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April 3, 2024 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:13:33
20240403_60-minutes-shoddy-havana-syndrome-report-and-hilla
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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show 00:02:16
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at least.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Later, our friend Maureen Callahan will be here in the studio with me to talk Megan Markle, Shakira, J.K. Rowling.
Oh, and that little thing about Lizzo quitting.
Well, that lasted about four hours before she was like, Never mind, I'm back.
We'll be airing that full interview with bonus content tomorrow morning as a special episode on our podcast feed and YouTube feed.
So stay tuned for that.
But we begin today with the very first guest on this show, and someone who's been on more than just about anybody else over the past 750 episodes.
That's how much we love Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald.
And I really do love Glenn.
It's perfect timing because have you heard of Havana syndrome?
We've talked about it on this show, including with Glenn back in episode 185.
But 60 Minutes just did a bumshell report on it on Sunday night.
But like so many other recent 60 Minutes segments, there are more major journalistic questions about it than answers.
Glenn is the host of Rumble's System Update, and he joins me now.
Glenn, how's it going?
Good to see you.
I'm doing very well, Megan.
Always great to see you.
I'm thrilled that I'm the most frequent guest, though.
I would like to have some kind of medal or an plaque like commemorating that.
I don't know if you guys have that, but I'd like to register my request.
But yeah, thanks for having me on.
You know, I'll put it in the mail and you'll get it just as soon as I get my million subscriber button from YouTube, which I still don't take forever.
And I'm edging in on 2 million and I still don't have it.
Poor little Thatcher checked the mailbox for weeks.
Finally, we just gave up on YouTube.
In any event, maybe I'll do better than them, Glenn.
So, the 60 Minutes thing I thought of you as soon as we saw it, we had discussed this back in episode 185.
We put on a former military four-star general who talked about the fact that he had seen this repeatedly, he'd suffered from it, and he thought it was real, this so-called Havana syndrome.
The Havana Syndrome Debate 00:16:10
And then we had you come on to say, maybe not really sure about this being some foreign weapon that's getting used against our top spies.
Well, I mean, in my view, that's how responsible journalism is done.
You point out this is these are the allegations.
Here's a contrarian point of view, if required, right?
I mean, not every story requires that.
This one does.
Nope, 60 Minutes went full-on balls to the wall.
The Russians are after us.
It is the Russians.
And I will say, if you watch this piece, Glenn, as you know, you would have walked away saying, oh, we're under attack.
The Russians are taking out our top spies.
You would not even know that there's like serious criticism of this theory even being a thing.
And to me, it was just yet another dereliction by 60 minutes.
So I'm sure you watched it before.
I watched your response to the report.
So give us your overall take on what we saw on CBS News Sunday night.
Well, I think the most notable part of all of this is that the media has been saying, and this goes back to the Trump years, that not only are our diplomats and our service members and intelligence operatives overseas being attacked, and it originated first with claims of people in Cuba, and that's why it's called the Havana syndrome.
There were these reports about people who had severe headaches of a kind they had never experienced before, and then it became dizziness and other forms of cognitive disorientation.
And always with Russia stories, when Trump was president, the subtext was, because Trump is captive to or controlled by the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin, he's unwilling to do anything to protect our country from this attack by Russia.
And so there was no questioning at all.
There was a wave of stories like this about what Russia was doing.
And so many of it ended up being debunked, like Russia had put bounties on the heads of soldiers in Afghanistan.
In this case, you know, there's been an obvious willingness on the part of the U.S. security state, the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, to endorse almost every one of these conspiracy theories about Russia.
They're the ones who, from whom it typically originates.
But in this case, Megan, the people who are leading the way in arguing that there's no evidence for this, that in fact the available evidence negates the existence of this narrative that Russia has secretly developed this kind of mysterious 24th century technology where they can attack the brains of our citizens with using a kind of directive energy weapon that nobody understands, nobody possesses.
Those who are denying vehemently that this happened are not people like me.
It's the CIA and the FBI and the Justice Department and experts that they've retained, all of whom say things like, the people who are claiming these symptoms have no detectable brain injuries.
They have no intelligence that Russia has a weapon like this, let alone that they've used it.
Remember, you know, we always claim that we have Russia under such meticulous surveillance.
So we know that Vladimir Putin is the one who ordered the hacking of the DNC, that he personally did it.
There's claims that we know that Vladimir Putin did things like ordering the murder of Alexei Nalvani in prison.
So there's constantly claims that we have Russia under these extreme surveillance mechanisms.
And I don't doubt that we do.
And yet the position of the intelligence community, the official position of the government is that there's no evidence to support this after they investigated it for years.
There's independent medical expertise.
For example, one of the very first bits of evidence that was presented was the people who thought they were victimized by this claimed that they were able to record the noise that the machine and the weapon was emitting.
And they recorded it and they turned it over to medical experts and scientists.
And when they investigated, they discovered that the sound that these people thought was coming from the weapon perfectly matched spectrally a sound that an exotic cricket that has come into that region, the Caribbean region.
Cricket.
Hold on.
I'm going to like a cricket the last time.
You were warning, like a strobe light warning.
This could cause some sort of Havana syndrome in your ear.
Not really.
But here's the sound of the cricket, the actual sound being reported as having caused this alleged syndrome in SOT 22.
Okay.
It's annoying, but it's not a weapon.
It's a cricket.
It's a female cricket sending out the signal.
She wants to get it on.
Right.
And so we know that the media has this obsession with Russia.
And I think it's important to think about why that is.
There's obviously a strong desire that most Democrats support, a lot of Republicans support sending billions and billions more over to Ukraine in order to get the American people on board with that.
You need to convince them that Russia poses a threat to the United States.
Otherwise, why is that our war in Ukraine?
But there's also a narrative that the United States and our American and our democracy is under attack by Russia.
And that's the reason they need more control over social media and the internet to protect us from things like Russian disinformation.
So there's a lot of important policies and a lot of power that depends on fear-mongering about Russia.
And so I don't mind that 60 Minutes gave a platform to employees of the government who insist that they have these symptoms or even people who think Russia did it.
The problem is, is that there's a mountain of evidence starting with the U.S. government itself that ordinarily does not reject conspiracy theories about Russia.
And I could spend the rest of your show going through the evidence, negating it.
They can't even find anything.
You know, they looked at, they did MRIs and brain scans of the people who are claiming these symptoms.
They have no ability to detect any kind of brain injury.
So what a lot of scientists have concluded is these people aren't lying.
You know, like they do feel these symptoms.
They do feel headaches.
They do feel disorientation.
But a lot of times we have the ability as human beings to create symptoms, you know, psychosomatically.
This happens all the time.
If you go to an ER and you think that you're not being attended to right away, the anxiety of that convinces you that now you have other symptoms.
And it's not like you're lying.
You really do have those symptoms, but you have elevated blood pressure, but because your brain has created them and this social contagion can happen where if you're a State Department employee or an employee of an intelligence agency and you constantly hear about this dangerous, advanced Russian weapon injuring people's brains, there's a social contagion that happens where you think, oh, maybe I have this symptom.
