and Tocqueville said that back then too, is America requires what he calls these intermediate institutions.
[01:39:26]  Capitalism is the biggest of those.
[01:39:28]  And so for me on a personal level, it's not just because I think it makes companies less successful, though that's definitely true.
[01:39:34]  And we see that example on display here.
[01:39:36]  It's that it makes America and our constitutional republic itself less successful.
[01:39:41]  It won't survive if we don't have those spaces where we can come together across the divides of identity politics or partisan politics.
[01:39:50]  I'm with you, Megan.
[01:39:51]  I think that we are at a potential turning point here.
[01:39:54]  I think people, you know, the woke movement, what it did is the analogy I sometimes have used is it's like when young people are hungry for a cause.
[01:40:02]  They tell them you satisfy your moral hunger by going to Ben and Jerry's and ordering a cup of ice cream with some social justice sprinkles on the side.
[01:40:10]  I mean, effectively, that's been the culture for the last several years.
[01:40:14]  I think that you don't satisfy a moral hunger with fast food.
[01:40:18]  You sort of get that hit initially, but then that starts to fade up, fade away, and you still realize you're still hungry, hungry for something more substantial, purpose that you derive from something other than corporate virtue signaling.
[01:40:30]  And that's the opportunity in front of us for the conservative movement.
[01:40:34]  Can we fill that void with a vision of American identity that's actually more powerful, that dilutes the woke agenda to irrelevance?
[01:40:42]  That's a question of whether the conservative movement can rise to that occasion or not.
[01:40:45]  That's why it's a potential race.
[01:40:47]  The way it used to be the way it can be.
[01:40:49]  And the way it can be.
[01:40:49]  How, That's the problem.
[01:40:51]  Like, I'm with you, 100% with you.
[01:40:54]  But how on earth are we going to get these young people to get back to that?
[01:40:57]  I mean, yeah, teaching civics.
[01:40:59]  What?
[01:40:59]  We're going to force them to go back to church.
[01:41:01]  That's up to their parents.
[01:41:02]  Americans are moving away from religion, away from more children, away from civics.
[01:41:06]  It's depressing.
[01:41:08]  But how can a president push us back in that direction?
[01:41:12]  Look, I think part of this is, and there are many hats to wear here.
[01:41:16]  One is a policymaking hat, and I can come to that.
[01:41:18]  But some of this is through the kind of leadership and national character that you set.
[01:41:22]  I don't think we have had a president in this country since Reagan who tied the what, what we're doing, the motions we're going through, to the why, to the principles that actually set the country into motion.
[01:41:34]  And I reject this political worldview that both parties seem to espouse, that human beings are somehow just these biological automatons walking around and we're supposed to bean count them to see how they'll vote.
[01:41:44]  I believe in the power of persuasion.
[01:41:46]  I think people are, especially young people, Megan, are hungry to be led.
[01:41:50]  I went to, you know, we've done these bus tours for the last few days.
[01:41:53]  I was in New Hampshire on a bus tour.
[01:41:55]  I was in Iowa on a bus tour.
[01:41:56]  South Carolina is a bus tour later this week.
[01:41:59]  We stop at college campuses on these bus tours.
[01:42:01]  I went to one, New England College in New Hampshire, where I was told that other Republican candidates didn't want to show up at some of these college campuses.
[01:42:08]  Well, you don't know why?
[01:42:09]  It's because they're going to get the kinds of questions that I got, which aren't that different than interaction with Don Lemon on set.
[01:42:14]  But the thing about, unlike Don Lemon, who was making millions of dollars while claiming to be a victim, the difference with young people on these college campuses, they don't really believe the stuff they're fed and spewing back.
[01:42:25]  They're hungry.
[01:42:26]  They're lost.
[01:42:27]  And I think if we can fill that void, even a sense of leadership, talking about understanding that our worst hypocrisies as a nation are actually our best evidence that we have ideals at all, because to be a hypocrite, you at least had to have those ideals.
[01:42:41]  I think we bring these people along, Megan, because here's the other thing about being 21 years old or 19 years old.
[01:42:47]  You want to stick it to the man.
[01:42:48]  You want to stand up to the system and be a hippie and be countercultural.
[01:42:51]  That's what made the woke movement popular in the first place, is that that was sticking it to the system of the people who were in power.
