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Oct. 15, 2024 - The Megyn Kelly Show
02:10:22
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Time Text
Defining Domestic Enemies 00:14:48
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at least.
Through a new lie about the enemy within, a phrase she keeps using against him and to be honest, misusing against him.
We'll fact check it.
Meantime, her media tour has her interviewed by Charlemagne Lagade, who's been on this program too, tonight, Brett Baer tomorrow night.
And could Joe Rogan be in her future?
Trump let it slip on a podcast this week that he's going on Rogan.
I haven't heard Rogan say it yet.
In the last election, Rogan refused to have Trump on because he said he didn't want to help him.
You know, he seems to have moved more to the right since then.
He was a Bernie Sanders voter back then, Rogan was.
So I believe it'll likely happen.
He's obviously friends, well, friendly with Elon.
He's had Tucker on.
So we'll see.
But for Kamala Harris to go on Joe Rogan, I mean, can you imagine?
Would she do the three hours?
I will be glued to my phone.
I hope it happens.
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As we've been reporting, the polls are tightening.
I mean, it's dead even now.
The NBC poll, the ABC poll, ABC had her up two.
NBC had them perfectly tied.
Both were a slip from a five-point heritage advantage.
So you can see for her team, though, tied is better than losing.
She's going in the wrong direction.
And you can tell because Vice President Kamala Harris is starting to think of desperation, as my friend Maureen used to say.
She thinks of desperation.
Not about her, but it's just about Rando's.
I mean, why else would she be going on Fox News after being completely cloistered since she launched?
Now she's going on Fox.
She might go on Rogan.
She's desperate.
She's seeing something very alarming on her internals that we're just starting to see in the public polling.
So in the context of all of this, yesterday her campaign rolled out a new-ish, kind of like revamped old attack that's sort of now a new attack against former President Donald Trump.
And it's right in line with what we were told will be part of her new strategy, which is trying to demonize Trump.
Welcome to the new strategy.
Same as the old one.
Of course, it's been many years we have heard how Mr. Trump is a threat to democracy himself.
He's going to end the Constitution, they say.
taking out some random quote from some random tweet or truth social post.
It's strange how I haven't heard him actually promising to do that or saying it over and over again on the campaign trail.
But okay, that's what they want to go with, though we're supposed to ignore all the things Kamala Harris said in writing and explicitly she wanted to do just in 2019.
But this is how politics works.
They're going over and over again how he'll use the Department of Justice to go after his political enemies.
I mean, a party that did that would be absolutely horrid.
You would never want them to win the White House, would you?
But this new-ish line of attack is that Trump sees anyone who does not support him, anyone who does not support him, as a quote, an enemy from within against whom he might unleash the U.S. military.
All right.
That's where they've gone with some comments Trump has made on the campaign trail lately that do not say that.
But when pulled out of context and bastardized, sure, you could make them say anything.
Same as I could make an AI bot say anything.
It began yesterday with a new ad released by the Harris campaign.
Watch.
Donald Trump, more dangerous, more erratic than ever before, echoing fascists.
The worst people are the enemies from within.
The enemy from within are more dangerous than Russia.
We have some very bad people.
They shouldn't be very easily handled by the military.
Trump's basically going to have the army show up at your front door if you don't vote for him.
That sounds ominous.
But we just decided to take a little fact check of the examples in that ad.
In the first clip, you heard Mr. Trump say, the worst people are the enemies from within.
The clip was taken from a rally he held in Coachella, California this past weekend.
In the full clip, Mr. Trump was talking about Congressman Adam Schiff.
The worst people are the enemies from within.
The sleaze bags like a guy that you're going to elect to the Senate.
Shifty Adam Schiff.
He's a sleazebag.
That's it.
He doesn't like Adam Schiff.
Who cares?
What the voters need to remember, it was Congressman Schiff who pushed the Russian collusion lie for years, years against Trump.
He eventually got censured for being a liar and said he wore it like a badge of honor.
He's open about it.
He promoted it all over MSNBC.
Date time, prime time, he couldn't get enough of the cameras to say how bad Trump was.
He read the steel dossier into the congressional record.
And when the investigation fell apart, he never owned it.
He never apologized.
He never showed any remorse because he feels none.
He tried to ruin Trump's first term with a phony lie about him being a Russian agent.
Mr. Schiff has wanted to see Mr. Trump impeached, thrown out of office.
He's been hoping and praying to see Donald Trump led away in handcuffs.
So maybe that's why Donald Trump sees him as the enemy, because it's what Mr. Schiff loves to be when it comes to Donald Trump.
So please spare me and keep that in mind when you see these dishonest ads.
Next up in the ad, you hear Trump say, the enemy from within are more dangerous than Russia.
This was taken from a rally in Wisconsin on October 6th.
He was actually talking about fascists, Marxists, and communists that he believes are pulling the strings in Washington.
The enemy from within, the crazy lunatics that we have, the fascists, the Marxists, the communists, the people that we have that are actually running the country, not her.
She's not running it, and Biden's not running it either.
And you all know that those people are more dangerous, the enemy from within, than Russia and China.
This is a political argument.
This is so like this is generic political argument.
These people are our enemies.
Same as he says the press is the enemy of the people.
They're working against the will of the people to undermine democracy.
I mean, this is like the Democrats say this stuff all the time.
This is not about arresting private citizens in their home or unleashing the Navy SEALs as you go for a swim in the Atlantic to come get you because you voted Trump.
The last example in her ad is won the campaign, Harris campaign and corporate media are really seizing on.
In the ad, Trump says, we have some very bad people should be very easily handled by the military.
Gonna have paratroopers landing in your backyard wanting to see how you voted.
It was taken from an interview he just did with Maria Bartaromo on Fox Business this past Sunday.
But the question Trump was asked was whether he was expecting any chaos on Election Day.
And the reason she asked him that is that President Biden recently said he's concerned Election Day will not be peaceful.
And he's clearly suggesting Trump supporters will be responsible for that.
And Ms. Bartaromo in the question poses to Trump, what do you think is going to happen?
And in setting it up, she reminds him that since he's left office, many foreign nationals have illegally come over the border.
So she kind of raises two issues in one, saying we've got illegals here who are murderers.
You'll hear it.
And also, Joe Biden says we're going to have chaos on election day.
So what do you think?
And you will hear in Mr. Trump's answer, he is talking about possible election day chaos, which she raised and Biden raised in reference to leftist radicals and the potential use of the National Guard and military if things spin out of control.
Listen.
What about that, though?
Are you expecting chaos on Election Day?
No, I know things.
Not from the side that votes for Trump.
But I'm just wondering if these outside agitators will start up on Election Day.
Let's say you win.
I mean, let's not, let's, let's remember, you've got 50,000 Chinese nationals in this country in the last couple of years.
You have people on the terrorist watch list, 350 in the last couple of years.
You've got, like you said, 13,000 murderers and 15,000 rapists.
What are you expecting?
Joe Biden said he doesn't think it's going to be a peaceful Election Day.
Well, he doesn't have any idea what's happening in Roferas.
He spends most of his day sleeping.
I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in and destroying our country.
By the way, totally destroying our country.
The towns, the villages, they're being inundated.
But I don't think they're the problem in terms of election day.
I think the bigger problem are the people from within.
We have some very bad people.
We have some sick people, radical left lunatics.
And I think they're the big, and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can't let that happen.
It makes perfect sense what he is saying.
Who organized all these protests on college campuses?
People like George Soros, who funded the tents and wanted chaos on the campuses because he wants a very different agenda than a capitalist free society like we actually have here in America.
What do you think she's talking about there?
What do you think Donald Trump is thinking about?
He's thinking about the chaos that Joe Biden says is going to happen on election day.
Maria's saying, yeah, there could be.
What would you do?
And he's saying, I would not let that shit spin out of control like we've seen in other situations, right?
He's saying, if I need the National Guard to maintain order around an election, then I will use it.
He's not saying he's going to go arrest people who vote for Trump in their home.
It's just ridiculous.
Anyway, you know what they do.
Here was Vice President Harris and Governor Tim Walz last night thinking they got a live one.
Watch.
Americans who don't support him.
Just to be clear, if any of your neighbors or friends or anybody thinks about that, you know who he's talking about?
He's talking about you.
He's talking about the enemy within our country, Pennsylvania.
He's talking about that he considers anyone who doesn't support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country.
This is a murder.
For reasons, I believe so strongly that a second Trump term would be a huge risk for America and dangerous.
Could you please stop?
Could you just please stop?
All right.
Because the man's already had two assassination attempts and that kind of rhetoric is not helpful.
You know you're lying.
The media complied.
They lied too.
It's such bullshit.
Anyone who does not support him is going to get arrested or get a visited, get a visit from the military.
Sure.
Sure.
Joining me now to discuss this and much more.
Josh Hammer, senior editor at large for Newsweek and host of the Josh Hammer show and America on trial with Josh Hammer.
And also with me, Delano Squires.
He's a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a contributor at The Blaze.
Guys, welcome.
So irritating, so dishonest.
Two beats of a pause and boom, right back to the incendiary rhetoric about what a threat to our country, the future of our country and people's individual liberties he is.
Josh?
Yeah, Megan, where to begin here.
So first of all, from one lawyer to another, the last I checked, the president of the United States takes an oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
So if it is, if it is not appropriate to talk about domestic enemies, that would have been news to James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and all the founding fathers.
They literally put that as a requirement every time the commander in chief takes the oath of office.
Second of all, what he is clearly talking about, as you just alluded to, is actual domestic anarchy, the likes of which we saw during the Black Lives Matter and Tifa riots in the summer of 2020.
That was when Tom Cotton, God bless him, wrote the now infamous New York Times op-ed calling to send in the troops.
Tom Cotton was right to call for that.
And by the way, in hindsight, you know, Donald Trump didn't actually really follow that advice, did he?
He didn't actually call in the National Guard.
Yeah, and he was president.
He didn't actually follow that advice.
So they're crying wolf where we had a clear example of him actually having the ability to do this to follow a leading senator, Tom Cotton.
He actually chose not to do it.
Second of all, though, I think the more important point here, we are dealing with a Democrat lawfare complex right now, Megan, as you and I have discussed on your show before, that is prosecuting him twice at the federal level and two at the state level.
They are coming at him with everything they've got to throw him in jail, to bankrupt him, to destroy his lives.
There have been two, possibly three assassination attempts now.
If you include the Riverside County stuff at Coachella this past Sunday, they have come within literal millimeters of taking out his life on national television before a global audience, calling him a threat to democracy, a fascist, Hitlerite dictator, throw in all these adjectives and adverbs that you want to there.
At some point, you would think you would have a modicum of self-awareness such that you lose the moral high ground to condemn your opponent for talking about the concept of domestic enemies, which, oh, by the way, as I just said a minute ago, the founding fathers actually explicitly put into the oath of office.
So this is absurd.
Darker Political Rhetoric 00:15:11
I believe this is what psychologists call projection as well, frankly.
And I don't think any none of us should have any of it.
It's total, total bullshit, as you said.
Tolano, what do you think?
I mean, Josh to the words right out of my mouth, particularly on the projection point, right?
When they talk about a second Trump term would be weaponizing the Department of Justice against your political enemies.
In my mind, I'm like, okay, that's what we're living through right now.
And this is just a reminder that the left often accuses the right of exactly what it is doing at any given time.
So I'm not surprised by this.
To me, this is, to your point, Megan, this is what a campaign that's in desperation mode looks and sounds like.
But, you know, the left is fine with fiery political rhetoric as long as they are the ones doing the speaking and conservatives are the ones who are at the other end of that type of language.
