The Megyn Kelly Show - 20240325_meltdown-at-nbc-over-ronna-hire-and-meghan-markles
Aired: 2024-03-25
Duration: 01:36:24


=== Missing You and Great News (01:33) ===

[00:00:00]  FICE presenter at Super Inkil Transkaus Programme for Alt Rheinskopskrein developed.
[00:00:35]  I hope if you were on vacay with your family, you did as well.
[00:00:40]  We have so much to get to.
[00:00:42]  I'm really looking forward to today's show.
[00:00:43]  That's the one downside of being off: I miss all of you and I miss talking about the news with you.
[00:00:49]  And my gosh, there's great stuff to go over today.
[00:00:52]  Two of my favorites here today to help us kick things back off.
[00:00:55]  Later, I'll be joined again by our pal Dan Wooten.
[00:00:58]  He's back on again, you know, twice in three weeks, which is rare for us.
[00:01:01]  But as you know, there was major news with Princess Catherine on Friday.
[00:01:07]  And Dan has got, as usual, the inside scoop.
[00:01:10]  Keep in mind, he was the only one who said what was real, right?
[00:01:15]  You remember he came on this program and he said she's very unwell.
[00:01:20]  She's going to be getting better, but she is very unwell.
[00:01:23]  He dismissed a lot of the stuff that was going around about her.
[00:01:26]  And he's back today with some new information on where we are now.
[00:01:30]  But we begin today with some stories that tell us a lot about where we are in 2024.

=== Unprecedented Legal Delays (14:17) ===

[00:01:34]  And there's major breaking news at this hour about Trump and that $450 million judgment against him and whether he was going to post the bond or see his buildings taken today, or at least the process begun.
[00:01:47]  So we're going to kick it off there.
[00:01:49]  And then we've got a bunch of stuff to talk about.
[00:01:51]  Chuck Todd, NBC, Rhonda McDaniel, Fannie Willis, absurd new comments from her.
[00:01:56]  And we start with Michael Knowles, host of the Daily Wire's Michael Knowles show.
[00:02:02]  Michael, great to have you.
[00:02:03]  How are you doing?
[00:02:03]  Doing very well.
[00:02:04]  Wonderful to be with you, Megan.
[00:02:06]  Wonderful to have you.
[00:02:07]  Okay, so breaking news in the Trump case, which you know, it's good news for Trump.
[00:02:12]  We have to keep in mind that the whole thing is just ridiculously absurd.
[00:02:16]  This number, that there's so many cases against him.
[00:02:19]  Just a quick refresher for the audience.
[00:02:21]  This is the civil case in New York State brought by the Attorney General Letitia James, claiming he overstated the value of certain properties in getting bank loans years ago and thus got the loans at more favorable rates than he otherwise would have.
[00:02:37]  They were all paid back on time with no complaints from the banks.
[00:02:40]  The banks do not claim to have been victimized.
[00:02:42]  No one does.
[00:02:43]  But there's a law in New York that allows her to sue for this kind of thing, which she did.
[00:02:46]  And she recovered a judgment with interest now over $450 million.
[00:02:51]  In order for Trump to appeal it, which of course he is, and many people believe that he may be successful on this appeal, he has to post the bond of equivalent to the judgment.
[00:03:02]  So he's got to come up with $450 million cash, which is very problematic.
[00:03:07]  Well, he appealed that requirement to a higher court, the New York State Court of Appeals, an appellate court, and it has just ruled that the number should be knocked down from $454 million to a measly $175 million, Michael.
[00:03:26]  That's all.
[00:03:28]  I mean, technically, it's a win.
[00:03:30]  So, I mean, I'm sure Trump land is happier right now than they were an hour ago.
[00:03:34]  But I think if the president needs, I mean, I guess I could cover it for him right now, you know, if we're only talking about 150.
[00:03:43]  That is a big problem.
[00:03:44]  Cigar business must be doing very well for you.
[00:03:46]  And so that's a good thing for him that they're actually going to lower that because I'm sure he didn't want to lose his buildings.
[00:03:52]  It's absurd.
[00:03:53]  Anyway, that's the headline.
[00:03:54]  What do you make of it?
[00:03:56]  I love the whole story.
[00:03:58]  I feel bad for the president.
[00:03:59]  It's obviously deeply unjust, though this is a recurring theme in politics.
[00:04:05]  We like to think that we live in a more civilized age where we have things like law and tolerance of political dissent.
[00:04:13]  But we're returning to a much older form of government where when you lose political power, your opponents who won exile you, imprison you, take all your property, and maybe kill you.
[00:04:26]  That seems to be re-emerging, and that's a longstanding theme in history.
[00:04:30]  So the number was, what, $350 million?
[00:04:33]  And then they add all this extra interest.
[00:04:35]  So it's $450 million.
[00:04:37]  Nobody on earth could come up with that kind of cash.
[00:04:39]  Elon Musk could not come up with that kind of cash.
[00:04:41]  It's just not possible.
[00:04:43]  But it doesn't matter.
[00:04:44]  And he won't be able to pay it anyway because they'll try to throw him into prison for some 700 years.
[00:04:48]  Maybe when he gets out at the age of 780, he could come up with the cash.
[00:04:54]  But what I love about the story is this guy just cannot be kept down.
[00:05:01]  I don't only say it because I admire him politically or I'm going to vote for him in November.
[00:05:06]  Anybody else would have wilted under the pressure of the four prosecutions and the civil judgment and this.
[00:05:14]  He doesn't.
[00:05:15]  He seems to thrive on it, even down to the backup plan, which is, okay, he's got to come up with $150 million now, much better than, you know, that's a third of what he otherwise would have had to come up with.
[00:05:25]  But then even Truth Social going public, the prospect of Truth Social going public through a SPAC, through this particular mode of going public that allows you to do it much more quickly.
[00:05:40]  And the fact that the stock price will be much, much higher than it's probably worth because Trump's supporters have memed this thing up to the point that it could increase his net worth by billions of dollars and could theoretically give him most of the cash on hand to pay this bond even before the decision came.
[00:05:57]  It's just so compelling.
[00:05:59]  It's so dramatic.
[00:06:01]  This is what I want in a political leader.
[00:06:05]  It is amazing what he has withstood.
[00:06:07]  I agree.
[00:06:07]  I too would be crumbled in the corner crying and feeling sorry for myself if I had to take all the incoming arrows that Trump has taken, especially the criminal ones that could take away your freedom.
[00:06:17]  But this one's just as bad, arguably, because it could take away his business that he's worked his whole life to build.
[00:06:22]  So here's some of the reaction.
[00:06:24]  Okay, first of all, the former president reacts.
[00:06:27]  This is it in part from Truth Social.
[00:06:30]  Speaking, I think, about the judge, his credibility and that of Letitia James has been shattered.
[00:06:37]  We will abide by the decision of the appellate division and will post either a bond, equivalent securities, or cash.
[00:06:43]  So he's going to post it, which is good.
[00:06:45]  That means she cannot begin the process of seizing his assets.
[00:06:49]  This also shows how ridiculous and outrageous Ngaron's, remember, the judge in this case is the one, the smiling judge who is like enamored with himself.
[00:06:57]  It shows how ridiculous and outrageous his original decision was at $450 million.
[00:07:01]  And then we switched to all caps in the Trump post.
[00:07:04]  I did nothing wrong.
[00:07:05]  And New York should never be put in a position like this again.
[00:07:07]  Businesses are fleeing.
[00:07:08]  Violent crime is flourishing.
[00:07:10]  And it is very important that this be resolved in its totality as soon as possible.
[00:07:13]  Thank you.
[00:07:14]  Then we have Lawrence Tribe, Harvard professor, Harvard law professor, the sort of nemesis of Alan Dershowitz in some ways, Michael, and a committed lefty who writes the New York appellate court's unexplained reduction from $454 million to $175 million in the bond Trump must post in 10 days to secure the judgment pending appeal is a travesty of justice.
[00:07:37]  Let's hope public disgust with this preferential treatment will come back to bite Trump politically.
[00:07:45]  He's getting more favorable treatment than the average civilian would.
[00:07:50]  That is the position of Mr. Tribe.
[00:07:53]  What do you make of it, Professor?
[00:07:55]  Well, I guess $150 million is preferable to $450 million.
[00:08:00]  So in that limited sense, that's true.
[00:08:03]  But I don't think the most committed anti-Trumper in the world could say that Trump has gotten preferential treatment from our justice system at any point since he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower.
[00:08:18]  Consistently and from the very beginning, the justice system has been demonstrably corrupted, perverted to destroy him, to destroy his campaign by spying on him and colluding with the Democrats and the Russians to cook up a bunch of nonsense about him,
[00:08:35]  then to undermine his presidency, then to oust him twice, and then to change the election rule so he doesn't get re-elected, and now to imprison him, like, you know, throwing spaghetti at a wall when you look at the prosecutions, to seize his properties.
[00:08:51]  The fact that the New York Attorney General, who's been pushing the whole civil fraud case, campaigned on getting this guy and then would just post on social media all the extra interest that she was going to get from him and then gave comments to the press to say that she was looking forward to seizing his buildings.
[00:09:11]  She wanted the one down on Wall Street.
[00:09:13]  It's just let me just play that in case people haven't heard it because you can hear the glee, like the controlled glee and anticipation in Letitia James's voice when she's talking about waiting to see whether he could post this $454 million bond to SOT 3.
[00:09:32]  If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek, you know, judgment enforcement mechanisms in court, and we will ask the judge to seize his assets.
[00:09:44]  We are prepared to make sure that the judgment is paid to New Yorkers.
[00:09:49]  And yes, I look at 40 Wall Street each and every day.
[00:09:53]  Wow.
[00:09:54]  Each and every day.
[00:09:55]  Well, she's going to have to look at something else for the time being because this thing's been reduced and she's not going to be seizing any buildings.
[00:10:02]  And you know who else is going to be sad, very sad?
[00:10:04]  The ladies over at The View.
[00:10:06]  Take a look at SOT 2.
[00:10:09]  You know who says he cannot come up with the cash to cover his $400 million plus bond in his New York fraud case.
[00:10:25]  I can't wait to see the chains on Trump Tower actually on Fifth Avenue.
[00:10:29]  I'm like, kind of excited about it.
[00:10:33]  That was Whoopee Goldberg and Sonny Hostin for the listening audience.
[00:10:36]  They're excited about it.
[00:10:36]  Well, they too are having a disappointing day, Michael.
[00:10:40]  It reminds me of Winston Churchill's line that socialism is the gospel of envy and the creed of ignorance.
[00:10:47]  In this case, Letitia James and the ladies at The View are not even hiding their envy.
[00:10:53]  They're not even hiding their acquisitiveness.
[00:10:56]  They just want to take what Trump has.
[00:10:59]  It can be unprecedented for an American president.
[00:11:02]  It can be obviously unjust.
[00:11:05]  It can be capricious.
[00:11:06]  It doesn't matter.
[00:11:07]  They don't like him and they want to take everything that he has.
[00:11:11]  The political downside for the liberals going this far when it comes to Trump, though, is they're really good at the stick.
[00:11:18]  They're reasonably good at the stick.
[00:11:20]  I guess they're not going to get his building.
[00:11:21]  They haven't been able to convict him of anything yet.
[00:11:24]  But they're not good at the carrot.
[00:11:26]  So Trump at this point, he's a man who, though he seems rather youthful and vigorous, you know, is a man of a certain age.
[00:11:34]  He's running for the one additional term that he can serve for as president.
[00:11:38]  He's done everything that he's wanted to do.
[00:11:40]  And they've tried to take everything from him and they've dragged his name through the dirt for eight years now.
[00:11:45]  He doesn't really have anything to lose.
[00:11:47]  They've given him no reason to go quietly off into the sunset.
[00:11:51]  And so when you've thrown everything that you've got at him by, what is it, March?
[00:11:59]  Then what are they planning for the rest of the election?
[00:12:03]  After going after him.
[00:12:05]  Right, right.
[00:12:05]  I mean, who knows?
[00:12:06]  They might try to just like throw him off a boat somewhere.
[00:12:09]  But at this point, they've thrown everything that they seem to have, and he's still up on Biden in all the swing states.
[00:12:16]  So if I were the Democrats, I would be panicking.
[00:12:19]  Yeah, well, I think there is some panic there.
[00:12:22]  And you can see it in the reaction to this reduction of what it's yes, it's reduced by 300 million.
[00:12:28]  I mean, what does it say about the initial judgment that it's been reduced by, is it 200, 300 million, and it's still pushing 200 million.
[00:12:37]  Okay.
[00:12:38]  Meanwhile, in another New York courtroom down the road, there is a criminal trial that was supposed to begin today.
[00:12:45]  This is one of the big four criminal trials against Trump.
[00:12:48]  This is the Stormy Daniels hush money payment trial.
[00:12:52]  He paid her.
[00:12:52]  That's not illegal, but he didn't write it down in his company books as hush payment, which kind of defeats the nature of hush payment, but okay.
[00:13:01]  And they've turned that into a campaign finance violation, which somehow parlays it into a felony, according to the prosecutor Alvin Bragg.
[00:13:10]  No one can follow.
[00:13:11]  If you can't follow, you're not alone.
[00:13:13]  No one can follow.
[00:13:15]  Well, that trial was supposed to begin today, but because certain documents that were in the possession of federal prosecutors were not turned over to the parties in the case despite some demands to do so, the judge has now given a bit of a reprieve on the trial date because they just did turn over those documents.
[00:13:35]  And the Trump team is saying there are 10,000 documents here.
[00:13:37]  We can't have a trial starting on Monday.
[00:13:39]  We just got these.
[00:13:41]  And these should have been given to us a long time ago.
[00:13:43]  And the DA is saying, hey, this came from the feds, not from us.
[00:13:45]  It's not our bad.
[00:13:46]  And the judge, who definitely doesn't like Trump, is like, you know what, even though I don't like you, I have to recognize I can't start the trial on Monday.
[00:13:54]  And they're in there this morning discussing when to start this trial.
[00:13:57]  And it's not yet settled as of the time we're taping this at 1213.
[00:14:02]  But it sounds like this judge is just as much of a Trump hater as Judge Engeron and the other one, Michael.
[00:14:09]  The judge is cross-examining Trump's lawyer.
[00:14:13]  Why, as a U.S. attorney, didn't you know that you could immediately seek these documents you wanted from the feds?
[00:14:19]  You waited until two months before the trial.
[00:14:22]  This guy, I think, is saying, I asked for the documents from the DA.
[00:14:26]  It was his obligation to get them, you know, if they were relevant to this case, blah, blah, blah.
[00:14:30]  But it's clear to me this judge already hates Team Trump.
[00:14:34]  And I don't think he's going to give them much of a delay on this trial.
[00:14:39]  There's a Team Trump wants a 90-day delay.
[00:14:44]  And the DA's office said you can have 30 days.
[00:14:46]  I predict it'll be a 30-day delay.
[00:14:49]  This judge can't stand them either, Michael.
[00:14:51]  Sure, sure.
[00:14:52]  Luckily, he seems to be getting delays in some of the other cases.
[00:14:57]  But here, okay, they'll proceed basically apace.
[00:15:02]  This to me might be the hardest case for them to present against Trump because one, if people are paying attention to it at all, it only comes down to two issues.
[00:15:15]  The two issues, if people read about the case, are Trump slept with models and porn stars, which everyone has known for 40 years.
[00:15:25]  And two, Trump made an in-kind donation to his own campaign, which everyone knows is legal and knows intuitively is perfectly fine.
[00:15:36]  If you can't donate to your own campaign, then who can donate to your campaign?
[00:15:41]  And I understand that the New York prosecutors are going to throw as many little aspects of campaign minutia as they possibly can, but that's all it comes down to.