[01:42:58]  Well, now we've cut full circle where what began as a challenge to the system has become the system.
[01:43:04]  I think we can actually tap into young people's desire to be heterodox.
[01:43:08]  You don't want to be heterodox?
[01:43:09]  Call yourself a religious conservative on a college campus.
[01:43:11]  See what that does to you.
[01:43:13]  And I think it takes a certain voice.
[01:43:14]  And I think it takes us.
[01:43:15]  I'm 37.
[01:43:16]  I'm the first millennial to ever run for president as a Republican.
[01:43:19]  But I want to use these attributes to reach that next generation.
[01:43:22]  I'm actually optimistic that that opportunity is sitting in front of us just through persuasion alone.
[01:43:27]  On policy, I could give you a lot of my ideas on how to do it.
[01:43:30]  But actually, I think this other cultural character is almost more important.
[01:43:33]  And then the policies just follow naturally from that.

=== America First On Moral Grounds (10:34) ===

[01:43:35]  I am, I'm gleaning, it's almost like you don't feel our current president has this ability.
[01:43:42]  But Vivek, perhaps it's because you have not seen his announcement rally that he held today with thousands of people cheering him on.
[01:43:51]  So, oh, wait, that didn't happen.
[01:43:53]  He announced that he's running for reelection on videotape.
[01:43:58]  And the message was, well, I'll let you react.
[01:44:02]  Here's a bit of it.
[01:44:09]  Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms, cutting Social Security that you've paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy, dictating what healthcare decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love, all while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.
[01:44:28]  When I ran for president four years ago, I said we're in a battle for the soul of America, and we still are.
[01:44:36]  I feel uplifted and optimistic about America.
[01:44:38]  How about you?
[01:44:39]  Well, that really sounds like a man who says he wants to deliver national unity by labeling his opponents, people who disagree with him as MAGA extremists.
[01:44:48]  You know, Joe Biden said he wanted to run on a vision of national unity.
[01:44:52]  If he was going to deliver it, it would have happened already.
[01:44:55]  By the way, the single most unifying, he had his chance.
[01:44:57]  It was teed up for him.
[01:44:58]  He had his chance to unify this country.
[01:45:00]  You know how he could have done it?
[01:45:02]  Is when Donald Trump was arrested and indicted by Alvin Bragg, a member of Joe Biden's political party.
[01:45:07]  If Joe Biden had said what I said at that same time as somebody who was also running against Trump, that this is a politicized prosecution.
[01:45:13]  It's persecution.
[01:45:14]  And even though you shouldn't elect Trump, you know what?
[01:45:17]  This is wrong and we should not arrest our political opponents.
[01:45:20]  That was his moment for national unity.
[01:45:23]  I don't think he cares about that.
[01:45:24]  But here's the thing that's deeper, Megan.
[01:45:26]  I think it's the joke and the farce in all of this that we may as well call out.
[01:45:29]  Joe Biden's not really the one running for president.
[01:45:32]  Let's just call that for what it is, right?
[01:45:33]  He's over twice my age and then some, but it's not even, it's not even the age thing.
[01:45:37]  It's his cognitive deficits.
[01:45:40]  They're not a bug.
[01:45:41]  They're a feature for the managerial class who would rather have a hollowed out husk in the White House.
[01:45:48]  They're almost needling the American people.
[01:45:50]  They're almost needling the citizens of this country, laughing, saying, you know how much we rule you as the managerial class, the three-letter acronyms, bureaucratic soup in Washington, D.C.
[01:46:00]  We can put that guy up, barely mentally competent, present even as a human being.
[01:46:06]  That's who we can put up, and we're still going to run the show for you.
[01:46:09]  That's what this really is.
[01:46:11]  And so when I see myself running against Joe Biden in this race, I'm not running against Biden.
[01:46:15]  I'm running against a puppet.
[01:46:16]  It's like the Wizard of Oz, the front man for a managerial class that's behind it.
[01:46:21]  That's really the heart of what's going on.
[01:46:23]  And we might as well see that for what it is.
[01:46:25]  And it's also why the DNC, by the way, doesn't want to have debates, because they want to make sure the frontman for that managerial class isn't subjected to debate from the likes of RFK or Marion Williamson or anybody else.