Listen to this, Delano, because they really, I mean, we've seen the polls tighten.
You know, we've seen it from Kamala Harris had the bounce or the bump, whatever, since she was anointed.
And she was kind of up here.
There's a little difference between them.
And now we've seen it go steadily down like this to where they're tied.
And most people believe that the tie goes to Trump.
Whether they fix the polls or not, Trump does a very good job historically of getting the low propensity voters to come out for him.
And they're very worried that's going to happen again and that those college educated white liberals are not going to be able to get her over the top.
So as a result, just take a look at what has happened now.
This is a montage of some Democrats and never Trumpers.
I mean, truly going into meltdown mode with three weeks to go, literally to the day as of today.
Donald Trump, anybody who doesn't agree with him is the enemy.
This is not Dukakis versus Bush, that this is not Republican versus Democrat.
This is not left versus right.
We are talking about the possibility of the return to power of a convicted felon, rapey seditionist who threatens to undo the constitutional order.
There is a coming massive crisis that's going to occur on November 5th with the election, in which even if Kamala Harris wins the election and wins those battleground states, the Trump team is going to declare victory with JD Vance at his side.
Focus on what at stake here, that literally this election is about the Constitution.
And we're not going to have one if we lose it.
He time and again tried to push the limits in a truly fascist manner.
He is lying.
He is lying about migrants.
He's lying about crime.
His rhetoric is only getting darker and more dangerous.
His rhetoric is getting darker and more dangerous.
It's unbelievable that these people have such little self-awareness that they will go on TV and say these types of things.
I mean, I know one MSNBC analyst, Ellie Mistell, has argued that we should tear up the Constitution altogether.
So when I see that network...
He's a crazy lunatic.
Yes, very much so.
I'm not even a lawyer, and I can tell that from the things that he says.
But I mean, these are people who feign concern for the Constitution one day and then say America, which is corrupt at its core, needs to be remade in a more progressive image the next day.
So it really is strange to hear them speak this way because, as I said, some of these folks are the types of people who think that the American flag itself is a symbol of hate.
And they code the American flag as something conservative.
But all of a sudden, they seem to muster patriotism when it comes to defeating the former president.
So I just assume that we're going to get more and more of this up until we get to November 5th.
And we'll see whether it'll subside depending on which way the election goes.
Right.
You'll see.
So Glenn Young of Virginia went on CNN yesterday and Jake Tapper was raising some of these same Trump quotes, trying to get Junckin to disavow or comment on, et cetera.
Look what happened.
But I was literally reading his quotes.
I'm literally reading his quotes to you and I played them earlier so you could hear that they were not made up by me.
He's literally talking about quote radical left lunatics.
And then one of those lunatics he addressed, he mentioned was Congressman Adams.
Talking about Donald Trump saying that he wants to use the National Guard in the military to go after the left.
That's what he's saying.
I don't believe that's what he's saying.
But listen, you and I are going to argue about that.
But I would suggest if you would play the quote and I read it to you.
If you would all meet.
I wish that he weren't saying that, but that's what he's saying.
Jake, all the time, people are taking little snippets of contact and turning it into a big, a big narrative.
I think exactly what he's concerned about, because I've heard him express it before, are the number of national security risks, violent criminals, and folks who are coming into this country where we don't know where they are that are committing crimes and put people's safety at risk.
Interesting.
So Youngin is seizing on the other half of Maria's question there, Josh.
But, you know, Jake does a sleight of hand there in the way he's, right?
It's like you've forgotten that this was all raised in the context of Biden's predicting chaos on election day.
Maria adds in the fact that we've got these illegals who have done God knows what in this country.
And what do you think is going to happen?
How would you control it to Trump?
And Trump says, I think we're more at threat from the enemies within who are planning on unleashing chaos.
And if I need to maintain order, then I will use the National Guard or what I need to use.
It's not literally, you saw how Kamala Harris spun it.
I will say this, Youngkin, I like him.
I would vote for him in a New York Minute, but he's no JD Vance.
JD Vance has been absolutely killing it of late.
No doubt about that whatsoever on the campaign trail and his interviews.
Obviously, he clobbered Tim Wallace in that VP debate.
But just one comment there on Glenn Younkin.
So he's totally right to reframe this in the national security counter-jihadist counter-terrorist context.
I'm not sure that I'm ready to move on, Megan.
I mean, we just had the one-year commemoration of October 7th last week.
I'm not sure that I'm ready to move on from what we have seen, for instance, on our campuses marching down Broadway in New York City, Michigan Avenue, in Chicago over the past year.
We have seen the unfurling of U.S. recognized foreign terrorist organization flags, the Hezbollah flag on Princeton University's campus, glory to our martyrs projected on the side of a building in George Washington University.
I mean, are there not enemies?
Are there not enemies within right here on U.S. soil that have gotten here in part due to the horrific open border policies of this administration?
There were eight Tajiki nationals arrested a few months ago with clear ISIS connections.
They recently arrested a Pakistani national who was threatening to blow up a Chabad site in New York City.
Yes, there were eight Tajiki nationals.
I don't even know what that is.
What's a Tajiki?
Someone from Tajikistan.
Never, never.
Fair enough, but the point is there are a lot of people here from all these various countries, many of which end in Stan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, whatever.
Kazakhstan.
That are here with clear and unambiguous foreign terror connections.
And if that is not a domestic enemy within, if the people in Dearmoor, Michigan who are clamoring on the streets, waving the Hezbollah flag and calling Hassan Nasrallah a martyr, which they were literally doing in a clip I saw two days ago in Dearborn, Michigan, there was a leading imam.
I think the mayor actually might have been there.
They were all praising the great martyr and Ahasan Nasrallah.
How else to describe this other than an enemy within?
If it gets out of hand, how is the National Guard not appropriate to quash these enemies within if it actually comes to that?
So I'm just not buying this faux moral high ground by people like Jake Tapper who really ought to know better.
Yeah.
All right.
So in the meantime, Delano, we've got panic on the Dem front when it comes to men writ large and young black and Hispanic men in particular.
Black and Hispanic men, but in particular, young black and Hispanic men, because the numbers are not good for her with them.
They're historic, at historic lows right now.
And so she's rolled out a plan that's going to, she thinks, appeal to young black voters and young Hispanic voters like she wants to legalize weed.
Sagar and Jetty was online today saying, just walk me through again how that's not racist, Alec.
I know I'm going to get the young black guys.
I'm going to start legalizing drugs and then I'll get them all.
I mean, if Trump did that, can you imagine?
And something about Bitcoin and she's going to make it easier for them to get loans and so on.
There are real questions about whether any of this is constitutional, her specific plans to get loans for black people that wouldn't presumably be given to white people.
But what do you make of her, her reach out now?
Because she's, you know, trying to buy votes.
I think it's another sign of desperation.
You know, I've been off of Twitter X for, you know, the last week.
I told myself I was going to take the month of October off so I can concentrate on things I need to do.
But I snuck back on yesterday and I did a quick search of the words black men on her Twitter timeline, her ex timeline.
And it went from yesterday, a post yesterday, two posts yesterday, back to 2020.
So it's clear that the only times that she's interested in messaging to black men are when it's time for an election.
And this is not even specific to Kamala Harris.
The Democratic Party is a party of matriarchy and post-second wave feminism.
They are not a party that knows how to speak to men, largely because it is a party that resents men.
And there are no men.
Obviously, they have issues with straight white men, unless they're trying to elect them president, like Joe Biden.
But they have a particular antipathy towards black men who don't carry the flag in the same way that black women do.
And so what you see Kamala Harris trying to do is address the problem that's clear that she has with black men and going doing black media.
And, you know, she had President Barack Obama out in Pittsburgh last week, hectoring and lecturing black men at her campaign, her campaign site.
So this is a problem that the party has.
This is a structural problem.
This is not a problem about one specific candidate.
A party that upholds the matriarchy and thinks that masculinity is toxic is going to have a problem speaking to men.
And what I see, particularly from her and her surrogates, is that they are deaf to the needs of black men.
And this is why they speak in sign language, shame, insults, guilt, and nagging.
And that is their primary method of communication when it comes to this specific demographic group.
You know, I have to say, I really don't want to hear it.
I don't want to hear their lectures on how they're not toxically masculine over on the Dem side when they've got a vice presidential candidate who wants to let boys into every single girl's sport, locker room, and private space.
And they've got a husband to the next possible female president, first possible female president, who has allegedly hit a woman across the face so hard that she spun around.
Not to mention knocked up the nanny while he was married to wife number one.
I've had it.
I don't want to be lectured by these people or the media that refuses to ask Doug M. Hoff when he's right in front of them about these allegations.
This is not like some random, oh, somebody sent out a mean tweet about Doug Amhoff that we have no idea whether this is an in-depth report in the Daily Mail with three independent witnesses, one of whom, a professional male, who said he was on the phone with her right after she got smacked.
She's a professional, successful lawyer.
These are ear witnesses right after the fact.
Two out of the three, one came a year later.
And to not even ask him, there was yet another loser who had Doug Amhoff right across from her.
First, we had Tim Miller of the dispatch, then we had Scarborough, and now we have Molly Jung Fast.
Screw her.
She purports to be for women.
She and her party, she's got him right across from her.
She doesn't ask him.
They don't care about women.
What they care about is abortion and scaring you into voting for them with abortion.
Okay, sorry, that's my aside.
But Tim Walz too is out there, Josh, trying to tell people that he, this problem with men, black men, all men, it just doesn't exist.
Like, don't believe your lying eyes.
He's not believing his.
Take a listen to his messaging on it in SOC 28.
And I'm talking here on this one, especially to the guys.
You keep hearing about this gap on there.
I refuse to admit that that's real because I know that we care deeply.
I know these issues matter to you.
I know they matter to all of us.
We need to get especially young men out there to vote.
This is not damn WWE type stuff.
It's not about, it's not about, well, it's cool when he talks like this or whatever.
It's not cool.
It hurts people and it leads to violence and it undermines our system.
That is not cool.
And again, they're all tough talk on this.
I guarantee you I can shoot better pheasants than them.
I guarantee you.
I guarantee you, Lee.
Really, Josh?
Yeah, I'm not sure if Tim Walz can hunt a better pheasant.
The video, at least that I saw, showed that he couldn't even properly load a 12-gauge shotgun cartridge in.
So I'm not entirely sure that he knows what he's talking about when it comes.
Right.
So I'm not entirely sure that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to pheasant hunting.
Megan, just real quick before Tim Walz on your excellent point about how they do not care about women.
I have a very simple point as well to make here.
What about Bill Clinton?
Bill Clinton is still tossed out as a national figure.
He spoke of the DNC.
I mean, are we just forgetting about what happened 30 years ago when it comes to Paula Jones, Juanita Broderick, and obviously Monica Lewinsky and all that?
I guess so.
I mean, back then, Hillary Clinton dismissed all of those women in fairly graphic terms.
I don't remember the exact verbiage she used, whether she said that they were low-grade whores or sluts or tramps or something.
I don't want to get the exact quote right now.
But I think it was Carville said bimbo eruption, which exactly.
That's exactly what it was.
That's exactly what it was from Jimmy Carville.
So, yeah.
So, look, I don't want to hear from these people.
They are total hypocrites, and it is all about the abortion issue, as you just said.
Look, when it comes to Tim Walz and the male gap, you know, the media, first of all, never actually talks about this.
They always talk about how Republicans are doing so poorly with women.
And yes, Donald Trump right now is down somewhere between 10 and 15 points when it comes to women, but they never actually talk about the fact that the Democratic Party has a just as big, if not greater, problem when it comes to men.
