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May 11, 2023 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:36:29
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Why Vaccines Were Debunked 00:15:21
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, and happy Thursday.
Democrats, corporate media, and prominent never-Trumpers in a full-on meltdown right now.
Started last night, it's ongoing over CNN's town hall with former President Donald Trump.
My God, I'm going to give you my full thoughts on that later, and there are a lot of them.
Stand by.
Meantime, President Joe Biden openly concedes our southern border is going to be going to be quote chaotic as the immigration enforcement measure known as Title 42 expires just hours from now.
Joining me first, the man who wants to defeat both Trump and Biden and become our nation's next president, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
As you know, I've spoken with him several times on this show.
You can find our past interviews, which are in-depth and great.
I think you'll love them in episodes 282, 283, and again in 419, 282, 283, 419.
Bobby, welcome back to the show.
Thank you, Megan.
I always love being with you.
That's great to see you.
You know, I have to say, the presidential run is exciting on a number of levels, but to me, it struck me as genius because when I talked to you back in episodes 282 and 283, you were still the victim of censorship everywhere.
You couldn't get anybody to talk about your book.
You couldn't get anyone to talk about your messaging.
You were being dismissed as part of the disinformation dozen.
And now, as a result of this run, they have to cover you.
They have to talk about your messaging.
To me, it's pretty brilliant.
Is that part of the goal?
No, the goal is to win.
And my wife would not have tolerated my run if it was just to hear me talk a lot more.
So, but the goal is, you know, I think I entered this because I think I can win.
I think I could change the country.
But you're right.
It's really kind of refreshing to be able to have conversations on television.
I'm still censored.
You know, ABC got a segment that I did the other day.
They asked me a question about vaccines, which I was not bringing up.
They asked me, and when I answered it, they cut that segment out, which was very, I think, unusual and was disturbing to a lot of people.
We need to stop treating the American people as if they're babies that need to be protected from dangerous information or from, you know, that they're too delicate to hear thoughts that are arguments about public health issues, other issues.
We need to start having frank, open debates that are candid, that are congenial, that are respectful to each other and respectful to the audience.
The American people can handle truth and they can handle, they can handle things that aren't true.
The remedy for that is the remedy for bad information and misinformation is not censorship, it's more information.
You know, it works too, their censorship regime.
I'm going to play that ABC soundbite you just referenced so the audience can see it for themselves.
But I said this before when you were on.
I've had an evolution on you.
I remember being on the chairlift with a friend of mine in December of 2021, I think it was, and she was reading your book.
And maybe anyway, it was a few months before I interviewed you.
And I said, oh, you know, you should be careful because, you know, sort of if you take in the wrong information, then you're saying the wrong thing to everybody.
And she was like, well, he has some really interesting things to say.
You might want to look at it.
So I did.
Started looking at your book, started reading it, started looking up the sources that you cited in support.
Then went to my team and said, let's check his sources.
Let's see what other people say about his sources.
Is he citing the right sources?
Turned into this long interview we did.
And your claims checked out the most controversial stuff that you get labeled a kook for saying, checked out time after time after time.
And this is not a full endorsement of everything you've ever said, but my takeaway was this guy has been unfairly maligned by people who are so pro-vaccine that they just needed to silence him.
So it works to the point where there's a fair amount of people who say like, oh, he's a kook.
My friends at National Review, we pulled it just not to insult you, but Jim Garrity, who I really like, said, you're cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
And there's similar, but I'll bet you he hasn't done half the work my team and I have to actually see whether that's true.
So this censorship actually does have a negative effect on you.
Yeah.
I mean, what I say to people is show me where I'm wrong.
Just show me the facts because, you know, I'm susceptible to change.
If somebody shows me where I'm wrong, I'm not going to stay on an opinion that is based upon a bad factual foundation.
I'm accused constantly of promoting misinformation, but nobody actually is able to show me a single factual assertion that I've made that is wrong.
And I'm sure there are some out there.
We're very, very careful on social media.
I probably have the most robust in-house fact-checking operation right now in the media.
We have 350 PhD scientists, MD physicians on an advisory board that looks at the things that I post.
None of them would stay with me if I was promoting misinformation, you know, regularly or even occasionally.
But if I do it, you know, my reaction is, and I say this at the beginning of my book.
Show me if there's a fact in this book that you disagree with and show me a counterfact and we will change it.
We've been through, I think, 12 or 15 editions of that book.
And if somebody comes, if somebody sends a letter to us and says, I spotted something on page 212 that is not true or that's challengeable, we'll just change it.
Well, here's what I think is happening instead.
Here's what they're deciding just to shut you up.
I make occasionally, because I tweet a lot now.
So the other day I made a tweet that said that there was AGIS missile systems in Ukraine.
I was wrong about that.
They were in Romania and Poland.
I thought they were in Ukraine.
I mistake because I'm tweeting very quickly all the time in response to current events.
Sometimes I don't get that kind of robust fact checking.
But immediately, you know, the reader said this is wrong.
And I went and looked it up.
And then I printed an apology and a rata.
And that would be my response in any case.
Or somebody says you're wrong about this.
I want to correct the public record.
But no, what's easier is to just say, this is the narrative is he's a nutcase on vaccines.
He's against the MMR vaccine.
Everyone knows that's important.
We have to stop listening to him as opposed to doing what you and I did on our four-hour exchange, where I actually got into each, what you're actually claiming, what you've actually written, and said this.
And we went to your worst critics.
We went to the people who can't stand you and said, where's he wrong?
And they gave us all their ammo and we presented you with it and you responded.
That is how people learn.
That is how people come to their own conclusion about, oh, he's right.
Or, no, I don't believe it.
Or what?
That's how journalism used to work and is supposed to still work.
But instead, we get this from ABC News, which, as you point out, interviewed you and made an obvious cut on the subject of vaccines.
And after the exchange that I'm about to show the audience, the anchor comes back on and says, to the effect of, he said a bunch of nonsense on vaccines, which we edited because he's full of it.
Here's part of it.
You've said in the past that there is a correlation between vaccines leading to autism that's totally been debunked.
Wait a minute.
Who debunked it?
We have not seen any kind of scientific connection from the CDC, the World Health Organization.
Those organizations are captive agencies, Lindsay.
And so you think they're all in cahoots.
Yeah, they're all captive.
You've discussed the Kennedy family as like any family.
There are disagreements.
Right.
So she cut out everything that followed.
Then she offered a 33 second disclaimer on how wrong you are on vaccines, rebutting claims we didn't get to hear, just whatever you had said and what wound up on the editing room floor, which was longer than the 20-second exchange ABC chose to air.
Yeah, I mean, what I did after that with Lindsay is I laid out the scientific studies, which I cited.
I cited the names of the author, of the authors of those studies, the in-house studies at CDC, et cetera, that actually confirmed that link.
And by the way, I didn't go on there saying I'm going to push this issue between autism and vaccines.
She chose to ask me about it and along with a kind of propaganda statement, it's completely untrue.
It's been debunked.
And when I pushed back on that and cited scientific studies supporting it, of which there are hundreds, she cut my, she left her propaganda in place and cut mine out.
And then at the end, gave this very unusual statement saying we have censored him because he was promoting misinformation.
And so it was, you know, it ended with a kind of a defamation.
But at least she allowed me on, you know, one of the things that you did when you first let me on, it was at a time, Megan, that nobody was allowing me to speak.
I was just, you know, I was just a pariah in the media.
I was exiled and it was, it was blanket.
It was, you know, wall to wall.
I was just not allowed on.
And you were one of the first people to have a conversation with me on this show.
And you did something very unusual, which is you would interview me and then you'd play a section of that interview and then you would play your fact check.
And people called me up and said, you know, that's not fair what Megan's doing because she's, you know, she's putting these, she's after checking you rather than having an argument about you.
And I said, what she's doing is the only way that she could allow me on.
What she is doing is great.
And I want people to do that.
I want people to fact check me.
People should not believe what I say.
And they should not believe what CDC says.
They shouldn't believe what the WHO says.
In a democracy, you have to do your own research.
That is part of the work of living in a democracy.
It's part of your civic duty.
And as a parent, you need to do that research to protect your children.
Everybody needs to don't just listen to your doctor.
Don't listen to me.
Do your own research.
You need to do that to protect your child today.
And what you did, Megan, I said to people who were, you know, who were questioning that, I said, what she's doing is exactly what she needs to do to allow me for the first time to speak.
So I was very, very grateful for the way that you handled it.
And you figured out a way to do that without enduring the kind of, you know, typhoon of criticism and hatred that you have gotten if you had just aired me unedited.
Well, we wanted it to live.
We wanted it to live on YouTube and Insta and all platforms that had been censoring you.
And it did and it does to this day.
I mean, we've considered it a feat, right?
We have four hours of RFK Jr. on all the most incendiary stuff and it hasn't been censored even a little, even one time.
