The Megyn Kelly Show - 20230711_grandpa-joes-cruelty-kamalas-nonsense-and-the-coca
Aired: 2023-07-11
Duration: 01:37:30


=== Happy Birthday Linda (01:39) ===

[00:00:35]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:47]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:48]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and happy birthday, Linda.
[00:00:52]  My mom officially turns 82 today.
[00:00:55]  She's here with us.
[00:00:56]  We're going to have a great day and just so happy and grateful to have her here in always.
[00:01:03]  There's plenty to get to today.
[00:01:04]  President Biden is in Lithuania for the NATO summit, days after he said Ukraine.
[00:01:09]  And by the way, just happened to casually mention the United States are running low on ammunition.
[00:01:15]  Wait, what?
[00:01:16]  What?
[00:01:18]  We are?
[00:01:19]  Because that's kind of a problem.
[00:01:21]  Is that real?
[00:01:22]  We'll get into it.
[00:01:23]  And the Secret Service will hold a briefing about the White House cocaine matter on Thursday morning.
[00:01:31]  What does that tell us?
[00:01:31]  That they have now scheduled a briefing on Cocaine White House for Thursday morning.
[00:01:38]  We'll also take a look at some of the other 2024 presidential candidates, including the controversy surrounding Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a topic our guests today are fired up about.
[00:01:48]  Joining us now for the full show, Camille Foster, partnere at Free Think, journalist Michael Moynihan, and editor-at-large for Reason, Matt Welsh.
[00:01:58]  They are the hosts of the Fifth Column podcast, which you can find and support on Substack at wethefifth.substack.com.
[00:02:08]  Guys, welcome back to the show.
[00:02:10]  Great to have you.
[00:02:11]  Thank you for having us.
[00:02:13]  Happy birthday.
[00:02:14]  Yes.

=== Hunter Biden Cocaine Briefing (15:43) ===

[00:02:15]  Happy birthday, Linda.
[00:02:17]  I'm so happy.
[00:02:18]  She's doing great.
[00:02:20]  It's so great, you know, to have your dad died when I was young, and it's just so wonderful to spend time with her.
[00:02:25]  And she's still hilarious.
[00:02:26]  She's so funny.
[00:02:27]  I told the audience a month or so ago, she visited me back at home in Connecticut.
[00:02:31]  She was playing, it was either trouble or sorry with my two boys.
[00:02:35]  And I hear from the next room from my mother, 82-year-old Nana.
[00:02:39]  I hear her say, I'm not going to give you the finger, but I want to.
[00:02:45]  Oh, wow.
[00:02:46]  Okay.
[00:02:47]  Okay.
[00:02:48]  Beisty.
[00:02:49]  I hope that answers my question about whether we can work blue with your mom.
[00:02:53]  Yeah.
[00:02:54]  Yeah, we're good.
[00:02:55]  We're totally good.
[00:02:57]  Now, you cannot, however, talk about Joe Biden's seventh grandchild because you may offend the ladies of the view.
[00:03:04]  Even if you are the revered Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, liberal columnist who most on the left absolutely love, and she's a must-read columnist.
[00:03:14]  And she wrote a piece over the weekend about the seventh grandchild saying Joe Biden's being a douchebag.
[00:03:21]  It's not exactly what she said.
[00:03:24]  You know, my take on it.
[00:03:26]  And she wrote about how she's got a sister who's a conservative and how she and her sister usually disagree on all things political.
[00:03:34]  But on this, they were in agreement.
[00:03:36]  And the headline of the piece was, It's seven grandkids, Mr. President, meaning not six, as he says.
[00:03:42]  And she says, Look, this is not a political issue.
[00:03:44]  It's a human one.
[00:03:45]  What you're doing to this little girl is wrong.
[00:03:47]  She knows you're her grandfather.
[00:03:48]  You won't acknowledge her.
[00:03:49]  And you continue to point out over and over, I have six, six, six grandkids, and we all know it's seven.
[00:03:54]  So that was a couple days ago.
[00:03:56]  But then the ladies of the view took this up yesterday, and here's how that went down.
[00:04:01]  President Biden doesn't need to overstep his son.
[00:04:04]  I like that part, but I don't know why they go out of their way to say six grandchildren or four kids.
[00:04:09]  When my parents talk about me, they say we love all our kids.
[00:04:11]  We love our grandbabies.
[00:04:12]  I've never seen them numerically repeat over and over.
[00:04:15]  I like three kids.
[00:04:16]  I like four.
[00:04:19]  The reason that's happening is because the right wing, who again is weaponizing everything related to Hunter, keeps asking, So how many children do you have?
[00:04:27]  It's grandchildren that you have.
[00:04:28]  It's long speech as well, maybe Maureen Dowd should find something else to write about.
[00:04:33]  Yeah, they write about some mountains.
[00:04:37]  I'm sorry.
[00:04:37]  You know, these things are, for me, when you start talking about people's families and what they're doing, I find it unnecessary.
[00:04:47]  This is not anybody's business.
[00:04:49]  Nobody needed to know about this.
[00:04:51]  This is private.
[00:04:53]  It's private, and Maureen Dowd needs to find something else to write about, guys.
[00:04:59]  Do you agree?
[00:05:02]  Not even a little bit.
[00:05:03]  I mean, Joe Biden had the opportunity to remain a private citizen and not have his personal life scrutinized and have there be public questions about his relationships with his children and his grandchildren.
[00:05:14]  Unfortunately, or fortunately, if you like him, he decided to run for office and he won.
[00:05:19]  And now people are asking completely legitimate questions.
[00:05:23]  And quite frankly, it sounds like, based on the reporting that I've seen, that his team are the ones who are particularly concerned with the numbers that are used when talking about the grandchildren saying that there were six and not seven and insisting on that being the way to respond.
[00:05:39]  I heard someone in that clip say that Joe doesn't want to overstep his son with respect to the relationship with his grandchild.
[00:05:46]  I could certainly appreciate that there are some ways in which my mom and my mother-in-law, both of whom I love dearly, kind of they talk to us when they're having these interactions with our children.
[00:05:59]  But I am trying to imagine a universe where either of them would be put in a position where they wouldn't go out of their way to try and have a relationship with a child that happened to be their grandchild, even if my wife or I didn't have the, I'm looking for the right word because the things that I want to say might actually offend certain people's sensibilities.
[00:06:27]  But I mean, there's just so much little integrity on display by people.
[00:06:32]  When does that stop you, Camille?
[00:06:34]  Go ahead and defend.
[00:06:35]  It's inappropriate to help kids.
[00:06:38]  I look, I understand that this woman is a stripper, the mother of Little Navy, who is the granddaughter.
[00:06:45]  And Hunter said she's not the dating type.
[00:06:49]  And I've got to be honest: if one of my boys, when they grow up, has a one-night stand and impregnates a woman and then doesn't want to be actively involved in the child's life.
[00:07:02]  And I say, please do, please do.
[00:07:03]  You made the baby.
[00:07:04]  You have to go be a responsible parent.
[00:07:06]  And then they say, I'm going to pay child support for this child and I'm going to sort of live up to my financial legal responsibilities, but I am choosing not to have an active role in the child's life.
[00:07:17]  I don't know.
[00:07:18]  I think I'd stay out of it.
[00:07:20]  But I'm not the president of the United States running around touting to everybody how important family is, how my grandchildren are the most important things in the world to me, and knowing that the grandchild that's out there knows I'm the grandparent and that I've made a decision to actively ignore them.
[00:07:37]  I mean, this circumstance is just so unique and full of problematic elements for this particular little girl.
[00:07:48]  They're going to have to deal with it.
[00:07:50]  You know, the child doesn't exist and I only have six is not going to cut it, Moynihan.
[00:07:56]  No.
[00:07:57]  You know, Megan, I say this every time I come on the show because it happens every time.
[00:08:01]  And I want to say it again.
[00:08:03]  And I want to upbraid you.
[00:08:05]  I want to denounce you for making me interact with the view, which is something that I only do on the Megan Kelly show, one of the greatest programs in Christendom.
[00:08:16]  True, but I don't care what the lady from Sister Act. says about journalism.
[00:08:21]  This is what we should talk about.
[00:08:23]  And then Anna Navarro, who wasn't she a conservative at one time?
[00:08:26]  And now she's talking about how the right wing keeps on making it.
[00:08:30]  Who are these people like popping up out of the bushes in the rose garden and the right wing saying, how many kids you got?
[00:08:36]  No.
[00:08:36]  And this is happening in briefings.
[00:08:39]  And Corrine Jean-Pierre, one of the worst press secretaries in American history, is a very bad job of responding to this stuff.
[00:08:47]  If they had a better job, then maybe we would be asking for your questions.
[00:08:50]  But here's the thing.
[00:08:51]  Hunter Biden has tied himself up with his father in so many possible ways.
[00:08:55]  He's made themselves a unit because all of his business transactions, he can drive 166 miles an hour in a Porsche because he can afford a Porsche because of his father.
[00:09:05]  He has no skills that we can see.
[00:09:07]  He's a painter, apparently, and an exceptionally bad one.
[00:09:10]  And he sells these things for $500,000 because he's Hunter Biden, the president's son, not because he's a good artist.
[00:09:16]  He is not an energy expert in the Ukrainian energy sector, nor is he in the Chinese energy sector, but yet he has these jobs.
[00:09:24]  And then when he's texting people about them, he says, you know, my dad is sitting here right next to me and he's at the White House all the time.
[00:09:30]  You know, you kind of tie yourself up with the president of the United States.
[00:09:33]  And in the process of that, you leave a laptop somewhere.
[00:09:36]  And in the messages of that laptop, you have the woman who, by the way, in these messages actually sounds totally reasonable.
[00:09:43]  She's like, hey, I get that you don't want to talk to me.
[00:09:45]  I get that this.
[00:09:46]  And he's just not responding.
[00:09:49]  And beyond anything, we can just say the president's son is a total ratbag.
[00:09:53]  We don't have to say that this is relevant.
[00:09:55]  It's not a campaign issue, but he's a bad person.
[00:09:57]  So let's just establish that.
[00:09:59]  But when the president then denies all this, I think what this is, is a class issue.
[00:10:04]  And Megan, you brought up the fact that she's a stripper.
[00:10:06]  That seems to be in the front of the mind of all these people.
[00:10:09]  If she was a congressional aide to Chuck Schumer or something with a rising political career, I suspect they'd probably have a different response to it.
[00:10:18]  But this working man of the people, the one who takes the train back to back to Delaware and then Scranton Joe, doesn't want to have his family soiled by this horrible woman who, as you point out, his repulsive son said is not the dating kind, much less the marrying kind.
[00:10:40]  I guess she's a former stripper.
[00:10:42]  I don't know the nature of their relationship, but she has a kid.
[00:10:44]  You know, I mean, look, there's no debating Hunter Biden did the wrong thing in when this woman got pregnant, just totally abandoning all of his responsibilities, you know, denying paternity.
[00:10:55]  She had to take him to court.
[00:10:56]  Even once it was proven, he tried to weasel out of it.
[00:11:00]  He hasn't wanted to spend one dime on this baby that he helped create from the moment the baby was conceived.
[00:11:07]  And now is even trying to get out of living up to his full obligations by offering her the damn paintings he's come up with instead of actual cold hard cash from barisma.
[00:11:16]  That's a great question.
[00:11:17]  Right.
[00:11:18]  So there's no, that's a no-brainer.
[00:11:21]  But it does get more interesting when you say, all right, you know, let's say you, Matt Welsh, prior to being a happily married man with all the children and all that, happened to have an interlude with a woman who didn't mean anything to you.
[00:11:34]  Some people make that choice to do.
[00:11:36]  And she wound up pregnant.
[00:11:38]  And you said, okay, I'm going to pay for the baby.
[00:11:40]  I'm going to, you know, but you didn't want anything to do with this woman.
[00:11:45]  And this woman lived across the country and you really didn't want to sort of be actively involved in the baby's life.
[00:11:54]  How do you see that judgment morally?
[00:11:58]  Because we'll start there and then we'll layer in the fact that it's Hunter Biden and it's Joe Biden, the sitting president of the United States, and the baby's going to know who all these people are.
[00:12:07]  I am absolutely disgusted with hypothetical Matt Welsh for even one from having gross.
[00:12:17]  But also for even thinking for a second about not taking full responsibility for parenthood.
[00:12:23]  I just don't, it's so foreign to me.
[00:12:26]  I mean, all three of us are fathers of girls and Camille's got a little problem boy too.
[00:12:33]  And it's like just the notion that you would, you would deny a creation that you're part of, I don't, I just don't understand it.
[00:12:40]  It feels so skeevy and gross.
[00:12:42]  And to Moynihan's point, and also, you know, your question about thinking about in terms of the president of the United States, Joe Biden has been with us or against us, but he's been in public life for 50 years.
[00:12:54]  He didn't just make that choice, you know, four years ago.
[00:12:57]  He's been making that choice over and over and over again.
[00:13:00]  I saw a funny tweet from Caitlin Flanagan.
[00:13:03]  Someone's like, hey, when's the proper time for Biden to say that he's not running for president, to drop out of the race?
[00:13:08]  And she said 1987.
[00:13:12]  Which was the proper time.
[00:13:13]  And it was the proper decision back then, back when we cared about politicians absolutely plagiarizing their own life stories as he did.
[00:13:20]  And that's why he had to drop out.
[00:13:22]  But he's had this lunch bucket Joe persona.
[00:13:25]  He's been talking about and weeping about.
[00:13:28]  And I presume most of the time weeping real tears, but about his family.
[00:13:33]  It's been part of his selling proposition that he is a family man.
[00:13:36]  How many times do we have to hear about my old man said people just don't, they don't need a hand up.
[00:13:42]  They need a middle out or something.
[00:13:43]  Like it doesn't even make sense anymore, but he'll bring up his family.
[00:13:46]  He'll bring up his kids, his son who died.
[00:13:49]  He'll bring this up over and over again.
[00:13:52]  And to have this person who's just a regular guy, he's just there on the beach in Delaware like anybody else, kind of stumbling around the sand and isn't that charming.
[00:14:00]  To deny a kid that exists that is your grandchild is so beyond gross.
[00:14:08]  It's not the most important thing about Joe Biden.
[00:14:10]  It's true.
[00:14:12]  But to the extent that he's in public life and that he has sold us on this persona, which has always been a bit ersats, as all political personae tend to be, and to do this, and there's a human being at the end of this who is blinking at the television, being the opposite of dead named, or I guess that might even be dead named.
[00:14:31]  You're just not being recognized as a member of the family.
[00:14:34]  It just fills me full of revulsion at professional politics even more than I already always am.
[00:14:43]  Yeah, the fact that he went into court, Hunter Biden, to make sure that this little girl couldn't use the Biden name is pretty stunning.
[00:14:51]  I mean, like, how can a judge order that she can't use the last name of her father?
[00:14:57]  I mean, it's so, but that's how important it was to him to put it in.
[00:15:01]  I mean, he uses the last name of his father all the time.
[00:15:03]  That's how he makes money.
[00:15:05]  Incredible that he doesn't afford his child the same opportunity.
[00:15:09]  And by the way, one final thing is that when you see these halfwits on The View saying that one cannot, the family is off limits.
[00:15:18]  I would like anyone to spend five minutes in the archive and see if they talked about Trump's kids at all.
[00:15:23]  I suspect they probably did.
[00:15:24]  Yeah.
[00:15:25]  I mean, I grew, I don't have much of a relationship, didn't have much of a relationship with my biological father.
[00:15:30]  I mean, it's the sort of circumstance where I would occasionally get birthday cards, which is to say twice in the 40 odd years that I've been alive.
[00:15:37]  And in both instances, my name was misspelled.
[00:15:40]  Like it's that sort of relationship.
[00:15:43]  The decision that one makes to distance themselves from their offspring, to not make it a point to have, to try and have some sort of meaningful, positive impact on their lives, I think is astoundingly awful.
[00:15:58]  It is among the most terrible things that someone can do in my estimation.
[00:16:03]  I think a grandparent has about as much right and in my, from my perspective, obligation to try and sew into that child's life.
[00:16:13]  And I don't know that I could give Joe a pass for kind of backing his son here.
[00:16:19]  I think the thing that Joe could do for his son that would perhaps be useful, considering Hunter seems to run away from responsibility and make any number of other sort of poor judgments is model what it looks like to try and be a good parent, to make this about the child and not the mother of the child, if they do in fact have an issue with her, to move beyond politics.
[00:16:42]  I think there are ways for them to message around this publicly and ways for Joe to thoughtfully be a part of this child's life and just be a grandfather.
[00:16:54]  Again, just beyond politics, beyond any other consideration, there's just something very fundamentally off about the decision making that's happening here.
[00:17:04]  And I get that he's an old guy and he's back at his son and he perhaps wants to respect that relationship.
[00:17:09]  But I think there are ways to navigate that that don't involve pretending, masquerading as though you do not have another grandchild, as though there's no issue here without any consideration for how this will impact this young woman's development.
[00:17:22]  There's no shame in having little Navy Joan come visit the White House and meet her grandfather.
[00:17:29]  And it doesn't necessarily have to be with all the other six grandkids if you've chosen not to have that relationship.
[00:17:34]  But there can be a direct relationship that's appropriate.
[00:17:38]  And, you know, you don't have to put her on display.
[00:17:40]  You don't have to make a PR event out of it.
[00:17:42]  You shouldn't make a PR event out of it, but just some sort of nurturing of the relationship so she knows she's valued, despite the fact that she was born out of wedlock and her father's obviously a hot mess of a man.
[00:17:54]  And the mother's got, you know, I don't know what the mother's past is.
[00:17:57]  Former stripper doesn't tell us all that much.

