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June 26, 2024 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:12:02
20240626_americas-ability-to-tolerate-risk-and-hillarys-cri
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The Antidote to Anti-Americanism 00:12:05
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Those who love this country and are proud of our history will be very interested in a new film.
All right, and it comes out tomorrow.
It's by one of my favorite people.
I watched it last night and I loved it.
I absolutely loved it.
The timing could not be better because while you and I want to celebrate our country, more and more people, it seems, want to tear it down.
You're seeing it, seeing it all over the place.
You're seeing it mostly from the left, but even some on the right now.
And the man behind this movie, reminding us who we are, has a name you probably know very well: Mike Rowe.
He's an Emmy Award-winning television host, best known for the hit show Dirty Jobs.
And his new film is called Something to Stand For.
Here's a bit from the trailer.
Watch.
My name's Mike Rowe, and this is Something to Stand For.
A film that celebrates a few extraordinary Americans who risked everything to build the nation we call home.
Americans who gave us something to fight for, something to be grateful for.
And today, all these years later, something to stand for.
Can't wait to talk about this film.
First, I thought, okay, Mike says something he wants to promote.
We'll talk about it for a second and then we'll move on.
But no, I want to talk all about this movie, which was filmed entirely in Oklahoma with actors from Oklahoma.
And it is so fun.
I woke up this morning, and as you know, Doug also saw it and blurbed it for you.
And my brother's in town with his wife.
And we're, I had so much fun quizzing them.
And I did it just the way you did it in the movie on these various stories.
Because I want the audience to know what Mike does is he tells you a really fascinating story about somebody.
The story itself is full of great nuggets and you're really enjoying it.
And only at the end do you get the big reveal.
It's just like your podcast in many ways of who is the person you've just become so fascinated in and by.
And it's always a big name where you're like, oh my God, I never knew.
This is your favorite thing to do and talk about our history.
And what's the slogan, Mike?
Things you don't know about people you do.
Something you didn't know about somebody you do.
And look, first of all, thanks for all the kind words.
I wish I could take credit for the format.
I stole it from the late, great Paul Harvey with permission from his son, Paul Harvey Jr., who actually wrote most of the rest of the story.
That was the title that most people will remember from the 70s and 80s.
But, you know, this guy, Doug Brunt, he borrowed from it as well.
And, you know, I loved his book too, but he uses the same kind of thing where you know he's talking about diesel, but you can't believe what you're learning along the way.
So the trick, to me anyway, at least when it comes to history, is you have to, you have to find a way to make history interesting for people who would otherwise not give a damn.
And if you can do that with a new level of enthusiasm, great.
We all had teachers who could do that.
But for me, it's always a bite-sized piece, a little something you didn't know about somebody you do.
And that opens a portal, hopefully, and inspires something like curiosity, perhaps.
So you come into the shallow end of the pool, but there's plenty of room to go over to the deep end and take a deeper dive if you want to learn more.
Right.
Instead of hearing all day, every day as we approach July 4th about how this founding father owned slaves, you will hear about extraordinary acts of courage they performed, risks they took, notwithstanding their positions in society, not to mention the military stories that are in there.
And just, you know, it's one thing to say we're the United States of America.
We're the greatest source of freedom and liberty and example in the world.
We liberated the world and saved it literally back in the 1940s and so on.
These are individual stories of the people who formed the country and became icons within it for a reason, because of our shared values and what they stood and fought for.
It's stirring.
I actually had chills more than once in hearing the stories.
We need that.
This is the antidote to the anti-Americanism that we're seeing.
Thank you.
I mean, I'm literally blushing on satellite radio.
That's so nice to hear, especially from you.
Because look, for me, the thing that worries me most about the time we're living in right now is we seem to have lost our nuance.
We seem to have lost our ability to hold two conflicting thoughts in our head at the same time.
In this case, it's the fact that, yeah, our country was formed by imperfect men.
And yes, we are still under construction as a country and an idea.
There's still work to do.
There's still progress to be made.
But that does not have anything or shouldn't have anything to do with our ability to celebrate the progress that we have made and to be grateful for the steps that we have taken and to be proud of how far we've come.
And it just seems like you're either on one side or the other.
And to see the coin with both sides, to see the men for who they were and where they failed and how they tried and how they strived and and how ultimately, we became better for it.
It's not just a love letter to our founding fathers and and and famous people, it's.
It's a love letter to anybody who's ever put on the uniform to defend those ideas and risk their lives for you and me and everybody listen.
And if we, if we can't agree that that that basic thing is worth standing for in 2024, then i'm i'm not really sure where we go from here.
We need this.
We need this now more than ever.
All the stats are kind of depressing on the falling patriotism in the U.s.
I'll give you some of those numbers.
Gallup does a poll every year.
It's depressing.
It hit record lows in terms of uh, Americans who feel patriotic and love a great, extremely proud of the country in 2022 and it hasn't recovered since um.
But we need it for people like this gal.
Uh, let's play sat eight.
I'm here enjoying a nice day at the beach with my kids.
This guy and I turn around.
I got these flags planted here on the beach by these MAGA fucks.
Listen, this is all America.
We know you didn't storm the beaches to stake out your territory on the beach.
This isn't the moon, I get it, this is America.
But I'm sick of my flag being represented by white nationalist trash on a goddamn beach.
Go yourself, okay.
So he's not ironic, Megan.
How ironic that the very flag he's so nauseous over represents the very notions that give him the very right to run it down.
Interestingly, about a hundred yards from where the owners of the flag are sitting, which one might conclude would have something unflattering to say about the conspicuous absence of courage in that particular gentleman.
But far be it from me to connect those dots.
It's um crazy because whenever we get to july 4th, I look into these stories because I just find them depressing and also important.
We got to keep our eye on what's happening.
This is from april 2024 in Seattle, where a dance squad was set to perform in the Emerald City Hoedown, which sounds like an All-American kind of event.