[01:46:36]  And so I think it's worth seeing through the farce that somehow this is about Biden and his failure.
[01:46:40]  He's just the stooge who's the front man at the end of it.
[01:46:43]  Let's get to what's behind it.
[01:46:44]  That's really what we're doing.
[01:46:45]  And they're going to allow it.
[01:46:46]  I mean, they're going to allow it.
[01:46:47]  They are saying that they're not going to be debates.
[01:46:49]  So RFK Jr. is not going to get this shot to go after Biden.
[01:46:52]  Never mind Marianne Williamson or whoever else might try to throw their hat in the ring.
[01:46:56]  But meanwhile, this is what they're up against.
[01:46:58]  NBC News poll released Sunday.
[01:47:00]  Should Biden run again?
[01:47:03]  70% say no.
[01:47:06]  Only 26% say yes.
[01:47:09]  You look at the numbers.
[01:47:12]  Okay, this is the Biden voters from 2020.
[01:47:16]  Only 53% of them think that he should vote again, or run again.
[01:47:19]  Only 53%.
[01:47:20]  He barely has a majority of the people who voted for him last time who won him again.
[01:47:24]  And amongst young people, 18 to 34 year olds, 76% say, do not run again.
[01:47:32]  We've had enough of you among Democratic primary voters who say he should not run.
[01:47:37]  The answers are he's too old.
[01:47:40]  He's ineffective.
[01:47:41]  There's a mental health problem.
[01:47:42]  He's forgetful.
[01:47:44]  He's not as sharp as he needs to be.
[01:47:45]  We need someone younger.
[01:47:47]  By the way, Trump did not do well in this poll either.
[01:47:49]  But right now we're on Biden.
[01:47:50]  And what you are saying is reflected in the polls of his own party.
[01:47:56]  But he is running again.
[01:47:58]  Dark Brandon is back.
[01:48:00]  That's how he chose to make his announcement.
[01:48:02]  And not only is he not going to debate Vivek, he's going back down to the basement.
[01:48:05]  The fact that this is on tape and he didn't have the ability to stand in front of a camera live and say these comments, never mind actual people, and make his own re-announcement.
[01:48:19]  That's it.
[01:48:19]  As we get news reports, he's at a record low for press conferences and interactions with reporters, one-on-one interviews.
[01:48:27]  He can't talk to anybody.
[01:48:29]  I literally think he might be at the point where he cannot.
[01:48:33]  It's not will not any longer.
[01:48:35]  He cannot.
[01:48:36]  And we're really approaching crisis, a crisis point here.
[01:48:41]  I mean, the fact that this is a form of elder abuse, that's just a cost of doing business for the managerial class.
[01:48:46]  Same reason they want John Fetterman in one of those U.S. Senate seats, right?
[01:48:50]  I don't even blame these people at all.
[01:48:52]  I feel bad for them.
[01:48:53]  They're being used by a managerial bureaucracy that actually, this is how it works.
[01:48:57]  And it's spitting in the face of their own base, by the way, right?
[01:49:01]  This is the managerial class versus the everyday citizen.
[01:49:03]  That's the struggle across the American and Western landscape today.
[01:49:07]  It's even beyond America.
[01:49:08]  It's definitely true even within the Democratic Party, as you pointed out.
[01:49:11]  But Megan, I think that if you look at those numbers and take them seriously, this is the opportunity of a generation for the conservative movement, for the Republican Party to rise to the occasion and actually deliver what Ronald Reagan did in 1980, a landslide election.
[01:49:27]  He did it in 1884 again, a landslide election that's the single most unifying thing that could bring this country together.
[01:49:33]  That's why I'm running this campaign, not even on Republicans versus Democrats.
[01:49:37]  It's about whether you're pro-American.
[01:49:39]  Do you believe in the ideals that set the country into motion?
[01:49:41]  Free speech, open debate, rule of law, self-governance over aristocracy, merit.
[01:49:47]  Who would have ever thought about that idea versus a culture that wishes to apologize for the existence of a nation founded on those ideals?
[01:49:56]  View it that way.
[01:49:57]  It's not 550 anymore.
[01:49:58]  It's easily 80-20 in our favor.
