The Megyn Kelly Show - 20240103_left-blames-racism-for-claudine-gays-harvard-exit-
Aired: 2024-01-03
Duration: 01:36:06


=== Performative Pouncing on Free Speech (15:12) ===

[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.
[00:00:15]  Well, Harvard president Claudine Gay made it longer than some predicted after various instances of plagiarism surfaced.
[00:00:23]  I lost count of how many.
[00:00:24]  It was like dozens by the time we were said and done.
[00:00:27]  But yesterday afternoon, she submitted her resignation, as we reported when it happened live during our show.
[00:00:34]  Now, many on the left, the woke left, are blaming her exit on racism.
[00:00:42]  Of course they are.
[00:00:44]  You got to dance with the one that brung you.
[00:00:46]  Plus, the crisis at the southern border continues.
[00:00:49]  My God, it's terrible.
[00:00:51]  As GOP leaders are set to visit the border today, and Secretary Mayorkas, for whom there is a strong case, I mean, that he ought to be impeached.
[00:01:00]  He blames the increase in migrants on climate change.
[00:01:04]  So fear not.
[00:01:05]  He's on it.
[00:01:06]  We're going to discuss it all with our pals today from the fifth column, Camille Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welsh.
[00:01:13]  You can find all of their content on Substack at wethefifth.substack.com.
[00:01:19]  Well worth your time.
[00:01:22]  Guys, welcome back to the show.
[00:01:23]  Thank you, Megan.
[00:01:24]  I have so much I want to talk to you about.
[00:01:26]  I'm so excited to have you guys here today.
[00:01:28]  You're just the perfect guests.
[00:01:29]  So the backlash to Claudine Gay's forced resignation is actually magnificent.
[00:01:37]  Is it not?
[00:01:37]  Like it's everyone knew their role to play and they're playing it to perfection.
[00:01:45]  It genuinely amuses me.
[00:01:47]  For example, there's Ibram X. Kennedy.
[00:01:51]  Okay.
[00:01:52]  First of all, he goes on with the question to assess whether this was a racist attack against her isn't whether Dr. Gay engaged in any misconduct.
[00:02:02]  The question is whether all these people would have investigated, surveilled, harassed, written about, and attacked her in the same way if the Harvard president in this case would have been white.
[00:02:11]  I, period, think, period, not, period.
[00:02:16]  Could never have.
[00:02:16]  Too often means reporters join the racist mob or give it credibility as they did here, just as they did a century ago.
[00:02:28]  That's and he went on.
[00:02:29]  I mean, he's got several tweets along these lines.
[00:02:33]  Celesting, you know, she wrote Little Fowlers Everywhere.
[00:02:36]  Hers was one of my favorites.
[00:02:38]  What we've learned here is bad faith bigots pretending they're concerned about anti-Semitism will happily use women of color, especially black women, as a scapegoat and lightning rod for large systemic issues, and that people invested in maintaining those systemic issues will comply.
[00:03:00]  And I'll just give you one more.
[00:03:01]  Nicole Hannah Jones, of course, the 1619 Project writer.
[00:03:05]  Academic freedom is under attack.
[00:03:07]  Racial justice programs are under attack.
[00:03:10]  Black women will be made to pay.
[00:03:12]  Our so-called allies too often lack any real courage.
[00:03:17]  So guys, it is the fault of systemic racism and its allies in the media who too often go along with the narrative, not to mention bad actors like Chris Ruffo, who's getting blamed for all the reporting he did on this.
[00:03:31]  You know, right-wing conservatives who seized an opportunity, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:03:36]  What do you make of it?
[00:03:39]  Who wants to go?
[00:03:40]  Well, Moynihan, you're a resident plagiarism.
[00:03:43]  You're a regular resident plagiarism expert, and this is a plagiarism scandal.
[00:03:47]  So you're the guy.
[00:03:49]  I want to correct you.
[00:03:49]  You unearthed plagiarism.
[00:03:51]  I have many, many plagiarism scandals, and I want to correct Camille on this.
[00:03:55]  I am now also an anti-racism expert.
[00:03:59]  Yes.
[00:04:00]  Because I have discovered how that one defeats these racists.
[00:04:04]  It's to not plagiarize 60 times.
[00:04:07]  And then none of this ever happens.
[00:04:10]  You can't bull Connor your way into a plagiarism allegation.
[00:04:15]  No, it's funny before we started, Camille very hopefully reminded me that she makes $900,000 a year.
[00:04:22]  I mean, look, the incredible thing about this is that there was a clip this morning.
[00:04:27]  I actually sent your producer, the great Steve Krakow, from another gay, what's her name, Mara Gay from the New York Times, who went on in an incoherent ramble.
[00:04:38]  Another gay, sorry.
[00:04:39]  That was, I'm very pro-gay generally, but in this case, I'm not.
[00:04:44]  But she went on as an incoherent ramble, and none of it addressed the actual allegations.
[00:04:48]  It's all the people are terrible.
[00:04:50]  All the people are doing terrible things.
[00:04:52]  They hate black people.
[00:04:53]  They hate black women in particular.
[00:04:55]  Multiculturalism is also the enemy.
[00:04:58]  Well, no, I mean, the very basic thing here is not only did she plagiarize.
[00:05:03]  And by the way, this is very, very clear plagiarism.
[00:05:04]  I'm somebody who's written a lot about this.
[00:05:06]  I actually am very tough on some of these plagiarism allegations and say, well, I don't think that meets the standards.
[00:05:12]  This met the standards 10 times over and it kept on going so bad, in fact, that she plagiarized in her acknowledgements, which I thought was really remarkable.
[00:05:21]  That's really showing a certain level of laziness.
[00:05:24]  But also, it just, it shows the kind of rot in these institutions.
[00:05:29]  This is the most prestigious university on earth.
[00:05:33]  Can we say that it's what, maybe Oxford, maybe, maybe Cambridge?
[00:05:37]  No, I'd say Harvard's number one.
[00:05:38]  That is the stand-in when you're talking about academic excellence.
[00:05:42]  And you have the president of this place who's not only a plagiarist, but has produced almost nothing in her academic career.
[00:05:49]  And this is also not somebody.
[00:05:50]  And this, by the way, I'm going to make a slight recommendation before I kick this over to Camille to give the not black perspective.
[00:06:00]  Camille, by the way, doesn't identify as black for your listeners who don't know that.
[00:06:03]  That's right.
[00:06:05]  But the incredible thing about this is Claudian Gay went to Phillips Exeter, one of the most elite schools on the East Coast.
[00:06:14]  She then went to Princeton, decided she didn't like Princeton very much, then went to Stanford and then went on to Harvard.
[00:06:21]  I would suggest maybe getting somebody from more of a working class background who actually does have a record and has worked very hard in their life and not produced 16 or 15 or 12 or however many sort of lazy and halfway fraudulent academic articles and never produced a book.
[00:06:37]  But, you know, I saw Mark Lamont Hill, the writer, professor, who just intellectual is a hip-hop intellectual.
[00:06:47]  Yes, which makes a certain amount of sense.
[00:06:50]  But he said, you know, we must replace her with another black woman.
[00:06:54]  I mean, this is kind of the problem, isn't it?
[00:06:56]  Is that, you know, that's it.
[00:06:58]  It wasn't who.
[00:06:58]  It could be anybody.
[00:07:00]  I mean, obviously it wasn't Candace Owens.
[00:07:02]  She's back.
[00:07:03]  Well, he didn't say that type of person.
[00:07:06]  Maybe.
[00:07:08]  She's smart.
[00:07:08]  She's young.
[00:07:09]  She has a long runway ahead of her.
[00:07:11]  Yeah.
[00:07:12]  Probably a more significant publishing record, too.
[00:07:15]  Shape and shade of her genitalia, check out.
[00:07:16]  So it should be fine now.
[00:07:18]  That's all you need.
[00:07:19]  That's all you need for when you're selecting the vice president of the United States as well.
[00:07:23]  You just declare initially it's going to be a black woman for sure.
[00:07:27]  No problem.
[00:07:28]  Or Supreme Court justice.
[00:07:29]  You really set these women up for success when you do that too.
[00:07:32]  Everybody, when they come, thinks first about their mind and not at all about those other things.
[00:07:36]  How could anyone doubt their credentials once you've laid that groundwork for them?
[00:07:41]  You know, I may disappoint Moynihan here.
[00:07:43]  I mean, the perspective I'd really like to bring to bear is actually the perspective I can offer as a board member of the wonderful organization FIRE, the Foundation for Intimate.
[00:07:53]  You got it.
[00:07:54]  You can do it.
[00:07:54]  You got it.
[00:07:55]  You can do it.
[00:07:55]  We learned it.
[00:07:56]  We reran it.
[00:07:57]  So initially it was education and now it's expression.
[00:08:00]  Yes.
[00:08:01]  We've been defending free speech and have been defending, and I'm using the we very generously there because I'm on the board.
[00:08:07]  I don't do any of the heavy lifting, but just defending academic freedom on campus for years and years.
[00:08:13]  And it is amazing to see people on MSNBC now very animated about the attack on academic freedom in the specific context of an overpaid administrator who has a documented history of engaging in plagiarism.
[00:08:27]  Now, this is an attack on free expression.
[00:08:30]  I want to commend to them the fire's rankings, which have for years now documented the rot in higher education and the genuine attack on free expression.
[00:08:39]  Nicole Hannah Jones ought to be well aware of this.
[00:08:41]  Fire came to her defense when she found herself in the midst of the firestorm where people were insisting that she shouldn't get a job because of her particular political background and in some cases criticizing some of her work on the 1619 project.
[00:08:52]  But in either case, Fire came to her defense because they're non-partisan and they believe in genuine diversity in higher education and they believe in free expression in higher education.
[00:09:01]  This isn't an example of that by any stretch of the imagination.
[00:09:05]  And it doesn't matter who is particularly excited about the fact that Miss Gay is being purged from the university or resigning because of the controversy surrounding her.
[00:09:13]  The controversy would not exist but for the documented history of plagiarism, which has existed for some time.
[00:09:21]  Records and rumors about this have existed for some time.
[00:09:23]  Harvard has investigated it.
[00:09:25]  And the only conclusion you can reach at the end of this is to let her go if you actually want to be taken seriously when you're censoring students, expelling students regularly for engaging in the same kind of conduct that Miss Gay is now being slammed for.
[00:09:41]  It's not a white supremacist cabal.
[00:09:44]  There's no secret conspiracy here.
[00:09:46]  I would even say that the activists who are most stumping their chest hoping to be given credit for this, they don't matter here.
[00:09:52]  What matters is that she's a plagiarist.
[00:09:55]  And as a result, she's getting bounced.
[00:09:57]  The question, of course, is who replaces her?
[00:10:00]  Who replaces her?
[00:10:00]  That's the thing.
[00:10:01]  Oh, this poor guy.
[00:10:03]  We know who's replacing her temporarily.
[00:10:05]  This poor, poor man.
[00:10:06]  Can you imagine being this man?
[00:10:07]  Hold on.
[00:10:08]  Where is he?
[00:10:08]  What's his name?
[00:10:09]  I've got to hear someplace in front of me.
[00:10:11]  But Alan Garber, and the poor guy is white.
[00:10:15]  Can you imagine what's going to happen?
[00:10:17]  That's why he's temporary.
[00:10:19]  His genitals don't actually measure up for the position here.
[00:10:23]  It's the wrong shape.
[00:10:24]  Don't get too comfortable, Alan.
[00:10:25]  It's definitely not happening.
[00:10:27]  You're on the way.
[00:10:28]  Alan also condemned the university's first shot at, you know, commenting on the anti-Semitism on campus.
[00:10:34]  He was like, oh, he didn't get there.
[00:10:36]  Alan is not long for this job, even the temporary job.
[00:10:39]  So he should not be too comfortable in that seat.
[00:10:42]  Here's the AP.
[00:10:43]  You guys probably saw this today.
[00:10:45]  Their take on this, the Associated Press.
[00:10:47]  Harvard president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges, plagiarism.
[00:10:56]  What?
[00:10:57]  This is the one.
[00:10:59]  We may be missing the real story.
[00:11:02]  Conservatives past.
[00:11:04]  I'm not thinking, Matt Welsh, like over at Reason, this is not, this would not have been your headline.
[00:11:09]  Scroll down in that piece, too.
[00:11:12]  They also say that Chris Ruffo using the word scalp is a classic white supremacist player.
[00:11:20]  White colonialism.
[00:11:21]  Couldn't make less sense if you put it in a blender and poured it out of a fourth story walk-up window.
[00:11:29]  Even I actually went back just for kicks, Matt, just to see, you know, Wikipedia.
[00:11:34]  How does Wikipedia describe scalping, right?
[00:11:37]  And of course, the whole thing is about the Native Americans.
[00:11:40]  The whole thing is about the Native Americans, what they did.
[00:11:41]  It's not about the white colonialists who came over.
[00:11:45]  But the AP apparently didn't even simply consult Wikipedia.
[00:11:49]  They just decided to blame that too on the evil white man.
[00:11:52]  I want to highlight a word that you used at the intro, Megan, which is performs.
[00:11:58]  You were talking about various people were like performing their roles.
[00:12:01]  There is something so performative about a lot of the response to this.
[00:12:05]  It feels rote.
[00:12:06]  It feels trite.
[00:12:07]  It feels not necessarily even that much believed by the people doing it.
[00:12:11]  But part of what they are doing is trying to browbeat the media, right?