So the dance squad gets together, they show up at the hoedown and at the hoedown mike they were told um, they needed to leave because they were wearing American flag shirts, which the hoedown organizers in Seattle said might be triggering, uh or upsetting to some in the audience and therefore these girls were not welcome.
They had to take them off or leave.
Uh they.
They said in particular, people might bring up Israel's war against Hamas or transgender issues.
And those people might not like the American flag on the shirts.
God bless the girls.
They refused to do it.
They did not perform.
Well, because the girls wouldn't stand for that.
This movie is not just about what we should stand for.
It's about what we shouldn't stand for.
And, you know, that's a very important distinction to make.
And I think, you know, just watching that last clip and listening to that story, I had a conversation not long ago with a historian who I really admire who told me that the Make America Great slogan,
the motto, the hat, and Trump and everything that all of that combined, it put the other side in a really difficult position because they were in this binary space and because they clearly understood that Trump was the devil, they had to take exception to and with everything he said.
America Was Never Great 00:04:32
So suddenly a big chunk of the country was in a position of saying, well, wait a minute.
No, we're not going to make America great again.
In fact, America was never great at all.
And here's why.
And so suddenly we started having a conversation, not between conservatives and liberals, at least not in the traditional way.
We started having conversations between that which was American and that which was anti-American.
And so both sides go back and forth and the stakes are ratcheted up higher and higher and higher.
And that's a hell of a thing.
I don't, I, I, it's, it's amazing to think that in our lifetime, Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan, who tore each other's throats out by day arguing over policy, would go out at night and have a steak and a bottle of wine and talk to each other like Americans.
I don't know what to say about that other than with regard to the guy in that clip and the people in the story you just told, I didn't write the movie for them.
I wrote the movie because of them, but not for them.
This is still for people who really do believe our country needs to be better and constantly improve, but nevertheless love it.
And those people seem to be in shorter supply, unfortunately.
Yeah, that's what the Gallup poll shows.
I'll give you the numbers.
I'm sure you're familiar.
This one's from June of last year.
I'm sure shortly we're going to be getting one, the one from 24.
39% of American adults say they are extremely proud to be an American.
39%.
That's basically unchanged from the all-time low of 38% in 2022.
Okay, so that's not adults.
It's just 39% of Americans say they're extremely proud to be so.
It used to be, let's say, 2003, 70% were extremely proud.
So a precipitous fall there.
You break it down.
This is again, June of 23 by party.
60% of Republicans, extremely proud.
33% of Independents, 29% of Democrats, 29% of Democrats.
So the vast majority of Democrats would not say they are extremely proud to be Americans.
It was not always this way.
Back to 2003, 65% of Democrats said extremely proud, 62% of Independents back then, and 86% of Republicans.
Even the Republicans are starting to fall now.
And that too was probably, I mean, it was two years post 9-11.
Feeling more proud, and we weren't yet in the midst of Iraq, 90 of you, as adults then said, well, i'm extremely or very proud to be American.
It's just going down and down and down, and today the lowest numbers of all are, of course, amongst the youth.
Only 18 of 18 to 34 year olds say that they are extremely proud to be an American.
That is really tough to believe.
It just goes back to the framing of the argument.
You know we're we're in such thrall of the talismans.
You know everything now represents something more than what it is.
Everything is a flag status, a mask, has repercussions and insinuations that have absolutely nothing to do with with health or medicine.
Everything is a way to to show or indicate your belief.
And when you conflate politics uh, with patriotism, you're going to get this.
One side is going to put the metaphorical and literal flag in the sand and they're going to own it, and it's not going to leave the other side with much wiggle room except to push back against it, unless they're of a mind to say, okay wait yes, of course I love my country.
Of course I appreciate what Patrick Henry said, even though I don't agree with the way he lived his life.
But look, that was 250 years ago.
What's going to happen Megan, 250 years from now?
That's the question for the guy on the beach.
How is your great great, great great grandson going to feel about you looking back through the mists of time with all of his or her enlightenment and awakening you know, somewhere down the road what?
Protecting What We Hold Dear 00:02:03
What statues are going to be pulled down today?
How are we going to think about, I don't know, meat eaters right, I mean?
Well, it's so much easier to judge than think, and that's why those polls suck so bad, because we're not thinking about our country anymore and we're not thinking about the price that was paid for us.
We're simply judging.
We've all been assigned a little gavel and now we all have, you know, our little smartphone and we all have our connection, and we're just out in the world slapping the gavel down, passing judgment not just on our neighbors, not just on this news network or that news network, but on men and women who have been dead for centuries.
And so when I talk to the park rangers in this, in this movie, a couple of random encounters that I had in Dc and they tell me that the first thing they do every morning, they go out and they, they scrub the filth off the memorials, they get the graffiti off of the monuments.
One said, you know I, I pray that we, We want people to express themselves.
We want a free country that allows for protest, but can't they just use chalk?
Can't they just write what they want on the sidewalk in chalk so the rain will just wash it away?
But no, there's red paint in places where red paint should never be.
They'll never win.
No.
Well, it's they'll never win.
Those guys will get up every day.
They will continue washing the monuments.
You can throw the paint on them all you want.
The United States of America will prevail in protecting the things it holds most dear.
And we saw vandalism even at the Lincoln Memorial.
That's insane.
I mean, like, who, who would dare ever touch that treasure?
Freedom To Screw It Up 00:05:17
But sure enough, there it is, free Gaza.
You know, I've been talking to the audience this week, Mike, because Doug and the family and I were in Scandinavia last two weeks.
We went to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
It was beautiful, absolutely gorgeous part of the world, lovely people.
But you feel these things on an innate level about like who you are, what your background is versus this new place that you're exploring.
And one of the things I was noticing was, what's America?
It's a capitalist country.
We're not a socialist country, though many on the left would like us to be more and more.
And these are democratic socialist nations and they have different policies and they have definitely a better social safety net.
But we asked our one guide, what do you pay in taxes?
And she said 75% of my money.
Okay.
All right.
Well, that's the thing.
All these folks know that no matter what they do or choose, they will be supported by the government till their dying day.