[01:50:00]  And I think half the 20 are young people younger than me who never learned those ideals in the first place.
[01:50:06]  1980 can be a small landslide compared to what 2024 can be if we in the conservative movement in the Republican Party actually step up and capture that opportunity.
[01:50:17]  I'm in this race because I'm worried that's not the direction we're heading.
[01:50:21]  Okay.
[01:50:21]  Yeah.
[01:50:21]  As a 37-year-old.
[01:50:23]  Let me stand by.
[01:50:24]  That's a good place to pause it.
[01:50:26]  Let me squeeze in a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about the gorilla and how you get past the gorilla, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, because you are not the only one running for president and in particular for the GOP nomination.
[01:50:37]  Stand by.
[01:50:38]  Vivek stays with us.
[01:50:39]  And I'm also going to ask him about his thoughts on Tucker's termination at Fox News.
[01:50:44]  And Vivek went on the 8 p.m. hour last night.
[01:50:51]  So the gorilla of Donald Trump.
[01:50:54]  He's already been president, which definitely gives him a leg up going into this contest.
[01:51:00]  And some have been critical of you running it all, saying, if you're not going to take on Donald Trump directly and tell us why you're better than he is, not just, you know, younger, but why are you a better choice, then what's the point of this?
[01:51:13]  Oh, I have been, Megan.
[01:51:14]  I think a lot of those people are thin-skinned supporters of certain other candidates who actually suffer from thin skin themselves, can take on criticism very poorly.
[01:51:22]  My view is if you can't take the criticism, you shouldn't be sitting across the table from Xi Jinping.
[01:51:26]  But I've absolutely been very clear about why I'm in this race vis-a-vis Donald Trump versus Donald Trump.
[01:51:32]  Look, Trump went as far as he was going to go.
[01:51:34]  I'm an unapologetic America First conservative.
[01:51:37]  I think I can take that America First agenda even further than Donald Trump did.
[01:51:42]  Because to put America first, we need to rediscover what America is.
[01:51:47]  And I tell grassroots audiences across the country this, Megan, America First does not belong to Donald Trump.
[01:51:53]  It doesn't belong to me.
[01:51:54]  It belongs to the people of this country.
[01:51:56]  Reagan actually ran on an America First agenda.
[01:51:58]  It wasn't born in 2016.
[01:52:01]  It was born in 1776.
[01:52:03]  And the reason I think I'm going to go further.
[01:52:05]  Beyond the rhetoric, get specific.
[01:52:07]  Yeah, sure.
[01:52:08]  So look, affirmative action.
[01:52:09]  I push Trump's people on this.
[01:52:11]  Why didn't you end race-based affirmative action?
[01:52:14]  That's something that a U.S. president can do.
[01:52:16]  Lyndon Johnson started it by executive order.
[01:52:19]  You can end it by executive order.
[01:52:20]  What they told me was that was a political hill they didn't want to die on.
[01:52:24]  Well, I'm not afraid to touch on that one.
[01:52:26]  I've said on day one, I would end executive order 11246.
[01:52:30]  That's the end of a national cancer on our soul of affirmative action.
[01:52:34]  The climate cult, not just talk about time horizons.
[01:52:37]  I'm wholesale against the anti-carbon measurement framework itself, and I'll run the federal government accordingly.
[01:52:43]  You know, Trump will put Betsy DeVos on top of the Department of Education.
[01:52:46]  I like Betsy DeVos plenty.
[01:52:48]  You don't reform an administrative agency top down.
[01:52:51]  You have to be willing to shut it down, which is why I said I would abolish the Department of Education.
[01:52:56]  Trump's been saying that more recently.
[01:52:58]  He's been saying that and people have been saying, why didn't you do it when you were president?
[01:53:01]  Yeah, keep going.
[01:53:02]  Yeah, I mean, exactly.
[01:53:04]  So look, I think, and this gets to the why, which I'll get to in a second, Megan, but there's plenty of contrast.
[01:53:08]  Not just build the wall, use the military to secure that wall, secure the border itself.
[01:53:13]  And I think there's a strong legal case for why you absolutely can use the U.S. military to secure our own border, even though the defense establishment recoils at that idea.
[01:53:23]  So you want to ask for contrast?