And we appreciate it.
You know, some of the stuff we had an actual back and forth on, like this is what somebody says, and some of the stuff I stole the last word with those, you know, this is what his critics are saying about it.
But I think people walked away from it really enjoying it, you know, my critics and yours saying, I learned something, you know, and I they saw you in a new light because all you need to do is talk to you to realize there's much, much more to you and your advocacy and what you're about than this one issue.
You're a lifelong environmental lawyer who spent his entire career trying to clean up the rivers and the environment and the ocean from toxic chemicals, which are killing us.
I mean, that's something even your critics would admit.
So it's the vaccine lane that they've used to try to dismiss you.
And there's much, much more to you.
And that's one of the reasons I'm glad to see you run because you're talking about a lot more.
And frankly, you sound in some ways, I've heard other people say this, but a lot more like my friend Tucker, who we've been talking about since his exit from Fox, than maybe you do like Joe Biden.
You know, I mean, he too sees government actors, elites who work in a coordinated way to snuff out the middle class, to snuff out the lower class, to snuff out the middleman or anyone who threatens their interests.
This is something you are appealing to people with this same kind of messaging.
I mean, Tucker, you know, I really admire Tucker for what he did.
And I don't agree with Tucker on all of his issues.
And during the, you know, a lot of his career, I was as I considered him a villain, but I have gotten to know him and I saw the courage that he demonstrated over the last couple of years, since the beginning of COVID in talking about civil liberties when nobody else was talking and talking and defending freedom of speech, which, you know, that it used to be that journalists were absolutists on the First Amendment.
Every journalist, if you mess around with the First Amendment, every journalist in this country would be against you.
And yet during COVID, they all went silent at a time when government imposed censorship was becoming the norm.
And Tucker was the one guy to, you know, to talk about it.
He was the person who was pushing back against the Ukraine war narrative.
And he's been, you know, pushing on all these populist issues about the corporate control of our government and all of the things that Democrats should be saying in this country and that, you know, people who care about civil liberties, people who care about the destruction of the middle class should be talking about.
And, you know, most journalists today have become kind of propagandists for the, you know, for the official narrative.
But what Tucker shows, what you show, is that these networks are not monolithic, that there's a lot of really good people in them who are still trying to practice journalism, who are still functioning from idealism rather than ideology and are pushing back even when their jobs are at stake.
CIA Propaganda and Mockingbird 00:04:47
I spoke recently with Matt Taibbi and we discussed this story about how when Joe Biden was running against Donald Trump and we had the Hunter Biden report in the New York Post saying that the laptop had come out and it had all this stuff on it and it was dismissed instantly by 51 so-called security experts as or Intel experts as Russian disinformation.
We now know that was coordinated between the Biden campaign and the actual CIA, which helped get people to sign on to this thing.
And it was all false.
It was not disinformation.
The FBI was actually pursuing an investigation at the time of the laptop and had it.
They knew it wasn't disinformation.
And so this is direct coordination between a presidential campaign and the CIA to snuff out a bad development for a presidential candidate with what was itself disinformation.
These claims about the laptop being a bunch of made-up BS from the Russians.
It's an extraordinary story.
It too has been all but blacked out by the mainstream.
Yeah, it's a shocking story.
And, you know, without sort of taking sides on the issue, it is so alarming that the CIA is now participating actively as basically as an agency in presidential campaigns and choosing favorites.
And this is exactly at the beginning that, you know, when the CIA was created in 1947 by President Truman, there was almost unanimity among Democrats and Republicans who were very, very alarmed at allowing the creation of an intelligence agency, of a secretive intelligence agency in the United States.
It hadn't existed before in American history, and most Americans believe that that was the province of totalitarian regimes like the Gestapo in Germany, like the KGB in Russia, like Savak in Iran, and the Stasi in East Germany, but that the United, it was inconsistent with the values of a democracy or the existence of the continued existence of a democracy.
And then in 1973, during the through 75, the church committee hearings, when all of these, you know, it was a two-year hearing on the assassinations and on the involvement of the CIA in assassinations all over the world and fixing elections and doing dirty tricks.
And also Operation Mockingbird, which was a project, an illegal project by the CIA, because the CIA and its charter is not allowed to propagandize American citizens, which is exactly what the 100-laptop story is about.
It was one of the key negotiating provisions that were added to bring on people who were very, very nervous that the CIA could never propagandize American citizens.
And yet, and so in 1975, when all this information came out about Operation Mockingbird, which was a project of the CIA to compromise American journalists, and there was over, I think, 500 journalists at that time, Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein wrote an article about in the Rolling Stone a couple years later, detailing that the New York Times, the Washington Post, all of these other journals,
the CBS, ABC, NBC, all had high-level CIA officers in their management, in their editorial section, that many journalists were on the CIA payroll.
And after that, the CIA promised that it would no longer, that it would disband Operation Mockingbird, which was illegal, and that it would now just propagandize foreign journalists.
So the CIA today, through USAID, is the single largest funder of journalism in the world.
They were supposed to only do it in foreign countries.
And now we know that they're doing it here too.
And, you know, during the COVID epidemic, the White House provided with Facebook and with Twitter and the social media sites provided a portal to the FBI through which the CIA, we now know, was censoring people like me who were speaking out against government policies.
This is kind of the worst nightmare of the people who oppose the CIA at the outset, which is that it would become an instrument for the president of the United States punishing dissenters or people, you know, his critics.
White House Border Wars 00:06:38
And that story that you talked about is so alarming.
And, you know, and yet the press does not, the regular journalists in this country do not seem to understand how horrifying this is, how threatening this is to all of the horrified when they do it to either side, not just to the side you oppose.
That's the problem.
They like it as the ends justifying the means.
And this is a very dangerous road we're going down.
We talked about this before about how it used to be the Republicans would be very defensive of agencies like the CIA and the FBI and the Democrats would be more suspicious of them.
And now we've sort of flipped roles in this country on that front.
Now, when it comes to Ukraine, I don't want to say you have unanimity between the Dems and the Republicans, but it's, you know, the Dems seem very in support of this, this, you know, our support of Ukraine and what we're doing over there.
Most Republicans also say that they support what we're doing, though there's a growing body of dissenters within the GOP.
And Trump certainly seems to be one of them.
Now, he participated in this CNN town hall last night and was asked about Ukraine.
Here's part of what he said.
Do you want Ukraine to win this war?
I don't think in terms of winning and losing.
I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people and breaking down.
Can I just follow up on that?
Cause that's a really important thing.
Excuse me.
Let me just follow up.
Can you say if you want Ukraine or Russia to win this war?
I want everybody to stop dying.
They're dying.
Russians and Ukrainians.
I want them to stop dying.
And I'll have that done.
I'll have that done in 24 hours.
I'll have it done.
Now he's getting pushed back on that from the more, you know, pro-Ukrainian intervention folks saying, what does that mean?
He's going to give it up within a day.
He's going to pull us out of it, start pull U.S. support, wave the white flag, and let Putin have what he's taken thus far.
People are upset about that.
And it was interesting, just anecdotally, it's a small room, but those are all Republican primary voters in New Hampshire clapping for his answer.
So what did you make of it?
Well, I was really happy to hear him say that.
And, you know, and I think his instincts are exactly right.
We just have to end this war and there's not going to ever be a winner or loser.
Both sides have been the loser in this.
We've killed now between 30,000 and 100,000 Russians and over 300,000 Ukrainian troops and 14 to 15,000 civilians.
We've destroyed the Ukraine.
We've destroyed 60% unemployment.
The infrastructure is wrecked.
The country now, because of the prolonging of this war, which is a?
U.s project.
The neocons in the White House have prolonged this war and?
Uh much longer.
Rather than treating it as a humanitarian crisis and trying to end it quickly.
Every step the White House has taken particularly the neocons in the White House has been to prolong the war and uh and expand and increase the bloodshed.
Um president, we were told, we were sold on The fact that this was the humanitarian issue, that a humanitarian intervention.
My son went over there and fought, you know, and that was his impression too.
He went over and he thought, you know, as a machine gunner, talked about that special forces unit and a Kharkiv offensive.
Um, my and.
But when president Biden was asked about the objectives of the war, he said it was to get, depose Vladimir Putin, to do regime change, which is a Neocon project, an aspiration the neocons for decades, or a decade.
When his, his uh, defense secretary, Boy Austin, spoke about the war in april of 2022 or 20 yeah 2021 2022, excuse me he said that the objective, our objective, into war was to exhaust the Russians and degrade their capacity to fight in any other part of the world.
Well, that is not a good idea for the Ukrainians.
That means we are turning this country into an abattoir for Ukrainian kids in order to achieve a geopolitical objective of you know, of weakening Russia.
And, by The way, I don't think it's a good idea for us to be weakening Russia.
We are pushing Russia into the camp of China and uh, and so the whole thing is is kind of a nightmare and it's.