=== Nurturing Relationships Beyond PR (02:38) ===

[00:17:59]  But I will say this.
[00:18:00]  This is, you know, I, as I said at the top, I don't know, if I were the grandmother and my child had chosen not to have an active role in such a child's life, I would not approve of it, but I would not overrule the child.
[00:18:13]  Like I would not go around my own child's decision to have a direct relationship.
[00:18:18]  But you think about what Maureen wrote, which really gets at the special situation here of being Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
[00:18:25]  And she says this, this little girl has Biden blood running through her veins.
[00:18:30]  And all she's going to have as a reminder of this are some of Hunter's original paintings.
[00:18:35]  Sounds like a lousy trade-off, if you ask me.
[00:18:38]  As she grows up, knowing that her father and paternal grandparents wanted nothing to do with her, there will be plenty of schoolmates to remind her that she wasn't wanted.
[00:18:47]  Kids can be mean that way.
[00:18:49]  And she says, Mr. President, many years ago, you lost your daughter in a horrendous car accident.
[00:18:53]  Please do not throw away your granddaughter.
[00:18:56]  This is from the draft letter that Maureen's conservative sister wrote to Joe Biden that persuaded Maureen as well that they're doing the wrong thing.
[00:19:09]  Today, there was some wavering on it.
[00:19:11]  There was a report about Hunter Biden now potentially going, he's going to see her.
[00:19:15]  I don't know what the, but at this point, it's almost pointless because anything they do from this point forward will be just to politically assuage Maureen Dowd and her sister and the like, right?
[00:19:26]  It's not none of us.
[00:19:27]  I mean, politics is such a warping thing, isn't it?
[00:19:30]  I mean, imagine that your life is completely governed by political instincts.
[00:19:35]  Every single decision.
[00:19:36]  I mean, this happens to families that are political families.
[00:19:39]  When Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge in Chappaquittic in Martha's Vineyard and Mary Jo Capetni was desperately taking her last breaths, when he got to safety, he was thinking about his political career and he didn't call the police because politics dominated everything.
[00:19:56]  When politics takes over your life like that, it makes you an immoral creature because politics is not a place for people who have normal morality.
[00:20:04]  And when you have somebody in your family, if it's a son, if it's a, I mean, look, I, I, I, I, you know, kind of grimace at even saying this is that, you know, his invocation of his son in his son who died in political context, repeated political context, I find very unseemly too.
[00:20:22]  Because when politics, again, when it, when it takes, it takes over every part of your life, it, you know, really intrudes upon normal human reactions to things.
[00:20:30]  And when the political consideration is first, you're doing something wrong and you have to step away from it.
[00:20:36]  Well said.

