The Megyn Kelly Show - 20230823_viveks-911-spin-trumps-arrest-theater-and-prigozhi

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Aug. 23, 2023 - The Megyn Kelly Show

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Government Lies After 9-11 00:14:10
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
	It's debate day in America.
	The first GOP debate tonight.
	It begins at 9 p.m. Eastern Time, and we expect eight candidates on the stage.
	Not Trump.
	He's going to be doing an interview, which we understand has been taped with Tucker.
	Also, Doug Bergum, the North Dakota governor, may not be on the stage either, even though he qualified because he was rushed to the hospital yesterday evening after an injury playing basketball.
	It's always something, though they say now he's out of the hospital and there's a question about whether he can stand at the lectern.
	Something tells me he'll find a way, right?
	It's like he went through all this effort to actually make it out there.
	I don't know what happened to him, but if he's out of the hospital, you got to imagine he's going to do everything within his power to actually get up on that stage.
	We'll see.
	Well, I'll tell you this.
	If the moderators and the other candidates do their jobs tonight, one topic will be Vivek Ramaswamy's recent comments about 9-11.
	Vivek is in the midst of a controversy entirely of his own making, and it's irritating on a few different levels.
	He's been playing footsie with 9-11 trutherism, the idea that 9-11 was an inside job.
	And I have to say, it's just deeply offensive on a number of levels, not to mention disrespectful to the families of the victims.
	Why is he doing this?
	This is totally unnecessary.
	He's rolling along just fine.
	This is completely unnecessary.
	We know who was behind the 9-11 attacks, and it was not the U.S. government.
	When confronted with this odd decision, he denied that he had done it and then he blamed the dishonest media.
	Well, that does not work when it is not actually the media's fault and where the press has not actually been dishonest.
	Not to mention, it undermines other legitimate accusations of media dishonesty when a politician throws that term around just to cover his own absurd missteps.
	Yes, I am aware he's not the only politician to do this.
	But Vivek's whole rap is, I'm the one based in facts and truth.
	Great.
	Let's have some.
	Here's what happened.
	On August 1st, the Blaze TV's Alex Stein asked Vivek a question during a rapid fire exchange about whether 9-11 was an inside job.
	Okay, 9-11, inside job or exactly how the government tells us.
	I don't believe the government has told us the truth.
	Again, I'm driven by evidence and data.
	What I've seen in the last several years is we have to be skeptical of what the government does tell us.
	I haven't seen evidence to the contrary, but do I believe everything the government told us about it?
	Absolutely not.
	I still believe the 9-11 Commission.
	Absolutely not.
	You see what happened there?
	Vivek said, and I quote, I have not seen evidence to the contrary, but do I believe the government told us everything about the 9-11?
	Do I believe everything the government told us about 9-11?
	Absolutely not.
	Do I believe the 9-11 Commission?
	Absolutely not.
	It was a pander to someone he knew was looking for a little conspiratorial red meat.
	But he admits in that clip that at least as of that date, August 1st, Vivek had seen no evidence that the government failed to tell us the full truth about 9-11.
	Not to worry, soon when under fire for those comments, he would go searching.
	Okay, but we know as of that date by his own comments, he did not have any evidence of this in his head.
	The Wall Street Journal, Mike Pence, and many others hit him for not clearly denouncing the suggestion that 9-11 was an inside job and for instead fueling the fire about a government cover-up.
	Well, by August 9th, Vivek thought it was time to take to Twitter.
	He dismissed this exchange as having been with, quote, a comedian podcaster.
	Having finally now done some homework on 9-11, Vivek went on to claim, quote, I wasn't referring to the baseless theories about controlled demolitions at buildings around the World Trade Center, but the very real possibility supported by recently declassified documents that al-Qaeda's attack was undertaken with support from Saudi intelligence officials.
	Oh, really?
	You were referring to the FBI report declassified in 2021?
	Weird.
	Because you told Alex Dein, quote, I have not seen any evidence of this, but I don't believe everything the government told us about 9-11.
	You told him you hadn't seen any evidence.
	Why didn't you mention the Saudi report?
	I thought you hadn't seen any evidence.
	Which is it?
	Look, the whole thing stuck in my craw.
	I don't like seeing these, somebody like Vivek come in and turn into your classic politician who just lies.
	Just fucking own it.
	Sorry, forgive me.
	Just own it.
	You screwed up.
	It was a dumbass thing to say.
	Abide by your truth, brand, and own it.
	The problem here for Vivek was, unbeknownst to the rest of us, this wasn't the first time he had done this.
	Weeks before he spoke with Alex Stein, he had given an interview to The Atlantic and a reporter named John Hendrickson.
	And there too, he pushed a form of 9-11 trutherism, making comments that seemed to suggest 9-11 was an inside job.
	Nothing about the Saudis there either, by the way.
	To Hendrickson, Vivek volunteered that it's totally legitimate for Americans to just ask, you know, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers.
	What?
	Who is asking that?
	Why is that a legitimate question?
	What is he saying?
	I thought we weren't pushing, quote, baseless theories.
	The Atlantic piece, including those comments, then hit this week, this past Monday, and the blowback was almost immediate.
	The comments caught fire online with many conservatives and liberals criticizing them as bizarre conspiracy crap pandering nonsense.
	That same night, Vivek goes on CNN with Caitlin Collins.
	The proper move here was obvious.
	Caitlin, I should have been more careful in commenting on something that is still an open wound for many Americans.
	This was no way to handle such a delicate, painful topic involving the murder of 3,000 Americans.
	Nope.
	The new approach is deny the remarks were even made and also defend them.
	Listen.
	A report in the Atlantic that you gave an interview to, you said, quote, I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers.
	Maybe the answer is zero.
	It probably is zero for all I know, right?
	I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero, but if we're doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9-11, we have a 9-11 commission.
	Absolutely, there should be an answer.
	The public knows the answer to.
	Explain to me what you meant there.
	This is really, it's funny.
	I mean, the Atlantic is playing the same game as CNN.
	It's funny.
	What I said is on January 6th, I do believe that there were many federal agents in the field and we deserve to know who they are.
	On 9-11, what I've said is that the government lied.
	And this is incontrovertible evidence, Caitlin.
	The government lied about Saudi Arabia's involvement.
	But your quote here, are you telling me that the quote-unquote-20 years later?
	Yeah.
	But are you telling me that your quote is wrong here because it says how many federal agents were on the planes?
	Yeah, when I actually, and this is just lifting the curtain on how media works again, I asked that reporter to send the recording because it was on the record.
	He refused to do it.
	But we had a free-flowing conversation.
	The truth is there are lies the government has told about 9-11, but it's not the ones that somebody put in my mouth.
	It's the one that I articulated, which is that Saudi Arabia, absolutely, their intelligence was involved in 9-11.
	Okay.
	So the quote is wrong.
	He says so explicitly.
	This is all media games by CNN and the Atlantic, according to Vivek.
	Except it's not wrong.
	It's exact.
	And the Atlantic has now released the audio tape so we can hear it for ourselves.
	What is the truth about January 6th?
	I don't know.
	We can handle it.
	Whatever it is, we can handle it.
	But what government agents?
	How many government agents were in the field?
	Right?
	You mean like entrapment?
	Yeah.
	Absolutely.
	Why can the government not be transparent about something that we're using?
	Terrorists are the kind of tactics that use to fight terrorists if we find that there are hundreds of our own in the ranks of the day that they were that they were.
	I mean, look, there's a difference between entrapment and the difference between a law enforcement agent.
	I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers.
	Like, I think we want, maybe the answer is zero.
	Probably is zero for all I know, right?
	I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero.
	But if we're doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9-11, we have a 9-11 commission.
	Absolutely, that should be an answer the public knows the answer to.
	Well, if we're doing a January 6th commission, absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom.
	We're at a 9-11 commission and there are federal agents on the plane, we deserve to know.
	And if they're in a Gen 6 commission and there are federal officers in the field, we deserve to know.
	Just tell us the truth.
	Tell us what happened.
	I think it's interesting to compare, contrast 9-11 and January 6th.
	Oh, yeah, I don't think they belong in the same conversation.
	I'm only bringing it up because it was.
	I am not making the comparison.
	I think it's a ridiculous comparison.
	I'm not comparing it, but I'm saying that I brought it up only because it was invoked as a basis for the Gen 6 Commission.
	Of course.
	What I'm saying, though, is that I think Democrats and Republicans would agree 9-11 is a day that's like Pearl Harbor Day, where there are good guys and bad guys, and America was attacked.
	I mean, I would take the truth about 9-11.
	I mean, I am not questioning what we've got.
	It's not something I'm staking anything on, but I want the truth about 9-11.
	It's exactly as the Atlantic said it was, and he denied on CNN.
	Now, Vivek is tweeting about the CNN reporter being a, quote, petulant teenager.
	Look, it's true, she has a grading style.
	She's got about as much warmth as the Nancy Pelosi ice cream collection, but her demeanor was not the problem here.
	His dishonesty was.
	It was wrong of the Democrats to compare the January 6th attacks to 9-11.
	Outrageous.
	And we called them out on it repeatedly.
	But it is also wrong of Vivek to use baseless bullshit conspiracy theories about federal agents on the 9-11 planes to make his case about government dishonesty.
	There are certain things most of us in this country still hold inviolate.
	9-11 is one of them.
	Politicians on the left and right, you have no business using the murder of 3,000 Americans to build your brand as an alleged warrior of truth.
	Period.
	Okay.
	That's, I like Vivek.
	This is a big misstep.
	He needs to fix it.
	He needs to fix it.
	Get off this weird ass train.
	All right.
	You're not doing yourself or the Republican Party any favors.
	I only wish I were moderating that debate tonight because I know exactly where I would go with him.
	Joining us now to discuss it all, Camille Foster, partner at Free Think, journalist Michael Moynihan, and editor-at-large for Reason Magazine, Matt Welsh.
	They are the hosts of the Fifth Column podcast, which you can find and support on Substack at wethefifth.substack.com.
	Welcome back to the show, guys.
	So, what do you make of it?
	Oh, man.
	Where does one begin with this?
	I think you're right about all this stuff.
	The comparison is bizarre, is baffling.
	Why would there be federal agents on a the flights on 9-11 makes no sense to me?
	But there are no other historical antecedents that you could come up with.
	You had to come up with 9-11.
	As you said, Megan, the answer to this is very, very simple because it used to be the purview of people entirely on the left.
	I mean, we used to point this out after 9-11.
