The Megyn Kelly Show - 20231102_biden-panders-to-anti-israel-crowd-and-free-speech
Aired: 2023-11-02
Duration: 01:36:32


=== Two State Solution Clarified (14:54) ===

[00:00:00]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at least.
[00:00:12]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:13]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, a potential major development just revealed by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer.
[00:00:22]  For years, the president, Democrats, and even some Republicans have claimed there's no direct evidence showing Joe Biden himself ever benefiting from his son's overseas business deals, right?
[00:00:33]  We've heard that so many times.
[00:00:34]  There's no smoking gun.
[00:00:35]  There's no direct evidence tying him.
[00:00:37]  Where's the money?
[00:00:38]  Where's the money?
[00:00:40]  But Chairman Comer, using subpoenaed bank records, has for the first time clearly laid out exactly how money from a Chinese company Hunter was doing business with was moved from bank account to bank account, in other words, laundered, to eventually end up in the personal account of Joe Biden in 2017.
[00:01:02]  Now the money was apparently, they said, a loan repayment.
[00:01:07]  That's probably not true, but it also is irrelevant.
[00:01:10]  Comer saying it doesn't matter because the point is Chinese money went directly, well, indirectly, but into Joe Biden's account.
[00:01:19]  And while the family members can say, oh, I swear I was just repaying my brother for a loan, it doesn't matter.
[00:01:25]  I mean, honestly, this is why people are asking, why didn't he crack down on the weird balloons flying over the United States?
[00:01:32]  Why has he been such a cow tower to China?
[00:01:36]  Is it because they have something on the guy?
[00:01:38]  It's a fair question to ask.
[00:01:40]  Not accusing the president yet, but I'm concerned about what I just saw on this money trail.
[00:01:46]  And we're going to get to it in a minute.
[00:01:48]  At the same time, President Biden making major headlines with statements he made last night is a rambling like slew of statements regarding Israel's response to the Hamas terror attacks.
[00:01:59]  No one seeming to understand exactly what the hell he meant by any of what he said.
[00:02:04]  Just perfect, perfect during an international crisis.
[00:02:07]  I'm actually surprised they haven't had any clarifying statements on it yet.
[00:02:10]  They probably will soon.
[00:02:12]  It happened last night during a fundraising event in Minneapolis.
[00:02:15]  A protester stood up in the middle of his remarks and interrupted him.
[00:02:20]  Watch.
[00:02:22]  When I heard that I'm like, Mr. President, I don't care about Jewish people as a rabbi.
[00:02:27]  I need you to call for a ceasefire right now.
[00:02:37]  Okay.
[00:02:38]  So that was not just any old protester.
[00:02:41]  That was, quote, Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg.
[00:02:46]  Jessica is a man pretending to be a woman.
[00:02:50]  And I don't know if she's pretending to be a rabbi too, but she barely tries to hide the fact that she's a man.
[00:02:56]  She sports a beard.
[00:02:59]  She's a bearded lady reconstructionist rabbi.
[00:03:04]  That's a thing, right?
[00:03:06]  So my Jewish friends.
[00:03:09]  I'm sorry.
[00:03:09]  We need to last.
[00:03:10]  We laugh.
[00:03:11]  We have to, right?
[00:03:12]  Can you imagine showing up at your synagogue and seeing that with the bearded lady up there?
[00:03:18]  Instead of telling Jessica to sit down and shut up like the rest of the audience appropriately did, the president decided to answer.
[00:03:26]  So Jessica wound up making news.
[00:03:28]  According to pool reports, the president said he thinks there needs to be a pause to get the quote prisoners out.
[00:03:38]  Okay, so they're hostages.
[00:03:40]  There is a difference.
[00:03:41]  Prisoners implies they did something wrong.
[00:03:44]  And said, quote, I'm the guy that convinced BB to call for a ceasefire.
[00:03:49]  Wait, what?
[00:03:50]  Words have meaning, especially when they come from a president.
[00:03:53]  What did he mean exactly by using the word ceasefire?
[00:03:57]  To most people, a ceasefire means an end to the fighting.
[00:03:59]  And in this case, a win for Hamas.
[00:04:01]  It's what Rashida Talib has been demanding.
[00:04:04]  Did that actually happen?
[00:04:05]  When?
[00:04:05]  What happened?
[00:04:06]  Just this week, a leader of Hamas said in an interview: the terror group will repeat the October 7th attack over and over and over until Israel is annihilated.
[00:04:19]  Now, this is very important.
[00:04:20]  This is an important soundbite we're about to play for you for you.
[00:04:22]  You may have heard it elsewhere yesterday when it hit.
[00:04:25]  Because so many people who want a ceasefire like to ignore that this is Hamas's plan.
[00:04:30]  So many people who are blaming Israel right now and demanding, you know, live in peace.
[00:04:36]  How'd that work out?
[00:04:37]  They lived in peace on October 6th.
[00:04:39]  Live in peace, two-state solution.
[00:04:41]  You know, we've got to get together.
[00:04:44]  Have they considered what Hamas says its own plans are?
[00:04:50]  We voiced over his comments so you can actually hear them in English.
[00:04:56]  Israel is a country that has no place on our land.
[00:04:58]  We must remove that country because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation, and it must be finished.
[00:05:07]  We're not ashamed to say this with full force.
[00:05:10]  We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again.
[00:05:13]  The Aqsa flood is the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight.
[00:05:21]  Will we have to pay a price?
[00:05:22]  Yes, and we are ready to pay it.
[00:05:24]  We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.
[00:05:28]  The occupation must come to an end.
[00:05:30]  Occupation where?
[00:05:30]  In the Gaza Strip?
[00:05:32]  No, I'm talking about all the Palestinian lands.
[00:05:34]  Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?
[00:05:36]  Yes, of course.
[00:05:37]  On October 7th, October 10th, October, 1 million, everything we do is justified.
[00:05:44]  Okay, so maybe we should just sit and chat at the negotiation table and we can come up with a lovely two-state solution in which wait.
[00:05:52]  Who are they kidding?
[00:05:54]  Who are they kidding?
[00:05:55]  It's not a ceasefire for Hamas, and it never will be.
[00:05:59]  The president's comments come at a time when he's facing growing pressure from progressives within the Democratic Party.
[00:06:05]  When he was in Minneapolis last night at that event we just showed you, anti-Israel protesters took to the streets with signs like Genocide Joe and Abandon Biden.
[00:06:14]  No more votes, ceasefire now.
[00:06:16]  They also chanted for the quote occupation to end.
[00:06:21]  Occupation!
[00:06:26]  Bombing civilians!
[00:06:27]  Bomb!
[00:06:38]  Joining me now, Tom Bevin.
[00:06:40]  He's the co-founder and president of one of my very favorite sites on the internet since I got in the news, Real Clear Politics.
[00:06:48]  Go there every morning, realclearpolitics.com to check my news.
[00:06:52]  I recommend it to you as well.
[00:06:53]  And Josh Holmes of the Ruthless podcast.
[00:06:57]  Gentlemen, great to have you here today.
[00:06:59]  So I don't know what happened in that blurb of words that came out of the President of the United States mouth last night while he was talking to Jessica, the bearded lady rabbi.
[00:07:14]  She made news.
[00:07:16]  He made news.
[00:07:16]  I don't know what Jessica, Jessica confuses me.
[00:07:20]  And you tell me, I'll start with you on this, Holmes, whether somebody from the White House should come out and clarify whether we have demanded a ceasefire and we learned it from Jessica the bearded rabbi.
[00:07:31]  Is that U.S. policy now?
[00:07:33]  Maybe a clarification is in order.
[00:07:36]  Yeah, I mean, look, the bearded lady got herself and her himself or whomever the bearded lady is in the news on this one.
[00:07:44]  You know, look, he's so imprecise with his words.
[00:07:47]  It's anybody's guess what it is that he's talking about.
[00:07:50]  I sense is what he's probably referring to was that lag between the October 7 attack and ultimately when Israel started the offensive in Gaza.
[00:08:01]  I assume that's what it is, but that's certainly not what he said there.
[00:08:05]  And like, again, this is part of the problem that you have with Joe Biden and this entire administration is that they can't actually articulate what they're doing, what their goals are, what they're trying to do.
[00:08:16]  And it just fuels all this speculation.
[00:08:18]  It fuels all kinds of doubt.
[00:08:20]  And the messages it sends to the international community has got to be horrifying to some of our allies.
[00:08:26]  What does he mean?
[00:08:27]  I don't know.
[00:08:28]  It doesn't.
[00:08:29]  The most, the busiest person at the White House, honestly, is what we call in the Ruthless Variety Program, Bracket Man.
[00:08:36]  Bracket Man is the person who has to go back through all of the transcripts when you're typing up what it is that the president is saying on a day-to-day basis.
[00:08:43]  And they go back and put brackets around what he really meant rather than what he actually said.
[00:08:48]  Bracketman is just like overtime right now.
[00:08:51]  Most secure job you can get at the White House right now.
[00:08:54]  Absolutely most secure.
[00:08:55]  You're never ever getting fired.
[00:08:57]  You know, Tom, he went on to say, I'm the guy that talked to Cece, Al-Sisi of Egypt to convince him to open the door.
[00:09:08]  Is the door open in Egypt?
[00:09:10]  Because as far as I know, all they've taken is like a couple severely wounded people.
[00:09:15]  And that's about it.
[00:09:17]  The door's not open.
[00:09:18]  It's been a national news story since October 7th that they will not open the door.
[00:09:21]  So when did that happen?
[00:09:24]  I'm just not sure we can put any stock in what the president of the United States is saying.
[00:09:27]  And that's a problem.
[00:09:30]  Yeah, I agree.
[00:09:31]  And I agree with Josh.
[00:09:32]  I mean, look, what the administration is facing right now is they are getting intense pressure from their left wing on all this.
[00:09:42]  You played the clips of the protesters, right?
[00:09:44]  And so what does the administration do?
[00:09:45]  They're trying to thread the needle here.
[00:09:47]  You know, Biden has been standing strong with Israel initially, but sort of, you know, what did they do yesterday?
[00:09:53]  They put out Kamala Harris announces the first ever White House strategic initiative to combat Islamophobia.
[00:10:01]  Yeah.
[00:10:02]  Interesting timing for that.
[00:10:03]  Why would they be doing that now if not to try and placate those folks on the left?
[00:10:09]  I want to let you finish it, but I want to show the audience what you're talking about.
[00:10:12]  It was unbelievable.
[00:10:12]  They dropped this late last night.
[00:10:13]  Here she is.
[00:10:15]  And today, we take another important step forward in our fight against hate.
[00:10:21]  For years, Muslims in America and those perceived to be Muslim have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks.
[00:10:30]  As a result of the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, we have seen an uptick in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic incidents across America, including the brutal attack of a Palestinian-American woman who was Muslim and the killing of her six-year-old son.
[00:10:54]  Go ahead, Tom.
[00:10:56]  I mean, look, you've got Jewish students that are getting chased all over campuses, having to lock themselves in libraries.
[00:11:03]  I mean, it's crazy what's going on.
[00:11:05]  And the administration chooses to highlight Islamophobia and hate crimes against Muslims.
[00:11:14]  The attack that she mentioned happened here in Chicago.
[00:11:16]  It was a completely deranged lunatic, a singular event.
[00:11:21]  And yet that's what she's highlighting here.
[00:11:23]  I mean, it just, look, again, I think it speaks to the political pressure that they're under, particularly, and there were a couple stories on this today, which we posted real clear politics, that the administration and his political advisors are deathly afraid that they have put Michigan in play and that Muslims, particularly in the Detroit suburbs, right, Dearborn, that they, if they don't turn out, that state is going to be close enough.
[00:11:48]  That could actually tip the balance.
[00:11:50]  Wow.
[00:11:50]  Trump, we were talking about this the other day.
[00:11:52]  Trump won Michigan in 16.
[00:11:54]  He won Michigan in 16.
[00:11:56]  So it's gettable.
[00:11:58]  And not to presume that it's going to be Trump, but certainly looking at it.
[00:12:00]  We'll get to that in a minute.
[00:12:02]  Can I kind of pause you on that?
[00:12:03]  Just imagine for a second, as a part of your constituency, you're talking about a population that's out chanting from the river to the sea.
[00:12:10]  They're talking about the elimination of Jewish people.
[00:12:13]  They're talking about the elimination of Israel.
[00:12:16]  To be politically sensitive to that is wild to me.
[00:12:21]  I mean, in any other context about a population of people, whether it's racial or religious or what have you, there would be an outcry across this country.
[00:12:33]  But yet somehow we watch all of these protests and what they're calling for, let's be clear, this is not like two-state solution, two-state solution.
[00:12:41]  They're calling for the elimination of the state of Israel and the eradication, as they say, of Jews.
[00:12:48]  I mean, it is, this is not a constituency that has to be appealed to.
[00:12:53]  This is a extremely radical, totally inappropriate bunch of folks that we should not have as a part of the political system at this point.
[00:13:03]  Well, and just not to put too fine a point on it, I mean, Joe Biden is the one who declared his candidacy.
[00:13:08]  He was running to save the soul of America after Charlottesville.
[00:13:12]  You had a couple of, you know, a couple hundred neo-Nazis show up there, and that was the rationale for his entire campaign.
[00:13:17]  And now he's running for reelection, but can't, you know, can't seem to denounce what's going on.
[00:13:24]  I mean, it's just, it is, it's crazy.
[00:13:25]  Oh, remember the nonstop news stories about Trump?
[00:13:28]  Do you, do you denounce, do you, do you denounce David Duke?
[00:13:32]  Right?
[00:13:32]  He was forced to say it like, whatever.
[00:13:35]  He's like, I, I denounced.
[00:13:36]  Okay, I denounced just because this one KKK, whatever white nationalist decided Trump was his guy, that there was a news story for a week and beyond.
[00:13:45]  It kept going.
[00:13:46]  But now you've got all these people who don't want to vote for Joe Biden in Michigan because he's defending our closest ally in the Middle East, who just was subjected to the worst terror attack since the Holocaust.
[00:13:57]  It killed more Americans, the worst since September 11th.
[00:14:00]  And that's a problem, but nobody has, he doesn't have to denounce anybody.
[00:14:05]  By the way, they're now saying that neo-Nazis are showing up at some of these free Palestine rallies because they all have the same cause.
[00:14:11]  Yes, just like the Hamas guy said.
[00:14:13]  So eliminate Israel?
[00:14:14]  Yes.
[00:14:15]  Right on.
[00:14:15]  Double thumbs up.
[00:14:16]  You got it.
[00:14:17]  We're on the right path.
[00:14:18]  They say it explicitly.
[00:14:20]  Here's, check this out.
[00:14:22]  It was a free Palestine rally.
[00:14:23]  We think it was outside of New York in SAT 6.
[00:14:27]  I'm a Jew going undercover at a free Palestine rally.
[00:14:31]  How would you describe it, Jude?
[00:14:33]  They're devils.
[00:14:33]  Who's at fault?
[00:14:34]  The Jews.
[00:14:35]  The Jews.
[00:14:36]  Always been the problem.
[00:14:37]  So if they do take Palestine, where do the 12 million Jews go?
[00:14:40]  Go to hell.
[00:14:42]  That's the literal slogan.
[00:14:43]  Free, free, Palestine.
[00:14:46]  Okay, if we free Palestine, where do the Jews go?
[00:14:48]  Hey, go back to Brooklyn, but shout out to Kaya.
[00:14:52]  He was right.

