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May 4, 2024 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:03:39
20240504_best-of-the-week-trump-legal-set-up-whiny-college-
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Intent Versus Motive 00:15:02
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon.
It's been a busy week with some insanity across New York City and the rest of the country, both on college campuses and in a courtroom downtown.
If you want to know the bizarre way the judge and the prosecutor on the business records trial of former President Donald Trump in New York are relying on a very dubious legal theory, to put it mildly, you have to hear my conversation with Andy McCarthy.
It went completely viral for a reason.
We've got the most important part here.
I also talked to our friends from the fifth column about the hilarious leaders of the protests on Columbia's campus in UCLA.
Their parents must be so proud.
They're hilarious for all the wrong reasons.
And did you see our vice president, Kamala Harris, on Drew Barrymore's talk show?
Batya Angar Sargon was here and we talked through why it was so representative of our out-of-touch elite.
And I found the topic I disagree with Michael Knowles on more than any other topic, by the way.
Christy Noam shooting her puppy in the face.
He's still wrong.
Enjoy and talk to you Monday.
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Is it Alvin Bragg trying to prove that Trump violated the federal election law?
Or is he trying to change it to he's proving that Trump engaged in a conspiracy to violate federal election law?
whether or not he actually did it?
Yeah, I think, Megan, it's worse than that.
What he's trying to do is establish that Trump conspired to violate federal election law as defined by Alvin Bragg, as opposed to as defined by the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department.
Let me hold you there.
Well, let me hold you there.
Okay, yes, I agree, as defined by Alvin Bragg, because I know you guys have had Brad Smith post at National Review.
We've had Brad Smith on the show here.
You cited him in your latest article.
I actually looked it up.
We had Brad Smith in April of 2023.
Well, I didn't know this.
I've been watching the Trump trial, but not this closely.
In January of 2024, Brad Smith tried to submit expert witness testimony.
be named as a witness for Trump.
In this case, as a true expert on election law, he was serving on the FEC, which you mentioned, Federal Election Commission, under Bill Clinton.
And he says there's no violation here.
He says it's a very complex area of law, just like you said, which is why they typically leave it to the experts.
And that the fundamental thing that's been misunderstood, as far as I can tell by almost everyone in this case, is that it doesn't matter what was in Trump's head or Michael Cohen's head or David Pecker's head in making these payments.
The subjective reasoning for making the payment is irrelevant.
The only thing the FEC or justice would look at is the nature of the payment.
In general, if this is a payment that could only ever be used to advance someone's election, then it may be a campaign finance charge fee.
If it's something that could be used for anything other than one's campaign, then it's not within the purview of campaign finance law.
And he said on this show, a hush money payment, of course, is used by men all the time.
Not just men, but even criminal defendants or people who are threatened with nasty information about themselves.
And there's been testimony at this trial.
Arnold Schwarzenegger cut a deal with the National Inquirer to protect him.
Rahm Emmanuel, when he was about to run for mayor of Chicago, cut a deal with the National Inquirer via his brother Ari, who's a big Hollywood agent.
Bill Cosby cut a deal with the National Inquirer, like he wasn't running for office, but those first two were to try to bury damaging information.
So this has been happening for a long time.
And the reason those things didn't get charged and the reason Trump didn't get charged by the FEC, by the feds, the Justice Department here is because they likely understood it doesn't matter whether Trump was doing it to advance his electoral chances.
All that matters is the nature of the payment.
I'm going to run the Brad Smith soundbite and on the tail end of it, you will hear Dave Ehrenberg, Palm Beach County prosecutor, great guy, comes on the show a lot, try to come back at Brad because they were all on the show together.
This is episode 522 of the Megan Kelly show with the John Edwards rebuttal.
All right, take a listen to SAT 1.
Let's suppose I decide to run for Congress and I say, you know, I need to be in a debate and I need a really good suit.
So I go out and I spend, you know, $2,000 on a suit, which I would never otherwise do, right?
It doesn't make it a campaign expense, even though my purpose was to do it to influence the election.
Campaign expenditures are things that no one would spend money on unless you're running for office.
So again, it's not the subjective reason why Trump made the payment.
It's the actual nature of the payment itself.
John Edwards was prosecuted by the feds for something just like it.
He had an outside, some rich folks who are paying off his mistress so that he could help win the election.
They kept paying off the mistress even after the election.
And his wife had cancer and it was clear that he didn't want her to know.
How then were the feds able to prosecute John Edwards under the same set of facts?
Judges are not experts in campaign finance law.
Most prosecutors are not.
And I think it was just a wrong decision.
Is a lot of Supreme Court precedent emphasizing that idea that you have to use objective standards for campaign finance law, not subjective standards, sort of the only logical reading of the statute, because otherwise, you know, take a person like Hillary Clinton right, one could at least theoretically argue that everything she did between 1976 and 2016 was for the purpose of influencing her electionist precedent.
So good, so clear.
And so it's very galling to listen to the coverage of this case andy, because I don't know if you're having the same reaction I am, but I hear all over CNN, FOX NEWS everybody I hear them getting down to David Pecker testified, he did it to help Trump win.
He did it to help Trump win.
Who cares?
You could have Trump on the stand saying yeah, they did it to help me win.
That was the goal, and it still wouldn't amount to a federal election campaign finance violation.
Yeah Megan, I think this is something that we see a lot those of us who are kind of legal wonks which is this conflation of two things that have to be separated out, intent and motive.
Um, as Brad said here, it you don't even get into intent unless you have something that objectively violates, you know, is a commission of the acts that are required, uh in a criminal statute for a prosecution to go forward.
You don't even have to think about somebody's intent unless you have that.
And here, as he points out, these are not technically campaign expenses to the extent they're talking about.
Uh, the Edwards case.
That's a very interesting case to to talk about actually, because it proves his point.
The Federal Election Commission declined to prosecute uh Edwards because they thought it wasn't a campaign expense the hush money payments.