The Ukrainians are a victim of U.s policies and Russian policies.
Now, you know, I like what president Uh Trump said.
During his administration he actually laid the groundwork for this war.
He began selling for the first time Ukrainians offensive weapons.
He walked away from the Abm treaty, which was the treaty that limited and made the Russians very nervous, because that was the treaty we had signed with the Russians to say neither of us are going to deploy um, the intermediate weapon, intermediate range nuclear weapons that from the Ukraine Ukraine is only 400 miles from Russia and we could hit Moscow in minutes with those weapons.
So it destabilized the area.
It made the Russians very, very anxious.
And then he continued to push the?
Uh the borders of NATO right up to the Russian borders, which the Russians had said was a red line.
So his administration, although he his intentions, I think, were good, his administration was filled with neocons and warmongers and, you know, swamp creatures and, uh and and pharmaceutical executives who were making decisions that you know did not reflect what president Trump was saying to his base.
Can I ask you a question?
That just to tie it all, not to make it all about Tucker, but I we talked about him a minute ago and um, I did see you tweet that you thought maybe one of the reasons he was asked was because yes, he spoke it out on Ukraine in much in the way you just did, but you thought it may had to do, may have had to do with big pharma.
Now, you and I discussed the last time in depth about how it is very true that big pharma finances most big media.
I mean, they're all over big media.
They pay half the bills of these companies and it's it's potentially perilous to speak out against them, against the vaccine and so on.
He was doing that, but that's just your supposition, right?
You don't have any inside knowledge on that being the reason.
Tucker is my supposition, you know.
Roger Ailes Ad Revenue 00:06:55
On on that particular transaction but um, in 2014, I had a conversation with Roger Ailes and that has bearing on that this, you know, on my kind of the background, of my assumptions going into this and Roger I, I had spent, when I I had this weird relationship with Roger.
Um, where was Roger Ailes?
Because I spent the summer in a tent with him.
In 2019, I spent three months in a tent in Africa with Roger.
What we?
We had this weird relationship ever since because I kind of considered him politically.
He was like Darth Vader.
He was and we were anathetical on everything, but we really had a lot of affection for each other and, as you know, he was a very smart, very funny um, very loyal friend, very endearing guy.
In many, many ways.
He had flaws clearly, and those are well known to everybody at this point but um, but anyway he he, he knew about this issue with a pharmaceutical relationship, with neurological injuries to children, and he believed that a family member of his had been possibly injured.
And we had, at that point, made a documentary that looked at all these issues, the science behind these issues, and I was promoting it.
I went and showed it to him and I showed it to Michael Clemente and other people at FOX NEWS and they loved it.
Roger brought me into his office and he said, I cannot help you on this one because he always, you know making one when I wanted.
I was the only environmentalist who was going on FOX NEWS at that time.
I went on John Annity show very, very regularly, I did Neil Cavuto, I did Bill O'reilly, I did all the major shows at FOX.
Because I call up Roger and say I have an issue I want to talk about, about warming or pollution or whatever, and he would uh, he would, he would get me onto these shows.
When I asked him about this show, about the vaccine show, he said, I can't do that for you Bobby, because if any of my hosts allowed you onto a show without asking my permission, I would have to fire them, and if I didn't fire them I would get a phone call from Rupert within 10 minutes, and so that, so I this was part of the background, my assumption that okay, if you talk about this on FOX, you're gonna get fired.
And that's what Roger said.
And by and since then and he told me at time, he said he said 75 of the of the uh prime time news hour, uh revenues come from pharmaceutical companies.
And he also said, as I remember, that 17 out of 22 ads on the typical evening news show are pharmaceutical ads.
That's what he told me, and and so then, when I saw Roger, when I saw Tucker the night, he introduced me And we had an interview, but before he introduced me, he did this long monologue about how the pharmaceutical companies were controlling content on network news and how bad it was for our country.
The other channels took hundreds of millions of dollars from big pharma companies.
And then they shilled for their sketchy products on the air.
And as they did that, they maligned anyone who was skeptical of those products.
At the very least, this was a moral crime.
It was disgusting, but it was universal.
It happened across the American news media.
They all did it.
So at this point, the question isn't who in public life is corrupt, too many to count.
The question is who is telling the truth?
And I was sitting there saying, that is exactly what Roger said he would get fired for if any new, if anybody on network knew said that.
So when he was fired five days later, I disconnected some dots.
But, you know, I'm sure they had, I know they had other reasons to fire Tucker.
There were other things that they didn't like about what he was doing.
He wasn't, you know, bucking the trend, but it shows that he had this enormous popularity.
His show was, well, he was getting 3.5 million viewers a night on an average night, 5 million on a good night.
CNN gets, I think, about 350,000.
So he was getting 10 times what CNN was doing.
He was such a huge revenue generator for that network.
And what his firing showed is that the ideology and it trumps popularity and even revenues that they were willing to get rid of a guy like that because he wouldn't, you know, he wouldn't follow the narrative.
Well, that's fascinating.
I have to say, that's a new theory and just as plausible as any of the others.
You know, I made this point, but I will say, you know, Foxnet right now is trying to run cover for itself by putting out the head of its ad sales department to say, oh, the ads are going up in the APM hour.
We're getting more revenue from blue chip brands now that he's gone.
Now that we just have generic hosts doing this hour.
But that's sort of a head fake because yes, they make some money, but they make some money off of their ads.
It is interesting, but that really Fox News makes most of its money off of its subscription fees from the cable providers who pay Fox to have Fox on their lineups so that they, the cable providers, look more attractive to their audiences.
Hey, if you go with us instead of Dish, you're going to have Fox News or whatever, however they do the pitch.
And it's more like, if we don't have Fox, they're not going to choose us.
And in order to drive those numbers up, they have to show good ratings.
So Fox uses the good ratings that its hosts deliver to jack up subscription fees.
So yes, Tucker wasn't getting blue chip brand advertisers on the APM because of all the left-wing boycott calls against him, but he was helping drive that all-important subscription rate up higher than ever because he was bringing in huge numbers, as you just pointed out.
Yet another one of the mysteries to this whole thing.
And I'll bring the audience's latest numbers because they're also not good.
I mean, the APM just on Tuesday, that's the latest we have.
My God, got 144,000 in the key demo, 144,000.
And when Tucker was there, let me see, I think I have this, but the, let's see, we did the average, when Tucker was there the last four weeks, his average at 8 p.m. was 429,000 in the key demo.
And this, the most recent numbers are 144.
Biden's Mental Model Crisis 00:13:49
I mean, it's just a, it's a bloodbath and it continues over there.
All right.
RFK Jr., RFKJ, stand by, quick break, back with much more.
I want to ask you what your plan is as they're trying to squeeze you out of the debates.
And yet you've got 20% of the Democratic vote, which is insane.
That's huge.
Stand by.
Let's talk about what's happening in Democratic politics because you are crowbarring your way into this race and the DNC is very much against you.
It's extraordinary.
I want the audience to know on average you have about 19, 20% among the Democratic voters.
That's unheard of when you have a sitting Democratic president running for reelection.
We've had other challenges in the past.
We have maybe 3%, you know, 2%.
Now you've got 20, but the DNC is saying we will not be having debates, period, go away.
So how do you get past that and wrest this thing from Joe Biden?
I mean, we're an insurgent campaign.
I would say this.
I think the Democratic Party is making a mistake from the point of view of the party and the kind of long-term credibility of the party to not have debates for a couple of reasons.
One is, you know, if President Biden at some point is going to have to debate President Trump, you know, as the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, President Trump has shown himself to be the most devastating debater probably since Abraham Lincoln, you know, in terms of just his capacity to obliterate and dispatch opponents.
And President Biden really needs to be on his toes in doing that.
And, you know, asking him to not train for that.
President Trump is going to have to go through a series of debates in his own political party, presumably.
And to have President Biden not being going through his own debate process and getting his, you know, getting in shape for that is like asking a prize fighter to, you know, to train for a champion ship fight by sitting on a couch and eating Chick-fil-A.
You know, he should be out there showing what he can do and also showing a Democratic base that, you know, here, here's that I can do this.
I'm able to do it.
I'm going to care.
I'm the guy who's going to carry the flag for the party against President Trump.
And I'm the most capable person to do that.
But I also think we're at a time in history, Megan, where, you know, with the January 6th demonstrations and all that, you know, the riots, whatever, that there are people in this country who believe that, who have strong, strong doubts and anxieties about the integrity of the electoral system and the integrity of our democracy.
And it's not just Republicans, by the way.
Most Democrats believe that the 2001 election or 2000 election was stolen from Vice President Gore under the Bush Gore election.
In 2004, I wrote an award-winning article for Rolling Stone showing how the 2004 election when Bush ran against John Kerry had also been fixed in the six counties in Ohio.
In 2016, Hillary believed that the election had been fixed against her.
