The Megyn Kelly Show - 20240510_failures-of-elite-media-and-hypocrisy-of-left-on-m
Aired: 2024-05-10
Duration: 01:35:22


=== Covering The Campus Revolution (11:52) ===

[00:00:30]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at least.
[00:00:42]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:43]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and happy Friday.
[00:00:46]  The anti-Israel and in some cases anti-American campus protests that began a few weeks ago have continued as finals and graduation approaches.
[00:00:55]  It's happening in big cities like New York, but also throughout the country.
[00:00:58]  And just wait until these brats go home for the summer and the 2024 campaign really heats up.
[00:01:03]  They're going to be so sad.
[00:01:04]  No more attention.
[00:01:05]  Back to us.
[00:01:06]  The Free Press has been doing some great reporting on all of this, which we will get to in a minute.
[00:01:11]  But first, joining me now is Nellie Bowles, author of the brand new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History.
[00:01:21]  Great title, and it actually really conveys what the book is about.
[00:01:24]  It comes out next week.
[00:01:26]  You can go pre-order it right now.
[00:01:28]  Nelly is also a reporter with the Free Press and the head of strategy for the Upstart Media Company, which was founded by our pal, Barry Weiss.
[00:01:36]  Happens to be the wife of our guest today.
[00:01:39]  And she's going to be joining us in a minute.
[00:01:43]  Welcome back to the show.
[00:01:44]  It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:01:45]  It's a pleasure to be here in person.
[00:01:47]  I know.
[00:01:47]  So funny.
[00:01:48]  I came out here from the Mr. Burcham premiere, and now I'm spanning it into two days of shows.
[00:01:53]  That's so fun.
[00:01:54]  We'll stay in LA.
[00:01:54]  It's a good town.
[00:01:55]  I don't understand what you and Barry are doing in LA.
[00:01:57]  Like, why?
[00:01:58]  I don't get it.
[00:01:59]  Everybody who's not a far lefty seems to have moved to Texas or Tennessee.
[00:02:03]  I'm long on California.
[00:02:06]  I think there's problems here.
[00:02:07]  There's issues.
[00:02:08]  I write about some of those in the book.
[00:02:10]  But I think to give up on California, I mean, it's like to see the most beautiful land in America.
[00:02:15]  That is to see all this grand.
[00:02:17]  No way.
[00:02:18]  Which is stunning.
[00:02:19]  Just driving around, once you get past all the homeless people in the tents, you just think, why doesn't everybody live here?
[00:02:26]  And then the next thought is, don't ever let your children come here.
[00:02:28]  Otherwise, they'll never leave.
[00:02:29]  Like, I need them to be East Coasters.
[00:02:31]  But it is gorgeous.
[00:02:32]  And it's, I would say, it's better than the lifestyle of Manhattan.
[00:02:36]  Like when we were living in the Upper West Side and the stress of 2020 and all the intensity of the New York media world was happening, getting out of that scrum.
[00:02:45]  I mean, California, for all of its eccentric politics, it's also just like a less politics are not like the center of your life here, or the media world's not the center of the universe here in a way that's very relaxing.
[00:03:00]  What is that like?
[00:03:00]  Walk me through that.
[00:03:01]  It's wonderful.
[00:03:02]  What happens at dinner?
[00:03:04]  We just cook, we hang out, we've got a deck.
[00:03:07]  We talk about other things.
[00:03:08]  You and Barry don't talk about other things, but when you have guests over.
[00:03:11]  Yeah, we make other conversations, all sorts of stuff.
[00:03:15]  Do you have to know about Hollywood?
[00:03:16]  Is it one of those things where like it's great that we don't?
[00:03:19]  We're sort of on the outside of that, too.
[00:03:21]  So it's all just sort of light.
[00:03:24]  They still like you, even though you can't do anything for them.
[00:03:28]  Well, maybe as like entertainment, as sort of their local entertainers who are here, and we bring like a headline or two along with us and like talk about a news story and then move on to, I don't know, Botox anecdotes.
[00:03:42]  Yeah, okay, I'm into that too.
[00:03:44]  Not that I've had any, but I'm thinking it's probably soon time.
[00:03:47]  I can spam both worlds.
[00:03:49]  So I might be able to last for a week out here.
[00:03:52]  All right.
[00:03:52]  So why did you write the book?
[00:03:54]  Wow.
[00:03:55]  That's a good question.
[00:03:57]  I wrote it because I had been a reporter at the Times and I'd been a features reporter who'd been given a lot of autonomy to write features.
[00:04:05]  And then 2020 came and there were all these amazing stories and the world was kind of spinning into this wildness into what you could describe as insanity, but it was definitely a revolution.
[00:04:19]  And I wanted to cover it.
[00:04:21]  And it was becoming very hard to do that within the confines of a paper that for a while decided not to cover those most interesting stories.
[00:04:29]  Now I think they're trying to pivot, but that's another conversation.
[00:04:32]  But I wanted to write about it all.
[00:04:35]  I wanted to write about what was happening in Seattle and Portland and what was going on on the streets.
[00:04:39]  And I ended up quitting the paper and writing this book.
[00:04:45]  It's crazy.
[00:04:46]  It kind of gave me an excuse to cover the revolution.
[00:04:49]  Well, because you wanted to write about it in an honest way.
[00:04:51]  You didn't want to go cheerlead it necessarily.
[00:04:53]  You want to just report what you found on the ground.
[00:04:56]  Yeah.
[00:04:56]  But that wasn't exactly what they wanted.
[00:04:59]  I think, and again, there's a small correction that you're starting to see happen, but for a long time, it was very explicit within mainstream American publications that we were not covering what was happening.
[00:05:12]  And it started around in 2019, but really 2020, it was said out loud.
[00:05:16]  You know, NPR put out a statement saying, we are not reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop.
[00:05:20]  That is the rule of the newsroom.
[00:05:22]  That is, that is, that is stated explicitly.
[00:05:24]  It wasn't like subtly said.
[00:05:25]  It wasn't, it was proudly said.
[00:05:28]  And, and I think within the Times, within every mainstream American sort of liberal media institution, it was quite proudly stated, we are not going to cover the most interesting stories.
[00:05:39]  And that was really frustrating as a reporter who was curious about the world.
[00:05:45]  And I didn't go to write propaganda.
[00:05:49]  I wrote to cover things with curiosity and open mind and a sense of humor.
[00:05:54]  And I just couldn't help myself.
[00:05:57]  Yeah, they weren't in the market for that.
[00:05:58]  Yeah, there wasn't a market for that.
[00:06:00]  Did they send you to Chaz?
[00:06:02]  Did they send you to San Francisco?
[00:06:03]  Because the book is replete with these stories of what you found there.
[00:06:07]  So they did eventually send you, but a couple of the first chapters and a little bit in the beginning of the reporting, I managed to kind of eke that through.
[00:06:19]  And then that became untenable.
[00:06:21]  It basically became impossible within the world of the paper.
[00:06:25]  I mean, most of this was done sort of socially.
[00:06:27]  It was done kind of by colleagues.
[00:06:29]  It wasn't a top-down thing.
[00:06:30]  The editors of all these institutions, the leaders of all these institutions, don't want this kind of closing of the journalist's mind.
[00:06:37]  They want the old values.
[00:06:39]  But the closing was a kind of communal effort of.
[00:06:46]  Excuse me.
[00:06:46]  So you're talking about, what's the line of command?
[00:06:49]  Because wouldn't it just be your boss?
[00:06:50]  You go to your editor, your assignment editor, and they say, this is what you're doing, Nellie.
[00:06:54]  Sort of.
[00:06:55]  How does somebody who's lateral to you shut down your reporting?
[00:06:58]  Well, there's a couple of reasons, but I think the big, really interesting one that happened was the creation of these huge Slack rooms that all staffers were.
[00:07:09]  Infamous New York Times Slack room.
[00:07:11]  But I think every single one of these go.
[00:07:14]  Yeah, where they all go.
[00:07:15]  Do not create a Slack channel at the free press.
[00:07:18]  No, absolutely not.
[00:07:19]  So I know we have like a tiny one and I was like, watch that Slack.
[00:07:23]  No, don't do it.
[00:07:24]  No.
[00:07:24]  If people want to complain at my show, they have to text me.
[00:07:27]  Perfect.
[00:07:27]  Right.
[00:07:28]  It says it should be.
[00:07:29]  But it flattened the hierarchy.
[00:07:31]  So you had like a 3,000 person Slack channel where someone like a junior editor on the wirecutter section could be like just reaming a top politics reporter and that politics reporter would then have to respond.
[00:07:46]  That's annoying.
[00:07:47]  And it was like this crazy flattening of the hierarchy.
[00:07:50]  Oh, that's bad.
[00:07:50]  We want hierarchies.
[00:07:51]  They work.
[00:07:52]  Yeah, hierarchies are useful for a lot of people.
[00:07:55]  Especially now that you're at the top of it, don't you see?
[00:07:58]  Now I'm like, we need our, you should have to ask my permission to even post anything in Slack.
[00:08:02]  These idiot White House interns who think they're going to set Israel policy.
[00:08:05]  Shut up.
[00:08:06]  The White House isn't enough.
[00:08:08]  No one gives a shit what you think about the Mideast.
[00:08:10]  They won't even put their names on it.
[00:08:11]  It's like if you're releasing a public letter, you got to name yourself.
[00:08:16]  And otherwise, it's like, you know what?
[00:08:17]  You know what?
[00:08:18]  Your thoughts, where they go, they go in your journal.
[00:08:20]  Dear Diary, I'm so angry about the evil Israel.
[00:08:24]  That's fine.
[00:08:24]  You can have that face as a kid.
[00:08:26]  You can't try to hijack the White House and demand policy change.
[00:08:30]  Anyway, this is why I'm against Slack channels.
[00:08:32]  I'm with you.
[00:08:33]  I don't mind.
[00:08:34]  Like, I don't mind if my staff complains about me or policy at the show.
[00:08:38]  That's part of, you know, being a corporate person, right?
[00:08:40]  You got to vent.
[00:08:41]  I mean, and I don't begrudge anybody that, but allowing a forum where they can go and do it publicly foments insurrection, you might say.
[00:08:49]  And that's bad.
[00:08:51]  Anyway, so the problem, the Times Slack channel is infamous for leading to this kind of problem.
[00:08:55]  Complete flattening of hierarchy, complete flattening.
[00:08:57]  And then basically the 5% of loudest, craziest voices get to decide editorial policy.
[00:09:03]  Because you don't want to be yelled at by a thousand people in a Slack room.
[00:09:07]  And I mean, it's, it's, maybe you do.
[00:09:11]  And, and, yeah.
[00:09:13]  Depends on the person.
[00:09:14]  But I think in within these leftist circles, it does matter.
[00:09:18]  You know, they're still obsessed with reputation and standing.
[00:09:21]  And certainly, I'm sure at the times, even more so.
[00:09:24]  And prestige and goodness and the appearance of good.
[00:09:27]  And writing this book and like doing this reporting and going to these places required giving up a little bit of my need for prestige and good standing and being good in the eyes of people who I'd spent most of my life trying to be good in the eyes of.
[00:09:46]  And that's very honest.
[00:09:47]  That was really jarring.
[00:09:50]  But at the same time, it was so fun to report these stories and it was so fun to do this.
[00:09:56]  I mean, a lot of it is such low-hanging fruit.
[00:09:59]  Like we joke at the free press about the idea of like time laundering, which is this notion that the mainstream media waits about two years before something is sort of kosherd to write about.
[00:10:13]  And so let's say puberty blockers for adolescents and the side effects those might have.
[00:10:20]  The sort of substack, free press, all of the independent media outlets get a full two years to report on that before the mainstream media decides it's safe to touch it.
[00:10:29]  Pretty great.
[00:10:30]  Or the lab leak.
[00:10:31]  You get two years.
[00:10:32]  So you're the laptop.
[00:10:32]  You get a big head start on a lot of these stories.
[00:10:34]  The laptop, exactly.
[00:10:36]  You get a big head start.
[00:10:37]  So in a lot of ways, it's very fun as a reporter because there's so many stories that the old institutions are scared to touch.
[00:10:42]  Well, let me ask you a question on that.
[00:10:44]  And I could bring this up when Barry comes too.
[00:10:46]  But so there's a piece of that that is fun because you have a corner on the market.
[00:10:51]  Then there's another piece.
[00:10:52]  Like, I really like Bill Ackman and I love what he's doing on X Now.
[00:10:55]  And I love watching his Awakening, this, you know, billionaire investor who's realizing how pernicious DEI is.
[00:11:01]  But I would be lying if I didn't say there's a piece of me that is also like slightly like, all right, Bill, you're a little late to the party.
[00:11:08]  Like, welcome.
[00:11:09]  But the way, you know, it's like people write about it like he's finally Bill Ackman is going to bring down.
[00:11:14]  It's like, you know what?
[00:11:15]  A lot of us have been fighting this fight a very long time and we're called a bunch of names for it.
[00:11:20]  Like fine that you're here now.
[00:11:22]  Okay.
[00:11:23]  But you're a little late.
[00:11:25]  But a lot of people are, I'm late to the party.
[00:11:28]  I have people on links about you.
[00:11:29]  No, no, you should.
[00:11:30]  You could.
[00:11:33]  But you want more people at the party.
[00:11:35]  Yes.
[00:11:36]  I don't know.
[00:11:37]  This reminds me of when, sorry, just a one-off.
[00:11:40]  No.
[00:11:40]  Charlize Theron.
[00:11:41]  Yeah, love.
[00:11:42]  So she played me in a movie and it was about sexual harassment.
[00:11:47]  Yeah, the Me Too movement.
[00:11:48]  And when she went on her media tour to promote the movie, people said to her something about like, well, Megan Kelly wasn't first.
[00:11:56]  You know, she, she had been harassed by him years earlier and she didn't come out with it until years later.
[00:12:01]  And she had the nerve to say, Megan Kelly was late to the party.
[00:12:05]  No question.
[00:12:06]  She would, bitch, you weren't even at the party.
[00:12:08]  You never fucking came forward with any allegations.
[00:12:10]  I'm sure you were harassed, but you're too pussy-footed to say anything about it.
[00:12:14]  So take a seat, all right?
[00:12:15]  I don't want to hear about the fucking, but there was no party before Fox News and then the New York Times exposing Harvey Weinstein.
[00:12:22]  So I was like so pissed about it.