=== Rising Anti-Semitism in Democrats (10:24) ===

[00:14:54]  How do I know that you are?
[00:14:56]  That I'm not a Jew.
[00:14:57]  Get the fuck out of my face.
[00:14:59]  Get out of my public.
[00:15:00]  The Hamas look the action they've taken.
[00:15:02]  It's not a terrorist attack.
[00:15:04]  I am queer for Palestine.
[00:15:05]  Yes.
[00:15:05]  What do you think about the argument when people are saying, can Gaza, they kill gay people?
[00:15:08]  It's very unsafe to be queer here, too.
[00:15:11]  They're not actually killing gay people for being gay by law, right?
[00:15:14]  The way it is in Gaza.
[00:15:15]  But why do we keep going back to like Gaza?
[00:15:18]  Why is there such a basis for them to have a homeland?
[00:15:20]  Nobody else has a homeland.
[00:15:22]  Where are you from, if you don't mind me asking?
[00:15:23]  My family is from Afghanistan.
[00:15:24]  And in Afghanistan, by the way, so that's a Muslim country, right?
[00:15:27]  Predominantly, yes.
[00:15:28]  So would you consider that your homeland?
[00:15:30]  Yes.
[00:15:31]  So I guess I do have a claim over that, but you can't claim Israel.
[00:15:33]  Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:15:36]  Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:15:36]  Okay, now, just to FY, I want to give credit where it's due.
[00:15:39]  That's from the account I think on social media from a guy named F. Jerry.
[00:15:42]  He spells out the F word, however, out today.
[00:15:44]  I'm trying not to swear.
[00:15:46]  Look at you.
[00:15:47]  F. Jerry.
[00:15:48]  I know.
[00:15:49]  Well, it's only 15 after the hour, Holmes.
[00:15:51]  Anything could happen in the next two hours.
[00:15:53]  So, in any event, you see, like, where's the denounced, denounced, denounced?
[00:15:56]  Of course not.
[00:15:57]  And that, Tom, to your point is those people are, their support for Joe Biden is likely dwindling right now.
[00:16:03]  Yeah.
[00:16:04]  I mean, look, it is the fact that they have to devise a plan to try and keep folks like that from staying home and not voting for him.
[00:16:20]  Again, in a swing state like Michigan, the fact that they're actively trying to placate those folks with talking about Islamophobia in this kind of environment, look, it's not great.
[00:16:34]  It's not great for the Democratic Party and it's not great for Biden himself.
[00:16:38]  And we've seen him try and, again, he did stand strong with Israel.
[00:16:42]  I think he deserves credit for that in the moments after October 7th, but has been particularly over the last few days, trying to sort of walk things back and thread a needle that he really shouldn't be trying to thread.
[00:17:00]  If he truly was concerned about hate in this country and saving the soul of the country and all that stuff, that he said that's why the rationale for his running.
[00:17:09]  Holmes, the immediate shift to Islamophobia is infuriating.
[00:17:13]  It's infuriating.
[00:17:14]  It's so false.
[00:17:16]  And for her to do what the president did last week, which is to, you know, both sides it, you know, like worst terrorist attack on Israel since the Holocaust, 1,400 people dead, children tortured in front of their families and so on.
[00:17:28]  And then there was that one child in Chicago.
[00:17:30]  That was terrible.
[00:17:31]  But yeah, that's not the same.
[00:17:34]  Deranged lunatic in Chicago does something awful versus the planned intentional massacre of 1,400 Israelis, not to mention the thousands injured.
[00:17:42]  They keep doing this.
[00:17:44]  And now this whole White House task force, and I don't know how she's describing it, on Islamophobia, it's like our friend Gad Said put it out yesterday.
[00:17:52]  According to the FBI director, who just testified this week, Jews make up 2.4% of the U.S. population, but are the targets of 60% of the hate crimes, which, by the way, Christopher Wray said is rising, a number rising at a stunning rate.
[00:18:08]  He goes on, that's why it's apparently important to fight Islamophobia.
[00:18:13]  What?
[00:18:15]  You know, first of all, there's not two sides to this argument.
[00:18:18]  There's just not.
[00:18:19]  There is nobody who is calling for the eradication of the Palestinian people.
[00:18:23]  There is a call to try to take Hamas out entirely, absolutely and entirely.
[00:18:30]  And if you want to get sophisticated about it, that goes for probably Hezbollah and Iranian actors as well.
[00:18:36]  But the thing that has been the most unsettling to me about all of this, Megan, is that the latent anti-Semitism that has been taking root in this country, not to mention across the world, that you just don't know about until moments like this.
[00:18:55]  And can you imagine just for a moment that we had rallies and protests by the thousand in cities across this country of white supremacists that were calling for the death of African Americans, for example?
[00:19:14]  We would have a task force in this federal government, the likes of which nobody's ever seen, to try to figure out how to reverse that immediately, nip it in the bud and make a societal change.
[00:19:26]  Not only is that not happening here, they're trying to actively figure out how to placate to this constituency.
[00:19:34]  How is it that we can ensure that we can keep them as a part of the Democratic Party?
[00:19:40]  What an unbelievable outrage.
[00:19:43]  I don't have any words to express how out of body that makes your average American feel when everybody that I know of post-George Floyd in 2020 was trying to figure out, do we really, are we really a racist country?
[00:19:57]  And people did a lot of introspection about that.
[00:20:00]  And I think if anything, that whole episode proved that in fact, we are not a racist country.
[00:20:04]  What I didn't know, but now know now, is that we, there's a huge amount of anti-Semitism in this country that is not only discouraged, it seems to be placated.
[00:20:16]  And that makes me sick to my stomach.
[00:20:18]  Tom, remember it wasn't so long ago that Charlie Crist, when he was running for governor down in Florida, and definitely Andrew Cuomo, and I think maybe also Kathy Hochl, who succeeded him, both said comments, all three said comments to the effect of, if you're a Republican, I don't want your vote.
[00:20:34]  Go home.
[00:20:35]  If you don't stand with me on things like gun rights, get out of here.
[00:20:39]  I don't want your vote.
[00:20:40]  So those Democrats could come up with that sort of ire for people who are just Republican.
[00:20:46]  But for these people, F Israel, kill the Jews.
[00:20:50]  Israel has no right to exist.
[00:20:53]  It's fine.
[00:20:53]  You know, as long as you show up, if you live in a swing state, we don't really care if you're in Alabama, but we definitely care if you live in Michigan.
[00:21:01]  I mean, it's so cynical, but he's going.
[00:21:04]  You're right.
[00:21:04]  Like the moderation in his tone and his language, it's got to be politically driven.
[00:21:11]  Well, I think there's no question it is.
[00:21:13]  I mean, you look at the numbers and we'll talk about those in a minute.
[00:21:15]  I mean, his approval rating and where he stands vis-a-vis Donald Trump in a general election setting, Michigan is going to be a critical state for the Democrats to hold on to.
[00:21:27]  And so, yeah, I think there's no question that it's politically different.
[00:21:31]  Now, the White House would say, of course, you know, Kareem John Pierre will say from the podium, of course, we condemn hate in all of its forms.
[00:21:37]  And then, you know, an hour later, they're releasing a task force to combat Islamophobia.
[00:21:42]  I mean, so they're trying to sort of have it both ways, I think, when they should be, I think, a little bit more forceful in terms of denouncing these folks.
[00:21:54]  But that obviously comes at a political cost.
[00:21:56]  And right now, and you're right.
[00:21:58]  Look, it is cynical, but politics is a cynical game.
[00:22:01]  I mean, it is a numbers game.
[00:22:02]  And the Biden folks are looking at the numbers right now.
[00:22:05]  And it's that close that they can't afford to do without even tens of thousands of voters in Michigan.
[00:22:15]  That's right.
[00:22:16]  They need them.
[00:22:17]  So a couple points.
[00:22:18]  It's amazing.
[00:22:19]  You look at Harris's speech.
[00:22:20]  Again, she says, for years, Muslims in America and those perceived to be Muslim have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks.
[00:22:26]  No, in fact, Jews.
[00:22:28]  It's Jews who have suffered that.
[00:22:29]  2.4% of the population, 60% of the religiously motivated hate crimes.
[00:22:34]  We've seen an uptick since October 7th in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic incidents.
[00:22:41]  She stuffs anti-Semitic in there in the midst of four words that speak to Muslim and bigotry against Muslims.
[00:22:48]  And then as her evidence, she adds the brutal slaying of this six-year-old Palestinian American boy in Chicago.
[00:22:54]  So she's got three words to describe Muslim Americans.
[00:22:57]  She's got one incident to support the bigotry allegedly being shown against them, not pointing out the lunacy of the old 70-year-old deranged guy involved in that case.
[00:23:06]  And she sticks anti-Semitism buried in the middle there without talking about, never mind the 1400 dead in Israel, but what we've seen on college campuses and on the streets of New York and America since October 7th in this country, totally ignored.
[00:23:20]  It shows you everything you need to know about how they actually feel.
[00:23:23]  So now their plan is to aim to protect Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim from hate, bigotry, and violence.
[00:23:31]  So what does that mean?
[00:23:32]  What are they going to do?
[00:23:33]  They're going to have some sort of task force that's going to first ever U.S. national strategy to counter Islamophobia.
[00:23:41]  We'll see what that looks like.
[00:23:42]  The Jews, they got a task force that looked like a roundtable at one university.
[00:23:47]  That's what they said they were going to do yesterday.
[00:23:49]  And some coordination on actual criminal threats.
[00:23:52]  Well, hello, that's your job.
[00:23:53]  That's not new.
[00:23:54]  You're required to do the latter under the law.
[00:23:56]  So this whole thing is just absurd.
[00:23:58]  And to your point on the numbers, Tom, here they are.
[00:24:00]  Gallup, a couple months ago, all right, this is more than a couple.
[00:24:04]  This is March 2023, okay, before this terrorist attack.
[00:24:09]  For the first time, they reported Democrat sympathies shift to Palestinians.
[00:24:14]  And they pointed out that in 2001, the feelings among Democrats on Israelis versus Palestinians and their respective causes were 51% of Dems favored Palestinians, 16%, sorry, 51 favored Israelis, 16 favored Palestinians, and the rest, I guess, didn't know.
[00:24:35]  So overwhelming support for Israel among Democrats in 2001.
[00:24:40]  As of 2022, it had risen to 38% supported Palestinians from 16.
[00:24:48]  So more than doubled.
[00:24:49]  You can see the growing support among Democrats for Palestinians instead of Israel.
[00:24:55]  And then in 2023, a massive 11-point jump, again, in favor of Palestinians within the Dem party.
[00:25:02]  And now, as of 2023, before October 7th, the support was now 38% of Dems support Israel, 49% support Palestinians, a 33-point swing since 2001.