And then Bernie Sanders followers believed that the Democratic Party had fixed the election against them.
We should all be focused right now, both political parties, but particularly the Democratic Party, which is supposed to be Democratic, should be focused on making ourselves templates or role models for electoral integrity and for persuading the American people that the system is not rigged against you.
This is not the Soviet Union where the party picks the candidate and the whole thing is fixed all the way through, but that there's real democracy at work here and that we're going to go out and meet people.
We're going to debate our opponents.
We're going to shake hands.
We're going to do retail politics.
We're not just going to carpet bomb the country with billions of dollars in advertising and have nobody actually question the candidate or challenge them on their issues or their beliefs, their ideologies and see them in action, make sure that they understand what's happening on a human level in communities across this country.
I don't think that's a good thing for our party.
I think we should be, you know, we should be making our party a role model for how democracy works and how it is not fixed.
It's not rigged.
We're supposed to be the party of the New Deal, not the party of the rigged deal.
You talk about how the prize fighter or the one heading into a prize fight needs to get off the couch.
This isn't like a Chris Christie or a Nuke Gingrich, you know, guys who have a natural facility with words and you could just put them up there tomorrow and they could probably do very well in a debate.
That is not Joe Biden.
Every day we get new videotape of him confusing people, muffing the words up.
Just yesterday, he went to an event.
He didn't go out when they played Hail to the Chief.
He seemed confused that that was him.
And then when he finally got out there, it was time to leave.
This is what happened.
There he is for the listening audience, confused, turning, doesn't know where to go off the stage.
A handler comes out, tries to show him, this is the way.
Okay, finally turns and waves.
I mean, we have one of these a day.
If this is a one-off, we wouldn't be showing this.
But I mean, it's daily where he looks confused or is doing word search or is mumbling his words.
It confuses a person, thinks a dead person is alive, thinks an alive person is dead.
I could go on.
So now more than ever, they need this.
But there's talk now of potentially the Democrats, if Trump's the nominee, saying Joe Biden's not debating.
He's not going to debate and help platform this lying, you know, stream of consciousness person who cannot, you know, see the truth with the highest strength glasses.
Like that's already what they're saying.
So they're going to do the basement campaign again, or at least try, and then not have him debate.
Do you think that'll work?
I don't know if it'll work.
I don't think it's good for our country.
I think, I don't think that's good for our country.
I don't think anybody can think that's good for our country.
And I think the optics and the rest of the world, you know, where we're already losing our leadership, where our moral authority is diminished, we're supposed to be the exemplary nation.
We invented democracy in this country, modern democracy.
The Greeks invented it before us and modern democracy in 1776.
We were the only democratic nation in the world at that point.
By the Civil War, by 1860, there were six democracies all modeled on the United States.
And today there's 180.
And we are their model.
We're the ones that they're looking to and saying, you know, we want to be like the United States of America.
And this is just, it is, it's very troubling to me, and it should be troubling to most Americans, that we cannot, you know, model democracy for the world that we're going to.
We're going to have leaders that are picked, you know on uh, by spending money, you know by, by getting money from wealthy people and corporations and then propaganda, propagandizing the American people, and that they never have to meet anybody, they never have to do a town hall.
That's not all set up with, you know, people who are whose questions they already know and the answers that are already written out for them, and that they're just reading stuff.
It's not real.
People know it's not real and people are angry in this country right now.
People are angry and they're they're uh, they're they're riddled with anxiety um they're, you know the middle class is being destroyed in this country and how our democracy does work.
I just think it's terrible for our democracy.
You know he's um, he kind of hid information about his full?
Um mental state in his last official exam because he didn't release the the, the results of any mental exam.
Same as John Fetterman frankly, that they they hid information about his well-being before uh, the election.
He got in and then promptly had an emotional breakdown and spent six weeks in inpatient at Uh Walter Read.
So there's a real concern here about how well Joe Biden is.
Do you, do you share those concerns about his mental well-being, his fitness for the job?
You know, I really don't have a way to make and I don't have any insight that's different than what the American people see.
I see the things you know, that you showed and that you know.
I read an article the other day, Megan I.
I don't know whether it was in the NEW YORK Times or the Washington POST, but it was in a major journal in which some pundit, a Democratic pundit, was making the argument that it's okay if the president is non-compass mentis it's, it's because you don't really need mental acuity to run the country.
You can be more of a figurehead and you're surrounded by, you know, technocrats and policy.
I saw this.
You say age, whatever.
It's.
So he's age, so he's, so he's old, so he might be potentially infirm, you know.
And then they pointed out that um Fdr was in a wheelchair.
Oh, that's the same Fdr was in with his.
His legs were disabled, you know, but he was not mentally disabled at the end of his, his last presidency, where he'd been, you know, his fourth election.
By that time he was extremely infirm and, you know, I and you can make an argument about whether that was good or, because we're in the middle of the war, people did not want to switch towards mainstream in the midstream.
But the problem is, if you're surrounded by people a lot of times and i'm not making a judgment on his mental acuity, you know or not, because I don't know, I don't have any insight into it, but I don't I don't think it's good to have a president who's not on his toast, because what happens, it empowers the people around you and those people are, in his case, are people who are, you know, the neocons, who are warmongering, who are these you know?
Who are technocrats, who are people from the pharmaceutical industry and lobbying firms, and it's just uh, it's a, it's a license for those you know, the military industrial complex and these large corporations to to pillage our country and to complete the destruction of the American middle class.
And we need a vigorous president who's robust who um, who's ready to tackle these real problems and not just keep the ship sailing.
You know one of the things with Fdr, when he was on his fourth term, He had a ship that was sailing to victory.
He had, you know, he was building the American middle class.
He was winning the war against the Nazis and against Japan and against fascism across the globe.
He was building alliances around the world.
So he had this long success story, and America was on an uphill trajectory.
Today, America's on a downhill trajectory, and there's nobody in this country who can disagree with that.
And we need a course reversal.
And a president who is infirm is not a president who's going to make that kind of course reversal.
We need somebody who's vigorous and who's ready to make big changes to change staff and to change the direction of the country.
And so people have to make a judgment about whether Joe Biden is actually going to do that or whether it's going to be business as usual.
And the business as usual is a prescription or cataclysm for the American middle class.
The article was in the Daily Beast, Daily Rothkoff, Joe Biden is old.
Get over it.
You know, hearing you talk and talking about some of these issues, you definitely have a fair amount in common with President Trump when it comes to policy.
And also, I would say, as an outsider, you know, just coming in and saying, I see all these things differently.
My party's doing it wrong.
So listen to me.
So we're going to come back, but quickly before we go to break, if you had to choose, if you didn't get the nomination, you had to vote for either Joe Biden or Donald Trump, could you see a world in which you supported Trump?
I don't think so.
I mean, I think you're right that a lot of my issues are, you know, cross-party lines.
They're on free speech, they're on rebuilding the middle class, on reindustrial, rebuilding the industrial base in this country, protecting the environment, ending corruption in government.
And those are things that kind of avoid the culture war issues and look for common ground with Americans.
And I think I share those with people of both parties.
And that's why I think I have a lot of support from both independents and Republicans as well as Democrats.
You do.
So you're not going to say if Joe Biden becomes the nominee, would you vote for him?
I'm not going to say.
I'd have to see what happens.
I have to see what happens.
Okay, stand by because I do want to ask you about a couple of those culture war issues that you mentioned.
Cheryl Hines Book Adventure 00:02:32
And also whether Cheryl Hines is going to be able to handle this kind of stress.
You described her as a tenderheart.
She's a tenderheart.
This is going to be a rough battle, already is.
And once your poll numbers continue to go up, even rougher.
So we'll go there next.
RFKJ stays with us.
Don't forget, folks, while I have your attention, you can find the Megan Kelly Show Live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East.
Full video show and the clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/slash Megan Kelly.
You can also get it via audio podcast.
And don't forget to go to megankelly.com to sign up for the American News Minute.
That's my email to you on Fridays.
Let's start with Cheryl, your wonderful wife, Cheryl Hines, very famous, well-known actress, is brilliant in Larry Davids' Curb Your Enthusiasm.
And people want to blame her because she's married to you.
She was there when you announced your presidential run.
And I wonder, because the last time we talked, you said she was, you said, don't read that book.
You don't have to read my book.
You don't have to get involved in my professional thing, which is very controversial.
And you said she's a tenderhearted woman.
And this was just a lot for her to take in.
So how on earth are you putting her through this?
How's this going to go?
That's a good question.
She, you know, she's been amazing on this because it was.
And, you know, when I said to her, don't read the book, and you describe her as tenderhearted, she's she is very tenderhearted and she is a very gentle.
I told you the last time I was with you that she is she's the best human being that I've ever met.
I've never heard her say a single thing that was pretentious or self-promoting or had even a molecule of dishonesty in it.