=== A Wake-Up Call On Drug Use (12:39) ===

[00:12:23]  So I have like some tolerance for people like you who are legitimately on the other side of just liberalism and like sort of with those people and of those beliefs who then were open-minded enough to see, wait a minute, I have questions.
[00:12:38]  Wait, this, I may not be on the factual side of this particular issue.
[00:12:43]  And I have that same tolerance for Bill Ackman.
[00:12:45]  I just don't like the lionization of people like Bill because it's like, no, of course, of course.
[00:12:50]  Yeah.
[00:12:51]  And I mean, it's fair.
[00:12:53]  But at the same time, like, I think of it in terms of like seeing evidence and responding to evidence.
[00:12:58]  Like I was always lockstep in being a sort of good progressive in the good progressive movement.
[00:13:09]  And I don't consider it that my politics have radically shifted in any which way, although, of course, the progressive movement doesn't allow any questioning.
[00:13:18]  So that they would consider me as having done so.
[00:13:21]  But it's more like I have a chapter about San Francisco.
[00:13:26]  If you live in San Francisco and you still believe that drug legalization, which I believe for many years, that drug legalization is a good idea after walking for years along the streets and seeing people dying on the streets as you're walking around.
[00:13:40]  And that being the ideal progressive outcome, where it's the freedom people have to just do drugs, die on the streets, be given cash every month to just sort of continue to live there.
[00:13:51]  If you look at that and say, this is working, and my ideas here were right, and I shouldn't change my mind on this, you're fooling yourself.
[00:14:01]  I mean, it's almost religious at that point.
[00:14:02]  It's not based in reality.
[00:14:04]  You're not an evidence-based person.
[00:14:05]  Yeah.
[00:14:06]  And emotionally, I want to say drugs should be legal because I'm like, the government should get out of as much of people's lives as possible.
[00:14:11]  And if people want to do drugs, whatever.
[00:14:13]  But the lived experience, the reality you see on the streets, you're like, you know what?
[00:14:18]  This isn't working.
[00:14:19]  Right.
[00:14:20]  Harm reduction is not working.
[00:14:21]  You write about how you walk around San Francisco these days and you realize this is what it's like to be in a failed state, a dying city.
[00:14:28]  Is it because of that, because of the open air drug use?
[00:14:32]  I think that plays a huge part.
[00:14:33]  The crime.
[00:14:34]  Yeah, I think it's a bunch of factors.
[00:14:37]  One is the open air drug use.
[00:14:39]  And San Francisco is a good example of there's a reformation happening there legitimately right now.
[00:14:44]  So it's pretty interesting.
[00:14:46]  I mean, it's there's an awakening by the formerly woke.
[00:14:50]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:14:51]  But yeah, you've got the open air drug use.
[00:14:54]  You've got the crime because of the policies around petty crime basically not being prosecuted.
[00:15:02]  You have the destruction of the public school system through basically the belief system that any standardized testing is white supremacy and any let's say accelerated math.
[00:15:16]  This is the really the thing that really lit the city on fire that offering accelerated math class is racist.
[00:15:23]  Racist.
[00:15:24]  And so you that kind of got gutted, although now is starting to be reformed.
[00:15:31]  And then you have the housing policy, which is sort of the progressive movement is actually also very anti-building housing.
[00:15:41]  It's always about like butterflies in backyards and chicken coops and things like this, and building an apartment complex doesn't sound very like green and lovely even though it, of course, is green and lovely but so the housing costs have gotten crazy, so you don't have a middle class in San Francisco anymore, so it's kind of a vortex of all the wackiest ideas.
[00:16:03]  But I think you can look at San Francisco as maybe five years ahead of the rest of the country in terms of no, but I mean this in a good way actually, because now you're seeing the Reformation and the waking up of people who are saying this isn't working, and so I write about that, about the recalls that you saw in the city for the first time in decades, where the citizens stood up and said this is enough.
[00:16:27]  This is insane, it was amazing and it was amazing, and so I think we have to question that.
[00:16:31]  In other liberal spaces in San Francisco there's a fair share of Asians uh, in American, you know Asian descent and they tend to be very hardworking you know, stereotypically they would be a very hardworking group and who believe in merit.
[00:16:46]  So I wonder, will it happen in other cities that are more full of, like the Upper West Side, where I live for 17 years, which is not a bunch of Asians, it's a bunch of woke leftist women and Lululemon.
[00:16:57]  I don't have as high hopes for them.
[00:17:00]  Well well, you're right that San Francisco the, the revolution, the moderate reforms that happened there very much, were driven by the Asian community getting very galvanized and getting pretty pissed off.
[00:17:11]  Yeah, because some of the school board members were basically calling them like white supremacists, whatever longer story, right?
[00:17:17]  Um, I think I mean, for the Lululemon ladies who you live among, I would say the person who best describes that is a Rob Henderson with the idea of luxury beliefs.
[00:17:29]  Um, which is this concept of people advocating for politics that have nothing to that, that don't impact their lives, but that sound really nice to them.
[00:17:38]  So like, let's say, you live in a doorman building, the police, you live in a doorman building, but you want to abolish the police.
[00:17:45]  Well, that sounds very nice for you yeah, but for the rest of us who don't have a doorman, it's more of an issue.
[00:17:52]  Yeah, and it's, and it's a perfect example of what you were saying before, which is like, oh, you know, I care, I care about the people, so I don't want to see them arrested for drug use, I just want to see them die in the street so I can step over them.
[00:18:03]  I I want to bypass their corpse on the way to my multi-million dollar townhome.
[00:18:08]  And in in the Upper West Side it's the same thing.
[00:18:10]  Where we have to defund, we have to defund.
[00:18:13]  The police are evil and they'll go to home to their doorman building on the Upper West or the Upper East, and they'll be completely ignorant of what's happening in the Bronx, where the black population does not want fewer cops.
[00:18:25]  Yeah, that's how they stay alive in some pockets and they're.
[00:18:30]  They're showing up to meetings saying, don't defund our police, but give us more police, not less.
[00:18:34]  We want them in the vestibules, we want them everywhere.
[00:18:36]  But if the money's not there, because they listen to these rich ladies in the Lulus who are having liquid lunches, but they feel really good about the upper West Side, glaring at the LULU ladies, oh my gosh, probably also wearing Lulus Nellie.
[00:18:49]  I would be walking down the streets there and people be like, who signed this for green peace?
[00:18:52]  We said we didn't planned parenthood.
[00:18:54]  I'm like, do you watch the news?
[00:18:55]  Do you have any idea?
[00:18:57]  Like, no, I know.
[00:18:58]  I don't want to.
[00:18:59]  I walked around Fox with my first child in a Fox News onesie, and I felt like a revolutionary.
[00:19:05]  I really did.
[00:19:06]  I mean, I was like, I felt like a Navy SEAL.
[00:19:08]  I was like, bring it.
[00:19:10]  Fox News crazies.
[00:19:13]  Yeah.
[00:19:14]  Yeah.
[00:19:15]  The abolition of the police is a good luxury belief example.
[00:19:18]  All the sort of public school faux reforms that actually like make the school worse when the people who are pushing for them tend to send their kids to private school.
[00:19:27]  Like, these are the classic hypocrisies of the moment.
[00:19:31]  But one of the other things you have in the book is a little journey to chaz, which remember when the last time that would be a great idea?
[00:19:37]  Yeah, now we're seeing at every college campus in America.
[00:19:40]  Yes.
[00:19:40]  It is mini chazzes.
[00:19:42]  Mini chazzes.
[00:19:43]  No one's been shot so far, but it is allowed to continue.
[00:19:47]  No, they're just doing hunger strikes and complaining a lot about missing lunch.
[00:19:51]  Did you see, like, there's been a couple of soundbites of these students saying, they're checking our vitals regularly.
[00:19:57]  Oh, my God.
[00:19:57]  And literally someone, I shouldn't be laughing at you.
[00:19:59]  In two minutes, you could have Chipotle here.
[00:20:01]  Just stop it.
[00:20:02]  Oh, we have it.
[00:20:03]  Okay, let's play that one.
[00:20:04]  There we go.
[00:20:07]  You know, we have people regularly checking our vitals.
[00:20:09]  We have people constantly worried about us.
[00:20:11]  We have people donating stuff all the time, like rain boots, all the stuff that we need to stay warm.
[00:20:17]  She doesn't actually care about, you know, doing good or being altruistic.
[00:20:21]  What they care about is that they look bad.
[00:20:22]  So let's make them look bad.
[00:20:24]  Oh, sweetheart.
[00:20:26]  They're not the ones who look bad.
[00:20:27]  I mean, they also look bad, but the absurdity of this.
[00:20:30]  So in Chaz, that was an autonomous zone that was created in Seattle by Autonomous Zone.
[00:20:36]  Sorry.
[00:20:37]  A group of anti-fascists called Antifa, written about by Andy No very beautifully, took over a neighborhood in Seattle.
[00:20:46]  They actually took over the gayborhood.
[00:20:47]  The neighborhood.
[00:20:48]  The gayboard.
[00:20:48]  The gay neighborhood.
[00:20:49]  The Nerf.
[00:20:50]  The Nerf.
[00:20:51]  And they declared it an autonomous zone and wouldn't let police in, ambulances in.
[00:20:58]  And I think there's a lot that was interesting about what happened in that moment and in that time when they had that.
[00:21:03]  The city of Seattle embraced it.
[00:21:04]  The mayor said it was like beautiful.
[00:21:07]  It was like summer of love.
[00:21:09]  Obviously, there were shootings.
[00:21:10]  Obviously, people died.
[00:21:12]  Till all the murders.
[00:21:13]  Yeah.
[00:21:13]  And then it was less lovely.
[00:21:14]  But I think that the thing that lasted from that moment and that we're seeing now is Antifa believes that violence and the threat of violence is a very acceptable part of a political conversation in America.
[00:21:32]  And there was a lot of work at the time to pretend like Antifa wasn't part of the BLM movement and just pretend like this, these two groups were totally separate.
[00:21:41]  But they were working together for a while.
[00:21:44]  And you saw it very clearly in the autonomous zones in Chaz because there were guys with guns wandering around guarding those new borders.
[00:21:54]  And I think now with what we're seeing on college campuses and with the comfort around, let's say, chanting for Intifada or chanting for violence, you're seeing that kind of anti-fascist notion of like, let's bring the threat and the frigen of a little violence back into the American conversation in a way that I don't think we've seen for a while.
[00:22:15]  And so that's become quite widespread and quite acceptable.
[00:22:19]  We've got a bit on the latest with this young, the Columbia chapter of the Lawyers Guild and their latest ridiculous accusations against the NYPD.
[00:22:29]  And by the way, we have an exclusive statement from the NYPD responding and it's on fire.
[00:22:33]  We'll get to it in a minute.
[00:22:34]  But you are seeing the parallels there too.
[00:22:36]  They're calling for more violence.
[00:22:38]  They don't care.
[00:22:39]  Yeah.
[00:22:39]  They would like to see some bodies hurt.
[00:22:41]  It's described as an anti-war movement, but it's very much a pro-war movement, which you can be pro-war, but just say what you are.
[00:22:48]  And you should, and the mainstream press ought to describe you as what you actually are.
[00:22:52]  And also, I don't really want to send Plan B pills or dental dams to your aunt, to your war effort.
[00:22:58]  I'm like, I should know what I'm getting.
[00:23:00]  Like, first, soon you're going to need Chipotle and pizzas and also condoms and HIV tests.
[00:23:07]  Literally, they're asking for that.
[00:23:08]  All right, but wait, I want to talk a little bit about more about the book because you also talk in there about Barry.
[00:23:14]  And I've talked to both of you about this separately, but this is sort of a piece of your awakening on where you were working, what your own values were, and whether these people who were so accepting of so many and so, you know, so many things and people were in fact accepting of you.
[00:23:32]  They couldn't have cared less that you were a lesbian.
[00:23:34]  That's, of course, big.
[00:23:35]  No, it was a good thing.
[00:23:36]  Yeah, that's big, big on the left.
[00:23:38]  Though I think the right's fine with it now.
[00:23:39]  Oh, yeah.
[00:23:40]  For the most part.
[00:23:41]  No, the gays of one.
[00:23:42]  The gaze of one.
[00:23:43]  That's why they had to move on to the weird trans stuff and abandon the gays.
[00:23:45]  And now it's, there's the divide.
[00:23:46]  But anyway, it was the fact that she is not a hard lefty.
[00:23:52]  She's more heterodox in her approach to issues.
[00:23:55]  Very controversial.
[00:23:56]  She was a Biden voter who never voted Bernie or never wanted Bernie.
[00:24:00]  It was really, you know, she's within the New York Times community.
[00:24:03]  She was considered a radical right-winger.
[00:24:09]  Yeah.
[00:24:10]  So I don't know.
[00:24:13]  Basically, in tandem with reporting on some of this stuff that was happening, I also fell in love with someone who was on the wrong side of the movement.
[00:24:22]  And I, for a while, was a little naive about it.
[00:24:27]  I didn't think it would be an issue because I was sort of like, I still believe in these core beliefs.
[00:24:33]  I still, I'm like, I'm still pro-choice.
[00:24:36]  I still want universal health care.
[00:24:37]  These are the things that matter.
[00:24:39]  This is what defines politics, right?
[00:24:40]  But no, because the political movement is a social movement.
[00:24:45]  It's not a checklist of policies.
[00:24:47]  And by falling in love with someone outside of it, I had violated kind of the social contract of it.
[00:24:55]  And I just, I mean, I couldn't, I couldn't change that reality.