And they also know that whatever they make, at best, they're only going to take home, let's say 25% of it.
Now, what does that do?
Does that just make you feel happy and secure and encourage entrepreneurship, moonshots, right?
Convention, risk, right?
No, I would suggest it does exactly the opposite.
And this to me manifested in small ways.
When you're not in a capitalist society, you walk into a hotel and the Bellman, who normally would rush to take a woman's big bag coming off of it, they're like, you're good.
They don't.
There's no rush.
They're not hustling for a tip.
They don't care.
You go to the restaurants and there's not a waiter who's going above and beyond to try to give you good service, make sure you have a good time so that he gets a good tip.
That's the American capitalist spirit.
If I work harder for you, presumably you will reward me with something that says I value you.
Nope, not there.
It's like, we don't really do that here.
And my government's got me.
I mean, it was, you could feel it.
And I miss that American hustle.
I missed the gunner, you know, that you see.
I miss going like I live outside of New York.
You go into the city, you see these guys everywhere.
You go into a cocktail lounge and these are the movers and shakers of the world having drinks there, talking about the future.
And then you go out on the street and you see the guys who are drilling the streets and with the, you know, doing the dirty jobs.
And they say, hey, sweetheart.
And you say, hey, yo, you, you go guy.
And you thank the cops for their service.
And they've got the New York accent.
I missed all of it.
I didn't really, I couldn't see life at a 6.5.
You know what I mean?
I much rather live in a place where there are ones and tens.
Well, you round the edges off of a thing, you know, and everything is smooth and careful and all terribly polite.
It's really, I think the only four-letter word that really matters in this conversation is risk and the willingness to accept it and society's decision to either reward it, encourage it, or punish it and discourage it.
We're coming out of a three-year period, Megan, right now, I think where risk in all of its forms has been mitigated.
We've attempted to erase it, eliminate it.
You know, I was listening to an old clip.
I posted something a few years ago when Andrew Cuomo, as governor, said no measure, no matter how draconian, could be deemed excessive if it saves a single life.
And, you know, you think about what would really happen to a society that actually believed that.
And we started to see it.
And when you read the texts of our founding fathers and when you look at the affirmative steps that were taken a couple of hundred years ago, the amount of courage, the amount of risk that the signers of the Declaration had to assume and knew they were assuming before they put pen to paper, it's mind-boggling when you weigh and measure it against today's state of mind.
It's, we're like a frog in the boiling water with regard to that.
We've truly embraced a literal safety first mentality in our country, which is absurd.
Safety is never first.
If it were, we'd still be in our homes.
If it were our the speed limit, Cuomo could have dropped the speed limit to five miles an hour, made rubber cars and made all motorists wear a helmet and eliminated left turns.
And it would have saved 35,000 lives a year.
But we don't do that because people weren't made to stay in their homes and cars weren't made to sit in a driveway and ships weren't made to stay in the harbor.
And all of that freedom and all of that individuality, that's what I think you guys probably missed in Scandinavia.
It was the freedom to screw it up.
The Right To Try And Fail 00:15:07
It was the right to try and the concerted effort to encourage the trying and the failing, the flaw, all of it, the stuff that makes it interesting.
That walk down that New York City street, you just envisioned, you know, who knows what that construction worker is going to say next.
He might go too far.
Who knows how they, we don't know.
We're not supposed to know.
It's not supposed to be that anodyne and safe.
You know, that's back to Franklin, right?
Safety and security.
And you get those two things mixed up.
You don't deserve either.
Yeah, no, the right to try.
That's what we give you here in America.
You have the right to try.
You don't have the right to win, no guaranteed success, and no guaranteed safety net for a lot of Americans.
That's also true.
But the right to try and to change your station in life, unlike any other country in the world.
And all right, this brings me back to the movie and one of my favorite stories.
So now, as I said to the audience up top, it's got about 10 or so stories of people whose names you will know for the most part.
Some you won't, but you'll recognize the role that they're being highlighted for.
And the fun part is getting the big reveal at the end.
So I'm not going to ruin it for the audience because I hope they experience it the same way I did.
But I'm going to tell, and I have your permission, I think, to tell one, just so they can get a feel for what's in this movie.
And it's my favorite one.
Okay, so you're going to help me tell it.
Here's a little bit from the movie that will jumpstart this particular story about a guy named Harry sought for.
Bill believed that Harry's daughter would make an excellent wife and planned on proposing after he graduated from Stanford.
All he had to do now was convince Harry that he was a good match for his little girl.
A challenge that would require him to swallow a mouthful of bull testicles.
And you literally mean bull testicles.
So the stars of this little story are Harry, his daughter, and Bill, who needs to impress Harry in order to win the hand or his blessing for the hand of the daughter whom Bill would like to date.
You take it from there.
Yes.
Yes.
So when I wrote that story a couple of years ago, the title was Not Inclined to Judge because our hero, Bill, was not a judgmental guy.
He took everything at face value and he always played the cards he got.
And he fell in love with this woman, Harry's daughter.
And so he basically goes to court her to woo her.
This is a Stanford student, by the way, smart fellow, but he's a bit out of his depth on the lazy bee ranch.
And the old man, Harry, you know, he knows his daughter's a catch.
And when the suitors arrive, he likes to weigh and measure them and see how they'll respond.
In this case, he has them go through some dehorning, which is a very difficult thing to do on a ranch and basic animal husbandry practices and branding and things like that.
And then, of course, we move on to castration, which on a personal level was kind of a big deal for me during Dirty Jobs.
In fact, when I castrated Lambs in season four, won an Emmy Award.
I don't know if you can see it back there, but there it sits.
So I knew that this, I knew that this topic would hit a chord.
And so I tell the story of what Bill does.
And spoiler alert, he's up for the job.
Old Harry takes these testicles off of these bulls with the help of his daughter, who really seems to enjoy it, by the way, and runs them through an ice pick and then puts them on an open flame.
He calls them shishkabals.
And he hands one to Bill.