She's and everything that she says is worth listening to.
And it's usually very, very funny.
But and she's super smart, but she's a comedian.
She said this to me.
I'm making people laugh.
If I read that book, I'm going to be so depressed.
And so I said to her, don't read it.
You're right.
It's a depressing book.
And, you know, it's.
You're quite the pitch man for your book.
Listen, I have to live with Cheryl and I don't want her moping around.
I want her to be, you know, I want that positive energy that she has all the time.
But she's been amazing on this.
Women in Sports Equality 00:05:42
And she's been, you know, she's out.
We're both having fun.
You know, there's been, she expects a roller coaster ride.
And, you know, she calls it an adventure.
And, you know, she occasionally says, how did you get me involved in this adventure?
But she signed on to it.
And I'm really happy because I could not have done it without her.
And so far, we're having fun.
So far, things are good.
And it's, you know, as you said, the campaign is getting a lot of traction, which has been, I think, it's been really exciting for both of us.
You kind of assume the risk when you marry a Kennedy that political office or campaigns could be in your future at some level.
She probably knew that.
It is not necessarily all of Cheryl's positions, your positions.
And some people need to remember that when they talk about her and her Hollywood career, people, I'm done.
I'm done watching that.
Really?
Why?
Okay, whatever.
All right, let's talk about some of those culture war issues because I did see you weigh in on one of them, and that's the trans issue.
So last month, Republican lawmakers in the House, they tried to pass legislation that would prevent trans athletes from running or competing in girls and women's sports.
Every single Democrat voted no.
And in fact, it was to the point where President Biden said if that bill ever came to his desk, he would veto it.
He's so committed to letting trans athletes participate in girl sports.
Now, the latest I could find was there was a poll out just this week from the Washington Post showing something like two-thirds of the American electorate is not in favor of this.
They do not want trans people running in women's sports or competing in women's sports.
Let's see, I have it here.
Youth sports, 62% say it should not be allowed.
High school sports, 66% say it should not be allowed.
College sports, 65% say it should not be allowed.
And at the professional level, 65% say it should not be allowed.
I mean, that's a huge number.
I went back to try to find a breakdown, Dems versus Republicans.
I could find one of those from about a year ago, last June.
And that showed among Democrats, 46% support trans people running, participating in women's sports, 41% oppose.
So back then, it was about evenly divided within the Democratic Party.
You do not agree with Joe Biden.
You, I think, agree with the majorities that this should not be allowed.
So do you think you are picking up on something within the Democratic Party that all these Dems who voted no and Joe Biden aren't?
Well, I don't know.
And I didn't make a, you know, I didn't do a poll before I answered that question.
I just, and I don't know what the bill says.
And I don't know if there was something else obnoxious in it.
And by the way, if trans individuals want to participate in intramural sports or on either side.
I think it's not nice to have kind of rules that laws that say they can't do that.
But when I look for example, first of all, I think we need to be respectful about everybody's choices and particularly what they do with their body.
And people should not be shamed for that.
And people should not be treated in a way that is disparaging or derogatory.
We need to respect each other.
And that is, I think, the key thing that all of us, we need to be sensitive to these issues and respect each other.
On this particular issue, my uncle, Ted Kennedy, wrote Title IX.
And I was, you know, I was very, very conscious of that and campaigned for him during that period and understood what a hard fight that was because, you know, his idea was that women should have the ability to participate in sports and have the same rewards and attention and investment as men.
And women had fought for that for years and years and years, women athlete.
They'd been treated as red-headed stepchildren of the system, you know, as second-class citizens.
And he wanted to put an end to that.
And so I was conscious of how of the hard battle women have fought to be able to develop college sports and professional sports and develop themselves as professional athletes.
And it just doesn't seem fair that a person who's born as a man and has all these advantages of heights, of, you know, of musculature and all these others, biological advantages, that, you know, they should be able to walk onto a team like that.
I have a niece who worked so hard her whole life to get and put thousands and thousands of hours in and made huge sacrifices in her lives to get a scholarship to play softball at Boston College, where she is today.
And it just seemed to me to be unfair if a person with biological advantages can take that away from her.
So just, you know, I answered that question the way that I saw it without really thinking much about it.
You know, when I think CNN broadcaster asked me about it, and it just seems to me to be common sense that, you know, and my assumptions, again, are based upon a long, long fight of watching women achieve, fight so hard to achieve what they've achieved in sports.
Banning Transgender Minors 00:02:24
And it just doesn't seem to, you know, fair to for somebody to be able to take that away from them.
Yeah, it's not fair and it's not safe in a lot of these instances as well.
We had on a young volleyball player who was forced to play against a trans player who was biologically male who really hurt her, who really hurt her.
And some of our viewers actually wrote in after the pack and explained that if you have a male volleyball match, the net is higher to accommodate for the the heights and I haven't checked this, but this is from one of our viewers um, and that you know, because they can spike it they, they can spike it so hard if the net is low enough, and this girl got seriously hurt and came on talked about it.
Just a quick follow-up on it though, because now 19 states have banned the medicalization of the trans issue for minors.
No puberty blockers, no cross-sex hormones and certainly no surgeries for minors who don't know what they're getting themselves into and who really the studies show that maybe over 90.
It varies on the study, but i've seen any place from 72 to 98 of kids who left, are left alone, will grow out of any trans confusion and will revert back to their biological sex and gender with no problem.
Um, where do you stand on that?
The, the push to ban medicalization of this issue for minors?
I think it should be banned without, certainly without parents permission.
I, I don't know enough about it Megan, to make a um, a uh, you know, make a decision about whether it should be banned altogether.
I just I think without parents permission it should certainly be banned for the reasons that you just gave.
Well, i'm telling you it should be banned altogether.
You get, we can talk more about it later.
But even with the parents permission, the problem is that yeah, they're saying yes to having having girls have their breasts cut off at age 15.
You know these are.
Some of these parents are kooks and they've got an agenda and they've got sort of a belief that this is what's in the best interest of the child and literally they're chemically castrating boys and girls.
If you go from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones at a young age, you will never have an orgasm.
You are rendering yourself, in most of these instances sterile, so you will never have a child.
Women chopping off their breasts who then have regrets will never breastfeed a child.
I mean, it's just absolute, it's a, it's a monstrosity.
That's my view.
So you have to come over here if you want to get my vote.
Okay, go ahead.
Where are you going to say something?
Cochrane Masks Study Rates 00:03:34
Good points, I just don't know.
You know, i'd love to hear arguments on on both sides, but you make a very, very compelling argument, Megan.
All right, let's talk about the book we've been talking about.
You've written a few uh, but the one I that first got me started on the RFK Lane Jay Uh was the real Anthony Fauci and he was in the news last week and when he admitted uh to, was it the NEW YORK Times.
Yeah, NEW YORK Times Magazine that masks were only 10 effective against Covid.
After everything they put us through.
He admitted masks were at best 10 effective against covid just around the edges.
Um, it absolutely was an obscene, belated and also still untrue admission.
Right, I mean, I think 10 is being generous, but what do you make of this?
This come to jesus moment for him?
Oh, I mean, you know, we knew at the beginning that they were not effective, and he knew that because not only did he say it publicly but he also advises boss at HHS.
When his boss asked him, should we be married wearing masks, he said no, they're useless against these respiratory infections.
And we actually at that point when they first started using them in April, March and April of 2020, we went into the scientific literature onto PubMed and we went and mined every single mask study that we could find and agnostically, just trying to figure out do they work or don't they work.
And I was shocked by what we found because what they showed is even in surgery theaters, the studies that had been done were inconclusive.
In other words, there was a big study in 1982 that the University of London did, University of London Hospital, where they actually took a mask off of everybody in the hospital for a period of time, even in the surgical theaters, and they saw that infection rates went down.
So the efficacy of masks has never been shown, even in those kind of clinical settings.
And then the Cochrane Collaboration came out recently.
The Cochrane Collaboration is the ultimate kind of arbiter of clinical trial data.
And they did a meta-review of all of the mass studies that they could find that were good.
They grade the studies according to a weight and a scale.
And they came to the conclusion that the masks were ineffective.
But HHS knew this.
Anthony Fauci knew this from the beginning.
And that was what was alarming, I think, to some of us because we could read the science that was available to him.
And it made no sense what he was.
The lockdowns also.
Lockdowns violated every pandemic preparedness protocol by the WHO, by the CDC, by the National Health Service in the UK, by the EU medical agency.
All of them had these pandemic plans, and they all said lockdowns don't work.
You quarantine the sick.
People have been thinking about this and planning for it for ages.
You quarantine the sick, you protect the vulnerable, but you let society continue to function because the penalty for not doing that, for locking down as a society, is cataclysm on the economy, on death, as from other sources, inaccess to medicines, from heart attacks, from distress, from suicides, from isolation.