And then you talk yourself into it.
And all the evidence suggests that that's what's happened here.
Well, and there's another syndrome that apparently many people suffer from in America and elsewhere that can be easily explained that has nothing to do with spies, where this can happen.
It's sort of like a tripwire goes off in your brain and you start to have a lot of these same symptoms.
So some experts have said, why are we immediately attributing this set of symptoms to spies using some supersonic weapon in our ears where they can target through a window as opposed to this other syndrome that a lot of neurologists see and treat all the time?
Yeah, I mean, there's so, you know, first of all, if Megan, if Russia has developed this very potent secret weapon that can cause people more or less overnight to become cognitively disabled and to suffer from extreme, you know, neurological problems and other kinds of physiological disabilities, why are they not using it on the battlefield in Ukraine?
Why aren't Ukrainian generals, unlike President Zelensky, complaining about why did they use it against Navalny and other Russian dissidents whom they've attacked in all kinds of other ways?
This would be a much more indetectable and effective way of attacking their enemies, and yet they are only using it against American diplomats.
And there's no real motive why these people were targeted.
But I do want to stress that like there are, I know, one of the things we covered in our show is, I don't know if you've had this before, a lot of journalists I know have, and I certainly have.
There's this community of people inside the United States who strongly believe that they are being targeted with microwave weapons.
And there's a whole list of syndrome symptoms that they are all convinced they have.
And if you interview them individually, they'll all tell you they have the same symptoms.
And yet most people treat them as like crazy conspiracy theorists.
believe they're being targeted and gangsta by the government or their bosses or corporations.
And most people treat them as crazy conspiracy theorists.
The thing is, they're not lying.
They do have these symptoms, but they have these symptoms because they've been convinced by discourse that these things are real.
And as you say, this is a common set of symptoms that neurologists treat, that psychiatrists treat.
You know, we have social contagion all the time.
We're social animals.
Like we, you know, I mean, this is one of the things that happens with gender ideology.
Like why suddenly overnight did huge numbers of young girls start identifying as male?
Whereas before they didn't, it's because you see other people doing it.
And as social animals, we're prone to copy that.
The question I have is, as you asked, why would we suddenly blame it on Russia?
And secondly, why when examining these reports, as 60 Minutes did, did they essentially include no dissent, no examination of the huge evidentiary holes?
That's what turns it from a reasonable journalistic examination into an obvious propaganda piece.
Yes, that's exactly right, Glenn.
I'm looking at this and I'm like, oh, wow, this is a dramatic car chase, which we'll show the audience in a second.
This is, you know, they got this woman on camera.
Okay, great.
I can't wait until these people get tested with the other side of the story, as, you know, you've been outlaying.
Nope, didn't happen.
If you were a 60 Minutes CBS news viewer, you have no idea there is another side.
And when the truth comes out at some point, as it probably will, if it's not as 60 Minutes posited, they're going to be journalistically humiliated again.
Again, it's not the newsman's obligation to have every story perfectly right when the story is not yet fully known.
It's his obligation to bring the full facts as we know them as of today to the audience.
And where there's a serious dispute in the evidence to flag that for the audience so the audience knows this is evidence we have on one side, but here's the other side.
So here is, first of all, okay, I had to, I'm sorry, with all due respect to this woman, and I appreciate her working for the FBI.
This was, there are a couple of red flags in this piece to me.
The ridiculous, quote, disguise that they put on the one female FBI agent, Carrie, who was, I joked online, they got their disguise tips from Clark Kent.
It was like, well, I could see everything about this woman, but I guess I'm supposed to think she's in disguise.
Here she is describing the alleged attack against her.
It's not 16.
She says in 2021, she was home in Florida when she was hit by a crippling force.
And bam, inside my right ear, it was like a dentist drilling on steroids.
Immediately felt pressure and pressure and pain started coursing from inside my right ear, down my jaw, down my neck, and into my chest.
And I remember complaining to all of my colleagues for months after that.
I felt like I had early Alzheimer's.
Okay.
So that's my one red flag.
Granted, I don't know what she looked like before.
They did show some of the hair and makeup process, which looked like my own.
It's like, I'm like, okay.
It felt very familiar, didn't it?
Right?
She wasn't like, bring in the prosthetics team.
Okay.
So that's fine.
They put a wig on her, probably, but yeah.
Yeah, she had on a blonde wig.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Secondly, they used political hack, Mark Zayd.
And I saw you talking about him too.
So let's play his soundbite.
He's the lawyer representing some of the alleged sufferers with Savannah, Havana syndrome.
And with no disclosure about this guy's politics or controversial status, here they are promoting him as just like this well-meaning lawyer trying to help these injured people, Scott 17.
Do you know whether there are other FBI agents who have also suffered from these anomalous health incidents?
There are other FBI agents and personnel, not just agents, analysts.
Were any of these members of the FBI counterintelligence people in addition to Kerry?
The one thread that I know of with the FBI personnel that is common among most, if not all of my clients, other than the family members connected to the employee, was they were all doing something relating to Russia.
Okay.
Glenn, you and I both know.
I used to like this guy because he's in Albany, where I'm from.
So I went to him a couple of times earlier in my career from Albany.
And then I learned, then I understood, wait, wait, what am I dealing with?
He's a partisan hack.
And one only need look at his X feed to see the litany of examples of his crazy resistance, hashtag resistance thinking when it comes to Trump, Russia, or anything that might look bad for Republicans or in particular, MAGA.
Yeah, exactly.
So first of all, that was a huge red flag for me as well.
And the fact that there's no disclosure of this, of the fact that he has such strident politics that would motivate him to affirm these claims is exactly the way in which the media in its more subtle forms can so aggressively manipulate the news.
So who you pick as an expert and how you choose to present them goes a very long way in how the story is shaped.
So when the government wanted to appoint as the head of the Department of Homeland Security's disinformation unit, which is basically a ministry of truth inside the U.S. government, one of the reasons it became so controversial is not just because of the existence, but because the woman they chose to lead that agency, Nina Yankovich, all you had to do is just take one look at her text feed and you can immediately understand what she is exactly on the lines of Mark Zayd,
this kind of extremist caricature or cartoon of not just an American liberal or Democrat, but someone who identifies themselves as part of the hashtag resistance, who endorses every crazy conspiracy theory about Trump and Russia, including, again, many that ended up being debunked.
And I think the point you made about the media is the key one here, at least for me, which is Americans don't expect journalists to get everything correct or everything perfect.
Americans don't hold against journalists, the fact that sometimes the story in the beginning is incomplete.
Sometimes journalists get misled.
Sometimes facts are wrong.
That's always been true, even when Americans had a lot of faith in media.
The difference is between making a good faith effort to get a story right and occasionally having mistakes that you then promptly correct versus constantly making quote errors in the same, in the service of the same ideological agenda.