And it comes back to exactly what Delano was saying just a few minutes ago, which is that men these days are told not to actually be men.
When I go to camp to campuses and I speak to young college kids, law school students, I hear this over and over and over again.
Young Voters and Marijuana 00:15:50
And, you know, look, I'm not a father yet, God willing will be very soon.
And I'm kind of in an odd place to give advice because I haven't actually raised a child myself.
But I think I have a decent idea what it means to be a protector of the home and to defend manly traditional values there.
And there are these people just have no places to look and they have so few places to look these days, Megan, when it comes to what it actually takes to be a man that they're settling for, you know, clean your room, basically, clean your bed, make your bed, the Jordan Peterson advice, because there is such a dearth, there is such a scarcity, a paucity of people who are actually trying to instill into the next generation what it actually takes to be a man.
And it's certainly not clean from the Democratic side of the aisle, that is for sure.
Yeah, and then you like Jordan Peterson for the very reasons you're stating, and you wind up getting called an incel by these Hollywood liberals who have no idea what the attraction is or why these young men feel lost to begin with.
I'll tell you this: I have three kids, I have a husband, and my husband's very supportive.
You know, he should be the Doug they love because he actually is a very supportive husband of a working woman and an amazing dad with his own career.
You can do it all.
You don't have to be like Doug Emhoff and give up your job to support your wife.
But I'll tell you what, there's nothing quite like, well, somebody does something to me.
It can be some jerk on the street.
It can be some whatever.
It's usually if like a man gets crossways of me in a way that Doug doesn't like, you can see his shoulders go back.
He zeroes in.
He wants to know exactly who it was, when it was, and where the person is.
And I'm not saying he's going to go throw a punch, but he will confront.
He is not afraid to go confront somebody on my behalf, which is, you know, a little like, okay, I got it, but also like, oh, you're hot.
You know, I mean, that's something we still want in our men, Delano.
We do not want the Doug Emhoffs of the world who project super sweet and supportive, but behind the scenes are going to introduce you to Mr. Backhand if you put your hand on the shoulder of the valet.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think, again, this party is one, you know, the trans issue is one that's obviously become big over the last 10 years.
But just at a more fundamental level, the party does not know how to handle the biological differences between men and women, right?
Because, and biological, cultural, social.
I'm thinking back to the vice presidential debate a few weeks ago, where the notion that JD Vance would push back on the moderators was spun as misogyny.
So on one hand, Democrats will say we need women and represent female representation in all areas of society, and we want to be treated exactly like the men until they are treated exactly like the men.
And then it's like, no, we need protectionism from, you know, the way that men typically speak to one another.
So this is part of the issue.
And as I said, this even goes down to policy because these are people who will look at certain industries.
They'll say, oh, the construction management industry is 95% men.
So we think we should have more women in there.
So if you are a woman whose husband provides for your family because he works in construction, now you're having to ask yourself, okay, do I take one for the sisterhood?
Would I prefer my husband to be fired so that someone who hasn't worked 20 plus years in this industry is installed?
Or do I vote for my household interests?
And this is why I think the issue of family is at the core of our politics, because when husband and wife, regardless of race, are together as one in terms of a household, then they are going to advocate for the things that benefit them as a family.
When men and women are separated, then each advances their own interests as a mercenary.
And it doesn't really matter what's best for the family.
And I think Democrats understand that and they exploit that division even within the household.
All right.
So I want to talk about some of the problems with the black voters and the young voters.
CNN's Harry Enton has been laying this out with his charts, which are helpful.
And here's, we'll start with SOT 23.
Margin among black men under the age of 45 in presidential elections.
You go back to November of 2012.
What do you see?
You see Obama by 81.
Clinton only won him by 63.
Then we're all the way down to Biden last time around by 53.
A tremendous drop already.
And then you take a look at the average of the most recent polls and Kamala Harris is up by only 41 points.
That is about half the margin that Obama won them by back in November of 2012.
This is part of a longstanding trend of young black men moving away from the Democratic Party.
Once again, it's younger black men.
It looks like the worst Democratic performance since 1960, since JFK versus Richard Nixon.
It's the same thing among black men overall.
It's really amazing how much she's hemorrhaging with this particular group and young voters too.
Back to Harry.
SAT 24.
Joe Biden won voters under the age of 35 by 21 points.
What do we see with Kamala Harris?
Well, she's still ahead, but the margin here is significantly less than what we saw with Joe Biden back in 2020.
Let's also talk about motivation, right?
Because it's not just who you would support.
It's whether or not you'd come out to the polls.
And this, I think, is rather interesting.
Do Democrats say they're more motivated to turn out after Biden left the race?
Well, we do see a significant portion of Democrats who say yes, 39%.
The thing I was interested in was it disproportionately younger voters who said that they were more likely to turn out or more motivated to turn out.
And what we see here is it's 42%.
Not a big difference between 42 and 39%.
So this idea, again, that the vice president has unique potential to dig in and get young voters to turn out, John, it's just not there in the numbers despite all the internet memes that are going around.
I want to look at party identification.
Again, voters under the age of 35.
Go back to 2020.
56% of young voters said that, in fact, they were Democrats.
They identified as Democrat or lean Democratic.
You look down at 2024, it's 49%.
Look at the Republican jump from 39 to 49%.
And that explains why she's desperate to go on Joe Rogan and she did the sex podcast, et cetera.
She's not going to get any men at the sex podcast, but she wants young people.
Go ahead, Josh.
Megan, I think what you're seeing in real time is the collapse of the modern post-2008, post-Barack Obama Democratic Party coalition.
In fact, Harry Anthon, who I've known since I was 19 years old, I actually had him on my show just last week.
Yeah, I go way back with Harry.
I actually asked him about this exact question about this collapse of the Obama coalition.
Harry basically agreed with my take, which is that you're seeing in real time this, you know, Obama was a very unique political phenomenon where he brought together a lot of Hispanics and young voters and black voters and white PhD liberals on the upper west side of Manhattan, San Francisco, all of that there.
And over the past five to eight years, really starting back as far at least as 2016, 2018, but really accelerating over the past few years, you're starting to see this whole coalition collapse, this whole woke, this coalition of aggrieved interests, as I'd like to call it there.
And young black men, Hispanic voters, and young voters are really the three key demographics that are the tip of that spear because these three demographics, and we're really generalizing here when we talk about these broad demographic groups, let alone trying to aggregate them.
But overall, if you can try to paint a picture as to what young voters, Hispanic voters, and young black men, what above all do they want?
They want economic stability and basic stability when it comes to the bread and butter issues, economy, inflation, immigration, crime, just basic quality of life issues.
And the media's hysterical rhetoric, notwithstanding, people have an old enough memory to go back to the four years that Donald Trump was president.
Donald Trump is not a blank slate anymore.
This is not 2016.
It was not a total guessing game as to whether he would nominate his pro-abortion sister to the U.S. Supreme Court, as many people thought back then because he floated as a possibility.
We have a track record and that track record was a phenomenal track record when it came to the economy up until COVID, which any president obviously would have had a tough time handling.
It was the lowest black unemployment rate going back to the 1960s since Galvin Pugh started having data on this.
We had transformative peace in the Middle East.
The border was relatively secure.
I could go on there, but there was a clear track record.
And young people, Hispanics, Black men, I think at this point remember that track record.
And that is what is getting these numbers that you're seeing.
Plus the whole thing we were just discussing of like just how effeminate the Democrat Party has become.
I just don't, I think this is why all men, not black, not Hispanic, not white, but just most of all men are finding this a turnoff.
Like, I don't want to identify with that brand.
It's the same way how none of us wants to order a Bud Light anymore.
The brand has been damaged by far too many stupid moves.
And like the Republicans seem like manly men and the Democrats seem effete.
Whether that's a branding issue or a policy issue, I don't know, but I see it.
I can see with my eyes what's happening.
However, she really wants to drive those numbers up with young black men, Delano.
And the opportunity agenda, one of her favorite words, includes the following.
I now have my notes in front of me.
One, provide $1 million in loans that would forgive up to $20,000, like a million dollar pool that would forgive up to $20,000 for black entrepreneurs and people of other races to start a business.
Two, expand access to affordable banking options that will allow black men and others to tap into more capital.
Three, new investments to help more black men become teachers.
Four, health initiative focused on the diseases that disproportionately affect black people like sickle cell, diabetes, and prostate cancer by expanding preventative screening programs.
And five, legalize marijuana nationally and to ensure that black men who were once disproportionately jailed for using and distributing marijuana can benefit from its business potential.
So three weeks out.
Is this what she should be talking about?
And will it move the needle?
I doubt it'll move the needle.
I'm not surprised by that agenda.
I think part of what candidates do, and I saw Stacey Abrams do this in the Georgia guberto election a few years ago.
She took her policy platform that was on the main part of her website and just moved it over to outreach to black men, that part of the website, and then just put black men over it, right?
So, because I don't think, obviously, legally speaking, that the government can only direct loans to one particular ethnic group.
So some of this probably won't pass constitutional muster, but I get why she's trying to package it this way.
The marijuana legalization piece always puzzles me.
I've seen something similar.
The governor of Maryland has been pushing on this hard.
And I guess the idea is, well, we want black people and black men in particular to be able to participate in the growing marijuana industry.
One, I don't think more drugs are good for any community.
But two, I ask myself, if you promote this as a social good, how are the men who either are engaged in the marijuana business or partake, are they going to be able to drive a school bus, operate a crane, right?
Are they going to be able to be part of your security detail?
Because if not, why are you promoting things that would make it much more difficult for some of these men to actually get jobs where they can have a wife and kids and build a family and support a community?
So I'm not particularly surprised by this.
Democrats are desperate.
They don't know how to talk to men in general.
And as I said, they have particular problems with talking to black men.
And I'll say this, Megan, in terms of the black male support.
I think there's a big difference between sort of the private and quiet support where guys may say in their group chat, yeah, I'm voting for Trump, and loud and public support.
And one of the issues that doesn't come up often is that, is the fact that being branded as a black Republican or black conservative, or even worse from the less perspective, a black Trump supporter comes with a significant social cost and penalty if you are black.
And very few people want to pay that cost.
Now, if things go in a particular way in this election, I believe President Trump will get at least 25% of the black male vote.
Wow.
If that puts him over the top, particularly black male votes specifically, if that puts him over the top in key swing states, right?
If he wins Michigan and Georgia and Pennsylvania because of that, the fury that will be unleashed on black men, right?
We can all remember back 2017, 53% of white women voted for Donald Trump.
Like that, that genre of op-ed is going to be at 10x level against black men if they are the ones who put him over the top at some of these key swing states.
So I hope the guys who are considering either not voting for Kamala Harris or voting for Donald Trump are ready for the pushback that will come because it will get ugly.
My money's on them.
You know, if those white women can handle it, the black men can handle it, be strong.
I mean, wear it with a badge of honor.
And by the way, Josh, for her to be touting, oh, I'm going to legalize pot, you know, to help the black man, I'm going to give him a bunch of loans and then I want him applying for them while he's high.
This is the person who, as Tulsi Gabbard pointed out in that infamous 2019 primary debate, put 1,900 people in jail or prosecuted 1,900 people for pot use.
Like that's now she's like, yeah, let's toke up.
You know, does anybody have a roach clip?
But I mean, just a couple years ago, once again, she's like putting people in jail for doing this, but she's counting on nobody to remember that.
Yeah, there are so many things that the modern Democratic Party does, Megan, that I wonder, how is that not in fact racist?
I mean, when you are pandering to black voters by saying that I'm going to legalize marijuana so you can get high 24-7, how is that not ipso facto racist?