=== RFK Jr and Ted Kennedy (15:05) ===

[00:20:37]  All right.
[00:20:38]  You bring up Ted Kennedy.
[00:20:40]  Let's talk about his nephew who's running for president right now, RFK Jr.
[00:20:46]  Sorry about that.
[00:20:47]  Ted Kennedy's brothers, so many Kennedys.
[00:20:50]  Ted Kennedy had many brothers, one of whom was president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, one of whom was Attorney General of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy.
[00:20:58]  And that man's son is RFK Jr., who's now running for president of the United States.
[00:21:02]  So many Kennedys, so little time.
[00:21:04]  And RFK Jr. or RFKJ, as I call him, is polling at, it's like 10, is it, is it 20%?
[00:21:16]  It's almost 20%.
[00:21:17]  It's almost 20%.
[00:21:18]  I mean, that's, that's amazing.
[00:21:20]  That's where Ron DeSantis is.
[00:21:22]  I mean, my God, think of it.
[00:21:25]  That's what a strong challenge he's posing on the Dem side.
[00:21:28]  But the party, of course, will squash him like a bug.
[00:21:31]  They won't let him debate against Joe Biden, who clearly is the frontrunner and has got some 66% in terms of being the next nominee.
[00:21:38]  We'll see.
[00:21:39]  I mean, it's not that anybody's rooting for this, but something could happen to Joe Biden.
[00:21:43]  And if RFK Jr. were challenging Kamala Harris, we might see a very different reaction from the Democratic National Committee and Democrats writ large.
[00:21:53]  I don't know what could happen, but the answer is anything in politics these days.
[00:21:58]  So he's getting more and more traction and people are taking a closer look at him.
[00:22:01]  And I know you guys are not huge fans, I think it's fair to say, of RFKJ.
[00:22:08]  So I would love to talk about this with you because I don't know that much about him.
[00:22:13]  You know, we did a very challenging interview, which we've touched on a little bit with you guys on his stance, not in particular on COVID vaccines, but more his vaccine skepticism on a larger scale, the questions he's raised about the MMR vaccines and sort of bigger vaccine questions.
[00:22:31]  And then we did a deep profile of his personal life and his life as a Kennedy, which was actually really interesting.
[00:22:37]  Anyway, you guys, I'm Matt Welsh.
[00:22:39]  I read your piece not long ago talking about like how you think people are sort of missing the story on RFKJ, these new like Republicans who love his anti-Fauci stance and his anti-military industrial stance.
[00:22:52]  You might be missing a few things that are relevant to RFKJ and also the fact that he's running as a Democrat for a reason, as some of these prior positions make clear.
[00:23:03]  He's got a career as a dot connector, which is the friendly way of saying conspiracy theorists.
[00:23:09]  But I think actually Doc, and he's used that phrase.
[00:23:12]  I think he even used that phrase on your show.
[00:23:14]  He's like, man, I'll connect some dots over here about why Tucker Carlson was fired by Big Pharma, which I went and wasted a lot of time to look into just because as the exercise, like, okay, it might be plausible.
[00:23:25]  Let's look into it.
[00:23:26]  And it was bonkers as an accusation.
[00:23:30]  Why?
[00:23:31]  And I want you to let you finish your point, but just why do you think that's bonkers?
[00:23:37]  It rests on a conversation that he allegedly had with Roger Ailes, with whom he had a really interesting, weird relationship.
[00:23:43]  They made a TV show together or worked on one in the mid-1970s.
[00:23:49]  It's bonkers because there's no other reporting anywhere to suggest this.
[00:23:54]  Tucker Carlson has been going against big pharma and talking about big pharma, as have several other Fox anchors before, during, and after the time that Tucker Carlson was fired, like literally the same week.
[00:24:07]  The accusation from RFK Jr. was that Tucker finally crossed this line that you cannot cross in American politics to say that pharma is this malevolent force that influences too much in media and they kind of dictate and call the shots and make people write about or broadcast things that are pro-pharma at every step.
[00:24:26]  Okay.
[00:24:27]  So if he crossed that line, how is it that all of these other people who work at Fox continuously cross the exact same line?
[00:24:36]  And that Tucker had crossed that line several times in the past and it was never a problem.
[00:24:40]  Meanwhile, you have all of these other absolutely contemporaneous things that are factors or very potentially plausible factors in Tucker Carlson's separation with Fox.
[00:24:52]  So there's no evidence to support it.
[00:24:54]  Even the amount of advertising that Fox News gets from Big Pharma compared to other people or from Pfizer and people who had skin in the game in terms of the COVID vaccine is not as much as other networks.
[00:25:06]  It just doesn't, it doesn't make sense.
[00:25:08]  It doesn't pass OCOM's razor.
[00:25:10]  And then all of the supporting evidence that you would think that would bolster that evaporates upon contact.
[00:25:14]  And this is what happens repeatedly when you look into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s claims about anything.
[00:25:20]  And I've only looked into about a half a dozen of them.
[00:25:23]  They just dissolve.
[00:25:25]  He made two different, completely long accusations about who really killed Martha Moxley because it obviously wasn't his cousin.
[00:25:34]  And one time it was, it was definitely going to be wait, wait, wait, wait.
[00:25:39]  I know who that is.
[00:25:40]  And you know who that is, but a lot of our listeners will not have any idea who Martha Moxley is.
[00:25:44]  She was a little bit more.
[00:25:45]  This is the problem with RFK.
[00:25:46]  I have to like learn things about the Kennedy family, which I've spent my entire life.
[00:25:50]  This is a fascinating.
[00:25:52]  This is a disturbing and fascinating crime, but I love true crime.
[00:25:56]  And I think a lot of our audience knows that.
[00:25:57]  But Martha Moxley was killed in the early 1970s in a Tony suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut.
[00:26:05]  And it was said, and ultimately this person was tried that someone related to the Kennedys did it.
[00:26:12]  Michael Scakel was the name of the boy who was ultimately, as later as a man, arrested and convicted, but then the conviction was thrown out years later for the crime.
[00:26:22]  Scakel is part of the Kennedy clan.
[00:26:24]  Skakel's mother was okay.
[00:26:28]  Hold on.
[00:26:28]  I'm trying to remember.
[00:26:29]  So RFK Jr.'s mother is Ethel Kennedy, but her maiden name, his RFK Jr.'s mom, who married RFK, her maiden name was Ethel Skakel.
[00:26:38]  And her brother is the father of Michael Skakel, who got accused of killing this young girl.
[00:26:45]  So they're first cousins is the bottom line.
[00:26:47]  RFK J and Michael Skakel are first cousins.
[00:26:50]  And Michael Skakel, who was 15 years old when this little girl got beaten to death the night before Halloween in this suburb by a golf club.
[00:26:58]  They never didn't make an arrest for years and years.
[00:27:02]  Ultimately, as like a grown man, he got arrested and tried and convicted.
[00:27:05]  And then ultimately was thrown out and they chose not to retry him at that point.
[00:27:09]  He'd already served, I think, 10 years.
[00:27:10]  Go ahead.
[00:27:12]  Yes.
[00:27:12]  So Bludgeon to Death, brutal murder golf clubs Halloween night, I think it was.
[00:27:18]  And so he wrote, and Bobby Kennedy and him were very good friends, very close growing up.
[00:27:23]  And I get defending your cousin and also thinking that he didn't do it.
[00:27:26]  What I don't get is that he wrote a 2003 Atlantic magazine piece about 50 trillion words long, as he tends to do in his pieces that eventually, in many cases, get retracted by the original sources.
[00:27:40]  And in that piece, he accused.
[00:27:42]  Let's talk about that.
[00:27:42]  Let's talk about it.
[00:27:43]  Because there was one infamous incident with Rolling Stone, which we can get into, but I don't know what other ones you're referring to.
[00:27:49]  Salon.com.
[00:27:51]  Same.
[00:27:51]  That was the same.
[00:27:52]  That was the same reporting.
[00:27:54]  What's that?
[00:27:55]  Salon.com had the same retractions based on the Rolling Stone piece.
[00:27:58]  So that's all one incident.
[00:28:01]  I believe there's two incidents.
[00:28:02]  One is vaccine related.
[00:28:04]  And then the other one was about the election being stolen by the GOP in 2004.
[00:28:10]  2004, okay.
[00:28:11]  Which was eventually retracted by salon.com.
[00:28:15]  I think that's the chain.
[00:28:17]  But both of those things were heavily contested at the time and either a series of corrections and then retractions afterwards.
[00:28:26]  I will say for the record, the big one that people use against him is the Rolling Stone article, which came out about whether vaccines have any role in causing autism.
[00:28:33]  And everybody uses that and says, Rolling Stone had to retract your big article.
[00:28:36]  And we took a deep dive on that before he came on.
[00:28:39]  We looked at the four things that led Rolling Stone to withdraw or retract the article.
[00:28:44]  And two, I think two out of the four went in RFK's favor.
[00:28:47]  If anything, they had understated the risk and they corrected it after the best.
[00:28:51]  And the others were not, did not get to the central piece of whether vaccines could play any role in autism.
[00:28:57]  I'm not saying vaccines cause autism for the record.
[00:29:00]  I will just give you my opinion as a reporter and somebody with no dog in this hunt.
[00:29:04]  When I looked at the Rolling Stone correction that had been cited by everybody to discredit the guy, I was like, this is it.
[00:29:10]  This is the stuff that led to the retraction of this article.
[00:29:14]  I'm not persuaded.
[00:29:15]  So anyway, okay, got it.
[00:29:16]  And the Salon thing, he did claim that the 2004, not 2000, 2004 election was stolen by the GOP.
[00:29:24]  That's a different story.
[00:29:25]  Keep going.
[00:29:26]  Yes.
[00:29:27]  So you looked into at least one of those.
[00:29:30]  I've looked into like four of them to my satisfaction.
[00:29:34]  And everyone should have their own sense of satisfaction.
[00:29:36]  But there's other people who've reported on the Martha Moxie story who've retraced his reporting as they did in the salon.com in the 2004 people who had covered the election irregularities or alleged irregularities in Ohio, which is where his thing was based on.
[00:29:52]  And there's a pattern in each one of these cases when there's a local reporter who has been covering the same exact things, then retraces his steps.
[00:29:59]  I have found every single time that I've looked in it and that his steps are terrible.
[00:30:05]  He takes shortcuts constantly.
[00:30:07]  He leaps to conspiratorial conclusions.
[00:30:09]  He connects dots.
[00:30:10]  That's what he does.
[00:30:12]  And so I, as someone who is a journalist, I don't have a campaign to discredit RFK.
[00:30:17]  I think it's ridiculous that anyone tries to de-platform him.
[00:30:20]  I think YouTube kicked off a Jordan Peterson interview with him this week.
[00:30:24]  That's ridiculous.
[00:30:24]  Don't do it.
[00:30:25]  I think he should be at debates.
[00:30:26]  I'm grateful that he's running.
[00:30:28]  I think more people should run and that if more people ran, he might not have 15%, or maybe he would have more.
[00:30:33]  We don't know.
[00:30:33]  I think deplatforming is wrong.
[00:30:35]  I love political competition.
[00:30:37]  Trust me.
[00:30:37]  I'm just looking at this from the perspective of someone who's interested in journalism more than I'm interested in how mad I am at the elites and people who.
[00:30:45]  Okay, but let me ask you this.
[00:30:46]  I take all of that.
[00:30:47]  And I know you're good faith on everything and always super researched and well-informed in your opinions.
[00:30:54]  But I will say that what I see people doing with him is they just take like their favorites and they tick them off.
[00:30:59]  Like they'll say, oh, you know, vaccines cause autism, which is not what he said.
[00:31:04]  He said that our children are swimming in a toxic stew.
[00:31:07]  And I think the vaccines may play some role in causing not just autism, but ADHD and ticks and all these other things.
[00:31:15]  And we can get into all of that.
[00:31:17]  That's what we did the long episode on.
[00:31:18]  Are they?
[00:31:19]  Are they playing some role?
[00:31:20]  What's the evidence of it?
[00:31:20]  And we got very, very deep in all that.
[00:31:22]  But I think there's sort of from others like a laziness to just sort of tick these things off.
[00:31:28]  Whereas some of them, like I could debate the Martha Moxley case with you, I think Michael Scakel did it.
[00:31:34]  100%.
[00:31:35]  I think Michael Scakal killed Martha Moxley.
[00:31:38]  He was a weird guy.
[00:31:39]  He was said to have done animal torture.
[00:31:41]  Hello.
[00:31:42]  All those people turn out to be killers.
[00:31:44]  He was jerking off in the trees, watching her.
[00:31:46]  I mean, like, that's, yes, it's the whole thing.
[00:31:49]  Happy birthday.
[00:31:55]  But RFKJ said he had a witness, a friend of theirs, who said these two guys came into town that night and that they, there were quotes from this other guy.
[00:32:08]  His name was Tony Bryant.
[00:32:10]  We looked it up.
[00:32:11]  And this former classmates of Michael Scakles, Tony Bryant, said, I know that he didn't do it.
[00:32:16]  I know who actually did do it.
[00:32:17]  These two other guys.
[00:32:18]  He named them.
[00:32:20]  He described their direct quotes and how they were focused on Martha Moxley and how they killed her.
[00:32:26]  Now, I don't believe it, but I don't think it's a conspiracy theory for RFKJ to say, this is a credible guy.
[00:32:33]  And I believe him.
[00:32:34]  And I know that my first cousin couldn't have done this.
[00:32:37]  Well, can I chime in here quickly just on one thing?
[00:32:40]  Is that no, on its own, it's not a conspiracy theory.
[00:32:43]  You know, I've read a bit of his thing.
[00:32:46]  I followed the Martha Moxley case when it was kind of revivified and Michael Skakal went to jail.
[00:32:54]  But I don't remember all the details of it.
[00:32:56]  And I think it's perfectly plausible that there's another explanation for this.
[00:32:59]  We see this in a number of kind of true crime cases.
[00:33:03]  But the thing for me is that you're finding patterns here.
[00:33:07]  And the pattern is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lurches towards what people call the conspiratorial.
[00:33:15]  And I think for good reason.
[00:33:17]  And the conspiracy theorist is a slur, right?
[00:33:21]  But it does actually make sense when every explanation for something that is actually not proven, it's very hard to prove all these things.
[00:33:31]  But when the opposite version or kind of the more conspiratorial one is the one that he always goes for and a couple examples of this, the CIA did not kill his father.
[00:33:39]  I'm sorry.
[00:33:40]  I've looked into this more than any person should.
[00:33:43]  I have read far too many books about it.
[00:33:46]  People make the argument about his uncle too.
[00:33:48]  I don't believe that either.
[00:33:50]  But I'm, you know, according to the American popular and opinion polls, most people do believe that there is a conspiracy to kill his uncle.
[00:33:57]  So he's not out of the mainstream on that one.
[00:33:59]  I suppose I am.
[00:34:00]  But that one, you know, so that was a conspiracy, the Michael Scakel one.
[00:34:05]  You know, his book about Anthony Fauci, a huge amount of it is about how HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
[00:34:12]  Now, there are people that do believe this, a very, very small minority.
[00:34:17]  Some of them are actual scientists.
[00:34:19]  And, you know, it's a very, very minority position.
[00:34:22]  And I find it very odd because RFK, when he was talking about climate change stuff, and remember, he became really a force in American politics and activist politics as an environmental campaigner when he was saying that people should be prosecuted, companies should be prosecuted, the Koch brothers should be prosecuted for quote-unquote denying climate change, something he has tried to, I think, start walking back.
[00:34:47]  Matt can speak to that because I haven't paid too much attention to that.
[00:34:49]  Matt actually was the one that dug up that clip.
[00:34:53]  The thing that I find weird about it is that when he's saying that, he says, look, all the experts agree, 90% of the experts agree, there is a scientific consensus.
[00:35:01]  So there are times when the scientific consensus on this issue matters.
[00:35:05]  The scientific consensus on vaccines, COVID vaccines, HIV, and AIDS, he then throws that out the window.
[00:35:11]  There's consensus on who killed his father.
[00:35:13]  He throws it out to women.
[00:35:14]  I mean, everybody's kind of an odd thing.
[00:35:16]  There is a conspiratorial thing, I think, to his instinct.
[00:35:20]  Take your point.
[00:35:20]  Take your point.
[00:35:21]  I take your point.
[00:35:22]  And it does tend to be that when somebody sees conspiracies over and over again, like they see them in everything.
[00:35:26]  And we've seen that in people like Alex Jones and others.
[00:35:29]  Like it's a rabbit hole.
[00:35:31]  You can get sucked down fairly easily, especially in 2023 America, especially, right?
[00:35:38]  Especially when your father and uncle were murdered, too.
[00:35:41]  That can actually have an effect, I imagine.