So one of the crucial foundational policies of American liberals, of the establishment Democratic Party, is this fixation on Russia.
Media Fixation on Russia 00:03:01
Now, I'm no fan of the Russian government or Vladimir Putin.
Obviously, that's an authoritarian regime.
No American should want to live under a regime like that.
But so much of what has been said about what Russia is doing vis-a-vis the United States or Republican politicians has been long ago debunked.
So many stories have ended up being false.
It obviously has a very strong partisan angle to it.
There's also policies like the war in Ukraine or the attempt to control the internet that this fixation on Russia and this constant insistence that they're attacking the United States is served by these stories.
And so when 60 Minutes does a story like this that has no dissent to it, that basically conceals all the reasons why even our own government has concluded this didn't happen when they're putting people on like Mark Zayd and not disclosing who he really is, pretending that he's just some noble crusading neutral lawyer.
These are all indicia that this is, as I said, a propaganda story designed to promote a narrative for partisan ends.
And that is what has caused the American public to turn against media, the belief that they are not trying their best to tell the story, but that instead they're basically, they've become, especially in the age of Trump, partisan activists who view their mission not as being a journalistic one, but a political one.
And to me, this is a perfect illustration of that.
We saw that with Scott Pelle's interview with Moms for Liberty, which was completely one-sided.
He had an agenda.
He completely disregarded facts that would suggest there is a woke ideology making its way into grade school and middle and high as well, and inappropriate sexual content and so on.
He just completely ignored it and treated the litany of evidence as just a one-off here or there.
So Mark Zayd, back to the lawyer, just a couple of examples.
He said of Trump in 2017, we will get rid of him.
This country's strong enough to survive even him and his supporters.
We have to.
Tweeted out in 2017 when Trump had a dust up with his then acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates, who refused to defend his Muslim ban, so-called.
He tweeted out, hashtag, the coup has started.
First of many steps, hashtag rebellion.
Hashtag impeachment will follow.
Went on, since January 20th, I would much rather be in Canada.
What a great country.
We'll be great again when Atreel Donald Trump leaves.
Goes on after December, this is 20th, 2023.
So just recently, I do believe Trump was engaged in a serious effort to overthrow the government.
Goes on.
That's who they put up there as their independent expert who we should trust to evaluate the state of our international affairs.
And let's not forget the fact that Mark Zayd's whole business is representing individuals who leave the intelligence agencies or who are still in them who want to sue for something or another.
So of course, Mark Zayd believes Havana syndrome is real.
His mortgage depends on it.
Questioning Russian Spy Claims 00:11:32
Where's the expert who represents defendants?
Where's the experts who have taken a hard look at this, including medical experts who have said, try as we might, we can't find anything special on the MRIs of most of these folks.
And while some MRIs have shown some suspicious problems, we don't know what caused that.
The vast majority of these people do not have a brain exam that would suggest they were injured by some sort of weapon that somehow the Russians have managed to develop.
And we have no idea what it is or how to create the same thing.
To your point about the Russian spying, before Tucker went over to interview Putin, he went out there and said our government was spying on me for sure.
And they knew about my interview before I'd announced it.
Same.
I've said this publicly before.
I found out that the intelligence agencies knew that I was getting the interview with Putin before I knew.
They're monitoring everything.
They know a lot more about what's happening inside the Kremlin than they reveal.
And if there were this super powerful weapon that can debilitate you through the window from afar, it's not plausible.
We wouldn't know.
You know, Megan, I spent three years of my life reporting, you know, on top secret documents of the NSA and of related intelligence agencies and was able to show that the extent of their surveillance capabilities was far greater than anyone understood and that it was often directed not at our foreign adversaries, but at the American people.
Of course, they have Russia under an extremely comprehensive and tight surveillance net.
That's something that is a legitimate function of any government, which is to surveil the leaders of foreign governments, of adversary governments.
So the idea that Russia has somehow been able under everybody's noses, think how many scientists would be required.
You know, even back in the days of World War II with the Manhattan Project, when there was no real kind of electronic surveillance, I mean, there was a little bit, the Russians were constantly aware of the tests that the Americans were conducting in order to pursue a nuclear weapon.
So were the Germans.
It's very difficult to keep major scientific projects secret, even before the era of massive comprehensive electronic surveillance.
The idea that the Russians would be able to develop a weapon that has these very mysterious effects, because not only, Megan, is it true that the vast majority of MRIs and other brain tests don't show any unusual brain injury, they don't actually show in the majority of cases any brain injury at all, which is why these scientists have concluded that in a lot of cases, it's psychogenic, meaning it's manufactured by the brain, which again will be perceived as very real.
But I think, you know, we have to remember, this is the critical context to me.
I think a lot of people in media don't understand this because their world doesn't tell them this ever.
In 2016, the 2016 election was drowned by a conspiracy theory that not just that the Russians had hacked the DNC and John Podesta's emails, but that the Trump campaign conspired with them to do that.
That was the major conspiracy theory that dominated our politics for three years.
It led to the appointment of a special counsel who had unlimited subpoena power, supposedly a team of prosecutors.
After 18 months, he closed his investigation and said we could not find evidence to establish that this happened.
The whole thing was basically debunk this conspiracy theory about Russia.
And then in 2020, when the New York Post got hold of authentic documents from Hunter Biden's laptop about what the Biden family was doing in Ukraine and China that raised a lot of serious ethical questions about Joe Biden, again, they lied.
The CIA invented a claim, a conspiracy theory that the media ratified that said, oh, don't pay any attention to this reporting.
These documents are not real.
They're Russian disinformation.
Only for the media, once Joe Biden was safely elected, to admit that they were authentic all along.
So they don't realize, but I think Americans do, that there has been this series of extreme claims that the media has ratified and endorsed about Russia, about Trump, about the attacks on the United States by the Kremlin that have proven to be false, that were disseminated purely for political aims.
And in their world, they think their reporting was great.
They gave themselves Pulitzers for it.
But in the actual world of people who aren't in the media, I think there's a lot of valid suspicion about stories like this.
And this is, this shows why, this shows how they do it.
Okay, so I mentioned the moment of the car chase that aired on 60 Minutes show on Sunday, and it was very dramatic.
I'm going to show it to the audience and then we'll talk about it.
Here it is.
In 2020, near Key West, Florida, deputies tried to stop the Mustang for speeding.
It ran 15 miles until it hit spike strips laid in its path.
A search of the car found notes of bank accounts.
Citibank.
Discover savings, 75,000.
And this device that looks like a walkie-talkie can erase the car's computer data, including its GPS record.
There was also a Russian passport.
What's your first name?
Vitaly.
V-I-T-A-L-I-I.
Okay.
And what they say is that this guy, Vitaly, was being investigated by Carrie, our friend with the wig.
And that after Vitali got arrested and went into jail, that's when Kerry got attacked by obviously not Vitaly, but maybe somebody Russian who was mad that Vitaly was now behind bars.