	There was all sorts of polls and studies that said people in New York, I mean, people in New York, liberals in New York, 30% of them, 40% don't quote me on this, but there was a high number of people that said this was the Bush administration.
	This was an inside job.
	And this was a stick that you would very kind of offensively beat the Bush administration, Republican Party with back then.
	And that was a thing that people on the right used to attack people on the left.
	The fact that this is happening 20 years later, I think there might have something to do with this, is that Vivek was probably 16 years old.
	If I'm doing the math right on 9-11, and those of us who were not 16 years old, I know I look very young, but I was an adult at the time, that that was not something that I would ever treat lightly.
	I was in New York at the time.
	I still treat it very seriously.
	I still was offended when Chuck Schumer said, I think on the year anniversary of January 6th, the year anniversary of January 6th, like it was some amazing event that we have to memorialize every year, compared it, I think, to Pearl Harbor, where also 3,000 people died.
	I wasn't alive then.
	And I think that's a kind of pornographic comparison too.
	But the response to this is quite simple.
	Well, I'm going to play the Saudi thing.
	Well, you know, we're not unclear about this.
	The Saudis were dodgy about it.
	The 9-11 report wasn't kind of full-throated enough about them.
	Perhaps.
	I don't think that's entirely right.
	But to come out and say that, look, there are people on the left that have said this for a long time because they hate America and they hated the Bush administration and they blame every foreign policy issue around the world on America.
	And they blamed the terrorism attack that afflicted America on 9-11 on ourselves.
	I do not do something like that.
	It was a comparison that I made for X, Y, and Z reason.
	If you think that I'm denying it, that's the thing that nutty people do.
	I am not.
	That's not a hard thing to say.
	Why would one not come out and say that in a full-throated manner?
Pat Tillman Release Confusion 00:12:24
	I don't know.
	He denied it, that he made it worse.
	He denied he'd ever said it to the Atlantic, guys.
	And then the Atlantic did release the audio.
	He did say it.
	We have ears.
	We know he said it.
	And by the way, he said it to the Atlantic and then he said something similar to Alex Stein.
	He's been flirting with the trutherism for at least July and August.
	And only now did he go on CNN and try to come up with this Saudi stuff, which is like actually not breaking news.
	He's trying to pin it all on that.
	Well, weird how you never mentioned any of that.
	In fact, what you actually said, which you had seen absolutely no evidence of the lies.
	But, you know, it's whatever.
	People don't prepare for the interviews and people get away with this bullshit.
	He's not getting away with it because it was on audio tape.
	Go ahead, Monty, Matt.
	Go ahead.
	Welch, whatever his name is.
	Yeah.
	You said we have ears, which begs the question or suggests the question.
	Who's we?
	We have ears.
	We all listen to this.
	We listened to this just now.
	A lot of people who consume a ton of political news every day on Twitter, on cable news, have ears, listen to this.
	A lot of journalists who pay attention to this, probably more than even than they should, have ears and they can't believe that he did all of this.
	I suggest perhaps an even kind of darker idea, which is that he knows full well what he's doing and that it's not going to put a dent in his popularity.
	What he's going to do, there's a political feature magazine feature that came out on him today.
	It's pretty interesting.
	I recommend people look at it.
	He talks about some of the same stuff.
	And he was confronted by the reporter about Mike Pence's initial kind of outrage and criticism of what he said in this case.
	And his response is telling.
	And I think it's going to telegraph how he's going to deal with this tonight when he is confronted about this, either by Pence or the moderator or whoever.
	He says, and this is a quote: they'll lie in public about Pat Tillman.
	They'll lie to the public about weapons of mass destruction.
	It's the same people who lied about Pat Tillman, who lied about the weapons of mass destruction, who lied to us today about the truth, about how many police officers were in the field on January 6th, who lied about the Nashville shooter manifesto, who lied to us about the origin of COVID-19, and so on and so on.
	You see what he's doing?
	What he's doing is he's appealing to people their sense of righteous, in many cases, outrage that the establishment has screwed up over and over and over again in the last 25 years, and that sometimes that's screwing up, especially in the case of COVID, which is the one that's frontmost on our minds these days, probably.
	That led to really bad policy that led to people having to change their lifestyles in ways they didn't appreciate.
	So he's hitting that, I think, on purpose.
	He knows that in the Republican primary field right now, basically for eight uninterrupted years, who have voters gravitated towards in presidential politics, a majority since September 2015 of Republican voters in polls, at least expressed that way, have favored people who are not politicians and who say crazy stuff.
	Ever since Ben Carson, who would compare his breakfast cereal to Nazis back in 2015 and Donald Trump emerged, and Donald Trump said a lot of just throwing things against the wall.
	Some of it sounded really rational, as does Vivek says a lot of really rational sounding things that I like.
	And some of it sounds crazy, like death taxes are cool, which is something that he's been coming up with recently.
	But they're total outsiders because Republican voters are in the mood to say, we don't want normal politicians.
	So what Vivek is doing right now and what this little loop of the media fact-checking and getting upset with him, and even I'm sure he'll play the Megan Kelly clip and try to use it to his favor.
	See, establishment Megan Kelly's doing it again or something.
	Oh, yeah, good luck.
	I know you're going to bear your fangs and claws at him.
	But I think that he's consciously using this.
	And it'll be a really interesting test to see whether it continues to work.
	Because one of the most interesting things so far about this Republican primary is he is gaining and all the normies are stuck in nowhere, this is so cynical, though, Camille.
	It's like those things that Matt just listed really are government lies.
	You know, we were lied to on COVID and so many of the other things that he just ticked off.
	It is not okay to link 9-11 trutherism with the lies we were told about COVID.
	That makes Vivek the liar.
	That takes the it makes him the bad guy as opposed to the people who actually are telling the lies.
	And it can be confusing to Americans who are hearing this nonsense.
	There is a faction of the Republican Party right now that's gotten very conspiratorial.
	There is.
	And it's not the people who believe Fauci lied and the CDC lied and, you know, the FBI is not fair and the DOJ misleads.
	It's not those people.
	There is a faction that goes down a dark rabbit hole and he's flirting with them.
	That I do think, I don't think Vivek really thinks 9-11 was an inside job or that we had federal agents on the planes.
	What is he saying?
	What, that this was like entrapment that the federal agents somehow entrapped the poor terrorists into actually flying the planes into the towers that we actually were behind it the whole time.
	We were working in tandem, holding hands like a couple of these Saudi intel officials.
	Like we were in what is he?
	Why?
	Why would he say U.S. federal agents were on the planes that hit the towers?
	How dare he say that?
	Honestly, there's zero evidence of that.
	That's that's crazy ass shit that you'd see deep in the rabbit hole on Reddit, Camille.
	So for him to link that shit to what we know are legitimate gripes, thus I would suggest to you tarring the GOP as a whole, right?
	Like this is what the Democrats will use to say these people are lunatics.
	You know, we can't tell you what a woman is, but they think 9-11 was an inside job.
	It's incredibly cynical and wrong.
	And this is, I've made a very difficult bed for myself because I try my very best to give people the benefit of the doubt and attribute the best possible motivation to them within reason, within reason.
	And I've met Vivek, and as I heard you say, Megan, I like him as a person.
	I think that he is generally like quite frank.
	I'm mad at him.
	A lot of the cases where we're having interactions, I would also concur that this was pretty easy for him to deal with.
	If you spoke inelegantly and you said it in a way that you didn't mean to say it, intimating certain things, then you own it and you clarify.
	You don't double down.
	You don't try to act as though you've been misrepresented.
	And you most certainly don't call for them to release audio that is likely to make you look worse when it finally arrives, which is why I think him being as bright as I know him to be in general,
	it's at least possible for me to think that this isn't some sort of well-calibrated strategy, that he is perhaps speaking without having much actual knowledge about what happened here and that the 2021 release of additional classified information by the Biden administration, giving us a better picture of what, if any role the Saudis had in it.
	I would guess that Vivek didn't know anything about that and hadn't actually known it carefully before he started to.
	He only looked into it after he started getting hit.
	That's why he admitted he has no evidence that they lied when he made his comments to Alex.
	He didn't know anything.
	He looked at, he did a Google search after he started to get hit and stumbled upon the thing with the Saudis like, aha, I'll put it.
	I'll pin it all on that.
	Yeah.
	So it at least leads me to believe that there is quite a bit more sloppiness as opposed to kind of calculated deviousness.
	And I will, however, forcefully agree that there is this conspiratorial current in the Republican Party, but it's actually a little worse than that.
	There is, broadly speaking, an appetite for conspiracism on the left and the right.
	And I don't mean to draw any sort of equivalence there.
	I don't need to.
	I think anyone who's been paying attention knows that this is the case, knows that since Donald Trump was running for office, let alone elected, we've been talking about inside job Manchurian candidate nonsense.
	And that is still the things that people in the different parties are willing to completely ignore for the benefit of their own kind of partisan interests.
	The fact that we had autonomous zones being declared in the summer of 2020, like people seem to have forgotten that kind of thing altogether.
	So it is a very bizarre, dark time.
	And I think it actually demands that people who want to be occupants of the highest office in the land are operating in an exceedingly respectable manner.
	I know that there are benefits to flirting with some of this darker nonsense, but I think Vivek is certainly up to the task of being respectable and above board while hitting hard.
	And if that's what he wants to do, then that's how he ought to conduct business.
	No more of this flirtation, no more of this nonsense, trying to blame the media.
	When you've made a mistake, own it and move on.
	And please give Megan a call.
	Let your people talk over.
	She's got good advice for me.
	I mean, I'm sure he'll come on.
	He loves going on every media source.
	He's been on this call.
	Yeah.
	Now, I will say, Camille, I disagree with you on one thing.
	I mean, actually, I agree with Matt on this.
	I do think the more that I think about this, that it is plotted because, Megan, you're right that I always assumed, not assumed, but knew just from practical experience that conspiracism was kind of the domain of the left.
	And it was for so long.
	And they proved themselves again with their Russia nonsense and repeating that in breathless Rachel Maddow episodes where there's going to be a revelation that Trump was working for the Common Turn or something.
	But that stuff never dropped.
	It was always about to drop.
	But there is that bit that's happened on the right more recently.
	And I think that when Matt says it's plotted out or he knows what he's doing, not as if there's some sort of whiteboard, but when you see what happens with RFK.
	And RFK getting so much purchase on the right, a man who is essentially a leftist, his economic ideas are left-wing.
	He is a member of the Kennedy family.
	We don't have to belabor that point.
	But there's been so much purchase there on the left.
	And Vivek is actually interesting because he is 39 years old.
