Megan Kelly and Anna Kasparian dissect the murder of Israeli staffers by Elias Rodriguez, whose "Free Palestine" chants mirror Columbia protests, while criticizing CNN's failure to link the violence to campus unrest. They analyze Democrats' reliance on identity politics over economic populism, exposing alleged cover-ups regarding Joe Biden's health and the cynical crushing of Bernie Sanders. The episode concludes with a fierce critique of California Governor Gavin Newsom for allowing biological males to win girls' track events, arguing this theft of medals undermines female athletes' confidence and safety while ignoring financial mismanagement in the state. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Two young Israeli embassy staffers murdered by an anti-Israel man yelling a chant heard for years now on liberal college campuses and streets of major cities.
Free, free Palestine.
Also, there is only one solution into FADA revolution.
It happened last night around 9 p.m. outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. According to eyewitnesses, the alleged gunman, Elias Rodriguez, was seen sitting calmly on a bench outside of the event and then pacing back and forth.
He approached a group of people leaving the museum and shot two of them at close range.
Rodriguez then calmly walked back inside the museum.
And in the chaos of the scene, people initially thought he was a victim.
One witness saying the shooter said, I did it.
I did it for Gaza.
Free, free Palestine.
Another witness described those moments to Fox 5 local in D.C. You know, I did see somebody run in.
The security guard happened to let this guy in.
I guess they were thinking that he was a victim.
And he was covered in rain.
He was clearly in trauma.
He was in shock.
And, you know, some of the people at the event brought him water.
They sat him down.
Are you okay?
Were you shot?
What happened?
He's like, he's like, somebody call the cops, bring the cops in.
So about 10 minutes later, when the cops actually came in, he put his hands up, he grabbed a red kafi out of his pocket and started the Free Palestine chants.
You know, there's only one solution into FADA revolution.
And he was being dragged out of the building as he was yelling, Free Palestine.
While he was being arrested, the shooter could again be heard screaming, Free Palestine, and it was caught on tape.
Free, free Palestine, come to the law.
Shout out!
Free, free Palestine, come the laugh!
That video there from Yuval David.
The victims were 28-year-old Yaron Leshinsky and his girlfriend, Sarah Milgram.
Yaron reportedly had apparently planned to propose to Sarah next week during a trip to Jerusalem.
It's awful.
Here's what we know about the suspect.
He's 30 years old.
He's an online.
He's got an online biography that says he was born and raised in Chicago.
His LinkedIn profile says he graduated from the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Rhetoric Fueling Violence00:15:28
The Daily Mail and New York Post report that in the past, Rodriguez was involved in activism with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, not to mention Black Lives Matter.
The Party for Socialism is a far-left group that regularly posts anti-Israel rhetoric.
The group confirmed Rodriguez's membership online, but distanced itself from the shooting, stating, we have nothing to do with the shooting and do not support it.
Cool.
However, a few hours earlier, the group had tweeted, the world would not forget the crimes of the U.S. and Israel.
In 2017, this guy participated in a BLM-led protest regarding the 2014 police-involved shooting of Laquan McDonald and Chicago's efforts to bring Amazon's headquarters to the city.
The sign Rodriguez held up said red, money for people's needs, not Amazon.
In an interview, Rodriguez said, whitening of Seattle is structurally racist and a direct danger to all workers who live in that city.
Wow.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Rodriguez made a political donation to the Joe Biden campaign in 2020.
A short time ago, Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist who used to work for the Intercept, posted to his own website Rodriguez's alleged manifesto.
Please understand, these sometimes turn out to be not the manifesto.
But in it, Klippenstein writes, quote, I am publishing it here not to glorify the violence, but so the public can better understand the truth of what happened.
I believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant, especially when politics is involved, as the document makes clear is the case here.
That's Klippenstein.
But the alleged manifesto, again, heavy caveat here.
I've covered so many of these damn fucking shootings, and we often turn out to have what's allegedly a manifesto, and it's not the manifesto.
In any event, this one reads, take it for what it's worth.
Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged.