[00:12:17]  There's a like, oh, look, your allies in the media are performing well.
[00:12:21]  You fell for the Chris Ruffo tricksterism.
[00:12:23]  I can't believe you let them frame the issue here.
[00:12:27]  All of those great words are tells that they're trying to tell their kind of fellow traveler colleagues in elite institutions to act and behave in a certain way.
[00:12:38]  And that is why you get conservatives pounce headlines.
[00:12:41]  There was a recent every decade study that came out.
[00:12:45]  I think Syracuse University does it, of the self-identified political leanings and affiliations of journalists ad newspapers and other institutions like that.
[00:12:55]  And it was pretty stunning.
[00:12:58]  In the 1970s, 80s, 90s, there was more or less two self-identified Democrats for every one self-identified Republican.
[00:13:07]  It would go up and down, but it'd be in that range more or less.
[00:13:10]  And then between 10 years ago and now, it has gone to 11 to 1 Democrats to Republicans.
[00:13:18]  The reason why you get a conservatives pounce headline in a way that you would never get, you will not once see a Democrats or lefties pounce on pro-Republicas reporting about Clarence Thomas.
[00:13:30]  You will not see that.
[00:13:31]  Yet they pounce.
[00:13:32]  Yet pounce they do.
[00:13:34]  It is that because the conservatives or people right of center are so outnumbered on campus and now so outnumbered in the media that they stick out like sore thumbs, right?
[00:13:45]  It's wildly.
[00:13:47]  It's like being a Jew or a Muslim in France, a Catholic country, even though it's supposed to nominally not be Catholic, but you stick out.
[00:13:56]  You look different, you sound different, you wear different regalia.
[00:13:59]  And so people are going to notice you and that is going to be the story.
[00:14:02]  And it happens over and over again.
[00:14:04]  And then on these occasions, these rare occasions, when the people are in the crosshairs and they lose their jobs under criticism from people on the right, it is a scandal and they can't even wrap their minds around it as if they forgotten the entire summer of 2020 when every single institution under the sun lost its ever love and mind trying to purge poetry magazine of people who are insufficiently anti-racist,
[00:14:33]  museums in San Francisco because they had a meeting and they said this word this way instead of that word that way.
[00:14:39]  It was an absolute season of madness.
[00:14:42]  And it wasn't conservatives pouncing.
[00:14:44]  It was a left of center people absolutely in a purity spiral and purged trial situation.
[00:14:52]  So this is why they do that over and over again.
[00:14:55]  And they're trying to tell their friends in the media, who they just assume, not inaccurately necessarily, that they're on their team, like, don't do this next time.
[00:15:04]  Next time Chris Ruffo wants something, make sure to be in the opposite position, even if the facts are on his side.

=== Left-Wing Purity Spiral Madness (14:24) ===

[00:15:12]  The Kendi tweet was going after, the Kendi tweet he's going after that I read where he's like, this shouldn't happen.
[00:15:18]  And this is like real journalists shouldn't pile on.
[00:15:21]  And contrast that with what he was saying yesterday.
[00:15:24]  Racist mobs won't stop until they topple all black people from positions of power.
[00:15:30]  Really?
[00:15:31]  Sure.
[00:15:32]  We don't need evidence for that.
[00:15:33]  Just saying it.
[00:15:34]  But I mean, the thing about the Kendi stuff is that it does make people think twice.
[00:15:38]  I mean, what is Kendi offering as evidence that this is a racist mob?
[00:15:44]  Absolutely nothing.
[00:15:44]  He doesn't need to offer anything.
[00:15:46]  It's putting the fear of God into people about reporting something like this or going after a person like this.
[00:15:52]  If you do that, we're going to say something and we're going to accuse you of the most toxic charge in public life.
[00:15:58]  And we don't have to have any evidence for it.
[00:16:00]  I mean, the thing about that is the more that this happens, and you see this from 2020 to today, the more it happens, the more people become skeptical of this stuff.
[00:16:07]  The average person who comes across this and says, well, you know, she plagiarized.
[00:16:12]  I mean, that seems to be true.
[00:16:13]  And then there's 85,000 tweets and a bunch of, you know, people on MSNBC on Morning Joe saying, well, this reeks of racism.
[00:16:20]  Okay, well, then why didn't we sort of prove that?
[00:16:24]  I would say that the opposite is true because you need people like Chris Ruffo.
[00:16:29]  And I disagree with Chris Ruffo on a lot of things, but he's right on this.
[00:16:34]  You need somebody like Chris Ruffo because the media in Harvard in general don't do their jobs.
[00:16:39]  Keep something in mind.
[00:16:40]  This is very important to remember.
[00:16:42]  The allegations against Claudine Gay were first surfaced online in 2022, December of 2022, right after she was appointed.
[00:16:52]  This was obvious to a lot of people.
[00:16:53]  This was on an academic forum where people are anonymous, and they had sent these things to Harvard.
[00:16:58]  Harvard knew about this.
[00:16:59]  In October, the New York Post, which didn't run a story about this, asked Harvard about it.
[00:17:05]  And what did they do?
[00:17:06]  They dragged their feet and they said, well, you know, all of these things, which of course would get you kicked out as a student.
[00:17:12]  They threatened the post.
[00:17:13]  They threatened to sue the post for defamation if they published a story that was transparently true.
[00:17:18]  If a student does this, of course, they get kicked out.
[00:17:21]  That's known.
[00:17:22]  And keeping in mind also that Claudine Gay was not fired, right?
[00:17:26]  She resigned.
[00:17:27]  Now, did they push her?
[00:17:29]  It doesn't matter if they pushed her.
[00:17:31]  What they should do is publicly fire her to disassociate themselves.
[00:17:35]  She should be humiliated, to disassociate herself from academic fraud.
[00:17:40]  And this is academic fraud.
[00:17:41]  The problem with Harvard is that they're like an aging model, right?
[00:17:45]  They were once beautiful.
[00:17:47]  And now you can't really trade on that anymore.
[00:17:49]  But everyone's at Harvard, Harvard.
[00:17:50]  It's a reputation.
[00:17:51]  Is it a university?
[00:17:53]  They have great professors.
[00:17:54]  They're a year away from the Daily Mail taking the obese pictures of them in a candidate on the street.
[00:18:00]  And then they say that they look beautiful.
[00:18:01]  By the way, the Daily Mail are always like, look at how rabbits look.
[00:18:04]  But it's always like sarcastic.
[00:18:06]  Yeah, they don't mean it.
[00:18:06]  They always are gorgeous.
[00:18:08]  And you're all like, oh, come on.
[00:18:10]  We know what you're doing here.
[00:18:11]  They're not looking gorgeous.
[00:18:13]  You're looking well-fed.
[00:18:16]  You're so kind of.
[00:18:18]  So, can I ask you, let me ask you about this because the fact that she keeps her nearly million dollar salary, notwithstanding the number of instances is which she's been exposed as an intellectual thief, is stunning to me.
[00:18:30]  And she also committed the same sin as Liz McGill, who got fired from UPenn for just that, for just not being able to say that, well, yes, free speech, here are the legal standards, but yeah, you really shouldn't be calling for genocide against Jews on campus.
[00:18:44]  That's not a thing we want to see on Harvard.
[00:18:46]  Anyway, the other woman, the white woman, got fired just for that congressional testimony.
[00:18:49]  Claudine Gay did that, plus got exposed as an intellectual thief and is not fired.
[00:18:55]  She lost the presidency, but she's still at Harvard.
[00:18:58]  And listen to this.
[00:18:59]  Okay.
[00:18:59]  So the goodbye letter to Claudine from the Harvard Corporation, this group that's really kind of making the decisions behind the scene, the scenes, they've got people like, I think Ted Wells is on there, very respected attorney from Paul Weiss, people like that, muckety mucks, who probably went to Harvard and are supposed to be standard bearers.
[00:19:18]  Okay, I just highlighted a few phrases.
[00:19:22]  With great sadness, we write in light of her message announcing her intention to step down and resume her faculty position.
[00:19:29]  Throughout Gay's long and distinguished leadership as dean of social science and this other dean, she demonstrated the insight, the decisiveness, and the empathy that are her hallmark.
[00:19:38]  She has devoted her career to an institution whose ideals and priorities she has worked tirelessly to advance.
[00:19:45]  And we are grateful for the extraordinary contribution she has made and will continue to make as a leader, a teacher, a scholar, a mentor, and an inspiration to many.
[00:19:55]  I'm not done.
[00:19:57]  Her own message conveying her intention to step down eloquently underscores, by the way, that's racist.
[00:20:05]  I've heard all the liberals tell me you refer to a black person as eloquent or articulate.
[00:20:10]  You're racist.
[00:20:11]  You people are racists.
[00:20:13]  Okay.
[00:20:13]  Her own message conveys.
[00:20:15]  You are not articulate, by the way.
[00:20:17]  Eloquently underscores what those who have worked with her have long known.
[00:20:22]  Her commitment to the institution and its mission is deep and selfless.
[00:20:26]  We've accepted her resignation, but we do so with sorrow.
[00:20:30]  She has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks.
[00:20:37]  Okay, what are the attacks that she plagiarized?
[00:20:39]  She did.
[00:20:40]  So I'm looking for the evidence and here it is.
[00:20:43]  Some has played out in the public domain, but much has taken the form of repugnant and in some cases, racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls.
[00:20:56]  You can't see.
[00:20:57]  Who among us hasn't received that shit, right?
[00:21:00]  Like it's ridiculous.
[00:21:02]  And they end with, for today, we close by reiterating our gratitude to President Gay for her devoted service to Harvard.
[00:21:11]  Amazing.
[00:21:12]  I know.
[00:21:12]  It's pleased like, please don't call us racists.
[00:21:14]  Don't sue us.
[00:21:15]  Please love us, Black people.
[00:21:16]  We love Black people.
[00:21:18]  We love Claudine and we're not racists.
[00:21:20]  See all the nice things we said about her, except for the racist part about being eloquent.
[00:21:25]  I mean, it's really bizarre to see this sort of thing play out.
[00:21:29]  I mean, it's hard to believe that there aren't more skeletons there, that there isn't going to be more evidence of some sort of general academic misconduct or malfeasance.
[00:21:38]  Granted, her tenure was pretty short.
[00:21:42]  And she only published 15 articles, Camille.
[00:21:45]  But it's not a lot to look at.
[00:21:47]  I just, I can't imagine like going out on a limb for someone who was being forced to leave a position under these circumstances.
[00:21:57]  It's not as though the only people calling her out here are conservative activists.
[00:22:02]  There are plenty of people who are disheartened by this, who were completely incensed by the horrible performance that she had in front of Congress.
[00:22:11]  And it's not to say that there wasn't a whole bunch of performing going on in those congressional hearings, as there always is, but you're really well compensated.
[00:22:19]  You know what you're going into.
[00:22:21]  You ought to have better answers prepared than that.
[00:22:23]  She performed abysmally.
[00:22:25]  And as you correctly pointed out, plenty of people, or not plenty of people, but one other person was fired precisely for that.
[00:22:32]  That ought to be, that's grounds for termination, apparently.
[00:22:35]  That plus all of this plagiarism.
[00:22:39]  I mean, I just can't, I cannot fathom them doing this for many people.
[00:22:44]  It's interesting.
[00:22:46]  That's the joke.
[00:22:47]  I mean, if I had a nickel for every white man who said, like, I'm sure I'd get the same treatment, the same bending over backwards, not to fire me as Claudine Gay's been getting.
[00:22:57]  Never mind the beautiful, we're so sad and sorry letter from the board.
[00:23:02]  Never mind the million dollar almost salary that will continue to go into her coffers.
[00:23:08]  No white guy would have been given these accommodations.
[00:23:11]  And not even a white woman.
[00:23:12]  Look what happened to Liz Medill.
[00:23:14]  Bye.
[00:23:14]  Don't let the door hit you.
[00:23:17]  And she didn't have any plagiarism.
[00:23:18]  She only had the comments before Congress.
[00:23:21]  The amazing thing, by the way, is that as you pointed out, Megan, there's a somebody who's collected these online and it's absolutely baffling and dizzying to look at the number of people who have accused those who have exposed Claudine Gay as and by the way, most people just passing on messages that were out there for a very long time.
[00:23:39]  And as I think I mentioned on the show before, I mean, somebody sent me those allegations before they came out.
[00:23:44]  I mean, I knew about them before they came out and, you know, was starting to look into them and was beaten on that because other people are faster than me.
[00:23:52]  But when everyone is out there saying this must be racist, it's absolutely a racist plot.
[00:23:57]  And the amazing thing is what precipitated all of this is Claudian Gay in front of Congress saying that calling for the extermination of Jews is not a violation of policy.
[00:24:08]  I love the fact that that might not be problematic.
[00:24:11]  That might not be problematic, but this is racist.
[00:24:14]  But what she said, she was.
[00:24:15]  But back to Camille's point, that she, even in her takedown resignation, is going back to her deep commitment to academic freedom and free speech.
[00:24:25]  And she also exaggerates racism too.
[00:24:26]  Selective.
[00:24:27]  Yeah.
[00:24:28]  It's a lie.
[00:24:29]  She played the racism card, which we read yesterday in her resignation saying like she'd been the victim of racism.
[00:24:35]  But I mean, all of it's a lie.
[00:24:37]  She wasn't the victim of racism.
[00:24:39]  Harvard doesn't stand for free speech or academic freedom and hasn't in years.