=== Fringe Elements on the Left (04:12) ===

[00:25:18]  And that's what he's dealing with now, Tom.
[00:25:21]  He knows, even though I do believe Biden's heart is with the Israelis, I mean, he's just come of age at a time when the entire United States was for the most part.
[00:25:31]  He's got to deal especially with the young people in his party who have factored this in as part of their race essentialism and just see this as oppressor, oppressed, skin color brown versus perceived white, end of game.
[00:25:47]  Right.
[00:25:47]  And it's, look, this is not some, you know, fringe operation here.
[00:25:51]  I mean, think about it.
[00:25:52]  You've got the members of the squad, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, AOC.
[00:25:56]  They are pushing this Corey Bush.
[00:25:58]  I mean, they are pushing this stuff in Congress, right?
[00:26:01]  Demanding ceasefire, talking about Israel bombing the hospital, pushing that lie.
[00:26:06]  So this is not just some sort of fringe element in the Democratic Party.
[00:26:12]  It is a growing part of the progressive left that includes representation in Congress.
[00:26:19]  And so it's something that Biden has to deal with.
[00:26:22]  I would also point out, Megan, you mentioned this task force.
[00:26:25]  I mean, the Biden administration rolled out a few months ago this anti-Semitism task force.
[00:26:31]  And they did that because they thought politically, you know, the talk at the time was, and their spin on it was that, you know, this was to combat rise in anti-Semitic attacks, implying that it was from, you know, Republicans that were doing this, right?
[00:26:45]  The Tree of Life Synagogue and the like.
[00:26:49]  And it turns out that actually a lot of anti-Semitism is on the left.
[00:26:52]  And oh, by the way, you know, if they've been working on that task force for six or eight months and here we are with a massive rise in anti-Semitism in the country, maybe they should spend a little more time trying to figure out what they, what they didn't do on that anti-Semitism task force because it clearly didn't work.
[00:27:10]  Yeah, they got some work to do.
[00:27:11]  I just want to give you one footnote, Holmes, here.
[00:27:14]  This woman, the, I don't know, it's the, it's the bearded lady, bearded lady.
[00:27:20]  Yeah, the bearded lady rabbi.
[00:27:22]  She, he, I don't know what it is.
[00:27:24]  I'm still confused.
[00:27:25]  I don't understand what's happening there.
[00:27:26]  But this person, I don't even understand that this is a real rabbi, but this person has worked as a national organizer at Bend the Ark, which was launched by the son of George Soros, whose name is Alexander Soros, of course.
[00:27:46]  And this is what this person has written in the past, all right?
[00:27:49]  This biological man posing as a woman.
[00:27:52]  He has posted, this is his concern as a rabbi.
[00:27:58]  Real instances of anti-Semitism.
[00:28:01]  Now, you're going to think this would end with are terrible and should be condemned.
[00:28:04]  It's a rabbi, no, can distract us from the pervasiveness of anti-black racism.
[00:28:16]  That's so telling.
[00:28:18]  Like that first embodies all the problems we just discussed.
[00:28:23]  Entirely.
[00:28:24]  And it's, I mean, the bearded lady, perfect encapsulation of where the modern left is.
[00:28:30]  And it's, it's this Marxist hold that's all interconnected in the domestic stuff we've got going on here too.
[00:28:37]  It's BLM.
[00:28:38]  It's it's sort of this Marxist view that guys like Chris Russo, you've had on the show a lot, have been talking about in our education system that unfortunately is starting now in elementary schools.
[00:28:50]  This is a real problem.
[00:28:52]  And it's not, this isn't just a today problem.
[00:28:56]  This is a going forward problem.
[00:28:57]  This is an ideology that's insane.
[00:29:00]  And as America, if you can't figure out how to counter that in any serious way, if you try to placate it, it's only going to make it a lot worse.
[00:29:09]  And I'm disgusted that this is a part of the constituency of the Democratic Party.
[00:29:15]  I am glad that it is now open and evident for people to see.
[00:29:19]  Some of us have been talking about this for a while, but it's really hard to ignore now.
[00:29:24]  If you're a Jewish voter anywhere in this country, boy, I mean, what does today's Democratic Party have for you?

=== Hunter Biden Money Trail (08:17) ===

[00:29:31]  Not a lot.
[00:29:34]  Good luck at the national convention.
[00:29:35]  You don't know who you're going to be standing next to.
[00:29:37]  All right, stand by.
[00:29:38]  Quick break.
[00:29:39]  We're going to come back.
[00:29:39]  We're going to talk about the Biden crime family.
[00:29:42]  And we've got to get to the issue of Ron DeSantis' boots.
[00:29:46]  I'm sorry.
[00:29:46]  It seemed petty to me at first, but now I'm very into it and I've got to get you into it too.
[00:29:50]  Stand by.
[00:29:55]  We've got to talk about Joe Biden.
[00:29:58]  All along, everybody's been saying, where's the proof?
[00:30:00]  Where's the proof?
[00:30:01]  Where's the proof?
[00:30:02]  You know, that he got paid other than Hunter.
[00:30:04]  It's the loser's son.
[00:30:05]  You can't pin that on the dad.
[00:30:06]  This is post his time in the vice presidency.
[00:30:09]  That's important, but it's also still relevant because it was pre-his time in the presidency and could potentially be affecting the way he affects policy and so on.
[00:30:19]  And this is one of the things the House is investigating.
[00:30:21]  So now I'm going to walk you through what Comer just put out.
[00:30:25]  He released it on Wednesday, just yesterday, 12 pages, latest discovery from subpoenaed bank records.
[00:30:31]  It's a $40,000, $40,000 check from his brother James and James' wife, Sarah, Sarah and James Biden's personal checking account written to Joe Biden, dated September 3, 2017.
[00:30:46]  Comer says the money chain shows this originated with the Chinese, with Hunter's Chinese business partners, whom Hunter had threatened like a month earlier in that now infamous WhatsApp message where he was like, I'm sitting right here with my dad.
[00:31:03]  I can't understand why you haven't responded.
[00:31:06]  Why hasn't the commitment been fulfilled?
[00:31:09]  Tell the director I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand.
[00:31:12]  And now means tonight.
[00:31:13]  Remember, he was threatening the CEFC, this Chinese energy guy.
[00:31:16]  And then sure enough, payments started coming to Hunter.
[00:31:20]  But so far, they've been saying that's to Hunter.
[00:31:22]  Hunter's a loser, but he set up these deals, doesn't affect Joe.
[00:31:24]  Well, listen to this.
[00:31:26]  So August 3rd, 2017, and the threat to the CEFC was July 30th.
[00:31:33]  August 3rd, money begins flowing.
[00:31:35]  Hunter opens a bank account in the name of Hudson West III, which is a joint venture between Hunter and the Chinese, okay?
[00:31:44]  Hudson West III.
[00:31:46]  August 8th, a $5 million wire from the CEFC connected business Northern International Capital.
[00:31:52]  We knew about that.
[00:31:53]  Hunter transferred $400,000 out of Hudson West III and into his corporation, Owasco.
[00:32:00]  So there's $400,000 that he got from the Chinese that he transfers.
[00:32:04]  August 14th, Hunter wires $150,000 from Hudson West into Lion Hall Group.
[00:32:10]  That's owned by James and Sarah Biden.
[00:32:12]  So $150,000 of the Chinese money goes to Joe Biden's brother and Joe Biden's sister-in-law.
[00:32:18]  Two weeks later, Sarah Biden, Joe's sister-in-law, signed a withdrawal ticket for 50 grand from that Lion Hall Group bank account.
[00:32:26]  This is how laundering is done.
[00:32:28]  If I want to pay off Josh Holmes, I don't just send him a check directly.
[00:32:31]  We set up four different companies that the money has to go through.
[00:32:33]  So it's a lot harder to trace.
[00:32:35]  So Sarah Biden withdraws 50 grand from this Lion Hall Group bank account and on the same day deposits that 50,000 into hers and her husband's joint personal checking account.
[00:32:46]  All right.
[00:32:46]  So she's gotten the money from Hunter directly, who got it from the Chinese.
[00:32:49]  It goes into her personal account.
[00:32:51]  And guess what happens?
[00:32:52]  September 3rd, 2017, she signs $40,000 of that $50,000 payable to Joe Biden, claiming it was a loan repayment.
[00:33:04]  But that $40,000 clearly came out of the $50,000.
[00:33:06]  We know that because after she made the transfer, her account only had $46 left.
[00:33:10]  She must have spent the $10,000 on herself and she gave $40,000 to Joe.
[00:33:16]  It's pretty explicit.
[00:33:17]  And actually, if you look closely, that $40,000 Joe got was exactly 10% of the 400,000 Hunter Biden got from the CEFC.
[00:33:26]  Exactly 10%.
[00:33:27]  The Hunter Biden laptop, which we were told is disinformation, has Hunter complaining he has to, he gets 10%.
[00:33:33]  Oh, he has to give like half of his money, but he gives 10% to the big guy, right?
[00:33:36]  That he talked with Tony Bobolinski about.
[00:33:38]  Got to reserve 10% for the big guy.
[00:33:41]  And that's never explicitly been said to be Joe Biden, but witnesses involved say it was.
[00:33:45]  So this is clear, you guys.
[00:33:46]  I mean, I hope you followed it because I didn't put a graphic on the board, but it's a clear money trail, Josh, from the Chinese to Hunter, to Joe Biden's brother and sister-in-law, to Joe Biden.
[00:33:58]  It's amazing how all of these things that we were reliably told by Joe Biden and his friends in the corporate media that were absolutely not issues and of course never happened are all happening and have all happened.
[00:34:13]  And what's so fascinating about this is the collective lack of interest in pursuing any of this beyond, thank God, a House Republican majority and Jamie Comer who have uncovered it.
[00:34:26]  And like this stuff is not, as you just suggested, it's not particularly impossible to figure out.
[00:34:31]  And you think if you had some journalists out there that spent a fraction of the time looking at this that they did at Russia Gate, for example, this would have all been evident prior to the 2020 election, let alone three years later.
[00:34:44]  So here we are now with, by the way, what they did, what the House majority did by setting up the impeachment inquiry sort of allowed for a greater emphasis to get these subpoenas out and obtain this information.
[00:34:56]  I mean, we talked to Jamie Comer when they first started getting into it.
[00:35:00]  And what he said is, you know, we've got a lot of smoke here, but what we're looking for ultimately is these bank records that would actually show a payment to Joe Biden.
[00:35:07]  Well, lo and behold, here it is.
[00:35:10]  It's amazing time and again how all of the things that were suspected and discussed by Tony Bobolinski prior to the 2020 election are true.
[00:35:19]  They're true.
[00:35:20]  And I mean, unless I've missed it, it's still there.
[00:35:22]  I don't seen a lot of front page stories about this.
[00:35:25]  It's like a press release from Jamie Comer and everybody's like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's great.
[00:35:30]  Anyway, let's talk more about the Muslim Brotherhood and what they have to say.
[00:35:34]  Yeah, yes, yes.
[00:35:35]  Let's talk about more about combating Islamophobia.
[00:35:37]  That's really where we know we're over the mark.
[00:35:40]  Tom, I mean, this is unbelievable.
[00:35:41]  Holmes raised a good point.
[00:35:43]  Can you imagine if they had anything like this on Trump and the Russians?
[00:35:47]  Anything like this, it would be dominating every news cycle in America.
[00:35:51]  Of course.
[00:35:52]  I mean, if it was Don Jr. or Eric Trump, if it was his laptop, if there were emails there that implicated Donald Trump, of course.
[00:36:01]  I mean, and every single, you know, outlet, the New York Times, Washington Post would have seven reporters working on it around the clock, digging through all of this stuff.
[00:36:10]  And it's, you know, it goes to show, and it's worth worse than Josh says.
[00:36:15]  I mean, it's not just, I mean, yes, the conservative media reports on what the, you know, House oversight is finding, but, you know, the other outlets, the New York Times, Washington Post, they don't, it's like it never existed.
[00:36:28]  They don't write anything about it.
[00:36:30]  I mean, they completely ignore it.
[00:36:33]  And it just shows that, you know, there's a level of corruption in the media that has become very clear over the last few years.
[00:36:43]  And we've seen, you know, working in concert with the government and other entities to really, you know, censor, suppress, stifle information that is unhelpful to, you know, to Joe Biden or the Democrats in general.
[00:36:59]  And this is just another example of it.
[00:37:01]  I mean, this kind of evidence produced against not just Donald Trump, but any Republican.
[00:37:06]  I mean, if Ron DeSantis happens to win the presidential race next year and something like this were to happen to him, absolutely the media would be making, it would be a nonstop feeding frenzy until questions were answered.
[00:37:18]  And right now, Joe Biden's not, he's not getting asked any of these questions at all.
[00:37:22]  It just gets waved away.
[00:37:24]  And let's not forget what he said in the 2020 debate when this came up, Trump v. Biden, what he said.
[00:37:30]  Listen.
[00:37:32]  I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life.
[00:37:36]  I have not taken a single penny from any country whatsoever, ever.
[00:37:43]  So that's just a weasely way of getting out of the fact that you definitely appear to have taken the money.