That's the theory, as I understand it anyway.
For me, I was like, okay, this is great.
They appear to have gotten, I guess, a Russian spy.
Scott Pelly says that in the anchor track that follows, that they think he's a Russian spy.
And I'm like, terrific.
What do they have?
Okay, bank accounts.
That's exciting.
I have those too, but okay, I'm with you still.
Show me what you got.
And it's like, the device, the walkie-talker device.
I'm like, there it is.
They found it.
He's going to say, and we found if you point it through the window, it can do the thing to the ear, cause vertigo, the massive headaches, it wipes your GPS clean.
I'm like, well, wait a minute.
This is the Russian.
Here he is, the Russian spy.
You know, he's in on it.
He's connected to the woman you have on camera who gets attacked.
Where's his weapon, Glenn?
Didn't happen, hasn't been found.
Well, also, they had him in custody for 18 months.
He served 18 months in prison.
They said the FBI had extensively interrogated him.
Why didn't the government, which again believes the Havana syndrome does not exist, that there's no evidence of a secret weapon being employed against us by any foreign adversary, including Russia?
Why if this person was such a high-level Russian spy and a technical genius, did he have no evidence of it that they extracted from him?
But this is the thing, Megan.
This is what I found so interesting.
This story depended on the kind of dot connecting and crazy conspiracy theory that if it came from anyone else, like some person on Facebook, you would probably not only get mocked, but probably even like censored.
Because what they tried to do here is to say that the motive that the Russians had for attacking that Carrie, who was working for the FBI, was that she was investigating this guy who's Russian who was detained.
Let's assume that he was a Russian spy.
Even if that were the case, how would that be a motive that the Russians would have?
I mean, so you caused the FBI investigator a headache, have headaches and dizziness.
So, okay, now she's disabled and she just gets replaced by some other FBI investigator.
It's not like she was the head of the FBI or some like unique specialist or some like that they had, you know, put her in the Kremlin after years.
She was just like a random FBI investigator who could be replaced at any moment.
So even that motive that they tried to imply was so strong is actually incredibly weak.
It makes no sense.
Again, you would much more likely be seeing, you know, if I had that secret weapon, I were the Russians, I would use it against Zelensky or like the top Ukrainian commander that's actually involved in a war with my country.
Why would you use it on a like relatively low-level FBI investigator just because she happens to be investigating some guy who might or might not have connections to the Russian government?
Because it wouldn't achieve anything.
It's not like it erases her brain or her memory or whatever she learned.
She could pass that on to somebody else and then she can be replaced in the investigation.
So the, it's really, I'm not saying it's definitely untrue, but like you also can't say that like 9-11 theories are definitely untrue.
You can take a look at them and then say, man, and understand, like, this relies on some wild conspiracy theories and like some crazy dot connecting and very dubious, but that's the same.
I felt that with the 60 Minutes piece that I was watching a kind of random internet conspiracy theorist, but it had the imprimatur of 60 minutes and therefore it was supposed to be taken more seriously.
Yeah.
Well, you won't be surprised to hear the counter view from John Bolton.
Take a listen here to him.
When I was a national security advisor, I was briefed on this.
I was very concerned about it.
I did then and do now think that there's very likely some hostile adversary behavior here, whether it's Russia, China, maybe somebody else, more than likely Russia.
Shocked?
Are you?
It would be.
I would fall over my seat.
I mean that without hyperbole if he had said anything but that.
And this maker, 20 years ago, John Bolton was on television telling everybody that it was basically proven that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, that he was in an alliance with al-Qaeda.
Every time there's a new enemy, John Bolton is there endorsing every allegation against that adversary or enemy.
That's the function that he plays.
And I guess, you know, I do think the Iraq war and whatever you want to say about that in terms of what the media got wrong, and everyone admits that the government and the media were wrong about what Saddam Hussein had made a major dent in the credibility of the media and the government in terms of people's willingness to trust it.
And then you add on to that many other things, including some of which I said.
So how is it that John Bolton, who has a long history of endorsing these kinds of claims and conspiracy theories that turns out to be false, still gets put on television as an expert to trust?
It's, it's, there's no accountability for it.
And, and they put him on because they know he's going to say that and that's what they want to hear.
You've talked so many times about how these, there are multiple stenographers in the mainstream media for our intelligence agencies.
And they just don't question.
They just write what they're told to write.
And that's how they get used and we get misled because the average American citizen is not thinking about this stuff.
Accountability in Expert Testimony 00:02:32
They're living their lives.
They're paying their bills.
They're taking care of their kids.
And yet the manipulation that happens at, you know, at levels high and low in media and the stool pigeons, whatever you want to call them, who just go along without without questioning, it's really kind of shocking.
And I want to be clear, I'm not saying that, that it's impossible.
You know, I've, as you know, spoken to people who say that they have this, people who are respectable, who are smart, who, you know, I believe in their sincerity.
And there was another woman featured in the 60 Minutes piece who I thought seemed more sincere and believable, perhaps, than the woman we played with all due respect to Carrie.
So I'm not saying it's not possible.
I'm just saying I didn't think this is a balanced piece at all.
And their unwillingness to balance it, if anything, made me more, made me less likely to believe them.
And now I've got more suspicions than ever.
Right.
I think that that's the key is, you know, there are a lot of people who have symptoms that we can't identify why they have.
And the ability of the brain to manufacture symptoms is very real.
I mean, again, go talk to ER doctors and they will tell you a lot of people who wait in waiting rooms end up with blood pressure crises, even though there's nothing causing the elevated blood pressure crisis, except for their anxiety, which produces it. doesn't mean their blood pressure isn't high.
It just means it's caused by mental health issues, by severe anxiety or other forms, and produce our brains are very powerful.
But very subject to that kind of suggestion.
I mean, just ask anybody who's ever seen, you find out your kid has lice, you're like, you can feel them all over you, right?
It's like, oh, anybody has been through that.
Well, and also you go, like every medical student or doctor will tell you, I've heard this so many times from them, that if you are in medical school and constantly studying diseases and what the symptoms are, you constantly start finding that you have, oh my God, I think I have this disease.
And, you know, because you're constantly hearing about these symptoms and reading about them, and then your brain starts creating them.
This is a very powerful motivator.
And especially when this has been going on, you can find stories from 2018 and 2019 about how people overseas who work for the U.S. government are being attacked by Russia with this brain weapon.
So if you're somebody who works for these intelligence agencies and you're hearing these reports, I'm sure there are a lot of people who start developing these symptoms because they're convinced they have them because of the power of suggestion, because of this social contagion.
Threats to Democratic Speech 00:12:26
But to go from that to this gigantic leap that we're under attack from Russia is just on an evidentiary basis so dubious.
But when you add onto it, all the reasons, the partisan reasons and the other policy reasons why so many people have an interest in promoting that narrative, that's what I think, I mean, this is not just a weird little story that may not be true.