[00:24:44]  Go ahead, Matt Welsh.
[00:24:45]  Camille's colleagues over at FHIR about 10 days ago published a really interesting Twitter thread.
[00:24:51]  And I'm sure it's a full document on their website saying, okay, let's make something out of this controversy constructive.
[00:24:59]  Here is what Harvard and other universities can do to recommit themselves to free speech and free inquiry and a truly kind of diverse level of thought and understanding.
[00:25:10]  Many things to commend about that.
[00:25:13]  And I have, you won't see a shred of that in that long and anguished letter, which that's why it took her so long to resign.
[00:25:20]  Is that they had to write that letter so long with so many adjectives to get there.
[00:25:24]  And she can't write on her own.
[00:25:26]  So it's there's nothing to copy from.
[00:25:30]  What are you going to do?
[00:25:32]  It is baffling, not baffling.
[00:25:34]  It is sadly unsurprising that the same people who are saying, oh, it's all about academic freedom have not been there on any kind of front lines when it comes to opening up academia for free speech.
[00:25:46]  And that means also understanding something that seems to get lost not just on campuses, but in the streets of New York for damn sakes, is that there's a difference between having a conversation, having a civil discourse, et cetera, and engaging in vandalism and illegal conduct and violent confrontation.
[00:26:09]  This bedeviled the university professors when they were in front of Congress.
[00:26:13]  It continues to absolutely flummox college administrators everywhere.
[00:26:17]  And it seems to confuse a lot of people who are trying to get to the airport, New York City without being encumbered by 400 snotty-nosed, bedraggled, nothing birds.
[00:26:29]  Terrorists.
[00:26:30]  They were terrorists.
[00:26:31]  You shut down JFK for your stupid ass political point.
[00:26:34]  You're a terrorist.
[00:26:36]  I mean, my at this point to Gitmo with you.
[00:26:39]  If it's that easy to close the Brooklyn Bridge, maybe I'll do it to protest Bobby Grinch not being in the Hall of Fame.
[00:26:45]  That's right.
[00:26:46]  We don't need to go to Gitmo, Monihana.
[00:26:48]  What we need to do is put them in a room and expose them to like 48 hours of baby shark, just over throwing them loose.
[00:26:56]  But I would just say that you're right about that, but I would do that in Gitmo.
[00:27:01]  One thing that we haven't mentioned, by the way, when we're talking about fire, is that Harvard was ranked last in all of its free speech rankings last year.
[00:27:10]  And I think it was the lowest.
[00:27:11]  They had like a negative score.
[00:27:13]  And the other thing about Claudia and Gay is somebody who cares about academic freedom.
[00:27:16]  There are two professors that were on the other side of her campaigns to ruin their careers.
[00:27:22]  And that was Roland Fryer.
[00:27:23]  And I think the other one was Ronald Sullivan, the law professor.
[00:27:27]  The dean, who they didn't extend his contract again.
[00:27:30]  He's still there, I believe, but they didn't re-up his contract.
[00:27:34]  And, you know, he did the simple thing.
[00:27:36]  And by the way, the Harvard Law School has some really, really smart and interesting people in it.
[00:27:40]  And they have actually defended academic freedom as a group.
[00:27:44]  They've released statements and they released a statement in defense of Sullivan.
[00:27:47]  And Sullivan Sinn, by the way, was acting as defense counsel for Harvey Weinstein.
[00:27:53]  And the people at Harvard Law School had to point out this is one of the foundational principles of our legal system is bad people get representation too.
[00:28:03]  And she didn't understand that.
[00:28:04]  And now it seems to be a little bit of crying wolf.
[00:28:07]  I mean, look, on the scale of sins you get dragged into a criminal court for serial rape and sexual assault is very, very bad.
[00:28:16]  But there are some worse ones.
[00:28:18]  And I'm sure any criminal defense attorney, especially those who are at an institution like Harvard, they give their eye teeth to be involved in a case.
[00:28:25]  Well, you know what?
[00:28:26]  I know this for a fact.
[00:28:26]  Alan Dershowitz was a Harvard law professor for 50 years.
[00:28:30]  He defended Klaus von Buehl.
[00:28:31]  He defended O.J. Simpson.
[00:28:33]  He didn't get kicked out of Harvard.
[00:28:35]  I mean, just like on the rank of sins, I'm just going to put murder and nearly beheading your ex-wife above sexual assault like Harvey did.
[00:28:43]  So, I mean, like the modern day standard, what do they think a criminal defense attorney does?
[00:28:47]  Just sits in his room and thinks about new amendments we can potentially push for on the Bill of Rights.
[00:28:52]  Like they defend accused criminals.
[00:28:55]  It was absurd what they did to that guy, Sullivan.
[00:28:57]  He got punished for something he was doing off campus, which was literally his job.
[00:29:02]  And by the way, I just had, I just, the parallel just occurred to me, the OJ parallel, which was the entire defense was because Mark Furman was the one that found this and he had bad personal views, he couldn't have done this other thing, which is essentially what we're getting right now, right?
[00:29:17]  The person who delivered this information, I think, is bad.
[00:29:20]  I'm not comparing him to Mark Furrow, any of these people to Mark Furman, but they're bad.
[00:29:23]  So therefore, the larger point is moot is null and void.
[00:29:27]  You're talking about the attacks on Chris Ruffo.
[00:29:30]  Yeah, or any of these people.
[00:29:31]  And I don't, I'm not saying, and again, I'm not comparing them in any way.
[00:29:34]  No, God, Mark Furman.
[00:29:35]  I'm just saying, but it's the same.

=== Elite Schools and Last Scandals (14:07) ===

[00:29:37]  It's the same instant.
[00:29:38]  The person, that person said the thing or found the thing.
[00:29:41]  But so what was that person actually?
[00:29:43]  What was their motivation?
[00:29:43]  Who are they?
[00:29:44]  And that is more important than the actual crime.
[00:29:46]  Who cares?
[00:29:47]  Yeah.
[00:29:49]  If she didn't give them the fodder, he couldn't have done what he did.
[00:29:53]  And it wasn't just Chris Ruffo, right?
[00:29:55]  It was Aaron, is it Siberium over at Washington Free Beacon?
[00:29:58]  I don't want to scrub his name.
[00:30:00]  He did a lot of really great work on it.
[00:30:01]  Yeah.
[00:30:01]  He did a great job.
[00:30:02]  I was just texting with Eliana Johnson about him and she said, he's a brilliant kid from Yale, has a heart of gold.
[00:30:12]  He's relatively young.
[00:30:13]  And this guy was critical in exposing this woman's plagiarism.
[00:30:17]  Like, can we just spend a minute on your plagiarism expose, Monihan?
[00:30:21]  Because this happened in 2019 when I was off.
[00:30:23]  But I do remember this happening to the New York Times woman, right?
[00:30:26]  The editor?
[00:30:27]  Yeah, I've done a few.
[00:30:28]  I've done about four or five of them.
[00:30:30]  It became my beat for a while.
[00:30:32]  Like, do you just take anybody's random book or post?
[00:30:35]  And is there like the plagiarism machine?
[00:30:37]  No.
[00:30:38]  Like, how do you?
[00:30:38]  I don't.
[00:30:38]  There are some people, I guess, that use those things.
[00:30:40]  I mean, there's one that I've been told that is effective, but it's really, really expensive.
[00:30:44]  I don't use it.
[00:30:44]  There are ways of doing it.
[00:30:46]  There are ways of finding like what does Harvard call it?
[00:30:49]  Duplicative language, that sort of thing.
[00:30:52]  And I've done it for a couple of, a couple of four or five people, maybe five or six, actually.
[00:30:57]  And I don't know.
[00:30:57]  The reason is because I can always tell.
[00:31:00]  There's always a way of telling when, particularly in certain type of writing, when you have shifts in language, you have shifts in style.
[00:31:07]  There's somebody in particular that is in this universe.
[00:31:10]  It's so funny.
[00:31:10]  Chris Ruffo put something up and said, I'm going to offer a bounty for more people.
[00:31:15]  And I'm like, well, you maybe should drop me a line because I got a few that I've discovered.
[00:31:20]  And I'm just like, you know what?
[00:31:21]  I don't really have time for this at the moment.
[00:31:23]  But the thing that bothers me so much about it is that writing is really hard.
[00:31:29]  And I think that people don't really get that is that, you know, writing an email is easy.
[00:31:33]  Writing a piece, writing a book, writing a long article is difficult for a lot of reasons.
[00:31:39]  And I don't like people who cheat at it because I've, you know, it's like William F. Buckley, who famously produced, you know, 10 columns a week, incredibly prolific writer, said he hated writing more than anything else in life, but he did it so much that he could just kind of dash these things off in the back of his car on his way back to Connecticut.
[00:31:56]  And that's kind of how he wrote, you know, but he didn't like it because writing isn't fun.
[00:32:01]  And sometimes when you're not having fun doing that, I maybe people have this instinct where it's easier to plagiarize now because you can cut and paste than before you'd have to type out these long passages.
[00:32:11]  And it's also easier to get caught.
[00:32:12]  But people don't think about that because most people aren't paying attention.
[00:32:17]  They were paying attention to her because obviously she was under the microscope.
[00:32:21]  When she was appointed president of Harvard, there were people in her field that were like, they started actually with the numbers.
[00:32:28]  They said, you know, her data sets don't look right.
[00:32:31]  And then it came to plagiarism and things like that.
[00:32:34]  But when it came to something like Jill Abrams, then who is the former editor of the New York Times?
[00:32:38]  She wrote a book that had a couple of chapters about the place that I used to work.
[00:32:42]  And what piqued my interest is that most of the stuff wasn't true.
[00:32:46]  And then I said, where did she get this?
[00:32:48]  And the first time you see it, you say, oh, God, there's a lot more of this here because the rule of plagiarism, no one ever does it once.
[00:32:57]  No one ever does it for a single sentence.
[00:33:00]  Fascinating.
[00:33:00]  They do it always, you know, throughout.
[00:33:03]  And notice with her language too, and this is what drives me crazy about the people who are defending her.
[00:33:08]  It's not, you know, language that is cut and paste.
[00:33:11]  So when I write, I actually do, I have a system where I label things.
[00:33:14]  If I've cut and paste something, this is interesting and I want to like reincorporate this or this thought or give credit to it.
[00:33:20]  I make sure it's labeled.
[00:33:21]  Sometimes people mess up.
[00:33:22]  That can happen.
[00:33:23]  And it happens once.
[00:33:24]  That's what happens once.
[00:33:25]  But the other thing is that it's usually exactly the same.
[00:33:28]  If it is not exactly the same, as in the case of Claudine Gay, what they do is they try to mask it.
[00:33:34]  They try to change a few words here and there, which means if you shroud the sentence in quotation marks on Google, and a lot of your listeners might know this, it'll give you exact results, but they're never exact results.
[00:33:44]  There's ways of finding this stuff where all the language is fairly similar.
[00:33:48]  The verbs change slightly, you know, this to the adjective might slightly change.
[00:33:52]  But the other argument that I've heard quite a bit is that this is common.
[00:33:57]  This is common in academia.
[00:33:58]  Is this common at Harvard?
[00:34:00]  Is this really what you're paying $75,000 a year for your student, your kid to go to a school where people aren't clever enough to come up with their own language?
[00:34:08]  I mean, do you think Christopher Hitchens, do you think Martin Amos, some of my favorite writers ever copied a sentence of their life?
[00:34:14]  No, they couldn't keep the sentences in them.
[00:34:17]  They were spilling out constantly, you know?
[00:34:19]  And these people are just like, it is hard.
[00:34:21]  And I want to be in this world.
[00:34:22]  I want to be an academic and there's shortcuts to take.
[00:34:25]  But just remember, if you're trying to do that, you're shortcuts, there's always an asshole like me who's going to try to catch you.
[00:34:31]  You'd rather somebody go like, we had an interesting discussion with our friends the other day.
[00:34:36]  And we were talking, and this guy's a very successful businessman.
[00:34:40]  And we were talking about how so many of these schools just want to build the perfect SAT score.
[00:34:44]  That's all they want to do.
[00:34:45]  They want your, you know, they will teach to the test and they'll make sure that your kid comes out with, you know, the top X percentile on the SAT.
[00:34:53]  And my friends were saying that doesn't produce a leader.
[00:34:56]  That's exactly right.
[00:34:57]  Like how it produces somebody who's very book smart or at least looks it, you know, who maybe can write the best appellate court brief.
[00:35:04]  But you need, in order to run a company or lead a team, you need a whole different set of skills.
[00:35:11]  And it's almost like they're just looking for the wrong criteria to begin with.
[00:35:14]  You know, it would have been much better for Claudine Gay if she said, I'm not really not a writer.
[00:35:19]  That's not my thing.
[00:35:20]  I teach well.
[00:35:21]  I can excite a room.
[00:35:22]  I'm inspirational to some people and leaned into whatever quality she really had.
[00:35:26]  I don't know Claudine Gay.
[00:35:27]  This is based on what I've read about her over the past 24 hours.
[00:35:30]  But instead, she had to, she had to defraud people.
[00:35:32]  She had to pretend that she was the thing other than what she was, and she got caught.
[00:35:37]  A quick thing on that, by the way, and sorry to interrupt and step on you guys here, but the thing about Claudine Gay and why I pointed out that she went to Phillips Exeter, one of the best schools in America, and then a series of other Beth schools.