=== Core Beliefs vs Social Movements (02:44) ===

[00:25:03]  I just.
[00:25:04]  So the reality changed you?
[00:25:07]  Yeah, a little bit.
[00:25:08]  I think it just was a wake-up call for me to realize that pleasing this movement and pleasing this really increasingly tight, increasingly strict group was not going to make for a happy life.
[00:25:27]  And it was a impossible ask of myself and a miserable ask of myself to squelch curiosity as a reporter and then to not love someone who was just a fraction of the way politically different from this movement.
[00:25:43]  It seemed ridiculous and I just couldn't go along with it.
[00:25:46]  And yeah, then I ended up marrying her.
[00:25:50]  So I don't know.
[00:25:51]  It all kind of worked out in the end.
[00:25:52]  Did people fall away?
[00:25:54]  Oh, yeah.
[00:25:55]  People who surprised you?
[00:25:58]  Yeah, of course.
[00:26:00]  Of course.
[00:26:01]  I mean, I would, yeah.
[00:26:09]  Yeah.
[00:26:09]  I'm just wondering if you have, because, of course, I've been through controversies in my own past.
[00:26:14]  And for me, when the people fall away, you don't realize it immediately.
[00:26:20]  It's like.
[00:26:21]  Some of them told me right away.
[00:26:22]  Oh, they did?
[00:26:23]  Okay.
[00:26:23]  In my case, it was like several months went by or a year or two.
[00:26:26]  And I'm like, oh, whatever happened to that person.
[00:26:28]  And then you realize, oh, yeah, fuck them.
[00:26:30]  The main thing when I really, there was no like, I was never canceled.
[00:26:35]  I'm not, I don't have like a sob story to tell.
[00:26:37]  Like I feel very empowered by my life and even leaving the times.
[00:26:41]  I left and then we started.
[00:26:42]  Bear had started A amazing at the time, very little newsletter, and I joined and it was growing.
[00:26:50]  And so, like, things didn't feel, I don't feel like I'm like here with my violin, but um, there was the one moment when there was a real sort of fracture was when everyone on staff at the times was supposed to tweet about this one young editor who had somehow contributed to the Tom Cotton op-ed that ended up getting all, you know, the opinion editor fired and all of this.
[00:27:15]  And we were all supposed to tweet that this op-ed puts our black colleagues in danger.
[00:27:20]  And basically, we were all supposed to kind of join a call to get this young guy fired.
[00:27:24]  Was this the guy who wrote the piece coming out with how they made him choose the Starburst?
[00:27:28]  Exactly.
[00:27:29]  Yeah, okay.
[00:27:29]  And I just wouldn't send the tweet.
[00:27:31]  What's his name?
[00:27:32]  Adam Rubenstein's amazing factor.
[00:27:34]  Okay.
[00:27:34]  I just couldn't send the tweet.
[00:27:36]  I couldn't do it.
[00:27:37]  I just didn't believe, I just didn't want to cancel him.
[00:27:39]  And I had been part of canceling people before, so I wasn't opposed to the idea, but I just couldn't do it.
[00:27:44]  I was too weak, I think.
[00:27:45]  I was too soft at that point.

=== Prestige Lost At University Chicago (07:58) ===

[00:27:48]  Whatever, maybe too strong.
[00:27:49]  And I, and by not doing that, then I got people in my life wrote me basically saying, by not doing this, you are endorsing violence against black people.
[00:28:01]  Oh, my love.
[00:28:02]  And yeah, no, seriously, I'm dead serious.
[00:28:04]  I'm dead serious.
[00:28:05]  And so I write about it in the, and, and I write about it in one of the last, in, I think, the last chapter.
[00:28:12]  And it, yeah.
[00:28:17]  I mean, at a certain point, you just no, anything I say, I make myself sound like too like heroic in this.
[00:28:24]  I'm not.
[00:28:24]  What?
[00:28:24]  So say what you're going to say.
[00:28:26]  The audience will decide if you're a hero.
[00:28:28]  Most of the book is not flattering of me.
[00:28:30]  I think, and, and I think rightly so.
[00:28:32]  I'm implicated in a lot of it.
[00:28:33]  And, but I, at a certain point, you have to say, like, enough is enough.
[00:28:39]  And I'm not just going to go along with what my friends are doing, even, even if I really love these people, because it's a frenzy.
[00:28:46]  And that year and those two years, and I think what we're seeing right now is a frenzy.
[00:28:51]  It's not reasonable.
[00:28:52]  It's not rational.
[00:28:53]  It's lying about what it is.
[00:28:54]  It's lying about what its intentions are.
[00:28:57]  And you just have to take a breath and step out.
[00:29:00]  It's a Salem witch trially, you know, where we're just being told over and over again, this one's a witch and this one's a witch.
[00:29:07]  And the mob is following, ready to stone her to death or burn her to death.
[00:29:10]  And then there are a few fallouts who are like, I know.
[00:29:14]  Maybe she just really likes the moon.
[00:29:16]  I don't, I'm not sure.
[00:29:17]  She makes fire with like sticks.
[00:29:19]  That's not a thing.
[00:29:20]  It's fine.
[00:29:24]  But it's good.
[00:29:24]  I mean, NetNet, I think you're right.
[00:29:26]  It's good.
[00:29:26]  Again, I want the audience to know the name of the book is Morning After the Revolution.
[00:29:31]  That's a good name.
[00:29:32]  I hope you're right that the revolution has kind of closed to the point where we are the morning after.
[00:29:38]  I know you're the morning after.
[00:29:39]  Well, I would say that the revolution, like the intensity, the loudness, the city's burning part has passed largely.
[00:29:48]  Although let's see what these college kids do, but I don't think they're going to be.
[00:29:52]  But it's only because it's now in the institution so fully, it doesn't need to be so loud.
[00:29:58]  So you don't need to scream so loud if to be hired at a university, you have to write a DEI statement.
[00:30:05]  And that actually is the only criteria that's considered for the first time.
[00:30:09]  They just stopped that at MIT.
[00:30:10]  It's starting to be slowed down, but it's these things completely imbued themselves within institutions to an extent where you didn't need protesters.
[00:30:20]  When you have like Raytheon doing Robin DiAngelo-inspired trainings, you don't need to be breaking the windows anymore.
[00:30:30]  You won.
[00:30:31]  So it won.
[00:30:32]  And I think quite fully.
[00:30:35]  And one thing I try to do in the book is to write about the movement from the movement's perspective and to help explain why it won.
[00:30:43]  Because you can't just say, oh, it's dumb.
[00:30:45]  It's bad because that doesn't explain why it won.
[00:30:47]  It won the day.
[00:30:49]  And so, yeah, I try to wrestle with that and help explain part of the appeal of it.
[00:30:54]  I just think it's so fragile, though, because have you really won when what you've really done is force the hostages to their knees with a gun to their head?
[00:31:04]  And so, making a smart move of like, okay, I'm either going to die or I have to get to my knees right now and say the words.
[00:31:10]  Most human beings, beings would comply.
[00:31:12]  But that's, have you really won when it's not willing?
[00:31:16]  It's their hearts aren't in it.
[00:31:17]  Your hostages are doing what you've told them to, but they're not really on your side.
[00:31:22]  Does anyone really think Raytheon cares about DEI or making people issue these statements?
[00:31:28]  I believe the universities are in, but corporate America, I don't know, the random Americans who felt like you did, not necessarily about James Bennett and that piece with Tom Cotton, but about like posting the black square.
[00:31:42]  I don't think so.
[00:31:44]  I think for adults, maybe it's more kind of swayable and they could be swayed in which way and that.
[00:31:53]  But I think once an institution is changed, it's very hard to change it again.
[00:31:57]  The inertia is powerful.
[00:31:59]  I also think that it has won so fully in our education system that those kids are being raised to be true, true believers in really the most eccentric versions of these ideas and these politics.
[00:32:17]  And so it's very scary.
[00:32:20]  Now you may call attention to your condition?
[00:32:25]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:32:26]  I'm super pregnant.
[00:32:27]  For radio listeners, I'm super pregnant.
[00:32:29]  It took an inch of makeup to hide the melasma.
[00:32:33]  Welcome to my world.
[00:32:35]  So I think about this sometimes.
[00:32:37]  I mean, I think about it because my kids are older, 14, 13, and 10.
[00:32:40]  But, you know, you and Barry at some point are going to have to direct your children on, okay, it's time to choose a college.
[00:32:46]  Do they, do you encourage college?
[00:32:48]  College is not the way it was when we went.
[00:32:50]  It's not four years of, well, yes, fun, but intellectual stimulation and learning how to think, not what to think, and having your ideas challenged and learning some of the classics.
[00:32:59]  As you well know, well now, it's not about that anymore.
[00:33:03]  So do you encourage them to go and where?
[00:33:06]  If so, where?
[00:33:07]  Well, given that we have some time, I think that by the time this one is 18, well, there should be new institutions.
[00:33:19]  I mean, one of the things that has happened with the kind of collapse of the old institutions and with the hollowing out of our old media empires and whatnot is that there's been a blossoming of new stuff and cool new stuff.
[00:33:34]  That's obviously we see it at the free press with the growth of a little newsletter into a media company.
[00:33:42]  But I think you're going to start seeing it higher ed.
[00:33:45]  You're going to start seeing it in a lot of places in American life where just new things are going to be built to stand up some of those old values.
[00:33:53]  So I'm hopeful that one of those will be great around then.
[00:33:57]  Yeah.
[00:33:57]  I have less time than you do.
[00:33:58]  I don't know.
[00:33:59]  But I'm really like, I look at it all the time because I think there's no way my our eldest is such a has such a beautiful mind.
[00:34:08]  Yeah.
[00:34:08]  And there's no way I'm going to let one of these institutions start to corrupt it, even though he's been inoculated.
[00:34:15]  I can imagine.
[00:34:16]  I can imagine.
[00:34:16]  Yeah.
[00:34:17]  But no way.
[00:34:17]  Why would I put this beautiful person in their clutches?
[00:34:21]  I just won't.
[00:34:22]  And so millions of Americans feel as I do.
[00:34:25]  And we are going to find other institutions, you know, whether it's non-college or it's a different institution that I look at the University of Florida run by Ben Sasse, which just seems like it's on a great course.
[00:34:36]  But there are a lot of universities that are stepping up.
[00:34:39]  And I think those really might be the future recruiting centers for the biggest and most successful companies in America.
[00:34:48]  Prestige is a thing that can be lost.
[00:34:51]  And I think we'll see that.
[00:34:53]  And I think we're starting to see that.
[00:34:54]  Not to say that Harvard's going to be a name that never means anything, but it will be a name that means something different.
[00:35:00]  Yeah.
[00:35:01]  And it already is.
[00:35:02]  And that's okay.
[00:35:05]  And if I ran a university, if I ran the University of Chicago, I would make clear there are zero race-based admissions.
[00:35:14]  You get no extra points for being, and not just race, but for being a woman, for being trans, for being black, for being Hispanic, zero, none.
[00:35:24]  Not in our hiring of professors and not in our admissions for students.
[00:35:28]  And then if I were a young black or lesbian or woman, whatever, somebody in any protected group, I would make sure I got in there.
[00:35:38]  And then I would run around the country saying, I went to the University of Chicago.
[00:35:43]  That's where I graduated from.
[00:35:45]  And you know what that means.