	He is a member of the sort of internet only generation.
	Mike Pence is not.
	And he understands that when what I called along, you know, probably a couple of months ago on the fifth column, the veification of politics.
	And the veification of politics was they are doing this.
	Never defined who it is.
	They lied to you.
	Who lied to you?
	Well, they did.
	I mean, there were some people in the military hierarchy that did not want it to come out that Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire because he was a heroic guy who signed up for the military and threw away an enormous NFL contract.
	And, you know, the Jessica Lynch story, all of that stuff.
	It came out very quickly and it was very quickly debunked.
	And it's so funny because now in this version, populism kind of demands a certain conspiracy instinct to it.
	And in this version of the Republican Party, young people don't remember that everybody on the right, including, you know, all most of the people on stage were defending the Bush administration during the 2000s, during the Iraq war.
	But now it's DeRigore that you get on stage and you say, all right, the Iraq war was the biggest foreign policy disaster in American history.
	You denounce the Bushism in the past.
	And so it's a very, very interesting transition from the left doing that and talking about Pat Tillman and weapons of mass destruction to people very commonly doing this on the right.
	I'm not saying they're totally wrong, but I think the instinct is very much an internet one because it does get a lot of short-term gain.
	Camille said there is a gain.
	I think he's right.
	But I think it's short-term.
	I don't think that in the long-term way, it is a good strategy to play footsie with these people because they are fucking nuts.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Like this is, this is, you're on your way to lizard people.
	You are on the road to lizard people if you go down this, these lanes.
	And that's part of what I see as my job is to keep a tether to the truth, to call out the lies that were being told by the government when it's happening, to stay objective enough that you can see them, but also objective enough that you can see when Republicans are bullshitting us too.
	And Vivek is bullshitting us.
	And he's bullshitting us not just about, you know, pilots, American pilot or American federal agents on the planes, but about why now he's taking fire for these comments.
Vivek Ramaswamy Swamp Outsider 00:08:03
	He's trying to play a card out of the Trump deck where he's like, it is coming from me because I'm an outsider.
	Listen to this.
	This is further from the interview on CNN last night trying to explain why he's being so unfairly attacked for these comments.
	Sat 3.
	That hilliest game comes up, Caitlin, every time there's an outsider who comes in.
	I am guilty as charged that I do not follow the establishment SuperFact donor approved script on these questions, but I'm speaking truth grounded in fact at every step of the way.
	And that's what's really elicited something of an anaphylactic reaction of the kind we saw in 2016 against a different candidate.
	But this time I'm going to be grounded in principles and conviction, not just vengeance and grievance.
	That's just simply.
	Okay.
	So he's, I love the dig at Trump at the end there.
	Like he wants the only reason he has any following whatsoever is because he's attracted some faction of the Trump fans who are like, okay, he sounds kind of like Trump.
	He's not going to attack Trump.
	There's some who aren't on the Trump team, but he's got a lot of Trump supporters who are open-minded to him.
	But they got to get the Trump dig in there at the end while trying to claim he's the new Trump.
	He's the outsider.
	That's why he's getting attacked.
	No, that's not why.
	It's not because you're an outsider.
	It's because of what you actually said.
	And this isn't the first time.
	Okay, the Washington Examiner had a piece yesterday that talked about how this is a pattern with Vivek, where I'll give you an example from the piece.
	They say, All right, the candidate repeatedly alleged in interviews that the first time he ever voted in an election was in 2020 for Trump.
	Though then he later admitted to the Washington Examiner that he actually had voted in 2004.
	And the Washington Examiner had raised that with him because they went and found election records in Ohio showing him voting in 2004.
	He, according to the Washington Examiner, told the examiner over the phone when it brought the voting discrepancy to his attention, I appreciate you smoking that out for me.
	That actually was very useful.
	But then he went online and posted, this is the most false and intentionally deceitful headline of the campaign so far about the Washington Examiner report, right?
	So it wasn't false.
	It wasn't intentionally deceitful.
	Behind the scenes, he thanked them for the clarification and he had said something that wasn't true.
	Okay.
	Then there's, oh, let's see.
	He told, I'm trying to get all my facts here.
	He told the New York Post in mid-August that he would be open to evaluating pardons for members of the Biden family if he becomes president.
	And then he later, once the story hit on social media, said, no, I don't have any plans to pardon Hunter Biden.
	That's planted trash.
	When you strike the swamp, the swamp strikes back.
	The swamp?
	The New York Post is the swamp?
	How's the plan?
	Washington Examiner?
	Simply left-wing Washington Examiner.
	Right?
	So you could see the pattern with him.
	He's like, I realize he's a politician now and they all freaking lie.
	It's just annoying to see the swamp swampify people like Vivek, but it does.
	I'm not sure it's the swamp, though, Megan.
	I mean, I think he brought the swamp to the swamp.
	I mean, let's pretend that word doesn't exist for a second because I want to go back to that world.
	But it's been effective.
	If anyone, God help them or God help all of us, have been to the Conservative Political Action Conference over the years and has watched a variety of GOP presidential candidates go up.
	What is the applause line?
	And this is true before Trump.
	It's certainly true during Trump and true whatever stage we're living through now.
	The biggest applause line, attack line, you know, 20 years ago is like the Kennedys or San Francisco values or whatever.
	Now it's just media.
	If you're attacking the media or if you want some little unearned praise, say the media is attacking you, that is it.
	That wins because the media is a stand-in for a culture that people feel like is looking down at them and sneering at them.
	And they feel like that with a lot of cause.
	They feel like there's sort of a bifurcation in America, that there's a journalistic or kind of elite class that runs things, kind of runs things badly and looks over middle America with disdain.
	And so you run for that direction if you are attempting to win a presidential primary.
	That's why I think a lot of this is conscious.
	So he's going, he loves a headline that says CNN fact checked shows that Vivek Ramaswamy was wrong about this.
	Great.
	Great.
	As far as he is concerned, it's not embarrassing in the least.
	Why would it be?
	So he's lying about it.
	His team came out today.
	Listen to this nonsense.
	His campaign spokesperson comes out and says, we're grateful that the Atlantic released the audio after we repeatedly asked them to do so.
	The audio clearly demonstrates that Vivek was taken badly out of context.
	And even this small snippet proves that.
	No, it doesn't, Tricia.
	No, it doesn't.
	It doesn't.
	What this reminds me of is what Michael was referencing before, RFK Jr. on the Democratic side, when people, including me and probably you, I think, I forget, Megan, posted a video of him making comments in 2014 about imagining that he wanted to jail the Koch brothers and other people who were climate deniers.
	In his words, he immediately said, Oh, though, that video is doctored.
	Well, no, it wasn't doctored at all.
	And then he said, Oh, it's taken out of context.
	Well, nope, it wasn't taken out of context either.
	But he's not going to suffer any real penalty for saying that as a kind of default response when acted on criticism, because the type of people who are attracted to these candidates are the type of people who will say, Well, you know, why is RFK important?
	Why is Vivek important right now?
	Because they are calling BS on the establishment and truth tell us.
	So, in that context, fighting with the media, scrapping with the media is seen as a gain.
	And until Republican voters in the primary act differently, they're going to respond to incentives, the politicians, I mean, in this fashion.
	In the primary, I mean, in general, this is going to be much harder.
	And Matt made a point that is pretty interesting.
	And I would urge your viewers, listeners, to go seek this out.
	I think it's on C-SPAN, but I've been to CPAC many times over the years and seen it get increasingly weirder and crazier.
	But that applause line of the media, look, the fifth column, which is the greatest podcast in Christendom, and that's just a study that showed that we're a media criticism podcast, and we talk about how shitty the media is literally every week, twice a week.
	If you pay and you should pay, but twice a week, we're saying how awful these people are.
	But this lazy crutch of the media, every time you get in trouble, I saw one person say one thing at CPAC about the media that was positive, and he was booed.
	He was lustily booed.
	Who is that person?
	Tucker Carlson.
	Tucker Carlson, when he was starting, and people should go look this up.
	It's actually a really good speech.
	He's starting the Daily Caller and he says the New York Times chorus of booze, booze, you know, horrible comies.
	And he says, No, wait, wait, wait, wait.
	They do some good work, but they're not on our side.
	We just have to emulate them.
	But they're not bad people and they don't do all horrible stuff.
	We just should be more like them and just put our spin on it.
	And that's why I'm starting the Daily Caller.
	And he had a very sober way of doing that.
	And I have to say that I think Tucker's still doing that by going to Twitter and doing his show there.
	And rather than ketching and, you know, hand-wrigging constantly about the media, is that, you know, go out, do your own thing, number one, talk to media who are going to be sympathetic to you, which would be in Vivek's case, Megan Kelly.
	But don't expect people like Megan Kelly or people like the fifth column, where Vivek has been a guest too, to just roll over and say, well, yeah, and obviously you're being treated poorly when you invoke 9-11 in your arguments about God knows what at this point about January 6th, as Chuck Schrumer would do.
	Don't expect us to roll over and say, well, yeah, of course, because the media, no, we know the media sucks, but don't use the fact that the media sucks as this crutch.
	And every time you get in trouble and it's an applause line and you roll your eyes at Caitlin Collins, who, by the way, got her start at the Daily Caller.
Vivek's Media Strategy Flaws 00:15:06
	Yeah, that's right.
	No, you look like a little baby.
	You little whiny baby.
	The mean media made me do it.
	No, they didn't.
	You did it.
	Grow up.
	You want to be the president?
	Act like a man.
	Okay.
	Let's take a quick break.
	We'll come right back.
	There's much, much more to get into with the hosts of the fifth column after this quick break.
	Before we move off of Vivek and RFK Jr., there are a couple of similarities between them.
	You know, we were laughing earlier this week because Vivek posted that I'm like, looks like I'm kind of rubbing the nipples, but that's not what I'm doing.
	I'm trying to show.
	I'm trying to.
	Doesn't it look that way?
	Why do I keep going with my hair?
	Just God, is this on OnlyFans now?
	What's happening?
	That's an idea.
	I can't make a bunch of dough that way.
	Probably like two cents down on the show.
	You probably could.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So, anyway, my point is he posted a video of him playing tennis without his shirt on.
	Okay, so he did that.
	And RFKJ had posted a video of him working out without his shirt on.
	And then, yeah, here it is again.
	And then Vivek.
	Yeah, so that happened.
	Vivek earlier has had been seen.
	I think it was in Iowa.
	It was in Iowa rapping Eminem.
	Lose yourself.
	We'll play a little bit of that.
	Here it is.