=== Haley's Iowa Poll Split (14:51) ===

[00:37:49]  You just made it go through four different, you know, different hoops before it got to you.
[00:37:54]  But that's right.
[00:37:58]  Yeah, right.
[00:37:59]  It's different.
[00:37:59]  I said, by the time it got to me, it was squeaky clean.
[00:38:02]  I didn't see any Chinese money involved there.
[00:38:04]  It was all dollars.
[00:38:06]  It's really absurd.
[00:38:08]  All right.
[00:38:08]  Let me shift gears and talk Republican politics because interesting things are happening in the GOP race.
[00:38:14]  I realize that it's all sort of, you know, second tier right now because Trump is dominating in all these polls.
[00:38:19]  They're calling it the undercard, the undercard race.
[00:38:23]  But the undercard race is getting interesting.
[00:38:25]  Nikki Haley is definitely having a surge of sorts.
[00:38:30]  She's now number two, according to Real Clear Politics' average.
[00:38:35]  She is in the number two spot behind Trump.
[00:38:38]  He's got 31 points on her.
[00:38:39]  He's at 46.5.
[00:38:41]  But now she's in the number two spot, 14.8.
[00:38:44]  DeSantis in third at 10.
[00:38:47]  In Iowa, you guys have got Trump on, this is the average of all polls.
[00:38:52]  Trump's at 48.
[00:38:53]  DeSantis is at 17.
[00:38:55]  Haley's at 11.
[00:38:56]  So she's third in Iowa, though there was recently an Iowa poll that had better news for her.
[00:39:04]  And then you've got South Carolina.
[00:39:06]  South Carolina Trump's still at 49.
[00:39:08]  He's up 30 over his next competitor, but she's in second in South Carolina at 18.8.
[00:39:14]  DeSantis is in third at 10.
[00:39:16]  And South Carolinians basically said they can't stand Ramaswamy and do not want to see him again.
[00:39:23]  Those are the main players now, DeSantis and Haley vying for chief undercard person and Trump walloping everybody.
[00:39:31]  Tom, where does that leave us?
[00:39:34]  Well, I mean, it leaves us with, I think, what we've known for a long time, you know, absent some additional significant surges by either of those candidates.
[00:39:46]  Donald Trump is in a really strong position to win the Iowa caucuses in, what, 74 days or something?
[00:39:52]  And New Hampshire after that.
[00:39:54]  And if he wins both of those states, I think he's going to have the nomination locked up.
[00:39:59]  Now, there was this, you know, this Des Moines Register poll that came out earlier in the week that had Haley at 16.
[00:40:05]  She was up 10 points and had Trump at what, I don't know exactly what it was, I think in the 40s, but suggested that there were folks who were supporting Trump that were still open to voting for someone else.
[00:40:19]  So it suggested there might be a little bit of fluidity in that race and potential surprises.
[00:40:25]  But again, we really haven't seen that manifest itself in the data in a consistent, significant way.
[00:40:34]  It'll have to happen soon.
[00:40:35]  And again, there have been late moves in Iowa.
[00:40:38]  You know, Rick Santorum was at 1% around Christmas time, ended up winning a couple of weeks later.
[00:40:43]  So that was a different race, though, where you didn't have a dominant frontrunner the entire time.
[00:40:49]  But that isn't to say that Trump might still not come out on top.
[00:40:53]  I mean, the odds are very much that he will at this point.
[00:40:56]  But yeah, and then Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis are effectively running for second place.
[00:41:02]  And, you know, in politics, that gets you nothing.
[00:41:06]  Yeah, that's the thing.
[00:41:06]  It's like, it's interesting, Holmes, if you forget that Trump is up there, right?
[00:41:10]  It's like getting to be a horse race amongst the undercard.
[00:41:14]  No, it's right.
[00:41:15]  I mean, look, Nikki Haley's been running the best presidential campaign in the field and has been since moment one.
[00:41:22]  And I think that's reflected out in these rising poll numbers.
[00:41:26]  Her moment sort of happened in Milwaukee and she's built on top of that every week since and is now, as you just suggested, in second place.
[00:41:34]  But, you know, in addition to what Tom said, which I very much agree with, the only other piece of this puzzle is the consolidation of the rest of the field.
[00:41:41]  All right.
[00:41:41]  And we saw Mike Pence get out last weekend at the RJC event.
[00:41:46]  There's going to be others, right?
[00:41:47]  I mean, you mentioned Ramaswamy.
[00:41:49]  It sounds like he's going to do a big spend at this point.
[00:41:51]  If that doesn't move his numbers, what's his decision look like?
[00:41:55]  Tim Scott is another one who he was on the program a couple of weeks ago and he said they're going all in on Iowa.
[00:42:02]  If that comes up short and he's not in a striking distance or not second or third, does he decide that now is not the time for his candidacy?
[00:42:12]  All of those things, you know, you look at the New Hampshire polls and South Carolina polls where you have Trump under 50%.
[00:42:19]  If he's under 50% and you get some consolidation, you can make things interesting.
[00:42:23]  But at right now, there's not a lot of interesting, Megan.
[00:42:26]  I mean, he's got these massive leads and it's very, very difficult to see what would dislodge that.
[00:42:32]  I mean, look, if the news of the last six months doesn't change that, I don't know what the hell is out there that could possibly change that.
[00:42:40]  So I think he looks pretty comfortable at this point.
[00:42:43]  Well, I mean, the only right.
[00:42:45]  So if the field could consolidate, I don't think somebody like Vivek has any reason to drop out because there's a lot of speculation about whether he's in there just to get a job in the Trump administration.
[00:42:54]  So why would he drop out?
[00:42:55]  You know, he's not going to respond to any do your duty as a Republican, help the field consolidate.
[00:43:01]  So there's a two-person race.
[00:43:02]  He may be there solely as a spoiler for Trump, who he may be trying to please.
[00:43:07]  This is a theory that gets bandied about.
[00:43:10]  You know, he says it's not true.
[00:43:11]  He says he's genuinely running thinking he could win.
[00:43:15]  But what the reports are, Tom, that DeSantis' super PAC has said, we're not going to spend any more right now.
[00:43:22]  We're not saying never, but we're not spending on you anymore for the foreseeable future.
[00:43:27]  And Nikki Haley is on a bit of a roll.
[00:43:30]  And if you look at sort of history, her trajectory is hitting at a nice time and her role could keep going up.
[00:43:36]  And if you had a Republican Party that really wanted someone other than Trump and there is, it's split.
[00:43:42]  If you look at that latest poll in Des Moines Register, it's split kind of right down the middle.
[00:43:45]  There are, it's 50-50 Trump versus non-Trump.
[00:43:49]  You could get one candidate to win.
[00:43:50]  You could get the support of the Republican Party behind somebody other than Trump.
[00:43:54]  They're not averse to a non-Trump Republican, the voters.
[00:43:58]  They're not.
[00:43:59]  But it's like Trump's being treated like the incumbent and they're just kind of going with the guy who looks like the winner.
[00:44:04]  Everybody likes to back a winner.
[00:44:06]  And so what are the odds now?
[00:44:08]  Because Nikki Haley's people, supporters looking at DeSantis saying, you tried, you lost.
[00:44:13]  You have no momentum.
[00:44:14]  Soon you'll have no money.
[00:44:16]  And it's time for you to step aside and let Nikki be the non-Trump alternative.
[00:44:22]  Yeah.
[00:44:23]  I mean, listen, there are tough choices, Ed, for these candidates.
[00:44:26]  And I've said exactly what Josh said, which is, you know, all along, it didn't matter how many people got in this race.
[00:44:30]  It matters when they get out of the race and whether they're able to consolidate around an anti-Trump, non-Trump candidate alternative prior to, you know, Iowa or New Hampshire.
[00:44:41]  Because if it doesn't happen in those two states, I mean, he's off to the races and it's going to be really, really hard to stop him at that point.
[00:44:47]  Could you get somebody who finishes, you know, if Nikki Haley finishes a close second in Iowa and she can parlay that into something in New Hampshire and then get to South Carolina?
[00:44:55]  Sure, possible.
[00:44:56]  But if people stay in this race, it's not going to happen.
[00:45:02]  And you're right.
[00:45:03]  I mean, the thing for DeSantis, I mean, he's been going down the entire time.
[00:45:06]  If you look at his national numbers, I mean, he's just, he's had every opportunity.
[00:45:10]  He's had all of the, you know, resources that he would have needed to have made this a race.
[00:45:16]  He's just run a terrible campaign.
[00:45:17]  I mean, his strategy has just been horrendous from the beginning.
[00:45:21]  And the idea that he was going to win over these Trump-leaning voters, people who like Trump, but were open to voting someone else by attacking Donald Trump from the right on immigration and transgender stuff.
[00:45:33]  I mean, it was just, you know, hindsight's 2020, but you didn't even need hindsight for this.
[00:45:38]  I mean, this was a terrible strategy from the beginning.
[00:45:40]  And so he's really squandered, I think, his chance.
[00:45:44]  And now you've got, again, Nikki Haley rising.
[00:45:46]  Tim Scott, I think, swandered his chance as well.
[00:45:49]  We saw Vivek had his moment and he's been on a downward slide ever since then.
[00:45:54]  So it is really, it's Nikki Haley's, you know, moment to become that alternative.
[00:46:01]  And, but will a guy like Ron DeSantis, I mean, how, how tough of a decision is that going to be for him to pull the plug on his campaign?
[00:46:09]  I mean, probably better to do it now than wait and finish, you know, fifth in Iowa or third in Iowa by 30 points or something, because that would be even more humiliating for him.
[00:46:19]  But yeah, tough choices ahead in the very near future for a lot of these candidates if they want to stop Trump.
[00:46:24]  How do you see these numbers, Holmes?
[00:46:26]  Because on the general election matches, again, RCP averages, Trump's up 0.7 over Biden.
[00:46:34]  Biden beats DeSantis by 1.1 percentage point.
[00:46:38]  Haley beats Biden by 1.6 percentage points.
[00:46:41]  So Haley's got more than double the percentage points in terms of polling to beat Biden than Trump does.
[00:46:48]  But none of that factors in the celebrity factor, that sort of incumbency factor that Trump will have, but also his motivation to the left.
[00:46:56]  So how do you, I mean, how do you see the most likely candidate to beat Joe Biden?
[00:47:00]  Well, honestly, Trump is such a known commodity here that you don't have to do a lot of guesswork.
[00:47:06]  I mean, it concerns me a lot as a Republican voter to know that in all of these polls, when they ask the question of, would you never vote for somebody, Trumps are consistently the highest amongst the general election?
[00:47:18]  I mean, we're talking well past the 50% marker, which tells you that that remaining undecided may be open for business, but they're not open for Donald Trump.
[00:47:26]  That concerns me.
[00:47:27]  It also concerns me if you look at Joe Biden's ballot question, where he's lagging the most amongst who he's lagging the most.
[00:47:34]  We just had a segment about that.
[00:47:35]  Young, very progressive people who aren't totally satisfied about where he has taken his administration.
[00:47:42]  Do you think they're going to vote for Donald Trump?
[00:47:44]  I don't think so.
[00:47:45]  Like the best you could possibly do is that they don't show up in the context of a presidential election against Donald Trump.
[00:47:52]  We've got now, what, six years of evidence that they, in fact, do show up and they can't wait to show up.
[00:47:58]  So I think, look, Nikki's got a huge draw.
[00:48:00]  I think any of the other candidates, it's very unknown what their ultimate ceiling is.
[00:48:04]  There's no question in my mind that Donald Trump's ceiling is lower.
[00:48:08]  It doesn't mean he can't win, but it's a real thin margin there.
[00:48:12]  Yeah, everyone's got their minds made up about Trump.
[00:48:15]  I mean, this current conflict in the Middle East may do him some good politically too, since he can basically say, was the Middle East on fire when I was there?
[00:48:23]  I did the Abraham Accords.
[00:48:24]  I moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
[00:48:26]  Nothing happened.
[00:48:27]  Look what happened once this guy took over.
[00:48:29]  All right, stand by.
[00:48:29]  If you guys can stick with me, 10 more minutes.
[00:48:31]  We've got to get to the DeSantis Boots issue.
[00:48:34]  We'll pick it up right after this break.
[00:48:36]  Don't go away.
[00:48:41]  Quickly before we get to Bootgate, DebateGate is up first.
[00:48:45]  Next week, there is the next Republican presidential debate.
[00:48:48]  Again, we don't think Trump will be there.
[00:48:50]  One never knows, but we don't think so.
[00:48:52]  It's going to be on November 8th.
[00:48:54]  It's going to be hosted by NBC News, Tom.
[00:49:00]  Lester Holt, Kristen Welker, and then they'll have Hugh Hewitt of Salem Media also partnering on the debate.
[00:49:08]  And there are many people who think this was not the best decision to allow NBC to host a Republican debate.
[00:49:16]  What do you think?
[00:49:18]  I mean, it's crazy that Republicans continue to do this and to have people moderate their debates who are, you know, Lester Holt has moderated debates before.
[00:49:33]  We know kind of his political leanings.
[00:49:37]  And so, again, this is a primary debate.
[00:49:39]  I'm not talking about a general election debate.
[00:49:41]  Okay.
[00:49:42]  This is a primary debate.
[00:49:43]  The Democrats would never allow, you know, some right-wing folks to, yeah, you, to moderate their debates.
[00:49:53]  And yet, and yet Republicans continue to do this.
[00:49:56]  I mean, even when Fox News did it and Fox Business, it wasn't fantastic.
[00:50:00]  I mean, and that's partly a function of the field and Donald Trump not being there and all these other atmospherics.
[00:50:07]  But in general, you know, people, I think, reacted negatively to the news that, you know, I mean, again, this is Rhonda McDaniels.
[00:50:16]  She's the one who's in charge of selecting the outlets and, you know, I think has some say in who those outlets select as their moderators.
[00:50:25]  And so, yeah, it's just the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
[00:50:32]  I doubt they're going to get a different result this time.
[00:50:34]  You know, Josh, it's interesting.
[00:50:36]  Like I would, of course, moderate a Democratic primary, you know, presidential debate, but I don't think I'm the right person for that.
[00:50:43]  I could absolutely, I think I could be better than anybody on a general election debate.
[00:50:48]  I really do.
[00:50:48]  I'm a registered independent.
[00:50:50]  I would never, I, of course, have a preference for Republican candidates given my own personal politics, but you would never see it if I were to moderate a general election debate.
[00:50:59]  You would not see it.
[00:51:00]  I would make sure.
[00:51:01]  So that's all we can ask.
[00:51:02]  Everybody goes into it with their own personal politics.
[00:51:04]  And what we ask as the viewers is, I don't want to see it.
[00:51:07]  I don't want to know from your questions where you stand.
[00:51:11]  But to think that Lester and Kristen Welker have a deep inherent understanding of what Republican voters care about is to be a fool.
[00:51:21]  And that is why Hugh Hewitt, with respect to Hugh Hewitt, he can't make up for what's going to be happening to him two seats and one seat away.
[00:51:29]  So it really does make more sense to pick people who understand Republican politics at this stage of the game.
[00:51:37]  Yeah.
[00:51:37]  I mean, look, I'm glad Hugh is on that stage.
[00:51:40]  I think he always does a good job with it.
[00:51:42]  I mean, look, the dilemma of hosting debates in the Republican Party is that you, A, you got to have media partners that are not only willing to do it, but have the distribution power of reaching millions of people, right?
[00:51:53]  And look, you could do it, Megan, no question about it.
[00:51:55]  And I'm sure there are different ways to handle it.
[00:51:58]  But if you look at like NBCs or the CNNs, I mean, there's a look, there's a reason why Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley and all of them have done CNN town halls that nobody thinks.
[00:52:07]  The Ruthless Variety program has more viewers than CNN.
[00:52:12]  You know it.
[00:52:13]  I know it.
[00:52:13]  And the American people need to know it.
[00:52:15]  Thank you.
[00:52:16]  Thank you, Megan.
[00:52:17]  I appreciate that little plug.
[00:52:19]  And you're quite right.
[00:52:20]  And you're quite right.
[00:52:23]  But I think, look, part of what they're trying to do is reach different demographics.
[00:52:27]  And we've got to choose your news culture right now, where unfortunately there's an awful lot of candidates out there.
[00:52:32]  And some of them have been doing a better job at this that basically only go back to the same three or four wells over and over and over again.