=== Waking Up In Medical School (03:43) ===

[00:35:46]  Yeah.
[00:35:47]  I didn't get the plus.
[00:35:49]  I got in based on my own men.
[00:35:51]  We're putting people in minority groups in this impossible situation now where if they are completely talented and qualified to get into a Harvard or Yale or Stanford omnibus and would have gotten in had they not checked any box, they'll always be looked at like you did.
[00:36:06]  I know how you got in there, right?
[00:36:08]  You're not a white man.
[00:36:09]  I get that's we're completely undermining them.
[00:36:12]  And there's a huge selection of folks in those categories who don't give a shit.
[00:36:17]  They're like, fine, just give me the fancy degree.
[00:36:19]  Then I'll work it.
[00:36:20]  And then I'll work all these same advantages, racial, demographic, gender, at my next job, too.
[00:36:26]  You know, I'll get my straight A's at Harvard because that's what they give.
[00:36:29]  And then I'll parlay that in medical school.
[00:36:31]  They've intentionally turned into pass fail institutions.
[00:36:34]  And now I'll do it in medical school.
[00:36:35]  The average GPAs now, but that's for that's for all.
[00:36:38]  And then when I kill some people out as a doctor, I'll just claim you're a racist for saying it was my incompetence.
[00:36:43]  This is the game right now.
[00:36:43]  It's insane.
[00:36:44]  All right, stand by.
[00:36:45]  We're going to take a pause.
[00:36:47]  Don't forget to order the book, okay?
[00:36:48]  It's called Morning After the Revolution.
[00:36:51]  A lot of deep thinking in there.
[00:36:52]  And it's kind of interesting, right, to see the process of the light bulb coming on.
[00:36:56]  A lot of Americans have been through this exact same journey over the past few years.
[00:36:59]  I think you'll find it very enriching.
[00:37:01]  Morning After the Revolution by Nellie Bowles.
[00:37:03]  And Nellie's wife, Barry Weiss, is up next.
[00:37:06]  Don't go away.
[00:37:11]  Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:37:12]  Back with me now, Nellie Bowles, and joining the two of us, Barry Weiss, founder, CEO, and editor of The Free Press and the host of Honestly with Barry Weiss, a great podcast.
[00:37:23]  Welcome.
[00:37:23]  Hello.
[00:37:24]  I'm so excited.
[00:37:25]  How'd she do?
[00:37:26]  She did well, didn't she?
[00:37:27]  She did great.
[00:37:28]  She is so nervous.
[00:37:29]  She gets nervous.
[00:37:30]  She's she's she can roar like a dragon.
[00:37:34]  Oh, I roared plenty.
[00:37:37]  She crushed it.
[00:37:39]  Okay, here's the thing: because I'm the ultimate wife guy, and because I know how brilliant she is and how brilliant this book is, I am just going to say that for anyone looking around at the world and wondering how the hell everyone supposedly who is smart and intelligent descended into total and utter madness and has capitulated to insanity, this is the book you need to read.
[00:38:01]  And I think the thing is, the morning after the revolution, dispatches from the wrong side of history by my wife, Nellie Bowles, who's also seven and a half months pregnant as she is doing this book.
[00:38:12]  She's looking gorgeous.
[00:38:13]  There's nothing she can't do.
[00:38:14]  And I think the thing that came through and is maybe kind of still evolving is like she was a part of, she was part of it, just naturally.
[00:38:26]  Like she's a San Francisco lesbian.
[00:38:28]  So like those were the waters she was swimming in.
[00:38:30]  And the New York Times, my God.
[00:38:31]  But I think one of the-I think, I think one of the things that's really unique about this book is how vulnerable it is.
[00:38:38]  I don't think you're going to find, there's a lot of excellent reporting out there from a lot of our friends, Megan, on what's going on and how it all came to this.
[00:38:47]  There's not a lot of voices out there who are like, I saw it from the inside.
[00:38:52]  And in some ways, speaking for Nellie, like, I was swept along by it.
[00:38:57]  And here's what got me to wake up.
[00:38:59]  And it's, it's very, very vulnerable and true.
[00:39:03]  And I'm just enormously proud of her.
[00:39:05]  And now we're going to talk about the news.
[00:39:06]  Well, no, but I think there has to be that journey and then that reckoning about one's journey in order for everyone to work together, right?
[00:39:14]  Because I do think there's resentment on the right.
[00:39:16]  I see it on, I'm sure you see it too online for some people who are like, you know what?
[00:39:21]  I mean, I've seen it in the wake of the Israel Hamas thing, right?
[00:39:24]  Where there are some on the right who are like, where were you?
[00:39:27]  Where were you?
[00:39:28]  I mean, you asked Nellie about that, right?

=== Proud Of Her Vulnerable Truth (16:41) ===

[00:39:29]  Like you were like, and Nell said, like, I was late to the party.
[00:39:32]  And compared to, you know, I remember so clearly when our friend Abigail Schreier, I said to her at a dinner, like, I didn't defend you early enough.
[00:39:44]  Now, if she were here, she would generally, generously say that I did.
[00:39:48]  And I was, you know, loudly, sort of proudly standing up with her.
[00:39:51]  But I told her and have said in public, I was scared to do so.
[00:39:55]  So like everyone has someone.
[00:39:57]  That was only 2020.
[00:39:58]  I don't remember that, Barry.
[00:40:00]  That wasn't that long ago.
[00:40:01]  You were still enough on the other side that Abigail's book was.
[00:40:04]  It's just that I knew the social and reputational ramifications that I might suffer.
[00:40:09]  And so it's easy for anyone to sort of look to someone slightly to their left, let's call it that, for the sake of this conversation and say, you were late.
[00:40:19]  I suffered the ramifications.
[00:40:21]  Like I ran, like I like, you know, broke down the wall so you could walk or whatever the right metaphor is.
[00:40:26]  And I, but I do think that that resentment is understandable, but it kind of doesn't get you anywhere.
[00:40:33]  It's counterproductive.
[00:40:34]  It's really counterproductive.
[00:40:35]  And I really think the right response to anyone at any stage, especially those who say, I got it wrong.
[00:40:43]  I mean, Bill Ackman, we were talking about him before.
[00:40:46]  He has said, I got it wrong.
[00:40:47]  Yes.
[00:40:48]  That is a very rare thing for people to say.
[00:40:50]  The right response is welcome.
[00:40:51]  Exactly.
[00:40:52]  Great to have you.
[00:40:53]  Exactly.
[00:40:53]  Coalition.
[00:40:54]  What I was trying to say is I pause at, and you're our new leader.
[00:41:00]  Right.
[00:41:00]  Yeah.
[00:41:01]  The fetishization of the newcomer who still has a little bit of the sheen of the old prestige.
[00:41:05]  Yes.
[00:41:06]  Right.
[00:41:06]  Totally get that.
[00:41:07]  You said it much, much better than that.
[00:41:08]  You're like, you have to do it.
[00:41:09]  Because you're like, I have to do it.
[00:41:10]  You haven't gotten damaged by the movement yet.
[00:41:11]  You haven't.
[00:41:13]  Exactly.
[00:41:13]  Where are your war wounds?
[00:41:14]  You know, it's like, where are all your stabbings and your jousting scars?
[00:41:17]  I don't see any yet.
[00:41:19]  Yeah, I know.
[00:41:20]  And then I like Ackman, but I do think he got very, very focused on the plagiarism allegations against his wife in a weird way.
[00:41:26]  It was like kind of off mission.
[00:41:27]  Like, care about the wife, but not that much.
[00:41:29]  Kind of care about the main mission more.
[00:41:31]  That's fine.
[00:41:32]  Go, Bill.
[00:41:33]  So let's talk about the news.
[00:41:35]  Let's not criticize wife, guys.
[00:41:37]  No, we've got to do it.
[00:41:38]  I will say we've got to do it.
[00:41:40]  When I see Aaron going to the barricades for his wife, I'm like, yes.
[00:41:44]  Like, I do, I do like that quality in a person.
[00:41:47]  I had a different response.
[00:41:48]  I feel like Doug would do that for you.
[00:41:50]  I wouldn't let Doug do that for me.
[00:41:51]  But he would say his own.
[00:41:52]  No, but I wouldn't let you.
[00:41:54]  Doug's on Twitter a million times.
[00:41:56]  Doug's like, I'm going to hit this person.
[00:41:57]  I'm like, don't you dare.
[00:41:59]  Because I really feel it's important to fight my own battles as much as he would love to.
[00:42:03]  And I realize Bill has a much bigger platform than his wife does, but she's also a very powerful person in her own right.
[00:42:09]  And had it been me, I would not have let my husband fight my battle.
[00:42:11]  I would have been out there fucking scalping people and standing up for myself.
[00:42:16]  And I don't like, like, there's just whatever in me that's like a little, like, you back her up, but let her lead the way or just don't let her.
[00:42:25]  Hey, yo, they should be lead the way.
[00:42:27]  Yeah, that would be fun.
[00:42:28]  I would watch that.
[00:42:29]  They should.
[00:42:29]  They should do it.
[00:42:31]  Maybe they will.
[00:42:32]  Maybe they will.
[00:42:32]  I mean, I'm in their, I'm in their camp.
[00:42:33]  I think it'd be great.
[00:42:34]  All right.
[00:42:35]  So, on the college campus front, we had so much craziness.
[00:42:38]  And I want to, and you guys have been breaking all sorts of news at the free press.
[00:42:41]  You got the custodian, and now there's more than one custodian who was held hostage by the lunatics at Columbia.
[00:42:46]  The one that came out today, there were two more that our wonderful reporter, Francesca Block, has been breaking this story.
[00:42:52]  First, she got Mario Torres, who was in that viral photo.
[00:42:56]  And it's the perfect encapsulation of this movement.
[00:43:00]  Because on the one hand, you have a 40-year-old self-described anarchist that lives in a brownstone in Brooklyn, or at least owns it, worth more than $2 million.
[00:43:10]  His parents own one worth more than three, up against a custodian who has two children, aged five and seven.
[00:43:17]  And the average janitor at Columbia, our average facilities worker, makes $19 an hour, right?
[00:43:23]  Who's the victim in this photo?
[00:43:25]  And it's kind of a really, really interesting workshop test.
[00:43:28]  So we got him on the record in this really, really moving interview I felt where he talks about being scared to go back on campus because the mob is still there at the gates and now being fearful that Columbia is going to retaliate against him.
[00:43:42]  And today, two more spoke on the record to Frannie, our reporter.
[00:43:46]  And one of them said that he was scared he was going to get killed in the building.
[00:43:49]  This is in Hamilton Hall.
[00:43:50]  Exactly.
[00:43:51]  We have a little bit of Mario.
[00:43:52]  Let me run this down by just an excerpt.
[00:43:54]  Let's watch.
[00:43:56]  I was on the third floor.
[00:43:58]  Initially, I thought it was about five, five or six students, and I was just trying to kick them out.
[00:44:03]  When I look back, they just multiply.
[00:44:07]  They came from both sides of the staircases.
[00:44:10]  They came through the elevators and they were just rushing.
[00:44:14]  You see people with bags with duct tape and zip ties.
[00:44:18]  And then they put tables and chairs to block it.
[00:44:21]  Like they stuffed that elevator.
[00:44:23]  I was freaking out.
[00:44:24]  How was I going to get out?
[00:44:25]  Through the window?
[00:44:27]  No.
[00:44:28]  It's just scary just thinking that you're locked in with a bunch of crazies.
[00:44:33]  We don't expect to go to work and get swarmed by an angry mob with rope and duct tape and masks and gloves.
[00:44:42]  Wow.
[00:44:43]  And this is unlike on January 6th, where we saw the left super empathetic for the cops who had to deal with that mob.
[00:44:51]  And I felt it too.
[00:44:53]  They're not speaking out about Mario.
[00:44:54]  They don't care.
[00:44:55]  This is not a problem.
[00:44:56]  They're on the side of the other of the mob.
[00:44:58]  I mean, just before I came on here, I was looking at there's like an internal Columbia app.
[00:45:05]  It's almost like Slack, but for Columbia.
[00:45:08]  I won't.
[00:45:09]  You have to have a.edu email to be on it.
[00:45:13]  So it's like an internal Columbia conversation.
[00:45:16]  And they shared this story.
[00:45:18]  And you know what the response is on the part of the students I was seeing?