	Oh, man.
	I hear groans.
	Why are you groaning before I get to the next thought?
	What's happening, gentlemen?
	Such a terrible idea.
	A terrible idea.
	I mean, this is why.
	Again, I like Vivek, but all of the energy is like, I was bullied.
	Yeah, totally.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I'm a billionaire.
	You're a billionaire nerd.
	And I'm rapping on stuff.
	Yep.
	Well, I will say something.
	That's not cool, man.
	Just don't do that anymore.
	Whoever's telling you to do that, do not do it.
	He's doing that, thinking about getting stuffed in the locker.
	He was pushed in the locker and he was just rapping MM at the same time.
	Look, he's winning.
	He's winning.
	He is better than those people, but he's giving something away every time he raps in public.
	Don't do it.
	But I mean, he gets him along at home on stage.
	Gets his name out there, gets us talking about him in a way we're not doing right now for, you know, Mike Pence or Asa Hutchinson, which I don't think we're going to be seeing.
	He's, by the way, a great rapper and a terrible tennis player, but a great rapper.
	What goes on on the field?
	Would you change your tune if he started bravely dropping end bumps?
	Yes, you would.
	You would.
	You would defend him, wouldn't you?
	I would defend him, but that's that's because, but that's because I object to the double standard.
	There's no double standard here.
	You don't have to be black in order to rap on stage.
	You just have to be really good at it and actually have some swagger.
	And he's got no.
	He just doesn't have the appropriate kind of swagger to be doing this.
	Yeah, you have to.
	I'm not a fan, Megan, of the trend towards shirtlessness in the primaries.
	I just think that, you know, like, look, Vivek is surging.
	Go do a search for Huckabee surging back in the day.
	And these are, I'm glad everyone had their shirts on back then because remember, was it date night and Mark Wahlberg?
	He's never wearing his shirt and his body's super taut.
	And Steve Corell, I think it is, is like, who likes shirts?
	Who likes shirts?
	I had one of those moments when I saw it.
	Okay.
	So then there's this.
	Vivek just posted a new video of him doing burpees with his wife.
	Okay.
	A family that burps together, stays together.
	Okay.
	So they're young and they're vibrant guys.
	I think that's the hidden message here.
	They're young and they're vibrant.
	And he had earlier posted a picture or a video of him playing the piano.
	I mean, what is he telegraphing I'm young?
	And yes, you know, I'm not an octogenarian like Biden and I'm not 77 like Trump.
	Or is he just trying to get like the young kids talking about him?
	Like he's one of us.
	He plays piano.
	He does burpees.
	He plays tennis.
	He raps.
	He's one of us people who got shoved into the locker.
	Sorry, but really Camille is right.
	It telegraphs bullying.
	It's like now, by the way, this will get him.
	I'm going to play piano.
	It's like, I don't, I don't think that's doing it.
	But shout out to the youth.
	I mean, he's right to do that.
	For sure.
	It's insane that we have these old semi-crazy people.
	And I know there's everyone listening here voted for all of them, but like, still, be honest with yourself, watch a video for more than like 30 seconds for many years.
	They're incredibly old, they're incredibly not vigorous, they say crazy things all the time.
	They, in the case of the sitting president of the United States, which is not a small deal, they cannot even go to a tragedy without making stuff up about their own family that didn't happen as a BS way of empathizing.
	It's just like we need young people audience, more burpees, please.
	I think it's fine for him to do that, although it's terribly embarrassing.
	Yeah, so he's a millennial.
	He's 38 years old.
	It would be nice to get somebody, you know, energetic, young, youthful.
	DeSantis is only 44, by the way.
	As he said to me in the interview we had, he said, I'll get in there and I'll be ready to spit nails on day one.
	And you kind of believe him.
	You know, he just seems like maybe you don't want to go to the prom with him necessarily, but you believe if you put him in that office, he'd be all business.
	You know, he wouldn't be doing the burpees.
	He would be legislating.
	He would be the Democrats' worst nightmare.
	You sit across from him, you do believe that.
	Yeah, I mean, you don't want to prime a prom king in the White House.
	Well, I don't anyway.
	But I just think, I mean, I think DeSantis is young.
	He doesn't telegraph as young, whereas Vivek, and I think it's before even he's doing burpees and playing tennis and archery and kickboxing online.
	It's just he looks like he's seven years old, but he's also really, really smart.
	We've been giving Vivek a hard time.
	He came on the fifth column.
	I disagree with him on a lot of things, a lot of Ukraine stuff, foreign policy stuff, but he's whip smart in that he is surging.
	Now, these surges ultimately don't mean very much.
	We remember Rick Santorum surging, you know, Herman Cain surging, Howard Dean, Mike Huckabee.
	And so it probably won't amount to much, but it does say something about what people, whether looking for an alternative, are looking for.
	And the one thing they're not, by the way, which is the association people love to make with the party, is that they're racists.
	I mean, the Herman Cain surging didn't do anything to disabuse people of this notion, too.
	But Vivek is not white.
	And we talk so endlessly, desperately about race.
	And if we insist on that, it might be worth pointing out that he's not just a white guy.
	He's a young, very successful Indian American.
	And, you know, there's something that's appealing about him, regardless of the fact that he believes, you know, 9-11 was an inside job or whatever he believes.
	We'll have to say that he believes that, but he's flirting with that kind of nonsense.
	By the way, just to go back to the video, I have to say, like, if we're trying to hire the one who's like most vibrant and energetic, I think we should maybe run the wife.
	The wife looks amazing.
	She looks so much better.
	Holy cow.
	She's getting higher.
	Look at that.
	Yeah.
	Good God.
	Hire her.
	I have to do burpees for this class I do online.
	And I just phone it in.
	I can, I barely like online.
	I would never do that jump at the end.
	That's horrible.
	What's the online burpee?
	Is it a master's class or something?
	It's OnlyFans.
	She wants to compete with Chris Cuomo to work on him.
	Now, wait, okay, we have breaking news on the debate, which we're still going to talk about.
	Daily Bee's reporting that, because as you know, Donald Trump will not be at the debate tonight.
	But they say, I'm reading here, Fox still plans for Trump to have a heavy, non-physical presence at the event.
	Multiple people familiar with the situation tell the Daily Bees the network has committed to a plan to beam Trump in by playing clips of him throughout the debate and then having the candidates respond.
	They will hold on to those ratings like Trump, He's kind of here.
	He said this about you.
	How about you?
	He said this about you.
	It would also satisfy Fox's desire to effectively counter-program the Tucker Carlson interview with Mr. Trump that was taped at Trump's Bedminminster New Jersey Golf Club last week.
	Their chat will run for two hours.
	It's going to air on X, you know, formerly known as Twitter, which is the expected length of Fox's debate.
	So it's, they're still going to try to make it all about Trump.
	The news media does it for the ratings.
	The Democrats do it because they think that they can beat Trump.
	I don't know whether it's the best thing for the Republican Party, but he is the front runner.
	So what do you make of it?
	It's like the Tupac hologram at Coachella.
	That's what this sounds like to me.
	It may be a good idea and certainly boosts the ratings a little bit.
	It's weird.
	There's a sense in which for Donald Trump, as he's doing the Tucker appearance, the best thing for him to do is probably not even mention the fact that there is this debate going on.
	You just ignore the gaggle of losers from his perspective who are having these conversations about him someplace else.
	He doesn't even need to be there.
	It doesn't matter.
	He's not even going to talk about them.
	And on the other hand, like all of the incentive is to constantly talk about Trump.
	I mean, this is, it's a kind of, but for all of the other surrounding contexts, it's kind of a masterful play in some regards.
	I personally, as a voter, would much prefer to see him there at the stage.
	I also think it'd probably be a little bit more entertaining if you were there.
	But it's kind of bizarre to watch all of this play out.
	It's very strange because I know that the consensus on this, and the consensus is probably right, that it makes no sense for Donald Trump to show up.
	I mean, he's, you know, these other people are, I mean, you get somebody at 13%, maybe.
	And like, why even bother going?
	Okay, I get that.
	But I think he is making the wrong decision.
	And for a couple of reasons, just as a viewer, number one, because you do like to see him on stage, because he's very, very, very good at it.
	And he has, what, four plus, five plus years of practice that, you know, when he was in front of the press, when he was doing debates with other Republican candidates, when he was doing debates against Joe Biden, he's very good at it.
	But if anybody needs a laugh tonight, instead of watching this grim debate, watch Shane Gillis, the comedian who was canceled from SNL before he started.
	His special, which is one of the funniest specials I've seen in probably five years, he has an incredible bit about watching his father hated Donald Trump and said, oh, this guy's a clown.
	And then watching the debate.
	And he was like, and as Shane Gillis said, they just kept on throwing these nerds up against him.
	He was just destroying them.
	And it's an amazingly smart way of looking at it because does Donald Trump need it?
	No, but it's not going to hurt him.
	It never hurt him in the past.
	And I, as a voter, would love to see him interface with people who are going to try to now attack DeSantis as the Trump surrogate and, you know, all go after him.
	I'd like to see them all go after Trump because during the campaign so far, they've all been kind of MAGA surrogates in their own way.
	They're not running against Donald Trump, as Larry Elder said the other day on the Breakfast Club.
	I'm not running against Donald Trump.
	I can run against Joe Biden.
	So it'd be actually more interesting to see people who aren't quote unquote running against Donald Trump and who have said very generous things about him get up against him on a debate stage.
	That would be actually really interesting.
	It's so fraught for them because you look at all the polls and the Republican Party still loves Trump.
	They love Trump.
	You know, 69% of them, according to that poll two weeks ago, are ready to vote for Trump.
	So it's very hard to get Trump out of the way by saying he sucks.
	He's terrible.
	You don't want Trump.
	It's like, then you're terrible.
	They have a much greater affinity for him and longer relationship with him than they do with most of these guys who want that job.
	So that's just part of the problem that they're all trying to figure out a way around.
	And no one has managed to do it thus far.
	We'll see whether tonight something breaks through.
	All right.
	Up next, we're going to talk about the stakes for each of the individuals going on that stage tonight.
	I've got some thoughts and I think the guys do too.
	Stand by.
	We're also going to talk about Megan Rapino speaking out and this insanity that happened, insanity at this California library where a young female athlete dared to speak out about men playing in women's sports.
	It was insane.
	I'll show you the tape.
	Don't forget, folks, you can find the Megan Kelly show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East.
	The full video show and clips at youtube.com/slash Megan Kelly.
	You can see my softcore OnlyFans if you go there today after the show.