[00:35:52]  One of the things that drives me crazy about this idea of representation and diversity is it's never really diversity.
[00:36:00]  And when people say that, they're talking about diversity of thought.
[00:36:02]  I'm like, no, but I'm actually not even talking about that.
[00:36:04]  I'm talking about diversity of background.
[00:36:06]  And what class in particular, and every time I worked at a place, we would hire, make sure that there was a Hispanic person, a Black person, and they all had parents that were doctors and they all had parents that sent them to Harvard.
[00:36:21]  There are kids, by the way, and this is true.
[00:36:24]  And if you don't think it's true, maybe you're the racist, is that there are kids in the projects, their kids come from really, really tough backgrounds who are insanely creative and insanely bright.
[00:36:34]  And if given the opportunity, because the public schools, particularly in the city of New York, where I live, are so terrible, they don't get those opportunities.
[00:36:43]  The teachers' unions are part of the problem there.
[00:36:45]  There's a lot of problems.
[00:36:46]  But you look at the kids that are dealing with that in those boot heels on their necks.
[00:36:52]  And what do they do?
[00:36:53]  They come out and they don't have the best SAT scores.
[00:36:55]  As you pointed out, Megan, they're trying to keep that 1600 or whatever it's been inflated to now.
[00:37:00]  They're trying to keep people, you know, hard to get into, easy to get out of.
[00:37:03]  It's like, no, no, you should be looking at kids who are, you know, come from disadvantaged backgrounds, regardless of race, by the way, and kind of try to help them out because those opportunities are sometimes those people have an incredibly interesting perspective, but aren't going to be booksmarked.
[00:37:19]  What I always notice is what these idiots care about is getting a Hispanic person who happens to be the ambassador from Mexico's daughter.
[00:37:27]  And that actually happened to me.
[00:37:29]  Somebody who was like, on the same front, yeah, I went to Syracuse and my college boyfriend was the captain of the lacrosse team there that won three national champions championships.
[00:37:40]  And in the field of lacrosse, you know, it's like Syracuse.
[00:37:44]  Of course he was.
[00:37:44]  He was.
[00:37:45]  And in the field of lacrosse, it's mostly all these white shoe colleges that produce lacrosse players, especially today.
[00:37:52]  Back then, they had more blue-collar guys who love lacrosse.
[00:37:55]  Like he was from Yorktown Heights, New York, which is a nice suburb.
[00:37:58]  But back then, he was, I mean, he was the youngest of nine children in a two-bedroom house, a New York City cop as a dad.
[00:38:04]  It was not privileged.
[00:38:06]  My point is that you're not going to be able to talk about it a lot, Megan.
[00:38:08]  You know, a lot.
[00:38:10]  Does Doug know this guy?
[00:38:11]  Doug does.
[00:38:12]  Doug does know about this guy.
[00:38:14]  But anyway, here's the point about this guy and the others on the team.
[00:38:17]  All these guys, even though we were all at Syracuse, which is not Yale, would get recruited to go to these big banks in New York to work in sales and trading, right?
[00:38:27]  Because they knew these guys knew how to deal with other guys to have a good time to sort of not whatever.
[00:38:36]  They might call it bro culture today, but that would be diminishing of these guys.
[00:38:39]  They weren't that way.
[00:38:40]  They were just cool guys who knew how to interact in a way that would make others feel comfortable, others want to be with them.
[00:38:47]  They weren't looking for necessarily the smartest book smart guy.
[00:38:52]  And I actually think that system could work, you know, and it could be open to more guys than just the white kids who are in private schools around New York.
[00:38:59]  You know what I mean?
[00:39:00]  If you did find guys with this personality or this ability to sort of reach out to others and give them those jobs, they could crush.
[00:39:07]  They don't, not everybody has to be able to write the perfect appellate court brief.
[00:39:12]  I think it's looking at Harvard, it is like a lot of these institutions, Phillips Exeter is one of them.
[00:39:18]  It's useful to look at them as kind of the, they are elite factories.
[00:39:24]  They produce elite.
[00:39:26]  There's always going to, whether or not the actual level of talent, the quality of person we might consider elite, but the most elite people in the country are going to gather in a university setting and perpetuate their status for their kids.
[00:39:43]  That's just going to happen whether we like it or not.
[00:39:45]  I happen to not be a huge fan.
[00:39:48]  But the people who rise to the top of that system are going to reflect the changes in what the values are that elite institutions now favor.
[00:40:02]  And I think in that sense, it's not a surprise that we see the emergence of someone like Claudine Gay as opposed to Lawrence Summers, right?
[00:40:10]  Larry Summers, who was a predecessor of hers.
[00:40:14]  He is like a total 90s guy, right?
[00:40:16]  There couldn't be someone who's more sort of neoliberal, bunch of books, you know, academic, sort of rough, Clintonites, whatever, right?
[00:40:25]  Like he just smells like the 1990s version of what elite Harvard is.
[00:40:30]  She looks like the elite of 2020, right?
[00:40:33]  We've seen in all of these institutions this incredible creation of a bureaucracy that has figured out how to talk in this completely tortured language that is inadmissible for normal people.
[00:40:46]  I mean, that's one of the reasons why the congressional meetup was so incredibly fascinating to watch and disastrous is because these people who learned an entire system that's insane and the lingo that's associated with it that is designed to repel kind of normal people.
[00:41:03]  You have to like go intricately through all of these different things.
[00:41:06]  She is a reflection of what the elite is.
[00:41:09]  And that is why this is not the last of one of these types of scandals.
[00:41:13]  It's not necessarily going to be plagiarism.
[00:41:15]  It's going to be that the systems that have been built up, particularly over the last 10 years in elite institutions and not just in academia, in media and a lot of other places as well, those systems are kind of crazy.
[00:41:28]  It's a lot of bureaucracy.
[00:41:29]  It's a lot of diversity, equity, and inclusion, mumbo jumbo.
[00:41:33]  And before that all gets rolled back, and I don't think it'll ever get fully rolled back, we're going to look around and say, my God.
[00:41:39]  I mean, the most interesting thing to me in terms of who's coming out of this unscathed is Columbia University.
[00:41:44]  How the hell did Columbia University escape by the last two years?
[00:41:48]  They produce more of that badness in the system through the Teachers College, through the Center for International Public Affairs, through the Journalism School.
[00:41:58]  They are producing these kind of elite ideas and attitudes that I think have been largely poisonous in the system of elite America.
[00:42:08]  And it's going to take a long time for that to be rolled back.
[00:42:10]  It's not a surprise that you see people rise up who just don't seem all of that normal or great or impressive under even the 1990s rules of what elite used to be.
[00:42:22]  But that's because elites themselves have changed.
[00:42:25]  And this is what they're producing.
[00:42:26]  And it is repellent.
[00:42:29]  I wanted to say one other thing.
[00:42:30]  I'm going to take a break, but I got to give a shout out to Colin Wright.
[00:42:33]  He's, among other things, at the Manhattan Institute.
[00:42:37]  And he predicted on December 19th, the following.
[00:42:43]  Harvard president Claudine Gay will resign, but she will not admit any wrongdoing.
[00:42:47]  Again, this is December 19th, right?
[00:42:49]  That she resigned on January 2nd or 3rd, whatever it was yesterday.
[00:42:52]  She will resign, but she will not admit any wrongdoing.
[00:42:54]  Instead, she will claim to be the victim of a racist right-wing witch hunt that is impacting her mental health and causing a needless distraction for students and faculty.
[00:43:04]  Her resignation, just give you a couple of highlights.
[00:43:07]  It's become clear that it's in the best interest of Harvard for me to resign so the community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge, which a focus on the institution rather than any individual.
[00:43:18]  She goes on.
[00:43:19]  Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor to bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.
[00:43:38]  Colin Wright nailed it.

=== Dashboard Lies and Gas Tanks (04:55) ===

[00:43:44]  So you guys, I won't say I almost didn't make it to today's show.
[00:43:48]  I did make it with plenty of time, but my team has told me that they are convinced one of these days I'm not going to make it because I have a little issue of keeping my car's gas tank off of E.
[00:44:03]  And I am just like Kramer.
[00:44:06]  I feel the need to push it.
[00:44:07]  I've got a point.
[00:44:08]  I do not fill up that tank until it's dangerous, until it's told bad for the engine.
[00:44:14]  It's something in me.
[00:44:15]  And one of the commentators on Twitter was saying, you're either one or the other.
[00:44:18]  You're either, as soon as it gets below half a tank, you got to go refill your gas tank, or you're like I am, like Kramer is.
[00:44:26]  Who could forget this from Seinfeld?
[00:44:28]  Watch.
[00:44:30]  There's still some overlap between the needle and the slash below the E. Where are you going to go?
[00:44:35]  Well, I've been in the slash many times.
[00:44:37]  This is Nikki.
[00:44:38]  It was good.
[00:44:39]  Just put it out of your mind.
[00:44:44]  Ever been completely below the slash?
[00:44:47]  Well, I almost did once, and I blacked out.
[00:44:52]  What a crazy thing.
[00:44:53]  This is me.
[00:44:54]  This is me.
[00:44:55]  And unfortunately for my husband, Doug, he's in the other camp.
[00:44:58]  So he gets very stressed out by my practice.
[00:45:00]  I get in the car this morning and take, I had to take my little guy to school.
[00:45:03]  Doug took me other two.
[00:45:05]  And I see that the gas tank, I've only got 14 miles less left.
[00:45:09]  And I know his school is about 11 miles away.
[00:45:12]  So I'm like, I'm good.
[00:45:13]  I'm fine.
[00:45:13]  I can, I could.
[00:45:14]  You got to get back.
[00:45:16]  But then, well, I figured I'd just go to the gas station at some point after.
[00:45:20]  And I didn't bother to see whether it was in three miles of, you know, where the school was.
[00:45:24]  But I know the dashboard lies.
[00:45:27]  I don't believe the dashboard of the gas fuel tank gauge.
[00:45:31]  And so we're driving.
[00:45:32]  I'm like, Thatcher, you know, I'm down to seven.
[00:45:36]  He's like, how far away is the school?
[00:45:38]  I'm like, I think it might be about seven.
[00:45:41]  Okay.
[00:45:42]  It goes down.
[00:45:43]  It's down at two.
[00:45:44]  By the time I get to drop him off, it's at two, which I took a picture of and sent to poor Doug, which was really mean because he just drove up his adjudah.
[00:45:51]  There it was at two.
[00:45:53]  Two.
[00:45:54]  Are you kidding me?
[00:45:54]  I had the seatbelt signs on because my little guy had gotten out of the back seat and he was going into school at 8 a.m.
[00:46:00]  So now I got two miles to get to the gas, but I don't believe it.
[00:46:02]  I know there's a reserve in there that they're not telling me about because they built it for people like me.
[00:46:07]  So I kept going.
[00:46:09]  And look what came up on the gauge next.
[00:46:11]  Look, this I've never seen before.
[00:46:13]  Look.
[00:46:14]  Can you see it?
[00:46:15]  No.
[00:46:16]  We'll zoom in.
[00:46:18]  It's a nothing.
[00:46:19]  It's literally a flatline.
[00:46:21]  That's just right here.
[00:46:24]  It's just gone.
[00:46:25]  You went into a different drugs, you know, for their kicks.
[00:46:30]  There's other things to do.
[00:46:31]  But you know what happened?
[00:46:32]  I dropped him off.
[00:46:34]  His last words to me, he's 10, was were good luck.
[00:46:37]  You're going to need it.
[00:46:39]  And off I went.
[00:46:40]  They said that the nearest gas thing was, I think, 11 miles away.
[00:46:44]  I was on E for a long time, just like Kramer.
[00:46:46]  Made it.
[00:46:47]  No problem.
[00:46:47]  Look what happened by 8.16.
[00:46:49]  Can you show him the picture?
[00:46:51]  Stay by.
[00:46:53]  So proud.
[00:46:54]  454 miles.
[00:46:56]  Boom.
[00:46:56]  By HR.
[00:46:57]  A menace, Miss Kelly.
[00:46:59]  Megan.
[00:47:01]  Megan, do you need to borrow?
[00:47:02]  Do you need to borrow some money or something?
[00:47:04]  Like, I can demo you if you need a little for like gas money or whatever.
[00:47:08]  I win.
[00:47:09]  You're winning.
[00:47:11]  I'm winning life.
[00:47:12]  It's just less time at the gas station.
[00:47:14]  That's how it feels.
[00:47:15]  Are you information?
[00:47:18]  This is, there's a parallel between people who do this and people who get to the airport like three minutes before the plane leaves.
[00:47:24]  They're shocking.
[00:47:26]  I always say, I'm not happy unless my lungs are burning when I sit down on the plane and I'm like, nailed it.
[00:47:32]  Yeah, that's you didn't nail it.
[00:47:34]  You didn't nail it.
[00:47:35]  There's going to be a video, by the way, that goes viral of you screaming at a gate agent.
[00:47:40]  Yeah.
[00:47:41]  No.
[00:47:42]  I don't have to because my system works perfectly.
[00:47:44]  He wants to go three hours in the dance.
[00:47:46]  God forbid we have the family with us and an international trip.
[00:47:49]  You could bring a sleeping bag with the amount of time he wants to leave between us and the flight.
[00:47:55]  He and Abby are the same.
[00:47:56]  And Steve Krakauer and Debbie Murphy, my producers, are very, very stressed out.