The Justice Department, I think recklessly, went ahead and charged him anyway.
They had a very complex trial.
The judge didn't clearly didn't like the case, but he allowed it to go to the jury and then the jury hung on counts.
They didn't convict him, I think, they acquitted him on one and hung on everything else and then the Justice Department, having learned its lesson, decided not to reprosecute the case.
So I don't think that's really a very strong argument for concluding that what what's happened in the Trump case uh is a viable campaign expense.
But when I say that you have to separate out intent and motive.
If Stormy Daniels used the election to to get Trump to pay because the election gave her leverage and Trump paid her because he was concerned about his chances in the election.
That goes to Trump's motive to pay.
It doesn't make the expense a campaign expenditure under the campaign finance laws, because it's not like polling or get out the vote efforts.
It's not the kind of an expenditure that would only happen if there was a political campaign.
Stormy Daniels could have tried to extort Trump to pay for any number of reasons having nothing to do with whether he was a presidential candidate or not.
It happens that he was a presidential candidate, so she tried to strike while the iron was hot and he had an incentive to pay her.
That doesn't make it a campaign violation.
The judge refused to allow Brad Smith and his expert testimony.
Harmeet Dylan pointed this out on the show the other day.
I had missed it.
It just happened in late march, about a month ago.
Uh, he said no, Brad Smith cannot take the stand.
It would be improper to have him instruct the jury in the law, among other things.
Well, Tell us what's wrong with that.
And if Brad Smith can't get up there and speak about the federal election standards, how do the actual standards, like you objectively look at the nature of the payment, not the subjective belief in the person's head, how does that get into this courtroom?
How does it get in front of the jury so they have the accurate framing of the law?
But by an utterly inadmissible, lawless method, the jury in this case is being instructed on federal campaign law by David Pecker and Michael Cohen.
Now, it's a black letter principle of the criminal law that let's say A and B commit a crime together, right?
Or an alleged crime together.
A decides to plead guilty.
B goes to trial.
A's guilty plea is not admissible to prove that B either committed the crime or believed that he was committing the crime.
Yet, Judge Murchond is allowing the district attorney to elicit from Michael Cohen that he pled guilty to two campaign finance payments and campaign finance offenses.
And worse than that, Bragg's lawyer, Bragg's prosecutor, opened to the jury saying that you're going to hear that Michael Cohen pled guilty to these payments because they violated the campaign finance laws.
And he went to jail over that.
Now, what Bragg knows is that my old office, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, had Bragg dead to rights on $4 million worth.
I'm sorry, had Cohen dead to rights on $4 million plus of bank fraud and tax fraud crimes.
He was going to go to jail over those crimes.
The campaign finance stuff is trivial compared to those crimes.
What drove Cohen's sentencing guidelines and his prison sentence were the fraud crimes he was already looking at.
He agreed to plead guilty to two campaign finance violations because he was trying to make himself a saleable witness to the Southern District of New York against Trump.
If they had signed him up as a cooperator, then the prosecutors, the federal prosecutors, could have filed a motion with the court to get Cohen out of having to do any prison time at all.
So that's the reason he agreed to plead to those charges.
No, right.
It was an add-on.
So, but this judge is allowing Cohen when he takes the stand to say, I pleaded guilty to this crime that you're now accusing Trump of and allowed already David Pecker of the National Inquirer to take the stand and say, I signed this agreement, sort of like a cooperation agreement with the feds on these crimes that you're now alleging.
And yet when Trump says, I would like to respond by bringing in my own election, a campaign finance official to say, I don't really give a damn what they pleaded guilty to or signed a conciliation agreement on.
I'm here to tell you there was no violation of the law.
The judge says no.
Right.
It's worse than that because Trump says, if you're going to let Cohen say he pled guilty and you're going to let this other stuff in from Pecker, I should at least be able to tell the jury that I was investigated by the Justice Department and the FEC and they decided not to charge me for a lot of reasons, not least that the campaign finance laws are different when you're the candidate versus when you're a supporter of the candidate.
Basic Humanitarian Aid 00:04:47
He's not allowing him to put in front of the jury that those agencies that have exclusive authority under the law to enforce these statutes looked at him and decided not to prosecute him.
And what the judge says about that is, well, you know, there could be a lot of reasons why they didn't charge him.
How about there could be a lot of reasons why Michael Cohen pled guilty that don't have anything to do with whether he was actually guilty.
He makes no allowance for any of that.
All the rulings are so heavily weighted in favor of Bragg and against Trump.
All of this doesn't help Trump right now, but it should help him on appeal, which will happen well after the November election.
Let's just stay on the morons for another minute before we get to the truly nefarious ones.
We showed some of this video, but here is this woman who her name is unfortunately Johanna King Slutsky.
And she's at, I know.
It's sorry.
That's what made her so bitter.
I mean, that's, you can see it.
I mean, it could be.
Her last name is Slutsky.
If you really run with it.
Change it.
Smith, what's that?
Why would you stick with that?
I mean, frankly, I don't understand the last name Cox either.
I don't, Dick is also bad.
I'm sorry, but they are.
Anywho, Slutsky is over at...
And by the way, it's hyphenated.
So she could have just gone with Johanna King.
That's not bad.
Who's like, I'll keep the hyphen Slutsky?
You're really trying to send a message.
Anywho, there she is at Columbia enacting her bitterness live in front of the camera for us all.
She's one of the leaders.
And you may have seen this the other day, but she was demanding that they be allowed to ferret up food and other supplies to the people who had overtaken this hall, Hamilton Hall.
And these are the terms that she described it in.
Take a listen to stop four.
Why should the university be obligated to provide food to people who've taken over a building?
Well, first of all, we're saying that they're obligated to provide food to students who pay for a meal plan here.
But you mentioned that there was a request that food and water be brought in.
Unless I missed an audience.
To allow it to be brought in.
I mean, well, I guess it's ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students.
Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you?