=== Rewriting History for Prosecution (15:10) ===

[00:15:51]  I don't know how for any, not just ordinary voter, but even somewhat sophisticated, tuned in, educated voter.
[00:15:59]  I don't know what else emerges from that trial that would change their opinion of Trump.
[00:16:05]  Okay, so Stormy Daniels, one way or the other, is coming back into the public view, as you know.
[00:16:11]  I mean, this case is kind of about her, but really she's more peripheral because it's really about money and how it was documented and when it was paid, right?
[00:16:20]  It was right before the election, which is why they're saying it was an underlying election interference or, you know, campaign violation, finance violation.
[00:16:29]  So Stormy Daniels, I mean, purely coincidentally, Michael, has had a documentary made about her now called Stormy.
[00:16:38]  It's by Judd Apatow, and it recently premiered.
[00:16:42]  And Stormy Daniel is featured, of course, throughout and getting all sorts of lovely, wonderful press coverage.
[00:16:49]  And here is just a bit from that documentary called Stormy of her talking about her alleged tryst with the president back in 2006, SAT 18.
[00:17:02]  I remember thinking, oh, fuck, how did I get myself into this?
[00:17:08]  I felt that I had been misled and tricked.
[00:17:12]  And I can't even find the words, but I thought we had this mutual respect.
[00:17:20]  You know, I've maintained it wasn't rape in any fashion.
[00:17:23]  Like, you know, but I didn't say no because I just, I was nine years old again.
[00:17:31]  There's that whole dynamic because I was from the South that he was an elder and a man.
[00:17:37]  And I was taught to show respect and be a good girl.
[00:17:46]  Okay.
[00:17:47]  I feel the need to point out Stormy Daniels is not some nun they found from the convent and then introduced her to President Trump, then just Donald Trump back in 2006.
[00:18:01]  She was a porn star.
[00:18:03]  It is not that a porn star can never be raped or sexually assaulted.
[00:18:07]  They can, of course.
[00:18:08]  But even she's not claiming that.
[00:18:10]  But the positioning, I was nine years old again because she had apparently been sexually assaulted when she was nine, I think is her allegation in the film.
[00:18:19]  I was nine years old again because Trump was propositioning her and she admits she went ahead with it.
[00:18:24]  But now in retrospect, the whole thing, like even she wasn't claiming it was non-consensual.
[00:18:31]  The whole thing was, did she get paid off not to tell about it in 2016, right before the election?
[00:18:37]  Now it's turning into a Me Too allegation.
[00:18:40]  And apparently she goes so far as to compare the whole situation to what is portrayed in a movie I now have seen and know well, Bombshell, which is all about actual sexual harassment at Fox News.
[00:18:56]  Here is a bit of her doing that in SOT 20.
[00:19:00]  The story hasn't changed.
[00:19:02]  Yeah.
[00:19:02]  I just remember Lil Boy, but I did remember a few more things.
[00:19:06]  It had nothing to do with the sexual encounter.
[00:19:08]  Those details are burned into my soul forever.
[00:19:13]  I did remember a little more of the words that he said to me because originally I didn't know that they were that important because they weren't direct threats.
[00:19:21]  It wasn't like, you are going to have sex with me or I'm going to murder you.
[00:19:24]  Or like, don't scream bad words.
[00:19:26]  It was more like, I thought you wanted to be a, you know, I thought you wanted to be successful.
[00:19:31]  You have to show me what it takes.
[00:19:32]  It was that kind of thing.
[00:19:34]  And I didn't really realize the gravity of that until I watched the movie Harmon Say the Lord again, bombshell.
[00:19:42]  So now it's turning into a Me Too allegation underlying the campaign finance.
[00:19:52]  What do you make of it?
[00:19:55]  I'm relieved to say that that trailer, Megan, was the first of Stormy Daniels' film work that I've ever seen.
[00:20:02]  And frankly, I'm just going to guess it's probably more offensive than the rest of her film work because it's so transparent what she's doing here.
[00:20:10]  You say she's coming back into the public eye.
[00:20:13]  Yeah, of course, because she had, well, I guess she had her career on film and then that went away because those careers only last two to five years or so.
[00:20:23]  And then what did she have?
[00:20:26]  I think she was working as a stripper or something like that.
[00:20:28]  And the best thing that could have possibly happened to her adult film career was that Donald Trump paid her some hush money payments and then she broke her NDA and comes out and gets a lot of publicity for it.
[00:20:41]  So then she did her whole media tour then, but that kind of went away.
[00:20:44]  There's not really much to the story.
[00:20:46]  As I mentioned earlier, it's not exactly breaking news that President Trump, who's been a billionaire playboy since the 80s, you know, has spent some time with women of dubious behavior.
[00:20:59]  So then that went away.
[00:21:00]  And so, of course, this is the next chapter.
[00:21:02]  In order to get back in the news, it needs to become a Me Too allegation.
[00:21:07]  And then if there's some new fad, ideologically, that crops up in five or 10 years and Trump is still in public life, she'll move toward that as well.
[00:21:17]  But once again, I mean, maybe I'm being a little too rosy for the Trump campaign here, but I just feel if this didn't work the first five times they tried it, I don't think they're going to make Stormy Daniels happen now.
[00:21:33]  You know, I would talk to her.
[00:21:35]  I would definitely interview Stormy Daniels.
[00:21:37]  I think it would be actually absolutely must-see TV because I, as you know, am open-minded to Me Too allegations.
[00:21:45]  I am not one of those people who just knee-jerk dismisses them all like it's not true.
[00:21:49]  I believe she did have an encounter with President Trump, then Donald Trump.
[00:21:53]  And he was married.
[00:21:54]  It was an issue, you know, and it wasn't like, you know, he wasn't just free to do what he wanted technically.
[00:21:59]  And I think the whole thing is very complicated.
[00:22:03]  You know, I actually, this isn't like E. Jean Carroll, where it's a he said, she said.
[00:22:07]  You know, I think Trump sort of with a wink and a nod has kind of suggested maybe there was something there.
[00:22:14]  Maybe I'm overstating his position on this, but I think most people believe this encounter happened, but that the criminal charges around the hush money payment are absurd.
[00:22:24]  And now she seems to be trying to change it into like a victimization situation.
[00:22:30]  Meanwhile, like, I just, I'm not sure.
[00:22:33]  I'd love to probe that allegation more.
[00:22:35]  So maybe I'll have her on.
[00:22:36]  I'll ask her.
[00:22:38]  I would love to see that interview, Megan.
[00:22:40]  You know, her story now changing and evolving, frankly, might even be sincere.
[00:22:47]  This is why we have statutes of limitations.
[00:22:50]  This is why it's wrong to prosecute people for crimes they allegedly committed 30 years ago.
[00:22:55]  Our memories are just not all that reliable.
[00:22:57]  And we tell ourselves stories and our view of relationships changes and our view of ourselves changes.
[00:23:05]  I'm sure she probably is ashamed of a lot of the things she did 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.
[00:23:10]  That's natural, but then to go back and rewrite history and in this case, so conveniently to try to prosecute Trump again for it is crazy.
[00:23:20]  And then to your point, Megan, the Stormy Daniels of it all is a sideshow here.
[00:23:26]  The real question is, did Trump commit a campaign crime?
[00:23:30]  And the campaign crime they're alleging is that, you know, he didn't fill out Form 75B when he made an in-kind contribution to his own campaign.
[00:23:39]  If Trump made the hush money payment and if he actually slept with Stormy Daniels and if everything that the liberals allege is true, then the crime they're alleging is that he made, what, $100,000 in-kind contribution to his own campaign and didn't file the right paperwork.
[00:23:55]  Okay, I guess you should file the right paperwork, but are you kidding me?
[00:23:59]  We're talking about a presidential campaign and you're quibbling over a $100,000 payment, regardless of what the details are surrounding that payment.
[00:24:06]  It's just so preposterous.
[00:24:08]  And if they didn't hate Trump and if they hadn't decided to wield the entire federal government and including certain international operators and agencies to try to get him for the past eight years, it would be a total non-story.
[00:24:21]  Okay, so since you brought up 30 years later, you make an allegation and then you get paraded through the media and celebrated.
[00:24:29]  We've got to talk about Christine Blasey Ford, who is back in the news.
[00:24:36]  Wait, before I get to her, this just breaking Judge Merchant, who's the one, M-E-R-C-H-A-N, by the way, who's overseeing the criminal case involving the Stormy Daniels hush money payment says April 15th is the day.
[00:24:49]  So the Trump trial begins April 15th, which is not much of a delay.
[00:24:52]  That's obviously much closer to what the prosecution wanted.
[00:24:56]  It might be, wait, what's today?
[00:24:57]  That's like three weeks, isn't it?
[00:24:58]  Yeah.
[00:25:00]  Yeah, that's like less than even the DA said Trump deserved.
[00:25:06]  So yeah, it's going forward.
[00:25:08]  And I think we all know how that one's going to end.
[00:25:09]  I don't think there's going to be any legitimate independent person shuddering when Trump is found guilty of this thing.
[00:25:17]  It's not, frankly, the most interesting trial.
[00:25:19]  But okay, moving on.
[00:25:20]  Christine Blasey Ford, coincidentally, is back in the news.
[00:25:25]  That is the accuser of Justice Kavanaugh, who claimed 30 years earlier.
[00:25:30]  This is when he was being confirmed, he had allegedly sexually assaulted her or attempted a sexual assault of her in high school.
[00:25:40]  And the story didn't have any independent witnesses.
[00:25:44]  To the contrary, she had a best friend who said that she didn't believe it.
[00:25:47]  And I think her dad said he didn't believe it.
[00:25:50]  It was like a long list of people around Christine Blasey Ford who had real questions about her story.
[00:25:55]  But it led to a full-on media frenzy with women coming out of the woodwork.
[00:26:00]  And I'm just going to say, making shit up.
[00:26:02]  Now, I've said before, Christine Blasey Ford of the women who came forward against Kavanaugh, her story, okay, you could believe it or not believe it.
[00:26:14]  You could not believe any one of the other women who came forward.
[00:26:18]  No honest, sane person.
[00:26:20]  It's just like the number of things that undermined these alleged other accusers, which is just like you'd have to be a complete hack to have given any credence to them.
[00:26:31]  Christine Blasey Ford versus Brett Kavanaugh was a he said she said.
[00:26:35]  But 30 years later, when the guy, how's he supposed to disprove something 30 years after the fact?
[00:26:40]  Well, she's written a book now.
[00:26:43]  And she is also getting the star treatment going on all the shows.
[00:26:48]  And you, I mean, you will believe, but you kind of won't believe the way the media is treating her now.
[00:26:55]  I think we've got, yeah, it's SAT 16.
[00:26:59]  Look at this media tour and how she's being treated.
[00:27:02]  That is brain for me under a whole different kind of fire.
[00:27:06]  Are you speaking out now so that you can take charge of the narrative?
[00:27:11]  I applaud you on your courage and your bravery.
[00:27:14]  Thank you for what you did.
[00:27:16]  I think speaking truth to power has an enormous cost, as we all know.
[00:27:20]  He was so angry with you for calling him out and ruining his pristine reputation.
[00:27:26]  How did you write your book without re-traumatizing yourself?
[00:27:31]  Do you think that the hearing was even more traumatizing than the assault?
[00:27:40]  How were you brave enough to go on in spite of those threats?
[00:27:47]  It was rather presumptive, wouldn't you say, in the nature of the questions around her, that this in fact must have happened, as opposed to leaning on the many doubts that have been cast on the story.
[00:27:59]  And of course, Justice Kavanaugh's staunch denials.
[00:28:03]  I'm sure in defense of the last questioner, it probably was very difficult for Christine Blasey Ford to write the book because she kept changing her story so many times during the testimony that it's very difficult.
[00:28:16]  Will we get the first edition of the book?
[00:28:18]  Will there be a new, a second or a third edition?
[00:28:21]  Now, just as I say with other accusers 30, 40 years later, I don't know if the woman was lying.
[00:28:29]  I'm not particularly inclined to believe her story, but she might have been sincere.
[00:28:34]  She might have believed one version of the stories that she was telling because your memory changes decades after the fact, which is why I know it's an contrary and unpopular opinion right now in our age of mob justice and throwing caution to the wind, but statutes of limitations are a good thing.
[00:28:58]  They exist for a reason.
[00:29:00]  And we decided during the Me Too movement, because mostly a bunch of liberals in Hollywood decided to behave like boars.
[00:29:07]  We decided that we were going to totally upend the American system of justice and get rid of statutes of limitations.
[00:29:13]  But actually, I think that's a bad idea.
[00:29:16]  And furthermore, when accusations come out at precisely the moment that a very politically significant event is about to occur that could derail that political event, I just have a really hard time believing it.
[00:29:31]  It's not as though Brett Kavanaugh just totally disappeared from public view and he went off and lived a private life.
[00:29:38]  Brett Kavanaugh had been a very public lawyer and judge for his entire career.
[00:29:44]  Christine Blasey Ford never came out when he was first appointed to a federal court.
[00:29:49]  Christine Blasey Ford never came out when he was working for Ken Starr on the Bill Clinton special counsel investigation because those were feisty, controversial.
[00:29:57]  They were political.
[00:29:59]  But what they were really concerned about was the swing of the court and what could upend all sorts of liberal jurisprudence that they loved, up to and including Roe v. Wade.
[00:30:09]  That's why that court seat became so important.
[00:30:12]  And so when all of that happens at these perfectly convenient times, when Christine Blasey Ford re-emerges years later, just during an election year to tell her story, now probably the 12th version of it, I don't see how anyone could really honestly believe that.
[00:30:27]  And so what has it become?
[00:30:29]  Regardless of whatever happened to Christine Blasey Ford, what it becomes is a kind of political fan fiction.
[00:30:35]  People are buying this book to just vent and feel a catharsis of political hate toward their opponents.
[00:30:46]  That's why it's coming out in 2024.
[00:30:48]  That's the only reason anybody's going to buy it.
[00:30:50]  And it's why ultimately these sorts of accounts are worthless.
[00:30:54]  Well, I wonder whether if Tara Reed, Joe Biden accuser, writes a book, if she'd be getting similar treatment.