[00:48:01]  They're texting me saying, Debbie Murphy says, this is just like when you're on the air and you won't rap in our days at Fox.
[00:48:07]  She said the dashboard is the problem.
[00:48:09]  It states, please refuel.
[00:48:11]  For you, it needs to be, I'm serious, refuel now.
[00:48:15]  Are you kidding?
[00:48:15]  I see the number on the screen ticking down now.
[00:48:17]  Can I just keep talking?
[00:48:18]  If it goes to see, I'll push it, right?
[00:48:21]  Who's a reserve?
[00:48:22]  Dash needs to say, MK, you're not going to make it.
[00:48:26]  Seriously, right now.
[00:48:28]  Go.
[00:48:29]  We got eight minutes.
[00:48:30]  I could introduce a whole new topic.
[00:48:32]  Oh, but they really don't want me to.
[00:48:34]  Stand by.
[00:48:35]  We'll be right back.

=== Immigration Policy in Crisis (15:45) ===

[00:48:40]  Bit of breaking news right now.
[00:48:41]  I called for the impeachment of Mayorkas at the beginning of this hour.
[00:48:44]  Guess what?
[00:48:45]  They're doing it.
[00:48:46]  They're doing like, what else should we wish for, guys?
[00:48:49]  What's on our list?
[00:48:50]  Oh, my God.
[00:48:52]  Peace on earth.
[00:48:53]  Here's good will towards the list.
[00:48:54]  Here's the Epstein list.
[00:48:55]  All right.
[00:48:56]  Yes.
[00:48:57]  A lacrosse player from Syracuse.
[00:49:01]  Here's the release.
[00:49:02]  House Republicans moving forward with impeachment proceedings against DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
[00:49:09]  The proceedings will begin January 10th with the House Homeland Security Committee holding a first impeachment hearing.
[00:49:14]  A committee spokesperson told USA Today, Punch Bowl News, first reported news of the hearing.
[00:49:19]  This concerns allegations that Mayorkas has been derelict in his duty of managing the border for Reuters.
[00:49:25]  They've been trying to get this done in the House, and they haven't actually had the GOP votes.
[00:49:30]  There's been like some eight holdouts saying, ah, he's like, he's derelict in his duties, but it doesn't rise to the level of impeachment.
[00:49:37]  And now things appear to be swinging the other way.
[00:49:42]  So yeah, we'll see what happens with him.
[00:49:45]  I mean, look, I'm just horrified by these numbers.
[00:49:47]  They're terrible.
[00:49:49]  We have no border.
[00:49:50]  The number was 302,000 in this past month, in the month of December.
[00:49:55]  302,000 undocumented migrants coming across the border.
[00:50:00]  That doesn't include the Godaways.
[00:50:02]  It literally is almost now equal with and about to exceed the birth rate in the United States.
[00:50:10]  More people coming in from other countries than are being born to American mothers.
[00:50:15]  Like there's something deeply wrong about this.
[00:50:17]  And maybe, maybe they're targeting the wrong guy because it's really his boss who ultimately should be directing the administration's immigration policy.
[00:50:26]  But even you guys is more, I don't know if I, if it's fair to say, you're more open borders guys, but you're libertarians.
[00:50:32]  You, even you have to see that this is, this is out of control.
[00:50:37]  Completely out of control.
[00:50:38]  I mean, 300,000 in a month is absolutely astonishing.
[00:50:42]  I mean, you have a border, you don't.
[00:50:44]  I mean, it's a very simple proposition.
[00:50:46]  If you want to have a border, you have to have some measure of enforcement.
[00:50:49]  And it strikes most people.
[00:50:51]  And by the way, this is true of both Democrats and Republicans.
[00:50:54]  I mean, I'm keeping in mind in the past, you know, Bernie Sanders was somebody very, very critical of more open borders because the left-wing argument always was that more immigrant labor pushes down working class wages.
[00:51:08]  And there is some evidence to suggest that that is absolutely true.
[00:51:11]  So, I mean, there are a number of ramifications from this across the board, whether it's from, you know, welfare state stuff, whether it's, you know, job market stuff.
[00:51:20]  But beyond anything is that there has to be some system.
[00:51:24]  And most people are totally baffled by this.
[00:51:25]  And I've talked to a few voters about this when I was in Texas doing a story about this.
[00:51:31]  And by the way, all of them are Hispanic.
[00:51:33]  That, you know, they're baffled by the fact that you cannot apprehend somebody and send them back.
[00:51:40]  And this is beyond, you know, something about seeking asylum, et cetera.
[00:51:43]  And I think, Megan, you played on the show the other day.
[00:51:46]  I can't remember who it was saying that, you know, everybody has a right to come to America in secret.
[00:51:51]  The mayor of Boston, Michelle.
[00:51:53]  The mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, who loves having parties that white people can't attend.
[00:51:59]  It's a great place, by the way.
[00:52:01]  But, you know, this kind of thing is baffling to people.
[00:52:04]  And it should be something that when there, an open border is an open border.
[00:52:08]  I mean, when I was down on the border, you had Governor Abbott who was sending the Texas Rangers and everybody out there to try to do something.
[00:52:15]  And when I talked to these people, they said, there is nothing we can do.
[00:52:18]  We're absolutely overwhelmed.
[00:52:19]  And I think that was the week where there was the false story that migrants were being whipped.
[00:52:26]  And that is, you know, they're trying to apprehend people.
[00:52:30]  And, you know, that's what these people have to deal with when they're in this job.
[00:52:34]  And apprehending them is kind of useless anyway.
[00:52:38]  Well, because Texas actually had to pass a law.
[00:52:41]  They just passed a law saying, we're going to take care of it.
[00:52:45]  We're going to start arresting illegals and we're going to deport them.
[00:52:47]  And the feds, the Biden administration has stepped in to say, oh, no, you won't because of federalism.
[00:52:53]  And unfortunately, the Biden administration is right.
[00:52:57]  That is the way the Constitution works.
[00:52:59]  When the feds haven't legislated, the states are free to legislate as they want.
[00:53:03]  When the feds have the responsibility of the legislating and have legislated, though not in the way most of us would like to see, you can't, it's their field to legislate in and they preempt the state law.
[00:53:14]  That's really the way immigration works.
[00:53:16]  And I applaud Governor Abbott for trying to do something about this, Matt, but that's not going to work.
[00:53:22]  It's going to be struck down in the courts.
[00:53:24]  And Texas has been really suffering, trying to just do anything.
[00:53:30]  Even if they got rid of Maorcus, the next guy's going to just be pushing Biden's policies too.
[00:53:36]  That power that the president has and that the executive branch has was expanded by Donald Trump.
[00:53:41]  So in the defense of his own more restrictionist policies.
[00:53:46]  So it's just always an object lesson in the way that power works in Washington.
[00:53:50]  If your guy gets more power, the guy that you hate is also going to get more power.
[00:53:54]  He's going to use it, use it in a different way.
[00:53:57]  One thing that is always brought to mind about this and one reason why we're in this cycle, right?
[00:54:03]  Take a broader view or a longer view of 30 years or 35 years.
[00:54:09]  35 years ago, there wasn't a mile even really of a wall or fencing.
[00:54:13]  Now we have, what, 650 miles of some kind of barrier, some of it concrete, some of it imposing, some of it less so.
[00:54:22]  When people get mad about illegal immigration, which they are right now, and I understand that, and the chaos is infuriating and just kind of horrific to grapple with, the instinct too often, in my view, is that they want to restrict legal immigration in those moments.
[00:54:42]  Donald Trump did everything in his power to basically stop America as a destination country for refugees, which is completely ahistorical.
[00:54:50]  That's not what we used to do in the 70s and 80s under both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
[00:54:55]  We were the primary destination for refugee populations who could totally enrich the country, right?
[00:55:00]  From Cuba, from Vietnam, from Russia, from Iran came to this country.
[00:55:05]  We no longer are that country anymore.
[00:55:09]  Part of what happens when you restrict the ways for legal immigrants to go in is that, of course, people find their way around in the other 1300 miles that's not fenced off.
[00:55:19]  They go around the normal way.
[00:55:21]  Like there's a, we did a magazine cover or graphic when I was editor of Reason called Get in Line, Now Stay Out.
[00:55:29]  It's a bit cheeky, but if you look at the actual flowchart of what would happen if you were a Filipino wanting to come here and immigrate legally, perfectly legally as a nurse.
[00:55:38]  This is something that people have done for a long time because we have a nursing shortage or we've decided that we have a nursing shortage.
[00:55:45]  That's a longer story about the nurses union in California.
[00:55:48]  But so if you did everything right, it takes 19 years.
[00:55:52]  That's not really a way to get people to come in legally.
[00:55:57]  But it's counterintuitive to say that, oh, we need more legal immigration to have less illegal immigration.
[00:56:02]  People already, you've already lost the plot with a lot of people.
[00:56:04]  And so we go into these cycles now where both sides, in my opinion, love the issue.
[00:56:10]  They don't love solving the issue.
[00:56:11]  Democrats love to say, yeah, we're here for the dreamers.
[00:56:14]  We're just like trying to do all this.
[00:56:16]  And they never, ever pass any bill that actually does anything with them.
[00:56:21]  And to your point, Matt.
[00:56:22]  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Donald Trump had a Republican Congress when he first took over.
[00:56:27]  He did too.
[00:56:28]  Always look at what happens in two years of a presidency when they have all the power.
[00:56:33]  What do they do with immigration?
[00:56:34]  In Donald Trump's case, well, he tried the Muslim ban.
[00:56:37]  So he did actually try to do his own executive power.
[00:56:40]  All the stuff he did could be easily undone, to your point.
[00:56:43]  I mean, we really do want a small executive.
[00:56:45]  People need to be reminded of this all the time.
[00:56:47]  We need a small executive.
[00:56:48]  We did not want a king.
[00:56:49]  That's not what the founders created this country for.
[00:56:52]  There's a reason why Article 1 of the Constitution establishes the legislative branch first, the legislative branch, the people who answer directly to us.
[00:57:00]  And the president comes second.
[00:57:02]  He's after.
[00:57:03]  He's supposed to be smaller.
[00:57:04]  We want his power to be tiny, teeny tiny.
[00:57:07]  He's harder to fire.
[00:57:08]  And it's no one man or woman should have that much authority over us.
[00:57:12]  And by the way, they're not using it properly.
[00:57:14]  It is getting, they skip the legislative branch altogether so they can push through their agenda items and then they just get undone.
[00:57:20]  This problem is really pernicious.
[00:57:22]  In New York City, where I know you guys are, there's lines going around the block yesterday for the guaranteed housing that New York is offering because it's a sanctuary city.
[00:57:35]  So these illegal migrants come in, they go up to New York, either because they're being bussed there by the Biden administration or they're putting them on planes.
[00:57:44]  The New York Post has documented this.
[00:57:46]  They get off at Westchester Airport and then they run around New York or because some southern state governor has bused them up here.
[00:57:52]  And then they get free housing, but only for like 30 to 60 days.
[00:57:56]  And then they just get out.
[00:57:56]  All you have to do is get back in line and back into the free housing.
[00:58:00]  Free in quotes, air quotes, free.
[00:58:02]  So the actual taxpayers of New York City are paying for this through the nose.
[00:58:07]  And what are they supposed to, I mean, like, yes, you should vote in a Republican, but even the Democrat in charge of New York now is starting to get it, speaking up about it.
[00:58:15]  His solutions are left-wing solutions.
[00:58:17]  More money from the feds, faster work permits for the illegals.
[00:58:21]  Well, that's an incentive for more to come.
[00:58:23]  Just no one is in charge.
[00:58:25]  I really believe this is one of the reasons why Donald Trump's numbers are so strong.
[00:58:29]  People are feeling this.
[00:58:31]  They're feeling this in northern cities, in southern cities.
[00:58:33]  The problem gets worse by the day.
[00:58:35]  Great, get rid of my orcas.
[00:58:37]  Until you get rid of Biden or somebody who's in favor of this shit, it's going to keep happening.
[00:58:42]  Yeah, it's certainly one of those situations where it's impossible to say that Donald Trump got everything right on the border.
[00:58:49]  Certainly didn't complete the wall that he promised to build.
[00:58:51]  He didn't end the problem, but he did talk honestly for the most part about what was going on.
[00:58:58]  At a minimum, the thing that he said that left people most incensed was saying there was a crisis on the border, that there was, to quote him, an invasion.
[00:59:06]  At a minimum, there has been a crisis on the border for a very long time.
[00:59:10]  It wasn't racist to say so when Donald Trump said it.
[00:59:12]  It was correct.
[00:59:13]  And at this point, it is a full-blown, undeniable crisis.
[00:59:16]  And the Biden administration has spent much of recent weeks trying to shift blame on this away from themselves and away from the policies that they have generally supported and towards Republicans insisting that they're the ones who really don't want to protect the border, which is a little bit hard to swallow.
[00:59:32]  But of course, there's a hell of a lot of politics being paid right now.
[00:59:36]  As you pointed out, Megan, I think it's fair to say that I, at least, I don't know about all of us uniformly, am generally in favor of very permissive immigration policy.
[00:59:46]  But what I'm most in favor of specifically is a functional immigration policy, something that is coherent, something that both at the national level permits permit makes it possible for people to come here who would like to improve the quality of their lives.
[00:59:59]  And at the local level, doesn't involve incredible entitlements being created that incentivize people to come that have no real means of taking care of themselves or finding a job on their own if they manage to immigrate to the country.