	Audio podcast available wherever you get your podcasts for free.
	Tonight doesn't, you know, Trump's not going to be there.
	And we're now getting more color on exactly how the decision went down per the Daily Beast.
	I read you some stuff, but this is what they're reporting.
	According to people familiar with the interview with Tucker, they say there's not going to be a bunch of tough questions or contentious moments, but this is the Daily Beast, a left-wing publication, two ideologically aligned men looking to exact revenge on Fox and its debate.
	Well, that'll work.
	And then they go on to say, Trump's mind was made up to skip the debate after he had dinner with Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace, the two top executives of the channel who went to try to woo him at Bedminster.
	Following that visit, the ex-president decided he did not need the conservative cable giant.
	They go on to say, according to one well-placed Fox News insider, the network had been working overtime recently to make sure the prevailing story around this debate is not that the network failed to get Trump, even though that appears to be the dominating narrative surrounding the event.
	Quote, they're panicked and they tried everything they could to get him to attend, but obviously it did not work.
	Their assumption is the ratings will be fine, but nowhere near where they would have been if Trump was there.
	I think that's true.
	Yes, I agree.
	They will not be as high as they would have been had Trump appeared.
	And I don't know, I think it's an appropriate middle finger by Trump, not to mention Tucker to Fox News.
	But it is an opportunity for the guys who remain on the stage, right?
	They're definitely going to get more airtime now.
	If poor Doug Bergham doesn't make it, now that's more airtime for, though, look, you know, I can speak to this as a debate moderator.
	You do not feel the need to give everybody perfectly equal time.
	That's never a promise that we've made anybody.
	Well, you want to be fair, the guys who are pulling down at 1%, they're not going to get anywhere near the airtime that DeSantis, now Vivek, will get.
DeSantis Racist Smear Tactics 00:04:57
	And so I don't know who's got the most to gain at tonight's debate.
	Let's start with that.
	Let's go around.
	Camille, what do you think?
	I mean, I'd say it's probably Ron.
	I mean, being in that second position, having floundered recently, if he were able to have a demonstrably strong performance and clearly set himself up as the alternative to Trump, this could be enormous for him.
	If he stumbles and if he looks particularly bad, I think he gives a little bit more ammunition to pretty much everyone else in the field.
	So it would be great for him to have a good performance, I'm sure, from his own team's perspective.
	Like anyone else, if DeSantis does okay and anyone else seems to really shine, I mean, that might be good for them for a little while, but it doesn't seem to me that they have nearly as much to gain or as much to lose in the short run.
	Let me show you some DeSantis.
	We pulled some from his 2018 race against Andrew Gillum for Florida governor.
	And there was a question, Gillum was accusing him of being a racist, essentially, because he showed up at an event sponsored by somebody who was very controversial.
	And this is how DeSantis handled it.
	SAT 14.
	How the hell am I supposed to know every single statement somebody makes?
	Here's the deal.
	Let me just say this.
	I've lived my life, whether it's athletics, whether it's military, whether it's serving as a prosecutor.
	You know, when I was downrange in Iraq, we worked together as a team regardless of race.
	When I was a prosecutor, I stood up for victims of every race, color, and creed.
	That's the only way to do it in our country.
	It's something I believe in.
	And as governor, I will represent all the people.
	Everyone will get a fair shake.
	But I am not going to bow down to the altar of political correctness.
	I'm going to not let the media smear me like they like to do with so many other people.
	So I'm certainly not going to take anything from Andrew Gillum.
	He's got neo-Nazis helping him out in the state.
	He has spoken at racist conferences.
	I'm not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist.
	I'm simply saying the racists believe he's a racist.
	What's Mr. DeSantis?
	The conference I attended was keynoted by a Medal of Honor recipient named Clinton Romashe.
	It was not a racial conference.
	That is an absolute lie.
	And I'm not going to sit here and take this nonsense from a guy like Andrew Gillum.
	Oh, pretty good.
	Yeah.
	Every reason he should be doing great reasons he should do well tonight.
	He should swear again.
	I like to swear again.
	Yeah, Gillum.
	It's authentic.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	He might have.
	I mean, Gillum did a great job after losing that race.
	I don't know if anyone remembers what Andrew Gillum did, but he likes passing out in hotel rooms and things.
	But no, I have been an outlier in this.
	And, you know, having seen DeSantis on the stump during his last campaign in Florida, that everyone thought I was crazy, but I said, I think he's actually quite good on the stump because, you know, the comparison that people make is to Donald Trump.
	And it's an unfair comparison because Donald Trump is unique in that there's nobody like him.
	And that's what people liked about him.
	I think that maybe what people are sort of tired of in some ways too.
	But, you know, DeSantis isn't bad at this.
	This is completely ridiculous if people think that he's bad at this stuff.
	He's very, very smart.
	It doesn't.
	And again, I have people emailing me when I say this all the time and saying, oh, you're a big design.
	No, I have a lot of things that I really disagree with him on, but it's just a statement of fact.
	The guy is a working-class guy who went to Harvard and Yale and then served in the military and has the pedigree that one used to have to get to the presidency.
	And he's no dummy.
	And people should not underestimate him because when he's up there tonight, he has, of course, the most to lose.
	And he's going to come out swinging.
	That debate prep strategy thing that leaked wasn't wrong, by the way.
	There was nothing crazy in it.
	It was pretty much how I would handle that debate.
	And I suspect that he'll do pretty much the same of what was outlined in that document, which is mostly common sense of, you know, making sure that you're on the attack a lot of the time.
	I think you're going to see somebody who's reasonably impressive as a debater.
	I'm not saying as a candidate, but as a debater.
	I think he's quite good.
	Now, Canadian Debbie, our producer, she's very thorough, guys.
	And she did look through most of that debate and found some potential areas of weakness for Ron DeSantis.
	And you will not be surprised, I think, to hear it was in some of his facial expressions, reaction shots.
	You know, what's happening when other people are talking, in that case, Andrew Gillam.
	We did pull some of that.
	Here it is.
	It's watch.
	It's a video.
	No, so he's looking at him.
	He's shaking the head.
	No, there's kind of like a smirk.
	I don't know, Deb.
	This isn't so bad.
	Does it get worse than this?
	Oh, she says it gets worse.
	All right, standby.
	From Bill O'Reilly.
Chris Christie Trump Spoiler 00:15:03
	Just okay.
	Head tilt.
	Don't like that.
	There's the next one.
	I mean, honestly.
	He's got a weird little smile on.
	He's got like a weird little fake smile.
	It's like somebody told him.
	Smile.
	Don't forget to smile.
	Yeah.
	Oh, that's a yeah, that's a weird one.
	But Camille's right, the tailoring is the most offensive.
	Yeah, I think you could do a better job.
	Yeah, he looks like David Burnham talking to stomach.
	I don't think that was so bad.
	I think Debbie, that was unfair impeachment.
	I think that was fine.
	But he does have to worry about, you know, he's got some facial and some that was quite mean for a Canadian.
	Well, she used to be American, but then she married a damn Canadian, went up there.
	Oh, healing.
	Traitor.
	Wow.
	Okay, Benedict Arnold producer.
	I know.
	So annoying.
	In any event, I think no matter what happens in this debate, here's my prediction is that one, Chris Christie will be declared the winner by the media.
	Of course.
	Two, the media will be wrong and he won't see much bump one way or the other in the polls.
	But more importantly, that whole category, the way from the middle, the middle is where all the action is between DeSantis and Vivek.
	I think those are the only other two people right now who have a realistic shot at the nomination at all.
	And Vivek's is not that realistic because it just depends on Donald Trump, you know, keeling over in prison or something like that.
	I don't think he could beat Trump himself.
	But that group, right?
	So Pence, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Chris Christie, you can add Will Heard in there.
	He won't be there tonight.
	Asa Hutchinson, the normal Republicans.
	Look at them as a group and see how they have polled over the duration of this primary campaign.
	Right now, as of August, that group together, regardless of who's high and who's low, 15%.
	Last month, 15%.
	The month before, 16%.
	And that was their high watermark.
	This is very similar in its own way to what we saw in 2015 and 16 with the Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and also Chris Christie Wing.
	That group never polled higher together than 25%.
	Republican voters are not going to vote for those people.
	I don't see any way out of that.
	DeSantis has the most to gain from this because he's lost the most.
	He's lost half of his support.
	He was polling at 29%.
	He's now like 14 and a half over time.
	But he's the only person besides Vivek who has shown that Trump voters will vote for him.
	Trump voters are not voting for Chris Christie.
	This is just, this is not going to happen.
	They're probably not going to vote for Mike Pence.
	There will be a couple people, a few Trump voters who might be disgusted by the conduct of January 6th or whatever that is described in the indictments and whatever, who have finally peeled away from him, but not too many.
	The biggest group, three quarters of the Republican electorate have like every single month, no matter what, the group of Trump, DeSantis, and Vivek.
	75% every single month, no matter what, no matter who's high or low.
	So it is right there.
	Can DeSantis differentiate himself in a way that arrests the slide?
	That shows the kind of dead enders is too mean for the people who are supporting Mike.
	No, I'm kind of with them in many ways because I don't want Trump to win either.
	But those people aren't going to win.
	So will their voters take a fresh look at DeSantis and say, okay, well, he's the best shot that we have.
	And will DeSantis be able to stem some of Vivek's upward trajectory, which has been really impressive?
	And can he get some Trump voters his way?
	That's a lot of ifs.
	I wouldn't bet on it.
	But this is, I think, where the only action in this debate is going to be in the center of the stage.
	He's going to get attacked for sure.
	DeSantis, especially without Trump there, DeSantis will be the biggest target.
	There was a report in ABC News today pointing out how Vivek allegedly said to a group of people a couple of times, if I run, it'll be to take out Ron DeSantis.
	Like I can take him out.
	It can be a spoiler for DeSantis.
	And then Chris Christie has also been attacking DeSantis.
	I predict tonight we're probably going to hear something on Chris Christie's upset over Ron DeSantis' answers on January 6th.
	He doesn't like how Ron DeSantis has been handling that.
	You know, DeSantis, he needs to come up with a better answer because one of his answers was like, I wasn't there.
	And I mean, Chris Christie had a good, like, what do you mean?
	You weren't there?
	So you can't comment on it?
	Like, what are you saying?
	Did you not have a television?
	Did you not?
	The entire American electorate has been shown clips of it at least by this point.
	But just as a reminder, we went back because Chris Christie is now sort of famous for taking out Marco Rubio back in the last election cycle, two cycles ago, 16.