=== Political Fan Fiction Explained (05:30) ===

[00:31:02]  Think she'd get booked by Terry Gross over on NPR or by the Ladies of the View?
[00:31:07]  Think she'd be getting questions like, oh my God, how courageous are you?
[00:31:12]  And what was it like to be re-victimized again when you came forward, right?
[00:31:16]  The presumptions in there.
[00:31:17]  It's just such an obvious double standard.
[00:31:21]  Christine Blasey Ford, she'll continue to get this kind of treatment.
[00:31:25]  I'm sure we're going to be watching it for some time, but it reminded me, Michael, of one of the most dishonest things.
[00:31:30]  So just by way of background, when I was at NBC and I had that morning show, we would do a roundtable of discussions about the news.
[00:31:39]  And I was the same me in those discussions as I've always been.
[00:31:42]  Go back and look at them.
[00:31:43]  I mean, this sort of, it was kind of interesting to see the veil come down for NBC to realize just because Trump didn't like me didn't mean I was a liberal.
[00:31:51]  You know what I mean?
[00:31:52]  Like I actually was the same person I am today in most ways.
[00:31:57]  And the pylon on Justice Kavanaugh was absolutely disgusting to me.
[00:32:00]  And I was out there every morning trying to set the record straight about him and what actually had been alleged and hadn't been alleged.
[00:32:07]  And there was a young guy over there named Jacob Soboroff who came on the set and tried to spew a bunch of nonsense about Kavanaugh.
[00:32:15]  And I let him have it.
[00:32:16]  Now, I will tell you in advance that I do believe the segment I'm about to show you is the reason after my discussion about Blackface on NBC that led to the end of my show, he was one of the most vicious to attack me.
[00:32:32]  And I would suggest to you, it had absolutely nothing to do with his feelings on Halloween costumes and everything to do with the following exchange.
[00:32:41]  This is the reason that people don't trust Washington.
[00:32:43]  This is the reason people don't go out to vote.
[00:32:46]  Republicans and Democrats cannot even agree on how to handle not one, not two, not three, but four alleged assaults.
[00:32:53]  No.
[00:32:53]  Sexual assaults at this point and how to handle it.
[00:32:55]  There are not four alleged assaults.
[00:32:56]  Two.
[00:32:57]  Let's say it's not.
[00:32:57]  No, there aren't.
[00:32:58]  Let's walk through it.
[00:32:59]  No, because this is what happens when you're here in this position for Judge Kavanaugh.
[00:33:03]  Everybody just tries to lump them together and say four or five accusers accusing him of sexual assault.
[00:33:08]  Not true.
[00:33:09]  Irrespective of the number.
[00:33:10]  No, it matters.
[00:33:11]  The facts matter.
[00:33:13]  No, no, let me say, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford accuses him of an attempted sexual assault on her, a sexual assault, attempted rape.
[00:33:21]  There are no corroborating witnesses to that event.
[00:33:24]  Number two is a woman who says while at Yale with Brett Kavanaugh in a circle, he may have exposed himself in a drunken stupor in a drinking deal.
[00:33:31]  Nobody else at the party confirms that account, not one person.
[00:33:35]  Number three is the Avenatti witness.
[00:33:39]  And that woman is talking about a gang rape and she doesn't accuse Brett Kavanaugh of ever having laid a finger on her.
[00:33:46]  Number four is an anonymous person whose account comes from the mother of another person, all of whom are anonymous.
[00:33:56]  Her daughter's friend was allegedly pushed against the wall by a young Brett Kavanaugh.
[00:34:00]  None of the actual participants of that event have come forward to actually say it happened.
[00:34:04]  There was a fifth woman who came forward who has already now recanted saying, I made it.
[00:34:10]  So let's be clear on what the facts are.
[00:34:14]  We'll walk down memory lane for you there, Michael.
[00:34:17]  And this is.
[00:34:17]  Why aren't you at NBC anymore, Megan?
[00:34:20]  I don't, I'm just so shocked.
[00:34:25]  You know, it doesn't take much, right?
[00:34:26]  It's like a little fact-checking here or there by a person in the media can actually make a difference.
[00:34:31]  But there are few and far between out there who will actually do it irrespective of party.
[00:34:36]  And Christine Blasey Ford deserves the same kind of fact-checking now that she's on her book tour.
[00:34:41]  You know what I mean?
[00:34:42]  Like she doesn't get a pass just because she raised the allegations a few years ago and he got confirmed.
[00:34:47]  No, she should be put through the same types of questions if she wants to put the story out there as she was when she first raised them.
[00:34:56]  But no one cares is the problem.
[00:34:57]  No one buying her book cares whether or not Kavanaugh did it.
[00:35:01]  No one, as you made, I think, beautifully clear on that panel on NBC all those years ago.
[00:35:06]  No one really cares about the difference between the Kavanaugh accusers.
[00:35:10]  All they care about is the headline, Kavanaugh, incredibly accused of rape.
[00:35:15]  I mean, the account of the criminal Avenati's client was that there was a gang rape and she's confident Brett Kavanaugh was there.
[00:35:22]  And how did she know?
[00:35:23]  because he was wearing a Georgetown prep sweatshirt.
[00:35:26]  He might as well have been wearing an My Name is Brett Kavanaugh future judge button on his lapel.
[00:35:31]  I mean, it was just so let's not forget Avenatti also represented Stormy Daniels.
[00:35:36]  And Stormy Daniels.
[00:35:37]  Wow.
[00:35:38]  Talk about full circle.
[00:35:40]  Right.
[00:35:41]  So, so, you know, of course, no, no one's going to be buying this because they care about the truth.
[00:35:46]  This is why, as you say, Tara Reed, who whether she's telling the truth or not, her allegation against Joe Biden is certainly more plausible than the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.
[00:35:59]  She had contemporaneous witnesses to whom she complained at the time.
[00:36:04]  I spoke with them personally.
[00:36:05]  These are like well-heeled, professional, smart women who I spoke to who said, yes, she told me this at the time in detail, the same story.
[00:36:15]  It's never changed.
[00:36:16]  Her mother went on Larry King and mentioned that her daughter had been the victim of a sexual assault of a well-known U.S. senator.
[00:36:22]  Tara Reid had all that.
[00:36:24]  Christine Pelasi Ford didn't have any of that, but they destroyed Tara Reed because she had the nerve to accuse a Democrat.
[00:36:31]  Yes, yes.