[01:00:13]  I'm a first-generation immigrant.
[01:00:15]  My grandfather and grandmother who came, my grandmother was a durastic worker.
[01:00:19]  My grandfather was an illiterate dock worker.
[01:00:21]  He died signing his name with an X. Like we probably wouldn't have been able to come here under certain policies, but I think I've made some pretty important contributions to this country.
[01:00:34]  Immigration policy that makes it possible for me to come here, that makes it possible for me to come here to this fabulous country and be a part and contribute is wonderful.
[01:00:43]  An immigration policy that creates the kind of chaos that we're seeing on the southern border and the chaos that we're seeing in blue states and blue cities all across the country is not functional and reasonable.
[01:00:55]  So there's a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done here politically.
[01:00:58]  And a lot of the attempts to blame shift and point fingers in one direction or another or insist that people are racist for being concerned about this are just dead wrong.
[01:01:08]  And I think you've got a lot of southern state, border state Democrats who are concerned about these issues and have talked about them in soberer ways than we've seen on the national level.
[01:01:19]  One can only hope that we start to get our act together because this is awful.
[01:01:22]  It is a genuine concern from a national security standpoint and is a real human tragedy.
[01:01:27]  There are people who are suffering because they're participating in these caravans and going to the southern border.
[01:01:33]  So there's so many reasons to be meaningfully concerned about it.
[01:01:36]  And I just wish there were more serious political conversations happening around these issues.
[01:01:41]  There's no one who looks at the images from those caravans and says, well, this is sensible.
[01:01:45]  This is the way it should be done.
[01:01:46]  I mean, that's the first reaction people have.
[01:01:48]  And as a little game, I would recommend viewers and listeners go back to the Trump years and find the endless numbers of media accounts that said that the crisis on the border was misinformation and was false.
[01:02:07]  That was four years of that, that this didn't, this was not a real thing.
[01:02:10]  This was a fake crisis.
[01:02:11]  It was not a fake crisis.
[01:02:12]  And we saw that it, you know, the incentives are for a caravan of people to come.
[01:02:18]  The immigrants that are coming know exactly what to do.
[01:02:20]  I mean, I remember this when I was in Sweden, is that people would come from the Middle East to Greece and to Italy, pretty hospitable climates for people that are from the Middle East.
[01:02:32]  And somehow they would try to go to the northernmost point in Europe, which is Sweden, and unbelievably inhospitable and cold, but very hospitable when it came to giving people apartments, giving people asylum, a very easy process there.
[01:02:48]  People know what they're doing.
[01:02:49]  They know exactly what they're doing, what they're going to get when they get here.
[01:02:52]  Taking away that incentive, I mean, I think Matt's right.
[01:02:56]  It was an enormous number of contributions of people that came from Vietnam after the Vietnam War, which by the way, we had a very particular responsibility for those people after fighting the Vietnam War and from Russia, et cetera.
[01:03:08]  But, you know, when you have people that are claiming asylum that they say that, you know, I'm in trouble in Guatemala or Honduras or something.
[01:03:17]  It's like, well, you've just walked through a number of countries that could provide you with safety.
[01:03:22]  That's not what you're looking for.
[01:03:23]  That's not a significant thing.
[01:03:24]  You didn't ask Mexico to help you.
[01:03:26]  Right.
[01:03:26]  You just want to be here.
[01:03:27]  It's a lie and we know it's a lie.
[01:03:29]  The whole thing is a, you know, it's chicken and egg, what you were talking about, Matt, because the higher the illegal immigration, the less amenable the American people are to legal immigration.
[01:03:41]  They just start to say, you know what?
[01:03:42]  It's like the sign from Homer Simpson, go home.
[01:03:45]  The country's full.
[01:03:46]  That's how they're feeling.
[01:03:46]  Like, get out.
[01:03:47]  We're done.
[01:03:48]  You know, we are hospitable.
[01:03:49]  We are welcoming.
[01:03:50]  We have been.
[01:03:51]  It's been abused.
[01:03:52]  And now Americans are suffering.
[01:03:54]  And so we're going full hardline.
[01:03:56]  And there's just, I mean, look, if this Biden administration were serious about doing something along the southern border, and it's not, it would consult with somebody like Stephen Miller.
[01:04:05]  Honestly, that guy had real plans for stopping the flow of illegal migrants across that border, like the Remain in Mexico policy, which the Biden administration is now much warmer to, like making you seek asylum in a country.
[01:04:19]  You can't seek asylum here unless you've already sought it in a country prior to getting here and so on.

=== Trump's Legal Complications and Successors (16:02) ===

[01:04:25]  This is what I think.
[01:04:27]  I want something closer to Australia's immigration policy.
[01:04:31]  You know the movie?
[01:04:32]  I make this reference all the time.
[01:04:33]  I'm going to have them cut the clip so I can just press it like a button on my little Sirius XM button box.
[01:04:38]  You know, the scene in a Christmas story with Ralphie where he wants the gun and he finally gets on Santa's lap and forgets to say he wants the BB gun and he starts going down the slide and then he remembers, oh my God, I forgot to say it.
[01:04:51]  And he climbs up to the top of the slide and you remember what happens to him?
[01:04:55]  He gets a boot in the forehead, boot in the forehead, back down the slide.
[01:04:59]  That's what Australia does to illegal immigrants.
[01:05:02]  That's what we need to do.
[01:05:04]  You go over to Australia and you're not supposed to be there.
[01:05:07]  They put you in a detention facility like that.
[01:05:10]  You are in immigrant jail, effectively.
[01:05:13]  And you do not get out of immigrant jail until you can prove that you are deserving of a visa or some other legal presence in Australia.
[01:05:22]  I mean, good luck to you in trying to get in there.
[01:05:24]  That's why they don't have the problems we have.
[01:05:25]  One of these days I'm going to put on Paul Murray, who I love.
[01:05:28]  He's over there on Sky News.
[01:05:29]  He's going to explain it all to us.
[01:05:30]  But we need something other than what we have because it's a hot mess.
[01:05:33]  All right, let me move on.
[01:05:34]  I want to do politics.
[01:05:37]  There's another debate, sort of, next week.
[01:05:40]  A couple of things are happening in the political world.
[01:05:42]  Number one, it's official now, according to 538 polling.
[01:05:46]  Nikki Haley is number two behind Donald Trump and DeSantis is number three.
[01:05:53]  You know, it's like, she's like a point ahead of him.
[01:05:56]  It's not a meaningful lead, but she has some teeny tiny bit of momentum and he doesn't.
[01:06:02]  This as the two of them, Haley and DeSantis, are about to face off against each other on CNN on January 8th.
[01:06:09]  Is it the 8th or the 10th?
[01:06:11]  You'll look it up.
[01:06:13]  And it's just those two.
[01:06:14]  It's DeSantis versus Haley.
[01:06:16]  CNN required you to have 10% in, I think, either three national or one Iowa poll.
[01:06:22]  It's on the 10th.
[01:06:23]  And the only two to make it were those two.
[01:06:25]  So they'll go mano amano, which doesn't mean man-to-man.
[01:06:30]  It means hand-to-hand combat.
[01:06:32]  Hello.
[01:06:33]  And one person very upset about this is your pal, Matt Welsh, because I read your recent article about him, Vivek Ramaswami.
[01:06:41]  Very upset that he was kept out of the CNN debate and is going to be counter programming with an interview with Tim Poole which I think, with all due respect to those two, will be watched by absolutely no one, at least live, because the real Vivek Donald Trump is having a live town hall on FOX at that same moment.
[01:07:05]  He's Trans Trumped and it's amazing.
[01:07:11]  It's amazing.
[01:07:12]  Great Kyle Dunnegan.
[01:07:13]  What do you make of the what's going on on the 10th between the GOP candidates?
[01:07:18]  I'm kind of relieved.
[01:07:20]  I generally want more people on a debate stage than less.
[01:07:23]  Uh, especially when it comes to general elections, I would like the third party and weirdo independent candidates to be up there um, just because i'm more likely to vote for them, but also because I think America needs more than what we're going to get in 2020, what we're going to get good and hard uh, in 2020.
[01:07:39]  Um, but in this case wow um 2020, there's there.
[01:07:42]  Whatever year we are now, it's always 2020, like we haven't climbed out of that rut yet.
[01:07:48]  It's true too um, but uh, in the case of the, if you're not going to have Trump on the debate stage and there's no reason for him to do it, so he's not going to um, then the question is, who's going?
[01:07:59]  Who has a meaningful chance of taking him on?
[01:08:02]  And Vivek Ramaswamy, as interesting as he is on in many ways um, he hasn't demonstrated uh, except for that little period of time when he was polling nationally around seven or eight percent, when he first sort of like broke through and that, you know, was arguably the most interesting person in the in the race on some level.
[01:08:19]  Um, but he has not uh, concentrated meaningfully on one of the early states in such a way to kind of break through or have a normal window of opportunity in there.
[01:08:30]  Um uh, so he's not polling nationally near 10.
[01:08:33]  He's not polling in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada or anywhere else like that uh, close to 10.
[01:08:37]  So it kind of does make sense to let's see the difference between Nikki Haley and Ron Desantis um, and see how they behave in that uh, a kind of rehearsal for what it's going to be like when there's just uh, two people um, or a very small number of people on stage, um.
[01:08:54]  So anyway, Vivek did the exact thing that you'd expect, is he slightly preempted CNN and and said, you know he's going to go, he's going to gloves are off now, you know, because up to now he's really unrestrained.
[01:09:05]  Yeah, from saying they gave him a town hall, like they haven't he's had an opportunity to go on CNN, he didn't qualify of uh, browbeating.
[01:09:16]  My god, CNN I think, before even the town hall had happened, had already had this Oliver Darcy, like hand-ringing, like my god, they're just platforming this person with their dangerous ideas.
[01:09:28]  Just awful, kind of browbeating.
[01:09:31]  Yeah, what it's?
[01:09:31]  It's media, it's journalism.
[01:09:33]  He's a presidential candidate.
[01:09:34]  Interview him, you bring him on, you ask him serious questions.
[01:09:37]  That's what you do.
[01:09:38]  To stop platforming, that is your job.
[01:09:40]  And then Van Jones's over the top reaction after the fact, like we're gonna be stuck with him and his ideas for the next 50 years, this fascist.
[01:09:49]  Okay, take a breath sweetheart, get your smelling salts.
[01:09:52]  You'll be okay, get over your fainting couch, but in any event, so they're gonna do.
[01:09:56]  Go, Nikki and Ron, and I don't think anything changes as a result of this?
[01:09:59]  It's on the eve of Iowa, they're gonna do the same thing.
[01:10:02]  I think on the eve of New Hampshire nothing changes.
[01:10:05]  Trump the NEW YORK Times is THE Daily Podcast did a very interesting deep dive on the plan ahead for the next year.
[01:10:12]  For Trump they did that yesterday, and for Biden they did that today.
[01:10:16]  Biden's, I would say, is less interesting.
[01:10:18]  It boiled down to, he's gonna make it all about Trump, Trump.
[01:10:22]  It's the Anti-Trump election.
[01:10:24]  Those of you who didn't really want to vote for me, you can't put this maniac back in office.
[01:10:28]  And the Republicans actually was a very interesting dive into what Trump has been doing with state party leaders to secure this nomination early when it comes to delegates, long before he has to sit for a trial.
[01:10:41]  So that if he is convicted, and we believe he will be convicted in some of these, if not all cases, we'll see what happens in appeal.
[01:10:48]  He'll already have the delegates necessary for the nomination.
[01:10:51]  If you listen to Maggie Haberman laid out with Michael Barbara on yesterday's podcast, it was good.
[01:10:57]  He's been working hard to make sure all these state party leaders are changing the rules right now to inure to Trump's benefit so he can round him up good and early.
[01:11:07]  And then the Republicans are stuck with Trump.
[01:11:10]  There won't be any switching him out at the convention, by which point he may have been convicted.
[01:11:16]  And the Democrats are banking on these independents and these sort of softer Republicans just not being able to pull the lever for someone who's been convicted of a felony.
[01:11:26]  And keep in mind that too will be the vote on the heels of seven months plus, no, more like 11, I guess, of nonstop Trump coverage.
[01:11:38]  So in a way, it's like Trump's been kind of lying low-ish.
[01:11:42]  But once he's back day to day in the national consciousness, this doesn't necessarily help him, right?
[01:11:49]  His drama is something a lot of Republicans were done with.
[01:11:53]  Democrats, yes, independent.
[01:11:55]  So they have him in the news every day and they have him on trial every day.
[01:12:00]  Like they're throwing enough shit at him that they think these voters in the middle are going to be done with him come November.
[01:12:08]  Anyway, things seem to be going according to plan.
[01:12:11]  I mean, they're one thing you can't say about the Democrats is that they're dumb.
[01:12:16]  Yeah, I mean, they know what they're doing here.
[01:12:18]  I don't, I wonder about this strategy.
[01:12:20]  I mean, there's some polling that suggests that that might be a decent strategy, the number of people who say if Donald Trump is convicted, if that changes their opinion of him and changes their willingness to vote for him, that's higher than I suspected because, you know, the thing about Donald Trump is he's done so much for so many years in so many kind of weird iterations and it doesn't seem to do much to his popularity and or credibility.
[01:12:44]  The difference, obviously, now is Joe Biden had to amble up on stage in 2019, 2020 and say, I am not him.
[01:12:52]  And now he has to amble up on stage and he's he's not as good at ambling now.