It has serious implications, obviously, if Russia is attacking our country with brain weapons, that requires a lot of action.
But if they're not, that requires other ways of thinking about policy and politics.
And I think that's why it's worth talking about so much.
So to sum up, could be healthy dose of skepticism is warranted.
But what is certain is we are being manipulated by a dishonest media.
There you go.
That's the first half hour of our show, summed up 60 minutes for you.
That latter lesson could be applied to virtually every day in media.
Glenn Greenwald, the one and only, stays with us.
You can see what?
You can see why he's been on so many times, right?
Why wouldn't he be one of our very favorites?
Let's talk politics for a minute.
Hillary Clinton is back doing a late night tour.
She spoke with Jimmy Fallon and she had some thoughts on this boiling down to Trump versus Biden again.
What do you say to voters who are upset that those are the two choices?
Get over yourselves.
Those are the two choices.
Yeah, I love that.
And, you know, it's kind of like one is old and effective and compassionate, has a heart and really cares about people.
And one is old and has been charged with 91 felonies.
Yeah, okay.
I mean, I don't understand why this is even a hard choice.
Get over yourself.
You don't matter.
Do what's right for the global citizenry, which is clearly to elect the compassionate one with the heart.
The guy who skipped Officer Diller's funeral, that fallen cop, got shot by somebody who'd been under arrest 21 times.
Instead, to go on the Smartlist podcast because he thought it'd be a better way to spend his time.
That one, the one who kept checking his watch as the bodies returned from Afghanistan at Dover Air Force Base.
That's the compassionate one, just in case you weren't paying attention.
Glenn.
I'm not even saying this to make a point.
I'm saying this very seriously.
If I were the Trump campaign, I would set aside as money funds as I could to pay for Hillary Clinton to go on a speaking tour around the United States because I can't imagine anything more helpful to their cause than to have her heard from as much as possible.
I mean, this is the sort of thing they, I mean, she had every advantage in 2016.
She was really supposed to win.
I mean, she was running.
Donald Trump was a game show host back in 2016, like, you know, a very unpopular candidate.
That's what she says.
Yeah, exactly.
She's the legitimate president.
And the reason she lost is because Americans couldn't stand her precisely because of that, this kind of mentality.
Because what it does is, you know, everyone knows she's an extremely wealthy and powerful woman.
She has been for a long time now.
And Americans are looking at their political system.
They don't like it.
They're looking at their way of life that they're very worried about.
And she's basically saying, you know, like not even a pretense of empathy.
She's saying, we don't care about your dissatisfactions.
You need to do what you're told.
And what you are told is to ignore and forget about and get over your dissatisfaction with your political choices and the system that we're providing you and just go to the polls and do your duty and elect a Democrat, elect Joe Biden, because I, Hillary Clinton, think he's the better human being.
Like just so, you know, like just so entitled and so arrogant and so just issuing these decrees to people with no attempt to persuade them.
Who is going to respond to something like that?
But, you know, the other thing that it's like Jimmy Fallon, I have to say, I like, I've never seen anybody more unctu and just like sycophantic on television than Jimmy Fallon.
He just like oozes over every guest.
But in this particular case, she's delivering a very partisan message.
Okay, that's fine.
You have Hillary Clinton on your show.
That's what she's going to do.
But he was agreeing with every word she was saying.
And even like before you cut it, after you cut it off, he was like, yeah, exactly.
Couldn't agree more.
I love that message.
Get out and vote.
The reason, like late night TV is another one of those institutions that used to command a lot of respect among Americans.
It was one of those things that all Americans, left and right, every politics gathered around and watched together.
And they've all basically become that.
Like Colbert and Jimmy Fallon, they all have the same liberal ideology.
And that's why they too have lost.
Nobody watches those shows anymore.
Those used to be huge cultural forces.
And that's part of the reason as well.
I did something I rarely do this morning.
I went on Huffington Post and they have a whole line of the late night hosts and little clips from them.
Every single one, they were bashing on Trump.
Fallon, Kimmel, Colbert.
And they got, you know, we showed you a little bit of Fallon, but it got more egregious as you went down that line.
Of course, Colbert was the meanest, nastiest.
And we've said many times that they look for applause, not for laughs.
And they're not getting laughs anymore.
They just want people to give them the thumbs up on their hard politics.
And it's gross.
Okay, let me shift to RFKJ, who is all over the news today for this snippet of an interview he gave over on CNN on Monday.
Watch this.
People talk about the threat to democracy that Trump poses.
Do you really think that that is, is it equal to Biden?
Listen, I can make the argument.
President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy.
And the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech.
So to censor his opponent, the greatest threat in democracy is not somebody who questions election returns, but a president of the United States will use the power of his office to force the social media companies, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, to open a portal and give access to that portal to the FBI, to the CIA, to the IRS, to SISA, the NIH to censor his political critics.
It was an amazing answer.
And nobody's calling attention.
Even Trump's not calling attention to that.
It's one of the reasons why he's such an important figure in this race.
I couldn't agree more.
I mean, when Donald Trump first ran in 2016, you can go find articles that I was writing about Donald Trump that were extremely negative and even alarmed, you know, about some of his rhetoric and some of the things he was saying.
And what I concluded somewhat quickly, it began with Rushigate and my suspicions of that, but then went on to many other things, was that even if you see Trump as this kind of danger or threat,
The union of institutions of power and authority that formed this confederation of power centers that formed in the name of stopping Trump and this belief that anything and everything they could do to stop him was justified from censoring to disseminating disinformation to weaponizing the Justice Department was infinitely more dangerous because they were more powerful than Trump.
And because their self-righteousness was so much greater.
And that's always what produces a destruction of limits on what human beings can do, the belief that they're so noble in their cause and so benevolent that anything they do becomes justified.
And that point that he made, which is, okay, Trump questioned the 2020 election with, in my view, without much evidence.
Obviously, January 6th was a very negative event.
I think it's been wildly exaggerated in terms of what it is, but everyone can agree that you don't want to see things like that.
But the systematic attacks on our core liberties from the forces aligned against Trump, whose only mission in life seems to be stopping Trump, has been so much more severe in terms of our political norms and our basic democratic values.
And to hear RFK Jr. say that on CNN was incredibly refreshing.
And the way he said it as well was extremely convincing and I think articulate.
And it's something we have to worry about for obvious reasons, but also because it's likely to be ongoing.
We're about to get a Supreme Court decision, we believe, that's going to uphold that behavior as constitutional.
And there's going to be effectively a green light for further coordination, potentially, between the social media companies and a heavy-handed government.
And even though that was technically lawful during President Trump's era, too, it wasn't done anywhere near like that we know of to the extent that we've seen under Joe Biden, who feels perfectly comfortable having the federal government try to curtail speech thoughts, police thought crimes, like things that you can or cannot say about COVID, et cetera.
He hasn't learned his lesson.
He's in there arguing that he should be given the right to continue it.
And that's what's likely to happen, Glenn.