	And he does have a very good ability, Chris Christie does, of seeing your weakness as a candidate and identifying it clearly for the voters.
	And in that case, Marco Rubio walked right into it.
	So like he's very good with sort of the laser vision.
	I see what you're doing.
	I've seen you do it many times.
	I'm going to call you out on the exact thing and I'm going to say it in the perfect way.
	And then if you're not a good candidate, you're going to prove him right.
	That's what happened to Rubio could happen again tonight.
	Here's a little walk down memory lane in SOT 12.
	This country already has a debt problem.
	We don't need to add to it by electing someone who has experience at running up and destroying the credit rating of a state.
	But I would add this, let's dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing.
	He knows exactly what he's doing.
	He is trying to change this country.
	You see, everybody, I want the people at home to think about this.
	That's what Washington, D.C. does.
	The drive-by shot at the beginning with incorrect and incomplete information and then the memorized 25-second speech that is exactly what's true.
	Chris, your state got hit by a massive snowstorm two weeks ago.
	You didn't even want to go back.
	They had to shame you into going back.
	And then you stayed there for 36 hours and then he left and came back to campaign.
	Those are the facts.
	Who's the bottom line?
	This notion that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing is just not true.
	He knows exactly what he's doing.
	There it is.
	The memorized 25-second speech.
	He's good at it.
	That was devastating.
	Devastating.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's absolutely true.
	I mean, you need a guy like Christie on stage because the dynamics of, you know, we're going to kind of be in kind of MAGA universe.
	Christie isn't.
	He's good at this.
	It doesn't matter what you think about him.
	Again, this is just only on style.
	And he's a bright guy and he's quick on his feet.
	So without having Trump there, the closest you're going to get to a Trump-like person just for entertainment value is going to be Chris Christie.
	But Matt's absolutely right that they're going to declare him the winner.
	You know, this is a media that has absolutely loathed Chris Christie from Bridgegate on and just said, oh, he's such a phony, but they're going to revise that tonight for sure.
	They'll love him tonight.
	So what does Vivek do?
	Because he's probably going to take some incoming now that his numbers are going up, right?
	He's a comer.
	And DeSantis, I think, went down, what, five points was it in the latest poll?
	And Vivek went up.
	That's not good for DeSantis.
	And so, you know, we're talking about DeSantis taking all the barbs.
	He's probably going to have to throw some other people's way as well.
	And we haven't even mentioned Nikki Haley or Tim Scott or Mike Pence.
	With all due respect, like those, they're not going to get a lot of airtime.
	And I'm sure the moderators right now are going to be like, you got to throw at least one to Asa Hutchinson, right?
	But like, you don't really want to, but you got to do it.
	So those guys are the way you get airtime, if you're one of those guys is start a fight with somebody else on the stage.
	Have a back and forth where they have to have you go, you know, boom, boom, boom.
	So what do you make of the also rans?
	I mean, they've got a much longer road.
	And for them, it's a great performance tonight, you hope, and a great performance in sort of the next one of these rounds.
	But it's just going to take a tremendous amount for them to make progress.
	It doesn't seem outside of the realm of possibility for Nikki Haley or Tim Scott to be able to gain some momentum going forward.
	They at least don't have the same kind of obstacle that Chris Christie does, where I just think appealing to the base for Christie is just going to be enormously difficult, if not completely impossible.
	And this is a preliminary.
	So that's going to be very, very important going forward.
	But I just think all of them have a very, very slim chance at this point.
	You know, if you can use humor, that's also something.
	I said Trump's very good at that.
	He did that almost every debate.
	Sometimes it was shocking.
	The best line ever was to Jeb Bush, more energy.
	I like that.
	Right.
	Remember that was the end of Jeb's campaign.
	That was it.
	And it reminds me of the Ronald Reagan exchange.
	This is, I love debate big moments going back through history.
	1984, Roger Ailes claimed at least to have given him this line.
	I think it's been verified in other forums, but they knew that Ronald Reagan was old and that this was going to be a potential problem for him and that, you know, it's going to get raised by Walter Mondale.
	So here is the exchange that has now just become super famous.
	13.
	I will not make age an issue of this campaign.
	I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience.
	He wins as Mondale laughs.
	Mondale laughs really hard at it for a long time.
	He's like, you just got me, which is amazing.
	It's a great moment.
	I mean, that used to pass for like kind of cutting, but also humorous.
	I mean, God, if they could only see where we've gone.
	But is anyone who's going up there tonight funny?
	You're kidding.
	It can be very funny.
	Christine.
	It's the closest.
	Yeah.
	But I mean, the hilarious Nikki Haley or the Friars Club mentality of Tim Scott.
	I mean, I'm Mike Pence.
	Good Lord.
	If you just clean it up, he's like Eddie Murphy.
	He just doesn't drink material all the time.
	The thing, the thing about it is that Tim Scott is the guy that I think might be the sleeper just because he's such a nice guy.
	You can't dislike Tim Scott.
	And if everybody's bitching at each other, you always have that little narrow lane in a debate.
	If there's so many people on the stage, you know, jawing at each other to be the nice guy who comes in and is like, you know what?
	Look, the youth and inexperience thing is like, he's like, I'm the kind of normal sane guy here.
	And all these people are kind of nuts.
	And, but as far as you have to have humor, the best thing that Donald Trump ever did, and again, I recommend the Shane Gillis stand-up.
	It's absolutely brilliant.
	But the best thing he ever did was it was the physical act of walking behind Hillary and then very subtly moving the microphone to his mouth and saying, you'd be in jail, is literally the greatest thing I've ever seen in a debate.
	I mean, it was, and when I watched that, it was like I was at the Apollo.
	I was like rolling in the aisles, slapping and like, you know, hugging my friends.
	I don't know why it was just so funny and delivered with such perfection because the man has so much TV experience.
	I mean, reality TV is obviously not real.
	It is, it is very, very tightly scripted in so many ways.
	And Donald Trump knows how to drop those barbed lines.
	And nobody on that stage, I mean, Ace Hodgkinson, maybe, maybe he's really funny.
	We just didn't know it.
	Or Doug Bergham.
	We don't know anything about him.
	He could be the funniest guy on earth.
	He's apparently broken some body part.
	We don't know what it is.
	I pass it on.
	He should come out in a wheelchair to Eye of the Tiger.
	And then people will be like, that guy's fucking great.
	He's going to Willis Reed and then do the Willy Wonka somersault.
	Oh, that would be amazing.
	That's pretty good, actually.
	Oh, yeah.
	I like the way you're going.
	Here's the reality.
	They've got tonight.
	We don't know whether Trump's surrogates are going to be there or not there.
	They've technically been banned, I guess, by the RNC from Spin Alley, you know, where all the media are interviewing the candidates and their surrogates after the debate.
	That makes sense to me, frankly, because if you're not going to show up at the debate, why should your surrogates be allowed to dominate the post-debate discussion?
	Fox News under fire for not allowing those people are saying, well, they can come if like they're on Hannity, you know, if like they're going to be a guest on the show.
	I don't know how it's going to work.
	But there is a question about how much Donald Trump will get purchase on any of the post-debate shows.
	However, Wednesday's only 24 hours and then Thursday comes.
	And Trump tomorrow is going to be turning himself in in the Atlanta criminal case that's been brought against him.
	You guys, it's brilliant, frankly.
	I mean, talk about like making lemonade out of lemons, right?
	Because it's going to take all the air out of the discussion about these other Republican candidates, which the Democrats who run the media don't want to do anyway.
	They don't want to talk about, oh, what a great moment for this guy.
	What a great moment for that guy.
	They'd much rather turn back to Trump.
	So he bow tied it.
	He gif wrapped it.
	And he's going to go turn himself in tomorrow.
	And you know what?
	Everybody's going to be talking about.
	And it's not going to be, oh my God, Asa Hutchinson slayed.
	Yeah.
	I'll turn him up in tonight during the debate.
	That's what he should have done.
	Give a fiery speech right before hold up your hands.
	Handcuff me.
	Take me away.
	Let's remember.
	Zero coverage of the debate.
	He should have done like a slow-moving white Bronco tonight.
	Can you imagine?
	Oh, my God.
	That's an ultimate counterprogress.
	Megan, this is a better idea than your OnlyFans.
	Who is the Al Cowlings, the AC Cowlings of this slow chase?
	Mark Meadows in second gear.
	I think you won.
	The first lady who is driving the Bentley.
	The white Bentley.
	Hot Melania driving the Bentley.
	But Megan, you do understand that we're in an insane political culture.
	We're like, what great fortune it is that after this debate, Donald Trump is going to be arrested.
	That'll take all the attention away from the people who won or lost the debate.
	It's brilliant.
	And on camera, let's not forget.
	I mean, Fulton County has cameras and we're going to see visuals and all that in a way that we didn't before.
	So it's going to be on just loop on every single television station.
	It's going to be amazing.
	The ratings will be bad tonight, I would predict.
	I don't think people are banging down the doors to watch Asa Hutchinson debate.
	It's just kind of a hunch.
	And everyone's going to be talking about the indictment.
	And it's this weird country that we live in right now.
	And one of the reasons why we joke about it is to hide the pain, Megan.
	It's just pretty bizarre.
	We've got a whole bunch of indictments.
	We've got the Ricos coming against the guy who's the obvious frontrunner and will probably win the Republican nomination despite not really campaigning.
	How often is he going to go to Iowa and New Hampshire?
Crazy Policies and Cartels 00:05:58
	Who cares?
	He's going to be like fighting four different trials at once.
	It is, it's, it's kind of nuts.
	So the best that we can do probably is do our responsible journalism, of course, as Megan did at the top of the show, but also to laugh about it and not let politics consume us individually as human citizens to the extent that it has kind of warped a lot of people's heads.
	All right.
	I am looking in my notes as you're speaking.
	I can't find it, but there's a report out about how Trump is not going to be there tonight, but he is passing out bingo cards to those who will be there.
	Is that in my update, you guys, or is that it?
	Is this in the AM update?
	Hold on, because it's worth finding.
	Oh, yeah, here it is.
	Okay.
	This is via political.
	I don't know.
	So he's been whining and dining.
	Team Trump has been whining and dining with a number of top reporters, and they're passing out things like pudding snack packs as well as debate bingo cards to troll governor DeSantis.
	The squares include like you have to drink or whatever when he, quote, dismisses the polls.
	This is not a nice one.
	This next one, I warn you, wipes Snot.
	Okay, that's, I don't get that.
	Is that a thing for him?
	Whatever.