=== Hiring Controversial Figures (11:41) ===

[00:36:32]  And that's what it all comes down to.
[00:36:34]  And so there's nothing changing anyone's mind because for Donald Trump, the crime that he committed is not donating to his own campaign.
[00:36:43]  It's not holding some documents at his home.
[00:36:45]  It's not doing the thing that Joe Biden did in a much less egregious way when it comes to Trump.
[00:36:51]  It's not any of those things.
[00:36:53]  It's that Trump is super duper mega Hitler and he's going to be Hitler 2.0 if he gets elected again and he'll never leave office and all the rest of it.
[00:37:02]  And Kavanaugh is just an expression of Donald Trump.
[00:37:07]  And all of these related figures, they're just emanations out from the very embodiment of evil.
[00:37:13]  So the book might sell well enough.
[00:37:15]  I mean, and people will read it at the beach and they'll fuel their hatred of Trump and all the associated characters.
[00:37:22]  And then we'll move on to the next one.
[00:37:25]  It won't change the polls at all.
[00:37:27]  Super duper mega Hitler.
[00:37:29]  That's, I mean, there should be like t-shirts with that.
[00:37:32]  I'm going to squeeze in a quick break and then we're going to come back and we're going to stay on the topic of NBC because what happened over there over the weekend with Ronna McDaniel was outrageous.
[00:37:41]  And I'm not talking about Ronna McDaniel.
[00:37:43]  Stand by.
[00:37:47]  All right, Michael.
[00:37:48]  So Ronna McDaniel, who was up until recently chairing the RNC, took a job as a contributor with NBC News.
[00:37:59]  NBC News, the vaunted.
[00:38:02]  Okay.
[00:38:03]  And I have to tell you, I considered sending her a text like, good luck.
[00:38:10]  No.
[00:38:10]  Really, truly.
[00:38:11]  Like as somebody who is on the right side, walking into that building, I mean, talk about going in the lion's den.
[00:38:20]  But she's a big girl and she can handle herself.
[00:38:23]  So I thought it might be, I don't know, somehow dismissive or condescending.
[00:38:28]  So I didn't do that.
[00:38:30]  Well, I should have done it because she needed the good luck during her debut weekend, which didn't go so well.
[00:38:36]  She appeared with Kristen Welker, who is now the host of Meet the Press.
[00:38:41]  She took over from Chuck Todd.
[00:38:43]  He lost the show to Kristen.
[00:38:44]  We're going to get to him in a second.
[00:38:46]  But here is a bit of how that went in SOP 5.
[00:38:51]  You owe this country an apology.
[00:38:53]  We're allowed to look after elections and say, I want to make sure this was done in a transparent and fair way.
[00:38:59]  Why should people trust what you're saying right now?
[00:39:02]  One, I will say this.
[00:39:03]  Kristen, voters right now in this country are going to be making a choice in November, and they don't care about 2020.
[00:39:12]  Republicans and Democrats.
[00:39:14]  A lot of people say it is fundamental to the country's democracy.
[00:39:17]  I represent 50% of this country, whether you like it or not, to be able to have different viewpoints and say, I disagree with that viewpoint, but it's important to hear it is important to our country.
[00:39:29]  Okay.
[00:39:31]  Then comes Chuck Todd, now as chief political analyst and a guest on Kristen Welker's same show with his thoughts on that exchange.
[00:39:41]  Watch.
[00:39:42]  I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation.
[00:39:46]  I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn't want to mess up her contract.
[00:39:52]  She has credibility issues that she still has to deal with.
[00:39:55]  Is she speaking for herself or is she speaking on behalf of who's paying her?
[00:39:59]  And look, there's a reason why there's a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.
[00:40:10]  When NBC made the decision to give her NBC News's credibility, you got to ask yourself, what does she bring NBC News?
[00:40:20]  Okay.
[00:40:21]  He's very confused about the fact that when she was the RNC spokesperson, she wasn't just out there spewing the opinions of Ronna McDaniel.
[00:40:29]  She was actually being paid to be a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, which is a group of people who drive policy within the Republican Party and try to get the results that they want.
[00:40:40]  It's not the Ronna McDaniel committee.
[00:40:43]  And that now that she's with NBC News, she is free to provide her own independent political analysis.
[00:40:50]  What has made him confused about that?
[00:40:51]  The fact that she's accepting an NBTC paycheck?
[00:40:54]  I don't get it because he seemed very capable to make the proper distinctions when NBC hired Jen Saki.
[00:41:02]  Remember Jen Saki?
[00:41:04]  You seem to understand it perfectly.
[00:41:07]  In fact, Chuck Todd, you promoted her show, which was being launched on MSNBC, which is even more partisan than NBC, just as she launched it.
[00:41:18]  Here, look at this, SOT7.
[00:41:20]  Jen Saki, who is here on the debut of the host of her show, Inside with Jensaki, it launches today at noon after you watch this show, of course, on MSNBC and Streaming on Peacock.
[00:41:32]  Welcome and congrats.
[00:41:33]  Thank you so much.
[00:41:34]  Formally, very exciting.
[00:41:38]  I hope the money is good, Ron.
[00:41:41]  You only have to apologize when you hire the conservatives, you see, when you hire the liberal mouthpieces from, you know, the White House or the RNC or the DNC.
[00:41:51]  It's a different story.
[00:41:53]  The greatest irony about Chuck Todd's soliloquy there is that he doesn't seem to know who currently pays Ronna McDaniel.
[00:42:02]  He says, is she expressing her own views or the views of the people who pay her?
[00:42:07]  The problem with Ronna McDaniel's hiring at NBC is that she is not expressing the views of the people who pay her.
[00:42:12]  NBC News is a liberal media outlet.
[00:42:16]  It exists to promote a liberal view, a liberal ideology, liberal policy prescriptions.
[00:42:22]  They occasionally make a big show of hiring a Republican, and usually they hire a liberal Republican.
[00:42:29]  So they hire someone like Michael Steele to come give commentary.
[00:42:32]  Michael Steele is pretty liberal, so it usually works out just fine.
[00:42:35]  Or they hire Nicole Wallace, right?
[00:42:39]  They'll hire somebody.
[00:42:40]  Steve Schmidt.
[00:42:42]  Yes.
[00:42:42]  Yeah.
[00:42:42]  I mean, it's always just that kind of Republican.
[00:42:46]  You know the person who goes on RNC.
[00:42:48]  Yes, yes.
[00:42:49]  Yeah.
[00:42:50]  Also known as Democrats.
[00:42:51]  Yeah.
[00:42:51]  But they'll say, they'll say, listen, I'm a conservative, but I'm not that kind of conservative.
[00:42:55]  I'm not the kind of conservative that, you know, would be supported by conservatives.
[00:43:00]  I'm not the kind of Republican who would ever get elected as a Republican, but I'm here to show you how fair and balanced NBC News is.
[00:43:06]  And I think what they assumed was that Ronna McDaniel, as the head of the RNC, a Beltway figure, someone with the last name Romney, might be able to fit into that kind of a box.
[00:43:18]  And it's an impressive thing to have the former head of the RNC as your lower third.
[00:43:22]  But the problem is, I think what the execs didn't understand is that Rana worked for super duper mega Hitler Donald Trump.
[00:43:29]  And so it doesn't matter if your last name's Romney.
[00:43:32]  It doesn't matter if you're a Beltway fixture.
[00:43:34]  That's just going to be stuck to you.
[00:43:36]  And the audience probably won't accept you.
[00:43:39]  Your hosts won't accept you.
[00:43:41]  It just won't happen.
[00:43:42]  And so probably what's going to happen, I hope they paid her a nice big signing bonus.
[00:43:47]  Probably she's going to get shuffled out at some point.
[00:43:50]  She's going to get shuffled.
[00:43:52]  It has to happen, right?
[00:43:53]  And so the replacement will just be Joe Scarborough Jr.
[00:43:57]  You know, the replacement will just be another fake Republican.
[00:44:01]  Speaking of Joe Scarborough, he also has strong feelings about the hire of Ronna Romney McDaniel.
[00:44:11]  Watches.
[00:44:12]  We weren't asked our opinion of the hiring, but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons, including, but not limited to, as lawyers might say, Ms. McDaniel's role in Donald Trump's fake elector scheme and her pressuring election officials to not certify election results while Donald Trump was on the phone.
[00:44:35]  To be clear, we believe NBC News should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage, but it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier.
[00:44:55]  And we hope NBC will reconsider its decision.
[00:44:59]  It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on Morning Joe.
[00:45:04]  Oh, well.
[00:45:06]  So they clearly wrote that and put it into prompter.
[00:45:09]  That was their official position statement.
[00:45:11]  She can't come on MSNBC.
[00:45:14]  And she certainly can't come on Morning Joe.
[00:45:17]  By the way, you shouldn't say it goes without saying and then say the thing.
[00:45:20]  That's that's a that's it goes without saying, but I'm frivolous and repetitive.
[00:45:26]  So here we are.
[00:45:30]  This is amazing.
[00:45:31]  Like hearing them, no one asked us for our opinion because they don't give a shit what we say, but we would have not just objected, but strongly objected.
[00:45:40]  Strong.
[00:45:40]  It would have been a strong objection to the hiring of that election denier because you're only allowed to question the results of elections if you are a Democrat.
[00:45:51]  You have to be named Hillary Clinton or Stacey Abrams.
[00:45:54]  And by the way, they only hire the most pristine, upstanding, ethical people over at MSNBC and NBC.
[00:46:04]  Like every other day, MSNBC, Morning Joe guest, Al Sharpton, Michael.
[00:46:12]  It's fine to incite race riots, to make up a race hoax about an alleged rape by white cops, which was a total lie.
[00:46:21]  As John Pedoritz pointed out, completely forgot about this one on Twitter.
[00:46:26]  1995, Sharpton sparked rage in Harlem against a Jewish store owner who wanted to expand.
[00:46:33]  Sharpton called him a white interloper at a rally.
[00:46:36]  Eight people were later killed in a fire set by one of the protesters.
[00:46:40]  I could keep going.
[00:46:41]  That's okay.
[00:46:42]  But if you question an election F off, you will not be asked on Morning Joe.
[00:46:50]  Of course, my favorite part of her diatribe, well, it was similar to Chuck Todd's, but she was more explicit.
[00:46:56]  She said, look, we need to hire conservative Republicans, of course, but they need to be conservative Republicans.
[00:47:03]  I can't tell you, Megan, how many times I have been lectured by liberal Democrats who not only disagree with what I think, but have no idea what I think really about anything on what a true conservative Republican is.
[00:47:14]  The Democrats have been pulling this since at least the Goldwater election, since the 1960s.
[00:47:20]  They ran an ad and it was some dorky looking guy, you know, with his horn-rimmed glasses.
[00:47:24]  And he says, I've been a conservative Republican all my life.
[00:47:27]  My father was a conservative Republican, but this man, Mr. Goldwater, he is just a bridge too far.
[00:47:33]  He's not a real, and you hear this all the time.
[00:47:36]  You never hear it from any of the conservatives because anyone who is a conservative Republican who speaks honestly would not be acceptable to the audience of a far-left network.
[00:47:48]  And so they need to maintain the patina of credibility and balance.
[00:47:52]  And so it's all just kabuki theater.
[00:47:54]  It's all just a fake show.
[00:47:56]  And it seems kind of like disreputable work for me.
[00:47:58]  I probably wouldn't take the job.
[00:48:00]  But, you know, if the paycheck is big enough, I hope at least Rana can, you know, get a few weeks' salary before the hammer comes down.
[00:48:08]  You know, what's amazing is I realize Rana is a controversial figure, but she's just such a nice person.