If the answer is no, then you should allow basic, I mean, it's crazy to say because we're on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we're asking for.
Like, could people please have a glass of water?
But they did put themselves in that very deliberate waterfront in that situation and in that position.
So it seems like you're sort of saying, we want to be revolutionaries.
We want to take over this building.
Now would you please bring us food and water?
Nobody's asking them to bring anything.
We're asking them to not violently stop us from bringing in basic humanitarian aid.
We are looking for a commitment from them that they will not stop it.
We haven't stopped it yet.
Well, I don't know to what extent it has been attempted, but we're looking for a commitment.
Those poor children.
I told you.
Oh my God, Miss Slutsky.
What have you included?
Can someone also point out finally that behind her there is a midriff like a half shirt on who clearly would be thrown off a building?
We have a full screen close-up of the guy behind her just for you.
Do I know my fifth column or do I look at this guy?
Yeah.
Wow, what a tragedy.
For the listening audience, you can see full midriff and belly button of this Hamas supporting gentlemen.
That's what Hamas in the battle is.
That's true.
That's the truth, truly disadvantaged.
Shopping at Zara Kids to buy his clothes.
It just, it doesn't fit at all.
This is not a fashion statement.
This is a man in desperate need.
Actually, it may change my view of the whole thing.
Hard disagree.
Hard disagree.
America wins.
He might be special.
I'm clear.
And let me get you so eyebrows.
Yeah.
Unbelievable.
Show me the country where that dude gets to do this.
Wow.
That country ain't Gaza.
No.
He's offering scholarships to students who find themselves expelled.
I'm sure that they would welcome him with open arms.
Yes, they would.
That's right.
I'm sure they would cinch around him in a very tight embrace.
No, Megan, one of the reasons why they asked for zip ties in UCLA.
Graduation During Genocide 00:10:12
I don't know if you saw some of the footage of the students trying to put their plywood back up the other night.
They kind of didn't know how to do it.
They were using zip ties to try to lash together plywood fortresses.
There's not a lot of people.
These are all like union guys.
These are all like, they're doing their PhDs.
And I'll tell you what, I'm going to read you a sentence because Ms. Slutsky is, of course, in a PhD program.
And this is what America, this is what we're paying: $90,000 a year for this, because we need this.
This is exactly what we have, particularly when inflation and recession.
This has to be loaned.
My goal, and this is her about her own PhD dissertation.
My goal is to write a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx's term for the disruption of energy circuits caused by the industrialization under capitalism.
So this is Ms. Slutsky has so many skills.
And, you know, it doesn't surprise me that she doesn't know how to get food.
Yeah.
So listen, so she's so wonderful.
I love her introduction as a character in this story.
I pray to God above and thank him for taking care of us this way.
We don't know who put this together, but my crack producers, Debbie, Canadian Debbie, found online a parody video that's been produced of Johanna King Slutsky.
Even I have not yet seen it.
Let's watch it together, shall we?
Basically, we would like to get some pepperoni pizzas.
Just make sure they are gluten-free.
Or, you know what?
Just sounds like you just want pizza with no bread.
Is that what you're saying?
Just send some pizzas without bread, okay?
Oh, and also no cheese.
Many of us are allergic to cheese.
And while you're at it, please make sure there is no tomato sauce.
It looks like blood, and we don't want to trigger anybody.
So just send us some plant-based pepperoni in a box.
And if they don't have vegan pepperoni, just send us some pizza boxes with napkins and shit.
Just make sure the pizza box is made with recycled cardboard.
And if they don't have any recycled pizza boxes.
If not, just don't send us anything.
We'll just go back home to mommy.
Thank you.
Almost impossible to parody these people.
It's hard.
Almost impossible.
Who says AI is dangerous?
It's the best thing that ever happened to America.
So I do want to stay on her.
She really is a gift, this gal.
So we also took a look at her, at her story.
And by the way, before I move on from the parody, Eve Barlow, who's a journalist on Substack titled Blacklisted, writes the following: Can we please get an airdrop at Columbia University?
We need 900 acai bowls, 1,300 impossible burgers on gluten-free bread with sugar-free vegan ketchup, and 3,000 bottles of pH 9.0 electrolyte water.
This is urgent at UNRWA, UN emergency services.
Exactly right.
So this gal, Johanna, is listed on Columbia's website as an instructor and PhD student.
Although we tried to click on her bio from the school, and it now says we cannot find the page.
So we don't know whether Johanna, you know, it's possible she received a little backlash from that nonsense.
She's currently getting her PhD in English and comparative literature.
And picking up on what you were saying, Moynihan, her bio on Columbia's website when it was posted, said her research interests include romanticism, transcendentalism, Marxism, science and literature, environmental humanities, eco-criticism, and 18th and 19th century poetics.
What?
I truly understood every other word.
Well, that's fine.
Yeah, I mean, pretty.
I like transcendentalism.
I'm in Emerson.
I'm from Concord, Massachusetts.
I'm an Emerson fan.
But you wouldn't have to say.
Yeah, go ahead.
Yes.
I love Ms. Slutsky.
Every, you know, Officer Slutsky.
Or this Krupke.
Sorry.
Speaking of lotion.
But the incredible thing about this is that if she hadn't put herself out there, we look at this stuff and we say, oh my God, how much nonsense can you squeeze into one human?
And it's like she's just representative of thousands of people on campus.
I mean, everybody who is doing a PhD is kind of in that universe.
There's a great contest.
I don't know if it's still, they still do it.
It used to be a guy named Dennis Dutton did it, but a bad writing contest of academic papers.
And it's just completely incoherent because there are people who believe that they can mask their stupidity with incoherence and people will think they're just being smart and they don't get it.
And that's the kind of stuff when you're trying to read what her PhD dissertation is about.
But it's funny because you see her in this situation.
And the one thing that you have to, we laugh at this stuff because it's ridiculous, absurd, and funny, and it undermines everything they're trying to do.
But notice what they are doing.