=== Alex Jones Vaccine Consensus (06:20) ===

[00:35:43]  Exactly right.
[00:35:43]  But also, you know, for even normal people, post January 6th, post-COVID lockdowns, post, you know, being lied to repeatedly by Anthony Fauci and others like him, which we know happened, right?
[00:35:55]  And it's, it's just, and not to mention what the FBI and the DOJ have been doing.
[00:35:59]  Like, I can see how his brand of, yes, he is more conspiratorial thinking is becoming very appealing to a lot of people.
[00:36:08]  And we've had people on this show, Michael Shermer and others talking about his skeptic magazine, talking about how, you know, you've got to really steal yourself against this because that kind of thinking can be very attractive and it can just, it can pull you in because it makes you feel like you're smarter than everybody.
[00:36:25]  Correct.
[00:36:26]  You're in on it.
[00:36:27]  Yeah.
[00:36:27]  You know, you're in your, like the red, nobody else gets it.
[00:36:31]  And you're in on it.
[00:36:32]  Like I remember interviewing Alex Jones and he was saying all the crazy things about frogs.
[00:36:35]  And I was like, oh my Lord, this guy's a lunatic.
[00:36:37]  And then we went back and checked it.
[00:36:38]  And lo and behold, the son of a bitch was right.
[00:36:41]  The frogs are turning female.
[00:36:44]  Like the water's turning frogs into girl frog, boy frogs into girl frogs.
[00:36:49]  It's happening.
[00:36:50]  They're like trans frogs and they're gay trans frogs.
[00:36:53]  I'm like, he's a lunatic.
[00:36:54]  It was true, but it doesn't mean it's happening to humans, right?
[00:36:57]  There is a leaf can be made.
[00:36:59]  That's what I want to.
[00:37:02]  Megan's gay frogs.
[00:37:03]  Let me just tell you.
[00:37:05]  Really?
[00:37:06]  I went back to NBC and I'm like, oh, he's a lunatic.
[00:37:09]  And then the NBC fact checking team came back.
[00:37:11]  They were like, it's true.
[00:37:12]  I'm like, oh my God.
[00:37:14]  But this, all this stuff works.
[00:37:15]  I mean, Megan, you know this.
[00:37:16]  I went down to Alex Jones' studio right before the inauguration of Trump and spent some time with him there.
[00:37:22]  And, you know, I mean, I found him a totally fascinating character, a very funny character.
[00:37:26]  He was a great person to interview.
[00:37:28]  It was only when you did it that people got mad and said, don't platform it when I did it.
[00:37:31]  Nobody gave a shit.
[00:37:32]  So that says a lot more about me than it does about anything else.
[00:37:35]  And you hate the fact that the thing about Jones is that the entire thing rests upon stuff that does actually exist, right?
[00:37:42]  I mean, it has to have some plausibility to it.
[00:37:46]  Otherwise, you know, these things just kind of, you know, are dead on offer.
[00:37:50]  And you're right about the fact that all of these things that have existed recently, but the thing about it is when it comes to the Fauci stuff, when it comes to the mass stuff, when it comes to if you don't, if you get, I mean, look, I was watching the Wimbledon the other day and people were talking about Djokovic, who was denied entry and kicked out of Australia for not having a vaccine.
[00:38:08]  This was all based on the idea that being vaccinated prevented the spread.
[00:38:12]  They're still having conversations about how Djokovic was insane to do that, despite the fact that we now know that the idea behind that, the thing that was underlying it was wrong.
[00:38:24]  But the thing is, this stuff all eventually came out.
[00:38:26]  The same thing is true of the Russia nonsense and all the conspiratorial stuff that you still see on MSNB scene and everything.
[00:38:34]  But the thing is, it's a very, and Michael Shermer, I think, is great on this stuff.
[00:38:39]  It's very tempting when so much of this stuff turns out to be bullshit to say that everything is bullshit, that everything that you can possibly see is not, and that there are these elites and stuff.
[00:38:51]  There are, but you know, it's not always the case that the CIA is going to kill your father or 9-11 was an inside job or HIV doesn't cause AIDS and it was a big pharma conspiracy.
[00:39:03]  That stuff is very hard over years and years and years to keep, say, keep that hidden and keep that secret.
[00:39:09]  I don't, look, we've gotten a lot of shit from our listeners who really like him and they like him for exactly what you're talking about.
[00:39:16]  It is the instinct that unlike other politicians, he has the instinct to say, these people in power are full of shit and they're tricking you.
[00:39:25]  It's like when people said about Trump, you know, the man talking about the working man is also a billionaire from Manhattan.
[00:39:31]  The man talking about the shadowy conspiracy and, you know, these families that control the world is a Kennedy.
[00:39:37]  I mean, it's rather funny that that's happening, but it also gives it an air of credibility and respectability.
[00:39:42]  So I get the instinct and I get why people are mad at us, but I think that the things that he's right about, he's right about.
[00:39:48]  But I think the whole package, and particularly for people on the right, and this is the warning that I would give to people on the right, and I'm sorry for ranting about this, but the man is still a man of the left.
[00:39:57]  Ask him what he wants to do about economic policy.
[00:39:59]  That's what nobody cares about.
[00:40:01]  They want to talk about the COVID stuff.
[00:40:02]  I get it.
[00:40:03]  I get it.
[00:40:03]  This is a man who praised Hugo Chavez in 2008, 2009, very fulsomely, as did his brother, Joe.
[00:40:11]  This is not a guy that you want as a conservative.
[00:40:14]  He will satisfy these and hit all these erogenous zones of attacking Fauci and these people that suck.
[00:40:22]  Yes, yes, I get it.
[00:40:23]  The whole package is not something that you want in the White House.
[00:40:26]  I'm sorry to say.
[00:40:27]  As an alternative to Joe Biden, though, he is very appealing.
[00:40:30]  I mean, at least anything is appealing.
[00:40:31]  Hunter is appealing.
[00:40:36]  He's very smart.
[00:40:37]  Hunter 2024.
[00:40:38]  Yeah.
[00:40:39]  And I think that's the only thing that's important to the litany.
[00:40:41]  I don't think he's a dishonest man.
[00:40:42]  Go ahead, Camero.
[00:40:44]  No, the only thing I'd add to the litany is with respect to immunizations and pharma conspiracies.
[00:40:50]  Immunizations make up an infinitesimally small portion of total pharma profits.
[00:40:56]  Like it seems rather odd to suggest that there is this broad conspiracy to destroy people who talk about pharmaceutical immunizations in particular in public and express skepticism.
[00:41:10]  I mean, the consensus in favor of them is pretty substantial and the revenue at risk is not so enormous.
[00:41:18]  It just, it just doesn't.
[00:41:20]  But we know they were in favor of censorship.
[00:41:23]  I mean, that doesn't mean they ran around getting people fired.
[00:41:27]  But I mean, Big Pharma definitely wanted people silenced on these negative side effects of the vaccine, for example.
[00:41:36]  And then just to go back even further, one of the things RFKJ is pointing out is that when he calls it a gold rush, when these vaccines first came out and became part of the mandatory offerings for young people and that they had to provide some sort of liability shield for them.
[00:41:54]  And so it was like, they were delighted because they were mandatory.
[00:41:58]  These guys were making them all and they were shielded from liability.
[00:42:02]  And then people weren't asking questions about them.