[00:45:21]  The Columbia custodians need to grow a pair.
[00:45:23]  No.
[00:45:24]  Yeah.
[00:45:26]  How's that for worker solidarity and all of the other things that the kids in the encampment pay?
[00:45:31]  This guy is not even a cop.
[00:45:32]  I wouldn't like it any better if he were, but I certainly don't like it when he's unarmed.
[00:45:36]  And these, he's not lying about all the ropes.
[00:45:38]  And we've seen them request more on the, that, of those same supplies.
[00:45:42]  Right.
[00:45:42]  This is not a mostly peaceful crowd.
[00:45:44]  I don't know what they were doing behind closed doors, but I certainly wouldn't want to have to fight them one-handed like this guy did.
[00:45:49]  Right.
[00:45:49]  And it's, it's just, again, I just think it's such a powerful litmus test of, you know, the 40-year-old anarchist who seems to be, you know, LARPing as some kind of like campus jihadi versus a guy who's trying to provide for his family.
[00:46:07]  And as he just said in that video, like he doesn't expect to go to work at an Ivy League school and get swarmed by organized protesters who are barricading themselves in buildings, who broke glass to get in there and are shouting, you know, shouting in praise of the Intifada.
[00:46:26]  Right.
[00:46:26]  And beyond.
[00:46:27]  I mean, death to America.
[00:46:28]  And so we've heard all of it.
[00:46:29]  If I were that guy, I would sue Columbia University to within an inch of it.
[00:46:33]  The, the.
[00:46:34]  I think the news broke.
[00:46:35]  I think the NEW YORK POST broke this story.
[00:46:37]  Um, I don't know if it was today or yesterday, i've really lost track of time since october 7th, I have to say.
[00:46:42]  But uh, they are.
[00:46:43]  They are organizing um a lawsuit, the Union OF Custodia Workers AT Columbia, so that'll be very interesting to see how it plays out.
[00:46:49]  Hopefully, violence and the threat of violence and, like we were talking about earlier, the Frigana violence is part of what this movement wants to bring.
[00:46:57]  So the fact that he was scared of course the Columbia CHAT isn't apologetic about that that's sort of proof that they're doing a good job.
[00:47:06]  They're not bringing zip ties in for for peace, dump tape, rope and zip ties.
[00:47:11]  Maybe they just broke some of those tables Nelly, and they want to, you know, put them back together.
[00:47:15]  It's they're saying they want violent armed revolution.
[00:47:18]  They're saying intifada.
[00:47:19]  They're saying you know, and they're saying don't feel bad about it, that we've actually read them say we need more violence.
[00:47:25]  We shouldn't feel bad about it.
[00:47:26]  This is part of the revolution and also, whatever the cause du jour is becomes the only priority.
[00:47:31]  So like, whatever was the old cause of labor rights or whatever is washed away now it's just this pro-war movement, whatever you want to call it Pro-Palestinian Pro-Hamas um, it's just whatever's good for that.
[00:47:45]  So you see this in the way that, like Zadie Smith is now, she wrote a somewhat um complex, really interesting essay about the movement and she's had been sort of celebrated on the left as an amazing writer, black woman like, kind of held up as an aspirational figure.
[00:48:08]  I still think of her as that and and now she's completely um thrown to the side and and hated because she goes against the most extremes on this one movement.
[00:48:18]  So whatever the cause du jour is becomes the only cause, and you see it time and again.
[00:48:22]  You see it with defund, the police, you see it with each of these movements, it becomes the only thing.
[00:48:26]  I think the other thing that's really important to pay attention to is just this kind of breathtaking double standard.
[00:48:33]  Right when we see the people marching in Charlottesville with tiki churches shouting, Jews will not replace us.
[00:48:41]  Everyone respectable, everyone in intelligent society, in the chattering class, says, take them seriously, take what they say seriously and, by the way, I agree with that.
[00:48:52]  Yeah, we should take them seriously.
[00:48:54]  That was the mentality that drove the Neo-nazi into Tree Of Life, the Synagogue where I became bat mitzvah and murder 11 of my Jewish neighbors in Pittsburgh.
[00:49:04]  But by the exact same logic, take what these young revolutionaries I don't know what else to call them are saying seriously.
[00:49:12]  They are saying, globalize the intifada.
[00:49:15]  You know what's hard about it?
[00:49:16]  Is they so much video of them being absolutely pathetic, you know?
[00:49:20]  I mean truly like the guy with the midriff exposed the other day and his little, of course, as Joseph Massey called him Uh, Osama Bin Osama, non-binary right.
[00:49:29]  I mean, it's hard to feel threatened by well, when they're doing like their interpretive dancing and talking about their gluten-free bread and like how they need their melatonin gummings.
[00:49:38]  Yes yes, but there is a and, and let's just say let's call it.
[00:49:42]  80 of the people that are going along with it are there for the vibes.
[00:49:46]  They're there for the fun, they're there to like sleep in a tent one night and go along with the cause, for sure.
[00:49:53]  But for the hardcore group and I include a lot of professors in this group that are shouting from the river to the sea, that are shouting, globalize the intifada.
[00:50:04]  What do they think intifada means?
[00:50:05]  I lived in Israel in 2002 during the intifada.
[00:50:10]  I know what that means.
[00:50:11]  Yeah, that's not vibes.
[00:50:14]  No, I remember watching Jennifer Griffin reporting from Israel through all of that.
[00:50:17]  It was terrifying.
[00:50:19]  She was there with her flak helmet on and the flak jacket and the reports were more and more dire by the day.
[00:50:24]  It's just they have no knowledge of the history.
[00:50:26]  Honest, it's like they're they're calling for for warrior, But but there are.
[00:50:34]  What did you say?
[00:50:35]  Midrift guy looked very strong.
[00:50:39]  That was that guy compromised.
[00:50:44]  You would be an easy target.
[00:50:46]  I, you know I wouldn't want to take him on.
[00:50:49]  Osama, non-binary is not going to hurt anybody.
[00:50:53]  He is the one who is going to get hurt when soon as he gets home to his friends in Palestine and Hamas.
[00:50:59]  Some people I agree with you Megan, just to give them the benefit of the doubt some people are saying it are saying it in the same way that they said every other thing, every other current thing.
[00:51:08]  For sure, they have the best slogans ever.
[00:51:09]  Let's be real.
[00:51:11]  But the some of the people saying it know exactly what they mean.
[00:51:15]  And there is no, there is no foreign word in Jews.
[00:51:20]  Go back to Poland or you're all inbred.
[00:51:24]  Those are some of the things that Columbus death to the Jews seems on the nose, that's.
[00:51:28]  I got it in a debate about what that means.
[00:51:30]  Right, that means what it means, and somehow there is an unbelievable pass being given to the students saying those things as if they are righteous, when if you said them about.
[00:51:43]  I'll give you just one example, because I I really like this example killed me.
[00:51:47]  Do you remember?
[00:51:47]  In 2021, there was a Native American student at YALE named Trent Colbert who invited his fellow students to a Constitution Day bash in his Trap House.
[00:51:58]  Okay, this was his sin.
[00:52:00]  Oh yeah oh, I do remember.
[00:52:01]  Do you remember this?
[00:52:01]  Yeah yeah, Imichua got involved within 12 hours.
[00:52:04]  He had been like she gets involved, she's involved.
[00:52:09]  Within 12 hours, he had like been hauled into a disciplinary meeting.
[00:52:13]  I believe the dean of YALE had put out a statement.
[00:52:15]  He was like pressured to apolog for Trap House in an email after 12 hours for using the term, for using the term yeah, and now like where all of the people right who had all of their sensitivities about like offensive Halloween costumes and bad tacos?
[00:52:35]  Yeah Barry, you came out.
[00:52:37]  We just referenced it.
[00:52:37]  After I first launched the show, we didn't have video.
[00:52:39]  You remember this was early 2020?
[00:52:41]  Well, I launched the show in september 2020, so it was.
[00:52:43]  I remember where I was sitting.
[00:52:44]  Actually I remember where I was too.
[00:52:45]  I remember like this is our first real conversation on the air and you said we talked about anti-semitism back then and you said and i've quoted you many times on it um, Jews don't count, we don't quote rate, we're not factored in.
[00:52:58]  And I know you fight, you fought very hard and continue to right now the saying, the solution is not to make us part of your Dei crowd.
[00:53:04]  No, we don't want into your weird little cult.
[00:53:06]  We want you to just recognize when we actually are being threatened and not to be excluded because we don't count.
[00:53:13]  That's right, been very obvious for the past six months.
[00:53:16]  Yes I, I mean.
[00:53:17]  To me it's really simple, like the, the radical proposition of America, and the thing that has allowed for the Jewish community to flourish in this country, unlike we have in any other diaspora in all of history, is because of the things that are found in the constitution and the bill of rights.
[00:53:35]  And the solution is not to for Jews at this moment to argue for a slightly better status in this new caste system, Really, ideological caste system, in which victimhood points get you more status and, frankly, more protection.
[00:53:52]  It's to go back to a world in which we follow the law, in which the law and social mores, frankly, are it's especially when you think about these campuses, you know, the codes of conduct are enforced equally and not less so for Jews as they are in this moment.
[00:54:10]  And to get back to a world, frankly, in which we judge people based on their individual merit and not based on whether or not they're part of a particular group or not.
[00:54:19]  I'll give you just one example that like really brought this home for me.
[00:54:22]  Abigail Schreier wrote about it brilliantly in our pages, which was, you know, one of the leaders of the encampment at Columbia, Hamani James is his name, four months ago, took part in a disciplinary hearing at Columbia in which he said, in which he openly fantasized, you're lucky I'm not going out and murdering Zionists.
[00:54:44]  Okay.
[00:54:45]  You're lucky I'm not going and murdering Zionists, which is, with rare exception, basically a synonym for Jew.
[00:54:51]  And the mask is falling more and more every day.
[00:54:54]  Nothing happened to this student until it went viral.
[00:54:58]  Right?
[00:54:58]  The school because he was proud.
[00:55:00]  He was proud of it.
[00:55:01]  Like the school itself didn't do anything about it.
[00:55:04]  Now, imagine if someone until it, yeah, and then and then they did.
[00:55:07]  Then they was like a slap on the wrist.
[00:55:09]  He hasn't been expelled.
[00:55:10]  But it only happened because it went public.
[00:55:13]  So you have a bureaucracy right now at an I, one of the most prestigious schools in the country, supposedly, where a student is saying that to the administration of the university and nothing is happening.
[00:55:27]  That's an enormous problem.
[00:55:29]  I do feel like, not the Jewish students who are there.
[00:55:32]  I feel for what they're going through, but I do feel like their parents, I hope, are having a big wake-up call right now because it was a dumb, dumb thing to send your child to Columbia.
[00:55:42]  It was.
[00:55:42]  If you are anything other than a member of one of these groups who are hard left or weird, you knew what you were going to get.
[00:55:50]  As weird people, no, no.
[00:55:52]  We're not weird.
[00:55:53]  We're weird.
[00:55:53]  Okay.
[00:55:54]  I'm sorry.
[00:55:54]  You saw my bit.
[00:55:55]  Why are they all so unattractive?
[00:55:56]  They're either unattractive or they're dumb.
[00:55:59]  I don't make the rules.
[00:56:00]  I just report on what I see.
[00:56:02]  But if you are one of these families that's in any way normal and you're sending your kid to Columbia, even within the past four years, you knew what you were getting.