Megan, if you go and read those court decisions, like, you know, in the first instance, you have a district court judge.
There are tons of district court judges, hundreds and hundreds and a hundred, I think thousands.
You know, you can get a district court ruling almost that says anything.
It's not that.
But what happened was on appeal, three more judges and appellate panel reviewed what the district court judge and not only affirmed it unanimously, but the language they used was extremely assertive.
said that what the Biden administration did in forcing and coercing and pressuring and threatening big tech to censor political dissent online was one of the gravest attacks on the First Amendment rights of free speech in our history.
This was the language of the court.
And the Supreme Court, you know, I think what happened there is that they're very embedded in Washington.
Supreme Court justices are creatures of Washington.
I think they have a lot of faith and trust in top government agencies.
So I think they were kind of like dubious of the idea that we would actually have an elected government that would really go that far to like threaten big tech.
They seemed uncomfortable with the perspective that that was what was going on.
I do think it's pretty clear from moral argument.
Sometimes you're wrong from moral argument, but I think in this case, you can predict they are absolutely going to sanction this.
I hope they do it on some technical ground, like the plaintiffs don't have standing to sue, meaning they can't prove that they were censored by the government and therefore have no right to bring the lawsuit, as opposed to approving of this behavior.
But whatever else is true, whatever the Supreme Court says, the fact that the government has a program in place to, even if it's just to pressure big tech, let alone coerce or threaten them, on top of all the other things they're doing.
Remember, we just talked about this attempt in Homeland Security to create a department that decrees what is truth and what is falsity, like a cartoon of what Orwell warned about.
All these efforts to combat disinformation is, I think, as someone who for whom the cause of free speech is my highest cause, or one of my highest causes, is something I consider uniquely threatening.
And it's absolutely being done by the Biden administration and the liberal establishment that supports him because they really believe that these weapons are justified.
And whatever you think Trump did, the worst things he did, I don't think are even in the same category of being as threatening to Democratic values as this.
Exactly right.
And that's not even to touch on the lawfare that's being used by for sure the Biden administration and their allies against Trump, their chief political rival.
Stand by.
Ronna McDaniel and MSNBC 00:14:36
Glenn stays with us.
Quick break.
Before that.
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We weren't asked our opinion of the hiring, but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it.
When NBC made the decision to give her NBC News's credibility, you got to ask yourself, what does she bring NBC News?
This isn't a difference of opinion.
She literally backed an illegal scheme to steal an election in the state of Michigan.
And our democracy is in danger because of the lies that people like Ronna McDaniel have pushed on this country.
She also said election deniers, not just they can do that on our airwaves, but that they can do that as one of us.
As badge-carrying employees of NBC News, as paid contributors to our sacred airwaves.
Take a minute.
Acknowledge that maybe it wasn't the right call.
It is a sign of strength, not weakness, to acknowledge when you are wrong.
Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show, my guest today, Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and host of Rumble's system update.
Why did I bring that back up?
Because now Ronna McDaniel is in talks with my lawyer, the brilliant Brian Friedman, who is amazing and who you definitely want on your side if you're in a legal scrap to go after NBC because they booted her before even allowing her to fulfill her contract.
And according to Politico, she is exploring potential, not just breach of contract, but defamation claims against them and hostile work environment claims, which is interesting given that, you know, those are her colleagues who engaged in a massive pylon and bullying attempt to get her right out the door.
And it worked.
And there was a headline on MediaIte the other day, which is a media website covering events and media saying Ronna McDaniel will never work in media again, something to that effect, that she's done.
She not only she fired from NBC, she'll never get another contributor deal because of what happened to her with those colleagues and those clips.
And the left-wing media headline is, ah, she's going to get how many, if you calculate it out by the minute, you know, she's, she was getting $300,000 annually.
And so that's $600,000 that they owe her.
She did not a not 20-minute interview.
So it basically is going to cost NBC more than $30,000 a minute or $500 per second.
And there's an eye roll, like she doesn't deserve it.
But what do you make as a former recovering lawyer, I should say, yourself, of these potential claims by Ronna McDaniel against NBC?
I mean, the irony of this from the beginning is that Ronna McDaniel is not like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Carrie Lake or some like, you know, like very fanatical Trump supporter.
Trump world can't stand Ronna McDaniel.
I mean, that's a big part of why she's no longer the head of the RNC.
She's like the most tepid and like cursory kind of Republican who has to sort of support Donald Trump now that he's the nominee and was a prior president.
Like she's as moderate and tepid in that role as it gets.
She's kind of sweet.
You know, she's not like easy to hate.
She's a sweet woman.
She's Mitt Romney's niece.
She's like, you know, very like well liked personally.
No, I've never heard like a bad word for her about her as a person.
Like I've heard a bad word about her politics from Trump supporters primarily.
And the fact that they turned her into this kind of extremist who, I mean, you just showed some of the people that NBC employs in its sacred halls.
You have like Joy Reed, who let us remember, invented a complex, complete lie that she turned over to the FBI, claiming that there was a hacker who wrote her bigoted blog posts that were discovered 10 years ago.
No one cared that she wrote bigoted blog posts from 10 years ago.
The issue is, is that she lied and said, oh, I didn't write these.
It must have, I think it was a hacker and the FBI is investigating.
It was a complete fabrication, like a crazy conspiracy theory.
They promoted her after that.
They have George Bush and Dick Cheney's press secretary or communications director, Nicole Wallace, who, you know, from a liberal perspective, said a lot of things that would put people off limits, including defending the Iraq war and torture and Guantanamo and all sorts of things like that.
You know, you have Jen Saki, who like five seconds ago was the press secretary for Joe Biden, who really says and does the same exact thing now on NBC.
So to turn Rhonda McDaniel into this kind of like enemy of democracy, this like extremist who's so far far beyond the pale of, you know, anything that any news organization could be associated with, it definitely, you know, had a serious, did serious damage to her reputation.
Whether it, you know, you know, as well as anyone, Megan, that when you're a public figure, which she is, defamation is very difficult because you have a lot of leeway, even to say false things about public figures, if they're in the realm of opinion, or even if you're wrong, if you're not intending to destroy the person.
But clearly there's a lot of contractual issues.
I'm sure NBC is going to end up paying her money.
But I do kind of think that what they did with her reputation, the way they all got together and trashed it on air in front of millions of people is something that if I were her lawyer, and you're right, she has one of the best, I'm sure they're exploring a lot of theories about that as well.
I would definitely be suing more for more than the 600,000.
This is what these companies do, right?
I mean, trust me, NBC has a history of this, but they're not the only ones where it's not enough to separate from you.
They try to absolutely ruin you on your way out the door.
They try to make you unemployable by anyone else because they're vicious, mean assholes.
That's why.
And it's a different crew running NBC than, you know, the people I knew when I was there.
But these people threw her under the bus and then repeatedly backed over her time and time again.
And to the point where I didn't know this.
I learned this in the political piece.