=== Censorship and Crop Tops (15:47) ===

[00:42:04]  And off to the races we went.
[00:42:05]  And it's right around 1989.
[00:42:07]  And then we saw this huge spike in autism.
[00:42:10]  And so he, he, when we had our interview, he was not saying, I am definitively saying that they caused the autism.
[00:42:15]  And he had all of his kids vaccinated and his kids don't have autism.
[00:42:18]  You know, he was saying, if you look at that point in time and you look at what was happening as an environmental lawyer, he was living it firsthand.
[00:42:24]  Because I've heard, I think it was you, Matt, saying, like, is this the guy's, he's not a doctor.
[00:42:30]  One of you guys was saying he's not a doctor.
[00:42:31]  How is he going to be advising us on all this?
[00:42:33]  But he's an environmental lawyer.
[00:42:35]  And trust me, as a lawyer who was a commercial litigator for 10 years, you do become an expert in this.
[00:42:39]  So there was a point at which I was an expert in retreaded tires, people.
[00:42:43]  I could have gone down the highway and seen those like tires on the side of the road.
[00:42:47]  And I could have told you, oh, that's, that's by Bandag.
[00:42:49]  This is what happened.
[00:42:50]  Like, I change it.
[00:42:54]  I was subscribed to modern tire dealer, boys.
[00:42:57]  So you're very anti-vaccination, but very strange.
[00:43:01]  Age three girls are off the charts, though.
[00:43:05]  Anyway, I don't know.
[00:43:07]  I forgot my point, but my point is basically, I think he is coming at it from an honest angle.
[00:43:12]  It doesn't mean he's always right.
[00:43:13]  And I think I take your point.
[00:43:15]  I think it's fair that he sees a conspiracy in way more instances than those of us who would agree with him on Fauci and some of these other things might fall into.
[00:43:29]  All right, stand by.
[00:43:29]  We have much more with the host of the Fifth Column podcast.
[00:43:31]  They're here for the whole show after this quick break.
[00:43:53]  Guys, our favorite podcaster and only our favorite podcaster, Chris Cuomo, is back at it.
[00:44:01]  Yes.
[00:44:02]  He's back at it.
[00:44:03]  This is this is the best when he offers life advice.
[00:44:06]  You know, he's worried about you guys.
[00:44:08]  Maybe you're not finding the motivation you need to do well in this life and to get after it.
[00:44:13]  And here are his thoughts on that.
[00:44:16]  Real talk.
[00:44:17]  Oh, no.
[00:44:18]  This is the reality.
[00:44:20]  All the people you see with the David Goggins and the self-talk and the embrace to suck and the stay hard and go get it.
[00:44:28]  Get after it.
[00:44:29]  Even me, let's get after it.
[00:44:30]  Sometimes you're just this, I don't want to work.
[00:44:34]  Maybe it's my feelings of depression or whatever.
[00:44:38]  I just don't want to do it.
[00:44:39]  That's what this video is.
[00:44:41]  Real talk, a little bit longer.
[00:44:44]  And here's my motivation: I got you guys.
[00:44:48]  What do you do when you don't want to?
[00:44:52]  You start.
[00:44:53]  That's the hardest part.
[00:44:54]  Get up.
[00:44:55]  Don't give in to self-talk until you have to.
[00:44:58]  We started at 237 a few months ago.
[00:45:02]  Now I was like, but what is the extra?
[00:45:08]  Got to do the work.
[00:45:09]  Got to do the work.
[00:45:10]  The grind is the glory.
[00:45:11]  Easy to say, hard to do.
[00:45:15]  Just take the shirt off, bro.
[00:45:17]  Oh, my Lord.
[00:45:20]  I should tell the listening audience: he did the first half of that with a pillow over his face.
[00:45:24]  Like, I'm so sorry.
[00:45:26]  And then he showed us his belly.
[00:45:28]  Yeah.
[00:45:30]  Wasn't that a camera break?
[00:45:31]  Because, like, you know, we do this podcast and they're like, can you move your computer this way?
[00:45:34]  Can you?
[00:45:34]  He did the whole thing with a friggin pillow on his face.
[00:45:37]  I mean, I don't want to see his face, but then he shows me a stomach.
[00:45:40]  Pick one.
[00:45:40]  He's talking about Bilbo Baggins or whatever.
[00:45:42]  Who the hell are these people?
[00:45:44]  Who's Doggins?
[00:45:45]  I don't even know what this is.
[00:45:46]  I love the guy that's giving me life advice who just got fired from like the best job of his life.
[00:45:52]  It's like who literally grew up in like this political royalty family who had everything handed to him.
[00:45:58]  Like, could you stop?
[00:45:59]  Just stop.
[00:46:00]  He wants to be Oprah.
[00:46:02]  Yes.
[00:46:03]  But Oprah never put a pillow over her face in bed or showed us her naked belly.
[00:46:07]  Not on camera.
[00:46:08]  Not on camera.
[00:46:08]  Yeah.
[00:46:09]  I think that there should be a hard and fast rule of that men should keep their shirts on unless they are a professional athlete or they're at Muscle Beach or something like that and are at a respectable age.
[00:46:23]  No, Matt.
[00:46:24]  You're wrong.
[00:46:25]  And I'm going to tell you why you're wrong.
[00:46:26]  And this is going to maybe sound a bit, you know, I don't know how to say it.
[00:46:30]  But I will say something in defense of Robert F. Kennedy.
[00:46:34]  When he took his shirt off and was on Twitter lifting rights, I was like, that is actually very impressive.
[00:46:38]  Maybe the CIA did kill his father.
[00:46:40]  Agreed.
[00:46:40]  Because I was really impressed by that because he's like 67 or something.
[00:46:45]  69?
[00:46:46]  He's ripped.
[00:46:47]  He's amazing.
[00:46:48]  Super jacked.
[00:46:48]  I still don't need that.
[00:46:50]  Put on a title.
[00:46:50]  That had a point.
[00:46:51]  That had a point.
[00:46:52]  I think he really was trying to show us how much younger and more vibrant he is than Joe Biden.
[00:46:56]  This was Chris Guoma.
[00:46:57]  I mean, he has a long compliment at all to get that.
[00:47:01]  Chris Cuomo has a long history of trying to show his muscle and like building his whatever.
[00:47:06]  I don't know what like and he, if you listen to a whole video, he goes on about the number of pull-ups he did and the number of push-ups.
[00:47:11]  He like, who does that?
[00:47:14]  What man does that?
[00:47:18]  The answer is in the question.
[00:47:19]  It's Chris Cuomo.
[00:47:20]  I don't know why you watch this stuff.
[00:47:22]  You watch The View and you listen to Chris Cuomo, Megan, you're going to have some serious mental health issues in the next like two years.
[00:47:30]  She gets out of bed with the, she got the pillow on.
[00:47:33]  She's got the camera person there.
[00:47:35]  I want to see Megan's version of that.
[00:47:37]  Come on, guys.
[00:47:38]  You got to get up.
[00:47:38]  I'm like, I don't want to get out of bed because I know what my team has got for me in this hideous packet.
[00:47:42]  The View and Chris Cuomo.
[00:47:44]  I love it.
[00:47:45]  I love to laugh.
[00:47:46]  And so, you know, the Newshounds, it was this organization that their motto was, We Watch Fox, so you don't have to, because they live to hear Fox News.
[00:47:52]  That's my team.
[00:47:53]  That's my live to watch Fox News and The View, so you don't have to.
[00:47:57]  We have to laugh.
[00:47:58]  We can't laugh at the news and each other.
[00:48:00]  Then where are we, gentlemen?
[00:48:02]  Then we are the ones showing off our new Svelte post-237 body in our abdominals and we're flexing and we're flexing the other way.
[00:48:11]  I'm going to do one of those videos.
[00:48:14]  I don't know.
[00:48:14]  I think it says something bad about certain other body parts that he doesn't want to talk about.
[00:48:19]  Okay, with that, I'm going to pause and go to break.
[00:48:21]  We'll be right back.
[00:48:22]  The guys from the fifth column, stay with us.
[00:48:24]  And don't forget, you can find the Megan Kelly show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday, right?
[00:48:30]  If you want to listen to the show live, you can do that starting at noon East.
[00:48:33]  You can see all the video clips if you subscribe to our YouTube channel.
[00:48:36]  That's youtube.com/slash Megan Kelly.
[00:48:59]  So we're talking about Chris Cuomo and his naked belly.
[00:49:04]  And I have to tell you, gentlemen, he may be onto something because the New York Times reports that guess what's coming back?
[00:49:11]  Crop tops for men.
[00:49:13]  Crop tops.
[00:49:15]  My man's eyes are like silver dogs.
[00:49:17]  Sorry, coming back.
[00:49:18]  Was there a time when that was a thing?
[00:49:20]  Yes.
[00:49:21]  Yes.
[00:49:21]  Did I miss this memo?
[00:49:23]  Well, the New York Times suggests it was big in the 70s or 80s.
[00:49:27]  I can't remember.
[00:49:29]  Here's what they say.
[00:49:30]  There are the more modest styles that hit right at your waistline, but many are cropped short enough to expose a navel.
[00:49:39]  Look, to expose a navel, guys.
[00:49:42]  Some are wearing them by taking scissors to old t-shirts.
[00:49:45]  Others buy them off the racks.
[00:49:47]  Others from stores' women's sections.
[00:49:50]  And they go on to quote man after man after man.
[00:49:55]  Look at this guy.
[00:49:56]  Just like, look at this.
[00:49:58]  And I'm going to be honest.
[00:50:00]  My first thought was every single man that you're quoting in here is a gay man.
[00:50:04]  There's no straightness who would wear, right?
[00:50:06]  I mean, there was, and yet, and yet, we go on to Cody James, 27, works in advertising in New York, said he grew up watching movies and TV shows from the 80s and the 90s and started wearing crop tops about a year ago.
[00:50:21]  Mr. James said about 70% of the shirts he owns are cropped.
[00:50:25]  Most, he added, hit below his navel, though a few are short enough to show it.
[00:50:28]  Quote, my girlfriend, oh, my girlfriend always makes fun of me.
[00:50:33]  What?
[00:50:34]  What?
[00:50:34]  Because sometimes she just wants a shirt to wear to bed, but they're all crop tops.
[00:50:39]  I have bad news for the girlfriend.
[00:50:41]  Yes.
[00:50:42]  Your boyfriend's gay.
[00:50:44]  Sorry.
[00:50:45]  I'm sorry.
[00:50:46]  I'd be the bearer of bad news on the Megan Kelly show.
[00:50:48]  Nothing wrong with that.
[00:50:49]  We celebrate it.
[00:50:51]  Just, you know, your being girlfriend might not celebrate it.
[00:50:54]  Yeah.
[00:50:55]  But it's real.
[00:50:56]  It's real.
[00:50:56]  I don't believe this.
[00:50:57]  I'm a crop top skeptic.
[00:50:58]  I don't think this is a thing.
[00:51:02]  Why?
[00:51:03]  It's a consideration.
[00:51:05]  question that I have to ask myself as a journalist and as someone who has gotten sources for stories.
[00:51:11]  When you're doing a story about a crop top, how do you find the person who this guy, Cody, whatever, 27 who works at some ad agency and says, you know, I found my source.
[00:51:22]  The man is 70% crop top.
[00:51:24]  Matt, do you know how to do this?
[00:51:26]  Do you post on Twitter or something?
[00:51:29]  Who's the croppiest of the crop tops in your neighborhood?
[00:51:32]  I don't understand this.
[00:51:33]  You know, in fairness to the trend existing before, the trend did exist before in college football in the 1980s.
[00:51:40]  Correct.
[00:51:41]  Who could wear mesh crop top, like tailbacks from SMU would wear a little crop and then they look great because they were tailbacks and they're running over your face at a thousand miles an hour and it was perfectly fine.
[00:51:52]  Had those little hit pads that would come up.
[00:51:54]  Remember those?
[00:51:55]  Sexy, all of it.
[00:51:56]  But like nobody actually wore crop tops.
[00:51:59]  People in the photos, for those of you listening, as I listened to Megan, the Megan Kelly podcast on a, as an MP3 and not as a video, those of you who have not seen these pictures, the people that are saying, they're not football players.
[00:52:12]  They might run over your face, but it's a different context in a car.
[00:52:18]  The best Twitter account, it's Super70 Sports.
[00:52:20]  They have the best, best.
[00:52:22]  We'll post it in just a bit.
[00:52:23]  But he had a post just the other day with a guy, look like 70s wear with a crop top, football jersey out there like watering his lawn, I think.
[00:52:31]  And he said, every one of us knew this guy, but somehow there's something different about it.
[00:52:35]  There are no football jerseys in any of these photos.
[00:52:38]  And you've got people complaining like some men, like Joseph Damien, 22, some men say the attention crop tops attract can be unwanted.
[00:52:49]  He's a content creator in Fresno.
[00:52:51]  Okay.
[00:52:51]  And he started to add the shirts to his wardrobe about three years ago, has been wearing them in public for about a year and a half.
[00:52:57]  So he's wearing them privately for a year and a half.
[00:53:00]  Yeah, for multiple years.
[00:53:01]  Yeah.
[00:53:03]  People are talking to him and looking at his ridiculous shirt.
[00:53:05]  And he's saying, hey, I'm up here.
[00:53:07]  You know, eyes, please.
[00:53:09]  Stop staring at my belly.
[00:53:11]  The quote is, I've had people look at me weird because I'm wearing one.
[00:53:16]  You think?
[00:53:17]  You think?
[00:53:18]  But the way out of it, just in case you were guys were toying with it, you were thinking about going crop top adjacent.
[00:53:23]  The way out of it is that he says, I feel like the way to actually rock a crop top is to just be confident.
[00:53:30]  You just got to like, wear it loud, wear it proud, guys.
[00:53:32]  Let it show.
[00:53:34]  Like Chris Bromo.
[00:53:35]  Put him out there.
[00:53:37]  I agree with this.
[00:53:38]  And I'm going to go somewhere here because now we know that on the cover of magazines, Sports Illustrated, swimsuit issue, you know, women's magazines, you have women of all shapes and sizes, correct?
[00:53:49]  This is where we are now.
[00:53:50]  This is sometimes they're not even women, by the way, on the cover of the swimsuit issue.
[00:53:54]  But we don't see that on men's magazines.
[00:53:58]  You don't see like overweight men with their shirts off or in like short shorts.
[00:54:02]  I'm saying we should.
[00:54:04]  And I'm saying now is the time for those of us who are maybe a bit doughy in places.
[00:54:09]  I want to be the cover on the cover of a magazine because I deserve it because I am proud of who I am, Megan.
[00:54:17]  Fact check quickly.
[00:54:19]  Prince Fielder was on the cover, the body issue either of ESPN magazine or Sports Illustrated.
[00:54:25]  Naked.
[00:54:26]  Prince Fielder.
[00:54:27]  Prince Fielder was a big man.
[00:54:28]  Yes.
[00:54:29]  Prince Fielder.
[00:54:29]  He made a lot of home runs back in the day and was a vegetarian.
[00:54:33]  Weirdly, none of it made sense.
[00:54:36]  The one exception.
[00:54:37]  That was one man.
[00:54:38]  That was one man.
[00:54:38]  But to your point, did you guys see the latest enrollee featured model in the Miami swimsuit?
[00:54:48]  Not parade.
[00:54:49]  It was like a fashion show.
[00:54:50]  Look at this.
[00:54:51]  Look.
[00:54:52]  Okay.
[00:54:52]  Listening audience is a man.
[00:54:54]  I don't know what's happening with the lips.
[00:54:56]  There's a serious issue with the lips.
[00:54:58]  They make Kim Kardashian's lips look small, as does the ass, makes Kim Kardashians look small.
[00:55:03]  A pink bathing suit.
[00:55:06]  Right.
[00:55:07]  Wow.
[00:55:07]  It just confuses.
[00:55:08]  I can't see what that is.
[00:55:09]  Look at it again.
[00:55:10]  Is that yes?
[00:55:12]  It's a man.
[00:55:13]  It's a tucket bathing.
[00:55:14]  Oh, Lord.
[00:55:15]  Yes, that's the right reaction.
[00:55:17]  Yeah, I'm not okay with that.
[00:55:18]  But thong up the bottom.
[00:55:21]  Featured as one of the big models at this year's Miami swimsuit runway show.
[00:55:28]  And it's a no.
[00:55:30]  I mean, this why this person normally, I mean, they're like, maybe I sound mean, but I think there was something to the day and age when we shamed people like this too much to go out in public and parade down the runway.
[00:55:44]  I missed those days.
[00:55:47]  So you're, you're calling for a shaming period to come back again.
[00:55:53]  You should get a red hat, Megan, that says make models hot again.
[00:55:58]  Because we need to, we need to.
[00:56:01]  I do want that.
[00:56:02]  I'm not saying that's me.
[00:56:02]  I'm saying that's Megan Kelly.
[00:56:03]  So when you report on that, that's her that has these horrible, horrible retrograde views.
[00:56:09]  I don't like hot models.
[00:56:10]  I like them ugly.
[00:56:11]  I want the people wearing the women's swimsuit for the, for the, you know, display, whatever, the runway to be women.
[00:56:17]  That's what I want.
[00:56:18]  I don't want a man.
[00:56:19]  I don't want chest hair.
[00:56:21]  I don't want the big fake lips and the big, big bottom.
[00:56:24]  Oh, wait, was that a man?
[00:56:26]  Stop it.
[00:56:28]  Yes.
[00:56:28]  Was that a man?
[00:56:29]  Are you joking?
[00:56:30]  What women?
[00:56:31]  Chest hair.
[00:56:32]  There was a penis.
[00:56:34]  We all don't actually know what's going on down there.
[00:56:36]  I mean, it could be.
[00:56:37]  Oh, we know.
[00:56:38]  No, a woman does not have one.
[00:56:39]  Oh, my Lord.
[00:56:40]  I just looked.
[00:56:41]  I saw what was going on down there.
[00:56:42]  Holy cow.
[00:56:44]  It's a man.
[00:56:45]  Good hand.
[00:56:46]  Oh, my God.
[00:56:48]  I didn't notice that.
[00:56:50]  Oh, now you, now you want one of my hats.
[00:56:52]  Megan, I don't see gender until you showed the pit where the front was, and then I saw gender.
[00:56:58]  Very explicitly saw gender.
[00:57:01]  It's very alarming, I have to say.
[00:57:02]  Brief question about the New York Times and the state of affairs over there.
[00:57:06]  I mean, is there any reason to suspect that coverage of the crop top phenomena has something to do or can at least be correlated in an important way with the fact that they're abandoning their sports coverage?
[00:57:22]  Yes.
[00:57:24]  Is this something that we should be reading into at all?
[00:57:26]  That's interesting, right?
[00:57:27]  Because they purchased, what's it called?
[00:57:30]  Yeah, the athletic.
[00:57:31]  The athletic, and they've decided no more New York Times sports reporters are just going to go through them.
[00:57:35]  So what you're saying is they're catering to a different kind of crowd now.
[00:57:39]  They're not going to go sports.
[00:57:40]  They're going to go crop-top males who aren't toxically masculine.
[00:57:46]  And their sports coverage had a bit of a weird bent to it as well.

=== The Decline of Sports Pages (02:24) ===

[00:57:52]  Matt Welch would very routinely send us the cover of the sports page in the New York Times.
[00:58:00]  I mean, Matt did this all the time.
[00:58:01]  And he would just take a picture of this and send this to our text change.
[00:58:04]  And it would always be like, you know, decolonizing cricket or, you know, white supremacy in speed skating.
[00:58:10]  And it's like, wait, what?
[00:58:11]  What is the, is there a sports issue here?
[00:58:13]  It's like, no, no, no.
[00:58:14]  We're doing the thing for New York Times readers.
[00:58:17]  Yeah.
[00:58:17]  Who hate sports?
[00:58:19]  I have literally never looked at the sports page of the New York Times.
[00:58:21]  I get it delivered to my house every day and I've never looked at the sports page.
[00:58:25]  New York Post, I will look at the sports.
[00:58:27]  But so they wokeified even the sports page.
[00:58:30]  Oh my God.
[00:58:30]  Oh, not even.
[00:58:31]  It was an especially situation.
[00:58:34]  It was all like, you know, racial tensions at the women's wrestling high school in Texas, like places that had nothing to do with New York that wasn't attracting any kind of national attention.
[00:58:45]  You damn well right.
[00:58:46]  They're going to write about that a lot.
[00:58:47]  I mean, it actually started sort of on one sense with Howell Rains, the former executive editor.
[00:58:52]  He actually lost.
[00:58:52]  He sort of bounced out because of his obsessive coverage of the past golf.
[00:58:57]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:58:58]  In Augusta, and whether the Augusta golf course allowed black people to be members or how long that lasted.
[00:59:03]  I forget the exact details, but he was just, which is an interesting story to write a few stories about.
[00:59:09]  He wrote like wouldn't stop yammering about it.
[00:59:14]  But as someone who likes sports, baseball and basketball especially, and likes sports writing when it's great, it actually wounds me to see the LA Times just basically has boiled down its sports section to, I think, four pages inside some other section.
[00:59:29]  They've cut off the deadline at 3 p.m. every day for a printer deadline.
[00:59:33]  I grew up reading the LA Times sports, Jim Murray, Bill Dwyer, Mike Bresnhan, Ross Newton, all these guys, incredible, incredible Hall of Fame talent really got me excited about journalism.
[00:59:43]  And that stuff just has died away for a lot of different conflicting reasons.
[00:59:47]  But definitely the New York Times sports section has been aggressively trying to make you feel bad about liking sports for a really long time.
[00:59:55]  To Camille's point, though, I think that them purchasing the athletic and euthanizing their own sports people is a way to get around union rules because the athletic is a non-union shop.
[01:00:05]  And the athletic still covers sports like it's sports.
[01:00:08]  So maybe actually someone within the New York Times is like, hey, let's mix it up with some sports coverage.