And Bill takes it off the ice pick and he eats it.
Now, this is a true story.
In fact, I'm going to show you something.
It's so weird that you brought this up.
Your viewers should know, I swear, this isn't scripted, but the prop director two days ago in Camp Pendleton gave me this.
We screened the movie for about a thousand Marines the other day.
Bull testicle.
It says hero bull testicle.
I'm going to open it up for you, Megan.
I'm going to.
Oh, God.
This is what you saw.
This is what you saw on the film.
I'm sorry, but it looks like a penis.
It doesn't even look like a testicle.
It looks like a severed penis.
I can't speak to that, Megan.
I don't know what your experience has been.
Testicles versus penises, bulls versus, you know, Aardvarks, but that's a good-sized testicle.
And that's the...
Was it recently severed?
There's still blood marks on it.
No, no, that's just all Hollywood magic.
That looks like a vein, doesn't it?
It's so realistic.
God, that's just.
This is what Bill had to eat, okay, in order to win Harry's approval in order to get a chance to date his daughter.
He does.
And the two get together and they kind of live happily ever after, except for the fact that Bill waited too long to propose.
And another guy comes to the ranch, another Stanford student who also passes the same testicle test.
He proposes and winds up marrying Sandra Day.
His name, of course, was O'Connor.
And so that couple goes off into the sunset.
But what about Bill?
Poor Bill, the man who's not inclined to judge.
Well, that was Bill Rehnquist.
He and Sandra Day sit on the Supreme Court for decades together.
And the families become dear friends, brought together by the father of a pretty young girl who wanted to see what the men in her life were made of and decided to do that with a litmus test that involved the recently severed testicles of a bull.
Now, a pair of scissors, the dad called the emasculators.
The emasculator.
Look, when you show up, I don't know what your dad was like, but when your old boyfriend showed up knocking at the door, when the old man answers holding a bloody emasculator and says, come in, I'd like to have a word, right?
I mean, that to me is so relatable.
Never mind history.
You know, if you're trying to get permission to tell somebody a larger story or to make a bigger point, you have to get their attention.
That's Dirty Jobs 101.
So the reason that that story is in the film, it's different from all of the other ones.
But the reason I wanted it in there was because it has to do with judgment and it has to do with what people will do in order to get to the heart of a thing, the truth of the matter, the character of a man.
How do we measure that today?
And regarding my earlier comments, you know, how will we judge these people from our past?
And how will we be judged from our grandkids somewhere down the road?
How do we think about our history?
We get to do all that.
But to me, for Bill Rehnquist and Sandra Day to become great friends and colleagues in spite of everything, I just found something really hopeful in that metaphor.
And so the way it works in the movie is it's just a piece of the puzzle.
But the other piece of it, Mike, that I love too, is in the film, you get to, and in 1981, President Ronald Reagan would ask Chief Justice William Rehnquist whether he thought a woman he was considering to appoint to the high court,
the very first woman ever, could handle being on a court with all men being surrounded by that much testosterone.
And the best of all people said, Mr. President, she's good.
She's got trust me.
She is not going to be intimidated by eight old bulls.
You know, like, I mean, it just must have been one of those great moments.
Look, this is why my podcast is called The Way I Heard It.
I wasn't there when Ronald Reagan asked Bill Rehnquist if he could recommend Sandra Day for that position.
But I know for a fact that Bill was there when Harry Day tossed him a severed testicle as his daughter applauded and hoped that he would have the intestinal fortitude to take a bite out of that ball.
Well, he did.
And I, in my mind, as a, you know, a fake cinematographer and an erstwhile writer, I want to see that scene.
I want that moment because I can see it in my mind's eye.
So to suddenly have permission to cast Ronald Reagan and William Rehnquist and create that little moment in history that nobody ever writes about.
I found that story buried in a footnote and a biography on Sandra Day's life.
And to be able to make that a centerpiece of a story, that's a fun way to turn history on its head.
You know, all the facts are right, but it is the way I heard it.
I don't know exactly how Reagan put it.
I don't know precisely what Rehnquist said, but I'd bet big that somewhere in the reptilian part of his brain, he was remembering the emasculator and the way young Sandy applauded in glee.
Those two must have had such fun behind the scenes chemistry when they were deliberating on these cases.
I can't imagine, especially because now Rehnquist was not exactly her boss, but in an even more powerful post than hers, I would have loved to have had a bird's eye view.
I did go to, I was at many arguments where they were present and I went as a reporter to cover Chief Justice Rehnquist's funeral.
It was actually an amazing event.
I mean, everybody was there, of course, but and it led to my one and only meaningful interaction with Justice Antonin Scalia, my very favorite justice ever, who I saw on the steps of the of the facility, the church, was coming out and he came right over to me, Mike.
And I was like, this is it.
He's going to tell me he appreciates my coverage.
He probably watches box.
He's a more conservative guy.
He's going to tell me I'm the only one who truly gets it.
You know, I'd practice law for 10 years.
So I got to leg up and all these other people.
And he did come right over to me and handed me his camera and said, Miss, could you please take my picture with this man right here?
Yeah.
Oh my God, that, I mean, and you know, though, Megan, you know, he knew exactly who you were.
You know, oh, he knew.
But that is such that that's great.
I mean, that tells you, I mean, you, you could take that moment and that would get people interested in hearing more about who Scalia was and why he took the positions he took.
And that's the point of all these stories.
You know, if I can find something in your background that informs and foreshadows the kind of woman you're destined to become, that's where the story starts.
That's what Paul Harvey was so good at doing.
And that's what I've tried to throw out.
Scalia, you know, speaking of some of the desecrations of our flag and people getting upset over seeing the American flag triggered now, you know, in the United States of America, it is legal to burn the flag, which is something we should be proud about.
And Scalia was one of the ones who casted the deciding votes affirming that, saying it is legal.
It is constitutional in this United States of America to burn the flag.
And he said, if this were the United States of Antonin and Scalia, I would make it illegal.
I would make it unconstitutional.