She's trying to pretend that she's a Gazan.
We need humanitarian aid.
She literally said humanitarian aid.
People are going to starve to death.
They're going to be thirsty.
I mean, it's like this kind of stuff is like they're cosplaying.
And they don't, they've never been to Gaza.
Obviously, they know nothing about this.
They've probably never been to Israel.
I don't know.
I mean, Ms. Slutsky maybe did Alia, did Birthright at some point.
Who knows?
But this is the thing that happens is you say, we're playing the role of these people.
We need humanitarian aid because the Gazans, which by the way, is very, very insulting to Gazans.
I mean, whatever you think about this war, and I think we've made very clear, I have anyway, of what I think about it on the show, but the people of Gaza are bearing the brunt of this.
And that's because Hamas doesn't give a shit about them.
And so I have an enormous amount of sympathy for those people because there are people there that are really opposed to Hamas and have no outlet to actually be opposed to them.
And then you have a bunch of spoiled $90,000 a year college students who could just order fucking Grubhub saying that they might starve to death on campus.
I mean, it reminds me of the water, Michael.
The pipes are very old in those buildings, Megan.
They might kill them.
They're from 1899.
You know what happened during the 50s with the water fountain?
It's very triggering.
People had separate water.
Now you want us to use a water fountain.
Okay, Bull Connor.
So listen to this.
So she, she then went on, okay, to speak and she wanted people to not have her name.
All right.
She refused to give her name.
Of course, we figured it out, but she did want you to know that her pronouns are she, her.
Okay.
Because like the gentleman with the midriff exposed behind her, she's very pro-LGBTQ and also pro-Hamas.
It can happen.
And she added the following life lessons, which is helpful.
She's getting her PhD.
She must be super smart and elite.
Let's take a listen.
Are there any plans to demonstrate a graduation?
It's really bizarre to us and perhaps to members of the public to see so much concern over graduation when we're in the middle of a genocide.
I think you have to really look at what's important here.
We are on stolen land from indigenous people and the land of people who were displaced from Harlem.
We recognize that we have a shared fight.
And when we say things like run the river to the sea or open the gates, it's in recognition of the shared fight that unites people at Columbia University, the people in Palestine, and people in Harlem.
I mean, unbelievable.
Fuck you.
If I truly believed I was somehow indirectly a party to some sort of crime, if it was important enough for me to talk about ad nauseum, I would do something about it.
I probably wouldn't go to that school.
I wouldn't be a partake of that.
I wouldn't have the affiliation.
I wouldn't be, I wouldn't pay them my money.
I would do something about it, but they never do something about it.
These land acknowledgements, this constant berating of everyone about all of the abuses that are somehow had been perpetrated at some point in history, which now need to be accounted for by someone other than me, the person who is literally apparently a part of the crime, it's just so insanely heinous.
And the appropriation of the suffering, one hand, is just kind of ringing in my ear as well.
The notion of imagining yourselves as the central player in all of this, the actual victim while you're talking about genocide is just heinous in the extreme.
Notice what she does struggle.
It's also struggle.
But notice what she does there.
From the East Ridward to the Hudson.
But notice what she does there in this thing.
You know, it's like it is about them, right?
We're starving.
You have to pay attention to them.
It takes the focus away.
But this is the unbelievable movement of hypocrisy in Double Standard.
She's standing in front of a bank of microphones saying, why are you paying attention to us?
Yes.
Get it away from the fucking microphones.
Because you're there.
Don't be there.
Leave and do a land acknowledgement and give all your money to the local tribe.
Everyone up until two minutes ago.
Yes.
Bernie Sanders yesterday gave a big speech on the Senate floor, and I won't do the Bernie Sanders impersonation because Moynihans is better, but in which he's like, you know, look, CNN, why are you paying attention to all these college students when you should be paying attention to the people of Gaza and their suffering?
And I agree.
I mean, I think CNN does pay attention to the people of Gaza and their suffering.
But that's a weird thing.
That's a weird flex for protesters to be saying, we're here protesting.
Why are you paying attention to us protesting here?
What are you doing exactly?
And then, I mean, also, it's not really getting that much direct attention as much as it probably should.
But what are they actually asking for in these places?
Always the list is we need to stop down this university having any exchange with anybody in Israel.
That's strange.
I mean, that's not really the traditional purpose of a research university is to close off exchange with an entire country and to make this one country the one.
Political Cluelessness 00:12:38
Like, was Saudi Arabia fine?
Like, what's what is the sliding scale, you know, that we're about China?
About Red China.
You know, there's, there's a whole bunch of people.
About them Uyghurs.
Kamala Harris.
That's like deep breathing, deep breathing.
She went on the Drew Barrymore show.
And on Monday, they released a promo clip, which we played for our audience, in which it was just affectation after affectation with Drew.
You know, she for the visual audience, I'm going to do an imitation where my microphone is Kamala and I'm Drew.
Oh, really?
Oh, I mean, uncomfortably close.
Like as close as you need to be to a microphone, that's how close Drew was to Kamala.
And I felt for Kamala Harris.
I did.
I felt bad for her.
You could tell she had embarrassment.
I had secondhand embarrassment.
And you could tell it was too awkward of an invasion of her personal space.
But this was Drew's attempt to show, I'm Oprah.
I'm Oprah.
Trust me, I'm Oprah.
I get it.
No.
For Oprah Winfrey, it came naturally.
And she didn't have to force a fake, feigned intimacy.
That's why she became Oprah.
Okay.
That's why back in her day, she was very special and one of a kind.
You're not Oprah, Drew.
And your segment with Kamala Harris proved it.
So Kamala Harris, on the other end, is accepting this adoration as though it's real and as though Drew Barrymore speaks for us all, for she speaks for all American women, right?
Like Kamala is our leader, the feminine hero that we need, feminist.
First of all, for the first time in the Drew Barrymore television show history, they stocked the audience with all women.
Here's a look at that.
It's not 13.