=== Culture and Passage of Time (03:38) ===

[01:00:16]  As always, I've got you because I see you, I hear you in your struggle for a little inspo.
[01:00:22]  And while you may not be finding it in the New York Times sports pages or LA Times sports pages, I have got just the remedy for you, Matt Welsh.
[01:00:29]  And her name is Kamala Harris.
[01:00:31]  She's got thoughts on what you might refer to as culture.
[01:00:35]  And I think this is going to make you feel a lot better.
[01:00:37]  Take a listen.
[01:00:37]  Great.
[01:00:38]  Awesome.
[01:00:39]  Well, I think culture is a reflection of our moment and our time, right?
[01:00:47]  And present culture is the way we express how we're feeling about the moment.
[01:00:54]  And we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment that is a reflection of joy because, you know, it comes in the morning.
[01:01:08]  We have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and a connection to how people are experiencing life.
[01:01:21]  And I think about it in that way too.
[01:01:26]  As my nana Tevi used to say, heh.
[01:01:30]  Why did no one intervene when there was somebody on stage having a stroke?
[01:01:34]  That seems to be rather rude.
[01:01:36]  Good Lord.
[01:01:37]  What?
[01:01:37]  That was the best description.
[01:01:39]  I mean, we should do contests on the fifth column of Kamala Harris.
[01:01:43]  She's like, you know, food is the thing that you put in your mouth.
[01:01:46]  It is tasty.
[01:01:47]  It is food.
[01:01:48]  It's calories.
[01:01:49]  It's just like she's describing what culture kind of is, but not even really.
[01:01:54]  And then just ramble.
[01:01:55]  Wow, that was amazing.
[01:01:56]  That's one of my favorites.
[01:01:57]  I have to say.
[01:01:58]  How you feel about the moment?
[01:02:00]  By the way, as you know, it's not her first time with the total fail in offering a profundity of any kind.
[01:02:09]  And my crack team, in between watching The View and Chris Cuomo, put this lovely 60 seconds together.
[01:02:15]  I think you're really going to enjoy it.
[01:02:16]  Oh, no.
[01:02:19]  It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.
[01:02:24]  We all believe that when we talk about the children of the community, they are the children of the community.
[01:02:31]  Talking about the significance of the passage of time.
[01:02:34]  Right?
[01:02:35]  The significance of the passage of time.
[01:02:37]  So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time.
[01:02:42]  I am here standing here on the northern flank, on the eastern flank, because we have the ability to see what can be unburdened by what has been and then to make the possible actually happen.
[01:02:59]  To see the moment in time in which we exist and are present and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past, but the future.
[01:03:16]  Let's always take a moment to also see what we have achieved thus far while we clearly see the moment that we are presently in.
[01:03:26]  So we have achieved a lot.
[01:03:29]  Oh my gosh.
[01:03:32]  That's exactly what I was saying.
[01:03:33]  She just repeats it.
[01:03:34]  When you drive the car, you get in and you go to the location because you're in the car and you're driving there.
[01:03:40]  It's like, what?
[01:03:41]  It's unbelievable.
[01:03:43]  She's incredible.
[01:03:44]  She's incredible.
[01:03:45]  Master of tautology.
[01:03:46]  It's the best thing ever in American policy.
[01:03:50]  She has a thing that she's good at.
[01:03:51]  This is what she's good at.
[01:03:52]  It's amazing.
[01:03:53]  Right.
[01:03:54]  Long may she reign.

=== Gavin Newsom Primary Fallout (15:31) ===

[01:03:55]  I never want her to go anywhere.
[01:03:57]  I love listening to her.
[01:03:59]  Her and Corrine Jean-Pierre.
[01:04:01]  They're cut from the same cloth, you know, just actually saying absolutely nothing with tons of worth toward that end.
[01:04:08]  It is a skill.
[01:04:09]  It shouldn't be underestimated.
[01:04:10]  It's a skill.
[01:04:10]  It could be sleep apps, you know, like looks at the rainforest.
[01:04:15]  Now she just sort of like is saying this.
[01:04:18]  The wall is the space.
[01:04:21]  Yeah.
[01:04:22]  What is that, ASMR, where she's whispering just like words in her?
[01:04:27]  I have a new theory based on watching that video, the great put together video.
[01:04:31]  And I hope that people will YouTube this if you're listening otherwise that your staff put together.
[01:04:36]  Watch her hands, which are very active hands.
[01:04:40]  There's a little bit out there theory, but me and RFK Jr. have been talking about it.
[01:04:45]  And it is that she's been taken over by some kind of like the real Kamala is inside, but she's been taken over by some like alien or some AI technology or something.
[01:04:54]  And when the hands are really starting to go, that is the interior Kamala trying to get our attention and saying help.
[01:05:04]  The problem with your theory is that AI is smart.
[01:05:07]  And that's the problem, right?
[01:05:09]  It can't possibly be that.
[01:05:11]  The one thing I did notice about that clip is that I was in Warsaw and I was about to meet the president, President Duda, and they canceled it because Kamala Harris was in town.
[01:05:20]  And you showed a clip of that day where I was cooling my heels in the presidential palace, true story, in Warsaw waiting.
[01:05:27]  And they were like, I'm sorry, Kamala Harris is here.
[01:05:29]  And so rather than get a penetrating interview with the president of Poland, he had to sit next to a woman and he was like, I thought I spoke English.
[01:05:36]  What is happening?
[01:05:37]  I mean, am I not?
[01:05:38]  I guess I don't speak English.
[01:05:40]  And that's what that's instead of talking to me, that's what he had to do.
[01:05:43]  It's an embarrassment.
[01:05:44]  It's an embarrassment.
[01:05:44]  Like, so we'll laugh at this because it's obvious drivel.
[01:05:48]  But we're like the left-wing press, they don't like her.
[01:05:50]  No, even the Democrats don't like her.
[01:05:52]  But remember what they did to Dan Quayle?
[01:05:54]  She's not getting that treatment by the press.
[01:05:57]  They still, we still, every once in a while, give it like another six months and you'll get the hit piece on why we're all sexists and misogynists and racists for having any fun at her expense whatsoever.
[01:06:07]  And that all these criticisms come from our bigotry at base.
[01:06:11]  But they have done it.
[01:06:12]  I mean, they're doing it.
[01:06:12]  They're doing it now, but they do it not in the way that they did with Dan Quayle or with George W. Bush, is that they do the drip, drip, drip.
[01:06:18]  I mean, there was a story about the turnover in her office.
[01:06:21]  I mean, there was a story the other day in Politico about Joe Biden's anger issues.
[01:06:27]  And I mean, Joe Biden's been in politics for many, many, many, many years.
[01:06:31]  This has been long known.
[01:06:32]  If you look at books from, you know, recounting the Obama presidency, there was a couple of references to this.
[01:06:37]  People talking about how Joe Biden was like very difficult to deal with and he'd start yelling at people, et cetera.
[01:06:43]  It's never talked about until the time then there's a certain number of people who think it should be talked about.
[01:06:48]  And I think those are the people that, number one, don't want her on the ticket.
[01:06:51]  Number two, kind of know that he's a problem as a candidate.
[01:06:54]  And the machine of the DNC is not going to allow that.
[01:06:58]  So you see these little stories that come out.
[01:07:00]  Those come out, those are sources from the White House.
[01:07:03]  The same thing was true with the Kamala Harris story in the New York Times about, you know, how she's out to lunch and how, you know, there's a huge taff turner and no one really likes her, that sort of thing.
[01:07:11]  Those are all very targeted.
[01:07:12]  Everything in politics is targeted.
[01:07:13]  It's like a film.
[01:07:14]  Every frame in a film, it's there for a reason.
[01:07:17]  They set their, they set it up for a very long period of time.
[01:07:20]  And when you see these stories about Kamala, they don't come out and do it the way they did it with George Bush and Dan Quayle, which is ridicule because that you can never come back from.
[01:07:29]  This is a kind of the controlled opposition from the inside, and they do that with her.
[01:07:33]  It's true.
[01:07:34]  It's much less damaging to say she or he is an angry bitch or bastard.
[01:07:42]  It's less damaging to say that than to say, oh my God, she's an idiot.
[01:07:46]  I mean, honestly, I gave her the benefit of the doubt.
[01:07:49]  I did not think she was an idiot.
[01:07:50]  I now think she's a moron.
[01:07:52]  She's just, she's not that smart.
[01:07:54]  Forgive me, I'm still one of those people who gets wooed by titles.
[01:07:57]  I'm like, she was the attorney general of the state of California.
[01:07:59]  You know, like, how dumb could she be?
[01:08:01]  Like, dumb.
[01:08:02]  The answer is very, very dumb is the answer.
[01:08:05]  And I've come to that conclusion just with my own eyes and ears from watching and listening to her.
[01:08:10]  She cannot put two sentences together.
[01:08:12]  I mean, the old man is actually losing his mental faculties.
[01:08:15]  She's just not a smart person.
[01:08:17]  And it concerns me because that's all we have in line of the Democratic side.
[01:08:20]  And as Trump's numbers continue to go up and up and up, and I realize some of the polls are showing him beating Joe Biden now in a hypothetical matchup.
[01:08:27]  He's still very vulnerable.
[01:08:29]  He did not win in 2020.
[01:08:30]  And it looks like it's going to be the same matchup.
[01:08:32]  And honestly, Joe Biden's knocking on, you know, the Grim Reaper's door, and she could be the president of the United States in the next six years by default if things go, you know, in a dark and upsetting way.
[01:08:47]  I'm concerned.
[01:08:50]  Right.
[01:08:50]  Go, Matt.
[01:08:51]  No, you, please.
[01:08:52]  Well, there are very few people that I like in American politics, anyways.
[01:08:56]  And she's certainly not one of them.
[01:08:58]  But I have zero doubt whatsoever at this point that if anything were to happen to Joe Biden or if he were to decide, you know what, I'm not going to do this.
[01:09:05]  I'm just not.
[01:09:06]  They would find someone else, Gavin Newsom, to run and push them to the forefront.
[01:09:13]  There doesn't seem to be any meaningful constituency for Kamala Harris.
[01:09:17]  And the fact is that even when she became the president's pick for VP, it wasn't necessarily because he thought that there was this expectation that she would be so helpful on his ticket, apart from being generic, prominent black woman.
[01:09:32]  That is what we were promised before he selected her.
[01:09:36]  Not selected because of her qualifications, selected, but I suppose her qualifications in this particular case were the shape and shade of her genitalia, which, I mean, that is offensive on its face.
[01:09:48]  I have two theories.
[01:09:51]  Wow, that was the line.
[01:09:53]  She's got a 41% approval rating.
[01:09:56]  56%.
[01:09:58]  Who are the 41% who approve of Kamala Harris?
[01:10:00]  I mean, honestly, I wonder.
[01:10:01]  I don't know.
[01:10:01]  Now, those are people who just don't want to say the wrong thing when the pollster calls.
[01:10:04]  Go ahead, Matt Welsh.
[01:10:06]  Two theories are: one, that Americans right now are getting the politics that they deserve, good and hard.
[01:10:13]  I blame all of us for everything.
[01:10:16]  And then two, that Kamala Harris is the most spectacular example of failing up in American politics.
[01:10:24]  I don't think that you can find a single, someone who's very bad at running campaigns, managed to win a lot of them and be plucked and put as a vice president.
[01:10:34]  That's fantastic and has shown no dazzle or sizzle as a public official.
[01:10:40]  So, those two things are going to combine.
[01:10:42]  I think whatever your worst case scenario is for American politics is the likeliest one.
[01:10:47]  So, for me, it is people are going to be petrified.
[01:10:50]  Democrats are going to be petrified of having anybody seen as competing either with Kamala Harris or Joe Biden.
[01:10:56]  That's why only RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson, who's polling at 6%, which never was within shouting distance of before, are in the race and polling pretty high.
[01:11:06]  So, what's going to happen is no one will challenge Biden.
[01:11:09]  He'll win the nomination.
[01:11:10]  He will fall down again and this time have a really hard time getting up.
[01:11:15]  Meanwhile, it's too late to kind of change the ballot.
[01:11:18]  Everyone knows it's going to be Kamala Harris.
[01:11:20]  Donald Trump, meanwhile, is in jail.
[01:11:22]  And he'll, of course, win the primary in jail.
[01:11:25]  Worst case scenarios here.
[01:11:27]  He wins the primary in jail.
[01:11:29]  So it'll be Donald Trump with the Republican nomination in jail versus basically Kamala Harris, who nobody likes.
[01:11:37]  And I think Cornell West and RFK Jr. will have a Green Party, Libertarian Party unity ticket.
[01:11:46]  I don't think, but just as a point, I don't think Donald Trump has any chance of being in jail, worst case scenario for him at the time of the actual election.
[01:11:55]  I think I don't think so.
[01:11:56]  It's very easy to delay.
[01:11:58]  It's very easy to delay, especially a criminal case.
[01:12:00]  You know, it's the defendant who normally wants a speedy trial.
[01:12:03]  They can keep kicking this down the line.
[01:12:05]  They can keep coming up with motion practice.
[01:12:07]  The New York courts are famously overburdened and take a long time to decide motions.
[01:12:12]  And I think that they can stop that trial in New York from even happening prior to the election.
[01:12:17]  And for sure, the federal trial is not happening anytime before 2024.
[01:12:22]  So I just don't think, I think if anything, if he's going to be tried, it might happen after he was either elected or lost in 2020.
[01:12:31]  You don't buy the rocket docket theory?
[01:12:33]  That's that's not a rocket docket in New York.
[01:12:35]  That's from Virginia.
[01:12:37]  No, no.
[01:12:38]  Down in Miami.
[01:12:39]  Are you kidding?
[01:12:39]  Down in Miami, where he is, the rocket docket is in Virginia.
[01:12:42]  But the one in Miami is going to take longer than the one in New York.
[01:12:47]  And not just because it was brought a couple months later.
[01:12:49]  There's going to be tons of litigation on what's classified, what's not classified.
[01:12:52]  What access can we provide to the jurors?
[01:12:54]  What documents can they see?
[01:12:55]  What documents can they not see?
[01:12:56]  Do they need security clearance of their own?
[01:12:58]  How are we going to get them that?
[01:12:59]  That's going to Andy McCarthy's been talking about this, who tried the blind shake case, the guy who bombed the World Traders Trade Center the first time.
[01:13:05]  And he's been saying like that, that alone, it was a dumb move for Jack Smith to even interject that.
[01:13:10]  He should have just gone for obstruction.
[01:13:12]  You know, like we gave him a subpoena, he didn't comply, as opposed to injecting the whole classified documents, well, sort of related issue into it, because that's going to take forever.
[01:13:22]  And I really don't, and no federal court case goes particularly fast.
[01:13:25]  So I just don't think he's going to get tried on any of that prior to either becoming the president or losing the presidential race.
[01:13:31]  And if he does run and lose, or if another Republican runs and loses, then Donald Trump is in a whole host of trouble.
[01:13:38]  He's in a lot of trouble because I do think a New York jury, even though the case is a joke, might hate him enough to convict him.
[01:13:44]  I don't think that that's the case.
[01:13:45]  Yeah, and that's an Andy McCarthy who's been very, very critical of Trump on a lot of these issues.
[01:13:49]  One would not expect that.
[01:13:50]  I mean, he's been not been partisan about this.
[01:13:53]  One thing I want to say about Democrats, I mean, it is really, really important to remember this data point that has been shown over and over again in polling that a majority of Democrats do not want Joe Biden to run.
[01:14:07]  This is rather important if you're sitting in the DNC and if you're looking at these numbers.
[01:14:12]  And as you pointed out, Megan, Donald Trump, who lost the 2020 election, his favorables have never been good.
[01:14:20]  And it's close.
[01:14:22]  It shouldn't be close.
[01:14:22]  It's the old sketch with John Lovitz on SNL when he was playing Mike Dukakis and he turns around and he says, I can't believe I'm losing to this guy.
[01:14:31]  That is kind of the point.
[01:14:33]  How is this happening?
[01:14:34]  Because what you would expect in something like this is some sort of leak about certain people in the Democratic Party.
[01:14:40]  And I have a feeling as to why this isn't happening because the opposition are nut bars like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and AOC, et cetera.
[01:14:49]  But you would imagine there'd be somebody in there that's leaking a story about how there is a small group of people, powerful people, that are going to Joe Biden and saying, you got to step back.
[01:14:59]  Everybody remembers that those two lines from LBJ in 1968, right?
[01:15:06]  I will not seek nor will I accept the nomination of my party for the president of the United States.
[01:15:12]  And he said that in 1968 for very good reason.
[01:15:15]  And also, you can remember 1973 when Barry Goldwater took that walk over the White House, Barry Goldwater, Mr. Conservative, and said to the president, it was for that he walked over and said, you got to resign.
[01:15:27]  This is not looking good for you.
[01:15:29]  You got to go.
[01:15:30]  And that was the culmination of a lot of Republicans coming and saying that.
[01:15:33]  Where are the Democrats right now who just for their own sake of survival are not going to Joe Biden and saying, I mean, is the wall around him that strong and that great?
[01:15:44]  Apparently it is.
[01:15:45]  And that is like a suicide of the party in a way, if they're going to run somebody who can barely get through his first term, much less, I can't imagine him getting through his second.
[01:15:55]  Do we know like by when as a practical matter, they'd really have to do that?
[01:16:01]  You know, like if they could possibly persuade him to step down and to take his number two with him and sub in Gavin Newsom, do we know by when realistically they would have to do that to get, you know, Gavin Newsome on the ballot and to get him with a head of steam going into Iowa, which of course won't be the first.
[01:16:20]  Now South Carolina is going to be first on the Dem side come January of 24.
[01:16:24]  Like anybody know?
[01:16:26]  I mean, it's just a matter of that they were the delegates at the primaries and caucuses.
[01:16:32]  So it's just when there's a preponderance, it has to do with whatever the deadline is for filing to get them in.
[01:16:38]  And I think that varies by state.
[01:16:40]  So presumably you could do it in March in April still before the first Super Tuesday, depending on whether there's a long filing backlog deadline.
[01:16:49]  So it can be, you know, I think practically it would have to be in November or October or December.
[01:16:55]  There would have to be someone is planning this out.
[01:16:58]  My God, besides Gavin Newsom, someone is clearly planning this out.
[01:17:02]  It has to be wargaming a strategy.
[01:17:04]  But again, since we're getting the politics that we deserve, maybe they're just somehow not.
[01:17:08]  They just are trying to squinch their eyes shut and make it all go away and that people will rally to Joe just like they did in the last primary campaign.
[01:17:16]  And that's a that's a foolish approach to take because this isn't the last primary campaign.
[01:17:22]  People are not animated by the same crazy like fear and lockstep kind of dynamics to get rid of Donald Trump because he's not in office anymore.
[01:17:31]  He's less of a threat.
[01:17:32]  So you're not going to be able to sort of back the seemingly normal guy.
[01:17:36]  Also, the seemingly normal guy looks less and less normal by the day.
[01:17:40]  So yeah, someone should be doing this, but it's the Democratic Party right now.
[01:17:44]  So who knows?
[01:17:44]  Maybe they're not.
[01:17:45]  Wouldn't it be amazing if it was Gavin Newsom?
[01:17:47]  Because then you would have the ex-husband of his opponent's daughter-in-law.
[01:17:53]  Is that right?
[01:17:53]  Yeah.
[01:17:54]  That would be rather odd, right?
[01:17:56]  Well, they're not married.
[01:17:56]  Don Jr. and Kimberly aren't married, but they're not married together for five plus years.
[01:18:01]  Yeah.
[01:18:01]  No, but I mean, she's obviously a campaign figure.
[01:18:04]  And yes, she's been together.
[01:18:05]  It would just be an odd thing.
[01:18:08]  She was the first lady of California or San Francisco when she was married to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
[01:18:13]  And now, you know, who knows?
[01:18:14]  Don Jr., he polls pretty well in some of these polls.
[01:18:16]  He could be the future president.
[01:18:17]  She could be the first lady of the United States someday.
[01:18:19]  It's a big swing.
[01:18:20]  It's a big swing.
[01:18:21]  Now, listen, one of the things Joe Biden might be doing in order to keep himself alert and a little bit more spry in the White House could be cocaine.
[01:18:29]  Could be.
[01:18:29]  Could be.
[01:18:30]  We don't think it's him, but it's still a mystery whose cocaine it is.
[01:18:35]  We don't know.
[01:18:36]  And now the Secret Service is holding a briefing Thursday morning to update us.
[01:18:41]  Trump, who I realize he tweets out truths out a lot of stuff, but he did live in the White House for four years, is saying there's no way the Secret Service doesn't already know whose it is.
[01:18:54]  There's no way.
[01:18:55]  And I tend to believe Trump on that.
[01:18:57]  I tend to agree with him on that.
[01:18:59]  But listen to Corrine Jean-Pierre and how indignant she is when she gets asked, can you just say explicitly that it doesn't belong to a Biden?
[01:19:08]  Listen to this.
[01:19:10]  I'm just saying once and for all, whether or not the cocaine belonged to the Biden family, there has been some irresponsible reporting about the family.
[01:19:22]  And so I got to call that out here.
[01:19:25]  And I have been very clear.