=== Just Be Normal People (06:30) ===

[00:56:10]  They're insane there.
[00:56:12]  Or Berkeley.
[00:56:13]  Don't go there.
[00:56:14]  Like, but let's steel man it, right?
[00:56:16]  Why are they doing it?
[00:56:17]  Because they want the prestige of a Columbia degree.
[00:56:19]  That's right.
[00:56:20]  And I really believe that like part of what needs to happen, and we talk about this all the time over dinner, like part of the, if we're really honest, like the difficulty of leaving a place like the New York Times, you know, is that you're giving that up.
[00:56:38]  Okay.
[00:56:38]  Like you're giving up the, at least in our circles, the cool thing to say at the dinner party.
[00:56:44]  Totally get it.
[00:56:45]  Right.
[00:56:45]  You're giving up like being with the beautiful people and at the right party.
[00:56:48]  David Zweig has talked about that too.
[00:56:50]  Beautiful people.
[00:56:51]  I'm not sure.
[00:56:52]  No, you're right.
[00:56:53]  The beautiful people are here at my house.
[00:56:56]  We're looking at Florida at state school.
[00:56:59]  Fair enough.
[00:56:59]  Way hotter.
[00:57:00]  But giving up the prestige is really hard.
[00:57:04]  Yes.
[00:57:05]  Yeah.
[00:57:06]  It's like breaking an addiction.
[00:57:08]  And it's absolutely incumbent, though, upon anyone who wants to, I'll say it, like save the country to like give it up.
[00:57:21]  But that too is not your fault, right?
[00:57:23]  It's a society that's indoctrinated generations into believing those are the right circles to be in.
[00:57:28]  Yeah.
[00:57:29]  Like that, those are the right elbows to rub.
[00:57:31]  And there's fair fights also between the ideas of abandoning ship, like us leaving the times.
[00:57:37]  Or fight for it.
[00:57:38]  Or fight for it, like us being in California right now and trying to right, you know.
[00:57:43]  I'm sorry to tell you that's going to go the same way.
[00:57:46]  You think we're all going to end up in Texas?
[00:57:48]  I guess you are talking to a seventh generation Californian.
[00:57:51]  She will go downstairs.
[00:57:54]  Wait till your kids get told they're secretly boys when they're girls or girls when they're their boys.
[00:57:58]  I think a lot of these people genuinely think, well, if we all leave, if we pull like a lot of the donors, if we pull out our money and lose our seat at the table, then I won't have sway over this direction.
[00:58:08]  I personally think that they're too far gone.
[00:58:10]  These institutions have money or no money.
[00:58:12]  They have not insane, even if it in the result is sort of self-harming and sort of putting their kids in positions to be kind of tortured by these institutions, by these professors, by these colleagues, these classmates.
[00:58:31]  Yeah, I wouldn't.
[00:58:32]  It's not everything's a risk benefit.
[00:58:33]  I mean, that was when we were in New York and thinking about do we stay or do we go with all the school craziness.
[00:58:40]  I actually made several phone calls to several billionaires in New York who I knew were not woke.
[00:58:45]  They were either reformed leftists on this issue or these, you know, social issues, or they were on the right already.
[00:58:52]  And to a man, they said, it's not winnable.
[00:58:56]  You know, I was like, well, Doug and I, you know, we've donated.
[00:58:58]  It's like, oh my God, these people have donated $100 million.
[00:59:02]  You know, it's like, they won't listen to them.
[00:59:05]  They are too busy on their mission.
[00:59:06]  So we reached the conclusion it's not, it's not winnable.
[00:59:10]  Right.
[00:59:10]  And I think that's why, you know, we're spending all of our waking hours trying desperately to build something new.
[00:59:19]  Like that's that's the alternative pathways.
[00:59:21]  That's the whole name of the game right now, you know, and I'm on the board of this new university in Austin.
[00:59:26]  I always screw up its name.
[00:59:27]  What's it called again?
[00:59:28]  It's hard.
[00:59:28]  It's just like another university now.
[00:59:30]  That's right.
[00:59:31]  There's the University of Texas at Austin.
[00:59:33]  This is the University of Austin.
[00:59:35]  That's in Texas.
[00:59:36]  But we call it UATX.
[00:59:37]  We'll work on it.
[00:59:37]  It will work on the day.
[00:59:38]  But the thing itself, I mean, it started off with a meeting with me, Joe Lonsdale, Neil Ferguson, Pano Canelis from St. John's.
[00:59:48]  Arthur Brooks was there.
[00:59:49]  This was like two and a half years ago now.
[00:59:51]  And that, and then it was like July boiling hot.
[00:59:54]  I thought to myself, this is really important.
[00:59:57]  Now, I'm like, this is of civilizational importance that this succeeds.
[01:00:01]  Yeah.
[01:00:01]  It really is because it was really simple.
[01:00:04]  Like we looked at our daughter and we were like, we're not like I'm saying, where are you going?
[01:00:08]  We're going to send her to school.
[01:00:09]  Not everyone can go to Hillsdale.
[01:00:11]  It's not big enough.
[01:00:12]  Like we need alternatives who are not crazy and who aren't going to try to indoctrinate us.
[01:00:17]  Again, it's like so offensive, right?
[01:00:19]  Because most of us, we don't need them to indoctrinate them in right-wing thinking.
[01:00:23]  I know I speak for you too when I say that.
[01:00:25]  Just stop indoctrinating them.
[01:00:27]  Teach them the classics.
[01:00:28]  We just have to know how to read, write, know things about history and do math.
[01:00:35]  Like, yeah, like it's not, we don't, we don't want politics at all, actually.
[01:00:40]  Yeah.
[01:00:40]  How about some debate?
[01:00:41]  I love in our new school, our son is just finishing fourth grade.
[01:00:45]  And this year, first of all, they say the pledge in the morning in the lower school throughout the school.
[01:00:49]  I love that.
[01:00:50]  And second of all, he spent the whole year studying the formation of the country, the American Revolution, and the various players, all the founding fathers, the documents.
[01:01:00]  They've done, you know, in science, they're doing like the solar system.
[01:01:03]  They're doing normal things.
[01:01:05]  They did a whole play on the American Revolution, the 50 states, their capitals, right?
[01:01:10]  Like this is like we joke a lot about like just be normal.
[01:01:15]  Like, yes, that's it.
[01:01:17]  It's really simple.
[01:01:18]  It's just be normal.
[01:01:19]  And that's, no, it's like, when I think about like how, how's the free press succeeding?
[01:01:24]  It's like, we're the just be normal people.
[01:01:27]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:01:27]  That's it.
[01:01:28]  Like, we're for reality.
[01:01:30]  And, you know, it's amazing.
[01:01:33]  Like, there's such a market for that because everyone else seems to have given up on reality and normalcy.
[01:01:38]  You started a new school that was like, we're just going to teach math and history and like radical math.
[01:01:46]  Where the numbers add up to what they've always added up to, right?
[01:01:48]  Yeah, where you can help yourself to your taxes a little bit and like function in the world well.
[01:01:54]  Like, that would be very successful.
[01:01:56]  Like, that people still want that.
[01:01:58]  They're thirsty for it.
[01:01:59]  They're very thirsty.
[01:02:00]  Are they calling the two plus two equals five indigenous math?
[01:02:04]  Oh, I can't believe that.
[01:02:04]  Is that what they call it?
[01:02:05]  There was something that came up recently.
[01:02:07]  You would know more because you write about all of these things in teaching.
[01:02:10]  Math Wars.
[01:02:10]  Well, the math wars are amazing.
[01:02:12]  I mean, speaking of math is the thing that upsets this movement more than anything, math classes, because it's so measurable.
[01:02:19]  And so it's very upsetting.
[01:02:21]  And teachers don't like these things because they don't want their work measured.
[01:02:24]  And whatever.
[01:02:25]  It's like the Craig T. Nelson line from The Incredibles.
[01:02:28]  They changed math?
[01:02:29]  Why did they change math?
[01:02:31]  Right.
[01:02:31]  Right.
[01:02:31]  When they went to whatever new method.
[01:02:33]  But now they've really abandoned math, is what they've done.
[01:02:36]  I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.

=== Masks Fully Come Off Online (15:59) ===

[01:02:40]  It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today.
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[01:03:40]  All right, I've got to get to this because it's just too good a story.
[01:03:44]  All right, here's the thing: so there's this group at Columbia, and it is the Columbia, it's the like the Young Lawyers, it's the Legal Law Guild.
[01:03:55]  And they have written the following insane letter that I wanted to read you because the cops gave us a statement back.
[01:04:00]  But these are not honest brokers.
[01:04:02]  Okay, I have so many papers and so little desk.
[01:04:06]  Okay, it's the National Lawyers Guild, but it's the Columbia Law chapter of them.
[01:04:09]  And these people are, to say far left, would be very generous.
[01:04:14]  They are complaining about the cops going into Hamilton Hall and reclaiming the hall that belongs to Columbia University and not these nutcases who are there.
[01:04:23]  And they write as follows.
[01:04:25]  I'm going to give you some highlights.
[01:04:26]  Our team of legal observers tried to enter campus repeatedly.
[01:04:30]  We remain stuck outside, facing a wall not of riot, facing a wall of riot police, unable to bear witness to the violence that was about to unfold.
[01:04:39]  Hello, that's the situation of Jews on the campus of Columbia, not of your weird lawyer guild people.
[01:04:45]  We felt a deep dread knowing that without any witness, the police could do whatever they pleased.
[01:04:50]  This moment eerily echoed the telecommunications blackouts Israel has imposed on Gaza.
[01:04:54]  Oh my god.
[01:04:55]  Oh my god.
[01:04:56]  That's exactly what it is.
[01:04:57]  Yes.
[01:04:57]  I'm just kidding.
[01:04:58]  No.
[01:04:58]  Oh, they really went full Hamas.
[01:05:00]  The police unleashed violence upon the unarmed students.
[01:05:04]  One was thrown down a staircase and knocked unconscious.
[01:05:08]  At least one cop fired his gun inside.
[01:05:11]  All protesters were arrested in prison.
[01:05:14]  Some had their hijabs ripped off by cops.
[01:05:17]  Many were denied water.
[01:05:18]  Some have been hospitalized.
[01:05:19]  The letter goes after the trope of the outside agitator calling it beyond tired.
[01:05:24]  I'm going to get to the NYPD's response.
[01:05:26]  To law professors, tenured Columbia law professors enjoy some of the greatest job security in the world.
[01:05:32]  Their response has been overwhelming, deafening, silence.
[01:05:35]  To those professors, you have forfeited the respect of your students.
[01:05:39]  Denounce your virulently genocidal colleagues.
[01:05:43]  Do something.
[01:05:44]  They go on to say on the safety of Jews.
[01:05:47]  You guys are the problem in case you have mental health.
[01:05:49]  Oh, we know.
[01:05:49]  You're the problem.
[01:05:50]  Okay.
[01:05:50]  We have repeated to the point of exhaustion that the protection of Jewish students and faculty is a dangerous, flimsy pretext for Columbia's violence.
[01:06:02]  Any Jew speaking out against genocide, Israel, or the U.S. war machine is not safe.
[01:06:08]  To Jewish students, faculty, and trustees blocking divestment and urging the violent crackdowns on campus, you threaten everyone's safety, yet you continue to claim to speak for all Jews.
[01:06:19]  Keep our names out your damn mouths.
[01:06:22]  They didn't say damn.
[01:06:23]  Yeah, it does say, keep our names out of your mouths.
[01:06:26]  No Jew is safe until everyone is safe.
[01:06:30]  And no Jew is free until Palestine is free.
[01:06:35]  These people are off their rocker.
[01:06:38]  These are not well.
[01:06:39]  I've never read that before.
[01:06:40]  It's crazy.
[01:06:41]  And so the NYPD decided to respond to this, giving us an exclusive statement.
[01:06:48]  All right, hold on.
[01:06:49]  It's very long and we're going to post it, but I'll read you the highlights.
[01:06:54]  Let's discuss the facts.
[01:06:56]  The allegations outlined by this Columbia law student group are scurrilous, deceitful, and have absolutely no basis in reality.