But I am a lawyer in a robe whose job it is to interpret the Constitution as written.
And as written, we have this very precious thing called the First Amendment that gives you a right, a freedom of expression that's written right there.
And it's really unambiguous.
And the reason it's so important to let people burn the flag is because the right to do it is more important than their objection, the objection to seeing somebody do it.
It's funny, though, isn't it, how that logic doesn't quite transfer to, say, the Nazi flag or maybe, I don't know, pick your favorite flag today.
I mean, maybe it's the pride flag.
Do we feel as magnanimous about that?
That guy on the beach you showed me 20 minutes ago, if those flags waving in the breeze behind them were the rainbow flags, would he still be spewing the same kind of thing?
And how would we feel about it?
You know, how do we feel about a person who protests today behind a bandana or a mask?
Are we generous with them?
It feels like we kind of are, but isn't it interesting?
Like, what's the difference between a Klansman who wants to go out there and set something on fire and a protester today who wants to go out there and set something on fire if both of these people are primarily concerned with covering their face?
So, yeah, I'm with Scalia.
If I were wearing the robe, my first duty of care is to the Constitution.
But he's also, it's incumbent on him to share his personal feelings too, because he's an individual and a human.
That's right.
I object.
I don't like it.
I don't want you to do it, but I'm not going to say you don't have that right, especially as a Supreme Court just.
I mean, this is turning into an X-rated show, people.
I think you can ban this.
I object to this prosthetic testicle.
I'd rather not eat it.
But I will.
I will.
Because there's something greater at stake.
Very good.
Do with that metaphor, what you will.
Stand by.
Quick break.
Be Unlikable For Truths Sake 00:15:47
More with Mike Rowe.
You've got to check it out.
The movie is something to stand for.
You're going to see it at movie theaters.
He's making it easy on you.
And it starts tomorrow, only for a limited run.
This is not going to be out in the theaters for that long.
He's just trying to get people to think about this country.
Something to stand for.
Back in a moment.
Joe Biden knows how to do this.
Yes, he knows how to do this.
He's quite good at this.
And, you know, you can't refute anything with him because he just, when I say him, I mean rambles.
Trump.
He tends to just.
But can I mention one thing?
Because out there calling his name.
I said his name.
So that was Whoopi Goldberg spitting, openly spitting on the show of The View, on the set of the View after saying Trump's name, something she has sworn never to do.
She would never say President Trump.
She told David Oxelrod years ago.
And I guess she just caught herself letting his name slip out and thought that was worth spitting openly on the set of ABC News.
Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show here with me today, Mike Rowe, writer and star of Something to Stand For, which is in theaters tomorrow.
You can check it out by going to somethingtostandfor.com, and then it'll show you exactly where you can find it.
That's the SOP movie.
Okay, stop movie.
That's how you find it.
That's the state of America today where we no longer have the Walter Cronkites of the world, but we have openly spitting when the name of the former president comes out of your mouth on the set.
So there's been a slippage in terms of courtesy and behavior and standards.
I think we can agree on that.
Thoughts, if any, on that, Mike?
And also on whether you're going to be watching what could be the only presidential debate of this entire election season on Thursday night?
They say there's going to be two.
We'll see.
There's definitely going to be at least this one.
I'm not sure there's going to be the one.
I think the whole situation is fluid, as they say, but sure, I'll watch.
I might even make popcorn.
I mean, what else can you do?
But bear witness.
And there's a lot to watch.
I don't quite know yet what to think of the reports I've read about the president hunkered down in an airplane hangar with 16 people coaching and prepping and preparing for a moment.
Well, 90 moments, right?
It's a 90-minute debate.
It just, I don't know, again, when I think about the people in this movie, when I think about our founding fathers and how they would prepare and how people spoke back then, and just the sheer poetry of so many of these people, their mastery of the language, their control of rhetoric,
their ability to make a case on the fly, to make a point, to be understood.
That stuff, I don't know where that went.
I mean, hell, our ability to write a letter, Megan.
If you go back and read the letters from soldiers during the Revolution or the Civil War, even in the First World War, we had such a better control of even common people had a seemingly more facile control and understanding of how to be understood.
It's just this thing has been reduced on all sides, especially on the media side, to a kind of kabuki.
You know, I don't even, I don't even know what to watch for when I look at a debate like this, because all of it reeks of preparation, performance, and the moment.
It just, it's drenched with it.
You mentioned Cronkite.
This is something else that I think a lot about.
You know, he used to sign off.
Do you remember how he would sign off every newscast and that's the way it is?
August 4th, 1977, or whatever it was.
Well, that's over, isn't it?
Nobody can look in the lens now and tell you the way it is.
I mean, they try, but you can almost hear the masses giggling from sea to shining sea.
What do you mean that's the way it is?
Who are you to tell me that's the way it is?
What do you know?
We don't trust anybody in front of the camera anywhere close to the degree that we used to trust Uncle Walter.
And that's because we don't trust, nor should we, right?
We should be skeptical first and foremost.
But the reason we need to be more skeptical today than we've ever been in the history of bipeds is because our media has never been less skeptical.
We need people who are willing to hold the elected officials' feet to the fire, regardless of your personal feelings.
We need more people like Scalia, who to your earlier point, would not do a thing, but would enforce the law.
And our media is just not doing their job.
And so it's incumbent on the rest of us to embrace this heightened level of skepticism, which means that Walter Cronkite is not only dead and gone, but any attempt to say, trust me, is over.
This is impacting every single thing in our world, Megan, from paid spokespeople like me from time to time, to journalists, to politicians.
I would suggest to you that anyone who stares into the lens of the camera and speaks with great earnestness about a thing and then concludes with something along the lines of take my word for it is about the most unconvincing, unpersuasive.
That's not for sale anymore.
In my view, the way to be persuasive today is to say, don't take my word for it.
I actually wasn't there, but this is what I read and this is what I think and this is what I believe.