=== Irresponsible Biden Reporting (05:01) ===

[01:19:27]  I was clear two days ago when talking about this over and over again as I was being asked a question.
[01:19:32]  As you know, and media outlets reported this, the Biden family was not here.
[01:19:37]  They were not here.
[01:19:38]  They were at Camp David.
[01:19:40]  They were not here Friday.
[01:19:41]  They were not here Saturday.
[01:19:42]  They were not here Sunday.
[01:19:43]  They were not even here Monday.
[01:19:45]  They came back on Tuesday.
[01:19:46]  So to ask that question is actually incredibly irresponsible.
[01:19:51]  And I'll just leave it there.
[01:19:55]  Okay.
[01:19:55]  Hell of a dodge.
[01:19:58]  Didn't hear the word no.
[01:19:59]  Didn't hear the word, it's not theirs.
[01:20:01]  Did not hear those words.
[01:20:02]  Also, they left on Friday, I think like 6:30 or 7.
[01:20:04]  So it could be one of them.
[01:20:06]  They were in the White House.
[01:20:07]  I mean, so that's actually the irresponsible, quote-unquote, irresponsible question was met by a lying answer.
[01:20:13]  So just typical politics, I guess.
[01:20:16]  Phil Houston, the spy-the-lie guy who ran, he created and ran the CIA's deception detection program for 25 years.
[01:20:23]  He says one of the many signs of lying is when you attack the question itself, right?
[01:20:29]  Like as opposed to just being like, yes, I can say it wasn't theirs.
[01:20:34]  You've got to say, that's incredibly irresponsible of you to even ask it.
[01:20:39]  And then list a long days, a long list of days in which they weren't at the White House.
[01:20:44]  And even your list is a lie, right?
[01:20:45]  Like a lot of lying went on in that 60-second answer she just gave right there, which tells us something.
[01:20:50]  I don't know if it tells us it's the Bidens, but at least Corrine Jean-Pierre, I think, has her doubts.
[01:20:55]  I've always been curious about her and just the way that she does her job.
[01:20:59]  I mean, for me, if I was doing her job, it feels like a much better response to that is, look, I get it.
[01:21:05]  I'm not going to entertain this ridiculous speculation.
[01:21:09]  The Secret Service is looking into this.
[01:21:11]  They're investigating it.
[01:21:12]  They will have their announcement later this week.
[01:21:15]  And if you want to indulge in preposterous speculation about the Biden family, be my guest.
[01:21:21]  But I'm not going to do it from this lectern.
[01:21:23]  But is it preposterous?
[01:21:27]  Preposterous.
[01:21:29]  I mean, that's what she said.
[01:21:33]  I could tell you.
[01:21:36]  So no, it's not.
[01:21:38]  And unless you wonder, like, is it really as bad as we think it is with Hunter Biden?
[01:21:42]  Was he really that bad off?
[01:21:44]  I give you the following nugget from just a couple, like a year or plus ago when he was going on his book tour.
[01:21:49]  I think we called them rocks, Megan.
[01:21:52]  I spent more time on my hands and knees picking through rugs, smoking anything that even remotely resembled crack cocaine.
[01:22:03]  I probably smoked more Parmesan cheese than anyone, anyone that you know, I'm sure, Tracy.
[01:22:13]  There'd be crumbs mixed in.
[01:22:16]  Yeah.
[01:22:16]  I mean, I went one time for 13 days without sleeping and smoking crack and drinking vodka exclusively throughout that entire time.
[01:22:29]  By the way, that guy is saying that the mother of Little Navy Joan wasn't the dating type.
[01:22:34]  What are you?
[01:22:35]  What are you, sir?
[01:22:36]  He's a real catch.
[01:22:38]  He's a real catch.
[01:22:39]  He's devoted.
[01:22:40]  He's resourceful, Megan.
[01:22:42]  He finds cocaine in the parmesan or whatever the hell he's saying.
[01:22:46]  I'm going to be looking at my craft in the freezer, refrigerator, a totally different way.
[01:22:50]  Like, what, what the hell?
[01:22:51]  I was just sprinkling it on pasta.
[01:22:53]  Yeah, I don't know if that is a vindication of him or not, because he clearly does lose drugs, but he also quickly finds them.
[01:23:02]  So maybe he wouldn't have left it at the White House.
[01:23:05]  But I have to say, as somebody who worked as a journalist in DC, I don't think he's the only candidate because it is not something that is rare that you don't see around.
[01:23:14]  You do actually, not to sound like Madison Cawthorne.
[01:23:17]  Remember him?
[01:23:18]  But, you know, there's a lot of cocaine and stuff around.
[01:23:22]  And but the thing about it is, is that, you know, as Trump said, there are a lot of cameras in the White House.
[01:23:27]  And if there aren't a lot of cameras in the White House, probably there should be because they're like the ones that I have around my house are like $25.
[01:23:33]  They don't cost a lot.
[01:23:34]  So maybe you should have cameras in the White House and, you know, probably figure this out pretty quickly.
[01:23:39]  Who's this?
[01:23:39]  But who loses cocaine?
[01:23:41]  Good Lord.
[01:23:42]  I know.
[01:23:42]  Who takes cocaine into the White House to begin with?
[01:23:45]  Yeah.
[01:23:46]  I mean, I don't know.
[01:23:47]  Maybe I would, but that's kind of a win, if we're being honest.
[01:23:50]  The dudes celebrating their W's.
[01:23:52]  But actually, it was a fifth column listener who apparently, like Michael Moynihan, has some at least reportorial knowledge of cocaine.
[01:24:01]  It's only reporterial.
[01:24:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:24:03]  The listener said, as a former Coke head myself, I got to say, everyone pointing the finger at Hunter is getting a thing wrong.
[01:24:12]  A Cokehead's going to know where all the Coke is and he's not going to leave any left over.
[01:24:16]  Like he's going to, he's going to be a human vacuum.
[01:24:19]  How did it get there?
[01:24:22]  I think he's saying an amateur of somebody who's not a seasoned addict.
[01:24:25]  A dabbler.
[01:24:27]  I see a dabbler.