[01:07:02]  The writers are in league with the unruly mob that broke into Hamilton Hall, doing all the bad things.
[01:07:07]  The protesters illegally locked themselves inside, securing the doors with clamps, heavy-duty bike locks, chains.
[01:07:12]  They disabled interior surveillance cameras so that their criminality could not be documented.
[01:07:17]  I'm just giving you highlights here.
[01:07:19]  Every police officer on the scene that night had a working body-worn camera, and everything was recorded.
[01:07:24]  Also recorded a protester dramatically rolling himself down the wide front steps.
[01:07:30]  His flop of a performance was worth at a minimum a yellow card from a professional soccer referee or at most a gold statue from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
[01:07:42]  At the end of the night, no injuries had been seen or reported.
[01:07:46]  What we learned a long time ago is that reversing the roles between offender and victim is a tactic often employed by professional demonstrators and their sympathizers, the same method exploited by sex offenders and perpetrators of domestic violence.
[01:07:57]  It is an insidious form of psychological manipulation, gaslighting.
[01:08:02]  And one plain fact remains.
[01:08:04]  Those arrested at Hamilton Hall were not victims.
[01:08:07]  And despite their urging, their urgent, imploring to the contrary, they never will be.
[01:08:12]  Boom, NYPD.
[01:08:14]  That's the way it's done.
[01:08:16]  How great is the NYPD?
[01:08:17]  And then they say, keep our names out your mouth.
[01:08:23]  Can you believe that?
[01:08:25]  That letter is bone-chilling.
[01:08:28]  That letter.
[01:08:29]  Go back to the letter for a second.
[01:08:30]  The letter's one.
[01:08:31]  The letter says that no Jew.
[01:08:35]  I just want to make sure I understand that.
[01:08:37]  Yeah.
[01:08:37]  That unless you are a Jew that denounces Israel, you will not be safe.
[01:08:41]  Yes, correct.
[01:08:42]  No Jew is safe until Palestine is safe or until Palestine is free.
[01:08:45]  Also that.
[01:08:46]  Yes, hold on.
[01:08:48]  I'm pulling it back up.
[01:08:49]  It's just so unbelievable.
[01:08:50]  So many people are not.
[01:08:51]  You're starting a sentence.
[01:08:52]  No Jew is safe.
[01:08:55]  Just stop what they're writing.
[01:08:57]  They're exhausted of saying that the protection of Jewish students and faculty is a dangerous, flimsy pretext for Columbia's violence.
[01:09:04]  Columbia is not committing the violence.
[01:09:06]  Any Jew speaking out against genocide, Israel, or the U.S. war machine is not safe because they're saying, like, all Jews are on our side, is what they're saying.
[01:09:15]  If you're a Jew, like Jewish Voices for Peace, which we all know is not really Jewish nor for peace, that those people are not safe because, you know, to the Jewish students, faculty, and trustees blocking divestment and urging the violent crackdowns, you threaten everyone's safety.
[01:09:30]  So if you don't want to divest, this is the predicate to violence.
[01:09:33]  You want to end the crackdown, if you want to end the campus encampments, then you threaten everyone's safety.
[01:09:41]  Exactly.
[01:09:41]  That's what they say.
[01:09:42]  This is what's so important here is they are saying that by being yourself, in other words, the fundamental part of 95, let's even be conservative, 90% of Jews' identity, which is a connection to forgetting the two-state solution, forgetting all the modern politics.
[01:10:02]  Jewish identity is fundamentally tied to the land of Israel.
[01:10:07]  That's like basic.
[01:10:09]  Anyone that denies that is a historical revisionist.
[01:10:12]  We could have another two hours about all of that.
[01:10:15]  They're basically saying that unless you cut off an absolutely essential part of your religious, ethnic, peoplehood identity, you yourself are a threat to humanity and to peace.
[01:10:33]  Haven't we heard that?
[01:10:34]  Haven't we heard that before?
[01:10:36]  I mean, the historical echo of this is just, it's just so scary to hear that in 2024 because it's, again, it's just a predicate to violence.
[01:10:46]  They're justifying their revolutionary violence by saying that in order to stop this thing that we have declared a genocide, which is actually a just war that was started by Hamas, the way that we solve that problem and make the world safe is by essentially a modern forcible conversion of Jews out of Zionism.
[01:11:10]  And so the very same bargain that was put to Jews in other times and places, right?
[01:11:15]  Where back then there was no state of Israel.
[01:11:18]  So it was, hey, you want to remain a Jew and safe in the Soviet Union?
[01:11:23]  No problem.
[01:11:23]  We're a communist society.
[01:11:25]  You have to renounce God and your religiosity.
[01:11:27]  Now it's, you want to be safe and be a Jew in progressive 21st century America?
[01:11:32]  No problem.
[01:11:33]  You just have to denounce the state of Israel.
[01:11:35]  It's the exact same bargain again.
[01:11:37]  It's just the terms of it are different.
[01:11:39]  So let me add this.
[01:11:40]  The original post from the Columbia group was first reported, as far as we know, by National Review, Bucky Fellow, National Reviews Buckley Fellow, Zach Kessel.
[01:11:50]  That's how we found it, like to give credit to the racist.
[01:11:55]  So where does this go, you guys?
[01:11:57]  I mean, we're going to go into the summer.
[01:11:59]  Where does it go now?
[01:12:00]  The summer's coming.
[01:12:01]  They have to get off campus.
[01:12:03]  And summers are usually when things quiet down.
[01:12:06]  And you're showing.
[01:12:08]  Right.
[01:12:09]  We got a DNC coming up.
[01:12:12]  Like, so where, where does it go?
[01:12:14]  Because it doesn't look like Israel's exactly ending things soon, right?
[01:12:18]  With Rafah happening, although hopefully that will lead to an end.
[01:12:22]  And I do, I don't know.
[01:12:24]  I feel, I'm a little worried because I've seen the polls.
[01:12:27]  I realize America is still overwhelmingly pro-Israel.
[01:12:29]  And this isn't, I'm not asking you how the war ends, but I do feel like there's a real risk on the right, too.
[01:12:37]  Oh, yeah.
[01:12:38]  Of this whole thing, and I include what's happening on the campuses and the anti-Semitism looking like Ukraine.
[01:12:44]  Like, we're done.
[01:12:47]  You know, we're not really into it.
[01:12:50]  It's not our problem.
[01:12:51]  I know.
[01:12:51]  I'm a little worried.
[01:12:52]  Well, that's it.
[01:12:53]  That vibe already exists strongly in major precincts of the online right, which basically goes from a sort of like neutral isolationist position to a out and out, sort of very old school anti-Semitic position that is now like masks have fully come off on a lot of people.
[01:13:14]  It's not hard to find online at all.
[01:13:16]  Right.
[01:13:16]  And they're talking openly about, you know, the Jews killing Jesus.
[01:13:21]  I mean, like, the oldest tropes in the, in the world.
[01:13:23]  We're not really over that.
[01:13:25]  Well, we're really fighting over Jesus now.
[01:13:27]  Yeah, that's what that's.
[01:13:28]  As if they're finally coming to realize that Jews do not believe Jesus is Christ.
[01:13:32]  We know.
[01:13:32]  But Megan, explain a little bit more what you mean about how, like, draw that out for us of like how it will look like Ukraine.
[01:13:39]  Well, I'm worried that, you know, in the horseshoe principle of like sort of the hard right is going to come together with the hard left and be like, yeah, we don't care about the Jews.
[01:13:48]  And to the extent we do care, we don't like them and not support Israel the way at least the right always has.
[01:13:56]  You know, the left, I think large sections of it have, but the right has always been very pro-Israel and leave it to itself, possibly not support with, you know, arms and other support.
[01:14:09]  And here domestically, not really do anything about these protesters and actually start to side more and more with them and start to like both sides it.
[01:14:22]  Yeah, I think that that is probably what's going to happen.
[01:14:26]  I think that's already happening.
[01:14:28]  So what's next?
[01:14:29]  What comes of that?
[01:14:30]  That's what I'm like.
[01:14:31]  I think what comes next is more of what we're seeing in Europe, which is kind of a full movement to overthrow local governance.
[01:14:42]  I mean, I think we'll see some of these folks become elected officials.
[01:14:45]  We'll see we'll see the revolution here start to win more.
[01:14:55]  What do we do with that?
[01:14:56]  Because Jews are not, it's not a big number.
[01:14:58]  No.
[01:14:59]  I think the threat of violence is going to continue and grow.
[01:15:02]  Like, I don't feel super optimistic about this topic right now.
[01:15:06]  I wish I could like be like the counter to you guys on this.
[01:15:11]  I don't feel super optimistic.
[01:15:13]  And I think now it's kind of latching into a broader movement to hate America, to overthrow America.
[01:15:21]  You're seeing a lot of that rhetoric become part of it that Gaza is lighting the fire to overthrow the empire and the empire being American empire.
[01:15:32]  And I take that as a serious part of the aspiration here to do away with our value system, to do away with Western liberalism and the idea that that maybe is tired and old.
[01:15:49]  And I think there's a lot of people on the right who also think Western liberalism is tired and old and played out and who are willing to toss it to the side.
[01:15:57]  And so I think, yes, you'll see a horseshoe.
[01:16:02]  It's like we're seeing the beginning of it right now.
[01:16:04]  Yeah.
[01:16:05]  I don't expect a horseshoe.
[01:16:07]  Well, we have to stop it.
[01:16:10]  We have to.
[01:16:11]  I regard this as the fight of our lives.
[01:16:16]  I don't know.
[01:16:17]  I think for most people going about their lives, they might look at what's happening on campus.
[01:16:22]  It's crazy, campus kids, or they might hear about something that happened where, you know, a Jewish store gets vandalized or, you know, oh, that's unfortunate.
[01:16:32]  And they go about their day because they're not Jewish or, you know, the Jews are such a small minority and oh, they're fine anyway.
[01:16:37]  They have a lot of money or they're so successful or they're smart.
[01:16:41]  I guess I would just implore those people.
[01:16:43]  And I think this case needs to be made much more articulately.
[01:16:46]  Perhaps the best person doing it right now on the scene, maybe in the world, is Douglas Murray.
[01:16:50]  He's the best.
[01:16:51]  He's the best.
[01:16:51]  I mean at everything.
[01:16:52]  He's the best at everything.
[01:16:54]  We're seeing him for Shabbat dinner on Friday night.
[01:16:57]  Not Jewish.
[01:16:58]  He's the best at talking.
[01:16:59]  He's the best.
[01:17:00]  But he's the best.
[01:17:01]  He's the best at explaining how the fate of this tiny minority, 100% of the time, for all of recorded history, is bound up with the fate of a civilization.
[01:17:17]  And that is why this should matter to everybody.
[01:17:22]  Because if the Jews are not, however you want to phrase it, if we're going down, it is simply a sign that the society is deeply, deeply diseased and dying.
[01:17:38]  And that's why this matters.
[01:17:39]  Like the Jews here right now seem like they're the main character.
[01:17:44]  America's the main character.
[01:17:46]  Like what is at stake here is, do we believe that this country remains exceptional?
[01:17:55]  Would we rather live here than Putin's Russia or Hamas's Gaza?
[01:18:01]  Like that's what I think needs, that's the framing I think that's really necessary and important in this moment.
[01:18:09]  And when I see people on the right, I mean, we have an excellent story today in the Free Press by Peter Savodnik about the American men on the right.
[01:18:16]  It's a handful, but really interesting and emblematic, I think, moving to Russia to pursue the American dream.
[01:18:22]  In other words, they've so given up on America and they so think that, you know, what's happening in terms of some of the madness we've been talking about is so impossible to sort of restore normalcy that they've headed all the way to live under Putin's regime.