Welcome to the show.
All right, yes.
God, look at her.
And yes, first female vice president of the United States.
Please welcome Vice President Kamala Harris.
I just threw up a little in my mouth.
I don't know what.
Let's just stop there.
Bacha.
The over-the-top behavior of Drew Barrymore, who everyone used to like.
She was cute when she was young and she was in these movies.
And now this, truly, it's performance.
It's bad acting.
That's what we're seeing.
In response to, I mean, you would have thought Jesus had just walked in.
The way she treated, no one feels like this about her.
Who does she think she's kidding?
It was a pantomime of, you know, positive feelings.
And even for Drew Barrymore, it was extremely overdone.
And when I watched that, I couldn't help but think like, this is what happens when you're extremely, extremely wealthy.
You know, what does politics even mean to you anymore when all of your needs are being met to excess?
Like when you're a millionaire or a billionaire, you know, what does politics even mean?
You don't need anything from politicians.
You don't need anything from this country.
And yet somehow our elites in Hollywood still have this need to see themselves as on the right side of history.
And so instead of doing an honest take, looking around the country and being like, hey, people really need things.
I wonder what kind of policies we should be putting in place to help people with 18% groceries inflated, right?
Instead, they do this pantomime of politics around identity because then they don't have to talk about the real issues.
And that's really what we were seeing there is extremely wealthy people pretending they're on the right side of history.
And like all, can you imagine how embarrassed you'd be if your introduction included something about your color?
Like your race?
What the fuck are you bringing up her skin color for?
You're so fucking weird.
I'm sorry, but like in defense of Kamala Harris, you couldn't find one thing she did as vice president.
I might not have liked what you might cite, but I'm sure the left, you could find something.
I don't know.
She went down to Tennessee after those three pro-abortion people, you know, threw a fit.
Something.
She's the first to go to Planned Parenthood as a sitting vice president.
Something that the left would, her skin color is brown.
I mean, that's really what she was saying.
How offensive.
But you're right.
That's what they worship there.
It's not like Jesus because that's not who she worships.
She worships skin color, which was on display.
So then comes the following.
Kamala offers the following little diddy about her name and what her stepchildren call her.
Listen here.
We kind of don't use the term step because I just think I'd love Disney.
However, Disney kind of messed that up for a lot of us over the years.
You know, the evil step parent.
And their word for me is mamala.
And so they call me mamala.
All right.
That's fine.
I actually think that's kind of cute.
It's kind of clever.
I fine.
Here's the follow-up by Drew Barrymore.
I keep thinking in my head that we all need a mom.
I've been thinking that we really all need a tremendous hug in the world right now.
But in our country, we need you to be mamala of the country.
And as a woman who respects so much and wants to share and wants to be confident and has no ounce of meat that has competitiveness, when we lift each other up, we all rise.
That's exactly right.
Oh my God.
That's right.
That's right.
However, we need a great protector.
Oh, my God.
She wants us to believe that that great protector who we apparently all need and desperately want is Kamala Harris.
Just once again, another word on the fake behavior, the affectation of Drew Barrymore.
Too close.
She's right on top of her like she's her microphone.
You can see she's on top of her.
Get out of my personal space.
And then again, with the, I can't really do it because my Botox is too intact.
I'll try to push my eyebrows.
It's like that.
Look at her eyebrows like, oh, oh.
Oh, we're also just hurting.
You know why we're hurting?
Because of her policies, her policies, which are outlined in your book, by the way, second class.
So what did you make of it?
No, totally.
America doesn't need a hug.
We need a secure border.
We need inflation to come down.
We need like better affordable health care.
You know, we need to get rid of the diploma divide.
We need to restore dignity to the working class.
We need vocational training.
We do not need a hug.
And you see here a real difference in like working class culture, conservative culture, and then liberal elite culture.
You know, working class people really value autonomy.
They don't need their politicians to tell them what to believe.
They don't need their politicians to share their values or tell them how to feel about things.
They just need them to enact policy that enables them to keep more of their paycheck and buy a home.
Like that's all they need.
Liberals, on the other hand, they are super into politics as a kind of spirituality.
And so they need their politicians to have some sort of like spiritual, psychological, like to tell them what to think and how to feel about things because all of their material needs are being met.
Because again, they're wealthy.
I mean, nine of the 10 richest counties vote for Democrats, like 65% of Americans who make more than $500,000 a year, Democrats.
Wall Street gave more money to Joe Biden than to Trump, right?
There's been this realignment.
And rich people, they look to these politicians not for policy, which they don't need, but for some sort of spiritual guidance because they have no sort of internal sense of right versus wrong anymore.
Thank you, universities.
And that's what we're seeing here.
We're seeing a woman in Drew Barrymore trying to create some sort of idol out of this empty shell, which is Kamala Harris, who represents only being female and being black and being Southeast Asian, right?
That she, she has no policy.
She is simply this empty husk of identities because the Democrats went all in on this to distract from their plunder of the middle class.
That's what we were seeing there.
Oh, and if the nation needed a hug, it never in its right mind would it go to Kamala Harris.
Like there's nothing, that's why it failed so brilliantly, like so miserably, I guess is the word, because it was, it, it was untrue.
If there had been even a nugget of truth in it, maybe it could have landed, but it didn't because that's not who you would go to for a hug.
There's nothing warm and fuzzy and comforting about Kamala Harris.
Even the left would back me up on this.
So it was just Drew Barrymore being completely obsequious because I guess she was so thrilled she got a sitting vice president on her show.
It was an embarrassment.
It was almost as bad as her Dylan Mulvaney embarrassment.
Her inability to control her over-emotionality is really a problem for her.
And it's a real turnoff to somebody like me.
By the way, most of us who have had good mothers, and I realize Drew Barrymore may not be on that list because she had the stage mother who pushed her and she was doing drugs at a very young age and all the stuff that she's come out with.
You know what a good mother does?
A good mother doesn't look at you and say, you're on your own.