When you are just, when you are decrying voter ID laws as racist, to put in a requirement simply to bring an ID to the voting booth and prove that you are talking to women, I'm going to run in a special program that's going to make Valium a lot less expensive for you.
Xanax and Valium are going to be offered to all of you moms at a much lower, like, what the hell?
We'd be rebelling.
Like, what are you implying?
Go ahead, finish your point.
Totally.
And, you know, just one other example that comes immediately to mind.
So Kristen Clark, who is the very far left woke assistant attorney general for civil rights right now, she's been an absolute menace over the past few years.
Her division of the DOJ has recently filed two so-called disparate impact lawsuits, one against the Maryland State Police and the second against the South Bend, Indiana local police, alleging disparate impact against blacks and women voters.
It's allegedly disparate impact against women who want to become police officers in those two jurisdictions.
It's allegedly disparate impact against them because of the physical test requirements.
So I'm thinking here about physically having to train to prove that you can take down a bad guy.
But perhaps even worse than that, perhaps even worse, Kristen Clark is claiming that there's a disparate impact against blacks who apply to be police officers in these two jurisdictions because there is a written test per proficiency.
They are literally saying that it is racist to have a 25, 50, 100 question, whatever multiple choice test about how to actually be a cop.
Well, by saying that that is racist, you're actually revealing yourself as the racist.
I mean, George W. Bush famously called this a soft bigotry of low expectations.
Clarence Thomas has used much more colorful verbiage in his various affirmative action opinions over the years here.
Illegal Immigration Debate 00:16:42
It is so infantilizing and belittling and frankly disgusting.
And the fact that some of these people like Kristen Clark happen to be black herself does not make it any better, I would say.
No, it absolutely doesn't.
But it is, I mean, to me, it's kind of interesting just to watch her struggling, right?
Like she's, she recognizes she can't get this group of voters to come over her way.
And the prescriptions are being thrown at her from all sorts of people, I'm sure.
And I just think it's too late.
I really think, you know, the folks who are on Tuay, like Mark Halperin and Sean Spicer, our friend Dan, they were making this point the other day that, A, this is very late in the game to be unleashing new messaging, you know, to target one specific group.
And the more you zero in on one group, like I'm going to help, I have all these special ditties for black men, the more you turn off other groups who are like, wait a minute, only the black men get the help starting the businesses, only the black men get the Bitcoin help, whatever that one was.
Like, only the black men get certain of their health ailments studied.
You know, what about like autism, which affects everybody?
You know what?
It's just, it has a polarizing effect.
And so it's, it's a risk, but all she can afford to do right now is risky moves like going on Fox Delano because she's definitely hemorrhaging.
There is nothing that explains her campaign decisions other than that.
Yeah.
And Megan, the point you just made, I think, goes directly back to Josh's point about the collapse of the left's identitarian sort of coalition.
And I mean, I have four young kids, you know, between the ages of eight and four.
And one of the things that I know for a fact is that if I offer something to one of the children, if I only give dessert to one of the children, the other three are going to get very upset about that.
And what the left has not learned is that, you know, when you treat all of your voters poorly, they will hate you.
But when you treat some better than others, they will hate each other.
And I think that's one of the reasons that their coalition is in the midst of collapsing right now.
It's very interesting.
Okay.
You guys, we have a lot to get to, including another CBS switcheroo on a soundbite that they didn't like because it criticized the Democrats' side.
We've got to get to Kamala Harris's word salad.
And then there's the matter of Bill Clinton and whether he's intentionally tanking this race.
It's an interesting theory.
This show encourages honest conversations, which is not always easy in today's media environment with big tech companies deciding who and what gets amplified or censored.
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On the subject of the outreach to black voters and trying to rally black voters to vote, Kamala, she went on with Roland Martin this week and he asked her a question about Trump, quote, trashing black cities.
He was in Detroit earlier in the week and said, look, if I don't win, America's going to look like Detroit.
You know, and he was obviously be like Detroit.
It was a comment about Detroit and its economic struggles.
We talked about on this show, but that's Roland Martin's version of he's trashing black cities, right?
This, it's a black thing.
And this particular soundbite is not being shown to you for the racial angle.
It's being shown to you for her inanity, which is now a word we use every day on the show because it's apt.
Listen to how she answered this.
That's what you feel when he trashes Black City.
Comments that he just made about Detroit basically being a living hell.
He's singling out cities where there are significant African Americans, and that's who he's talking about.
Black people.
Yes.
Yes.
You know, there's this whole, I talked with somebody once who said, you know, if you just look at where the stars are in the sky, don't look at them as just random things.
If you just look at them as points, look at the constellation.
What does it show you?
So you just outlined it, Roland.
What does it show you?
I'm lost.
I'm lost again.
You guys, I can't.
How are we going to deal with four to eight years of that?
I mean, I have no idea.
I mean, like, what do we just hear?
I mean, I mean, like, I genuinely do not know what point she was trying to make there.
I mean, I could maybe guess, but like, I genuinely just like actually don't know.
I mean, just real quick on the substantive point.
Look, I went to law school in Chicago.
I lived there for three years.
When I was there, Chicago was already known for high crime.
It's actually degraded considerably just over the past three to four years or so.
In fact, when I took my then-girlfriend, now wife to Chicago with me for the very first time about two and a half years ago, her purse was actually stolen in broad daylight in Streeterville, a very wealthy, nice part of Chicago.
Yeah, great part of Chicago.
So you know it very well.
I mean, this happened in broad daylight in Streeterville, not the kind of thing that would have happened in the Southside or anything like that.
So, I mean, if I were to condemn the crime in Chicago, does that make me a racist?
It's just so stupid.
I mean, like reasonable Americans who have more than one brain cell operating between the ears, who have anything remotely resembling common sense, they're just not buying this.
And they're doubly not buying it when she talks about the constellations in the sky to make some point that I still don't know what she was trying to do.
No, nor do I. We've got to talk about Bill Clinton because Bill Clinton goes out there.
He's stumping for her.
They're feeling the panic.
Obama's been out there, as you mentioned, Delano.
He's shaming black men, saying you're misogynistic if you're a black man and you're not voting for her because it's all about her being a woman.
And it can't just be her policies.
It has to be something having to do with her gender.
And they unleash Bill Clinton, notwithstanding the history with him and the women.
But he goes out there and I have to say, he does not look good.
I mean, just like a little bit of foundation.
I know he's a man.
I'm just saying like a little bit of cover up.
It's okay, guys.
If you have a serious complexion problem or like serious acne, you can get away with it.
Now, don't go full foundation on your face.
That's a little, but a little cover-up is fine.
You got permission from Megan Kelly.
You can tell anybody who gives you a hard time.
Bill Clinton, it's an aside.
He goes out there and while looking like a little off, he's trying, allegedly, to make the case for Kamala on the subject of illegal immigration.
And he winds up inadvertently, question mark, making the case for Trump on the subject of Lake and Riley, who was of course killed by an illegal who came in this country in 2022 under the Biden-Harris administration.
And he killed Lake and Riley in Georgia just earlier this year.
Listen.
Trump killed the bill.
The bill was written, being written by senior Republicans in the Senate.
And he killed the bill.
Why?
You had a case in Georgia not very long ago, didn't you?
made an ad about a young woman who'd been killed by an immigrant.
Yeah, well, if they'd all been properly vetted, that probably wouldn't have happened.
Exactly.
Delano, no one can believe he said that.
He must have been confused and not realized that the guy came in under Kamala, not under Trump.
And Jason Miller, a top Trump operative, tweeted that out with it was tongue in cheek, saying he knows exactly what he's doing.
She's running with a picture of Hillary.
What do you make of it?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure.
It might be easy to chalk it up to age and to say, you know, Bill Clinton has sort of lost track of what it is that he was saying.
But I think the substantive point holds, right?
Everyone can see that the left's immigration policy has been a complete disaster.
And it's not just for people who live in border towns.
I mean, I grew up in New York and I have family immigrated to the United States.
And even in Brooklyn, where you have a significant portion of people who were born in a different country, there are people saying, no, we need to get this immigration issue under control because it's one thing to have legal immigration.
I know there are debates on the right as to what those levels should be, right?
You know, who should be coming and for how long and how many people should be coming.
But everyone can agree that unfettered legal immigration is a national security risk, as well as just, you know, it undermines law and order.
So I'm not surprised Bill Clinton says that because every once in a while, politicians make a mistake and actually tell the truth.
I'm just wondering how that plays in Harris Walls campaign headquarters.
Oh my God.
I do wonder too.
This is a good question, Josh.
Like, do they start maybe with friends like this?
You know, who needs?
I don't know.
Bill Clinton, he's older now.
How old is Bill Clinton?
We'll look it up.
But, you know, he's not, he's 78.
He's not used.
Like, you're not used to him making mistakes like that.
Look, I mean, I think Delano just said it very well, actually.
Every so often, a politician slips up and actually says the truth.
I mean, I mean, this is a very visceral reminder as to just how much the Democratic Party has transmogrified over the course of the past three decades since Bill Clinton was president.
Under the Bill Clinton presidency, the Democratic Party was famously the party of safe, legal, and rare when it came to the abortion issue.
President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act DOMA in 96.
He had welfare reform.
He had a capital gains tax cut.
The Democratic Party, that back then, was actually very harsh for the most part on illegal immigration.
Bill Clinton signed into law in 96 a very tough on illegal immigration bill.
Harry Reid back then, when he was one of the Senate Democratic leaders from Nevada, actually went so far as to oppose birthright citizenship for illegal aliens.
Now, when Donald Trump says that 25, 30 years later, they call him a retrograde troglodyta, racist, fascist, whatever kind of adjective you want to throw out there.
So Bill Clinton saying the quiet parts out loud in this kind of mask off moment there.
It really ought to be a moment for the American people to pause and say, hmm, you know, why is Democratic Party saying such different things now in the era of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz than it was saying 30 years ago back when it was saying some common sense sort of stuff.
Yeah.
And am I still a Democrat?
Like Bill Clinton is a reminder of what Democrats used to be.
And Kamala Harris's version of democracy or being a Democrat, I should say, is very, very different.
Okay.
So the media, as we've been showing you throughout, very compliant, very, very much rooting for and in the camp of Kamala Harris openly.
And This was evident on CBS News again with one of the CBS News debate moderators, Margaret Brennan, who is just, she continues to just disgrace herself.
So she has a Sunday show and on it, she hosted Speaker Mike Johnson.
Speaker Mike Johnson was speaking to the hurricane relief efforts.
And as you guys know, they've had problems, serious problems, especially after Helene at the federal level.
So you saw what happened to CBS and 60 the other day, what they did with Kamala Harris's word salad answer on whether Bibi Netanyahu's listening to us.
They cleaned it up.
They got rid of some of her inanities and left in just a shorter version and refused to tell us whether that shorter version was in fact part of her initial response to the question asked.
If it came from a different place in the transcript, totally unethical, totally unethical.
And we deserve an answer as to exactly how this went down because they released the one longer word salad as a tease.
They tightened it up and used a totally different phrase set of words for the answer that aired in the actual 60 minutes piece.
They refused to release the transcript, notwithstanding pressure now, even from Trump to release it, from former CBS employees demanding an investigation.
So far, nothing.
Zero downside to them if they didn't violate ethical breach, ethical rules, zero in releasing that transcript.
The only reason, well, it could be one of two things.
It would make them look bad or it would make her look bad or both.
That's it.
Those are not good reasons.
If you did something unethical, too bad.
It's time to pay the piper.
And if you are just trying to cover up her word salad, that's not a good reason for withholding it.
That's partisan hackery.