And that's why, whether it's a product that you use or a fact that you're reporting or a headline you're calling into question, we've entered into a place where people are now so skeptical and so dubious and in many cases, so cynical.
that I honestly don't think there's any upside in being persuasive by trying to be persuasive.
So that's a long way of saying, I can't wait to see what happens in this debate because I don't know how either of these two men are going to fundamentally overcome the deep suspicion held so close by so many viewers who are watching.
We smell a fake.
We can smell it.
I mean, I can't believe anybody uses a teleprompter anymore, present company excluded.
But I mean, from a persuasive standpoint, what are we doing?
We say on the one hand that we're desperate for authenticity and then we watch people perform.
You know, there's nothing wrong with a prompter, but show me the watch.
Both going to do it.
They're both going to do it, but Biden's, I mean, there's no question Biden's rehearsing way more than Trump is and he's going to have his canned lines.
And I think Trump will be much more off the cuff and ad-lived.
But when you were talking about, you know, Walter Cronkite and what's changed, all I could think is we, we've made a critical error.
And it's something a Mike Rowe would never have allowed had you been in charge of all the journalism.
And that is we've let our journalism class become part of the elites.
You know, they're, they're no longer those shoe leather, scrappy, working class guys and gals shoving dimes into the payphone, trying to work their sources.
F the man.
I'm not on his side.
I'm on the side of my readers and my viewers and my listeners.
No, now they are on this.
They are the man.
And worse than that, they've forgotten their connection to the other side.
You know, I think about it in terms of my own life.
You can go on a Scandinavian vacation.
You can enroll your kids in the summer club where they learn how to play tennis, but you should never forget that you spent your own childhood.
Your summer yacht club was your mom's sprinkler in the backyard, right?
Like that, to forget that is the unforgivable part of what the journalism class has done.
Yes, a thousand times.
Yes.
You, I mean, we often say, look, our elected officials work for us.
Well, of course they do, but they have a duty of care to groups.
They have a duty of care to their own party.
They have all sorts of other things, all kinds of chronologies and hierarchies that make that platitude not terribly plausible.
Journalists don't.
Journalists work for all of us.
We need you on that wall, right?
We need you to be skeptical.
We need you to be disagreeable, unlikable, and unflappable in your relentless pursuit of the truth.
Because if you don't do that, if you don't question the experts in every other field, you will leave us no choice but to do that for ourselves.
And we can't because we don't know who to believe anymore, because anybody anywhere can go to any website to find any number of self-appointed experts to confirm that which they hold dear.
And so we're lost.
We need you guys.
We need journalists back and we need them scrappy and pissed off and highly dubious of every single thing.
You said it exactly right.
The goal of any journalist should not be to be liked.
It should be to be respected.
That's it.
If you're in the being liked game, you're failing.
Mike Rowe, both likable and respectable, the very rare combination with the movie Something to Stand For.
Go and see what theaters you can watch it in at somethingtostandfor.movie.
Great to see you, my friend.
It is great to see you.
Please tell Doug hello.
And I swear to God, if there's any justice in this world, we all have to get together in person sometime with a frosty beverage and do this right.
Oh, it's happening.
All three of us are counting the moments.
I look forward to it.
All the best, sir.
Till then, thanks.
See you soon.
And we'll be right back.
I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.
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Hillary Clinton is out with a new op-ed in the New York Times, giving President Biden tips on how to handle Donald Trump during the debate tomorrow night.
Surprisingly, one of her tips was not to get the questions ahead of time from the DNC.
That is so helpful.
Donna Brazil did me a solid.
That's really what her op-ed should have said.
Plus, why is Jennifer Lopez suddenly trying to pretend she's not mega-rich, flying economy, and obviously leaking a picture of herself to TMZ?
There are so many stories to get to with our friend, Daily Mail columnist Maureen Callahan.
I want to tell you right now, Maureen is also out with a must-read new book.
This is the must-read book of the summer.
It's called Ask Not, the Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed.
You will fly through this thing.
There's so many interesting new nuggets on this bizarre family.
Trust me, you're going to want to read it and you're going to want to buy it for everyone you know.
She's giving us the first exclusive interview on it ahead of the book's release next week.
Maureen, welcome back to the show.
Megan, thank you so much for having me.
And thank you so much for supporting this book.
As I've said before, your opinion means so much to me.
And giving my book your stamp of approval is just, you're the best.
You're the best.
Oh, oh my gosh.
Thank you so much.
I enjoyed every page.
And some of these topics and cases that you go into, I have studied pretty extensively.
I learned so many new facts, even on the things I thought I knew well.
It left me feeling I never want to really do a story again without having Maureen research it.
Like she just gets things nobody else gets.
So anyway, we'll get into all of it.
Let's tick through a couple of the news headlines because I always love getting your take on what's in the headlines.
But then I really want to spend all of our time on your book because it's just so good.
Let's start with politics.
Okay.
First of all, we showed our audience this clip the other day.
Let's just remind them.
SOT 22 of AOC going into the Bronx, acting like Cardi B, like, yeah, yo, screaming, trying to get people riled up for what?
To vote for Jamal Bowman, fellow member of the squad, who went down in flames last night.
So let's remind them what AOC looked like rallying for him.
Whips the hair down.
Look, are you ready to take this burden back?
Are you guys young?
Are you ready to win me?
Well, apparently not, Maureen, because Jamal Bowman, the I didn't really pull the fire alarm congressman, was booted out very easily by his Democratic challenger for this role.
And they were not ready to fight on behalf of anything AOC was selling, as it turns out in the Bronx.
What do you make of it?
Or take anything back?
Dumping Burdens On The Guy 00:14:52
I mean, what a ridiculous and embarrassing display.
This woman is positioning herself as a future elder stateswoman of the far left.
So what does she do?
She gets up and she cosplays as Cardi B, singing along to lyrics, calling women bitches and hoes in support of a guy who is a rape denier who said that what Hamas did on the seventh was an out and out lie, that there was no such thing as mass rapes or killings of women and babies.
This is, I mean, you have to marvel as ever at the lack of self-awareness.