But Kristen Welker, who is now the host of Meet the Press, began her interview of Ronna McDaniel for that one 20 minute interview by saying, I want to make clear this was booked when you were just the former head of the RNC.
I did not know that you were going to be an NBC News contributor and I had nothing to do with your hiring.
And then, of course, Chuck Todd came on and was like, oh, you've been put in a terrible position by our bosses.
They owe you an apology.
But political reports that actually the truth is Kristen Welker did have something to do with the hiring of Ronna McDaniel, that she had met with her privately along with another executive, Carrie Budoff Brown,
senior vice president of politics, in mid-February, which was a few days after Budoff Brown initially reached out to McDaniel's team to gauge her interest in joining as a paid contributor and that that potential role as a paid NBC News contributor with a contract was brought up in that meeting.
But now Kristen Welker, I had nothing to do with it.
Oh, who?
And the head of MSNBC too.
She came out, Rashida Jones.
She was like, don't worry, she'll never be on MSNBC.
She played a pivotal role in getting Ronna McDaniels hired too.
So the executives and the talent are lying about their role in hiring this woman.
And then as soon as she gets there in Rashida Jones' case anyway, and in Kristen Welker's sitting across from Chuck Todd, they let the mob kill her.
I mean, emerge with her jugular all while sitting there playing holier than thou.
Yeah, I mean, look, I have two views on this.
So from the perspective of what was done to Ronna McDaniel, I mean, it is so outrageous.
They didn't even give her the chance.
I think what would have happened was, and she saw, you kind of saw this in the Meet the Press interview, when she was asked about some of the claims that liberal media personalities find offensive, like Chuck Todd and Kristen Welker, she was kind of distancing herself from those, especially stuff about the 2020 election saying, well, look, as of the RNC chair, there were things that I kind of had to say.
It was part of my job.
And now that I'm here and free from that, I'm not necessarily going to endorse all those same claims.
So they didn't even give her a chance to kind of say what it is that she thinks now that she's in a different role, because I don't think they recognize that because Jen Saki, as I said, didn't do that at all.
Like there's nothing that she's doing now or saying now that wouldn't fit perfectly when she was the Biden White House spokesperson.
But that's the other thing is looking at it as kind of a citizen or as a journalist or a consumer of these news or what I'm glad that NBC did this because what it really showed is that not just MSNBC, but NBC is an ideological actor, that they have an agenda to which they're captive.
It's kind of like what we just were saying about Jimmy Fallon, that these institutions that were supposed to be politically neutral and nonpartisan and non-ideological are in fact everything the opposite of what they claim to be.
And the more that becomes manifest and evident, I think the better off it is.
It's going to make like half the country or more, again, realize that there's no place for their views or their beliefs or people like them at a major network like NBC.
These people have learned nothing from 16 forward.
They've learned nothing.
And that brings me to another story about MSNBC.
It starts at a different publication, which is the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which had its editor, Chris Quinn, write a letter in, you know, publish a letter in the Plane Dealer.
And it reads in part as follows.
And then I'm going to give you the reaction over on MSNBC to it.
This is a tough column to write because I don't want to demean or insult those who write to me in good faith.
But no matter how I present it, I will offend.
The North Star here is truth.
We tell the truth even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.
The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency.
You know what?
Just a pause.
I'll give him that.
I will concede that point.
And then he goes on to say, he sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power.
No president in our history has done worse.
This is not subjective.
There are not two sides to facts.
People who say the earth is flat don't get space on our platforms.
If that offends them, so be it.
He brings up Hitler because, you know, that's what you do when you're talking about Donald Trump and his rise to power and the German leaders who helped create him and then offers this.
How are those German leaders different from people in Congress saying the election was stolen or that January 6th was not an insurrection?
How are the people who stood by as Hitler rose any different from the people who deny this was an insurrection?
Our nation does seem to be slipping down the same slide that Germany did in the 1930s, says the guy who again wants you to know, we are all about truth.
We're going to tell you the truth no matter where it takes us because that's our North Star.
Okay.
So this is the guy, Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Enter Donny Deutsch over on MSNBC and Morning Joe.
And here are his thoughts.
The media, as we know, it won't exist if they don't do this the right way.
It's very, very simple.
What people have to understand is if Donald Trump wins, he's going to do an Aura bomb.
He's going to all of a sudden call up various networks and say, if you don't take this guy off, you don't take that off, I'm not going to let your next deal go through.
That's going to happen.
So if the media wants to remain free, they better get that message that fantastic editor from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Got it?
You know, there's so much going on here.
The, First of all, this attempt to depict Donald Trump as the next Hitler, I think would be easier if it weren't for the fact that he was actually the president of the United States for four years and everybody remembers that he was president for four years and there were no death camps that were created, dissidents or critics weren't rounded up, media outlets weren't shut.
That is happening in places like Ukraine and a lot of other places around the world.
But it didn't happen when Donald Trump was president.
So they tried this in 2016 as well.
Oh, he's like the Hitler figure.
He's going to bring fascism to the United States.
It didn't work in 2016.
And that was before he was president.
So Americans don't rely on these people anymore to form their views about the world.
But the other part of it, Megan, is that I think it's like I said with, you know, NBC and Ronnie McDaniel, it's kind of illuminating.
This really is how they think.
I think it's so important to understand this, you know, they all read from the same script.
What that guy from the Cleveland Plain Dealer said is what I've heard from, you know, you hear any CNN or MSNBC or New York Times or Washington Post.bed, they all say the same thing.
Independent Media Constraints 00:09:15
The job of a journalist is to stand firm in defense of truth, even if it means being on the one side of the party rather, one party rather than the other.
I think like sometimes we have to remember that if you're a journalist and you're just living in like very ordinary times, it's kind of boring.
You don't feel like you're really doing anything that exciting.
But if you actually believe that you face another Hitler, this like singular evil, and now it's your job to stand up to Hitler and to stop Nazism, it's a very flattering thing to think about yourself.
There's a personal motive in believing this that, oh, journalists are the only guardians left to protect us from the new Hitler.
And there's a very strong psychological motive, especially when they all listen to each other and want each other's approval and applause to believe this about themselves.
And then they do believe this about themselves.
And this is why they are now openly partisan because what they're saying is, yes, we do think the Democrats are spirit of the Republicans, but that's not a corruption of journalism.
It's a vindication of journalism.
It's what we journalism is here to do, to tell the truth.
And truth is the Democrats and Joe Biden and lies and fascism are Donald Trump.
And the more they say that, again, the more people will see them as partisan actors and the more journalism is destroyed.
And every poll shows that these journalists are hated by the public more than like sexually transmitted diseases.
You know, there's very few people left in our society less hated and less unpopular and distrusted than these media figures.
And they never look in the mirror and ask why.
And this is the reason.
To your point of we just know better, we do.
It comes full circle with that Hillary Clinton clip.
It's just they're all of the same political persuasion, ideological persuasion, and this false belief that, you know, truth is their North Star.
Okay.