So anyway, now we get Speaker Johnson on the CBS Sunday show and the VP debate moderator, Margaret Brennan, who asks him a question about hurricane relief.
And I'm going to show you the version that aired, because it was obviously pre-taped, and he taped himself giving the answer and then released his full answer.
And it's not to say you're not allowed to make any edits whatsoever when you're putting on a program.
You are.
But a substantive edit like this will get you in trouble every time.
Watch.
So that's a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
Yeah.
So they've obligated some funds, but they've only distributed 2%.
The rescue and recovery effort's still going on.
And then we address the rest of it.
So that's a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
Yeah.
So they've obligated some funds, but they've only distributed 2%.
And when I was there on the ground, and you should go, I mean, bring the cameras and talk to the people there.
They'll tell you.
Don't, don't take politicians' words for this or the administration's word.
Talk to the people there on the ground.
They had not been provided the resources almost two weeks out from the storm that they desperately needed.
And when I was there, 13 days post, you know, post the storm hitting that state, people are still being rescued.
They're stuck in the higher elevations in the mountains because the roads are down and all the rest.
So they need every available resource and all hands on deck.
What do you make of it, Josh?
Look, CBS News, I mean, if there is any media outlet out there that is more discredited at this point than CBS News, I can't possibly think of what it is.
I mean, these are the same people that moderated the vice presidential debate that were fact-checking JD Vance in real time after explicitly saying that they were not going to do that.
As you alluded to, they totally chopped up the Bibi Nets and Yahoo answer and Kamala's 60 Man's interview.
How about the Tony Docapill-Tanahese Coats real-time struggle session?
Tony Docapel, the morning anchor, has the temerity, has the hutzbot to ask very basic rudimentary questions to the charlatan Tanahese Coates.
You're talking about this conflict that you quite literally flew into in the Middle East with no knowledge.
Why are you not talking about the Sabaro bombing in the second Intifado?
Why are you not talking about Hezbollah, Hamas, all of that?
And apparently the big wigs of CBS News were so up in arms that they had a real-time Maoist struggle session the next morning.
The way the Dei czar who they were going to bring in to oversee this hearing.
Apparently they they ditched him at the last minute because he has a social media history of referring to Tim Scott as uncle Tim.
You know that goes back to what Delano was saying about a half hour ago or so about how black men are so stigmatized for for supporting conservatives and whatnot there.
Media Narrative Checking 00:05:04
But now you have this.
I mean look, the people have to have to pause at some point and say, The trust in the media right now is the lowest it has been in the recorded history of Gallipue public polling on this issue.
I think the media has the lowest approval rating of maybe any institution in America right now outside of the Congress itself, which has been horrific for multiple decades now.
Will they ever look in the mirror and ask why?
And I have to conclude at this point, the answer is probably not, which by the way, is why you see the rise of alternative platforms.
You see the rise of YouTube and social media and Twitter and Instagram because people just no longer trust the one-time institutional gatekeepers of information.
And that paradoxically then leads these very same people who are engaging in this sort of slate of hand and ledger domain that paradoxically then leads them to decry what they see as the purported misinformation and disinformation on these alternative services that they have actually induced the people to go to in the first place to get out of their own failed gatekeeping.
So it's a total catch-22, but I don't think that they have the self-awareness to look in the mirror and actually stop these practices.
And, you know, it really is at the detriment of the person who doesn't tape themselves.
Like Speaker Johnson was very smart to do it, because you know how it works, Delano.
You go on one of these shows, you think a point like that will make air, right?
Like you don't think you're going to be overly edited, especially on a criticism of the ruling administration on something that's affected thousands, millions of Americans.
Hundreds of Americans are dead.
So this is a very much an issue in the news right now.
And so you give the answer with the criticism, but you don't give it 10 times because when you're giving the interview, you're in your head, you're like, I've already said that.
And so it's a very effective way for CBS to just get rid of it.
It's gone.
And that's just a point that doesn't exist.
It's off into the ether.
And now I've cleansed the record for this administration, the same as Margaret Brennan tried to cleanse the record by cutting JD Vance's mic when he tried to correct her fake news fact check over our border policies.
And this is one of the reasons that we have such difficulty and people are resistant to media fact checkers, because at the end of the day, the media does not engage in fact checking.
The media engage in narrative checking, right?
So they choose which facts to include and which to omit.
They choose the language that they use to frame particular stories.
And then they do things like this, right?
Where they will just cut out substantive portions of a person's response in order to make it appear that they're saying something that they don't say.
Now, what makes this even worse is that they take this position when they deal with right of center politicians.
But when they want to criticize these politicians, particularly in defense of the left, then they will do what they did, I'm thinking back in Florida a few years ago with the entire fake, you know, don't say gay controversy, right?
About a law that substantively was about parental rights in education.
And they do, the corporate press does what it often does, which is act as what I call a media laundering enterprise, where they take ideas, they quote unquote, they wash them in the press.
And then when they come out on the other side, it allows advocates, activists to say, yes, this is what I heard from this particular CBS News or CNN.
And this is true because I got it from these particular platforms.
So They are good at distorting the truth in such a way where they can always say, well, no, as Jake Tapper said, you know, earlier in the program, no, I'm reading his words.
Yes, but you're reading them out of context.
And I remember an old pastor of mine says that whenever you take a text out of context, all you're left with is a con.
Oh, I like that.
You know, speaking of fact checking, in our next hour, we're going to have Steve Ballmer, reportedly the world's seventh richest man.
He owns the LA Clippers and he used to run Microsoft for many, many years and was in on the ground floor of it with Bill Gates.
He's going to be here because he's talking about a fact.
It's not a fact checker, but it's a fact offer.
The name of the website is usafacts.org.
And it's a website that's basically going to offer real facts about, for example, our economics and our crime rates and so on.
And he's done everything humanly possible to take all bias out of it.
And we'll get into whether that's even possible when it comes to reporting facts on controversial issues in our next hour.
But, you know, why not give it a try?
Okay, last but not least, I want to update our audience, and you guys might find this interesting, on a Twitter account, an ex account now, that has been pushing a story we have covered to some extent on this show and now is pushing an incendiary story about Tim Walz.
Whistleblower Allegations 00:12:49
The audience may know the Twitter website or the account goes under the name Black Insurrectionist.
And the reason we talked about it on this show was he made some incendiary posts about a month ago after the ABC News presidential debate between Trump and Harris and said he'd been in touch with a whistleblower from within ABC News who was alleging that he has worked at ABC News for 10 years,
that he heard conversations amongst executives, that he has them on tape, and that they reveal that ABC News inappropriately coordinated with the Harris campaign in advance of the debate to do a couple of things, including not ask her anything about her time as AG, which they didn't at the debate, to not ask her anything about her brother-in-law and his tenure over at the Department of Justice, which has been immersed in some controversy,
and to not ask her anything about Biden's mental acuity.
None of those subjects was breached at the debate, but this alleged whistleblower was claiming he knew that they wouldn't be touched and he knew it the day before the debate and that he filled out a signed sworn verified affidavit,
which is a document you sign in the law under the penalties of perjury, the day before the debate and that he met, he mailed certified mail, a copy of said affidavit sworn to Speaker Mike Johnson the day before the debate.
And then in the wake of the debate, he was proven correct.
He had the audio tapes.
He was going to come forward with them and was lighting the internet on fire.
You had a Republican congressman saying, was calling for hearings on Capitol Hill.
You had very prominent lawmakers from Ted Cruz to just notables like Bill Ackman saying this must be investigated within possibly by the SEC, if true.
And we reported that on this show.
And I did tell the audience I did not put my credibility behind this guy, but that we needed to raise it because it was turning into a thing.
Well, update for you.
Since that date, we have been trying to ascertain whether Speaker Johnson did receive that certified letter.
Because it did seem to me from the beginning, if he got the letter, this guy's legit.
If he didn't get the letter, he's not.
That just seems pretty clear to me.
With the caveat that mail can be lost, but certified letters, no.
Well, we are now able to confirm they never got the letter.
We have spoken with a source with direct knowledge.
Speaker Johnson's office never got said alleged certified letter.
The alleged tapes have never been made public.
The alleged whistleblower has never come forward.
We were told he was possibly filing a lawsuit.
That didn't happen.
He allegedly filed a complaint with the SEC and the FEC.
We contacted those organizations, which did not confirm or deny.
They made no comment on whether they'd received such a complaint, but even if one were received, it doesn't prove said whistleblower exists.
That is the state of this alleged ABC News whistleblower and this X account, which for whatever it's worth, I have unfollowed because when I followed him, he put me in his bio as Megan Kelly's following me, which is not okay.
I specifically made clear on this show and elsewhere, I was not vouching for this person's credibility.
I do not follow him now.
I do not recommend you follow him.
And I recommend everybody proceed with extreme caution on the latest incendiary things he is saying about Governor Tim Walsh.
Just because it hurts, quote, the other side doesn't mean it's appropriate to run with.
And in this day and age, people need to be really careful who they trust.
So I want to make sure our audience is up to date on that.
Any thoughts on the state of information and what passes for scandal, news, and, you know, stories these days?
Because you know how it is, guys.
It's like we've been lied to so much by our government.
I understand why people are like, hmm, anything's possible and by our media, but you've got to be so careful.
Yeah, you do.
Look, I live here in Florida, Megan, and we've gotten battered by multiple hurricanes recently.
We had Hurricane Helena.
We had Hurricane Milton.
And, you know, I was filling in on radio last Monday.
I was trying to project to both the South Florida area and also to Tampa Bay, trying to encourage them to prepare for this, to prepare for Hurricane Milton, to go to the grocery store to get your jugs of water, to get your non-perishables, your canned goods, whatnot.
I mean, does it really help when someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying that they're doing this to you, deliberately vague as who they is, whether it's the Jews or the government or perhaps someone else there?
No, it obviously does not help.
I mean, this is blatantly incendiary stuff.
Yeah, the hurricane, exactly.
I mean, Marjorie Taylor.
You can control everything, Josh, for the love of God.
I mean, it's very, very big group, very powerful.
You know, Megan, sometimes I wish that my people controlled everything, given how much the Jews are being killed out there in the information war and the PR war over the past year, but neither here nor there, I suppose, for present purposes.
But, you know, I had a similar thought to this back at the Baltimore Bridge collapse when that happened back.
I think it was in late March as well.
You know, people just immediately go to the absolute craziest thing that will get you retweets, reposts, whatever Elon Musk is calling it these days there.
And yes, it is true.
On the one hand, it is true that many things that our ruling class dismisses as so-called conspiracy theories end up being the case.
We all remember the COVID-19 origin, the Wuhan lab, the Hunter Biden laptop, where you had the 51 deep state spooks the next day, Jim Clapper, John Brennan trying to dismiss as Russian disinformation.
Yes, the ruling class has complete Aegon's face when it comes to a lot of things they have tried to shunt aside as misinformation or as fake news or whatever, conspiracy theory.
But on the other hand, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to try to put out the craziest thing imaginable, as you say, just to try to hurt the other side.
It is a delicate bounce.
It's a delicate line to draw, but we have to do our best in this business and the talking head class to do our best to try to toe that line.
That's the thing, Delano, because you run with like, I mean, what he's peddling now, I won't repeat on this show.
It's just so incendiary.
And I should point out, ABC News denied his report on the whistleblower.
Hey, if there's a guy out there with tapes, it's not too late.
It's not too late, but I think we know where that's going to go.
In any event, you have to be careful, right?
Because I think what could happen is you run with, let's say, what he's peddling right now.
And then when that turns out to be absolutely untrue, if and when it does, you've embarrassed yourself.
And there are many people theorizing that this could all be a kind of an op by the other side to trap people, right?