They'll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'm not reading more of this.
You get the idea.
He was very anti-Israel.
And his own statements on site made that pretty clear.
Before we welcome our guest, Michael Knowles, to talk about this story, there was an extraordinary moment on CNN this morning.
Another eyewitness to the shooting went on to describe what he saw.
And he had a blunt take on the shooting and how it ties into what we've seen on so many of these college campuses.
And would you just watch the anchor revolt?
You can see she's very uncomfortable with him making this tie.
What a shock.
Watch this.
As you go forward, as you go forward with what you have seen, can you give us any sense?
Because you said you looked the shooter in the eyes.
Can you give us any sense of what you saw in him as he was sort of getting help and people were tending to him as if he too was a victim of seeing this?
Yeah, to be clear, I like heard about that part because we were in a secure room when he initially walked in.
I just saw him screaming and then being handcuffed.
But what I saw in his eyes, I mean, I went to Columbia for grads going.
I saw the same thing in his eyes as I saw in the eyes of all the protesters at Columbia.
Nothing different between him and them.
But they did not create this horrific shooting.
They did not, you know, sort of shoot.
They gave permission.
They gave the permission.
And they've called for this.
They have called for intifada revolution, which is the same thing he yelled last night.
Do you worry that there will be a conflation, though, of the two, those people who are speaking their mind who are about what is happening in Gaza and those people who are like this person who did this horrific shooting who intend to do harm?
A conflation.
I mean, they are calling for intifada.
At Columbia University, they call for intifada constantly.
They're not quietly.
They're loud.
They're loud.
You can hear it.
They make recordings of themselves.
So what's the difference?
Are you afraid?
Yes.
You're an idiot.
That is not what you ask the fucking eyewitness.
Oh, she's so worried about the tie he's making to the violence that was just unleashed against two people walking out of this Israel event and what we're hearing on college campuses literally calling for an intifada against anybody who's pro-Israel.
So heaven forbid you make that connection.
Sorry, it's obvious.
No one's saying, Sarah Seider, that they caused it, that they made this guy do it, but it's exactly the same rhetoric.
And, you know, Jewish people are getting a little sick of college campuses allowing these people to run around calling for their murder.
It's kind of upsetting because she's so, she recoils at him making the connection.
Fuck off.
I'm sorry.
That's so fucking annoying.
Joining me now, Michael Knowles.
He's hosted the Michael Knowles show for the Daily Wire.
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That's so annoying to me.
No one's saying that the people on the College of Columbia directly caused that guy to unleash this violence, but it would be asinine to not note this is exactly the same rhetoric we're hearing on these far left college campuses from coast to coast.
Obviously, this guy is rattled.
He was an eyewitness to it, but you're not allowed to make that connection on CNN, Michael.
You're not allowed to say, gee, I don't really like these chants being allowed everywhere because it's endorsing something that, you know what, kind of feels a little genocide-y, kind of feels a little murdery.
And now we've had two pro-Israel Israeli embassy workers killed.
Are you worried about the conflation of these two groups of people?
Well, they're saying the same thing and they say that they want the same thing.
So yeah, I think we could probably conflate them.
That CNN lady did an earnest performance of a Norm McDonald comedy bit.
There's a great Norm McDonald bit where he says, my greatest fear is that Muslim radicals will get a dirty bomb and set it off in a major city and kill tens of millions of people because then the backlash against peaceful Muslims would be terrible.
That was a comedy bit that he did.
And the CNN lady is performing that as though it were earnest.
You know, this is the conclusion of the Free Palestine stuff.
I talked about this on my show yesterday or two days ago.
I mean, really spooky timing.
I said, I'm sorry, I just can't get on board with the free Palestine movement because I've yet to hear a coherent argument as to how what they want makes any sense.
I've yet to hear a coherent argument that the state of Israel is not justified in going to war in Gaza or even continuing the war because the hostages are still being held.
I've yet to hear a coherent argument for bringing this movement into the right-wing coalition.