[01:53:24]  I've been unafraid about saying it, is that I think I will go further with the America First Agenda than Donald Trump did because I'm doing it based on first principles and moral authority, not just vengeance and grievance.
[01:53:40]  And that's not a stylistic difference.
[01:53:41]  That's an effectiveness difference.
[01:53:43]  That's why Reagan was able to do what he did over the eight years from 1980 to 1988.
[01:53:49]  I think I can do the same thing eight years starting in 2024, January 2025 when I take office.
[01:53:54]  But I will tell you this.
[01:53:56]  That is something that the America first base, the Trump base, is actually hungry for and open to.
[01:54:01]  And that's how I think I'm demonstrating that contrast to not only go further with the agenda, but also to unite the country in the process.

=== Ron Desantis As A Good Troll (12:05) ===

[01:54:10]  And I'm in this because I think I'm the single candidate in either party who has our last best chance of unifying this country, not on showing the middle and saying, let's hold hands and compromise and sing kumbaya.
[01:54:23]  Certain other candidates might want to do that.
[01:54:25]  I think we deliver national unity by embracing the radicalism of the ideals that set America into motion, stand on principled footing, and the other side will come after me, but I won't make it as easy for them to do that as Donald Trump did for himself.
[01:54:39]  I will be living many of the values that I preach about, family values, belief in God.
[01:54:44]  We're unapologetic about these things.
[01:54:46]  But when you lead with moral authority, I think you get to go further and unite the country.
[01:54:52]  And it is a little bit of a laughable narrative.
[01:54:53]  I think it's pushed by a lot of DeSantis' people because Ron DeSantis has very thin skin.
[01:54:57]  He won't talk to people who disagree with him.
[01:54:59]  And so if you're criticizing DeSantis, then he's jealous that I'm not criticizing Trump.
[01:55:03]  To the contrary, I will talk very openly about why I believe I'm the best candidate.
[01:55:07]  But just because I differentiate that from DeSantis doesn't mean that I won't differentiate that from Trump or any other candidate, even though he's in a laughable talk track.
[01:55:14]  Yeah.
[01:55:14]  One of those critics who I think does like DeSantis a lot is our friend Charles C.W. Cook.
[01:55:19]  He comes on the show a lot, but he is not your fan, as I know you know.
[01:55:23]  He wrote, now he did reel me in with the beginning of his column because he referenced Pride and Prejudice, which, you know, pretty much every woman I know absolutely loves.
[01:55:31]  And he was comparing you to Mr. Wickham.
[01:55:34]  Vivek.
[01:55:35]  He was comparing you to Mr. Wickham.
[01:55:36]  He is a Brit himself, Charles C.W. Cook.
[01:55:38]  Now he's an American.
[01:55:39]  And he said, I first became aware of Vivek Ramaswamy at an event in 2021, like Jane Austen's Mr. Wickham from Pride and Prejudice.
[01:55:46]  He said you did the following, which was a line from Mr. Bennett, Elizabeth Bennett's dad, as portrayed here in the 1995 version of the movie, Pride and Prejudice.
[01:55:57]  Listen.
[01:55:58]  He's as fine a fellow as ever I saw.
[01:56:01]  He simpers and smirks makes love to us all.
[01:56:05]  Simpers and smirks makes love to us all.
[01:56:08]  That was the BBC version, which is amazing.
[01:56:11]  I watched that whole thing on videotape.
[01:56:12]  I have all the tapes.
[01:56:13]  There are like 10 of them.
[01:56:14]  Well worth your time if you're ever homesick.
[01:56:16]  Okay.
[01:56:16]  Anywho, his point is as follows, Vivek.
[01:56:19]  And I'm not trying to just rub your nose in a nasty column, but I've heard people raise this criticism, and I know you have thick skin.
[01:56:25]  He says, Vivek, he's not really running for president.
[01:56:28]  He hasn't really given up his job.
[01:56:30]  He's transitioned into another one.
[01:56:32]  He's not really thinking about what it means to be an American.
[01:56:34]  He's building a ginormous mailing list.
[01:56:36]  He's not really selling a vision that I have personally developed, quote unquote.
[01:56:39]  He's running as Donald Trump's obsequious press secretary.
[01:56:43]  That's an as, not a to be.