With credibility or online into saying, repeating these incendiary things, only to then later be embarrassed.
Yeah, I think instead of focusing on fact checking, and I chuckle when the people who talk about wanting to do fact checks are the people who believe that men can get pregnant.
To me, that would be the first question I would ask to anyone who wants to be in that business, right?
To just sort of true up my scales a little bit.
But I do think that media literacy, information literacy is a bipartisan, sort of multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious.
Every American needs this because to Josh's point, when you remove the gatekeepers, you also remove one of the things that they bring, right?
Which is a sense of discipline and order and structure in terms of our information systems.
And now we're at a point where no matter who we're talking about, what side of the aisle they fall on, there's going to be someone pushing some information that says that this person is the worst person in the world.
And it's something that can catch both the left and the right in its net.
And that's why I'm a firm believer, obviously, in checking your sources, getting first-person accounts.
To me, the heavier the claim, the more evidence you need to bring to bear.
And I think that this is something that politicians on both sides of the aisle, it does not matter whether you're a conservative and you're talking about immigrants in one particular Midwestern city, or you're a liberal and you're talking about people who are clinging to the God and guns and advancing certain theories about what people do in their personal lives.
So this is needed today more than ever because the next generation who I think has their digital natives and have grown up with devices and ubiquitous information, have never heard of the Dewey Decimal System,
have never had to go and check out a book from a library, they are going to be even more vulnerable to this type of thing because what people instinctively do is to find information that confirms their priors and sort of reaffirms their existing narratives.
Yeah, stay in the business of truth seeking and then decide how you feel about it.
But it should go in that order.
Delano, Josh, great to see you guys.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you.
Thank you, Megan.
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Unbiased Data Matters 00:15:21
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Steve Bommer is a hugely successful entrepreneur.
He's a billionaire.
He came from humble beginnings and is entirely self-made.
His father was a Swiss immigrant who worked a mid-level job at Ford, grew up in Detroit.
He wound up graduating first in his class from high school.
He went to Harvard.
He was the football team manager, and he happened to live down the hall from a kid named Bill Gates, who was there at the same time.
After graduating from Harvard, Steve wound up selling Duncan Hines cake mixes, which I mean, let's be honest, they sell themselves.
They're delicious.
But soon, his old pal Bill Gates called him up and said, You know, I've got this new startup.
You might be interested in joining.
Why don't you leave where he now was, which was Stanford Business School, and join me over here?
So he did.
He went over to the now multi-billion dollar company Microsoft.
And for 14 years, Steve Bommer served as the chief executive officer there.
Under his leadership, revenue at the company more than tripled.
And in 2014, just months after he retired as CEO, instead of getting on a yacht and moving to St. Bart's, he purchased the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team for a whopping 2 billion bucks.
And in the 10 years since, he's doubled the franchise's worth.
And it seems to have brought him quite a bit of psychic income as well.
Now he's got this new project that is and feels philanthropic.
And this one's for all of us.
He is the founder of USA Facts with a mission to provide unbiased information rooted in data.
You can find said facts at usafacts.org.
Welcome to the show, Steve.
Great to see you.
Great to be here.
Thanks for having me, Megan.
Real pleasure.
All right.
Well, I love the idea.
I went over, of course, just to check it out and to see whether I thought USAFacts.org was unbiased because I'm always primed to find bias if it's there.
And actually, I approve.
I did not detect what I thought would be a left-wing bias coming from somebody who's been in tech his whole life.
So thumbs up on that.
Well done.
Why was this necessary?
Why'd you want to do it?
Well, I actually started the project in 2014, right after I retired.
My wife had been focusing in on philanthropic activities, really focused on kids and families who might not have a shot at the American dream, if you will.
And I told her, no, no, no, no, I'm tired.
Government pays for that stuff.
We don't need to do anything.
And she said, you know, come on, dude, we're going to do better than that.
Let's take our responsibility or desire to help.
But I set out to kind of understand whether government did pay for all of that.
Where does government money come from?
Where does it really get spent?
What does wealth transfer look like through the process?
And then when you get into it, you got to talk about what the outcomes are.
I took kind of the business approach, which was to say, I don't want people's forecasts.
I don't want think tank analysis because think tanks generally have some bias.
I said, let's just look at the numbers that government produces.
I happen to believe that we have good statistical agencies with credible people.
And if those numbers are wrong, then I bet blame politicians on both sides who have the opportunity to address and fix these things.
I did that for myself.
And as I was going along, I said, hey, why don't we package this up in forms that might be useful to other people?
And that was kind of the birth story.
2017, three years later, we took a business approach.
We published a 10K report like businesses would have to and an annual report.
And we've been off to the races ever since.
Okay, but now how do you manage to keep this thing from veering left?
Because I have been invited to go speak at Google HQ and Facebook HQ.
And I've been asked by their CEOs and others over the years, how do we make our products more fair?
How do we understand the right half of the country since tech historically has leaned left and is based in a sort of a left-wing town?
And, you know, it tends to be populated like news with mostly lefties.
So what do we do?
And I told them all the same thing.
Get more actual Republicans or conservatives in your organizations in an editorial role.
They don't have to dominate it, but get them in there, get them a seat at the table.
And Steve, they did not listen to me.
And they should have.
So how do you manage this?
Well, we have pretty strong culture around being unbiased.
And because we're using government data, it's hard to, and we don't try to forecast.
We don't try to say what the cause of something was.
We just say, here's the current state of affairs.
I mean, look, if both parties can't somehow agree that inflation was X versus Y, that's a problem.
Where might it go in the future?
Who caused it?
So we stay very principled around that.
I also tell us to avoid adjectives wherever possible.
Adjectives, words, they can sound partisan.
Numbers are not partisan.
You know, three is three, two is two.
Some people might say, oh, three is hugely bigger than two.
It's one and a half times.
But if it's in the context of 100, so we're very careful to provide historical context, context in terms of other numbers that government produces.
And if we do those things, I think we've been able to stay well anchored.
Now, also before we first published, we had some folks, political folks on both the right and the left take a look at our stuff and say, hey, what do you see?
What are we missing?
Are we showing bias in what we're doing?
And consistently since then, I've gone to DC every year.
We've had bipartisan groups of senators together a number of times now.
And nobody's actually picked on that one key aspect.
Of course, there are various numbers that are more interesting to one party or the other, but that's on them.
I want to make sure the numbers are clear, presented well, how they choose to use them.
That's a political statement.
That's a partisan statement.
You can't, now in the future, you can't go to Washington.
You can't talk to senators and congressmen for this.
You have to come to people like me because they all want your money.
I don't want anything from you.
You need people.
But oh, slow down, slow down.
I am not a political donor.
There are a few causes I care about.
I am not a political donor.
Now, I don't control my wife.
And if you look at her history, it would tend to be more left than right.
But there are issues that I care about.
But basically, I will not participate supporting candidates on either side.
I appreciate it.
Now, some old friends.
I have an old friend from Microsoft who I know is very smart, et cetera, but I won't support her because I don't want to take partisan positions.
Well, it's funny because in my role, I don't make any political donations.
It's not appropriate for a journalist to do that.
But at some shops, they'll let you.
And I always felt like that was just a deeply wrong thing to do.
And most news organizations feel the same.
They just, once you've put money into something, you've actually, you know, made a bet with money on something.
It's very hard not to have a bias in favor of the something.
So I appreciate that.
I mean, I wish more people would follow your lead, including celebrities who make it almost impossible for us to watch them because they're so hard partisan on one side.
It's like, wow, now that I know you can't stand me, how am I going to enjoy you on the big screen?
So thank you for not ruining the LA Clippers for us, even though I honestly barely knew that was a basketball team before this week.
I'm so non-into sports, Steve.
I've got to confess the truth.
Now, you, you mentioned no adjectives on usafacts.org.
That to me seems antithetical to who you are based on what I've seen, you know, just in clips of you at the Microsoft meetings and you at the Clippers.
Not a more adjective prone, enthusiastic cheerleader for the things that you get involved with.
The no adjectives must have been hard.
Yeah, I mean I can't.
I'll also sort of put up front, you know there are some adjectives that get used but we try to avoid largely.
I mean for me measured, measured and show the numbers.
Yes, i'm a huge fan.
I was a fan of Microsoft as well as a participant, a fan of the Clippers.
But the one thing I like better actually than my fandom is numbers.
You know math is was my sort of key skill growing up.
Uh, I perfect 800 on the math sat.
That got exaggerated.
It was 790 but Wikipedia was a little off on that.
But that's okay that's, that's false news.
But I can't.
I can't change those.
It's a Wikipedia issue.
But at the same time I do love numbers.
I think they tell stories.
Uh, I made this point even in in sports football, Tom Brady, when he was playing in quarterbacks.
They have to have a sense of how far people away, where are they going, and in a sense it's almost like a numerical puzzle.
So I I love numbers, I love to use numbers and i'm very disciplined about not letting my enthusiasm for things get in the way of what the numbers actually say.
Well, it's interesting because some of the people i've trusted most over the past few years as we've started edging toward a post-factual world um, at least in politics and public messaging are economists.
Um, they're math guys at heart, because math does still add up unless you inject something weird into it.
Um, this is not my area of expertise, it's not my forte, but I appreciate people with a strong background in math because they tend to make the most sense.
Um, I did want to ask you about that because a couple of things about you.
So okay, 790.
I mean you should have tried a little harder, but it's fine.
790 is fine.
So you get into Harvard self-made, as I said, now do.
When you were a kid, rising to the top of your class as a high schooler, were you an incredibly hard worker or were you one of those kids that this just came easily to you?
It was just natural for you?
I'd say a little bit of both.
Uh, a little bit.
I, I was very hard worker and writing never came easy to me.
Math speaking did come easy to me uh, which is why I pushed through the math curriculum in my high school in two years and started taking college math courses, because I believe it's helpful for people to pursue, you know, to pursue things that they're good at but passionate enough to really, you know bust, bust their butts, so to speak, to be good at it.
So i'd say a little bit of both, actually in my case.
Uh, can I come back to one thing you said about economists?
Just just yeah to your point about bias.
I used to think I was applied math and economics major and I used to think economics was a total science.
I now know we have left-wing economists and right-wing economists, which will tell you it is not an exact science.
Otherwise, you can't have two scientists looking at the same data and coming to completely different conclusions.
So even economic analysis, unless it comes from the government, moving through it, you know, got to live by the way.
I'm thinking about people like Thomas Sowell, Glenn Lowry, you know, like people who are more heterodox in some of the dicier issues in our news over the past few years.
And you look over and you say, why are they, why do they sound so much different than everybody else on this?
A lot of these guys have a background in econ.
And I don't think it's accidental.
I spoke with Glenn Lowry about it, who's formerly of Harvard.
Now he's at Brown.
I just don't think it's coincidental.
So I see that, okay, you go on, you're at Harvard.
One of the great things about going to a great school like Harvard, or at least used to be, Harvard's much more controversial for reasons you know now, is that you do have connections.
You make connections.
This is something, I'm going to be honest, really wasn't a factor at Syracuse.
With all due respect to my friends at Syracuse, they have not proven instrumental to me in my professional life.
But, you know, it seems like, can you speak to that dynamic?
Because I think a lot of people out there right now, I'm asking you this as a mother, are ruining their children's childhoods to try to get them into a school like Harvard so that they can make a connection, kind of like Bill Gates down the hall and wind up the seventh richest man in the world or whatever they say you are.
So can you speak a little to that?
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, I did meet Bill in school.
Obviously, that connection, I wouldn't say just was important to me, also important to Bill.