=== Debates and Stilts (11:39) ===

[00:52:41]  Not only does that not give them an opportunity to make a mistake, which is why they're doing it, but it limits your potential voter base in a very significant way.
[00:52:49]  And I think if you are a Republican and you're looking at what happened in 2020 and you're thinking about a redux here, that concerns you.
[00:53:00]  The idea that you're not reaching anybody in the center right of the electorate or somebody that doesn't tune in to Hannity every night is alarming.
[00:53:07]  You've got to figure out how to reach those people.
[00:53:09]  And so far, there's been very few campaigns that have done that on their own.
[00:53:14]  So it is a little bit of a dilemma.
[00:53:15]  I love if there was a really off-the-shelf solution to it.
[00:53:18]  I mean, look, I got plenty of space here on the Ruthless Variety Program.
[00:53:20]  And Megan, you are welcome anytime to come interrogate.
[00:53:25]  I've seen what you do to these candidates.
[00:53:27]  There is absolutely no stone unturned.
[00:53:30]  I would love.
[00:53:30]  I'm not on their side.
[00:53:34]  No, once they're on that debate stage, I am not on their side at all.
[00:53:37]  I may wind up voting for them, but I'm definitely not going to be on their side in the actual questioning and debate.
[00:53:42]  Hell no.
[00:53:42]  It's me for the viewers, me against them, me testing them to make sure they're worthy of the people watching behind me.
[00:53:49]  Okay, let's talk about Bootgate because it's actually a really fun story and we need it.
[00:53:52]  We need this after the dark news coverage of the past few weeks.
[00:53:56]  Bootgate involves Ron DeSantis.
[00:53:59]  And when I first saw, I'm like, this is so petty.
[00:54:01]  This is so stupid.
[00:54:01]  I'm completely into it now.
[00:54:03]  Okay.
[00:54:04]  So here's what happened.
[00:54:06]  Originally, there was a TikTok video that kicked off the questioning about whether DeSantis is artificially inflating his height with these boots.
[00:54:16]  Look at this.
[00:54:17]  So they are an odd-looking boot.
[00:54:21]  Like the front of them kind of turns up.
[00:54:23]  And I don't know why the front of them turns up, but the theory is because there are lifts secretly inside of them.
[00:54:29]  So then Patrick Beck David gets DeSantis.
[00:54:32]  Look, see, why are they all turned up at the end?
[00:54:34]  Anyway, Patrick Beck David has DeSantis on his show last week and had the following exchange.
[00:54:43]  I'm sure your marketing team points out how they're trying to troll you in the marketplace.
[00:54:47]  Play this clip.
[00:54:48]  This on TikTok went viral.
[00:54:50]  It doesn't have a million views.
[00:54:52]  It doesn't have, you know, 10 million views.
[00:54:54]  This thing's got 1.2 million likes.
[00:54:56]  And some people are wondering, how do they, I don't even understand that.
[00:55:01]  They've not shown this to you.
[00:55:03]  Okay.
[00:55:03]  What they're trying to say with this is that in your boots, you have heels.
[00:55:07]  No, no, no.
[00:55:09]  are just standard off the rack um lukese um how tall are you how tall are you governor how tall 5'11.
[00:55:16]  Okay, why don't you wear tennis shoes and dress shoes?
[00:55:20]  Uh, I do wear tennis shoes when I work out.
[00:55:22]  Yeah, you do.
[00:55:23]  Okay, I got a gift for you i'd love for you to wear.
[00:55:26]  Okay, ICE SHOP at Furgamo, okay.
[00:55:29]  Oh, my god, I don't accept gifts.
[00:55:34]  I can't accept it, i'm sorry.
[00:55:39]  So, Patrick Bett, David tried to get him to put on the boots and obviously was going to see how tall he really is.
[00:55:47]  And he said no.
[00:55:49]  It gets so awkward, cringy, cringy, but kind of interesting too.
[00:55:52]  Trump puts out a statement on it through his spokesperson referring to, and I'll get to this, a scathing new article from Politico about Ron DeSanctimonius's high-heeled shoes.
[00:56:06]  He goes on to say in another moment of insanity, because he definitely believes that these are lifts inside the boots.
[00:56:12]  Ron offered up the laughable claim that he is 5'11.
[00:56:15]  Instead of telling the truth and just being comfortable in his own skin, he resorts to borderline psychotic behavior by lying to the American people.
[00:56:24]  Is this what the country wants in a president?
[00:56:27]  With a close-up of Ron DeSantis's shoes here.
[00:56:32]  Okay, so here is my own.
[00:56:35]  Oh, no, Politico.
[00:56:36]  We got to get to this before I show you my own personal evidence, members of the jury.
[00:56:40]  Politico on Tuesday publishes an in-depth piece on bootgate.
[00:56:47]  Okay, first look at this video.
[00:56:48]  This is Debbie Murphy's concern by this video.
[00:56:53]  It's sort of odd the way the walk.
[00:56:55]  I can see why people think maybe there are lifts inside these boots.
[00:56:58]  Politico gets three expert shoemakers to analyze pictures of DeSantis and his boots, walking, sitting, standing, what have you.
[00:57:09]  They get, I guess, a guest columnist to actually write the piece who's a menswear writer.
[00:57:14]  He's written for the Washington Post, Financial Times, and so on.
[00:57:17]  So they put it in the hands of an expert who then interviews three expert shoemakers.
[00:57:23]  And they all have concluded he is wearing lifts.
[00:57:27]  There is no doubt.
[00:57:28]  The things, three things stick out to me, said one of them, Graham Ebner, the Austin-based cowboy bootmaker.
[00:57:36]  The instep.
[00:57:37]  That's where you normally would tie your sneakers, like where the ties of a sneaker normally are.
[00:57:41]  The instep, the toe spring, and where the ball of his foot is sitting in the boots.
[00:57:45]  In almost every photo of DeSantis, you see an unusually high instep that angles nearly 60 degrees.
[00:57:52]  They've estimated the degrees, my friends, angled nearly 60 degrees, pushing the leather outward and making it unusually taut.
[00:58:00]  Unusually taut, I say.
[00:58:03]  Another guy says, yep, he's basically standing on his tippy toes.
[00:58:09]  You can see it.
[00:58:10]  His shins look unusually long for his proportions and estimated that the lifts inside of his shoes, that's in addition to the heel you can see, are about 1.5 inches.
[00:58:22]  DeSantis denies it, says the governor does not pad his boots, but if he ever needed anything to line a, what is it, like trash can?
[00:58:33]  He'll use that politico article.
[00:58:35]  So, all right.
[00:58:37]  Thoughts on boot gate?
[00:58:39]  It's so fun.
[00:58:41]  I don't know.
[00:58:42]  Do you guys wear your boots?
[00:58:44]  You hate a taut instep.
[00:58:46]  That's as rough as it gets.
[00:58:48]  Tot's normally kind of hot.
[00:58:50]  Who doesn't want to be taught?
[00:58:51]  But I guess it's bad if it's in your instep.
[00:58:54]  I don't know.
[00:58:55]  They say tall people are more likely to win elections.
[00:58:57]  So Tom Bevin, it could matter.
[00:59:01]  You know, I guess it could.
[00:59:02]  I mean, listen, I was talking to Josh during a break.
[00:59:05]  I'm 5'9, so I'm all for lifts.
[00:59:07]  I mean, I think Ron DeSantis should just lean into it and go for like those, you know, Gene Simmons kiss, like platform shoes, just the bigger the better, you know, whatever.
[00:59:16]  Uh, that's what I'd do if I was in his circumstance.
[00:59:19]  But there, there is a thing about not wanting to seem small on stage, especially when you're standing next to a guy like Donald Trump, who's what, 6'2, and some of the other candidates.
[00:59:31]  So maybe he's doing it.
[00:59:32]  Maybe he's not.
[00:59:33]  I'm not sure it's affecting his campaign, but it certainly is the story of the moment.
[00:59:39]  Holmes, I'm going to give you another piece of evidence to consider.
[00:59:42]  Okay.
[00:59:42]  I want to interview DeSantis.
[00:59:44]  Now, all right.
[00:59:45]  So there's another piece of evidence for the jury.
[00:59:47]  I interviewed DeSantis and we first sat together.
[00:59:50]  I don't know if we have the picture of the two of us sitting together.
[00:59:53]  And I definitely was wearing high heels.
[00:59:55]  Well, this is the two of us standing.
[00:59:56]  All right, just hold this here.
[00:59:56]  Hold this picture.
[00:59:57]  Okay.
[00:59:58]  So I had probably two and a half inch heels on, and he had boots on, like those, he had those very boots that we've been showing, those black boots.
[01:00:06]  And they were, I'd say, at least a two inch heel.
[01:00:08]  So that kind of strikes us as even.
[01:00:11]  So we should actually right here be looking our actual height difference because we both had probably the same amount of lift in our heel.
[01:00:18]  This is excluding the possibility that he had an additional lift inside.
[01:00:23]  Now I am 5'6 without my heels and he says he's 5'11.
[01:00:27]  So there's about a five.
[01:00:30]  Could you, is that, does that look like a five inch difference to you?
[01:00:34]  To me, I can buy it.
[01:00:36]  I can buy that that's a five inch.
[01:00:38]  Yeah, that that could be a five inch difference between us.
[01:00:40]  But what the allegation is that that is in fact, if he didn't have the secret lift inside the boot, there would only be about a three inch difference between us and he would be a lot lower in this picture.
[01:00:52]  Members of the jury, Holmes, I don't know what to say.
[01:00:57]  You know, like just from a substantive standpoint, campaigns are totally brutal.
[01:01:02]  And having run a lot of them, when you're, when you're like real sort of in the soup, it's not just about like debating the issues and trying to get to right or left of something or sign of the electorate.
[01:01:13]  Sometimes you just have this toolbox full of stuff that you want to throw out there and try to get people talking about because it's just sort of a one, you know, it makes somebody look bad, but two, it also just throws your opponent off entirely.
[01:01:29]  And Trump has been really, really good at doing this, right?
[01:01:32]  Their campaign, remember the putting fingers thing?
[01:01:35]  And now this thing.
[01:01:36]  And one of the reasons I've been sort of bearish on where DeSantis' campaign is with an awful lot of this stuff is that they have some sensitivity to doing that back, certainly to Donald Trump.
[01:01:47]  And when you have one side that is willing to deploy every tactic in the book and get the national conversation about whether he's wearing lifts, and you're not willing to say, like, I'm going to take my lift and shove it up your fat ass.
[01:02:02]  Like it's, it's a one-sided discussion.
[01:02:06]  Like you can never get out of it.
[01:02:08]  And you're like, well, another thing about the border wall.
[01:02:11]  Well, that's not where the people, like, you got to be entertaining too.
[01:02:14]  And I think that he's consistently, and it's not trying to be a pun, but he's had him on his heels.
[01:02:22]  Right.
[01:02:23]  Right.
[01:02:23]  I don't know.
[01:02:24]  I think if I were a guy in his position and I did not have lifts inside the boot, I might actually take off the boot and show it to Patrick Bet David.
[01:02:31]  I might, I might, you know, like, go ahead, take a look at my boot.
[01:02:35]  I know what you're doing.
[01:02:36]  You're ridiculous.
[01:02:37]  Here, look inside the boot right now.
[01:02:39]  I mean, it's a little beneath the dignity, but it would have put it to rest once and for all.
[01:02:43]  Or another route could be like what Tom just did.
[01:02:48]  I do wear them.
[01:02:48]  I've always been kind of sensitive about the fact that I'm not a little taller.
[01:02:52]  You caught me in my insecurity.
[01:02:54]  Maybe other guys out there can relate.
[01:02:55]  I don't know, but I do love these boots and you can get them from this manufacturer and they'll give you an extra two inches.
[01:03:00]  And unless you run for president, no one will ever be the wiser.
[01:03:03]  Or you can Come out on the next debate stage on stilts or something.
[01:03:08]  You know, I mean, just make a whole thing, a clown show out of it.
[01:03:11]  I'm sure people would love that.
[01:03:13]  Listen, I got bad news for Governor DeSantis.
[01:03:16]  He's what, I think, uh, four or five years, a few years younger than I am.
[01:03:19]  And it only goes one direction from this point forward, my friend.
[01:03:22]  I gotta, I just gotta own it because as you get older, you start going down, down, down, down.
[01:03:29]  My mom always says that's not the only thing.
[01:03:31]  I don't believe that.
[01:03:32]  I'm telling you.
[01:03:34]  My mother, she tells me, she talks about a certain other region of her body saying she used to be a 38 double D and now she's a 42 long.
[01:03:46]  Somebody tell the bearded lady, he's going to be very upset.
[01:03:50]  And on that note, thank you guys.
[01:03:52]  Thanks so much for being here.
[01:03:54]  Thank you.
[01:03:54]  Thanks, Megan.
[01:03:55]  All right.
[01:03:56]  Now, audience, don't go away because up next, we're going to have a great deep dive into free speech with the man.
[01:04:01]  You know, we've been referencing fire.
[01:04:03]  That's he's been on before, but this is the main guy who's been trying to hold all these universities responsible for their abandonment of free speech principles, firing professors, chastising student groups, getting speakers thrown off campus over the past few years.
[01:04:18]  Definitely post George Floyd.