[01:56:45]  As a candidate, Ramaswamy is not running to be Donald Trump's press secretary.
[01:56:49]  He is running as Trump's press secretary.
[01:56:53]  Ramaswamy seems set to become the first contender for president in American history whose approach to the race is to sell the virtues of the frontrunner better than the frontrunner can himself.
[01:57:02]  And he goes on to say as follows.
[01:57:04]  It was inevitable that at some point a talented entrepreneur would come along and truly industrialize the process.
[01:57:09]  And so it has come to pass.
[01:57:11]  Ramaswamy 2024.
[01:57:13]  Buy the book, The ETF, and the imminent show on Fox Business weekdays at 7 p.m. Eastern Time.
[01:57:20]  Your thoughts on it.
[01:57:21]  I think it's pretty funny.
[01:57:22]  I don't know the guy.
[01:57:23]  I think it's an embodiment of why the National Review brand of conservatism has actually gone the way of irrelevance that it has in this country, because the sense of respect that I exhibit in this race that he mistakes for being for one man about Donald Trump is actually for the people of this country who I'm running to serve.
[01:57:39]  Okay, so I think that the disrespect, the quiet condescension, I think there's a wing of the Republican Party, frankly, that looks at the MAGA voter the way that much of the Democratic establishment looks at black people.
[01:57:50]  Shut up, sit down, do as you're told, because we're going to do better for you than you know how to do for yourself.
[01:57:54]  And I think that Charles Cook, I don't know the guy, but based on his writings, I think seems to embody that worldview of old school Republicanism that I think is long out the door.
[01:58:04]  And I think that I have to confess, I only read the first.
[01:58:06]  Thanks for reading me the rest because it seems so far off the mark, I decided it wasn't worth my money to pay for the paywall to see the rest of that article.
[01:58:12]  So I got something out of that exchange that you just delivered.
[01:58:16]  Look, for me personally, this is table stakes for getting into a race.
[01:58:19]  You're running for U.S. president.
[01:58:20]  You better be willing to take the heat and take a little bit of criticism, or else you shouldn't be asking the American people to sit across the table from autocrats abroad.
[01:58:27]  It's my main issue with DeSantis: I think that he refuses to take that heat.
[01:58:31]  I'll take that heat.
[01:58:32]  I have no problem with it.
[01:58:33]  But I think here's the thing.
[01:58:34]  Here's the thing.
[01:58:34]  I mean, the first part of our conversation, I don't know if that sounded very much like a press secretary for Donald Trump to you, Megan.
[01:58:39]  I'm drawing a contrast on why I will take this much further than Donald Trump ever did.
[01:58:44]  And I'm not sure if you're not sure if you're a person.
[01:58:46]  And I've heard you say differences with between you and Trump before.
[01:58:48]  Yeah, I think Charlie, I love Charlie and I love National Review, but I do think that they're definitely more drafting behind DeSantis right now.
[01:58:55]  They're not necessarily Trump fans.
[01:58:56]  Yeah, of course they are.
[01:58:57]  You haven't won them over so far.
[01:58:59]  Yeah, DeSantis loves that.
[01:59:00]  I mean, he's, we could talk about DeSantis separately.
[01:59:02]  That's beside the point.
[01:59:04]  Let's let's do that.
[01:59:05]  Let's talk about him because he's on this point, though.
[01:59:07]  Just to finish this, the most funny part about that is I think that he quoted the price of the books, a book for $27.99.
[01:59:13]  If you think I'm making money off books, that tells you exactly or that's what makes my money.
[01:59:19]  I do want to say, can I just say this?
[01:59:22]  So you've never told me how much you're worth, but there are, you know, definitely reports that it starts with a B.
[01:59:26]  And I will say in our own past history, without really even knowing each other, more than once, Vivek, through other people, has reached out to me to help people who have come on this show who have been canceled or hurt by cancel culture or had their lives ruined.
[01:59:42]  Doing, I'm not even going to embarrass you by telling the stories, but extraordinary acts of kindness for these people who are in trouble.
[01:59:48]  So I know it's not about money for you.
[01:59:50]  I know that it is a heartfelt situation for you.
[01:59:52]  So, you know, and I'll tell Charlie that when I talk to him.
[01:59:54]  Okay.
[01:59:55]  Yeah, that's okay.