Sure.
Sure, Jan.
Oh, I haven't used that in a while.
Here we go.
Sure, Jan.
That's very millennial of you, Megan.
That's a very millennial meme.
But it's also Gen X because that was our show.
Hello.
I grew up.
That's true.
The Brady Bungee was ours.
That is true.
Right.
Totally.
At my Nana's, at the boatyard with my TV dinner.
Those were the days.
Salisbury steak with a little apple pie on the side.
Delicious.
Somehow we lived.
On the subject of media, I would be remiss if I did not point out my beautiful friend Sage Steele, who's got a new podcast out.
She's working for Bill Maher, who's building a podcast network of his own.
And she's making the rounds to promote it and so on.
And she'll be here soon.
And she offered this in an interview with Fox about her time at ESPN about when she went in to interview Joe Biden, the president.
Watch.
A wonderful day in sports.
Opening date for America's national pastimes.
This is about two months after he took office.
That was an interesting experience in its own right, because it was so structured.
And I was told, you will say every word that we write out.
You will not deviate from the script.
And go to the word, like every single question was scripted, gone over dozens of times by many executives, editors and executives.
Absolutely.
I was on script and was told not to deviate.
It was very much, this is what you will ask.
This is how you will say it.
No follow-ups.
No follow-ups.
Next.
Can you imagine telling your journalist there will be no follow-ups in your interview with the president of the United States?
Not to mention the scripting of her questions by executives.
That's an outrage.
Yeah.
I mean, there was, you know, Jon Stewart, I don't know if you saw interviewed on his new or his old but new comedy show, The Daily Show, the head of the FTC, Lena Khan, who whatever you think of her has become an enemy of corporate America.
And he said when he was at Apple, when he had a show on Apple, he was barred from interviewing her by Apple executives or even examining a lot of the issues raised by antitrust issues, because obviously that contravenes Apple's corporate interests.
Here, though, this is a news agency that is protecting the most powerful political official in the United States from any difficult questions.
And I do think sometimes people get convinced that maybe it's like a conspiracy theory that corporations control their journalists in that way.
Obviously, a lot of people work for media corporations are never told quite that explicitly, you can't say this or you can say this.
A lot of people wouldn't accept it.
But again, when it comes to Joe Biden and Democrats, they really see their mission as promoting the Democratic Party and not questioning him.
And honestly, it's shocking, but not surprising.
To be told that you can't ask any follow-ups of the president of the United States.
I mean, it does remind me a little bit of what happened to Dasha Burns, the NBC reporter after she had her interview with John Fetterman.
And she had the moment where she said, when we talked, he was, he had difficulty understanding me in the small talk and he was very reliant on the computer.
And then the left, including the press, rained down on her as if she had committed some cardinal sin.
You're right.
You don't deviate from the script.
And the script is support Democrats.
The only ones we make look bad are the Republicans.
Kara Swisher went off on her.
Many people went off on her.
It's they get the message.
And, you know, in both of those cases, it's a young female reporter in Sage's case with a family to support.
She's a single mom.
You know, it's not easy.
It's easy in theory to say, I'm not doing that, right?
If you have power at your organization and you're willing to walk and you know you have other options.
That's not always the case, right?
Most people actually need their paycheck.
And while they'd love to die on principle, they really can't because it's like their kids are going to starve.
So I feel for young journalists put in this position because it's it's hard.
Those are hard battles to fight.
Yeah.
You know, one of the points I made when I said about Jon Stewart, when I heard him say that, you know, my, that was exactly my point.
Like, if Jon Stewart, who obviously can walk away from a net contract, he doesn't need the money.
He's a very wealthy person from the work, you know, that he's done previously.
If Jon Stewart isn't willing to tell Apple, I'm not going to live under these constraints.
I'm going to break my contract and walk away, who was supposed to do that.
And I think one of the things that struck me, Megan, was when I was doing a lot of questioning and a lot of skeptic, explaining a lot of skepticism to a lot of these Russia gate claims, I really was getting messages a lot from younger journalists, like mid-level journalists who worked inside major news organizations who were saying to me, oh, I'm really appreciative of what you were, of what you're doing.
And the subtext of it obviously was, I wish I could, but I can't.
And I understood why they can't, because if they did, if they stuck their head ups and went even a little bit off script and said, wait a minute, some of this Russia gate stuff seems excessive or without evidence, they'd be the first one put on the list to get fired or laid off.
They'd be the last one to get hired.
They would be viciously mauled by all their colleagues on Twitter.
Their reputation would be destroyed.
And I think, you know, people like you and I who have developed a big audience, who have an independence, who have a kind of freedom, I think it is important to realize that that's not the case for most journalists.
And while you wish, you know, journalists would say, oh, FU, a lot of people can't do that.
They need their paycheck.
They need their job.
And these kinds of constraints of the kind she just described are very effective because, you know, not everybody can just throw their jobs away the first second that there's something happening that is a violation of their integrity.
And that's, and that's the case for most journalists.
And that's why it's so powerful as a conformity weapon.
And nothing is worse for journalism than conformity.
It does make you wonder.
I don't have proof of this, but what happened, for example, with Catherine Herridge, who recently got pushed out of CBS, who was reporting on intelligence circles as she has for her whole career, has very good sources, and was doing more heterodox work over there that didn't always toe the party line.
And then suddenly was one of the first to go when they did a round of layoffs.
And it's like, well, why would you get rid of one of the few people here who actually makes and gathers news?
Why wouldn't you get rid of one of these other many bodies here?
And that hasn't been fully explained or explored.
I'm sure there is some sort of a legal battle going on right now, given them trying to hold on to her papers and so on and so forth.
But yeah, because what happens is it would be rare that they would just turn around if Sage Steele asked a follow-up question and fired her.
They're not that dumb.
They understand that would turn into a national news store.
She'd go public with it.
She'd tell people.
Same thing with Herridge.
So they wait, you know, like snakes in the grass.
And when you're looking the other way, when enough time has passed, that's when they get you.
And then they have plausible deniability.
They had nothing to do with her going off script.
It was just, you know, layoffs.
It's just a tough, tough time economically.
And it's, it's gross.
It's how media works.
But it also sends the message to other reporters.
Why Independent Media Matters 00:00:51
What's expected?
Exactly.
Glenn, it's wonderful to be free.
Yes, it is wonderful to be free.
And I think being free makes you realize how excessive these constraints are.
And a lot of times you don't even realize until you're free how many that you have.
I think sometimes you kind of justify them away.
But that's why independent media is so important because they don't have those constraints.
And that's what makes it so liberating.
Yes.
All right.
If you want to know more about what exactly was wrong with that 60 minutes piece, you've got to go to just Google Glenn Greenwald Rumble and it's right there at the top of his speed.
And you can watch this whole episode because he does a great job of going through it point by point.
I loved it.
And I hope and I believe that we will see you again soon.
Absolutely, Megan.
Always great to talk to you.
Likewise.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
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