It's amazing to me.
Jamal Bowman then getting up in his like sleeveless muscle shirt, slamming this stool around and, you know, yelling all manner of things about taking things back and blah, blah, blah.
And you contrast that with his appearance in Westchester in like a suit and a tie and being all decorous, you know, as it would be.
It's just, it's, it's remarkable.
It's a great kickoff to the summer.
Yes, well said.
I agree with that.
So Jamal Bowman in the final stretch before he knew he was going to lose, played the race card, came out and said during his final debate, I'm an outspoken black man.
And said his challenger supporters don't want that because it challenges their power.
Right.
When in doubt, play the black card.
It didn't work.
And even now in defeat where he didn't concede, he came out and played the victim.
Listen.
We should be outraged when a super pack of dark money can spend $20 million to brainwash people into believing something that isn't true.
Unfortunately, some so-called Democrats are aligning themselves with radical, racist, right-wing Republicans.
We should be outraged about that.
Ah, you see, that's why he lost to Democrat George Latimer 58.4 to 41.6, because those dumbass, misinformed Democrats aligned with racist Republicans, Maureen.
Well, Megan, I think you really have a hard time playing that card in a post-Obama America.
I think if you're going to call that segment of the electorate racists, I think you then have to turn to Hillary Clinton, who endorsed Latimer.
And lastly, I think the loss lays at your feet when, as at that rally, you take the stage full of vim and vigor and you yell things like, we gonna show them who the fuck we are.
Well, you did and you lost.
Right.
Noted.
And we are moving on.
Okay, back to speaking of Hillary, her op-ed, which is really pretty spectacular in the New York Times.
First of all, my team just showed me this.
Have you seen the cover for her new book?
Something lost, something gamed, gained.
A game deserved Freddy and Slip.
And she, I like the amount of retouching on this face, I haven't seen since, you know, Joan Rivers had her 15th surgery.
God love Joan.
This, I don't know what she's trying to be with this soft focus.
My executive producer, Steve Krackar, is like, she looks nothing like herself.
I said, well, why are you saying that?
Like she's Cindy Crawford.
That's a good thing in the case of Hillary Clinton.
We shouldn't be upset.
Sorry.
Personal insult, but yeah.
My mind, though.
Like the air toucher, the retoucher deserves a huge raise.
This is a this is a much more soft, welcoming, friendly, I suppose, Hillary.
Although again, to self-awareness, something lost, huh?
I wonder what that was, really.
You know, the woman who wrote a book called What Happened, like marveling over all the external forces that could have caused her loss in a presidential election that was handed to her on a silver platter.
And then you get into this op-ed, which again is just remarkable for what's in there.
She has a paragraph in there about all the preps she did to debate Donald Trump herself in 2016.
And she ends that passage with these two words.
I kid you not.
It worked.
It worked?
You lost.
If it worked, you would have won.
Why aren't you the president if you're so smart about how to debate Trump, asking for a friend?
Like it didn't work out for you.
But she comes in like the elder stateswoman, like you can do it perfectly is really what she's arguing.
And it won't help because you can't debate this insane man.
She writes, it's a waste of time to try to refute Mr. Trump's arguments like in a normal debate.
It's nearly impossible to identify what his arguments even are.
He starts with nonsense and then digresses into blather.
This has gotten only worse in the years since we debated.
So this is, these are just insults, right?
It's like, actually, what he did was he got out there and said you'd be in jail if he were in charge.
And people loved the challenge of power of somebody who'd been considered untouchable.
You in the meantime, as we now know, were cheating behind the scenes of these debates.
He was not cheating with the Russians or anyone else.
And he was raising issues that really mattered to working class and middle America, whom she totally ignored.
None of that's in the op-ed.
None of it's in the op-ed.
By the way, she also has a line in which she refers to Biden.
She calls him this.
the most empathetic president we've ever had.
I cannot repeat this enough.
Ashley Biden's diary.
Was I molested?
I think so.
Showers with my dad.
Probably not appropriate.
Let's talk about the debate tomorrow night.
Let's talk about which moderators are going to go all in on Donald Trump.
And I guarantee you the opening question is going to be, Mr. Trump, President Trump rather.
You are now a convicted felon.
How is it that you can tell the American people you possess the character for the highest office in the land?
Do we think a single one of those people is not only going to raise Ashley Biden's diary verified by Ashley herself in court filings?
Do we think they're going to raise the concerns of world leaders at the G7 who said they have never seen an American president so out of capacity mentally and physically?
Are we going to reference the Wall Street Journal story two weeks ago in which 45 government officials, Republican and Democrat, said that they were so concerned about Biden's fitness for office and all but said he falls asleep in meetings and he clocks out at three in the afternoon.
What are we going to discuss this?
I would love for Hillary Clinton to have raised some of these truths in this self-reflecting, self-regarding op-ed in which she, the biggest loser in modern American politics, is telling President Biden how to beat this guy.
The other absurdity is in all of these debates, whether Trump was debating Hillary or Joe Biden, the moderators were on the opposing side.
They were all against Trump.
She had the assistance of every moderator they appeared in front of, as did Joe Biden.
That was obvious to anybody watching.
It's a lot easier to feel you did well when you're not getting asked the most pointed questions, when the other guy is taking all of the frontal blows.
And you're right.
Like if this, by the way, a prediction.
I think if they ask Biden about his age and infirmity, then they'll feel the need to ask Trump the same question.
They're going to both sides that one.
Like, oh, well, they're both old.
Yeah, they're both old.
And Trump has normal, I'm getting older signs of aging, like he mistakes a name here or there, stuff that we all kind of do after we hit 50.
It's not, there's no comparing what Trump is experiencing and what Joe Biden, no, no comparing.
And no respectable, honest debate moderator would feel the need to both sides it.
We'll see whether they do it.
Okay, so we'll see.
That's tomorrow night.
Much more to get to here.
I got to ask you about Jennifer Lopez.
This story has been everywhere.