I mean, you can't do it.
You need me to step in and be your mom-in-law who handles these problems for you.
A good mom says, you got this, kid.
Life's tough, but so are you.
You're good.
And that's not what Drew Barrymore needs or was asking for.
She's used to a lifetime of coddling and somebody else doing it.
Here's another thing I wanted to say.
This reminded me of the following, your comments.
Rhys Witherspoon, after Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted, guarantee you this woman did not watch one minute of that trial.
No one should be able to purchase a semi-automatic weapon, cross state lines and kill two people, wound another and go free.
In what world is this safe for any of us?
Reese Witherspoon with undoubtedly her security guards and her mansions and her gates, yet another elite, rich woman who has no clue why someone might actually buy a semi-automatic weapon and feel the need to protect others.
Yeah, and I think it's really important to keep pushing home this, you know, the Democrats used to represent labor and they abandoned them to cater to the college educated elite, the educated rich, the cultural elites in Hollywood, and the dependent poor.
So, you know, when you look at every policy pushed by the Democrats, it's either appealing to the top 20%, who now control, by the way, over 50% of the GDP, thanks to the Democrats, or to the dependent poor on the bottom, which means that 70% of Americans who want that autonomy, who want the dignity of labor, are being left out in the cold because all of the culture is being produced by Drew Barrymore on her knees, elevating Kamala Harris, who can only hurt the working class with her democratic policies.
It's amazing.
It really truly is amazing to watch these women in their cluelessness about what America actually needs, wants, and also who's to blame.
Like Drew Barrymore has no idea.
She's probably, I bet she doesn't know like how much a carton of milk costs.
Animals As Prey 00:15:58
She probably doesn't.
She probably has somebody else do all her shopping.
And that's why she just wants to cheer on this woman like she's a second coming because she's got the right skin color and she's got a vagina.
And those are the things she mentioned in her big intro.
It's offensive.
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Who shoots their puppy in the face?
Listen, I don't, I don't want to be the one person out here defending Christy Noam.
I agree with you.
She's probably out of the Veep stakes.
I don't, I don't really care that much about Christy Noome.
And I agree with you.
It's bad politics to shoot your puppy in the face and then to brag about it.
I agree.
This is political campaign school 101.
It's not a smart thing to do.
However, however, in Christy Noome's defense, who do you want to be a governor of your state?
Do you want someone who's really nice and sensitive and feeling?
Or do you want some cold-blooded killer who takes cricket out to the gavel pit and puts cricket down like old Yeller because he ate all the chickens?
Don't you want the really nice?
No, you can choose someone who's tough and not a puppy killer.
That's like they're calling her the Jeffrey Dahmer of dogs.
This is, she seemed to enjoy it.
She lost her temper.
I'll read the piece from The Guardian.
Okay, we haven't seen her book yet, but this is the excerpt from The Guardian, which she's not denying.
This is her story, just to make it clear, in her book, this isn't like some tabloid outed it and she's denying it.
It's they got a copy of her book in advance.
Cricket was a wire hair pointer about 14 months old.
She writes in her new book.
And she said the dog had, quote, an aggressive personality and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.
She says, she includes this story to show how she's willing to do anything difficult, messy, and ugly if it needs to be done.
By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noam says, she hoped to calm the young dog down.
All right, first of all, who thinks an overly excitable young dog is going to calm down on a pheasant hunt with other dogs?
That's stupid, right?
Hello?
Why don't you just put it in front of a bunch of birds it naturally wants to kill and its ancestors have been trained for generations to kill?
And that'll bring, it'll be just like a Xanax for the dog.
Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going, quote, out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.
This would be the beginning of Cricket's death sentence for Governor Noam.
Noam describes calling Cricket and then using an electronic caller to attempt to bring her under control.
Nothing worked.
Then on the way home after the hunt, as Gnome stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Gnome's truck and attacked the family's chickens, quote, grabbing one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.
Okay.
Do you know what my Strudwick would do?
If I brought him near a chicken farm or anywhere near, there were chickens, he would do exactly the same thing.
And he is the sweetest big galug you've ever seen.
They're dogs.
They see this as food, as prey.
He doesn't, the dog didn't understand that it wasn't for him to eat.
But she reminded me of the sweetest dog.
Train him.
He's the sweetest dog.
Tell that to the chickens.
Won't somebody please think of the chickens?
It occurs to me that this memoir, this episode that Christy Noam is recounting, it's sort of the opposite of Richard Nixon's Checkers speech.
When the left was attacking Richard Nixon, really trying to push him out of politics, he realized that by hugging this little puppy, he could win support from everyone.
And so he said, you know, the one gift I'm not going to give up is this sweet little dog, Checkers.
Well, Christy Noam must have missed that lesson in political class where she took the opposite notes from it.
But in any case, I think we all know what she was thinking here.
She was thinking that she's a female politician, and so she has a weakness because she's a member of what has traditionally been described as the weaker sex.
She's got to make herself look really tough.
If she wants to be a leader, she's got to look like the Iron Lady.
She's got to pull a Maggie Thatcher.
And she thought that this would accomplish that and appeal to her audience.
So it didn't work, obviously.
It was a pretty grisly killing.
We haven't even gotten to the part where Governor Noam then turns her guns on some poor goat that was also old and smelly and angry and then shot the goat like multiple times.
And it was a grisly account.
But if we can take ourselves away from the emotion of it, Megan, I guess this is my broader point.
I don't think there's anything wrong with humanely killing an animal on a farm.
Could she have done something different?
Could she have given it up for adoption?
Could she have sent it to a farm upstate?
Fear me.
Right.
Like the horse is suffering and he has to be put down.
Everyone gets that.
She wouldn't be getting the blowback that she's getting now.
Or the dog had bit 17 people, was a mature dog.
She tried to rehab and train it.
Maybe then.
This dog was 14 months old.
And I'll tell you something.
We've been hearing from dog trainers all weekend since this broke.