	Red ears, DeSantis, DeSantis, flips off flops on social security, woke, and bonus points for any mention of pudding.
	He's ribbing him for mentioning woke.
	But you know, Trump has readopted that term.
	I've heard Trump mention that a couple of times.
	So I don't like that hypocrisy.
	Well, he went after DeSantis for being obsessed with Disney, which was interesting.
	And also, you know, incredible that a Republican on the bingo card is saying, you know, attack him or give him a, you know, a negative checkoff if he says social security is going to bankrupt itself, which kind of used to be a Republican line all the time.
	But Trump has actually reimagined that is like, oh, he's going to attack.
	He's going to take away your social security, which is kind of a progressive way of looking at social security.
	So, I mean, that's kind of interesting too.
	But on top of all of it, it is Andy Kaufman.
	It is performance art and he is the master of it.
	And everybody, you don't show up, but he's still showing up.
	He's always going to be there.
	He's going to haunt it in about 500 different ways and handing out these like, you know, Oscar gift bags of like pudding pops and stuff is absolutely brilliant.
	Sorry.
	Let's also remember that yesterday over the last 24 hours, he has come up with two pretty huge and from my point of view, not everyone will agree with me, clinically insane policy proposals, which is across the board 10% tariff on everything because we all need things to be 10% more expensive.
	And then also a naval blockade of Latin America.
	Yeah, that was an interesting one, too.
	He really called for that yesterday.
	And like almost no one's talking about it.
	It's like, whatever.
	It's the former president and the GOP presidential frontrunner, who, by the way, is facing four different criminal trials calling for the naval blockade of Latin America and a 10% tariff.
	Yeah, okay.
	It's just too much.
	And I presume that some of those will be talked about at the debate.
	And there will be a competitive attempt by everyone on stage to sound like that they're going to be just as tough on foreign stuff.
	I was just going to say to outdo him.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Of course.
	Even, you know, getting ready for the DeSantis interview, I was looking closely at the immigration policies he's proposing.
	And, you know, one of them is using our military to interfere with Chinese shipments to the Mexican drug cartels, which I know may sound great to people who don't like what's happening at the southern border.
	You know, I don't like what's happening at the southern border, but there are, you know, such things as like boundaries of countries.
	And if you start sending our military down there to stop the Chinese from hitting the ports down in Mexico, probably going to have a war.
	I mean, it's like, that's, they're not going to take that lying down, either the Mexicans or the Chinese.
	And so, you know, I know people are like, well, good, it's about time they've declared war on us.
	But like, no, this could turn into an actual war where your kids have to fight, which is what they're saying they don't want.
	What would you say?
	An even bigger trade war, too, which was a enormous policy failure of Trump's first administration.
	I mean, I was up at the Foxconn factories that were going to bring production.
	Remember Trump with his golden shovel there digging?
	Those are all empty now.
	Nothing's happened in any of those places.
	You know, the trade war on China, the tariffs were, I think, insane.
	And the idea of a 10% across the board tariff of everything coming into the country might sound good to people in the classic way that mercantilist policies sound good to people.
	Then we'll just buy stuff that's made at home.
	But people don't think about the components of so many things that are made at home are from abroad.
	So for instance, I was at a nail factory in Missouri who they were cheering Donald Trump's trade policies until they realized that it was going to cost them an enormous amount of money to bring the raw materials that they used to make the nails into the country to then make them in Missouri.
	And this has been just a really bad idea.
	Every economist, I mean, this is left, right, and center disagrees with these kinds of things of hiring, higher, higher trade barriers.
	And to the point about the Chinese stuff, Megan, you're absolutely right because so many things sound good on paper, but the point of politics is to look at previous examples of policies and say, hey, that sounds good, but it's not going to work for X, Y, and Z, these exogenous factors.
	One of the things that I would say about this is that Matt pointed out all these crazy policies.
	I couldn't hate these cartels any more than anyone else out there, particularly when you see that they're the ones that are supplying all the fentanyl and stuff that is ruining downtown San Francisco.
	It's basically a cartel operation.
	A lot of good reporting about that.
	But he also declared that we're going to declare them enemy combatants.
Putin Poisoning NATO Dealings 00:14:05
	Is that, was I wrong in reading that?
	Because that was what we did after 9-11, Guantanamo, and I would say enemy combatants for foreigner people in Mexico who are drug dealers.
	It sounds like a great kind of muscular way, but it has so many bad repercussions because I want that stuff.
	I want that border to not be as poor as it is as it is.
	But, you know, like instead of making these incredibly strong statements, what are the practical things that one's going to do to actually stop these things?
	Because, you know, bringing jobs back to America is not going to happen by making everything in America 10% more expensive.
	Everything.
	Well, I mean, people are already dealing with inflation.
	You know, still baked in, even though the Biden administration is celebrating the reduction from what, 12% now down to 4%, but still that's 4% higher than you were paying.
	And you've already had two years of pain.
	So I don't know that they want more pain in there in the goods that they buy across the board.
	Stand by.
	I got to squeeze in a quick break.
	More with the fifth column.
	Coming up.
	Don't go away.
	Well, breaking news as we sit here live in the air at 1:33, and that is Yevgeny Progozhin, the head of the Wagner group, who had rebelled against Vladimir Putin.
	And there were reports that it was an attempted coup.
	Then he seemed to be brought to heal by Vladimir Putin.
	There were reports that possibly he'd been paid off.
	We didn't quite understand fully the circumstances under which he abandoned this revolt against Putin after Putin had reportedly been targeting Progoshin's men, which was like it's this military faction in Russia that had been working for Putin in Ukraine and elsewhere, but then got a bit more independent under Yevgeny Progoshin, who was known formally as Putin's chef, but turned into this military warrior.
	In any event, for a time there, he rebelled against Putin.
	He didn't like what Putin was doing to his men.
	A lot of guys he had pulled straight out of prison to fight for him.
	And Putin was in jeopardy.
	There was a real belief that, you know, Putin could somehow be brought down by some who wanted to see it happen.
	That's not what happened.
	He brought Yevgeny Progoshin back into the fold and onward they went.
	He's now dead, according to breaking news reports.
	His plane mysteriously went down.
	We've got the video and it does look very bizarre.
	I mean, it's disturbing.
	You can see that thing going straight, straight down.
	It's a vertical line.
	And then we've got footage of the burning wreckage once it hits the ground.
	He was on the passenger manifest.
	He had reportedly been traveling, I think, from St. Petersburg to Moscow.
	They said that he, initially, they said they weren't sure if he was on board, but now they are reporting he was on board.
	He is dead.
	It's tough to say this was likely accidental, guys.
	Let's be realistic.
	I mean, I don't want to get ahead of my skis here, but awfully coincidental.
	And when you know how Vladimir Putin acts when you try to betray him, this is what we're dealing with over there.
	This is not, this is not somebody who plays by any rules with which we are familiar.
	There's 0.0001% chance that this is accidental.
	Progozhin was just in Africa, released a video fairly recently, and it was interesting to see him back.
	He had been pushed into exile in Belarus, and we don't know what kind of agreement was made, but that was, you know, a step to send him to Minsk and take control of his warriors who were taken out of Ukraine, some of them put back in Africa, presumably some back in Ukraine.
	We don't know the details of it.
	But what we do know is that steps from the Kremlin, Boris Nemtsov was shot in the head.
	And Moris Nemsov was a very effective anti-Putin campaigner.
	We know that, you know, Alexei Navalny was in prison and he was just sentenced for another 19 years.
	People forget about not only is he in prison, he has been poisoned.
	There was somebody in an anti-Putin person in Germany who was presumed to be poisoned recently too.
	Alexander Litvin Yenko, who was poisoned with polonium, indicted an excruciating death.
	And we know who poisoned him.
	And that person went on to serve in the Duma in Russia and became a bit of a hero.
	The Screepols, the couple in the UK who were former FSB, KGB, FSB operatives who were also poisoned.
	I mean, this is, I mean, Anna Politskaya, the incredible journalist from Novoya Gazeta, the only independent newspaper in Russia, which has since been closed down at the start of the war in Ukraine, was brutally assassinated in a stairwell going into her apartment.
	This is a gangster country that is run by an actual dictator.
	We used to call them authoritarians, and it was appropriate for Putin for a while.
	But when there's no independent judiciary, when one cannot run as an independent candidate, when one speaks out against the government, one can expect to find themselves in jail or exile.
	That is not in any way a democracy.
	Progozhin was living on borrowed time because he did the thing that nobody dared to do.
	And he did it quite effectively too.
	But one thing that people do forget about, it wasn't just like, hey, we're going to march toward Moscow.
	They were going towards Moscow.
	They had shot down a plane that was a Russian plane.
	They had killed Russian soldiers on their way out of Ukraine to, by the way, complain about things that were acceptable and to complain about because they were just meat grinder soldiers at this point.
	As you said, Megan, a lot of these people were killers who had been released from prison and put into the Wagner group.
	And the Wagner group is actually the Wagner group named after Richard Wagner, the anti-Semitic, a German conductor who was a favorite of the Nazis, because they were started by somebody who was a fan of the Nazis, which is ironic when you accuse the Ukrainians of being a Nazi state run by a Jewish man.
	But this was inevitable.
	And in a way, I'm surprised it took this long, but that is a clear message.
	Do not try this.
	Because when Putin, having sort of shaky support because of how poorly the war has gone, in it looking as if you can do this and get pretty far in doing that, they basically negotiated their way out of being overthrown or those troops battling on the streets of Moscow.
	That showed a weakness and he had to show some strength.
	And the strength is to murder 10 other people too.
	And if there are people in the way to get to that one person, he'll do it.
	It's just a reminder of who we're dealing with over there.
	You know, I do think that there is some sort of a belief that this is a man we can work with.
	This is a man we can negotiate with, you know, and it's not to justify the war in Ukraine, but the people who support the war in Ukraine say like he's not going to be deterred if we just pull out and say, okay, you know, you can have what you took so far, but we're out of it.
	It's no longer our battle.
	Like Vladimir Putin, if we pull out, is going to sense opportunity.
	He smells weakness.
	He will act on the weakness.
	He will grab something else.
	He's not afraid to be provocative.
	He's not afraid of anything.
	All he wants to do is build up Mother Russia to its former glory.
	So, I mean, I see the argument.
	This isn't necessarily proof of, you know, anything when it comes to our foreign policy, but other than this is not somebody.
	This is not somebody who we can work with in a way that we would work with, you know, any truly friendly ally.
	Russia is run by a very dark man.
	And we're going to have to deal with that.
	You know, so is China for that matter.