=== Free Speech vs DEI (14:38) ===

[01:04:20]  But even before that, they were doing this.
[01:04:23]  How does he feel about their newfound commitment to free speech now that it's Hamas supporters out there?
[01:04:29]  We'll talk about it next.
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[01:05:34]  Some of the nation's top law firms are now putting the nation's top law schools on notice, writing in a letter telling the deans they are alarmed by the rampant anti-Semitism they are witnessing on campuses and saying, In no uncertain terms, quote,
[01:05:48]  as employers who recruit from each of your law schools, we look to you to ensure your students who hope to join our firms after graduation are prepared to be an active part of workplace communities that have zero tolerance policies for any form of discrimination or harassment.
[01:06:04]  This comes as we learn new details about a disgusting display at Harvard targeting Jews.
[01:06:12]  Here's a quick reminder: Well, one of the groups that's been doing the hard work to uncover exactly who these people are made an alarming discovery.
[01:06:37]  The group that's doing the investigating is called the Canary Mission, and they say one of the men taunting the Jews on the Harvard campus is a Harvard student and an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
[01:06:49]  They say his name is Ibrahim Barmal, and here he is.
[01:06:57]  Stop touching me.
[01:06:58]  James!
[01:07:01]  Shames!
[01:07:15]  Maybe he's our next Supreme Court justice.
[01:07:18]  Already there are calls to kick him out of Harvard.
[01:07:21]  And get this, the Washington Free Beacon reports this same guy, Ibrahim, attended Stanford and in 2018 won an award for outstanding service.
[01:07:31]  Joining me now, co-author of the new book, The Canceling of the American Mind.
[01:07:36]  Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All, but there is a solution.
[01:07:42]  He wrote this along with our former intern here on the MK show, Ricky Schlott.
[01:07:47]  Greg Lukiyanoff is president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or fire for short.
[01:07:55]  Greg, welcome back to the show.
[01:07:57]  Great to have you.
[01:07:57]  You've been a busy man lately.
[01:08:00]  It has not been dull in the free speech world.
[01:08:03]  No, no, it hasn't.
[01:08:04]  All right, so we'll get to individual cancellations and all that in a minute.
[01:08:06]  But first, let's just start with you're the number one person whose reaction I wanted when I saw these universities come out college after college to say, we believe in free speech.
[01:08:18]  We would never interfere.
[01:08:19]  You know, these pro-Palestinian students on the campuses chanting from the river to the sea.
[01:08:24]  We don't get involved in that because we're a place for learning, not really for judging.
[01:08:29]  It's such a lie, Greg.
[01:08:31]  Yeah, no, I've been doing this for 22 years.
[01:08:34]  And to watch universities suddenly discover free speech and even talk about institutional neutrality when it relates to, you know, Hamas's horrifying attacks is almost comedic.
[01:08:48]  Now, if they really mean it this time, that they believe in free speech and neutrality from this point on, swell.
[01:08:55]  But you have to forgive me for being super cynical and skeptical, because just like at 9-11, when they saw the threats as coming from off campus, they suddenly discover free speech and academic freedom.
[01:09:07]  When the threat comes from on campus, which is most of the time, it's activist students, administrators play a huge role, and sometimes embarrassingly enough, professors themselves, they always cave.
[01:09:18]  So I think this newfound commitment to free speech is probably going to last like three weeks.
[01:09:23]  Yeah, two minutes, but I'm looking forward to holding them to it.
[01:09:27]  You know, I mean, when Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, came out on her third try after she'd been shamed by the previous dean, Lauren Summers, and finally said, okay, no, we're really committed to free speech.
[01:09:38]  I said, you know what, A, bullshit.
[01:09:40]  And I cited your organization because I know they were last.
[01:09:43]  Harvard was last.
[01:09:44]  They were last in our campus free speech ranking.
[01:09:46]  And boy, did they earn that ranking.
[01:09:48]  People were like, no, that's a stunt.
[01:09:49]  I'm like, no, it's based on 13 factors, the largest study of student free speech opinion ever conducted and four massive databases.
[01:09:58]  My God.
[01:09:58]  So, okay, so that was my first point.
[01:09:59]  My second point was, but you know what?
[01:10:01]  Let's go with it.
[01:10:02]  Let's take her at her word.
[01:10:03]  Terrific.
[01:10:04]  Welcome to the party, Claudine.
[01:10:06]  Great to have you here.
[01:10:07]  Looking forward to you enforcing this when the women's rights activists want to march on Harvard saying a man can't become a woman.
[01:10:14]  There's only one thing that's a woman and it doesn't involve a man, right?
[01:10:17]  Or the people who want to push back on the BLM radicals and so on.
[01:10:21]  Like, I can't wait to see her commitment then.
[01:10:24]  Well, and, you know, of course, people say she just started.
[01:10:27]  So, you know, you should give her a chance.
[01:10:30]  But I'm pretty sure she was one of the people involved in the prosecution of Roland Fryer, who was one of the people who showed evidence that the racial disparity in shooting is not actually what most people think.
[01:10:41]  And then, ta-da, just like cancel culture works, suddenly he's being investigated for something unrelated, which is not a coincidence.
[01:10:48]  And meanwhile, it was just, I think, last year where Carol Hooven, who is in our book, Carol Hooven is a brilliant person.
[01:10:55]  She's a lovely person.
[01:10:56]  She was on Fox News to talk about her book, testosterone.
[01:11:00]  She went on and she gave a stirring talk about being compassionate towards trans people, using their pronouns, all of this kind of stuff.
[01:11:07]  But then she said, biological sex is real and we do our students a disservice and we do signs a disservice if we pretend this isn't true.
[01:11:16]  And immediately, of course, a DEI administrator started calling her out.
[01:11:20]  And then you started having student petitions, oftentimes encouraged by administrators.
[01:11:24]  Her friends abandoned her, not all of them, but some of them.
[01:11:28]  And only people like Steve Pinker came out, who's an author and one of our advisory committee people who really believes in freedom of speech came out to defend her.
[01:11:37]  But a healthy university, everybody would have come out to defend her, especially the university president.
[01:11:42]  So Harvard, to say the least, it will take years to convince me that Harvard has really changed its ways.
[01:11:49]  And they're not going to get off the hook just because they said the right thing in a bad circumstance once.
[01:11:55]  Well, you mentioned DEI.
[01:11:56]  And, you know, technically, these people who we've spent so much money on at all these universities, nevermind corporations, should be the people to be cracking down on this.
[01:12:06]  Aren't they there to protect minority voices and make sure that people aren't harmed by violent rhetoric?
[01:12:14]  We've been hearing all this stuff.
[01:12:15]  Well, Jews are the minority.
[01:12:16]  They are a minority.
[01:12:17]  They're only 2% of America.
[01:12:19]  So they're going to be a minority on any college campus.
[01:12:21]  And yet we're not seeing even the Biden administration as it creates its little task force say, you know what, we're going to put this through the DEI administrators at Harvard and Brown and Penn and Stanford.
[01:12:32]  No, they know very well the DEI administrators won't help this particular minority.
[01:12:39]  Well, yep.
[01:12:40]  And that's something that we talk about a lot in our book, because I think because of my first book, or my last book, Coddling the American Mind, people think that what Height and I are saying is that for most of my career until 2013, like the bad guys were administrators and then the bad guys, like the censors.
[01:12:59]  And then suddenly 2014, it became the students.
[01:13:02]  That's not really what happened.
[01:13:03]  Now it's the administrators working with the students that has created this absolute disaster for free speech.
[01:13:09]  And I want to be clear here, the last five, six years for academic freedom have been disastrous.
[01:13:15]  And watching people who suddenly think that their jobs might be on the line, suddenly like, oh my God, you know, this is this is accountability culture, but not the kind that I like, but completely unaware of the fact that this has been going on at a disastrous level for years now.
[01:13:31]  I want every single one of them to be to either purchase themselves or have purchased for them a copy of Canceling of the American Mind, where we put all the evidence to make the point that in the last 50 years, we have not seen a threat to academic freedom like of the likes of cancel culture.
[01:13:46]  It even claimed more professors than McCarthyism did.
[01:13:50]  We talked, a couple of them stand out to me and still really, I find them very chilling because, you know, we can kind of talk about it, surface level and breeze past it, but these people's lives get ruined.
[01:14:01]  You know, poor Roland Fryer was a gift to us all and he's been completely shamed out of a job, basically.
[01:14:06]  I mean, they have him on ice and he's not been able to do his work and his studies.
[01:14:10]  Okay.
[01:14:10]  And then there was this guy, this is Canadian, but still it stuck with me because we did this report over the summer with a free press reporter who came on to talk about this guy up there, a teacher, who was making the most mild of mild comments, trying to say, I think his point was, oh, you know, I used to live in America and they're worse than we are.
[01:14:30]  Canada is not as bad as America is when it comes to race and stuff like that.
[01:14:34]  And there was a black woman up there, DEI instructor, who went off on him because she thought he was trying to downplay Canadian racism in their school system.
[01:14:44]  And really, he was like, no, no, we're racist too.
[01:14:46]  Just not quite as racist as America.
[01:14:48]  We have a bit of the soundbite, but listen to it, understanding not only did he have an enormous shitstorm unleashed on this guy, he wound up dying by suicide.
[01:14:57]  The stress of what they did to him was so bad.
[01:14:59]  Here it is.
[01:15:01]  I just wanted to make a comment about the Canada-US thing and a little bit of the challenge of it.
[01:15:06]  I did my student teaching in the US and have spent a lot of time in the US.
[01:15:10]  And to say here, honestly, that Canada is not a more just society than the United States is, and we talked about facts and figures.
[01:15:20]  I invite everyone here to do some research.
[01:15:23]  And you look at, yeah, absolutely.
[01:15:26]  And look at things like education and look how more, you think about a system we have in Ontario where every student is funded equally.
[01:15:34]  They go to the United States.
[01:15:35]  They're funded based on their tax base.
[01:15:38]  We have a public education system where everyone is funded the same way.
[01:15:42]  It's not like that in the United States.
[01:15:44]  We have a healthcare system here where everyone has access to health care.
[01:15:48]  It is not the same way in the United States.
[01:15:51]  So to say, sit here and say, all honesty, we're talking about facts and figures and to walk into the classroom tomorrow and say, Canada's just as bad as the United States, I think we're doing an incredible disservice to our learners.
[01:16:06]  No one backed him.
[01:16:08]  And this exact same thing has happened to countless numbers of educators here in the United States, K through 12 and college in particular, though thankfully with not as dire a result.
[01:16:17]  But they piled on him so badly within this school system, administrators who knew, who knew he had bent over backwards to take care of minority students throughout his career.
[01:16:26]  And the pylon was so bad without a single defender over that anodyne comment that he took this.
[01:16:36]  It's horrific what they've done.
[01:16:40]  I have a whole chapter on my friend, a short chapter and my friend Mike Adams.
[01:16:44]  He was the rarest of conservatives on campus in that he wasn't a libertarian.
[01:16:50]  He was an evangelical social conservative.
[01:16:52]  And they hired him back when he was a lefty, but he had a, he converted after he got, or right before he got tenure.
[01:17:00]  And he was one of the first professors I defended back in 9-11 were some of my first cases.
[01:17:06]  And Adams got in trouble because he called out a student who wrote the entire campus community saying America had this coming.
[01:17:14]  It was totally America's fault that we got attacked on 9-11.
[01:17:17]  And he kind of, I think he said something like, well, that's First Amendment protected, just as bigoted and foolish speech always is.
[01:17:25]  That was the entirety of what he said.
[01:17:27]  And they launched an investigation of him, which was just crazy.
[01:17:31]  And I'd say on the grand scheme of things, like on a 10-point scale, this would end up being like a three or a four on the outrageous scale for the rest of my career.
[01:17:39]  But at the time, I was pretty shocked.
[01:17:42]  Fast forward to 2020.
[01:17:44]  You know, he's made a name for himself as being like a jokey conservative, you know, on campus.
[01:17:50]  He writes for Town Hall.
[01:17:51]  Like he actually said that I inspired him to learn about Lenny Bruce and to have this much more kind of comedic take on his conservative activism.
[01:17:59]  And he made a joke in 2020 on Twitter, likening a lockdown to slavery.
[01:18:05]  And they came for the student mobs and administrators came for his career.
[01:18:10]  And unfortunately, this was 2020.
[01:18:12]  This was June of 2020, which was a explosion of cases, unlike we have ever seen at fire in our entire lives, much worse than anything you're seeing on campus now in terms of professors and students getting in trouble.
[01:18:24]  And it was all ideological.
[01:18:26]  I thought my friend Mike would be fine because he always seemed so confident.
[01:18:31]  And so he got a severance package, which also put him in a better position than some of these professors.
[01:18:35]  So I didn't, I was too busy.
[01:18:37]  So I didn't check in on him until mid-July of 2020.
[01:18:41]  And he was having a real hard time.
[01:18:44]  And he killed himself the next week.
[01:18:47]  And people were still coming to his house.
[01:18:49]  People, like, people were still calling him on the phone.
[01:18:52]  He was still a target of the cancelers, even though they'd won.
[01:18:55]  They really wanted him gone.