[01:12:57]  Also not as good at talking.
[01:12:59]  If you go, honestly, go back and watch those debates.
[01:13:02]  He's not very good at all, but he's a thousand times worse now.
[01:13:06]  It's really, really astonishing.
[01:13:07]  So what they have to do is kind of keep him out of the spotlight, keep him out of a debate.
[01:13:11]  I mean, they should, Donald Trump should want to debate him.
[01:13:14]  He'll absolutely crush him.
[01:13:16]  And that's sort of beneficial to him.
[01:13:18]  But obviously, you know, Joe Biden has a record now to run on.
[01:13:22]  And a lot of that record isn't very good, particularly when it comes to the border.
[01:13:26]  I mean, the Bidenomics, I mean, that has just been the weirdest rollout of this is what we're going to hang our shingle on.
[01:13:33]  This is going to be Bidenomics is going to be the thing, despite the fact that now the economy is getting better and interest rates are coming down, which is going to be actually a very, very positive thing for a lot of people, particularly people always forget about those who have adjustable rate mortgages, who are paying $1,000 more in the past four years.
[01:13:50]  I mean, now that that is a substantial difference.
[01:13:53]  So he has some things to run on, but there's plenty that people do not like.
[01:13:58]  It's just like, God, if Republicans could run somebody who is not Donald Trump and who is not about to sit in the docket four times, there wouldn't be a question that Joe Biden wouldn't have a Michael Dukakis election.
[01:14:12]  The Bidenomics thing, Camille, is like Trump trying to run on like Trumpocracy.
[01:14:17]  Take your weakest thing, you know, like January 6th, the worst thing, and just try to turn it into a positive.
[01:14:23]  Yes, it was true.
[01:14:24]  You'll like it.
[01:14:25]  Look, I'm Doc Brandon.
[01:14:31]  I can only imagine that the Biden administration in a universe where Biden has the nomination and Trump has the nomination will use the Trump precedent of just not engaging in debates is at least part of their rationale for refusing to share a stage with Donald Trump.
[01:14:46]  And it is very curious.
[01:14:47]  I mean, certainly all these state efforts to try and push Trump off the ballot in states that he probably wouldn't win anyways.
[01:14:54]  So it's largely theater does seem to be having a beneficial effect for Trump in that you've got all of his opponents essentially rallying to his defense and kind of insisting that this is wrong and you're overstepping.
[01:15:08]  And you certainly see Republicans who are similarly seeing this kind of thing.
[01:15:11]  And certainly anyone who was even remotely skeptical about the outcome of the election in 2020 now having essentially their concerns validated in a way because they see these states doing something that at a minimum is an extremely novel legal maneuver to try and ensure that the person who would be most likely to win a Democratic election, or at least a person who has a shot at winning a Democratic election, can't even participate in that Democratic election.
[01:15:38]  I mean, they are sending all of the worst signals if this is some sort of scheme that they hope will actually hurt Republicans.
[01:15:47]  Not clear that it will.
[01:15:48]  It could backfire in a pretty profound way.
[01:15:51]  You mentioned states that he's not going to win anyway.
[01:15:54]  I will say, well, he came within, it was 4.9 percentage points of Hillary in 2016 in Colorado.
[01:16:00]  So, you know, that's that's not insurmountable.
[01:16:06]  Then in Maine, where he's also been booted off the ballot by this one unelected Secretary of State, very partisan woman who's called him an insurrection, insurrectionist in the past, among other things.
[01:16:18]  Among other things, that's one of those states that splits, that splits its electoral votes.
[01:16:22]  And at least one of them is definitely gettable.
[01:16:25]  And this kind of thing can come down to one electoral vote.
[01:16:27]  That leads me back to Vivek, because he is pledging that he's going to take himself off the ballot in Maine because of what they've done.
[01:16:35]  He says the same about Colorado.
[01:16:37]  Here he is talking about Maine on News Nation on Monday.
[01:16:41]  Watch that for but if every Republican removes themselves, that nullifies Maine and it nullifies Colorado.
[01:16:48]  If they remove Trump's name, my name's off too.
[01:16:50]  And I call on Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley and Chris Christie to do the same thing.
[01:16:55]  Their words are cheap.
[01:16:56]  Action speaks louder than words.
[01:16:58]  Now, their unwillingness to do that, I think, reveals that they're actually complicit in part in what's happening, even if indirectly.
[01:17:06]  Okay.
[01:17:07]  Oh, it's got to get taken over.
[01:17:10]  I'm the only one with the courage to do it.
[01:17:11]  I'm the only one with the courage to do it.
[01:17:14]  Here's Ron DeSantis responding last night on Laura Angram.
[01:17:17]  Just absurd.
[01:17:18]  I mean, I have a responsibility to accumulate delegates.
[01:17:21]  I'm not going to unilaterally seed any.
[01:17:24]  I'm going to win as many as I can.
[01:17:26]  And I've been very clear about both of those decisions in those states.
[01:17:30]  It's not consistent with the Constitution.
[01:17:32]  I do expect them to get reversed.
[01:17:35]  I've raised the question about Biden.
[01:17:37]  I mean, if he has greenlit 8 million illegals invading this country, is he eligible to be on?
[01:17:42]  So we can play this game all along.
[01:17:44]  I think it's not going to end up well for our country.
[01:17:47]  But I do know this, that if any of the other ones of us had gotten kicked off the ballot, Trump would be spiking the football.
[01:17:54]  Let's just be clear.
[01:17:55]  That's just the fact of the matter.
[01:17:58]  That sounds about radical.
[01:17:59]  So true.
[01:18:00]  Yeah.
[01:18:00]  Well, Vivek is obviously doing this the right way.
[01:18:03]  If in a race to see who maybe gets the vice presidential nod, you want to say everything that would be satisfying to the frontrunner.
[01:18:10]  And hey, if he's off, I'm off.
[01:18:11]  And anyone else who doesn't do the same is a coward and a monster and is a party to this horrible, egregious crime.
[01:18:18]  He's saying precisely the right thing.
[01:18:19]  That's what he said to say.
[01:18:20]  He said in the longer shot, he says, I'll lead the way.
[01:18:22]  I mean, this is Vivek's rhetoric on everything.
[01:18:25]  I'm the only one.
[01:18:26]  Only one.
[01:18:27]  There's a reason you're the only one.
[01:18:28]  Same thing about pardoning Trump, let's remember.
[01:18:31]  He said, I will preemptively, not only will he pardon Trump on day one, I'm sure it's minute one.
[01:18:37]  He's not even going to take a presidential piss.
[01:18:39]  He's just going to get there and he's going to preemptively pardon Trump.
[01:18:42]  But that he's the only one with the courage to, he's calling out everybody else.
[01:18:46]  If they're not going to preemptively pardon Trump, we had him on the Fifth Column podcast a few months ago and like pressed him on this.
[01:18:54]  And it wasn't just like, yeah, I think it's a good idea to make the piece.
[01:18:57]  And also, I would really love to be the vice presidential nominee.
[01:19:00]  It was like, no, I'm the only one who understands the legal theory of why all of the prosecutions of Trump are like unconstitutional.
[01:19:09]  He had to invent some kind of constitutional expertise, which he patently does not have.
[01:19:15]  He was unfamiliar with.
[01:19:16]  But meanwhile, both, I mean, I don't have any love loss for Chris Christie's presidential race, but Chris Christie and Ron DeSantis were both practicing lawyers for far longer.
[01:19:26]  I don't think Vivek's ever practiced law.
[01:19:27]  I think he went right into entrepreneurship.
[01:19:29]  If he did, he practiced it for maybe for a year.
[01:19:31]  Those two, I mean, DeSantis was a jagcore lawyer for years, and Chris Christie was the attorney general before he became the governor.
[01:19:38]  So, I mean, yes, there are others in the race who do understand the law probably much better than Vivek.
[01:19:44]  Yeah.
[01:19:45]  And in fact, that's what we handed him was Chris Christie's interpretation of the law.
[01:19:51]  And he rejected it out of hand.
[01:19:55]  But, you know, let's also say that it's good to have people who are not lawyers, Megan, to be involved in politics, in addition to not being necessarily Harvard lawyers.
[01:20:05]  So I have respect for that.
[01:20:06]  But yeah, almost everything that Vivek has done just so happens to be very, very copacetic to Donald Trump's political fortunes.
[01:20:17]  He should just endorse him.
[01:20:19]  So who's on the Ben Shapiro yesterday was saying if he really wants to help Trump, he should just get out of the race and endorse him.
[01:20:25]  Just like, what's the point?

=== Endorsement or Exit for Vivek (15:39) ===

[01:20:27]  You know, like, go for it.
[01:20:29]  Well, I think one of the points is that Trump might die and Trump might and Trump might have something involved with his legal complications that makes it difficult for him to run, in which case, Vivek is the best suited at this point, maybe to be a recipient of people who are ride or die for Trump right now.
[01:20:48]  Not this.
[01:20:49]  Yeah, but don't under.
[01:20:51]  Yeah, don't under count narcissism too.
[01:20:53]  I mean, Chris Christie this morning was on Morning Joe and asked about this and says, you know, I mean, it would be beneficial to the people that you think could potentially be Trump slayers if you backed out the tiny bit.
[01:21:06]  The tiny number of people that are actually backing you would maybe be thrown to Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis.
[01:21:11]  And he was like, you know, I'm in it to win it.
[01:21:13]  And it's like, you're not, but you're not going to win it.
[01:21:15]  It's just, I mean, like, you can't win it.
[01:21:18]  So why don't you?
[01:21:19]  And it was, and he also gave a very mealy mouthed attack on the main decision too, which was like, yeah, it's wrong, but he is an insurrectionist.
[01:21:29]  It's like, no, no, no, you don't get to say that.
[01:21:30]  That's the way this works is very simple.
[01:21:33]  Due process in this country is important.
[01:21:35]  If you think that he's an insurrectionist, it does not matter.
[01:21:37]  A court has to decide that.
[01:21:39]  When David Axelrod is saying it better than you're saying it, you're a bad Republican presidential candidate.
[01:21:45]  I mean, it's ridiculous.
[01:21:47]  But I have to agree.
[01:21:48]  I mean, the cases against Trump, there is one that has, in my view, legal merit, and that is the prosecution on the Mar-a-Lago documents.
[01:21:57]  If he defied a federal subpoena, he's in a lot of trouble.
[01:22:00]  All of us would be if we defied a federal subpoena.
[01:22:03]  But there's a real question about whether it should have been brought.
[01:22:05]  We can go back to Hillary.
[01:22:06]  We can go back to a lot of whatever.
[01:22:07]  We've been over this.
[01:22:09]  But I agree with Vivek that these are bullshit cases and that they shouldn't have been brought in the first place.
[01:22:14]  The thing with Vivek is that he's out there saying shit like, why am I the only one to be talking about how 9-11 was an inside job?
[01:22:20]  Why am I the only one to be talking about how January 6th was an inside job and that the 2016 election was stolen too?
[01:22:26]  There is a reason why you're the only one.
[01:22:28]  No one else is totally insane.
[01:22:31]  I got theories.
[01:22:32]  I got feelings.
[01:22:34]  Anyway, okay.
[01:22:35]  So let's move on because that's immigration and that's politics and that's all very interesting.
[01:22:39]  But I want to get to the fact that, well, we have to do a quick, quick break and then come back and then we have to talk about the fact that now in America, USA Boxing is allowing men who say they're women to box actual women.
[01:22:57]  This has been a joke up until now.
[01:22:59]  This has been the one sport that people have been joking, like, oh, sure, yeah, like what's going to happen?
[01:23:04]  Like, in boxing, yeah, it's happening.
[01:23:06]  Finally, I can box.
[01:23:10]  I'll let you roll that over in the next 60 seconds and we'll get back to you.
[01:23:14]  I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.
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[01:24:11]  Offer details apply.
[01:24:17]  So it's finally happened.
[01:24:18]  USA Boxing, the governing body overseeing America's amateur and Olympic style boxing, has adopted a new policy that will let men who say they're women beat up actual women.
[01:24:31]  You do have to have reassignment surgery, but I've got news for USA Boxing.
[01:24:37]  Cutting off your penis doesn't eliminate your male muscle and bone and lung strength and so on.
[01:24:43]  Advantages.
[01:24:45]  You don't fight with your penis when you're boxing.
[01:24:47]  You guys may not be aware of this.
[01:24:48]  Oh, boxing boxing.
[01:24:50]  Sorry.
[01:24:50]  I just thought in general, because I do.
[01:24:52]  Yeah.
[01:24:53]  Anyway.
[01:24:53]  Be it for yourself.
[01:24:55]  Yeah.
[01:24:56]  Now you do have to lower your testosterone for four years.
[01:25:02]  But again, none of this reduces the advantage.
[01:25:04]  I mean, picture the rock.
[01:25:06]  All right.
[01:25:07]  Suddenly his penis is gone and he's lowered his testosterone.
[01:25:11]  He's going to fucking kill somebody.
[01:25:13]  What shows this?
[01:25:16]  Oh, my God.
[01:25:18]  So somewhere, Ike Turner is smiling.
[01:25:23]  Yes.
[01:25:24]  I was thinking that.
[01:25:25]  This is like the Ike Turner Boston.
[01:25:26]  He never relented.
[01:25:27]  He never relented from his defense that when he hit Annie Mae, it was for her own good.
[01:25:31]  He was helping her.
[01:25:32]  That's right.