[01:59:56]  Yeah.
[01:59:56]  What we can say about it.
[01:59:56]  Let's spend a minute on DeSantis.
[01:59:58]  Yeah, sure.
[01:59:59]  There was this.
[01:59:59]  He's going to lie.
[02:00:00]  He's going to want, he'll learn to love.
[02:00:01]  Trust me.
[02:00:03]  DeSantis was in the news yesterday for this kind of weird exchange, and I don't totally understand what happened with it, but he looked a little dear in the headlights.
[02:00:10]  It's more of a clip for YouTube.
[02:00:12]  So our listening audience, try to use your imagination to picture him kind of blinking and looking a little off when he was asked in Japan about, I think it was Trump's criticisms.
[02:00:22]  Here's a bit, Sod 11.
[02:00:24]  Governor, a poll show you falling behind Trump.
[02:00:26]  Any thoughts on that?
[02:00:29]  I'm not a candidate, so we'll see if and when that changes.
[02:00:34]  The polls show you falling behind Trump.
[02:00:36]  So what's your response?
[02:00:37]  And he just very sort of weird moment with the facial expression.
[02:00:41]  What do you think is going on in that?
[02:00:42]  Because it went totally viral yesterday.
[02:00:44]  I think there's a lot of insecurity.
[02:00:46]  I mean, look, I actually shared a stage with Ron DeSantis once at an event.
[02:00:50]  You know, we both spoke.
[02:00:51]  I was on my Woke Inc. book tour.
[02:00:52]  He was the main speaker.
[02:00:53]  People came to hear him, not me.
[02:00:55]  But I was also on that stage.
[02:00:56]  And, you know, I got a standing ovation.
[02:00:58]  He got a more muted response.
[02:01:00]  He left and stormed off stage.
[02:01:01]  He was supposed to stay for the dinner.
[02:01:02]  He didn't.
[02:01:03]  And I got coached afterwards.
[02:01:04]  Be careful not to upstage him again.
[02:01:06]  It's the kind of thing that, look, I think he's been quite a good governor, actually.
[02:01:10]  Look, I think Christine Ohm did a fantastic job on COVID.
[02:01:12]  I think Ron DeSantis followed her lead, did a great job too.
[02:01:15]  He's somebody who actually does a good job of following other people's great ideas and executing them.
[02:01:21]  And that's not a criticism.
[02:01:22]  That's a compliment, actually, to be able to see other people's great ideas.
[02:01:27]  You don't have to be the visionary.
[02:01:28]  You can be the executor.
[02:01:29]  I think that's part of what's made him a successful governor.
[02:01:31]  I think that we live in a moment in American history now, though, where we need not only somebody who can execute, but somebody who can actually be a visionary in the White House, because we have an entire generation that needs to be inspired around what it means to be American.
[02:01:46]  And I think if you're the guy who's going to say, I'm not going to talk to NBC News because they're not nice to me, I go toe-to-toe with Chuck Todd.
[02:01:52]  I've done it just like I did with Don Lemon.
[02:01:54]  I have no problem with that.
[02:01:55]  I won't go to a college campus because the script isn't set about what kinds of questions you're going to get.
[02:02:00]  Won't tell you whether you got the second COVID shot or not.
[02:02:03]  I think you're not suited to sit across the table from Xi Jinping actually with a spine and represent American interests at the top job.
[02:02:11]  And so I think that a big part of this is he's doing a fine job, a great job, I would say, where he is.
[02:02:16]  We require many foot soldiers in this national revival.
[02:02:19]  Governors are important to do this at the state level.
[02:02:22]  But when you have the combination of, you know, thin skin without actually having real vision of your own, I think that that actually just falls a little bit short of what we need in this country.
[02:02:32]  And very honestly, Megan, I tried to squint and see every way from Sunday to really get excited about, you know, maybe this is a guy I can get behind because there's easier ways to do this than to spend gobs of our families money and the time and the sacrifices we make traveling across this country.
[02:02:47]  Life was good, starting businesses and writing books, raising a three-year-old and a 10-month old.
[02:02:52]  But when I see that vacuum, I don't think Ron DeSantis is going to be anything close to a Ronald Reagan leading a national revival.
[02:03:01]  I think he could be a good troll of the left.