=== Cancel Culture in Universities (15:15) ===

[01:18:58]  It's unforgivable.
[01:19:00]  I just to remind the audience, you can read that story and many others in Greg's latest book, The Canceling of the American Mind.
[01:19:07]  He wrote The Coddling of the American Mind, which is a huge bestseller.
[01:19:10]  Everyone loved it, learned a lot.
[01:19:12]  And now this is the canceling of the American Mind, talking about cancel culture.
[01:19:16]  All right, so let's turn the page and talk about where it gets where it gets sticky now, at least for me.
[01:19:21]  Because as you know, and I know I'm cited in a few places in your book, I am very anti-cancel culture, or I have been very anti-culture.
[01:19:28]  You got it from both sides.
[01:19:29]  We're actually almost like proud of you for that, that you got canceled by the left and the right.
[01:19:32]  Yeah, I did.
[01:19:34]  I've had both sides come after me.
[01:19:35]  It's a badge of honor.
[01:19:37]  Yeah.
[01:19:38]  But, but I've said even before this whole thing with Israel, I'm not opposed to seeing it used against the people who push it the most just because the left hasn't learned its lesson.
[01:19:50]  You know, we tried for so long to take the high road.
[01:19:53]  They didn't accept our peace offering of like, you know, we're going to try to take the high road and talk you out of this nonsense.
[01:20:00]  It just kept canceling us at every turn.
[01:20:03]  So then I got more in the place of you got to fight fire with fire, just steal your organization's term.
[01:20:08]  You know, let's start canceling people's asses.
[01:20:10]  And maybe then they'll have some skin in this game and stop behaving like these morons that they are.
[01:20:14]  Well, that hasn't really been working either.
[01:20:16]  So I don't really have the answer.
[01:20:18]  I just know I hate cancel culture.
[01:20:20]  But then here come, here came the Israel thing.
[01:20:23]  And I actually do support what's happening with some of these students, not all of them, but I 100%, for example, Winston and Strawn revoking the offer of Raina Workman, this young woman at NYU Law who spearheaded the letter, blaming the entire attack, terrorist attack on Israel and absolutely no empathy for any of the victims.
[01:20:48]  And then she was caught on camera ripping down the hostage posters.
[01:20:51]  And Winston and Strawn said, you, Rhina, are not for us.
[01:20:56]  No problem.
[01:20:56]  She wasn't deprived of her right to speak.
[01:20:59]  She's still speaking every day, from what I can tell.
[01:21:02]  But I support the outing of these people.
[01:21:05]  She put her own name on it.
[01:21:06]  She wasn't doxed.
[01:21:07]  She wants to use that term, but she wasn't doxed.
[01:21:10]  She signed the letter on behalf of her group and she keeps going on camera.
[01:21:14]  And so I don't really view it as cancel culture, Greg.
[01:21:17]  I view that as, you know what?
[01:21:19]  You put yourself out there.
[01:21:20]  You cancel culture was never a statement that we have zero principles in this country, that you can put on a KKK hood and go march in the streets saying, I hate black people, and that every employer still has to employ you.
[01:21:33]  Otherwise, it's cancel culture.
[01:21:34]  No, no, there's always going to be bounds of morality and just civility and humanity that we play within.
[01:21:42]  And so for me, I make a distinction between the people who couldn't condemn the Hamas terror attack and blamed entirely the victims who are being murdered and defended the murder and slaughter of babies and the people who now just say, you know, I'm on the side of Palestine.
[01:21:57]  It's a long struggle.
[01:21:58]  I think Israel's more of an oppressor, but I fully condemn the way Hamas attacked them on October 7th.
[01:22:06]  I think there's a difference between those two, but the former group, I'm all for not not hiring them and outing them.
[01:22:11]  What do you make of it?
[01:22:13]  So our definition, and I'm glad I have an opportunity to kind of explain that actually our definition of cancel culture introduces more nuance than currently people seem to be getting.
[01:22:23]  So our definition of cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns to get people fired, deplatformed, et cetera, or otherwise punished, accelerating around, starting around 2014 and accelerating after 2017 for what would otherwise be First Amendment protected speech.
[01:22:38]  And we say this in the appendix because we don't want to bog the whole thing down, but what we're getting at is as an analog to public employee law, basically saying if it couldn't get you fired as a public employee, because there are protections for the private right of citizens to speak as public employees, then we count that as cancel culture.
[01:22:58]  Usually the cases are pretty easy.
[01:23:01]  And so for example, as far as an example that we do think is cancel culture, like unequivocally, is the professor who lost his job at a journal for retweeting something that was a kind of a snarky onion headline talking about being critical of the killing Palestinian kids.
[01:23:22]  And even though they argued that there were other reasons why it was fired, if the straw that broke the camel's back was merely expression or retweeting an onion headline, we count that as cancel culture.
[01:23:33]  When you get to the situation of people ripping down posters and that kind of stuff, that's not protected speech.
[01:23:41]  And if I saw that as an employer, I'd be like, wow, I'm not sure I can hire somebody because that's mob censorship.
[01:23:47]  Like I'm not sure I want that person.
[01:23:50]  If you get to the situation where you're just talking about someone's expression of opinion, but like you've pointed out, when you do the analog public employee law, one thing that is kind of consistent is if people become aware of the fact that the person they're hiring might be a raging racist or anti-Semite, then actually the laws existed in case law.
[01:24:09]  They actually say, no, no, actually, that's a situation where you can get rid of somebody.
[01:24:13]  And I think that in a lot of these cases, you're talking about trying to work at firms that might actually even have Israeli clients.
[01:24:19]  So we take it on a case-by-case basis, but we do work a lot of nuance into our definition by incorporating public employee law.
[01:24:26]  I think that's very fair.
[01:24:27]  That's very fair because I realize it's potentially dangerous ground to say, yes, these outrageous students who are on these campuses calling for one solution and actually saying things like, you know, kill the Jews, get rid of Israel.
[01:24:42]  I mean, I realize condemning that and saying those people should be canceled could potentially open up the door to them saying, well, the same thing with Black Lives Matter.
[01:24:51]  You know, they feel their lives are in danger when you say the United States is not a white supremacist country.
[01:24:57]  They don't think you could be sitting next to them at a keyboard because you're dangerous in the same way that you're saying these Palestinian supporters are dangerous to Jewish students.
[01:25:08]  And I just think, no, there's a clear distinction between openly supporting terrorism against Jews and then saying you can come to a corporation that hires Jews as every corporation must, otherwise they're going to be in big legal trouble and saying, I have a political opinion or a cultural opinion that you may find offensive that no one could legitimately argue endangers anyone.
[01:25:36]  And two points of clarification that I really want to make, because I forget to make this point all the time because I take it so much for granted.
[01:25:41]  I'm a First Amendment lawyer, but I also argue for a culture of free speech.
[01:25:44]  And we talk a lot about a culture of free speech.
[01:25:46]  I absolutely support freedom of association for private companies, for any association.
[01:25:53]  And that means you absolutely have the legal right to hire who you want and to fire who you want.
[01:25:59]  The only thing we're trying to do is to get people to think about what the world was starting to look like in, say, 2020 and 2021, where it seemed like, You know, every investment firm was also a company that had a political identity too, and that you could get fired for basically disagreeing with the opinions of the boss or worse, the HR department or the young employees.
[01:26:21]  And that really seemed to be where we were headed in 2021.
[01:26:26]  And so all we're arguing for is a thumb on the scale for everyone's entitled to their opinion.
[01:26:31]  Is that going to be enough to prevent someone from getting fired for retweeting a joke?
[01:26:37]  Hopefully.
[01:26:38]  Is it going to be enough for someone who shouts Intifada and wants to go work for Goldman Sachs?
[01:26:44]  Probably not.
[01:26:45]  Right.
[01:26:45]  Because you think about this guy who was at Cornell, who was on camera, this professor saying when he saw Hamas conduct the terror attack on October 7th, that it was exhilarating.
[01:26:56]  It was exciting.
[01:26:58]  And then you're asking yourself as a Cornell administrator, can I really send this guy back into the classroom and have Jewish students feel comfortable?
[01:27:05]  I mean, truly, that word safe space is totally overused and you get the gag reflex on it now.
[01:27:11]  But I genuinely can see how a Jewish student would not feel safe sitting in the classroom of a man who said it was exhilarating to watch Hamas kill all those innocent Israelis.
[01:27:20]  Like, I can see it for real.
[01:27:24]  It's about as unsympathetic as I've seen in my career.
[01:27:28]  And yeah, and I think that if they were to look into whether or not this person's actually been engaging in discriminatory harassment, that wouldn't shock me.
[01:27:37]  I will say that if that's all he did, it's protected and fired.
[01:27:42]  Absolutely.
[01:27:43]  We defend even highly offensive speech.
[01:27:45]  That being said, I've been seeing some extra highly offensive speech in the recent past.
[01:27:51]  But take a look at what's happening with Amy Wax at Penn, for example.