[01:25:33]  It was totally fine.
[01:25:33]  She deserved it.
[01:25:34]  She needed to be okay with that.
[01:25:35]  It's in his mind.
[01:25:35]  She wasn't singing the song right, Camille.
[01:25:37]  Correct.
[01:25:38]  Or she just wouldn't.
[01:25:39]  Yeah, what's wrong with you, girl?
[01:25:40]  What's wrong with you?
[01:25:41]  It went off for like two, three days.
[01:25:42]  So I just, you know, hit her just a little bit.
[01:25:45]  To try to get it a toss, and then she know this is the end of whatever career you have.
[01:25:49]  Camille, that's what he said.
[01:25:51]  I'm not saying it's good um, look it.
[01:25:54]  In boxing, at a minimum, you do have these weight classes um, in mma you've got even more.
[01:25:58]  I know that there's apparently I just learned there's something called an atom weight um, which is less than a straw weight.
[01:26:04]  So I don't have to worry that i'll see um, a castrated rock pummeling some 105 pound woman um, but it is.
[01:26:12]  It is um, and and this is the thing, there are certainly men who have had their asses whooped by women um, and I imagine that that will happen again in the future.
[01:26:21]  Uh, and in some cases they've even got somewhat equivalent weights.
[01:26:24]  But there's a reason why you have weight classes in boxing, you're trying to avoid people who are of dramatically different capabilities getting into a ring together and bludgeoning one another to death um, or someone being bludgeoned to death because they're so out of their, out of their depth in a particular fight um, and I don't know if they'll be able to maintain that sort of parody by disregarding gender, even under the particular criteria that they've defined for this.
[01:26:51]  I know here's your answer.
[01:26:52]  It's a no.
[01:26:54]  It's a no.
[01:26:55]  It's a hard note, hard not.
[01:26:58]  Who are those girls?
[01:27:00]  I'm gonna find one of them.
[01:27:01]  I just want to figure out which one.
[01:27:02]  I'm finding Sages on this issue.
[01:27:06]  That's who they are.
[01:27:07]  Yeah no, this is ridiculous and they ought to be ashamed of themselves, and this needs to be reversed immediately.
[01:27:13]  Okay, there's a couple other things i've got to get to, otherwise I could spend all day doing that.
[01:27:17]  Have you heard about?
[01:27:18]  The Conservative Dads calendar made a bunch of waves when we were all celebrating the holidays and the um it's, it's the ultra right.
[01:27:29]  Beer is the sort of brand behind it.
[01:27:31]  This guy I follow him on twitter he put out this calendar of conservative women, full disclosure.
[01:27:38]  He actually asked yours truly if I would be a part of it.
[01:27:40]  I said hell no um, but others made a different choice and now, like a lot of people on the internet, are upset about this.
[01:27:47]  More conservative women are saying this is not what we need.
[01:27:50]  It's been called Conservative Dads Real Women For America calendar, but I gotta be honest, I couldn't care less about people, do I think this is great?
[01:27:59]  Dana Lash she's amazing.
[01:28:00]  She's not showing anything.
[01:28:01]  She's like holding guns.
[01:28:02]  Riley Gains is in a bikini?
[01:28:04]  Hello, she's a swimmer, she's so she's gorgeous.
[01:28:07]  I don't.
[01:28:08]  But people are upset, like a lot of conservative women who, I love, are like this is not the way forward, so it doesn't have to be the way forward, it's up against the wall.
[01:28:17]  It's not everything has to be the way forward.
[01:28:20]  Something could be just staying right in place or not having any forward, lateral or backwards motion at all.
[01:28:26]  The only thing that matters here, Megan and you know this as well as I do is if they are hot, and if they are hot then it's fine.
[01:28:33]  If they are not hot, then i'm opposed to the calendar.
[01:28:35]  I mean, this is a simple calculation.
[01:28:37]  Wow, you know right Monan, you make a very strong argument.
[01:28:40]  I make a very strong.
[01:28:42]  I could.
[01:28:42]  I could be a lawyer from that.
[01:28:44]  I'm gonna check with my wife.
[01:28:45]  I'm gonna see if this argument passes mustard, but if it does, I may be a corner.
[01:28:50]  She'll tell me.
[01:28:50]  Though I told I said this on a column I the FED CALL.
[01:28:54]  The other day my daughter accused me of uh being at a At a restaurant, my 12-year-old daughter said, You think the waitress is hot, don't you?
[01:29:00]  And I'm like, Am I really?
[01:29:02]  Is it that obvious?
[01:29:03]  Am I like, am I showing this at all times?
[01:29:06]  And I said, Yes, dear, I do think that.
[01:29:08]  And then we just moved on and had a very lovely meal.
[01:29:10]  Dear, wow, very creepy.
[01:29:12]  Girl, years of therapy for that one.
[01:29:15]  Yeah, oh, we've already started it.
[01:29:17]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:29:18]  I don't know.
[01:29:19]  People are upset.
[01:29:20]  They're like, I mean, I love Allie Beth Stuckey.
[01:29:22]  She's conservative.
[01:29:24]  She's Christian.
[01:29:26]  And she's like, Look, I do we really need something for conservative dads.
[01:29:29]  I don't think it's necessarily for people who are married with children.
[01:29:32]  It's like, that's the name of the guy's group.
[01:29:35]  Anyway, you know, saying, like, I've seen this before.
[01:29:38]  I posed actually for, was it GQ magazine?
[01:29:41]  I can't even remember now.
[01:29:42]  I think it was GQ magazine in like a sultry little dress.
[01:29:44]  I was very pregnant at the time and I was proud that I could still squeeze myself into one of these numbers.
[01:29:49]  And it was when I was turning 40.
[01:29:51]  I was like, this is a good marker in time for like the 40-year-old me, but I got a lot of blowback for that too.
[01:29:55]  And it was all from conservatives who are like, that was a mistake.
[01:29:58]  That's not what conservatives stand for.
[01:29:59]  I was like, what do you mean?
[01:30:00]  Conservatives can be saucy.
[01:30:01]  Why are conservatives?
[01:30:02]  Why do we have to be all stuffy and like not sexy?
[01:30:06]  I don't.
[01:30:07]  Yeah, I don't know.
[01:30:09]  I think conservatives lose the culture war because they give you a hard time about being in GQ.
[01:30:13]  Yeah, right.
[01:30:14]  But it's not just conservatives who do it.
[01:30:15]  It's people on the left, I imagine, primarily who were critical of you, Megan, for posing.
[01:30:20]  And there is a bizarre double standard with respect to gender here because, you know, we, and less me and more for Moynihan and Welch.
[01:30:28]  I mean, they're confronted every day with, you know, these apex predators who have their chiseled eight-pack abs and they're on the covers of magazines.
[01:30:36]  And where's the love for Moynihan and Welch?
[01:30:38]  They sure love to know.
[01:30:40]  You know, not all of us, not all of us can be.
[01:30:42]  You can show them right now if you want.
[01:30:45]  Yeah, Doey.
[01:30:46]  I could.
[01:30:46]  But that Doey Libertarian Monthly is not a great magazine.
[01:30:50]  Camille, we're not getting along.
[01:30:52]  I'm someone's cup of tea.
[01:30:53]  That's just one.
[01:30:55]  You know, I hope that I'm someone's cup of tea, but I doubt that.
[01:30:58]  So we could give it a try, guys.
[01:31:00]  We could take one of those like cruises together and we could bill it as like meet the men of the libertarian calendar.
[01:31:07]  Oh my God.
[01:31:08]  That would be by the way, I say this, and Matt knows this very well: of being around libertarian world.
[01:31:13]  That is not.
[01:31:14]  And Matt actually just dropped out of the call because he was so angry.
[01:31:19]  He's so angry because he's frozen.
[01:31:21]  He looks so unconscious with what you're saying.
[01:31:23]  He's so unhappy.
[01:31:24]  Yeah.
[01:31:25]  Well, I mean, if you've ever been around libertarians, you realize that maybe you'll get January and February, and it's both going to be me.
[01:31:31]  So I'm sorry.
[01:31:32]  Well, I'm Mr. October.
[01:31:33]  So it's docile.
[01:31:35]  It's docele in there.
[01:31:37]  Oh, Stostle with the mustache, of course.
[01:31:39]  Yeah, one month for Rand, one month for Ron.
[01:31:44]  That'll sell.
[01:31:45]  He's the Tom Selick of free markets.
[01:31:47]  Yeah, people love him.
[01:31:49]  I already have that.
[01:31:50]  At least your men.
[01:31:51]  Okay.
[01:31:51]  At least your men.
[01:31:52]  There's a growing trend to fall in love with trees.
[01:31:58]  Trees.
[01:31:58]  This is from the New York Post, right?
[01:32:00]  New York Post, highlighting a woman who calls herself an ecosexual who has become infatuated with an oak tree.
[01:32:08]  She is also a self-intimacy guide and quote, somatic sex educator in training.
[01:32:15]  She has taken nature-loving to the extreme after becoming infatuated with this oak tree, which she says fills her with erotic energy.
[01:32:23]  There was a quote and eroticism with something so big and still old.
[01:32:32]  That's what she says.
[01:32:33]  And I don't know.
[01:32:36]  That's pretty great.
[01:32:37]  Oak tree.
[01:32:38]  What do you think?
[01:32:38]  I'm thinking, like, at least if it were like an apple tree, she could get something back.
[01:32:45]  I would love to lose out in that relationship.
[01:32:49]  She's not into you.
[01:32:50]  She's into the old tree.
[01:32:53]  Sounds makes sense to me.
[01:32:56]  I'm trying to see that picture of her.
[01:32:57]  Oh my god.
[01:32:58]  Yeah.
[01:32:59]  You mean the tree or her?
[01:33:04]  I want to make a Bush joke, but I'm not going to.
[01:33:06]  Don't.
[01:33:07]  So I'll just put that on.
[01:33:08]  It's serious, but you still can't do it.
[01:33:10]  That's it.
[01:33:10]  That's it.
[01:33:11]  That's all I've got to say.
[01:33:13]  This is the new trend.
[01:33:14]  All I could think was, oh, Walsh, Welsh, you're back.
[01:33:17]  Do you do you have any thoughts on Moynihan and the libertarian calendar?
[01:33:23]  Oh, dear God.
[01:33:25]  Leon is really his little like skinny jeans trying to pretend he's in a Brit pop band.
[01:33:30]  We're not talking about me.
[01:33:31]  We're talking about everybody else in the libertarian movement who doesn't deserve to be photographed, much less photographed for a calendar.
[01:33:38]  I just want David Repoy to be on every single calendar.
[01:33:42]  That's a deep cut if we can do that.
[01:33:44]  That's all at once.
[01:33:45]  Just one love woman.
[01:33:46]  One man.
[01:33:47]  Yeah.
[01:33:47]  Check out the Twitter account.
[01:33:49]  Well, in any event, look, this woman has managed to find love and good for her because it's hard to find it in today's date.
[01:33:56]  She said, she said, I was walking a path near the tree five days a week for the whole winter.
[01:34:02]  I noticed a connection with the tree.
[01:34:05]  I would lie against it.
[01:34:07]  And she went on to talk about how she loves the feeling of being tiny and supported by something so solid, the feeling of not being able to fall.
[01:34:17]  The presence I feel with the tree is what I'm looking for, but that's a fantasy with the person.
[01:34:23]  You can't get that from a person.
[01:34:24]  I've been craving that rush of erotic energy that comes when you meet a new partner.
[01:34:29]  And that's just not sustainable, unlike her life with this tree.
[01:34:35]  Yeah.
[01:34:36]  Many times.
[01:34:37]  There's a reason we want to go for picnics and parks and hike in nature.
[01:34:42]  That's the reason why we have no idea it's turning you on.
[01:34:45]  That's the thing.
[01:34:47]  I want to have a sandwich.
[01:34:49]  Like on a quiz, that is the last time I take my daughter for a walk in the park.
[01:34:55]  That is the we will no longer do that.
[01:34:58]  This one woman is a wonderful woman.
[01:35:00]  And if she'd like to hang out under the tree with me, we can figure it out.
[01:35:03]  But I think she might have some slight mental health issues.
[01:35:08]  I think there's something for everyone.
[01:35:09]  I think if she wants to date the holly tree, she can go lesbo.
[01:35:13]  Oh, that, yes.
[01:35:14]  She wants to be codependent.
[01:35:16]  She can date the weeping willow.
[01:35:19]  If she wants something more prickly, she can go over the pine.
[01:35:22]  I mean, there are all sorts of options or me.
[01:35:24]  I got questions about settling on the oak.
[01:35:27]  Maple, producer.
[01:35:28]  That's your complaint.
[01:35:29]  I'm just going to leave it at that.
[01:35:31]  Wow.
[01:35:33]  Why is it when we come on, there's always a trans thing and it just descends into pornography.
[01:35:38]  I apologize to the listeners out there.
[01:35:41]  Megan has lost it.
[01:35:42]  She's on E.
[01:35:43]  She has a mile left.
[01:35:46]  And I don't know if she's going to make this what they gave for a boyhan.
[01:35:50]  This is it right here.
[01:35:52]  Guys, always a pleasure.
[01:35:54]  Thank you.
[01:35:55]  They're the best, aren't they?
[01:35:56]  Oh, love them all.
[01:35:57]  Tomorrow, we've got Nancy Grace.
[01:36:02]  Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
[01:36:04]  No BS, no agenda, and no