=== Sensitive Royal Announcements (14:13) ===

[00:48:14]  She's like kind of sweet.
[00:48:16]  You know, she's not a pit bull.
[00:48:18]  She's not an asshole, right?
[00:48:19]  So it's like, you would think that they could find a way to say, all right, you know, and by the way, she wasn't like election denier in chief.
[00:48:26]  It's not like hiring Trump.
[00:48:29]  There was some, you know, questions in Michigan.
[00:48:32]  But the point is, you're not going to find somebody in Trump's Republican Party who is going to tell you they think the election was perfectly fair and had no problems.
[00:48:43]  That's about as controversial as she got.
[00:48:45]  In any event, it's going to end in more ruination and despair, like most Republican careers over there do.
[00:48:51]  Michael Knowles, always a pleasure, my friend.
[00:48:54]  Wonderful to be with you.
[00:48:55]  Thank you, Megan.
[00:48:56]  All right.
[00:48:56]  When we come back, Dan Wooten, and the latest from Kate.
[00:49:03]  After months of speculation, Kate Middleton, Princess Catherine, Princess of Wales, announced the shocking news that she is undergoing treatment for cancer.
[00:49:13]  She did not specify what kind of cancer.
[00:49:16]  This came after she was spotted for the first time last week at a local shop, a local farm, they said, with her husband, the Prince of Wales.
[00:49:24]  But that did not stop the online frenzy and claims that that was not really her, either at the farm or even in the video.
[00:49:32]  As now two members of the royal family have been diagnosed with cancer, big questions remain about the future.
[00:49:39]  Here to discuss it all and more.
[00:49:40]  One of our favorites on All Things Royal, Dan Wooden.
[00:49:43]  He's host of the newly launched show and Substack, Dan Wooden Outspoken.
[00:49:49]  That's W O T T O N. Three O's, two T's.
[00:49:55]  A lot of work in that last name, but he's worth it.
[00:49:58]  Dan, welcome back to the show.
[00:50:00]  So here you are again.
[00:50:02]  Last we spoke, you said she's very unwell.
[00:50:06]  Like, it's not true.
[00:50:07]  All the other stuff is not true.
[00:50:09]  She's very unwell.
[00:50:09]  She's dealing with something.
[00:50:10]  We think she's going to be okay, but she's genuinely having a health issue.
[00:50:15]  And then we get this news.
[00:50:16]  Just for those who didn't see it, but I'm sure everybody's seen the video by now.
[00:50:20]  Let me play an excerpt of Kate Middleton on Friday announcing her cancer diagnosis.
[00:50:25]  In January, I underwent major abdominal surgery in London.
[00:50:29]  And at the time, it was thought that my condition was non-cancerous.
[00:50:34]  The surgery was successful.
[00:50:36]  However, tests after the operation found cancer had been present.
[00:50:41]  My medical team therefore advised that I should undergo a course of preventative chemotherapy.
[00:50:46]  And I'm now in the early stages of that treatment.
[00:50:51]  This, of course, came as a huge shock.
[00:50:53]  And William and I have been doing everything we can to process and manage this privately for the sake of our young family.
[00:51:00]  Most importantly, it has taken us time to explain everything to George, Charlotte, and Louis in a way that's appropriate for them and to reassure them that I'm going to be okay.
[00:51:12]  As I've said to them, I am well and getting stronger every day by focusing on the things that will help me heal in my mind, body, and spirits.
[00:51:21]  Having William by my side is a great source of comfort and reassurance too.
[00:51:25]  As is the love, support and kindness that has been shown by so many of you.
[00:51:30]  It means so much to us both.
[00:51:35]  England's lucky to have her.
[00:51:36]  Dan, what do you make of the announcement?
[00:51:39]  Well, I think it's quite an extraordinary statement, very unusual for a member of the royal family to give an address like that on video.
[00:51:49]  Usually, such an announcement would be made on paper.
[00:51:54]  But after the sort of frenzied speculation which had gone all around the world, I mean, Fox in the US just the night before had run a prime time documentary authored by TMZ.
[00:52:08]  Where's Kate?
[00:52:09]  She knew she had to step up.
[00:52:12]  It had to be a video.
[00:52:14]  But as you say, hasn't stopped the conspiracy theorists.
[00:52:18]  I feel, Megan, this is almost like Paul McCartney.
[00:52:22]  You know, some people think Paul McCartney died in a car crash in the 1960s, and we don't have the real Paul McCartney today.
[00:52:30]  I promise you, Google this.
[00:52:32]  It's a major conspiracy theory.
[00:52:34]  I promise you, in about 50 years' time, there'll be people who still don't believe that that's the real Kate.
[00:52:41]  Look, that was her.
[00:52:44]  It was a genuine video.
[00:52:47]  I promise you, there's no one at Kensington Palace with the technical know-how to do some sort of deal.
[00:52:54]  You saw how they did that photo.
[00:52:56]  Photoshop a picture.
[00:52:59]  Right.
[00:53:00]  Okay, so it's her.
[00:53:01]  And they didn't release, there's so much to go over, but they didn't say what kind of a cancer it was.
[00:53:07]  So she said that she had major abdominal surgery and that after, you know, whatever had been removed, it sounds like something was removed because she said, however, the surgery was successful.
[00:53:20]  However, tests after the operation found cancer had been present, had been.
[00:53:25]  So to me, that suggests she had something removed and then they always check the removed organs and so on to make sure nothing remains.
[00:53:34]  And something appears to have been cancerous that was taken out.
[00:53:38]  And now she's in the early stages of preventative chemotherapy.
[00:53:44]  Okay, here is some of the reaction to that, Dan.
[00:53:48]  You and I are not doctors, but I just want to get you to weigh in because this is CNN, Anderson Cooper, who hosted Dr. Jeremy Jonathan Reiner.
[00:53:57]  I will say we looked up his background.
[00:53:59]  It appears his expertise is in, let's see, certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular disease, and interventional cardiology.
[00:54:08]  Okay, watch.
[00:54:10]  Well, with all respect to the royal family, that kind of press release doesn't make a lot of medical sense.
[00:54:18]  When people undergo extensive surgery, they just don't go in for typically anymore for, quote, exploratory surgery.
[00:54:27]  All of these operations are preceded by extensive imaging, like CAT scans and MRIs.
[00:54:33]  Piece of the tissue removed, whatever the organ is or the organ removed or intestine, for instance, that goes directly to the pathology lab, often during the surgery.
[00:54:45]  And sometimes whether something is cancer or not will dictate the extent of the actual operation.
[00:54:51]  It's very likely that the surgical team knew or had a good sense of what this was going to be prior to surgery.
[00:54:59]  And that was confirmed at the time of pathologic testing during the operation.
[00:55:05]  So this is something that would have at least been suspected before and confirmed during the operation.
[00:55:12]  What do you make of that, Dan?
[00:55:14]  Well, of course, if that is true, it means that Kensington Palace directly lied because they were very clear in their public announcements about Catherine's surgery, which remember was just around the time that King Charles's cancer diagnosis was announced, that she was not suffering from cancer.
[00:55:36]  I'd say two things.
[00:55:38]  Firstly, the royal family have a long history of playing down medical issues.
[00:55:45]  So Prince Philip had loads of serious cancers in about the 15 years before his death.
[00:55:52]  Not once did he make a public announcement.
[00:55:55]  Likewise, the late queen, who died of blood cancer, but on her death certificate, it simply said she passed away from old age.
[00:56:04]  So this is something that the royal family do.
[00:56:07]  They don't like to raise lots of issues about their health.
[00:56:10]  But when it came to Kate, clearly this was particularly sensitive given the timing.
[00:56:16]  The royal family is always very conscious of how announcements, major announcements from them, affect the public confidence in the monarchy.
[00:56:26]  Just imagine, Megan, if in the course of two hours, it had been announced that both the king and the future queen were suffering from cancer.
[00:56:36]  So I think it is quite possible that there was at least some sort of expectation that cancer would be found, but the decision was made not to announce it publicly.
[00:56:46]  Perhaps they hoped never to have announced it publicly.
[00:56:50]  However, when it became clear just how serious this was, but also just how much the world was not going to accept a lengthy absence from Catherine, the PR strategy changed.
[00:57:02]  What I still think though, and remember, I have been very, very strong.
[00:57:07]  I've never joined the carnival of criticism of Catherine herself.
[00:57:12]  But what I would say is that Kensington Palace managed this in a very amateur-hour way.
[00:57:19]  Why on earth did they want to release a photograph of Catherine looking healthy and happy, knowing full well that at some point they were going to have to reveal that she's suffering from cancer and about to have chemotherapy?
[00:57:32]  That was an odd decision and it exacerbated the situation.
[00:57:35]  But I think for those blaming the princess herself, that's really unfair.
[00:57:40]  Her priority, rightly or wrongly, personally, I say this is rightly, was her children.
[00:57:46]  So the kids are now on holiday, Megan, until April the 17th.
[00:57:50]  So William and Catherine have this idea that in the next three weeks, they'll be able to get them, especially Prince George, who's a sensitive little soul, the future king, get them to a place psychologically where they've accepted that mummy has cancer.
[00:58:04]  We think she's going to be okay.
[00:58:05]  So that when he's amongst his peers, he's 10 years old now, he's sort of strong enough to deal with that.
[00:58:12]  You've got to think as well, that's something William is so strong on because of his childhood when he was at school, having to deal with loads of major stories about his parents, not only his mother's death, but the divorce as well.
[00:58:25]  And he struggled with that.
[00:58:27]  So as I say, he's always been clear, William in particular, they will put the children first.
[00:58:34]  In this case, they did that.
[00:58:36]  Personally, I think there's lots of people who should feel quite ashamed with the pressure that they put on Catherine over that period.
[00:58:47]  Okay, this is so interesting to me.
[00:58:49]  You're right.
[00:58:50]  So the royal family doesn't normally come out with the cancer diagnoses, Prince Philip, the queen, and so on.
[00:58:56]  And I think you make a good point because in Catherine's case, it would have been extra shocking.
[00:59:03]  Yes, because we also had the king's diagnosis, but also she's only 42 years old.
[00:59:08]  Yeah.
[00:59:09]  And they needed to be extra careful around this announcement, even more so than the queen and Prince Philip and now the King Charles, because she's got three little ones.
[00:59:19]  I mean, any mother could understand letting your young children know that you've got a potentially fatal disease.
[00:59:27]  I mean, I'm not saying in her case, but you know, cancer obviously kills millions of people is a very sensitive discussion.
[00:59:34]  And you'd want to handle that in exactly the right way.
[00:59:37]  Maybe they did delay telling the children, as they're claiming, until they could spend three weeks straight with them and the kids could see mom all day seeming fine, acting normal.
[00:59:49]  I could absolutely understand that.
[00:59:51]  So to me, that does make sense.
[00:59:54]  I will say, you know, if they're still misleading in the description of how it all went down, it just undermines the whole thing even more because people, when they sense they're being misled, will hold on like a dog with a bone.
[01:00:13]  And in this case, prior to Kate's announcement, we were being misled.
[01:00:18]  You know, the people were right that they were not being given the full straight story.
[01:00:24]  So now more than ever, they need to be extremely explicit and honest.
[01:00:28]  They can say, this is where we're drawing the lines, but there can be absolutely no missteps like the ones that we've seen.
[01:00:35]  And I think that's what Kate tried to do in the video.
[01:00:39]  But I would point out, Megan, there are lots of bad actors involved who were trying to exacerbate the situation.
[01:00:46]  So I've never said that Kensington Palace dealt with this perfectly.
[01:00:50]  Clearly, they didn't.
[01:00:52]  It became an international PR disaster.
[01:00:56]  But let me just balance it up a little bit.
[01:00:58]  We now know for a fact that there are bots and troll farms working on behalf of the Russians and the Chinese and potentially the Sussex squad as well, who were purposefully spreading lots of false narratives to try and make the Catherine story bigger than it actually was.
[01:01:17]  Now, that succeeded.
[01:01:19]  We also know that there were lots of folk on the hard left who were deliberately trying to damage the monarchy.
[01:01:26]  The most significant of them, Owen Jones, who is a radical left columnist here for the Guardian newspaper, has actually had to issue a groveling apology because he knows what he was doing was completely wrong.
[01:01:40]  So yes, I agree.
[01:01:41]  There were mistakes made.
[01:01:42]  Some people felt they were badly misled.
[01:01:45]  But don't underestimate how much the enemies of the royal family have been using this to specifically damage Catherine and William, especially when it comes to their relationship, their marriage.
[01:01:57]  We had jokes from Stephen Colbert on American primetime television as a result.
[01:02:02]  And never forget the hatred and the bitterness that Harry and Megan still have towards the royal family because they had their friends out briefing that this was a mistake that Megan would never have made with the Photoshop.
[01:02:17]  So all I'm saying is that mistakes were made, but I do think there has also been a really deliberate ploy to make this even worse for the royal family than it had to be.