=== Untethered Hosts And The Right (12:23) ===

[01:18:40]  And you see the same phenomenon sort of on the left of, as Nellie just said, like the turn against America, I think is what this is about.
[01:18:47]  The turn toward nihilism, whether on the left that wants to burn it all down or on the right that's glorifying right-wing authoritarianism, where there are none of the liberties that we get to enjoy here.
[01:19:00]  And for those of us whose entire lives, like look at our life, not possible anywhere else in the world to have the kind of freedoms we have.
[01:19:10]  You know, that's what this is all about in the end.
[01:19:13]  And I think a lot of the times Nellie and I are looking at each other and are like, we get called conservative.
[01:19:17]  Like, are we conservative?
[01:19:19]  It's like, no, we're just trying to like conserve liberalism.
[01:19:23]  We're trying to.
[01:19:24]  That's a good thing we got going here.
[01:19:26]  Yeah, like this is really good.
[01:19:28]  It's not hard to imagine.
[01:19:29]  It doesn't get better.
[01:19:30]  No.
[01:19:30]  It's actually more surprising that fundamentalist Islam has aligned with sort of Western progressivism because it's very easy to imagine the American right, the Western right aligning with fundamentalist Islam.
[01:19:43]  The values are quite easy to see as compatible in a lot of ways.
[01:19:47]  You're talking about that weird slice on the right, not yes, yes.
[01:19:50]  I'm not talking about the moderate conservatives.
[01:19:52]  I'm talking about because you are one now.
[01:19:55]  I'm talking about the faction of the online right that we're talking about who's who's turned.
[01:20:00]  So this sort of alliance against Western liberalism is not hard to imagine.
[01:20:07]  It's already there.
[01:20:09]  It's already there.
[01:20:09]  I hate to make it so dark, but I mean, this is the reality.
[01:20:12]  And like on my own show, we focused on Israel when the attack happened for a while, but I've always, since the beginning, been much more interested in what's happening here.
[01:20:20]  Like, how are we reacting?
[01:20:22]  And very poorly in many ways.
[01:20:25]  And it's not limited to left or right.
[01:20:27]  I just, it's a unlike anything I've seen before.
[01:20:30]  I've been covering Israel for a long time as a journalist.
[01:20:32]  I've never seen the right start to turn on Israel the way I'm starting to see.
[01:20:38]  And I don't know where I'm asking genuinely because I'm searching on where does it end?
[01:20:43]  How does it look, you know, in 10 years?
[01:20:46]  I've had Jewish friends of mine actually say, yeah, we think we'll eventually be pushed out of the United States.
[01:20:52]  Oh, yeah.
[01:20:53]  That's our open conversation.
[01:20:55]  Steel man the right on this a little bit with this.
[01:20:57]  I think some people are looking at the last couple decades of American wars and thinking, that didn't really work.
[01:21:06]  Look at Afghanistan.
[01:21:06]  The Taliban's running it again.
[01:21:08]  Look at Iraq.
[01:21:08]  That's true.
[01:21:10]  And so they're thinking, we don't exactly have American success stories in the Middle East.
[01:21:16]  And why do we think it'd be different?
[01:21:18]  Now, I think obviously Israel is a lot different than Afghanistan and Iraq.
[01:21:21]  Difference in those cases is there's no American soldiers being asked to do anything at all.
[01:21:25]  Obviously, of course.
[01:21:26]  But I'm to steelman that argument, I don't think it all comes from like just, I don't think it's all necessarily like anti-Semitic or hateful.
[01:21:36]  I think some of it is from people who are just like exhausted with well-I make a distinction between the separationist, right?
[01:21:44]  Yeah.
[01:21:44]  Who they don't want an involvement in any foreign conflict.
[01:21:47]  And I get that entirely.
[01:21:48]  I think that's a real but they are like, I we've talked on the show before about like the Nick Fuentes of the world.
[01:21:53]  Oh, well, that's no, but he is rising in popularity.
[01:21:56]  Very much.
[01:21:57]  Not only did he have the sit-down, you know, with Trump, but people I follow on Twitter and who follow me regularly like retweet him and they'll slide like a video into your mentions.
[01:22:10]  So you've got to watch this.
[01:22:12]  I have really zero interest in hearing anything he has to say other than to respond with scorn.
[01:22:19]  But I rarely try to mention him on the show because he deserves to be ignored.
[01:22:22]  However, he's rising in popularity.
[01:22:25]  He's not waning.
[01:22:27]  And there's a reason for that.
[01:22:28]  You know, and people I formerly knew, like at Fox News, like the one woman in particular I work with very closely is like now an open Groyper.
[01:22:38]  Like I, I don't, I just, I don't know where it ends.
[01:22:42]  Well, I don't like where we are.
[01:22:44]  I will say that I think one of the important principles here is like, it's really easy for people on the left to look at, he's a Nazi, look at Nick Fuentes, a Nazi, and say, aha, the problem's on the right.
[01:23:01]  And it's so easy for someone on the right to look at what's going on in the left and look at Ilhan Omar and say, aha, the problem's on the left.
[01:23:07]  And I think it's really important for those of us who care about the future of the country, not just like our Jewish friend, like the literal future of the country to like police your own side of the street.
[01:23:21]  And I find that the incentives to do that are just very low.
[01:23:25]  And it's so easy to point to the other side and say the problem's there.
[01:23:29]  And I have been, I would say, heartbroken by the lack of that impulse.
[01:23:37]  Like, you know, I, I have sent personal notes to people saying, you know, the guys that run the Babylon B, I saw how much, I've never met them.
[01:23:46]  I saw how much shit they were taking online for standing up against anti-Semitism from the right.
[01:23:52]  And I just wrote them a note saying, like, thank you.
[01:23:55]  They've been awesome.
[01:23:56]  But there, but I can count the people that have been awesome.
[01:24:00]  And that's what really worries me on both the right and the left.
[01:24:04]  And most people are just sort of like going along with it.
[01:24:09]  If I'm honest, because I obviously have nothing against the right.
[01:24:12]  I do have my issues with the left.
[01:24:14]  My own perception is this is overwhelmingly a leftist problem.
[01:24:19]  And there's a smaller percentage on the far right that's titillated by it, interested with it, starting to kick it around more, starting to make it more like some sort of a, well, aren't we technically against the Jews because of the whole Jesus thing?
[01:24:30]  No, no, we're not.
[01:24:31]  Look at Candace Owens.
[01:24:32]  This is not where this comes in.
[01:24:34]  You know, I have.
[01:24:35]  She's not no one.
[01:24:36]  No, she's not.
[01:24:37]  She's not no one.
[01:24:38]  So there are people at the same time.
[01:24:40]  But let me ask you about Candace because I, she's been on the show.
[01:24:44]  I don't know her personally, but she definitely had some criticisms of Israel, which you would defend, right?
[01:24:51]  Like you don't agree with them, but you would defend the criticism of Israel.
[01:24:56]  So I actually went and looked, like, what are the specific tweets?
[01:24:59]  And there was that one where she clicked the tweet on like drinking Jewish blood, right?
[01:25:04]  I was like, okay, that's what got her in all the trouble.
[01:25:06]  That's one of the things.
[01:25:08]  But that was the biggest thing.
[01:25:09]  And I can, I was like, oh, that's bad.
[01:25:11]  But then when I looked at it more, she seemed to be defending herself saying that wasn't what I was liking.
[01:25:15]  I was liking the fact that this guy was defending me on a previous argument that didn't get circulated.
[01:25:20]  I didn't take a deep dive into it.
[01:25:22]  I just think I really, I want the bar to be high before we dismiss somebody as an anti-Semite.
[01:25:28]  Here's what I'll say.
[01:25:29]  I think there is a 100% correlation, pretty much, between people that seem to be, or minds that seem to be vulnerable to conspiracy-minded thinking and the line between that and open anti-Semitism.
[01:25:48]  And sometimes that path takes a while to get to, but it always gets there.
[01:25:52]  That is so interesting, Barry.
[01:25:54]  You're not wrong about that.
[01:25:55]  That is, that's those two things do tend to go hand in.
[01:25:57]  There's a reason for that.
[01:25:58]  It's because anti-Semitism is the oldest conspiracy in the world.
[01:26:02]  Like the cabal of powerful Jews controlling everything.
[01:26:05]  Sure.
[01:26:05]  And now it's, you know, the, you know, the Jewish state instead of the Jew themselves standing in for that exact same thing.
[01:26:13]  But it's, you know, if you are openly talking about how Brigitte, is her name Brigitte Macrone?
[01:26:21]  Yeah.
[01:26:21]  Yeah.
[01:26:22]  How Brigitte Macrone is a man.
[01:26:24]  Okay.
[01:26:24]  Okay.
[01:26:25]  I'm like, okay, it'll, it'll be, I don't know when it will get there.
[01:26:28]  So those are the indicators to you that someone's going down that line.
[01:26:31]  Alex Jones is a great example.
[01:26:33]  Right.
[01:26:33]  I don't think Alex Jones.
[01:26:35]  I've never met Alex Jones.
[01:26:36]  Don't watch him that much, but notice some things he's been saying recently.
[01:26:40]  Is he starting to?
[01:26:42]  Oh, yeah.
[01:26:43]  And it's like, well, yeah, like, like, look at, look at the, look at the pattern.
[01:26:48]  Like, it was only a matter of time before that happened.
[01:26:52]  Like, it's, again, I will never attempt to get into someone else's mind or psychology.
[01:27:00]  I will just say that there is a very clear fact.
[01:27:02]  There's a very clear pattern at play, which is that when you start to make yourself susceptible and it's easy in a moment where everyone's lost trust in everything.
[01:27:14]  Yes.
[01:27:14]  Like, I get how it's happening.
[01:27:15]  Like, I have some questions about the fluoride in our water.
[01:27:19]  Alex Jones has been railing about that for a long time.
[01:27:21]  So I'm just.
[01:27:22]  I don't know.
[01:27:23]  Now, what do you mean?
[01:27:24]  Really, can I tell you?
[01:27:26]  Not for nothing.
[01:27:26]  But when I went down to interview Alex Jones, I've told the story before, but he said all this crazy stuff.
[01:27:31]  I'm like, oh my God.
[01:27:33]  And you guys got onto water quality.
[01:27:36]  And you were like, I'm there with you.
[01:27:37]  Well, there was.
[01:27:38]  I mean, clearly, you know, there were some that were very serious, and I pressed him very hard on those.
[01:27:42]  And, you know, he's later apologized for some of those positions.
[01:27:44]  But when we ran the fact check at NBC, and NBC's fact check is no joke.
[01:27:48]  You know, when they really want to do it on something that's not political where they've got a thumb on the scale, they have a team that's very good that will actually figure out whether somebody's got the basis for what they're saying.
[01:27:58]  He was all coming back as supported.
[01:28:00]  It was like, there is a goat that has a human face and there is a goat.
[01:28:06]  Okay, I was like, oh my God.
[01:28:08]  I think as, and there are aliens in the goat with a human face.
[01:28:13]  I'm telling you.
[01:28:13]  Or maybe it's a pig.
[01:28:14]  I can't remember.
[01:28:14]  One of those two.
[01:28:16]  The old gatekeepers have lost so much credibility and so much power because of that.
[01:28:23]  And it's really, in this situation, it becomes very sad that they've lost that power because so many things that the old gatekeepers now declare as conspiracies aren't conspiracies, right?
[01:28:38]  So like, how do you figure out?
[01:28:40]  Like the lab leak theory is not a conspiracy theory.
[01:28:43]  That's a really, really fair thing to talk about.
[01:28:45]  And for years, that was called a conspiracy.
[01:28:47]  Obviously, we've all talked about this ad nauseum, but it's true.
[01:28:50]  And it's really interesting.
[01:28:51]  And by losing the credibility to say this goes beyond the pale, Brigitte Macron is a man conspiracy.
[01:28:57]  Those are separate.
[01:28:58]  Those are worse.
[01:28:58]  Those are real ones.
[01:29:00]  If you've already said everything you don't like is a conspiracy theory, you don't have, you don't, you don't have any more juice left to then fight something like that.
[01:29:08]  And so I think we're in a really tough situation where the old gatekeepers, the mainstream media, there's no like Walter Cronkite.
[01:29:16]  No sort of confident voice who can set the record straight.
[01:29:22]  Set the record straight that we all trust.
[01:29:24]  There's no central trust in American society anymore.
[01:29:27]  I really think that it's been lost.
[01:29:29]  It's been lost.
[01:29:31]  Probably lost.
[01:29:32]  Of this, you know, COVID didn't help, you know, people locked inside in small, isolated pockets of America and just spending hours on the internet.
[01:29:39]  That's not, that's not a healthy thing.
[01:29:41]  But I do, at its core, blame the collapse of the media for most of this.
[01:29:47]  Yeah.
[01:29:48]  Yes, it was important to have an Uncle Walter.
[01:29:51]  And it's not to say he shared the politics of most people over on my side of the aisle, but he played it straight.
[01:29:56]  And there were, you could go back, you could go back and pick apart his coverage for sure.
[01:30:00]  Yeah.
[01:30:00]  But it was important to have a news media that in general was earnest in its effort to chase facts instead of agendas.
[01:30:09]  That's gone.
[01:30:11]  It's gone.
[01:30:12]  And people don't know where to turn.
[01:30:15]  They've been so burned by that media that hated them, that told them their own.
[01:30:21]  They were deplorable and conspiracy theorists.
[01:30:23]  And now they're understandably rushing into the arms of so much and they don't know where to turn for information.
[01:30:30]  You know, it's like Reddit or some guy on Twitter or, you know.
[01:30:34]  Reddit is my OBGYN.
[01:30:35]  I know that.
[01:30:37]  It's a problem.
[01:30:39]  Or Nick Flunt.
[01:30:41]  I mean, it's.
[01:30:41]  Yeah.
[01:30:42]  So what do you, I mean, and all the old terms have lost all their power, right?
[01:30:46]  Like terms like racist, terms like sexist, terms like transnocent.
[01:30:50]  And so then when a real bigot walks onto the scene, there's like, how do you know he's got hats?
[01:30:56]  He's like, oh, they always use that word.
[01:30:57]  Exactly.
[01:30:58]  So that's why all of this always mattered.
[01:31:00]  The weapons are weak.
[01:31:01]  That's how we got to where we are.
[01:31:02]  Yeah.

=== Rushing Into Reddit For Info (04:18) ===

[01:31:03]  So what do you think?
[01:31:04]  I think we should go get a drink.
[01:31:06]  Yeah, I know that.
[01:31:06]  Yeah, that's it.
[01:31:07]  That's how we got two in the afternoon in LA.
[01:31:10]  We're just talking about it.
[01:31:12]  Reddit says, it's fine.
[01:31:13]  I could have a margarita.
[01:31:14]  Yeah, you're good.
[01:31:15]  It's fine.
[01:31:19]  Like me.
[01:31:20]  Well, no, no.
[01:31:22]  I don't have the solution.
[01:31:24]  Thankfully, I am not in the business of providing solutions.
[01:31:27]  I'm just in the business of shining the light on the problems and having honest discussions about them, which eventually leads us to the right place.
[01:31:35]  I do think we have to rebuild some sort of media center.
[01:31:37]  You know, you guys are doing it at the free press.
[01:31:39]  Independent journalists are doing it in the digital lane, and that's working.
[01:31:43]  I do think we have to be careful about building up, whether it's like me as a host or you guys at the free press, people who have become untethered.
[01:31:52]  I agree.
[01:31:53]  And, you know, I'll, I have certain people on that list who are, you know, people who I care about, but I don't have to be promotional of the product, right?
[01:32:03]  And then at night, honestly, I pray.
[01:32:05]  I pray.
[01:32:06]  I pray for all of them and I pray for the country and I pray for the wisdom to know what to do and how to handle it and how to check my own hubris on whether I'm the wrong one.
[01:32:17]  Not about like dude being evil, but like, am I being too judgmental?
[01:32:19]  Am I being too harsh?
[01:32:20]  Do let me listen to their arguments.
[01:32:23]  Don't come into it as a know-it-all thinking you are better or you know better.
[01:32:27]  Like hear them out.
[01:32:29]  Have a kindness and a generosity of heart, which is number one, if you want to convince somebody to come over to your side anyway, right?
[01:32:34]  Like whether they're right or I'm right.
[01:32:36]  I'm not going to get them if I'm the right one by being nasty to them and judgmental of them.
[01:32:41]  I am sometimes.
[01:32:42]  I'm not perfect at this.
[01:32:44]  And I don't know, Barry and Nelly, I think part of it also goes back to just foundational values of spending more time with your family, having family, having kids, believing in the future of America, believing in each other, having true love, nurturing it, like just turning away from this device for large amounts of the day, just having dinner together, holding each other, watching a stupid movie together, having dumbass laughs over some stupid comedy.
[01:33:08]  I think those things are really important and they're integral to fixing everything.
[01:33:13]  We have some dinners.
[01:33:14]  Yes, good.
[01:33:15]  Who's the chef?
[01:33:17]  It's not.
[01:33:17]  Bear is the chef.
[01:33:18]  No, no, she is.
[01:33:19]  She's a really good chef.
[01:33:20]  I'm like a line color.
[01:33:21]  I'm sorry.
[01:33:22]  God is a bear god.
[01:33:23]  He wouldn't give her that many gifts.
[01:33:24]  No, no, no.
[01:33:25]  She's really good.
[01:33:26]  I mean, come on.
[01:33:26]  I'm going to be honest.
[01:33:27]  Her sister, Susie.
[01:33:28]  My sister's.
[01:33:29]  I love Susie Weiss.
[01:33:30]  Susie Weiss.
[01:33:31]  She's a great family.
[01:33:31]  She's got a family.
[01:33:32]  She's like a professional.
[01:33:33]  She's really good.
[01:33:34]  I'm very good.
[01:33:36]  Wow.
[01:33:36]  I'm good.
[01:33:37]  There's nothing those weiss parents didn't give you.
[01:33:39]  No, that's not true at all.
[01:33:40]  Are you kidding?
[01:33:41]  I see a number and my mind goes blank.
[01:33:44]  I do our home economics.
[01:33:48]  100% of it.
[01:33:49]  I don't even know how to log on to our house.
[01:33:52]  No, she really doesn't.
[01:33:52]  It's ripe for fraud.
[01:33:54]  No, yeah, don't say that.
[01:33:56]  Yeah.
[01:33:57]  I agree with everything you've just said.
[01:33:58]  And I just, I don't know, having kids, I think, has clarified everything for us.
[01:34:05]  Yeah.
[01:34:05]  I do think, you know how these far leftists are like, no, kids, we're going to save the environment.
[01:34:09]  Part of the problem.
[01:34:11]  You were at a dinner party where we were.
[01:34:13]  Oh, God.
[01:34:13]  Well, yeah, this is very common.
[01:34:15]  I mean, it's not just women.
[01:34:16]  I've been, yeah, this is a very common idea that we shouldn't have kids and it's irresponsible.
[01:34:21]  It's irresponsible.
[01:34:22]  The argument goes for the child.
[01:34:25]  Like you're putting a child into a worse world because it's a very pessimistic worldview.
[01:34:29]  And it's irresponsible in terms of the environment.
[01:34:33]  That one kid is, you know, X number of carbon units.
[01:34:36]  And well, you're doing the right thing.
[01:34:38]  That's certainly how we look at our daughter.
[01:34:41]  We need to have more children.
[01:34:43]  If I were a younger woman, I'd be doing what we were doing right now.
[01:34:46]  I wish Doug and I could have had five or six, but three is a good you did it.
[01:34:49]  These contributions are very curious.
[01:34:53]  No woman's ovaries.
[01:34:54]  It's been a pleasure.
[01:34:55]  Let me give you, let me hold up the book.
[01:34:57]  That's the money shopping.
[01:34:59]  Morning after the revolution.
[01:35:02]  And the revolution is ongoing.
[01:35:04]  Please join.
[01:35:04]  Join our side and help.
[01:35:06]  It's by Nellie Bowles.
[01:35:07]  Well worth your time.
[01:35:08]  And it's available for pre-order right now.
[01:35:10]  Okay, for a copy today.
[01:35:11]  Have a great weekend.
[01:35:12]  And I'll see you guys Monday.
[01:35:17]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
[01:35:19]  No BS, no agenda, and no