Gain of Function Bioweapons 00:02:36
These things kill people and they kill people at rates that are comparable to infectious diseases that have rates like COVID.
It would have been nice to hear a question like that asked of President Trump last night.
Let me, my last minute with you, ask you about today's news, which is unbelievably, unbelievably, EcoHealth Alliance is getting $2 million more of taxpayer money.
The very organization that was caught doing gain of function research in that Wuhan lab on our dime the last time that lied about it.
Peter Dasik, who runs it, lied about it.
Anthony Fauci lied about it to Rand Paul.
We're giving them more money.
Now, supposedly, we're not supposed to worry about this $2.3 million because they have agreed, EcoHealth has, not to subcontract the work to China, collect new virus samples from the wild, or carry out gain of function research.
That's what they promised the last time.
That's what they said the last time that they weren't doing it.
Turned out to be a lie.
So your thoughts on the fact that we're giving them another 2.3 million?
That's insane.
But also, President Biden has now allocated $88 billion for more gain of function science.
So we're, you know, we're doing this not only through, you know, maybe not anymore, hopefully at the Wuhan lab, but we're doing it in labs in Ukraine.
We're doing it in labs in Georgia and in the nation of Georgia.
We're doing it here in the United States, the University of North Carolina, at Galveston, at Boston College or University or Boston University and the other NIH labs that are continuing this, you know, its biowarfare development.
And we should, we signed a treaty in 73 that says we're not going to do that anymore.
And then, you know, when we passed the Patriot Act, the Patriot Act gave an exemption that said, okay, that treaty still exists, but we're going to give an exemption for federal officials who do biowarfare development.
They cannot be prosecuted.
And that relaunched this arms race with this explosion and gain of function study.
So now the Chinese are doing, the Russians are doing it.
Everybody's doing it to keep up with us.
And they're developing some really horrendous weaponry.
They're developing both the Chinese, the Russians, and the U.S. are working on weapons that are ethnic bioweapons, organisms that will kill people of certain races, you know, and we don't want to unleash this stuff on humanity.
We need to just sign a treaty, make it enforceable, make it verifiable, and everybody just stops doing it.
Caitlin Collins CNN Coverage 00:14:38
Either way, that's a happy note on which to end.
That bioweapon that's going to take out certain races.
Okay.
Sleep well.
Megan, you don't want to get me started.
I know.
I do.
I do want to get you started, but for now, we'll pause and say to be continued until the next time because we're going to move on to our next guest, Charles C.W. Cook.
RFKJ, great to see you again.
Bobby Kennedy will be watching.
And as I said, to be continued.
Thank you, Megan.
All right.
Up next, Charles C.W. Cook.
And my thoughts on last night's Trump CNN town hall.
My thoughts on the CNN town hall last night.
It failed on every front except one.
It was wildly successful in giving Donald Trump an hour of free airtime to make his case without laying a glove on him.
Congrats, CNN.
My biggest takeaway on this thing is town halls or debates meant to help primary voters decide on a candidate ought to be hosted by anchors who understand what is important to that candidate's party.
I realize Caitlin Collins once worked for the Daily Caller, but her days of connecting with the GOP audiences are apparently over.
The topics pushed by CNN in this thing might as well have been selected by Rachel Maddow or the Never Trump Lincoln Project.
It's actually possible.
Possible they did it, though.
Chief Lincoln project guy Rick Wilson did not seem too happy about the execution by CNN.
And whatever the fuck they thought they were going to get out of this, they instead have said a match to democracy.
This insanity should be pulled off the fucking air.
Chris Lick, you should be ashamed of yourself.
This is astoundingly bad for the brand of CNN.
It's astoundingly bad for the country.
And it's astoundingly bad, honestly, folks, for every other Republican candidate in the primaries.
Wrap that shit up.
It's done.
You saw this tonight.
You know you can't beat him on the stage because he's going to be the nominee.
This shit is unfucking believable.
I've never seen anything like it.
It is a disaster of the highest fucking degree.
So you liked it.
January 6th, election denialism, Mar-a-Lago documents, the Eugene Carroll sexual abuse case.
Are these the topics Republican voters want to devote their town halls to in order to make the best primary decision?
Only a liberal would think so.
And though the questions were supposed to come from the audience, it was Caitlin Collins who raised most of these or who refused to move on from them once Trump had answered in some cases repeatedly.
Where were the questions about inflation or the banking crisis and what to do about it?
She spent three minutes on the economy and 20 on January 6th in the last election.
How about a question on why he didn't fire Fauci?
Whether he regrets the lockdowns, where he stands on women's rights vis-a-vis the trans community, what his plans are to address the intelligence agency's capture by hard partisans, whether government should be used to shut down corporate ideologies that Republicans don't happen to like, as his rival Ron DeSantis is trying to do in Florida.
What would he, President Trump, do about tech censorship of conservatives?
One-third of the debate on whether he lost the last time around, the insurrection, and pardons for its participants may be catnip for the left, but it is not what's driving GOP voters.
CNN tried to thread the needle here.
It's dying in the ratings, absolutely dying.
It's truly a dreadful situation over there.
They're under new ownership, which reportedly wants to restore CNN's reputation as a somewhat boring but mostly nonpartisan news channel that might be acceptable even to Republicans.
I support that mission, but I don't believe it's possible with the cast of anchors that drove those Republican viewers away in the first place.
Firing Don Lemon and Brian Stelter was a start.
But let's face it, their lineup from start to finish not only hates the GOP, they don't know the first thing about them.
CNN lured Trump back on its air with an hour of prime time while surrounded with Republican voters in New Hampshire.
He said it was an offer, too good to refuse.
But it was train wreck TV.
It was like they forgot everything we know about Donald Trump.
Like how hard he is to control, how he likes to filibuster, how difficult it is to fact-check him in real time, how important time limits on answers are when dealing with him.
How the way to stop him from talking is to remind him to respect the audience and their time, not just to start talking during his answers over and over and over.
Then you look rude instead of Trump.
So the thing quickly spun out of control, and Caitlin Collins was ill-equipped to stop it.
A town hall is about the audience and the candidate.
She should have faded into obscurity while he had his exchanges with the audience.
Instead, she hijacked the event by trying to turn it into something about her and her supposed toughness, trying to fact-check him at every turn, and worse, by not knowing when the horse is dead, and there's no reason to keep beating it.
Here is one example.
Would you sign a federal abortion ban into law?
What I'll do is negotiate so that people are happy.
But the fact that we were able, I was able, I'm so proud of it, to put three great justices on the Supreme Court.
We have almost 300 federal judges on this court.
So you, just to be clear, just to be clear, Mr. President, you would sign a federal abortion ban.
I said this.
I said this.
I want to do what's right.
And we're looking.
And we want to do what's right for everybody.
But now for the first time, the people that are pro-life have negotiating capability.
If they send it to your desk, would you sign it?
Some people are at six weeks.
Some people are at 30%.
Where's President Trump?
President Trump is going to make a determination what he thinks is great for the country.
All right.
At a certain point, the audience knows the candidate is dodging.
You don't have to try to extract the answer like a guard down in Gitmo.
Just move on.
They get it.
They get it.
He's not going to answer.
You risk making the moment about yourself, and worse, you're wasting precious time.
Collins is young.
She's inexperienced.
In the future, hopefully, she will do better.
This time, she was not up to the job.
As for the fact-checking, well, that is nearly impossible in a live event with Donald Trump.
We know this.
He will say whatever he wants, and she did a decent job of trying to correct certain things, but it spun into her opinion versus his.
That's not good.
Why did she say the 2020 election wasn't rigged, for example?
What does rigged mean?
You have to be careful as a news anchor.
Rigged does not necessarily mean Dominion voting machines switched votes.
That's nonsense.
It could mean mail-in balloting was misused.
Laws were changed to facilitate more votes from Democrats in questionable ways.
Stories about Joe Biden were unfairly suppressed by big tech.
The media was fawning in its coverage of Joe Biden.
For example, they blacked out his long history of racism, but pummeled Donald Trump with accusations of racism every day.
They buried the Tara Reed story in which she accused him of sexually assaulting her, but made a heroine out of E. Gene Carroll.
It's going on to this day.
Who's Caitlin Collins to declare to GOP voters, 63% of whom do not believe Biden legitimately won the election, that everything was fair and square?
She wanted to appease CNN's existing audience and her media critics.
She knew she'd get points if she injected her opinion disguised as fact checks in there.
That's not the job of a journalist.
Had the topic selection been better and more germane to this audience, had she interfered less and only when it mattered?
And had there been a time limit on his answers, her interruptions would have been less needed and more effective when deployed.
Instead, you had an anchor who looked out of her depth and partisan, a candidate who seized the opportunity and won the night, and a network that pleased approximately no one.
Joining me now with his thoughts, Charles C.W. Cook, senior writer at National Review and host of the Charles C.W. Cook podcast.
Charles, welcome back.