=== Deliberate Ploys Against Royals (14:29) ===

[01:02:28]  That's very interesting.
[01:02:29]  Yeah, I believe every word of what you just said.
[01:02:32]  Just one other point before we get to some of that, because we've got some examples of what appear to be Megan and Harry surrogates, or at least close confidants out there fanning these flames.
[01:02:44]  But before we get to that, I just want to follow up on that guy, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who we played from Anderson Cooper.
[01:02:49]  He went on and said these operations like the one she had are typically preceded by extensive CAT scans and MRIs, adding it's very unlikely, very unlikely that the surgical team knew of the, did not know of the cancer prior to operating.
[01:03:09]  I'm trying to read my notes here.
[01:03:10]  But in any event, he's saying that they would have had extensive CAT scans and MRIs and probably knew what they were dealing with.
[01:03:16]  Oh, very likely, very likely that the surgical team knew of the cancer prior to operating.
[01:03:24]  So look, my instincts tell me they're probably still downplaying exactly what they knew and when they knew it for reasons of their own.
[01:03:33]  But the bottom line remains the bottom line.
[01:03:36]  She has cancer.
[01:03:37]  We don't know what kind of cancer.
[01:03:39]  The medical professionals were out there speculating.
[01:03:42]  Dr. Mark Siegel, for example, was on Fox News.
[01:03:45]  He's, I know him well, NYU Langoan Medical Center, very respected facility.
[01:03:50]  His suggestion was it was likely either, it is likely either early colon cancer that was removed and cured surgically, but then cells were found, or potentially early ovarian, uterine, or cervical cancer that was found incidentally.
[01:04:05]  It has been reported in previous years that she has Crohn's disease.
[01:04:08]  We've discussed that with our audience.
[01:04:09]  Chronic inflammatory bowel disease affects, that's what that is.
[01:04:13]  It affects the lining of the digestive tract.
[01:04:15]  And in at least 50% of the cases, one does need surgery.
[01:04:18]  And colon cancer is becoming more and more common among young people.
[01:04:22]  It used to be like a, you start to get screened when I think when you're 50 or 45.
[01:04:26]  And now it's, they're finding it more and more in young people.
[01:04:28]  We don't know whether that's what it is, but people are left to worry because, you know, you don't like to see a 42-year-old mother come down with cancer of any kind.
[01:04:37]  No, and I think that is all fair analysis.
[01:04:39]  The one thing that I would pick up on, though, is this idea that William and Catherine knew how bad this was before her surgery.
[01:04:48]  Now, the reason I say that is you know that William pulled out of this memorial service where he was due to speak for the king of Greece.
[01:04:56]  It was a really big deal.
[01:04:57]  He pulled out on the morning of the service.
[01:05:00]  That just does not happen, especially seeing the king wasn't in attendance.
[01:05:04]  It meant that Queen Camilla had to lead the family at that event and it was all considered quite embarrassing because you had Prince Andrew there and no William and no Charles.
[01:05:13]  Now, the reason he pulled out, Megan, is because it was around that day that Catherine got the bad news.
[01:05:22]  So whether they had some sort of understanding before the operation that perhaps there was a suspicion that cancer was going to be found, possibly.
[01:05:30]  But certainly the news got progressively bad, leading to that very dramatic moment when William decided to pull out on the day because that just doesn't.
[01:05:40]  I would just say one other thing, one other thing.
[01:05:42]  I understand she wants her privacy and she should have it the way she wants it.
[01:05:46]  But she has a real opportunity here because there are millions of people who have colon cancer, young people too, other moms like Kate, colon cancer or ovarian cancer or uterine cancer or endometrial.
[01:05:59]  It's like one of any of these things.
[01:06:02]  And if she were to share anything about what she's going through and how scary it was for her, and she doesn't have to be an open book.
[01:06:08]  I understand, you know, we don't want that from our royals exactly.
[01:06:12]  I really think she could help people.
[01:06:13]  She could call attention to it.
[01:06:15]  She could encourage people to do screening for it.
[01:06:18]  Maybe she'll get there.
[01:06:19]  This is all still new, I think, but like there really is an opportunity for her to be the people's princess, right?
[01:06:27]  Even more so than Diana, if she could help people through this very scary diagnosis.
[01:06:33]  Yeah, it was where Diana, I would argue, had her most power.
[01:06:37]  will never forget in the early 90s when she went public in a very dramatic and emotional speech and revealed her battle with bulimia.
[01:06:47]  It was highly personal.
[01:06:48]  It was very detailed.
[01:06:50]  But you've got to remember, Megan, Diana went completely against the grain of the royal family who like to keep these matters private or at least general.
[01:07:03]  Harry, of course, has followed in his mother's footsteps talking about his mental health issues in some detail.
[01:07:10]  Now, lots of people would say that was a mistake.
[01:07:12]  And his tis Todder.
[01:07:14]  Let Doni.
[01:07:15]  Yeah.
[01:07:16]  Please, God, none of that.
[01:07:19]  We don't need to know.
[01:07:20]  He's really gone there, Dan.
[01:07:22]  Okay.
[01:07:23]  So let's talk about what some of these bad actors have been doing, because I did think it was interesting that this guy featured in their Netflix documentary in Megan and Harry's Netflix documentary, last name Boozy.
[01:07:37]  Christopher Boozy.
[01:07:39]  He's been one of the chief firelighters, as far as I can tell, on the doubting.
[01:07:46]  And he continues to.
[01:07:48]  So here is a bit of what he has been saying.
[01:07:52]  Is this his comparison of them at the farm?
[01:07:56]  Let's watch it.
[01:07:57]  He posted this to Twitter comparing them walking where we know it's them versus this two, these two at the farm, suggesting there's a difference, right?
[01:08:07]  Some people online have said, oh, there's a height difference, Kate versus William.
[01:08:10]  I mean, sometimes we wear heels as women, sometimes we don't.
[01:08:12]  Who knows?
[01:08:13]  But a lot of people believing that that farm video is not the real Kate.
[01:08:18]  Some suggesting it's not even the real William.
[01:08:21]  And this guy, Christopher Boozy, is a tech CEO.
[01:08:24]  Again, he was from the Megan and Harry documentary.
[01:08:28]  I use that term in air quotes.
[01:08:30]  Let me give you what he's saying.
[01:08:32]  I'm sorry to hear Kate has cancer.
[01:08:33]  I hope she has a full recovery.
[01:08:35]  He posted this on X.
[01:08:36]  But it's also clear that all three earlier photos of her were fake and the palace tried to cover it up.
[01:08:42]  There was one of her sort of puffy faced caught in the car.
[01:08:46]  There was one of her in a different car.
[01:08:49]  And then there was the farm video.
[01:08:51]  It still hasn't dawned on most people yet how much the palace lied.
[01:08:54]  Kate is fighting cancer and they blamed her for the Photoshop photo, knowing it wasn't true.
[01:08:59]  Kate wasn't releasing blurry fake photos of herself.
[01:09:02]  I'm not the least bit embarrassed.
[01:09:05]  I said the woman in the Windsor Farm video wasn't Kate and she's not Kate.
[01:09:09]  Kate bravely sharing her cancer diagnosis has nothing to do with the smiling person who was walking fast and holding a grocery bag.
[01:09:17]  I am vaccinated against gaslighting.
[01:09:20]  And there's much, much more from this guy, but what do you make of that?
[01:09:23]  Well, look, this plays into much into a much bigger issue.
[01:09:26]  So Christopher Boozy, he is effectively the spiritual leader of the Sussex squad.
[01:09:32]  Now, the Sussex squad, Megan, they're actually a really nefarious force on the internet.
[01:09:38]  They are the biggest group of trolls in the world.
[01:09:41]  I think the vast majority of them are fake.
[01:09:44]  I've learned that the key ringleaders will run hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of accounts.
[01:09:51]  Bots are involved.
[01:09:52]  But what the biggest issue is, is that Boozy claims to be the guy who's railing against internet trolling, just like Harry and Megan do, Harry and his role at the Aspen Institute as this disinformation czar.
[01:10:08]  And yet, when it comes to this story, they are the ones leading the charge when it comes to disinformation, trolling, and abuse.
[01:10:18]  So I'm going to quite publicly now, Megan, again, call on Prince Harry and Megan Markle.
[01:10:24]  If they really believe what they say about trolling and disinformation on the internet, Harry and Megan, the time has come for you to completely disassociate with Christopher Boozy and the Sussex squad.
[01:10:39]  If you are not prepared to do that, I believe you are leading this charge against your own family with online trolling.
[01:10:47]  And I think it makes him the biggest hypocrites on the internet.
[01:10:52]  This same man, Boozy, had posted over the weekend on Saturday, which is after her video, Seen Round the World, was Friday, posted serious question.
[01:11:03]  Has any reporter taken the time to go to Windsor Farm and ask the staff if William and Kate were there over the weekend?
[01:11:10]  Besides the man who was paid for the video, has anyone else gone on the record about seeing William and Kate at the farm?
[01:11:16]  Not a single person who works at the farm or store has gone on the record about seeing them.
[01:11:20]  So just some random guy is the primary source of the story.
[01:11:24]  Sounds legit because the man who took the video, his name is Nelson Silva.
[01:11:28]  He's 40.
[01:11:28]  He said he saw them with his own eyes and told the son, I'm not so much shocked that these comments have continued.
[01:11:35]  I'm just confused how exactly they can continue.
[01:11:38]  This is a video clearly showing Kate and William.
[01:11:41]  I did see them with my own eyes.
[01:11:45]  So he's still not backing down.
[01:11:48]  And yeah, would it not take a simple text from Harry or Megan, who are the ones who made this guy a star, to say, yo, just stop.
[01:12:00]  Of course it would.
[01:12:00]  They don't want it to stop.
[01:12:02]  They do not want it to stop.
[01:12:04]  And by the way, when it comes to the farm shop, he's spouting absolute nonsense.
[01:12:09]  The editor of The Sun, Victoria Newton, has gone on the record on the BBC over the weekend to essentially admit that Kensington Palace confirmed the veracity of the photos.
[01:12:21]  That's why they paid the £200,000 plus to run them.
[01:12:26]  Come on, no Murdoch publication is wasting £200,000 on a couple of pictures of lookalikes.
[01:12:32]  It's just ridiculous.
[01:12:33]  Also, by the way, I've met most of the Harry and Megan lookalikes in the UK.
[01:12:39]  They're lovely people.
[01:12:40]  Sorry, not the Harry and Megan lookalikes.
[01:12:41]  The Prince William and Kate lookalikes.
[01:12:43]  They're lovely people, Megan, but they don't look that much like William and Kate.
[01:12:48]  Do you see what I mean?
[01:12:49]  So this is just him spreading disinformation.
[01:12:52]  And it's so ironic.
[01:12:54]  It's just so ironic.
[01:12:57]  I would say that if you haven't seen the movie Dave recently, go rent out the movie Dave.
[01:13:02]  We watched this with my family the other week.
[01:13:04]  It's so, it's, it's, you know, older now.
[01:13:05]  It stars Kevin Klein, but he takes over as the, as the acting president.
[01:13:10]  He's a lookalike and the real president has a stroke early on.
[01:13:13]  I'm not ruining anything.
[01:13:14]  And they, this evil chief of staff who wants to continue running the government hires Dave, the lookalike, to act as the real president and Sigourney Weaver's the first lady.
[01:13:22]  It's hilarious.
[01:13:23]  So anyway, it's kind of timely given the fact that most, not most, many people think Joe Biden has a lookalike.
[01:13:30]  Many people think William and Kate are not really in these videos.
[01:13:33]  Anyway, it's kind of, it's a fun movie to watch.
[01:13:35]  So before we move on from Catherine, can I ask you about the hospital security breach?
[01:13:41]  Because this is like crazy.
[01:13:44]  So she was in the hospital, as she admits.
[01:13:46]  And what happened?
[01:13:47]  Did the hospital give her records to someone pretending they should have access?
[01:13:52]  Or was it, did somebody try to access her records inappropriately?
[01:13:56]  What happened?
[01:13:57]  Yeah.
[01:13:58]  So what we believe, and remember, this is the London clinic where not just Catherine was being treated, but the king as well.
[01:14:05]  And we believe that there were numerous staff members who tried to access Catherine's private medical records.
[01:14:14]  Now, the police are investigating this as well as the clinic now.
[01:14:17]  Buckingham Palace hasn't confirmed if King Charles's records were also accessed.
[01:14:23]  So the rules in the UK are so much tighter, Megan, when it comes to privacy and what you can report on someone's health.
[01:14:31]  There's certainly a real fundamental belief that if you're in hospital, even as a public figure, no one can sell that information.
[01:14:39]  And I think it does show you the frenzy that had developed online can have a real real world consequence because presuming these staff members at the London Clinic just wanted to tell their mates.
[01:14:51]  like this is what Princess Catherine has got.
[01:14:54]  But actually, don't be surprised if that could result in people losing their jobs, perhaps even facing criminal charges, because I think that will be taken very seriously.
[01:15:05]  That's a nightmare.
[01:15:06]  I'll tell you what, Dan, when I had my three kids, I went into the hospital and I went in all three times because that's like a, if somebody wanted to know, like when a woman's pregnant and then she misses her show as a news anchor, you know what she, you know, like they would announce it.
[01:15:21]  She's there.
[01:15:22]  She had her baby.
[01:15:23]  Anyway, I was very careful about that.
[01:15:25]  And so I used an alias and I had the same, it was a ridiculous alias because I'm, you know, it's just whatever.
[01:15:31]  I felt so silly doing it, but I did it.
[01:15:34]  And it was so ridiculous that by the time I had my third kid, they asked me if I could use something else because it was so absurd.
[01:15:43]  So I did.
[01:15:44]  I chose something completely benign and boring for the third one.
[01:15:48]  And I still have the little tags on for me and the baby that say these fake names, but I'm just saying, you know, protection of one's privacy, even at my level, is a big deal.
[01:15:59]  I cannot imagine being the princess of Wales and trying to have like a cancer surgery and having to worry about prying eyes going into your records in the computer.
[01:16:12]  It's like the royal family needs its own hospital.
[01:16:16]  But surely she was using an alias too.
[01:16:18]  So I actually think this must have been a staff member who was aware that she was in hospital, was aware what ward she was in, was aware what alias she was using.
[01:16:29]  Do you see what I mean?
[01:16:30]  It actually becomes a heightened security breach because there's no way she's down as Princess Catherine on the computer records.
[01:16:40]  TC.
[01:16:41]  Yo, how you feeling?
[01:16:43]  All right, wait.
[01:16:44]  I'm going to squeeze in a quick break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about so much more.
[01:16:48]  We've got some updates on Harry and Megan and Dan had a big exclusive relating to a lawsuit against the pair and we'll tell you what he learned.