	It's like, these are the guys who we're trying to craft our foreign policy with.
	And how do you have, you know, to me, it's like you want somebody tough in there.
	This could help somebody like a Trump.
	I'm going back to presidential politics.
	You want somebody tough.
	You don't want somebody squishy, soft, shirtless.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm just saying like this is what attracts people to a Donald Trump is like, you need, you need a little madness on our side, perhaps.
	And we need to keep Donald Trump's shirt on by any means.
	And Joe Biden's Joe Biden's.
	To tie it to the top of the show, when we talked of Vec Ramaswamy, when he came on the fifth column, we had a long and kind of interesting conversation just about this, where Moynihan and I were a bit skeptical about his plans, which was basically to negotiate with Putin and without Ukraine, without Ukraine.
	So in a similar way to things were negotiated in the 1930s and 40s to ways that small countries in Central Europe were not very fond of during and afterwards.
	He would do that and grant territory of Ukraine to Russia in exchange for promises of NATO not including Ukraine in the future.
	This shows, I think, kind of the naivete or illustrates the naivete of that position, both in terms of like, I can do the negotiating better than anyone else has ever negotiated, which is kind of his approach.
	You know, if they don't agree, then Ukraine joins NATO the next day was one of his colorful ideas about all of that.
	But it also says, yes, Megan, the person that is on the other side of this negotiation has been trying and very consistent with Russian public opinion, even though we don't really know what Russian public opinion is, but we do know that there is that sense of lost national glory because of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
	It's been a popular project, not just of Vladimir Putin, to meddle into Russia's so-called near abroad, its former imperial holdings.
	They've been doing this in Moldova, which is a very interesting country to watch right now, tiny country near Romania that's been trying really hard to not have their problems in Transnistria come over to the rest of the country.
	Certainly in Georgia and elsewhere, this is the person that you're dealing with.
	Long before NATO was ever being expanded or thought to be expanded, Russia and Vladimir Putin and others have been trying to restore this sense of lost empire and will resort at, doesn't really care what people think.
	He's been launching one of the most brutal wars, civilian killing wars that we've seen in modern times in our lifetimes, at least since the end of the Cold War, and continues to do it day after day and committing assassinations.
	So got to be clear-headed about that, regardless of what you think the wisdom of giving Ukrainians weapons are.
	And one quick.
	Every country you just listed paid Hunter Biden money.
	Like a little like, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I'm in the wrong racket.
	He knows how to pick them.
	The one small thing to add to that is Matt is right in Russia's former empire and near abroad, but it's bigger than that too, because Putin is very conscious about expanding Russian power and showing Russia as a great power.
	It has nothing to do with NATO.
	And if it did have something to do with NATO, somebody has to explain to me why the number of civilians who have been killed by Russians and Russian bombers and Russian military in Syria and now in the Central African Republic are as high as they are.
	And they're as high as they are because they're trying to put their footprint in other places in the world.
	As America retreats, this is Putin's idea.
	We should be on the offensive.
	So, this is not somebody who would be satiated by walking away from NATO.
	That was never in the cards for Georgia, for instance, and Ukraine.
	I mean, these are conversations that haven't happened and they're invaded.
	So, this is depressing.
	And this has, again, as you said, Megan, this is actually a really important point.
	This doesn't have anything to do with whether or not we're giving money, giving too much money, giving too little money.
	This is just looking at a country on its own and its expansionist, revanchist ideas, and it is an imperial power and it wants to be an imperial power and it is acting like one.
	And the only thing that people like Putin care about is staying in power.
	And that's why Progozhin just fell out of the sky.
	That's right.
	You don't leave the role that Vladimir Putin has.
	You either die or you get killed.
	Like you cannot leave power.
	Something terrible will happen to you.
	You'll probably be taken out.
	So he has no choice.
	I mean, he has a choice, but he realistically, in his mind, it's kill or be killed.
	Go ahead, Camille.
	Yeah, it's just such a volatile situation, and there are no good options so far as I can tell.
	And I am just yesterday, I was having contemplating the America's adventures in the Middle East in recent years over the past two decades.
	We literally expended two decades' worth of fortune and blood.
	And a lot of that blood belonged to people who live in those regions trying to make particular kinds of changes in the Middle East.
	And it sure as hell isn't obvious to me that most of those efforts were not for naught.
	And it's just, it's hard to say exactly where things would have gone but for those interventions.
	I'm not saying that they'd be better or worse, but at this point, 20 years later, given the amount of time and effort and energy that was expended there, that we can't say definitively that this improved matters, I think, is important and worth filing away someplace while we're thinking about exactly what the right thing to do is here and what the right kind of leadership looks like.
	It's certainly true that you don't want someone who's kind of capitulating to Putin at every turn, but you do have to talk to him.
	He is, in fact, in power.
	And there are going to be a lot of difficult decisions and choices that have to be made that are uncomfortable, that are unattractive.
	But we could do with just a great deal more sober thoughtful reasoning when it comes to conversations about these issues, as opposed to what's been happening, where, you know, even to the extent that there is opposition to what's happening in terms of the investment on behalf of Ukrainian forces by the United States, to the extent the criticism of that is largely, well, we're supporting Nazis, that is just not at all serious and completely ignores the gravity of the circumstance here.
Passenger Plane Shot Down 00:04:31
	I mean, this is just incredibly untenable and has the capacity to become something that is just a wide-ranging conflict that involves a great many parties.
	So I'm hopeful that we can get to a better place, but it's just tough.
	It does make you think about foreign policy and who's got the best foreign policy chops.
	You know, you've got Nikki Haley, who was at the UN, who was the sitting governor.
	The governors don't tend to have foreign policy chops.
	So, you know, you wouldn't expect much from her if she hadn't had the UN role or from Ron DeSantis for that matter.
	You've got, I mean, he was a U.S. Congressman, though.
	So DeSantis has got that too.
	Asa Hutchinson, also a governor.
	You know, we don't have a lot out there other than the guerrilla who is a former president of the United States.
	You know, Donald Trump was commander in chief.
	Like that's obviously going to work to his advantage.
	Just to update you guys as well, this reporting coming to us via BBC.
	Wagner-linked Telegram channel.
	So this is a Telegram channel that should be in the know about what's happening to the Wagner group.
	Gray Zone reporting that the aircraft was shot down, shot down by air defenses north of Moscow.
	The jet was flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg, carrying seven passengers, three crew.
	Gray Zone said local residents heard two bangs before the crash and then saw two vapor trails.
	TASS news agency saying the plane caught fire upon hitting the ground, adding that four bodies have already been found.
	The aircraft had been in the air for less than half an hour, it said.
	You know, I was just listening to a report talking about how domestic air travel here in the United States is, you know, it's been so safe.
	We haven't had a major crash, I think they said in 14 years.
	But they're just calling like a meeting now with air traffic controllers at the federal level because we've had too many near misses, which is such a weird name.
	It's a near hit.
	It's an actual miss and it's a near hit.
	I don't know why we call them near misses.
	In any event, where now we have, I guess, staffing problems at the airports with the, we have too many new pilots.
	Man, I would just add my own two cents.
	We're focused on DEI instead of hiring the best and the brightest and the most talented.
	And we're having an uptick in potential problems with our own aircraft.
	That's not what happened in Moscow.
	But I'm trying to underscore just the rarity with which a plane ever goes down on its own.
	It's incredibly rare in modern day America or Russia, even in Russia.
	And, you know, according to these reports, yeah, it certainly looks like it was shot down.
	It was not, let's see.
	It was, oh, wow.
	It was exactly, today is actually exactly two months from the failed coup.
	It happened on June 23rd.
	Wow, that's interesting too.
	They want you to know that they're doing this.
	They're not going to admit it.
	They're going to say that they didn't do it, but they want you to know.
	And, you know, it's interesting.
	There was, it's about the frequency of things that happen.
	I mean, there was a migrant ship off of illegal migrants going to Europe that sank and, you know, 800 people died.
	And then the, you know, guy that was going down to see the Titanic and there's a bunch of rich people and, you know, they, and everywhere I saw, everywhere I saw people saying, oh, we care about these rich, but we don't care about the 800.
	The thing is, is that there's a drumbeat of this stuff.
	There's so many migrants who have drowned on the way to Europe.
	And the reason I bring this up is that we don't like Putin understands we don't care about this stuff because it happens so frequently.
	Does anyone even remember that Russian aligned forces shot a passenger plane out of the sky?
	It has been researched and studied by a million people.
	And we know that Russian aligned people in the Donetsk in Luhansk region shot a plane out of the sky with 200 odd civilians on it, a Dutch aircraft that just happened to be flying over Ukraine.
	That had no effect on the public consciousness in any big way.
	So what does it matter if you shoot this guy out of the sky who tried to overthrow the government?
	I mean, when we don't react to anything, then you're not going to react to things like this.
	And so, you know, the frequency of things, whether it's these migrants, it's like the reason we don't pay attention to it because it happens so often.
	And the fact that you shoot a passenger plane out of the sky and that really, people never remember that.
	And that is one of the most hideous crimes of the past 10 years.
	Unbelievable that that happened and nobody really cares about it.
	One group that cares about it are the Dutch who just sent them a whole bunch of attack helicopters.
	Yes, they do remember that.
Putin Ruthless Manipulation 00:00:57
	Exactly.
	Listen, I think back to when I was in Moscow and St. Petersburg with Vladimir Putin, and he was telling me about how much he loved his mother and how much he loves his daughter and trying to paint himself as somebody who I would like, who I would, you know, soften toward.
	And everything he does is a manipulation, right?
	I mean, he is a former KGB spy.
	Everything is a calculation, a manipulation, and he's good at it.
	He's really good at it.
	He's a good actor.
	He lures people into thinking, like George W. Bush, that you can look into his eyes and see something good and actually work with him.
	Think again.
	He's clever and he's ruthless.
	Guys, thank you both.
	Thank you all for coming on today.
	What a great discussion.
	Really appreciate it.
	And look forward to seeing how many of our predictions turn out to be correct.
	Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no

Chapters

00:00:00 Government Lies After 9-11
00:14:10 Pat Tillman Release Confusion
00:26:35 Vivek Ramaswamy Swamp Outsider
00:34:38 Vivek's Media Strategy Flaws
00:49:44 DeSantis Racist Smear Tactics
00:54:41 Chris Christie Trump Spoiler
01:09:45 Crazy Policies and Cartels
01:15:44 Putin Poisoning NATO Dealings
01:29:49 Passenger Plane Shot Down
01:34:21 Putin Ruthless Manipulation