And I'm going to get to the details of what she did.
But dog trainers are saying things like the following.
This is a guy named Dan Lucen quoted in Rolling Stone, professional hunting dog trainer, saying a 14-month-old dog is, quote, a baby that doesn't know any better.
To me, it's a lack of guidance by the owner or training by the owner or discipline of the owner, he says, explaining that young bird hunting dogs in training often go through a slow process of introduction to dead fowl before ever being around gunshots.
There are a lot of steps, he says, that you take before you take it to a field and shoot birds over it.
Hello, that's obvious even to those of us that don't have traditional bird hunting dogs.
Labs are meant to go retrieve the dead carcasses.
Go ahead.
Megan, I think this dog trainer has accidentally hit on the real point here, which is even 20, 30, 40 years ago, people probably wouldn't have thought this was a smart political story, but they wouldn't have become so enraged as they are now.
And I think part of the reason why people are getting enraged over Christy Noam taking her dog out back like old Yeller, even a little young dog 20 years ago, is because we now view dogs as babies.
That's what that trainer said.
It's a little baby.
And today, I'm not going to name which family member of mine it was.
I have a family member who purchased a dog.
He rescued a dog from a very expensive breeder in Texas, flew a guardian down to pick up the little dog.
Then they flew back to New Jersey.
Then this relative of mine bought a stroller, a nice expensive stroller, to stroll the little dog around so that the little doggy's unvaccinated paws wouldn't touch the nasty sidewalks of New York and New Jersey.
This is crazy.
And you don't need to take my word for it.
The Holy Father, Pope Francis, has said, we are living in a culture now that is mistaking animals, especially puppies, for children.
So as we have fewer and fewer children, and not even through natural infertility, but choosing to have fewer children, choosing not to get married, we all of a sudden start to treat animals like they're kids.
And look, I'm all off.
You're wrong.
You're wrong.
This is not it at all.
This, fine, people, I mean, people have gone so far, forget dogs.
They have monkeys now.
They call them monk kids.
They put them in diapers.
They dress them.
Yes, there's a problem there.
But America loves its dogs.
They're not replacements for children, nine times out of 10.
They're an addition to the family that are messy and a hassle and difficult and awesome.
And you get them because it's fun to love them and have them love you and play with them and teach your children how to care for animals and all of that.
So this is, oh, this thing is stretched across party lines.
It's true.
Democrats and Republicans are outraged by her behavior because dogs tend to be extremely sweet.
And the fact that this puppy killed chickens, which are below him or her, Cricket was a she on the evolutionary scale, right?
Thank you.
Doesn't say anything about how aggressive it was.
And she talks about how cricket allegedly came for her as she tried to get it away from its meal, the chicken, and cricket snapped at her.
Again, many dogs that aren't aggressive would do that because they see it as their food.
It needs to be trained.
She goes on to say, Cricket behaved like a, quote, trained assassin.
When Gnome finally grabbed Cricket, she says, and by the way, another dumbass move to bring your puppy by a chicken farm before you've trained it, after you brought it out on a pheasant hunt, thinking it would just know how to behave.
Okay, the dog, quote, whipped around to bite me, right?
Because you were trying to take food out of its mouth.
Then, as the chicken's owner wept, that's also a problem.
I don't know who's crying over their chickens.
Okay, but that's, I guess you get attached to your chicken.
Emily's a naughty.
She would tell me so.
No, of course I love her apologized.
She wrote, I'm only sympathetic to the cute animals.
I've told my audiences before.
She wrote the shocked family a check.
Okay, that was the right thing for Christy Noam to do for the price they asked.
And then helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime.
Through it all, Noam says Cricket was the picture of pure joy.
Then she adds, I hated that dog, adding that Cricket had proved herself untrainable, dangerous to anyone she came in contact with, and less than worthless as a hunting dog.
At that moment, I realized I had to put her down, quote unquote.
Noam then led Cricket to a gravel pit.
Quote, it was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done.
And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.
The Guardian.
Incredibly, Gnome's tale of slaughter is not finished.
Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat that was nasty and mean because it had not been castrated.
Furthermore, the goat smelled disgusting, musky, rancid, and loved to chase Gnome's children, knocking them down and ruining, what, their safety, their well-being, no, their clothes, getting their clothes dirty, Michael.
Noome decided to kill that guy too, the same way she just killed Cricket the dog.
Though she dragged him to the gravel pit, the goat jumped out as she shot and therefore survived the wound.
Gnome went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down as well.
At that point, she writes, she realized a construction crew had watched her kill both animals.
The startled workers swiftly got back to work, she writes, only for a school bus to arrive and drop off Noam's children.
Kennedy, her child, looked around confused.
This is her daughter and asked, where's cricket?
Cricket's dead, shot in the face by mommy Kennedy, who's now bragging about it in a book.
There's no coming back from this.
She tried this morning, I'm reading that guy, Dan Lassen, Michael, to do like a corrective tweet, you know, something to like stem the bleeding, saying, I can understand why some people are upset about a 20-year-old story of cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch in my upcoming book.
The book is filled with many honest stories in my life, good and bad days, challenges, painful decisions, and lessons, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The ratio on this, you know, meaning people who comment who people who liked it, 17,000.
People who have commented so far, 26,000.
The earlier two tweets, wishing a happy birthday to Melania Trump, completely ratioed as well.
9,000 liked it.
Yeah, 7,000 and climbing on the dislikes and the comments.
And then she tried, we love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm.
Sadly, we just had to put down three horses, blah, blah, blah.
Harsh ratio on that one too.
America's not having it.
6,000 likes, 22,000 comments.
This is, honestly, this is political malpractice.
And she's managed to piss off 98% of all dog and pet lovers in America.
It will be studied for generations to come in poli-sci classes as a really dumb move.
There's no question.
My last defense, though, of Governor Noam, as you read that tale, I think we're getting this image of Governor Noam as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.