[01:27:55]  That was a case where some of the controversial stuff she said about affirmative action led to the university.
[01:28:02]  Yeah, she's a very good idea.
[01:28:04]  She said, is she the one who said something like, blacks continue to be at the bottom of the class?
[01:28:08]  And I think it's a result of affirmative action.
[01:28:11]  Yeah.
[01:28:12]  She said that, I think, on the Glen Laurie show.
[01:28:15]  And that was one of the main arguments, but she's always been against affirmative action.
[01:28:18]  Like this has been a, yeah, well, totally.
[01:28:22]  And that's, that's been a longstanding position.
[01:28:25]  And students argued that black students argued that they didn't want to have to take a mandatory class with her.
[01:28:30]  Now, if they try to fire Amy Wax, you bet that is a fire case.
[01:28:34]  And we're going to fight in that case.
[01:28:37]  The decision to say that to no longer make her class mandatory, we're like, okay, that might be more kind of like something that would be hard to argue against.
[01:28:48]  But yeah, in terms of the double standard, though, like the fact that they, I mean, you would think that students being like, oh yeah, the Hamas attacks were exhilarating would basically be getting rid of forever the idea that these are, you know, super sensitive people who care about microaggressions.
[01:29:08]  That all makes that look like a big fat lie.
[01:29:10]  But meanwhile, out in California, you had, I think, hundreds of professors sign a letter demanding that the university not refer to the Hamas atrocities as terrorism because it might be, it might make pro-Palestinian students feel unsafe.
[01:29:24]  And I'm like, how can you still believe this stuff?
[01:29:28]  It's been shown to be completely untrue in other contexts, but none of this seems to get through somehow.
[01:29:34]  This, I'm just pulling up this Columbia news.
[01:29:39]  So the Columbia faculty is at war, which I take as a good sign because I thought they'd all be on one side.
[01:29:44]  You know, the fact that there are any who are pushing back on the radical leftism is a plus.
[01:29:51]  So the headline from the Daily Mail is Columbia faculty is at war over anti-Semitism.
[01:29:55]  Hundreds of professors signed new letter slamming appalling colleagues who defended students for supporting Hamas.
[01:30:00]  So in other words, there were, I think, 100 who signed a letter that was pro-Palestinian slash Hamas.
[01:30:06]  300 signed a letter calling out those professors, but the original letter really is so outrageous.
[01:30:12]  The original letter from those 100 staff at Columbia speaking out in support of the pro-Palestine students.
[01:30:19]  Okay, this is a dated October 30th.
[01:30:23]  They refer to what Hamas did on October 7th as a right.
[01:30:30]  That was Hamas exercising its quote right to resist occupation.
[01:30:36]  That it was mere military action.
[01:30:39]  Okay, the murder of children, the torture of children, mere military action.
[01:30:43]  It was just they needed to recontextualize the way this was being covered as quote, just a salvo, just one salvo.
[01:30:52]  I'm quoting here, in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies and goes out.
[01:30:58]  I mean, this is the mentality that you've been dealing with.
[01:31:04]  Like the people behind a letter like that, right, are the ones who see, they see injustice everywhere, except when we have dead Israelis.
[01:31:13]  Yeah.
[01:31:14]  Yeah, I've reached a point, particularly like we spent a lot of canceling of the American mind talking about potential solutions.
[01:31:21]  And I've gotten increasingly sort of radical in kind of what I suggest.
[01:31:26]  And I think one of the best things that could happen for American higher ed is if donors are like, listen, I don't, I don't care if you can reform if you want.
[01:31:34]  I don't care right now.
[01:31:35]  We're giving all of our money to University of Texas at Austin, you know, and fire his campus free speech rankings to make sure that we know what the good schools are, for example.
[01:31:46]  We're pulling our kids out.
[01:31:47]  We're going to smaller state schools.
[01:31:50]  I think the time is now to really realize that the, I wrote something in Substack today talking about how if this isn't enough to show us that something is really wrong in higher education, that the group think has just gone way too far and the cancel culture has led people to believe that some of these monstrous beliefs are perfectly acceptable.
[01:32:09]  When university presidents are afraid to condemn the Hamas attacks, even though they are very, some of these presidents are very pro-Israel themselves, that's cancel culture.
[01:32:18]  And I think we should be thinking big in terms of, you know, both bigger and smaller solutions for better ways to show who the best and brightest are other than these gigantic over-bureaucratized megacorporations.
[01:32:31]  Just again, to remind everybody, because I want them to buy this book, The Canceling of the American Mind, Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All.
[01:32:40]  But there is a solution by Greg Lukianoff and our old pal, Ricky Schlott, who helped him with it.
[01:32:48]  So you say there is a solution.
[01:32:50]  Is this what it is?
[01:32:52]  Is it dollars and cents?
[01:32:53]  Is it what we're seeing now among some big donors at the universities?
[01:32:57]  Not only are you not getting my money, but I'm giving my money to this organization, to this college.
[01:33:03]  Make sure they know that.
[01:33:04]  Make sure the university knows that you're giving your money or send them a dollar and say, hey, I know you gave me 300 million before, but now I'm giving you one and taking my money elsewhere until you figure out what on earth you're doing there.
[01:33:17]  That's part of the solution.
[01:33:18]  But in the book, we talk about solutions for parents, for corporations, for K through 12, and for higher education.
[01:33:26]  And there we're talking about experiment big.
[01:33:30]  What do you mean?
[01:33:32]  You know, like I said, like University of Texas at Austin, this upstart liberal arts college that Pano Canelis and Joe Lonsell are doing.
[01:33:40]  That's great.
[01:33:41]  We don't need just one of those.
[01:33:43]  We need 100 of those.
[01:33:45]  We need ways.
[01:33:47]  I even talk about figuring out some insanely difficult exam that would allow you to test out of a bachelor's.
[01:33:54]  Because right now, Harvard is not really promising you the best and brightest.
[01:33:57]  They're promising you someone who might be like the kid of a legacy and everyone gets a 3.8.
[01:34:02]  I mean, the average, the average grade point average at Harvard right now is a 3.8.
[01:34:07]  And you might be ending up hiring a canceler, someone who shows up and is like, you know what, we actually, this whole company has to be pro-Hamas.

=== Reviving American Mind (02:18) ===

[01:34:14]  And by the way, that genius IT guy who seems to be mildly pro-Trump, that guy's got to go too.
[01:34:19]  And so right now they're delivering a product that is increasingly problematic.
[01:34:24]  And I think that there's better ways to actually, there's better ways, cheaper ways, more rigorous ways to show who actually your best employees are going to be.
[01:34:32]  Are there any schools left?
[01:34:34]  You know, I think about it a lot, Greg, because I have like my eldest is now 14.
[01:34:38]  He'll be in high school next year.
[01:34:39]  Is there any school left for somebody who's very bright?
[01:34:42]  He has a beautiful mind.
[01:34:44]  And I would love to see it nurtured in the way it used to be when, you know, back in our day when we went to school.
[01:34:49]  But I would never send him to one of these universities.
[01:34:51]  Is there anything out there?
[01:34:53]  University of Virginia has been doing a good job.
[01:34:55]  They finished in our top 10.
[01:34:56]  University of Chicago has been doing a good job.
[01:34:59]  None of them are perfect, but I think the future in a lot of ways lies in some of these new experiments.
[01:35:04]  You know, for more conservative students, Hillsdale, you know, like does well in terms of other schools on our ranking.
[01:35:12]  So there is actually University of Florida actually think does pretty well.
[01:35:20]  I always get Florida State and the University of Florida confused, though.
[01:35:22]  One does really well in the other.
[01:35:23]  I didn't even realize Ben Sas had left the Senate and was running it now until he put out his great statement.
[01:35:27]  I was like, oh, I got to pay more attention.
[01:35:30]  I love that you are such a warrior on this.
[01:35:34]  You've done a lot of good.
[01:35:35]  I know you don't win all the battles, but you get involved and you fight them.
[01:35:38]  And that's, you know, that's what it's all about in today's day and age.
[01:35:41]  Greg and Ricky together writing the canceling of the American mind.
[01:35:45]  Get it now.
[01:35:46]  The canceling of the American Mind.
[01:35:47]  Cancel culture undermines trust and threatens us all.
[01:35:50]  But there is a solution.
[01:35:51]  And just so you know, Greg's book, it was such a talker.
[01:35:53]  Everybody had read it.
[01:35:54]  It was like you couldn't go to a cocktail party or whatever without somebody mentioning that book to you.
[01:35:59]  So you will be ahead of the curve if you get this book now.
[01:36:01]  And you'll be the one regaling your friends with stories about this and showing how smart you are.
[01:36:06]  Greg, all the best to you and to Ricky too.
[01:36:09]  Thank you so much.
[01:36:10]  All right.
[01:36:11]  We'll see you soon.
[01:36:11]  And before we go, I want to tell you that tomorrow we're going to be back.
[01:36:14]  I almost did take the day off tomorrow and I was like, I can't, I can't.
[01:36:17]  I got to be there.
[01:36:18]  Because you know who we have tomorrow?
[01:36:19]  Somebody I absolutely adore.
[01:36:21]  Adam Carolla back on the show.
[01:36:23]  Cannot wait.
[01:36:24]  Hope you'll join us.
[01:36:27]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
[01:36:29]  No BS, no agenda, and no