=== Erasing Samantha's Legacy (14:32) ===

[01:16:57]  I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.
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[01:18:00]  All right, let's talk about everyone's least favorite princess, and that's Megan Markle.
[01:18:06]  So, okay, she's launched a new brand.
[01:18:10]  She's rebranded again, Dan, again.
[01:18:13]  And I didn't believe it until I just saw it.
[01:18:16]  Pardon me, please, audience, because you might throw up a little in your mouth as I just did when I saw it.
[01:18:21]  Okay, I'm going to describe it for the listening audience, but this is, she's promoting her new, I guess, Instagram and her new website.
[01:18:31]  She posted an Instagram story.
[01:18:33]  Okay, the day after it launched.
[01:18:34]  Here it is.
[01:18:35]  Watch this.
[01:18:36]  Oh my God.
[01:18:37]  I wish you bluebirds and the spring flowers.
[01:18:42]  She's baking a song to sing.
[01:18:45]  She's in a ball gown in a mansion.
[01:18:47]  But more than this, I wish you love.
[01:18:52]  Oh my God.
[01:18:53]  Dan, the name of the new website is American Riviera Orchard Montecito.
[01:19:02]  Hold on.
[01:19:03]  It's just seven more pages long.
[01:19:04]  I'll get to the end of it.
[01:19:05]  American River and Orchard Montecito, which she says she thinks is perfect.
[01:19:09]  And the best I can tell, because they've, I guess they're going to be selling cookbooks and other, like, she's trying to be that ballerina farm lady who's over here on Instagram, who everybody's following.
[01:19:19]  I think she married the guy whose parents owned JetBlue and she wants everybody to believe that she's like self-made.
[01:19:25]  Meanwhile, she's got all this money from the husband's parents and she's out on her farm with 10,000 kids trying to say, this is what it looks like to be a trad wife.
[01:19:33]  And it's a lie.
[01:19:34]  And now I think we have another lie going out of Montecito from the Duchess of Duplicity.
[01:19:39]  Oh, yes.
[01:19:41]  This is like goop on acid, isn't it?
[01:19:44]  And not in a good way.
[01:19:46]  I mean, come on.
[01:19:47]  Who wants to buy garlic oil from Megan Markle?
[01:19:52]  I actually think this is going to be a real failure, genuinely, because I do not understand what market she's pitching at.
[01:20:01]  Who wants her products?
[01:20:02]  No, this is odd.
[01:20:04]  I'll also tell you, Megan, I'm picking up from the royal family.
[01:20:08]  My source is there, lots of unhappiness that she used the vacuum provided by Catherine and all of the headlines around her health in order to purposefully launch her new venture, which they thought was quite icky.
[01:20:24]  But look, this is what they do, isn't it?
[01:20:25]  This is what they do.
[01:20:26]  They want to make lots of money.
[01:20:28]  They failed to make money from Spotify.
[01:20:30]  It was a complete disaster.
[01:20:32]  Spotify pulled the deal.
[01:20:34]  They've failed to have any hits on Netflix apart from their one reality series where they decided to slag off their own family members.
[01:20:41]  So now she's doing a goop and I think it's not going to go well.
[01:20:46]  I mean, after all that, after like getting the role in suits, landing Prince Harry, doing the Netflix, she's back to the TIG.
[01:20:56]  She's back to the dumb lifestyle website.
[01:20:59]  She's a lifestyle blogger.
[01:21:02]  Yes, she's a lifestyle blogger.
[01:21:04]  And you know what?
[01:21:04]  This tells you so much about this woman's priorities.
[01:21:09]  Megan, she had an opportunity to change the world.
[01:21:14]  Look at Princess Diana.
[01:21:15]  We spoke about her earlier, right?
[01:21:17]  Even now, decades on, people remember what Princess Diana did in terms of raising the awareness of AIDS in the world, in terms of bulimia, and in terms of landmines.
[01:21:31]  What is the cause that we're going to connect to Megan Markle, apart from acute narcissism?
[01:21:40]  Yeah, right, exactly.
[01:21:42]  So in the meantime, she continues a legal battle.
[01:21:46]  This one is one of the rare few that she didn't actually file.
[01:21:50]  She was on the receiving end of this one.
[01:21:52]  She loves to sue.
[01:21:53]  She's a big suer, she and Prince Harry.
[01:21:56]  But she found herself on the receiving end of a lawsuit this time by her half sister, Samantha Markle.
[01:22:01]  And Samantha Markle's case has officially been thrown out with prejudice, meaning she cannot re-file it.
[01:22:07]  She was claiming that she had been defamed in Megan Markle's media tour, including with Oprah Winfrey in these comments that Megan made about how she barely knew her family or this sister and she considered herself an only child.
[01:22:24]  And there were other comments too.
[01:22:26]  The court ruled, that stuff is basically opinion and it's not actionable.
[01:22:31]  Opinions are not actionable as a matter of law here in the United States.
[01:22:34]  So you talked to Samantha Markle in an exclusive, which is awesome.
[01:22:40]  I love that you're already getting exclusives.
[01:22:41]  This is huge.
[01:22:43]  And what did she tell you?
[01:22:44]  We have a bit of a, we have at least one soundbite, but set it up for us.
[01:22:47]  What did you learn?
[01:22:48]  Well, she says that this is absolutely not over and not going to be appealing.
[01:22:53]  Now, you know, Megan as America's number one legal brain, what this means, but her lawyer, her attorney, Peter Ticton, who's a Florida lawyer who's very close with Donald Trump, grew up with Donald Trump, previously represented Donald Trump.
[01:23:08]  He really believes in Samantha's case.
[01:23:11]  And he says it's going to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and that he believes that once they are in front of a judge who is not an Obama appointee, which is what Judge Huniwell was, and isn't someone who is motivated by the race factor in the Samantha versus Megan battle, he thinks she's got a really good chance.
[01:23:33]  What is, I'm going to, I have a soundbite here that is her talking about being called part of a hate group.
[01:23:39]  It's a reference, as I understand it, Dan, to the Netflix documentary.
[01:23:42]  Before I play it, what set it up?
[01:23:46]  How did Megan Markle refer to Samantha?
[01:23:48]  How did her Netflix documentary suggest Samantha Markle was part of a hate group?
[01:23:53]  Yeah, so she's tried to link Samantha.
[01:23:55]  I mean, you remember the documentary was all about saying that their trolls were all people who were effectively racist and on the far right.
[01:24:04]  Now, Samantha, who's a very good woman who I've got to know very well.
[01:24:08]  Sure, she's a Donald Trump supporter.
[01:24:10]  She's a supporter of the American Constitution.
[01:24:14]  She loves her guns.
[01:24:15]  She loves her free speech.
[01:24:16]  But to link her to a hate group, which is what she feels the documentary did, is completely outrageous.
[01:24:23]  And that's one of the reasons she's so angry, as well as the fact that Megan lied about not knowing her.
[01:24:28]  I mean, Megan was at her university graduation.
[01:24:32]  There's pictures of it.
[01:24:33]  Like this woman just lies about everything, even about her sister.
[01:24:38]  Yes, they've fallen out, but they share the same father and they were like a family.
[01:24:45]  But she, of course, she abandoned the father too, and she wanted nothing to do with the more working classes.
[01:24:52]  Yeah, she's embarrassed.
[01:24:54]  She's embarrassed.
[01:24:54]  Yeah, she doesn't like the fact that Sam is on the right and that Sam is a Donald Trump supporter.
[01:25:00]  Megan hates that.
[01:25:01]  She's a big time Democrat.
[01:25:02]  We've seen loads of families in America torn apart by this, haven't we?
[01:25:06]  But to claim that Sam has any hate in her, which is what Boozy and this documentary and all of those people have done, I think it's personally outrageous.
[01:25:16]  And Sam obviously feels like her reputation has been trashed on an international level because, yes, she can talk to me, but she doesn't have the power of an Oprah Winfrey interview because Megan also trashed her in that interview with Oprah or a Netflix documentary where she's been trashed as well.
[01:25:32]  And it's sort of tried to erase the part that Sam played in her life.
[01:25:36]  Remember, there were years and years and years when Doria, the mum who Megan now loves, wasn't in the picture at all.
[01:25:43]  It was Thomas Markle who was raising Megan almost as a solo father.
[01:25:49]  And at that point, Samantha was around.
[01:25:51]  Now, sure, she's in a wheelchair.
[01:25:53]  She's got serious illnesses, which is one of the reasons why physically she wasn't always in the same house.
[01:25:58]  But as I say, Megan attended Samantha's university graduation.
[01:26:03]  Would you go to a graduation of a half sister who you claim you literally didn't know?
[01:26:09]  All right.
[01:26:10]  Well, here's Samantha speaking to you about that piece of it in SOT 44.
[01:26:15]  I was made out to be in the Netflix thing, a member, a leader of a hate group.
[01:26:21]  A hate group by definition incites a lot of violence globally now because of what is going on and what's being fueled by the radical left.
[01:26:30]  So to put me in the crosshairs of that, I think is morally, you know, irreprehensible.
[01:26:36]  It's disgusting because it's not true and it endangers people.
[01:26:40]  And she's out there, as you mentioned before, talking about online bullying and, you know, bullying between women.
[01:26:49]  Well, we've got a woman who has millions of dollars who is, in my opinion, and many others, a purveyor of bullying and of misinformation.
[01:27:02]  Certainly misinformation, but the bullying too charge is supported, Dan.
[01:27:08]  Look at the number of people who have worked for her who have left running or were reduced to tears with the stories are legion coming out of not just when she was at the palace, but since she's moved to the American Riviera Orchard Farm, Ballerina, I don't know what it is, but whatever she's doing.
[01:27:28]  No one stays working for this woman.
[01:27:30]  No one stays working for this woman.
[01:27:32]  But look, I think Samantha's right to use the B word.
[01:27:35]  I think it can be bandied around a bit too often.
[01:27:37]  But remember, there were formal complaints made to Buckingham Palace when Megan was a member of the royal family.
[01:27:44]  The staff said that she often left them in tears and that she felt like she was bully.
[01:27:49]  But what I just think is so ironic, and again, it connects to what I was saying earlier about Catherine, Princess Catherine.
[01:27:56]  If Megan hates this online bullying, then why is she allowing her squad, the Sussex squad, they are her people representing her online.
[01:28:07]  Why is she allowing them to bully her own sister?
[01:28:11]  Yeah, that's exactly right.
[01:28:13]  And why just a simple text to say, hey, even if, even if it's not her god, I put you in my Netflix documentary.
[01:28:19]  I made you an international star.
[01:28:21]  Just stop.
[01:28:22]  It's not the time.
[01:28:22]  It's not appropriate.
[01:28:23]  And that's all it would take.
[01:28:26]  Before I move on from Harry and Megan, I've got to ask about Harry speaking out.
[01:28:29]  He went on GMA.
[01:28:30]  We missed this in February, mid-February, to promote his Invictus games.
[01:28:34]  And he was asked about, this is before we had the official diagnosis that we've heard now from Kate, but we knew that she was ill.
[01:28:41]  We knew that the king was ill and whether the family could reunify.
[01:28:45]  Here's what he said.
[01:28:46]  An illness in the family can have a galvanizing or sort of reunifying effect for a family.
[01:28:52]  Is that possible in this case?
[01:28:53]  Yeah, I'm sure.
[01:28:54]  I have my own family, as we all do, right?
[01:28:56]  So, you know, my family and my life in California is as it is.
[01:29:02]  You know, I will, I've got other trips planned that would take me through the UK or back to the UK.
[01:29:08]  So, you know, I'll stop in and see my family as much as I can.
[01:29:14]  Pretty interesting.
[01:29:15]  Like, that was not warm.
[01:29:17]  And to me, Dan, that just underscores what we've been hearing, which is that these two have gotten the complete stiff arm on any information about Kate and what she's going.
[01:29:27]  Like they, they just, they don't want to share anything with those two.
[01:29:30]  Oh, no, no, because they can't be trusted.
[01:29:33]  So the issue that William and Catherine have is that they literally do not believe that Harry and Megan will not leak even the most personal information.
[01:29:43]  So check this out, Megan.
[01:29:45]  These two, the Sussexes, had no idea what Catherine's announcement was going to be.
[01:29:53]  Their odd little mouthpiece, that weird little guy, Omid Scobie, who wrote the book Fighting Freedom, he had to apologize because he posted on X a really crass countdown clock to 6 p.m., which again suggested that everyone was thinking that this was something much less significant than what it was.
[01:30:12]  So Harry and Megan had no idea that would have been a personal choice made by William and Catherine because when it came to Charles, he did inform his son beforehand.
[01:30:22]  You'll also remember that Harry visited for 15 minutes with Charles after the cancer diagnosis before Charles desperately wanted to get away from his youngest son.
[01:30:33]  But when it comes to William, he doesn't want Harry back in his life.
[01:30:38]  William is a very moral man, Megan, but let's just say he's not the most forgiving man.
[01:30:45]  And once Harry included all of those revelations in his autobiography spare, including the physical fight between them, including the fact that Catherine had apparently been cold to Megan right from the start of the relationship, that was it.
[01:31:01]  I do not see their relationship recovering.
[01:31:04]  I honestly don't.
[01:31:05]  Charles is a different story.
[01:31:06]  I think he loves his son.
[01:31:07]  I think he feels very bad about what he put Harry through as a youngster.
[01:31:12]  He takes on a lot of the responsibility himself for Harry's issues.
[01:31:16]  That's not how William feels.
[01:31:18]  And the problem is, Harry and Megan went for Catherine.
[01:31:24]  William has a huge issue with that.
[01:31:27]  It's like, you can say what you want about me, mate.