And I know that there are some people who are a little more favorable to the Free Palestine thing, but I said, just as a basic matter of political coalitions, the Free Palestine movement is led by frothing leftist lunatics who are inclined toward violence.
The Free Palestine movement is led by Greta Thunberg and the Columbia graduate students and Islamists.
Somehow the Islamists are the most sensible people in the movement.
That's not a good sign.
And so it just doesn't make any sense.
And it doesn't take a genius, it doesn't take a political philosopher to realize that the logical conclusion of revolution, revolution, intifada, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, blot out the Jews in the Middle East.
It doesn't take a genius to recognize that when people who are already inclined toward violence in politics state those things, you're going to get political violence.
Not to mention, you know, CNN, that one reporter, he interviewed Taylor Lorenz.
They're laughing about Luigi.
Like he's been lionized over there.
Not to mention they had Caitlin Collins out there promoting his crowdfund link.
You know, maybe now might be a time to be a little bit more careful in how you handle these stories.
It's possible you've made, you've been a little too slow to connect these messages to resulting violence, right?
You've been a little too quick to fan the flames of or to tamp down the flames, connecting all this rhetoric and then resulting violence.
I just like CNN, I don't know what they're doing over there, but it's not journalism.
She immediately pivoted.
Why don't you just get his story?
Get his testimonial.
This is how he feels.
Shut the fuck up with your justifications of what we're hearing on college campuses.
It's so annoying to me.
He just watched two people get shot to death.
He's upset.
He's drawing a comparison to the rhetoric he's been hearing for two years now on college.
Let him have his say, Sarah.
It's not for you to try to cleanse his opinions.
That CNN lady is demonstrating the suicidal impulse within liberalism, which is that whenever they see any political action, they see a clear perpetrator and they see a clear victim and they say, well, it has to be the opposite.
They always have to immediately take the side of the perpetrator and always immediately neglect the victim, even when the political action is so clear as a murderer murders a young couple, a young couple of civilians.
You know, this is not to say that the Israel-Palestine issue is without nuance and complexity and totally clear-cut.
I recognize there's been a lot of nuance and complexity to this issue, not only for about 100 years, but really for centuries and even millennia.
However, I want nothing to do with the Free Palestine movement.
And I think that people need to have some moral clarity here, okay?
Just as a rule of thumb, you don't need to understand all of the complexity to realize that when the worst people on earth are all supporting one side, one political movement, you, if you are a sensible, reasonable person, should say, wow, I don't agree with these people on anything, on basically any other issue.
So no, I probably shouldn't be on their side when it comes to this issue.
Yeah, same.
I just, I've said before, it's totally fine to criticize Israel.
It is fine to think that they've over-responded to the horrific attack that they suffered on 10-7.
But you don't run around chanting globalize the intifada and from the river to the sea, all of the, like these are violent.
These are calling for violence.
That's really what they are.
It's different.
Free Palestine.
Okay, that one.
Yeah, I understand.
That's less controversial.
But these chants that we've been hearing on college campuses as these activists harass Jewish students, in some cases, assault Jewish students.
And then if I hear one more person try to tell me that, oh, no, these are Jewish students doing the violence on college campuses, like Jewish voices for peace.
It's such a joke that they're the, this is not a pro-Israel group.
This is not even really a pro-Jewish group.
This is a group of radicals who are pro-Hamas, who are masquerading as Jewish people who speak for Jewish people and they're not.
In any event, it's infuriating.
And now two people are dead.
And my understanding is, yeah, go ahead.
I'll go even further.
You know, this is not even to say that there's never a role for violence in public life.
Of course there is.
There is such a thing as just wars.
There is justified violence in self-defense, for instance.
There's justified violence after due process when the civil authority punishes criminals.
It's not even to say that violence in itself is always terrible and evil.
But in this case, listen to the arguments that these people are making.
The free, free Palestine from the river to the sea, Israel or Palestine will be free is a call at the very least for ethnic cleansing, if not genocide.
Doesn't take a genius political philosopher to understand that.
These kinds of arguments that the people are making are arguments not only against the state of Israel or not even arguments against Jews or Zionism.