You know, Cricket, do you like Huey Lewis in the news kind of putting on the smock and everything?
And it's not, it'd be one thing if she were torturing this animal, but she, you know, she just kind of took him out back, said, look at the flowers, George, you know, and did a little of mice and men kind of action, a little old yeller action.
And so she's having the time of her life.
As this psycho dog was gleeful, you know, at the bodies of the chickens, you know, tossing them in the air.
Psycho.
That's normal.
That's normal behavior.
Every time Stradwick sees a squirrel or a rabbit run across our property, he's almost frothing at the mouth.
He's so excited.
If he were just a little faster, he'd be killing them every day.
But he's kind of fat and a little slow, so he can't do it.
It's, he's a dog.
Don't get a dog if you don't want something that's going to eat smaller critters running across your property.
And don't bring your damn dog to the chicken farm.
Look, that is a very great point.
And first of all, you certainly shouldn't bring your dog to South Dakota these days.
I would definitely keep it, you know, away from that state.
But it's in their nature, absolutely.
And I totally agree with you that it's in their nature.
The political problem with all of this is, as I mentioned earlier, sometimes we I think we anthropomorphize our animals a little too much.
So Philip Raines, the former spokesman for Hillary Clinton, top aide to the Clintons for many years, he went on TV on CNN to talk about Cricket Gate.
And he said, this is dreadful.
I have two cats.
I love animals.
I actually prefer animals to humans.
And I think a lot of people agree with that these days.
But animals, as we were talking about the order of creation, they are less than human because they don't have rational souls.
That's why when they bite chickens, we don't put them on trial.
We don't have multiple prosecutions of dogs or anything like that.
And there are two things that I think are true here at once.
One is that the animals don't have any particular rights.
They don't have a rational soul.
They're not going to go to college.
They're here to serve us.
They're here for our fun and enjoyment.
And we're called to be good stewards of them because we have humanity and all the stuff we've just been talking about.
And also, and this is probably the more important political fact, people really like their dogs.
And if you want people to vote for you, you shouldn't brag about gleefully killing the dogs and then the ghosts.
Dogs Without Rights 00:02:04
And who knows?
Yeah.
I agree with you.
You are clearly not a dog owner, Michael Knowles.
Do you?
I'm a people, Megan.
You admit you have no dog.
I have no dog.
I have no dog.
I have no cat.
I have no goldfish.
I was clear to all of us.
Here's another one.
The Daily Beast interviewed Cole Jensen of Badlands Kennel, said wire-haired pointers are known as the most aggressive of the hunting breeds.
Quote, I find it very unlikely she wouldn't have known that before bringing one home.
Quote, it sounds like this dog was just not trained properly.
It's a common problem that any trainer worth his salt can help with.
Maybe you don't just put a bullet in its brain just before Kennedy gets off the school bus saying, where's cricket?
This is so effed up on many levels.
I'm dying to know my audience's thoughts.
You know what?
Maybe we'll take some calls on this throughout the Michael Knowles segment.
You guys can call in.
What's our number?
I always forget our number.
What's our number, you guys?
Hold on.
Usually we have it hanging in the studio so I don't forget it.
Christy Krakar, what's our number?
What is it?
Nobody knows it, Michael.
You can call my cell phone.
I'll put it on.
833-446.
What's the last four?
3496.
Okay, 833-446-3496.
833-446-3496.
446-3496.
Okay, call us and we'll let our audience be the judge.
Okay.
Was she right to shoot cricket or is Michael Knowles right in saying it's a free-for-all on your puppies?
This is going to be, you know, about twice a year, I go on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, which has the Democrat phone line, and I just get hit with a barrage of attacks.
I think that is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what people are going to send to me over cricket.
That's going to be the, that should be the title of Christy Noam's memoir.
Where is Cricket?
A political life, Governor Christy Noam.
She can't run.
Literally, if you ran against her, every single ad would start with a picture of cricket.
And there's a picture.
We'll put it on for the YouTube show.
The Cricket Debate 00:02:20
There's a picture of the dog.
It's absolutely adorable.
It's so cute.
If I could tell you the number, do you have any idea how much money I have spent on trainers for my Strudwick?
I mean, we had Dog Commander five-time winner B-O-W.
He came.
Strudwick came back.
He was well-behaved for five days.
He was amazing.
And he went back.
And then we had another guy who was wonderful.
He was a reform monk.
He used to be like, not reform, but like, you know, was once.
He was great.
But Strudd is a strong personality.
And unless you have all day to sit with the dog and reinforce these trainings, sometimes they don't behave.
Strudd is alive and well.
Why?
Because I have a heart and I love him.
Abby's always saying, I can't believe you kept him.
I can't believe you haven't gotten rid of him, like giving him away and everyone killed him.
I can't imagine looking a difficult dog in the face and putting a bullet between his eyes.
That takes a special kind of coldness.
Are you telling me you were never once, as your dog is jumping and breaking things and tearing, you were never once tempted by the gravel pit?
Never, never.
The worst I've gotten, Michael, is I've called poison control so many times and I've had to give the dog the hydrogen peroxide mixed with the yogurt.
That's what the vet and the poison control tells you to do.
Don't do this at home unless you have the advice on how much hydrogen peroxide because that can kill the dog if you give too much.
Anyway, so many times.
And I've spent so many thousands of dollars on endoscopies and the looking at the intestines and all that I thought the next time he ate, like he just ate a whole bottle of antibiotics.
Okay, so the thought has occurred to me.
Let nature take its course.
We'll see.
So, but I don't.
I do give the hydrogen peroxide to get the antibiotics out, but I'm not going to lie, the thoughts occurred to me like, maybe it's Darwinism.
Maybe, you know, it's nature.
It's nature, as we say.
Yeah.
I could never hurt him.
I love him, even though he aggravates me.
I love him.
I love him.
Not the same way I love my kids, but I adore the dog.
You fall in love with most normal humans fall in love with their dogs and would never hurt them.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
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