You're the only one I wanted to talk to about it.
Now, J-Lo, when she left, when she and A-Rod broke up, he was cheating on her.
All the tabloids had the fact that he was dating some reality secretly star while he was supposed to be living with J-Lo.
And like that, she was suddenly all over the magazines.
She suddenly had the tabloid photographers catching her everywhere.
And within about two minutes, she was back with Ben Affleck and completely changed the news narrative to, Bennifer, they're back.
They're amazing.
Not J-Lo is kind of past her prime and got cheated on, right?
That's she didn't want that headline.
And I understand why, but I'm convinced she got back together with Ben Affleck to get rid of those headlines.
Then she went so far as to marry the guy.
And shock of all shocks, it's not working out.
So now the PR campaign is back into gear, Maureen.
And you see her.
I mean, I'm sure you saw the shots of her in Italy on a boat, like by herself, taking pictures of her own ass.
I saw those pictures, Megan, and I was like, this woman is maybe 13 years old emotionally.
Like your marriage is in tatters.
Every project you've put out this year has failed.
You had to cancel your tour because when you reduced your tickets to $9, Americans still don't want any part of you.
You vamoose to Italy to lick your wounds.
You're in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
And what do you do?
You take out your cell phone to shoot pictures of your own ass.
Are you kidding me?
Oh my lord.
I think we've talked about this before, but for anyone who hasn't seen her documentary called The Greatest Love Story Never Told about her and Ben Affleck, I mean, never told.
And immediately it is beyond incredible.
And like the way that Ben talks about her on camera, he talks about her, Megan.
He literally says like, she's a bottomless pit of need.
Right.
This is her husband.
Oh my Lord.
And then the shot of her in coach, that was like chef's kick.
Okay, so tell them what you're talking about.
So she's on like a, almost like a puddle jumper in Europe.
It's like an hour-long flight between countries.
And somebody gets a picture of J-Lo looking downward, seated in coach.
Jenny from the block.
She's just Jenny from the block.
She's not trying to like us.
She's like us, not trying to unload a $60 million mansion, you know, and navigate a divorce while we all know she's like frantically trying to line up her next victim because she cannot be single for a single second.
You know, we have to all participate in this delusion that Jenny's just a dewy little starlet, not like a thrice divorced mother of two.
Yeah.
And oh my God.
Yeah.
I mean, like fresh off the heels of trying to sell this relationship as the greatest love story.
Never mind the never told, never told.
It's been told incessantly.
We're just not that interested.
We pulled, knowing that you were coming on, a clip from said, quote, documentary.
Here's a, here's a bit of it.
Sat 24.
On that first day, I showed everybody this book.
This book is a book that Ben gave me on our first Christmas back together.
It is every letter and every email that we wrote to each other from 20 years ago.
And today it became like our Bible and we just left it there in the studio and people would thumb through it.
Can we look at it?
It's like you've been showing all the musicians all those letters.
And they're like, yeah, we call you Pen Affleck.
And I was like, oh my God.
What's a because what's a love letter from your husband if you don't share it with the world?
Right.
I mean, Jenny from the block is such a strong, proud Latina, you know, a real woman who gets shit done, but it doesn't mean anything.
It's the world.
And by the way, the like 35 songwriters she had to hire to articulate this great personal love story do not have access to the J-Lo and Ben Affleck quote unquote Bible.
And, you know, watching that documentary, which I did with my jaw on the floor the entire time, what really struck me was there's a real strain of cruelty in there because that Bible, which she so proudly holds up, holds up to the camera is dated like 2001 to 2024 and counting.
And what that says is he was writing to her the entire time he was married to Jennifer Garner, the mother of his three children.
On what planet does this woman feel the need to try to humiliate a woman that in her mind, you know, she's like vanquished, you know, as the one who landed the amazing Ben Affleck, you know, the alcoholic, degenerate gambler who, despite his protestations, we all kind of believe screwed the nanny in the house.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Who won't, who won't, who finds Republicans so disgusting, he won't even act in a movie across from one.
That's from his own lips.
So she was just fine with him marrying him.
And now that it's going south, he must be destroyed.
We're seeing all the articles leaked about how he's mean, he's sour puss.
She's done all she can, Maureen, but he's just too unhappy and unlikable to save.
Another Failed Marriage 00:02:13
She's really got to move on now.
It's like, this is yet another failed marriage for her.
She's trying to dump it all on the guy, right?
She's taking no responsibility.
I tried.
I did my best.
I lied to everybody about the greatest relationship.
What more can a girl do?
I guess it's back to my ass.
I'm sorry.
I have zero respect for this person and I see what she's doing with the tabloid press.
And America's too smart to fall for this.
She's failing.
She's failing in all of her professional lanes.
The only way she's not failing is she's got a huge social media following.
So she's reinventing herself as a Kardashian.
Yeah, she is.
But, you know, I think part of the factor here is that the American people, like, we just don't like her.
We don't like her.
We know she's a big phony.
We know all the stories about her.
Like the one thing you can say about Ben Affleck is like reportedly he is a great tipper.
And wherever he goes, he will lay down like hundreds or thousands.
And she snatches those tips back out of the hands of working people.
Jenny does.
Oh, she takes the tips.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yeah.
How do we know that?
They're all known in Vegas for doing this.
Oh, it's all over the place.
You just, you know, Megan, really, you've got bigger things to worry about.
Like the likes of me, I control like corners of the internet for these little breadcrumbs that I just adore, really.
But it says everything.
Like this woman who's worth, you know, more than he is, she's worth like $450 million.
So flying coach, that's bullshit.
But pulling tips out of the hands of working people in like the hospitality industry, one of the hardest industries to work in, you are lower than low.
So we don't like her.
Also, another nice little nugget for Jenny's Annis Horribilis.
Sephora is discontinuing her cosmetics line.
Great.
Great.
She will be reduced to a reality show.
I think you're right.
She's going to go the route of the Kardashians, try to make herself relatable.
No one wants to hear it.
Yeah, it's done.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
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