=== Eric Adams Wallet Photo (05:13) ===

[01:24:28]  Okay.
[01:24:28]  Okay.
[01:24:29]  Well, we'll find out what the Secret Service has to say on Thursday, but it certainly seems to me like this is going the way of the Supreme Court leaker.
[01:24:35]  You know, we investigated it.
[01:24:36]  It was just too tough a case to crack.
[01:24:39]  Pardon the pun.
[01:24:40]  You know, further updates to follow, and then it just completely quiets, gets quiet.
[01:24:44]  Now, we're going to take a quick break.
[01:24:46]  And when we come back, we're going to talk about this story I've been wanting to get to now for days.
[01:24:49]  And it may be the best story of the week.
[01:24:51]  It has to do with the New York mayor, Eric Adams.
[01:24:54]  You may think you're not interested in the New York Mayor, but you will be interested in this bizarre story breaking just over the past couple of days on him.
[01:25:02]  Stand by more with the fifth column, guys, after this quick break.
[01:25:07]  All right, guys, this is an incredible story.
[01:25:10]  New York City, thank God, got rid of Mayor de Blasio.
[01:25:14]  He couldn't run again because of term limits.
[01:25:16]  And they voted in Eric Adams.
[01:25:17]  And people thought, okay, you know, he's a former cop.
[01:25:20]  Anything's better than de Blasio.
[01:25:22]  Maybe he'll be pro-cop.
[01:25:23]  Well, that's not exactly how it turned out to be.
[01:25:26]  There's a soft on crime prosecutor, Alvin Bragg.
[01:25:30]  Soft on crime unless your name is Donald Trump.
[01:25:32]  And we had defunding of the police and all sorts of the same issues in New York City as we've seen in many other big cities.
[01:25:39]  And unfortunately, they instituted a policy where they were no longer going to pursue the death penalty or severe penalties for people who kill police officers.
[01:25:47]  And shortly around that time or after that time, two cops got killed, Officer Wilbert Mora and Jason Rivera back in February of 2022.
[01:25:55]  And Wilbert Mora's sister made headlines when she spoke at his funeral, which was covered by us and everybody else saying how many more police officers have to die.
[01:26:04]  They protect us, but who protects them?
[01:26:06]  Who watches for their lives?
[01:26:08]  And it became a big thing, especially for Mayor Eric Adams.
[01:26:11]  Now, in the wake of this firestorm, Eric Adams Started to tout his cop credentials and said that he wanted that the loss of these officers reminded him of the 1987 line of duty death of one of his friends, Officer Robert Venable.
[01:26:31]  At a news conference at City Hall, shortly after this, Adams said, I still think of Robert.
[01:26:36]  I keep a picture of him in my wallet.
[01:26:39]  A week later, Mayor Adams posed for a photograph for a portrait in his office holding a wallet-sized photo of Officer Venable after the New York Times had requested to see the photo.
[01:26:50]  Mr. Adams brought up the photo, quoting here from the New York Times, which broke this story.
[01:26:53]  Mr. Adams brought up the photo in at least two television interviews last April as well, saying, I understand the pain.
[01:27:00]  I carry around a picture of Robert Venable, my close friend, who was shot several years ago during my early days as a cop.
[01:27:06]  And I always have Robert's picture.
[01:27:08]  The pain never dissipates.
[01:27:11]  Times points out he's repeated the moving antidote many times, including at the police academy where they were graduating last June and so on.
[01:27:20]  Great story, except it's not true.
[01:27:23]  It appears to be a total lie.
[01:27:26]  And unbelievably, and to its credit, the New York Times broke that piece of this story too.
[01:27:33]  They tell us that the weathered photo of Officer Venable had not actually spent decades in the mayor's wallet.
[01:27:42]  It had been created by employees in Mayor Adams' office in the days after Mr. Adams claimed to be carrying it in his wallet.
[01:27:53]  Listen to this.
[01:27:54]  His employees were instructed to create a photo of Officer Venable according to a person familiar with the request.
[01:28:03]  Listen to this.
[01:28:04]  A picture of Officer Venable was found on Google.
[01:28:09]  It was printed in black and white and made to look worn as if the mayor had been carrying it for some time, including by splashing coffee on it, said the person who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
[01:28:22]  The person who directly ordered the altered photo to be created, according to the person familiar with the matter, said she had no comment when called by the Times and asked about all of this.
[01:28:36]  Finally, the mayor's office, confronted by the Times for comment, a Fabian Levy, spokesperson for the mayor, insisted that Adams had carried a photo of the officer for decades and provided the names of several former transit police colleagues who said in an interview that Adams and Officer Venable had indeed been friends, which is a little different than saying he'd had that photo on him in his wallet.
[01:29:02]  And then the spokesperson criticized the Times for what he characterized as a campaign to paint the mayor as a liar.
[01:29:12]  Mr. Levy ignored repeated requests to elaborate about the authenticity of the photo.
[01:29:17]  He did not respond to questions about whether the photo was made to look old in part by staining it with coffee.
[01:29:25]  Guilty!
[01:29:26]  He is guilty.
[01:29:27]  He did it.
[01:29:28]  It's obvious.
[01:29:29]  It's disgusting.
[01:29:31]  And, you know, kudos to the Times for breaking it.
[01:29:33]  But what does this tell us about Mayor Eric Adams, the new great hope for New York City?

=== Disgusting Photo Manipulation (04:06) ===

[01:29:41]  Tells me that he should resign.
[01:29:45]  I think there should be a one, remember those three strikes and you're out?
[01:29:48]  Little things?
[01:29:49]  I think for politicians, one strike like this and you should be out.
[01:29:54]  One of the few advantages that my home state of California has over other states or some other states is that at least we have a recall mechanism and sometimes we even use it.
[01:30:08]  We can recall a politician who's just a douchebag or does some very malfeasant thing and that's totally a word.
[01:30:16]  And this for me is that this is such a piece of sociopathic behavior.
[01:30:21]  It's exactly what Moyham was talking about before, the way that politics absolutely corrupts everything.
[01:30:26]  Your basic human interaction and decency.
[01:30:29]  A guy who's going to lie about this will lie about literally anything.
[01:30:33]  One of the problems I had with Donald Trump from the beginning is that he will lie for no reason at all about things that don't matter.
[01:30:40]  And that to me is a human failing.
[01:30:41]  And I don't want that in a leader anywhere for him to do this in the service of trying to portray himself as something that he is not, to try to respond to a human tragedy that happened on or near his watch.
[01:30:54]  It's so grotesque.
[01:30:55]  There aren't really any words for it.
[01:30:57]  I think the broader thing that it points to, besides the personal pathological nature of it, is that there have been some signs electorally of a backlash against the way that big city Democratic cities are run, right?
[01:31:11]  You had recall elections in San Francisco of Chase of Boudin, of three of the school board members there.
[01:31:17]  You've had some reversals, even in Portland, Oregon, of some of the excesses there.
[01:31:21]  Eric Adams was kind of a backlash candidate.
[01:31:24]  But none of this is really, none of those efforts have really coalesced into someone with the program.
[01:31:29]  It's not like there's some kind of Manhattan Institute adjacent to centrist-y Democratic politicians saying, okay, well, here's what you actually do for governance of these places that have been mismanaged and that you campaigned on the excesses, which he totally did.
[01:31:44]  So there is reason to be happy that he won and that he was a kind of expression of this.
[01:31:50]  But going in, you could tell that he was an erratic person, prone to personal corruption, weird, like dodgy about where he lived and who he was dating, and didn't really have a program for governance.
[01:32:01]  So I wish this was more surprising, but it's not.
[01:32:04]  This is disgusting.
[01:32:05]  I mean, really, it's disgusting to say this is true when it's not.
[01:32:08]  And by the way, he was asked about it yesterday.
[01:32:11]  And see if you can make sense of what the hell he is saying.
[01:32:16]  What this soundbite shows me is he's lying again.
[01:32:19]  Listen.
[01:32:20]  Scott 22.
[01:32:21]  Appearance that was trying to be created that we were not friends was really amazing.
[01:32:26]  Robert was a friend.
[01:32:28]  It was very painful when I lost her.
[01:32:31]  We asked whether the photo had been fabricated.
[01:32:33]  Okay.
[01:32:36]  I put out a statement and I responded to that and giving credibility to what was done in a very painful was brought up to all of us of that painful moment of losing Robert.
[01:32:52]  He's a liar.
[01:32:53]  Wow.
[01:32:53]  He's a liar.
[01:32:54]  It's not even a liar.
[01:32:56]  He's just dodging.
[01:32:57]  I mean, it's a truth teller says it's true.
[01:33:01]  I had it.
[01:33:01]  The New York Times report is bullshit.
[01:33:06]  No, that's what you say if you're telling the truth.
[01:33:08]  At least in this particular instance, he didn't, he decided, didn't decide that this was an opportunity to challenge someone and insist that they think they're talking to someone down on the plantation, down on the plantation.
[01:33:20]  Yes, exactly.
[01:33:20]  Not respecting.
[01:33:21]  Which happened this week, too.
[01:33:22]  So that dodge is gone.
[01:33:24]  Yeah.
[01:33:24]  And if people miss that, Mayor Adams told a Holocaust survivor that she was like a plantation owner, an 80-year-old, 80-plus-year-old woman who was talking about the rent being too damn high, a frequent refrain in New York City.
[01:33:41]  And he's like, what are you going to do about it?
[01:33:43]  Well, the funny thing is that it was very imperial because he said, don't wag your finger at me.

=== Thanks for Listening (03:41) ===

[01:33:48]  Like, I'm in a position of authority.
[01:33:50]  You don't do that to me.
[01:33:51]  Who do you think you are?
[01:33:53]  Do we have time to play it?
[01:33:54]  Let's listen to it.
[01:33:55]  It's crazy.
[01:33:55]  I demand respect.
[01:33:56]  Listen.
[01:33:57]  Yeah.
[01:33:58]  Yeah.
[01:33:58]  Why in New York City, where the real state is controlling you, Mr. Mayor?
[01:34:03]  Why are we having these horrible recognition?
[01:34:07]  If you're going to ask a question, don't point at me and don't be disrespectful to me.
[01:34:11]  I'm the mayor of this city and treat me with the respect I would deserve to be treated.
[01:34:16]  I'm speaking to you as an adult.
[01:34:17]  Don't stand in front like you treated someone that's on the plantation that you own.
[01:34:22]  Give me the respect I deserve.
[01:34:25]  Oh my lord.
[01:34:26]  Unbelievable.
[01:34:27]  There's Holocaust survivors at our own plantation.
[01:34:29]  And they applaud him.
[01:34:30]  And they applaud him, too.
[01:34:31]  Yeah.
[01:34:32]  Be a man.
[01:34:33]  Be a grown-up.
[01:34:34]  Let your constituents yell at you.
[01:34:35]  It's part of the job.
[01:34:37]  Demand respect.
[01:34:37]  Oh, just stop.
[01:34:38]  Just stop it.
[01:34:39]  Guys, that was fun.
[01:34:41]  This was fun talking today, as always.
[01:34:43]  And by the way, we're going to have an extra for you with the guys, Camille, Michael, and Matt.
[01:34:47]  And you know where you can see it.
[01:34:48]  If you're a regular listener or a viewer, you may have heard me talk to you about MeganKelly.com.
[01:34:54]  We send you there to sign up for my weekly American News Minute, right?
[01:34:56]  For our email on Fridays.
[01:34:58]  Well, now there's a whole lot more.
[01:35:00]  We just officially launched Megan.kelly.com is a real website.
[01:35:04]  And we're going to post a little extra with the guys there.
[01:35:07]  And now our hope is that this can be your one-stop shop for everything related to the show, the news, and what's going on in our world, and including my world, including my naughty dog, Strudwick, and his shenanigans.
[01:35:17]  It remains the most clicked-on item in our newsletter.
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[01:35:32]  My team and I are publishing new articles and videos from the show and other news stories every day.
[01:35:37]  We'll have some behind-the-scenes content for you.
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[01:35:47]  But go check it out.
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[01:35:54]  A lot of our viewers have said, how can I find the archives?
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[01:35:58]  Just go to MeganKelly.com and you will find all the archives easily searchable of the Megan Kelly Show, both in video and podcast form, plus some memorable, funny, inspirational moments from earlier shows that you may have missed or would like to revisit.
[01:36:12]  Meg Storm, she's been working on it non-stop.
[01:36:14]  We got a lot of megs here.
[01:36:15]  Meg Storm has been working on it non-stop and she's very talented and she has a nice eye for how to make things user-friendly.
[01:36:22]  You're going to like MeganKelly.com is going to be home to exclusive content from me and from friends of the show as well, including the fifth column guys who will be recording a special segment for the site with me in two minutes as soon as we sign off.
[01:36:34]  I read your emails and so many of you have been asking for a destination like this for some time.
[01:36:39]  So I'm super excited to be able to bring it to you.
[01:36:41]  Eventually, we're going to create sort of a fan interaction piece of this so we can talk behind the scenes as well.
[01:36:48]  And it's just our way of sort of thanking you for being royal fans of the show, listeners, viewers, what have you.
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[01:37:00]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
[01:37:02]  No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
[01:37:29]  Talk for Marksman.