What'd you think?
Well, I have a somewhat cynical take on this, which is that both sides were trying to get what they want out of their relationship, but that CNN failed.
It helps Donald Trump to pretend that he hates CNN when in fact he hugely benefits from CNN, as he did last night, as he did in 2015 and 2016.
And it helps CNN to pretend that it hates Donald Trump when, in fact, Donald Trump helps CNN by boosting its ratings, allowing it to sell advertising, and permitting its journalists to play hero.
And many of the criticisms that you just advance against Caitlin Collins are best understood as being part of the plan.
If you remember back when Trump was running and then when Trump was president, figures such as Jim Acosta cast themselves as great heroes.
They talked as if they were journalists in the Soviet Union.
That didn't hurt them.
That helped them.
They got book deals out of it.
They became celebrities out of it.
I just think that CNN miscalculated the event.
I don't think Caitlin Collins was strong enough to act as a foil for Trump.
There were far too many pro-Trump people in the audience so that it ended up not just Trump versus Caitlin Collins, but Trump plus the audience versus Caitlin Collins.
And it helped Trump a great deal.
Now, it's worth saying as a caveat here that it didn't help Trump as much as last time around.
The numbers just came out.
I think they were 3.1 million.
That's obviously pretty good if you're comparing it to where CNN usually is at that time of night.
It's pretty good compared to Fox and MSNBC last night, but it's not what we were dealing with back in 2015 when Trump was covered wall to war.
I wonder if this return of the Trump and CNN show will be short-lived because Trump turned it to his advantage.
And that's why the left is freaking out.
They are so mad at CNN.
They were calling for a boycott.
I played just Rick Wilson with all his F-bombs.
Sums up the anger, but here's just an example of a bit more with the Democratic reaction and their anger at CNN for doing this and the way they handled it in SAT 9.
I think it was a profoundly irresponsible decision.
What we saw tonight was a series of extremely irresponsible decisions.
It was shameful.
It was the Hindenburg disaster of TV news.
CNN must fire its CEO, Chris Licht, for an abomination unprecedented in American television history last night.
Its new owners must sell the network whose brand they irreparably destroyed.
It was disgraceful on every level.
We've been criticizing and complaining about Biden.
This is a horror show that we don't want a rerun of.
So they're upset, Charles.
They didn't really like it.
Well, look, I didn't like it either, which is a separate question from whether it should have happened.
As I say, I thought that CNN played its part in the dog and pony show pretty badly.
And I don't want Donald Trump to be the nominee.
And Donald Trump is a habitual liar.
And much of what he said was untrue.
And he often refuses to answer questions, as you noted, that really are the whole point of a presidential candidate's being in the fray in the first place.
So I didn't like it.
What I find so annoying, though, here, Megan, is the double standard, the Calvin ball that is played by media outlets such as CNN and by many people in the press more generally.
The excuse, and it was an excuse that CNN gave for why it held this, is that Donald Trump is a presidential candidate and that therefore he's newsworthy.
Now, that is, of course, true.
He is a presidential candidate and he is newsworthy.
But in so many other circumstances, you would hear complaints about platforming.
We'd be told that disinformation is the higher value.
The press seems to pick and choose which one of those approaches it wants to take on the fly.
So you end up with when the press wants to cover a story, it says, well, look, this is obviously newsworthy.
All we're doing is putting a camera in the face of somebody who, by dint of his position, is worth our attention.
And when the press doesn't want to cover a story, it says, well, we shouldn't platform this, or this is hateful, or this is disinformation, or what you will.
And, you know, the result is pretty cynical.
The result is biased.
I think CNN wanted to host this town hall with Donald Trump because he's good for ratings and because many of the people at the network would like him to be the nominee again.
I'm not saying those people agree with him necessarily.
I'm not even saying they think he's good for the country necessarily, but they may well think that he's good for CNN.
And as a result, all of the so-called sort of realist approach or journalistic ethics that we've heard so much about over the last six years, all of the complaints that we heard there from Alexandria Casio-Cortez and Keith Olbermann and Van Jones immediately become irrelevant and CNN does whatever it wants.
Yeah, they definitely would like to see him to be the nominee because the Democrats are convinced he's the most beatable Republican candidate.
So it's a win-win for them.
They get more ratings because he is a ratings machine.
3.1 million isn't as much as he might have gotten on an average night all those years ago and 16, but it's amazing for CNN.
It's 10x what they normally get.
And, you know, it advances him toward a little closer towards the nomination, which they like too.
That's a little bit longer of covering him and potentially a Democratic win.
Byron Watch Odd Criminals 00:15:33
But they seem genuinely confused about who their audience is.
Right now, their audience is all liberals.
I mean, Republicans don't watch CNN.
They just don't.
They were driven away during the last eight years once they went hard partisan.
And I guess it's a buildback process, but I'm not sure you begin that by dropping this kind of a bomb on your left-wing audience of Donald Trump with an anchor who can't control him at all and a format that wasn't built to.
Well, yes.
And that's why, and this was so odd to watch.
And it was so odd this morning to read at CNN's website.
That's why you have this really strange sight of CNN putting its time and advertising budget behind this event, making a big deal of its decision, and then cutting to a whole bunch of its employees who are savaging the network for having done it in the first place.
Yes.
So Oliver Darcy saying this is not what CNN is.
This was a disgrace.
I mean, I don't think it's necessarily wrong for institutions, be they CNN or the New York Times or whatever, to have an ombudsman on staff, maybe one person who has some latitude to criticize the network.
But this was really either or.
You had the event, which was defended, and then you had all of the other people in CNN's orbit savaging CNN, saying it had been destructive to American democracy and should never have taken that decision in the first place.
And that's because of what you're describing, which is the schizophrenia between wanting to attract a new audience, but actually not having that audience yet.
And not having anybody on board within CNN who actually understands real live Republicans.
They did, to their credit, put on Byron Donald's, Republican from Florida, your home state, on the CNN panel.
And there were like eight or nine others and then Congressman Donalds.
And man, he unleashed a can on them.
It was actually quite beautiful to behold because it was so nice just to hear somebody say what people actually cared about and give a different take on it.
And they just looked at him like he was an alien that nobody there could even, you could tell they could, it was all they could do to stomach his opinions.
I had my team cut just a little bit of him defending Trump.
It was the sole voice anywhere on the panel doing so.
Here's a little bit of Byron Donald's in Sat 10.
Town halls are for the voters, not for the press, not for the person who's the moderator.
Caitlin spent more time interjecting her own viewpoints or her own views on a situation.
Those are actually the facts.
Now, are you hold on?
Are you guys not going to interject your answer here?
Do I get a chance to speak now?
He did not say he was just going to give over Ukraine the way you intimate, Van.
He did not say that.
What he said, Van, what he said was, is that he would actually look for a solution to end it quickly.
He put 24 hours on it, but let's be very clear.
What Joe Biden has done has been a disaster.
We spent 22, 23 minutes talking about January 6th.
We could have been talking about a whole lot of other issues.
What was said in this town hall about National Guard troops that were authorized by Clayton, by Caitlin, was wrong.
I'm on the oversight committee.
I was in two hearings on January 6th.
It was testified in oversight that Donald Trump authorized National Guard troops on January 4th.
You could, Charles, they were like, what is it?
And why is it saying all the defensive things about Donald Trump?
Yeah, I mean, I'm in two minds on some of those criticisms.
I think he's absolutely right when he says that this should have been for the voters, not for the network.
And that was the main problem with last night's spectacle.
The other one being that CNN forgot how entertaining Donald Trump is.
I don't say that as a compliment in every circumstance.
I say it as a fact.
He is just a wildly entertaining person.
He's extremely talented in that regard, and he always has been.
One thing I slightly disagree with Byron Donaldson, and I think you to some extent in your opening remarks, yes, CNN focused too much on the 2020 election and on January 6th.
But that is also a criticism that we can level at Donald Trump.
I mean, if you look through Donald Trump's press releases and his behavior on Truth Social, he is far, far more obsessed with the 2020 election and with January 6th than Republican primary voters are.
So we're going to hit CNN for it, which we should.
And 20 minutes is absurd.
We should also point that out about Trump.
I mean, this is a big distinction between Trump and every other Republican candidate is that he really is still very interested in relitigating 2020 and January 6th and the rest of the margin.
So it is going to come up, but yeah, perhaps not in that proportion.
Of course, they opened the debate with a question about it from a GOP voter.
I mean, the people in the town hall were GOP voters.
But of course, it is the network that selects what questions will be fronted and which ones do not.
And so all of those were orchestrated really ultimately by CNN.
They were the ones who crafted the editorial flow of the evening.
There's a reason they started with it.
And then she stayed on it over and over and over, trying to get him to give a different answer.
In fact, we have a sample of that.
Just a bit of the exchange in SAT2.
If you are the Republican nominee and you were in that 2024 race, will you commit tonight to accepting the results of the 2024 election?