I think it was a special partnership with him and his co-founder, Paul Allen and me, since I joined when the company was only 30 people.
And obviously we grew, we grew tremendously.
With that said, if you ask me, were there other connections I met, I made at Harvard that were instrumental?
Yeah, there was one guy I hired who I'd gone to Harvard with and actually I had known since summer math camp in Detroit.
But by and large, no, it wasn't the folks that I met at Harvard that wound up being key to my life.
So I do think that, and I can't speak exactly to today, but I do think, you know, the more competitive to get into schools are a little bit of a screening process, at least on kids' SAT scores.
Building a Tech Empire 00:06:15
Nowadays, people are using SAT.
So it's a screen.
But it, you know, I can't say the old, I'll still say old boys network.
I can't say the old boys or old girls network I have found fundamental.
But the screening process on SATs, particularly when you're looking at, you know, engineers and, you know, they've been screened for math scores, it does help a little bit.
We're more like the we, when I was at Microsoft, where we would hire a higher percentage of the kids that we interviewed at Harvard than the kids we would have interviewed at, I don't know, Purdue.
Purdue is an excellent school and we hired a lot of people from Purdue.
It's fascinating to me because it's like you have this natural aptitude.
You use it, you make the most of it.
You wind up at Harvard, like circumstance brings you together with this guy, Bill Gates.
And as you say, you form this partnership and Paul Allen's there too.
And then the world has changed.
Before you know it, the world has changed.
This started in 1980, right?
Is that when you went over?
Is that when Microsoft started?
Company started in, I would say, late 74.
Bill and I were friends when he started the company.
I didn't join until 1980 when he finally said he needed a business guy.
And I came in as, quote, the business guy in the company.
And he looked at that record with Duncan Hines and the cake and he was like, Steve, I need you.
Yeah, that being the business guide of the school newspaper and the manager of the football team, those are my relevant qualifications, maybe.
Yeah, but you were on the rocket ship.
You helped build the rocket ship as it was taking flight.
And, you know, the whole country has benefited from that.
I'll move off of this, but I do want to ask you, I got to spend a minute on achieving enormous wealth after such modest background and growing up, you know, the son of immigrants and in Detroit.
A friend of mine told me a story once.
They'd been on Paul Allen's private jet.
And Paul Allen had said, you know, what would you like for dinner tonight as they flew?
You know, whatever you like.
And he's like, it's pizza.
And so Paul said to the flight attendant, could we get some pizza?
And she said, oh my God.
So it's like the one thing we don't have.
You know, they could have made him osabuco, but they didn't have pizza.
And so Paul's like, well, you know, we're flying over whatever.
Is there any way maybe we could stop?
We could put the plane down for a minute and we could get some pizza.
So now the flight attendants are calling every pizza joint in town of the state that they're over or the city they're going to land in.
And they're all closed.
It's the middle of the night.
So they call some guy who's at home, the pizza owner.
He's at home.
And they get his home line.
They call him up.
And the guy's like, what?
Is there any way you could go in and make a pizza?
And he's like, no, the pizza joint's closed.
I'm not doing it.
And the person representing Paul Wisdom Paul says to the guy, imagine a world in which money is no object and no is not an option.
And the guy's like, all right, I'll do it for $10,000.
Like, done.
So he got his pizza.
I love this story.
I mean, it's, of course, excessive and all that, not relatable, but I mean, come on, it happened and it's kind of an interesting tale.
So how has achieving, earning such immense riches changed your life?
Yeah, I'd never heard that story about my dear friend Paul.
It doesn't shock me, but yeah, I had never heard that story.
Yeah, in my case, I would point to probably three things, four things that are important.
Number one, I just don't have to worry about money.
My family doesn't have to worry about money.
And all of the pressures that come with that, we just don't have.
And it takes stress out of life.
That would be number one.
Number two, I could buy a basketball team.
I really could buy a basketball team, which, you know, when you're a kid, people say, oh, did you always dream of owning a basketball team?
Of course not.
Nobody gets enough money to buy a basketball team.
But I was fortunate.
Not only did I get to buy a basketball team, we just finished building a two plus billion dollar arena that I think is the best.
It's almost the best product I was ever, thank you, that I was ever involved with.
So you get, you know, that kind of ability.
You know, philanthropically, you know, for example, we paid for, I don't know, 18,000 kids in Detroit, K through 8, Detroit area, to do a six-week summer program this summer.
That's fun.
That's exciting.
Couldn't do that if I wasn't so blessed.
And then there are what i'd call some perks of wealth.
We have a nice speech house.
Yes, I have a plane.
And those are.
You know, as Warren Buffett used to say, they may be into indefensible, but they really are nice perks.
And no, i've never stopped to get pizza in whatever Debuke Iowa.
What's the best one?
Give me the best one.
Is it the plane?
No, It's the basketball.
It's the basketball.
I probably couldn't get to, I get to almost all our games, home games, and that wouldn't be possible without the plane.
But by far, the best thing is the basketball team.
Oh, well, that's amazing.
And you have managed, you know, we went back and looked at what you've donated to and so on.
And it is like you have maintained a line right down the middle and helped like some very good and indisputably excellent charities and groups.
So hats off to you.
Inheritance Tax Issues 00:07:23
We kind of need you back on the front lines in the political fight that's going on in our country right now, not to take a side exactly, but to help with real solutions.
And I'll tell you why I'm leading into it that way.
I was at the all-in summit not long ago with I'm sure lots of guys you know like David Sachs and others.
And they were asking me what I thought we should do to change politics and just how messed up they are.
And we talked a little bit about Citizens United and how much money funnels into politics.
But I said to them, I just really think bottom line, because they said, well, if you could wave a magic wand and change the political system or add a constitutional amendment, what would you do?
And I said, I just really don't think the answers are coming from there.
I said, I think they're coming from places like this, like this audience that we were sitting in front of, people outside of the political system who are problem solvers.
And that leads me back to you.
So you start with this website, usafacts.org, where you're trying to restore a belief in facts, that there are facts that we can agree on, filter 10 times over.
It's just keep filtering, keep filtering to try to get out biases and slants and so on.
How do we expand this to a place where we can problem solve when it comes to things like the debt that we're about to shove on our children?
Both candidates, big on spending, big, right?
How do we do something like that, Steve?
I think we, first of all, go all the way back to civics classes, which is what they were called when I was school, in school.
It's good to educate people.
We have three branches of government.
We have checks and balances.
But without any sense of what government looks like by the numbers, how are we really educating our kids to participate in the political process?
So I think, you know, even going back to education, and we're thinking a lot about how we get our stuff into a form that can be relevant in high school.
I talked to a high school teacher, somebody I happen to know, and they're using some of our videos.
And I was real proud, but it got me stimulated to think again about going all the way back to high school education, if you will.
Number two, I really think our political leaders, there should be almost a mandate that they all read and agree with a fundamental set of facts.
When I was CEO of Microsoft, the SEC makes you sign a document.
I have read these numbers.
To the best of my knowledge, they are accurate.
There's no forecasts.
There's no detailed explanations.
It's just by the numbers.
Why can't we get our political leaders to have to sign up to say, hey, look, I know the data.
You can agree or disagree with me about why and what.
I just think it's almost, I just think it's really, really not okay for our political leaders to not be held to account for producing and understanding every layer of detail, but some fundamental information about our country.
Number three, there are tools that we see being able to build in our future in which you could take almost any piece of media, if you will, and let people in real time click and check, okay, this is what so-and-so is saying.
Let me look at the source data.
Let me look at the context around it.
You know, there are ways to get there.
We have some ideas and with artificial intelligence, maybe not immediately, totally, because of the possibility for hallucination.
We're working through how we'd avoid that.
But right there, when you're reading something or watching something, boom, you ought to be able to get the answers to your question.
And even older people need a level of education.
We put out these, what we call just the facts from USA Facts videos.
I showed them to my wife and she said, oh, wow, I didn't realize that number would be that big.
Or, ooh, that was interesting to me, being surprised by some of the things that are just outside the day-to-day world in which she and I happen to live.
So I think there's three, four, five things where you can get people ready to go, including our politicians, and have that really help propel a better political environment.
Now, will there still be people who just disagree about what to do?
Sure, but at least do it in the context of what is true today.
Today's deficit is X. Today's spending is Y.
It can kind of drive me crazy.
Again, I make no forecast, but people say, you know, we're going to close the deficit by doing X, Y, or Z.
And you say, huh, well, you know, just under a quarter of all government spending is on Social Security.
Okay, we may have to talk about Social Security.
Again, I'm not making value judgments.
I'm not saying what to do.
But don't, don't tell me you're going to work on something without taking a look at and acknowledging the, let's call it the elephant in the room.
Here's the big numbers.
Darn it.
If you really want to get after it, you're going to have to get after some of these things.
Or tax revenue.
People say, well, either we're going to lower taxes, increase taxes, but not that this is relevant to me because our kids aren't going to get the vast majority of our resources.
But inheritance tax.
Inheritance tax is under 200 million, let's say.
It's probably $50 million, $50.
Sorry, let me get my $50 billion a year of revenue.
It's great, but our total tax base at the federal level is $4.4 trillion.
We're not going to get there by doubling the inheritance tax.
Again, I make no value judgment.
It's fine.
Society wants to increase or decrease things, but the numbers give you a scale and sense.
And darn it, our politicians ought to acknowledge that and explain what they want to do in that context.
Well, I object to the inheritance tax.
I'm so angry about it.
I don't have your kind of dough.
I'm doing fine.
But I just feel like you earn it.
Come from nothing.
I earned it.
I paid taxes on it like actual taxes, with the you know the W-4 and all that.
I didn't have any vehicles to hide the money.
I was a salaried employee and you know now you pay over 50 in taxes if I want to give what's left when I die to my kids, I don't want them coming for it again, but they do so.
It's annoying um, it's just, the government's constantly got its hand out, and usually in your pocket, so it annoys me.
Um, I want to show the audience from a USA facts perspective.
Fentanyl Overdose Crisis 00:09:13
Yeah, please tell me.
No, I was just gonna say it's a good example of how we have to stay non-biased on the issue.
You you're.
You should have your opinion.
You should vote your opinion yes, but you can do it in the context of what's going on, and that's right.
Yeah, here is one.
Um, this is one about fentanyl deaths.
Uh, to to your point of like gee, I didn't know that.
I mean, our audience is up to speed on the fact that fentanyl is a massive problem for us and, in particular, the number one death for young people.
Uh, as of now.
But take a look at sot four.
Now let's look at accidental deaths.
Unfortunately, they have been increasing over the last decade, totaling over 227 000 in 2022 and accounting for seven percent of total deaths.
Accidental poisonings, which include drug overdoses, represent 45 percent of all accidental deaths.
The leading causes of overdoses are fentanyl and meth, with fentanyl overdoses alone growing from just over 3 000 in 2010 74 000 in 2022.
Oh my god, look at that 70 000 increase.
Boy oh boy.
But I like this because, without being alarmist, without taking a position, it the number, the chart speaks for itself.
Almost Steve yeah yeah no, it it does.
Um, you know, if we had more than 15 minutes, our video, you can also get the context.
It's not just that fentanyl deaths are growing, but they're not replacing.
It's not like people used to overdose from x and now they're overdosing from fentanyl.
The surge, you know, is about a factor of I don't know.
Off the top of my head, let's say, the surge is almost a factor of 15 in terms of total overdoses.
So it's not like okay, people were dying for heroin and now the same number of people are dying for fentanyl.
It is clearly a crisis uh, and we see the same thing actually with meth huge adjectives, i'll give you the numbers if you like.
But there is a relatively in context, large growth also in meth and in cocaine ironically, and most other forms of accidental death are shrinking.