=== The Thatcher Comparison Debate (03:58) ===

[01:31:30]  You've now come for my wife.
[01:31:32]  There's no going back.
[01:31:34]  Yeah.
[01:31:35]  And not just in there, in his book, but in that Omud Scoby book, which was obviously just the mouthpiece for those two.
[01:31:42]  They really went for Kate.
[01:31:43]  They went for the Queen.
[01:31:45]  I mean, they really, you know, Queen Camilla, they unleashed fully.
[01:31:50]  Okay, last but not least, Margaret Thatcher.
[01:31:53]  I got to ask you about this because I saw this in the news.
[01:31:56]  I'm like, what?
[01:31:57]  Yes.
[01:31:57]  The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has named Margaret Thatcher on its list of unpopular public figures right alongside Hitler and Osama bin Laden as a quote contemporary villain.
[01:32:18]  This is after they already rejected an offer from Margaret Thatcher's family that back in 2015 had offered the museum some suits of hers, some handbags, hundreds of items reportedly, including her wedding dress, her red prime ministerial dispatch box.
[01:32:37]  They didn't want them.
[01:32:40]  They quote politely declined.
[01:32:41]  And now they're, I realize she was a controversial figure.
[01:32:44]  Just ask the folks in Ireland.
[01:32:47]  But they're literally putting her in as a villain or as a literally unpopular public figure and listing her along with Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden as a contemporary villain.
[01:32:59]  What do you make of it?
[01:32:59]  Megan, nothing has made me angrier over the past few weeks.
[01:33:04]  At the weekend, I was at the University of Buckingham, which was the university effectively founded by Margaret Thatcher, one of the only sound universities in the country left, which actually embraces free speech.
[01:33:16]  And I was there for the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Festival.
[01:33:20]  This is the greatest prime minister in UK history, modern history, since Winston Churchill.
[01:33:28]  This is a woman who even the left in the UK now acknowledge was an incredible leader.
[01:33:36]  The UK is currently going to the dogs.
[01:33:38]  The Conservative Party is being utterly thrashed.
[01:33:40]  They need a Margaret Thatcher figure in their life.
[01:33:43]  And for the Victorian Albert Museum to take this stance, I actually think is sickening.
[01:33:47]  It is completely sickening.
[01:33:49]  And it was really interesting speaking to lots of the people at this conference who knew Margaret Thatcher, they loved her.
[01:33:54]  They worked closely with her.
[01:33:55]  They know how brilliant she is.
[01:33:57]  And they are absolutely furious, Megan, that anytime she's mentioned in the media, people say things like, love her or hate her.
[01:34:04]  Megan, she won three elections.
[01:34:08]  She never lost an election.
[01:34:11]  She's one of the most popular prime ministers this country has ever had.
[01:34:16]  This is a media narrative.
[01:34:18]  It is a woke narrative.
[01:34:20]  It doesn't back up the facts because believe me, within the Conservative Party, you know how the Republicans embrace the era of Ronald Reagan.
[01:34:28]  That is exactly how the Conservative Party feel about Margaret Thatcher.
[01:34:33]  The problem is there's no heir to Thatcher at the moment, which is why their party is so adrift.
[01:34:39]  But this was despicable.
[01:34:41]  It was disgusting.
[01:34:42]  It shows you why these woke institutions have been taken over by the radical left and actually why something has to change.
[01:34:50]  Because as I say, the universities are all the same.
[01:34:52]  I was able to go to this University of Buckingham because it was Thatcher's university.
[01:34:56]  It is a free speech university.
[01:34:57]  In most university campuses in the UK, Megan, folk like me, we're no longer welcome.
[01:35:02]  Free speech is dead.
[01:35:04]  It's not unlike a story we discussed in our first hour where the former head of the RNC can get hired by NBC News and get excoriated where they have to feel, they have to apologize to their audience.
[01:35:16]  But the former White House spokesperson, Jen Saki, she can get hired.
[01:35:22]  She gets the red carpet rolled out for her.
[01:35:24]  You see it in the coverage of conservative figures and females all the time.

=== Double Standards in Coverage (00:55) ===

[01:35:28]  I'll give you one personal one.
[01:35:31]  In so many the New York Times or whatever, you'll see someone like me described as the controversial, the controversial.
[01:35:38]  I don't, did you describe Al Sharpton that way?
[01:35:40]  The guy whose comments led to eight deaths back in 19, right?
[01:35:44]  No, the left never get, and you too now, Dan, you're going to get that, like the controversial, or for a couple of years, they'll mention like the canceled, you know, the comic.
[01:35:53]  They only do that to people who are on the right.
[01:35:56]  And poor Margaret Thatcher, even in death.
[01:35:58]  But you know what?
[01:35:59]  She's in a better place.
[01:36:00]  So to you, Victoria and Albert.
[01:36:02]  Too bad.
[01:36:03]  Dan, it's always a pleasure.
[01:36:05]  Thank you so much, Megan.
[01:36:07]  Great to be here.
[01:36:08]  Okay, don't forget, go to Danbootin, three Os22s, outspoken.com.
[01:36:14]  Tomorrow, the EJs are here.
[01:36:16]  See you then.
[01:36:20]  Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
[01:36:22]  No BS, no agenda, and no