Yeah, if I think it's an honest election, absolutely I would.
Will you commit to accepting the results of the election regardless of the outcome?
Do you want me to answer it again?
If I think it's an honest election, I would be honored to.
If I don't win, this country is going to be in big trouble.
It's so sad to see what's happening.
But no commitment there on the accepting the results regardless of the outcome.
If it's an honest election, correct.
Okay.
So not committing to accepting the 2020 horror election results or acknowledging what happened in 2020.
I mean, again, so that was more about forward-looking.
But again, Charles, you see what I mean?
As the anchor, you need to know when to move on.
You need to know when the audience gets it.
He's not going to give you a straighter answer than the one you've gotten.
And if you just continue browbeating the guy, you look a little silly.
You look a little absurd.
And they start sympathizing with the guy.
And you saw he was like, all right, that's my answer.
You don't like my answer.
That's fine.
I'm not here for you.
I'm here for them.
It's just the whole thing, the whole night was like that.
Yeah, well, this is why I say they blew it.
I mean, again, we shouldn't abstract this too far out from Donald Trump.
Donald Trump should not lie about the 2020 election.
Donald Trump should not have tried to convince the vice president to overturn the results of the 2020 election by rewriting the Electoral Contact and the 12th Amendment.
But CNN knew what Donald Trump was going to say.
As I said earlier, this is where they try and have it both ways.
On the one hand, they say they're so worried about misinformation and they don't want to platform Donald Trump's lies.
On the other hand, they knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was going to stand there and say what he's been saying for the last two years.
There's no question about that.
It's not as if Donald Trump has changed his tune on this.
It's not as if he was going to say, well, you know what, Caitlin, now that you've asked this five or six times in a row, I'm here to break news for CNN.
The 2020 election was fair and I got the electoral contact interpretation wrong.
And I apologize.
They knew he was going to say this.
So if you know that, and if you genuinely believe that it's a great threat to the country to have him say that and have it broadcast, then you can't invite him on.
But you can't have it both ways.
You have to try to advance the ball.
You have to try to, I mean, this is half the game when you put together questions for somebody like this in this kind of forum.
You have to incorporate their prior positions into your question so you can try to get past his normal rhetoric on it and advance the ball, try to make news, try to get him to a new place, which was not done there.
Just a quick example of what they're saying internally.
This is Oliver Darcy within CNN.
He's the new Brian Stelter saying CNN is facing a fury of criticism within CNN and without.
It's hard to see how America was served by this spectacle of lies that aired on CNN on Wednesday evening, though there are reports that Donald Trump staffers were absolutely delighted with the event.
We're not surprised.
That one of the exchanges that got a lot of horrified liberal reaction, Charles, was the exchange on E. Jean Carroll.
And I'd love to get your take on this.
You know, Trump denied her allegations.
Yes, he was found liable, not guilty, liable by a civil court jury in Manhattan of sexual abuse, not rape, and then of defaming E. Jean Carroll by saying she was a con artist when she accused him of this.
He says it didn't happen.
He says he didn't know her.
A jury believed otherwise.
He was asked about it last night, and the almost uniform reaction on the left is: how dare they allow him to say and do this to a sexual abuse victim on CNN?
Watch.
What do you say to voters who say it disqualifies you from being president?
Well, there aren't too many of them because my poll numbers just came out.
They went up.
Okay.
This woman, I don't know her.
I never met her.
I have no idea who she is.
I had a picture taken years ago with her and her husband.
She called him an ape.
Happens to be African-American.
Called him an ape.
Her dog or her cat was named Vagina.
This woman said, I met her at the front door of Bergdorf Goodman.
And a few minutes later, we end up in a room, a dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman, right near the cash register.
And then she found out there are locks in the door.
So she said, I found one that was open.
She found one.
She learned this at trial.
She found one that was open.
What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up, and within minutes, you're playing hanky-panky in a dressing room.
Okay.
And by the way, they said she wasn't raped.
Okay, that was her charge.
They found he didn't rape her.
And I didn't do anything else either.
You know what?
Because I have no idea who the hell she is.
Do you wish that you had testified?
It wouldn't have made a difference.
And I swear to I have no idea who the hell she's a watcher.
All right.
So your thoughts on the outrage over allowing him to speak this way about E. Jean Carroll.
Well, as you know, I'm a criminal justice squish, at least when it comes to the court system.
And I get very, very uncomfortable when I hear people, especially people who describe themselves as liberals, saying that organs of information should not have people on to profess their innocence.
I understand we have to and must respect the court system, although you say this was a civil trial, not a criminal trial.
But the idea that once somebody has been found guilty in a criminal system or liable in a civil system, that they should not be platformed so that they can say it didn't happen.
It makes me queasy.
I have no doubt that Donald Trump is bad news when it comes to women.
He seems to have cheated on all of his wives.
He's not morally upstanding.
He's certainly not the sort of man I would like my children to emulate.
But, you know, this country has systems of free speech and of presumption of innocence.
And yes, I know it works slightly different than the civil context.
So I would rather have more speech in that respect than less.
To me, it's just, it's so absurd to expect the man who has denied the allegations from the start to go out there and say, I respect Ms. Carroll.
I understand she thinks that I sexually abused her.
What would you expect?
He's mad.
He's been saying all along it didn't happen.
And I don't know what actually happened and whether something happened if it was consensual or what.
All I know is it took her almost 30 years to say she'd been raped and put him in a position almost 30 years later where he tried to deny a claim that had she alleged it a week later, he would have been able to much more actively defend.
You know, if I said to you, Charlie, you raped somebody 20 years ago, it'd be a lot, that's a lot different than saying you did it last Tuesday when you could go find your records and defend it.
Yeah.
And of course, he's going to, as anyone would, say the same thing, whether he's telling the truth or lying.
I mean, if he didn't do it, he's going to say, I didn't do it and he's going to sound indignant.
If he's lying, he's going to say he didn't do it and he's going to sound indignant.
I just don't want the press second guessing people who are denying accusations, especially when the press invited that person on in the first place.
You just can't pick and choose.
If you're going to have him on television and you're going to ask him that question, then you have to let him give his answer.
I mean, it seems, that seems to me a question of sort of elementary liberalism.
Agreed.
All right.
So I know that you were standing by during our RFKJ interview, and I wonder what you think of him, because 20% is pretty remarkable in a party in which they've got a sitting president who's already a Democrat.
So, I mean, usually get 3% of it, you get an 8%, but a 20% entry is pretty significant.
Well, he's not my guy.
You know, he is down the line, a fairly mainstream Democrat.
And then he has some eccentricities, some of which he outlined on the show.
Now, a few of them I agree with.
For example, I think his preference for free speech is admirable, especially given the state of the current Democratic Party.
But he is not in the Charles C.W. Cook political mold.
I think the president that he cited the most in that segment was Franklin Roosevelt.
So, you know, he's not my guy.
That said, I think it is extraordinary that he's at 20%.
And I would be extremely worried about that if I were Joe Biden and if I were a partisan Democrat.
And I say that for a couple of reasons.
First off, we have not seen a challenger to a sitting president hit 20% or even double digits since 1992.
And when it happens, at least historically, when it has happened within the era of the modern primary system, the incumbent president has lost.
Double digit challenges, let alone 20%, have taken down George H.W. Bush.
That was Pat Buchanan.
Have taken down Jimmy Carter.
That was Edward Kennedy.
And have taken down Gerald Ford.
That was Ronald Reagan.
If this sort of statistical performance continues, I think Biden could be in trouble.
Chaos Southern Friday Talk 00:01:23
He's a charming guy.
And I think he has been so censored that people are, a lot of them, getting their first look at him.
And I think he poses a bigger threat to Joe Biden than Team Biden would like, especially as he gets out there more and more with his messaging.
So for sure, somebody to watch.
Charles C.W. Cook, thank you for your thoughts on it.
We'll look forward to hearing more on the editors, which should be released later today, right?
Are you going off to tape that?
Have you already done that?
What do you mean?
Today's Thursday.
Isn't today your day?
No, Friday.
No, it's Friday.
You're right.
It's Tuesdays and Fridays.
How could I forget?
All right.
I'll listen to you then.
Thank you for being on today.
And we're going to be back tomorrow to talk about all the chaos at the southern border.
It's bad and it's getting worse.
We've got the best person on that.
He's going to come on, Stephen Miller.
You know, he worked in the Trump administration on this very issue.
The Trump administration now, I mean, the Biden administration trying to sound like it's even tougher on immigrants than Trump was.
This is the new spin by some on the left.
We'll talk about that with somebody who actually knows.
Stephen Miller will outline to you the crisis and what to expect in the coming days.
As now, the plan is by many of these southern state governors to ship more and more of these migrants up to sanctuary cities.
Is one coming to a city near you?
We'll talk about it.
See you then.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
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