[02:03:02]  I think he's an excellent troll of the left at times.
[02:03:05]  But I think when we're looking for a leader of a nation that's going through a national identity crisis, that just ain't it.
[02:03:11]  And I think that when we're thinking about putting the country first, we can't have somebody whose ego needs to be massaged and thin skin needs to be managed because the world, it's the rule of the jungle on the global stage, with Xi Jinping or otherwise.
[02:03:23]  I think we need someone with an actual spine.
[02:03:25]  Some of these plans are outlined in capitalist punishment.
[02:03:28]  And the way what I love about the way Vivek writes is it's very easy to understand.
[02:03:31]  He makes it like clear for people like me who don't have a lot of time to pour over the book at night and we're tired.
[02:03:36]  And so he's very pithy, but his ideas come across very clear.
[02:03:39]  And you can learn a lot about what's happening with his ESG nonsense and his plan to stop it.
[02:03:43]  But in the time we have left, I've got to ask you about Tucker Carlson because now there are jokes going around that you are like the Grim Reaper.
[02:03:49]  You were set to go on Tucker Show last night.
[02:03:51]  You were on Don Lemon's show last week and you did.
[02:03:54]  You didn't know Tucker was going to get fired, but you did go on last night.
[02:03:58]  So how did it go?
[02:03:59]  And was that uncomfortable for you?
[02:04:01]  It wasn't Kill Meads.
[02:04:03]  Here's the meme.
[02:04:05]  Don Lemon, it's like Don Lemon with the door and blood coming out, Tucker Carlson with door open and blood coming out.
[02:04:09]  And then there's Vivek as the Grim Reaper knocking on the third door.
[02:04:13]  Who's behind the third door, Joey Reed?
[02:04:15]  Who's there?
[02:04:17]  I think that that was true for Don Lemon.
[02:04:20]  Tucker's a friend.
[02:04:20]  Look, I respect the heck out of the guy, Megan, because the thing I respect most about him is he's willing to buck any orthodoxy, even in the GOP.
[02:04:29]  I was just watching, I don't watch the shows.
[02:04:31]  I don't watch TV super often, but I happened to be watching it last week and there's someone from PETA that was on the show.
[02:04:36]  I respect that, right?
[02:04:38]  There's somebody who he disagrees with on a lot of things, but there's something he found common cause and agreement with.
[02:04:43]  He was talking about the cancellation or even the political arrest of some black nationalists who he surely does not agree with on a lot, but was saying, you know, it's interesting how the left used to be the party that said, the movement that said, I will defend to the death your right to say it, even if I disagree with you.
[02:04:58]  I think Tucker Carlson is probably one of the best embodiments of that in America today.
[02:05:02]  And so, look, I think that I think he's a friend, but at the end of the day, I don't know what went down there.
[02:05:07]  I do think that whatever it's going to be that he does next, I mean, there were some people were asking me yesterday if I thought he should enter the presidential race.
[02:05:14]  I said, that's a decision.
[02:05:16]  I can tell you from first personal experience, you should do that only if you are called to actually do it.
[02:05:22]  But yeah, but my point is, whatever he does, I'm sure he's going to have a continued positive impact on the discourse of the country.
[02:05:29]  In the meantime, I think that we're going to each have to continue speaking truth.
[02:05:32]  And I had a good conversation with Brian yesterday about why I think the, you know, the 2024 election is teed up for success if we step up and capture it.
[02:05:40]  But you raised such a good point on the left's old message.
[02:05:42]  I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.
[02:05:45]  Contrast that with AOC.
[02:05:47]  Deplatforming works.
[02:05:49]  I mean, my God, what a shift on the left.
[02:05:52]  That's why it's important to have voices like yours out there.
[02:05:53]  Vivek, thank you.
[02:05:54]  Thanks for the book.
[02:05:55]  Thanks for coming on.
[02:05:56]  Again, the new book is called Capitalist Punishment.
[02:06:00]  It's out today.
[02:06:00]  If it's anything like Vivek's other books, it's going to be a bestseller and well worth your time.
[02:06:05]  Great to see you, my friend.
[02:06:07]  Thank you, Megan.
[02:06:07]  Appreciate it.
[02:06:11]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
[02:06:13]  No BS, no agenda, and no