But the explosion in fentanyl and meth is really overwhelming us and it's uh, from my perspective that I think I could say in a nonpartisan way, is is tragic, yeah.
Well, let me uh take a step outside of Usafacts.org for a second and ask, as a human, as an American, why you think this is.
I mean, why you think fentanyl is going crazy and young people more and more are trying these experimental drugs and they're trying other drugs that they don't know have fentanyl in them.
It just seems like you obviously you've lived in America your whole life.
You went to college.
You came of age in a very stressful industry.
So what is it about now that's leading to those kinds of numbers, do you think?
Yeah, I'll give you, again, as a human being, not as a USA fax person at this stage.
I think the first thing, and people don't always process this, if you take an economics perspective, supply is easier.
The ability to get supply, whether it's fentanyl or meth, that has exploded.
And so now we sort of see more what a balance between supply and demand looks like.
So I think the supply is up is actually an important part of this.
Demand is interesting.
Are kids under more stress today?
You know, how should we think about that?
I mean, by the numbers, the rates of depression amongst young people 18 to 25 and 25 to 34 have increased and they're higher than they are for older people.
But that could possibly be just people don't admit in the same way that they are depressed.
But stress slash anxiety slash depression probably drives demand.
Again, Steve Ballmer guess.
And certainly the supply of the drugs, I think is an important aspect of the expansion.
What role do you think, not Microsoft?
I know everybody always brings up the fact that you didn't think the iPhone was going to be a big seller at 700 bucks, but I forgive you.
That's fine.
At 700 bucks, I might have been right, but I wasn't right in terms of them getting it subsidized.
So that was a competitor.
Steve Jobs had an idea.
He was an eccentric character.
How are you to know?
But a lot of people think it's this device, right?
It's this device and in particular, social media that's doing it with our kids.
That's making them depressed.
And of course, ironically, more disconnected and lonely than ever before.
It's certainly not the way that you or I grew up.
Could be.
It could be.
Certainly the amount of time, I mean, the numbers are clear on that.
The number of time, the amount of time that people spend.
We call it screen time in our family because it could be phone, it could be PC, it could be Xbox, et cetera.
But screen times are certainly up, no question about that.
And, you know, I have not been a teenager in this environment, but certainly all the data that I've read, again, not government data, would suggest it is a problem.
Now, I happen to be the father of three boys who just don't spend that much time on social media, ironically.
How old are they?
So now they're 32 to 25, but when they were growing up, when they were prime college and high school age, that's when social media completely blossomed, if you will.
And, you know, but so I haven't had as much of a personal experience on that.
And there's no good, there's no data that confirms social media and depression, or at least not to my eye, confirms that connection.
All contraire.
You got to go look at the hearings with Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram and his apology to the room for what it's done, in particular to little girls, but that's for another day.
You mentioned that you're not going to leave the vast majority of your fortune to your sons.
So can I just ask you about that?
Because successful people don't want to raise jerks for kids or ambitiousless kids.
And it's a real problem.
It could be your level of success or it could be just a family that's making it upper middle class and they don't want their kids to think this is how life is.
You know, they want them to be hungrier.
Did you and your wife wrestle with that?
Because you get the same wife that you married way back years ago.
You raised your three boys.
Sounds like they're doing well.
So you raised three productive, capable humans.
So what are your thoughts on that?
I think it's something about which it takes a lot of care and thought.
And everybody gets to decide their own path on that.
Our kids will certainly be more comfortable than not.
I mean, there's no question.
Even while we're alive, they'll be more comfortable than not.
And certainly when we pass, they will.
With that said, if you, we think, if you create an expectation of getting, you know, big money when you are younger, if we create an expectation of just the way it is, at our level of wealth, it's a completely different program, but large to me means in this context, large is a percentage.
How can the kids not come out right?
I mean, it's ironic that my kids all got some money when they were 25 years old, but it's ironic.
It was money that my mom and dad left them in trust.
It was $170,000 when my parents put it away and it grew nicely.
But that's the money our kids have gotten.
So they've got a little bit of experience now, all of them dealing with half.
I think they each probably got a million dollars out of it, which is a lot, a lot of money, but it didn't come from my wife and I. Wow.
Well, I don't know.
I think it's very hard, and especially when they're exposed to enormous privilege, you know, in their town, et cetera, to create that hunger.
I'm not sure.
I think maybe I'm hoping it'll happen with my kids, but with other families I've seen, it almost like might have to skip a couple of generations until they feel it again.
I'm not sure.
Although, on the other hand, it could be just an absolutely wonderful life where you are both well adjusted, know you're loved, and have some dough in the bank so you don't have the sickening feeling every month at the end of the, at the, you know, when the bills come.
Verifying Medical Claims 00:09:20
Okay, so let's let's go back to USA Facts because here's something tricky that I foresee in your effort.
Eventually, politics and ideology is going to seep in in some way.
For example, crime rates.
This is a big issue right now.
Is crime falling?
Is it the lowest it's been in 50 years, as you would hear from Rachel Maddow and from some in the liberal media?
Or do we only have those numbers because they excluded the major cities, as Trump retorted at that debate, which is true.
They did exclude major cities incoming.
So how do you deal with those prickly types of considerations, Steve?
Not hard for us.
We simply report what's out there and we document what we reported.
So we will tell you, these are the numbers that the, I think in this case, it's the UCR, the FBI, as opposed to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
We will tell you, this is what we're publishing.
We will tell you what is there and what is not there.
In fact, in many of these cases, we highlight, hey, you know, the fact that you might want to actually push your legislators to make sure this gets better.
Now, we do live in a sort of a federal system of government.
And so there are some things the federal government, as it pushes to collect data, there's some things that it can incent with money local jurisdictions to do.
But ultimately, whether it's Dallas, Texas, or San Francisco or whatever, the police departments do have some latitude in what they report.
And I think our job in our work is to note what is there, what is not there, and help put pressure on government to get better reporting done.
So in a way, it doesn't tax us as much as you might think.
It might aggravate us.
God darn.
Why isn't that piece of data out there?
Shoot.
But at the same time, we can, I think, remain true to our mission in the way we present the data.
Okay, what would you have done, for example, during COVID when we had the debates about where COVID started or whether the vaccine worked in the way they were telling us it worked in the beginning, claiming it stopped the spread and so on?
Like, would you have even taken that on?
I'll take COVID and the spread.
Okay.
And again, we don't explain causality, but we can give you a timeline and we do.
It's on usafacts.org.
We'll give you deaths by period of time.
We had very good data of that down to the county level.
And we can show you when the waves of vaccines came in.
Now, people can look at that.
Some people could say, yeah, the vaccine really worked.
Some people will point to other situational factors.
I personally, I'm glad I took the vaccine because I'm healthy in all ways.
It didn't hurt me and I didn't get COVID severely, but that's a personal decision.
But taking a look at kind of what happened is important.
And then deciding your own view.
The government doesn't have data that gives us an accurate view that would allow us to perfectly claim causality or not.
So we won't give that to you.
But if you look at- What do you do in a situation like that where then it comes out that, I mean, eventually the mainstream started to report it too, that the deaths were being included in the hospital stats, even if you died of a gunshot wound, but you just had COVID.
It was being counted.
You know what I mean?
Like it gets tricky.
And I'm just bringing this stuff up because as somebody who's on the front lines of some of these battles in the political lane, I do think it's very hard to try to do what you're doing.
Like you're going to, at some point, you're going to get tripped up because if you just had the stats you just laid out, I know a lot of the people in my audience would have said, you're overstating the deaths of due to COVID.
You are not factoring in what has been first reported on those right-wing blogs, then denied by the mainstream, then eventually accepted by the mainstream, then winds up in the New York Times.
Then everyone left and right will say, oh, okay.
Okay, so let me let me push on that.
If this was some massive top-down issue, somebody could say, hey, it's been politicized.
You're right.
Doctors do have to decide at the time of death what the sort of driving factor is, if you will, of death.
And I'm sure we have, I don't know what the political leanings are of doctors, but we're looking at- Well, no, they were getting more money if the deaths were due to COVID.
That's why they were classifying a lot of deaths as from COVID as opposed to a gunshot.
Good point.
I'm just going to let it sit there and say, hey, you have a good point and we report what's out there.
But you're right.
In that case, I hadn't even thought about it.
There are financial challenges.
I'm doing to you what I did at Google and Facebook.
I'm giving you a heads up that this stuff, you should, you should make sure one of the people at usafacts.org is a legitimate conservative who is in tune with, even if they're not pushing you to go right.
That's not the point.
The point is to just have some, I have a job, but to have somebody say, we need to be aware that this is a controversy and to make sure that bias doesn't come in right to our, because in other words, I'd hate to see USAFacts.org just become another one of those, you know, like fact checkers.
Like for years, we were told PolitiFact was apolitical.
Well, I saw that guy on Morning Joe this morning, hard left, ripping on Trump, saying he's, you know, all the stuff and how he's this big Democrat.
We can't have that happen if you want USAFacts.org to stay what you want it to be.
But for example, that's why we are not fact checkers.
We are providers of context.
When you get involved in fact checking, the biggest issue that's partisan is which facts you choose to check.
If you choose to check the facts that represent your political point of view, that's certainly a partisan activity.
So we produce source material, if you will, for context.
You know, we pick topics that run the gamut of all the things in which government is involved.
Now, do we have people who really look at this with a little bit more conservative bent?
Yes, people both inside our organization and outside our organization.
Now, I think of myself, frankly, as very much a centrist.
I mean, conceptually, I think of myself as a centrist.
That means different things to different people, if you will.
But I find it not that hard for me to highlight to people how, you know, either the right and let me say truthfully, the left will look at some of our stuff and say, were we biased in the way we presented that?
So we do have some people who can do that who do bring an opinion from the right.
And, you know, we do our best.
And I listened to your admonition and it just, no, seriously, it always is something.
I'm glad you didn't see bias in what we've produced.
But it keeps us.
And I looked.
Yeah.
No, it keeps us.
It keeps us honest to have people push us from both sides, I'll say.
Good.
All right.
I got a minute left.
Please end on this.
You were so shy, you could barely shake hands with people when you were young.
You would hyperventilate reportedly before you went into certain public settings.
Quick primer on for kids out there on how they go from that to this.
Well, I guess three things.
Number one, build your darn confidence by getting good at something.
Number two, these problems will get better with time.
And number three, force yourself into uncomfortable situations.
When I became football team manager at Harvard, having to get up there, the manager's not a distinguished position.
You have to get up there and say, listen up, everybody.
You got to make announcements.
Managers, sit down.
That was a comfortable position for me, but it built my confidence in being out there in front of people.
I like that.
Put yourself in uncomfortable positions.
That's good advice for life, for business, and for personal development.
Steve Ballmer, what a pleasure to meet you.
My pleasure to meet you.
We've spent a lot of fun making.
All right, we'll see you at the Clippers Games and stay with it.
Finding Personal Confidence 00:01:31
Good.
Go Clippers.
Go Clippers.
I know you're not a sports fan.
But you get out of here.
You let me know.
We'll go to a game.
I will.
The arena is amazing.
And in the meantime, everybody check out usafacts.org and let me know what you think.
We've got some sharp-eyed viewers.
You let me know if you think it's right down the middle.
I liked it.
Okay, so tomorrow, my old pal Tucker Carlson returns to the show.
Gee, there's so much to talk about.
Wonder where we will even begin.
We'll tackle it together.
See you then.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
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Eller ta med en 5-kiloskartang med frosne reker til bare 2-89.
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Alle er enige om at vi må være oppmerksomme når vi kjører.
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