They're arguments against imperialism.
They're arguments in favor of radical liberation.
They're arguments in some cases in favor of Islamism, Islamic government.
These are arguments that we would not accept on any other front that we disagree with at a fundamental philosophical level.
And so if there's been ambiguity, if there's been some lack of clarity up until now, well, now you're seeing the logical conclusion of those arguments made by the people who favor unjust political violence in many other circumstances and with which we have basically nothing in common.
That's right.
That's why Marco Rubio is ejecting these people from college campuses.
I mean, truly, you're here on a student visa.
Sorry, it's a privilege.
You come over to my house for dinner and you behave badly.
I can throw you out.
It doesn't matter.
I don't care whether you're here on a visa or you're not here.
You're here by invitation and you can be ejected by my whim.
You have no right to be in my home.
And that's how Marco Rubio is treating these student visas on college campuses.
He got into this.
I'll show you.
I'm going to get to something else that happened on the murders.
But he got into this with Representative Jayopal, this squad member, on Wednesday at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee because he is trying to eject this Tufts PhD student who wrote this op-ed in the student paper that was basically aligning with the free Palestine crowd.
And he suggested he has more than that.
Two courts have looked at it and said he doesn't have more than that and that this is a matter of free speech.
It doesn't matter.
She has the right to say whatever she wants, sure, while she's here at America.
And he has the right to say, I've heard enough.
You're out of here.
She has no right based on a student visa to stay.
He can say, I don't agree with those views.
Ilan Omar Withholds Comment00:15:10
They don't align with the foreign policy of this administration.
Go home.
But watch this exchange between Rubio and Jayopal.
That law student was a guest in the United States on a student visa.
No one's entitled to a student visa.
So you revoked her student visa based on an op-ed, which trumps the supreme law of the land, which is the Constitution.
Someone's coming up here to stir up problems on our campus.
We're going to revoke their visa.
She didn't do any of that.
She wrote an op-ed.
She wrote an op-ed.
And I'm talking to you about her particular case.
You recall you reclaiming my time.
You revoked her student visa because she wrote an op-ed.
Would you revoke it?
We're going to do more.
A totally different process.
Students.
Secretary Rubio visas are a privilege.
Secretary Rubio.
You deny it all the time.
You revoke it.
You revoked a visa based on an op-ed.
And then you allowed to snatch somebody off the street.
That's your claim.
That's not accurate.
Recognized ranking.
I mean, Michael, honestly, even if it is accurate, like, okay, you know, she's made a position clear.
He's the Secretary of State.
He's not real pro on the, you know, divest from Israel or else crowd.
And we've seen what they do.
We watched what happened on Columbia University's campus with that same crowd.
You may not like it, but that is consistent with the president's policy when it comes to supporting Israel.
So sorry.
The only problem with the president's policy, as far as I can tell, is that it's not broad enough.
I also want some of these foreigners ejected for being anti-Christian, for being anti-American, for being, because, you know, Pramila Jayapal, again, I have to ask, if you're a little confused on this issue, do you think you're on the side of Pramila Jayapal?
Do you generally side with her on political issues?
If you don't, chances are you're probably not on her side when it comes to this issue either.
But what is she saying?
She's saying that people have some kind of right, foreign nationals have some right to be here and use our resources and benefit from our country's generosity.
Why?
Well, when you really dig down deep in this leftist ideology, it gets down to the notion that America is bad and we owe something to everyone else and we have no right to this land.
We have no right to our own country.
We have no right to sovereignty.
We have no right to decide who comes in and who goes.
And that's just not true.
The question that we should ask when it comes to immigration fundamentally is, do the people who are coming here benefit our country or not?
When it comes to Columbia graduate students flying around from all over the world, most of the time the answer is no.
And so we don't need to get much deeper than that.
Do they benefit our country?
No.
Get them out.
Get out.
Right.
We just haven't been doing it.
So now we're going to start doing it.
Good.
I stand by Marco Rubio when he says he's going to do more.
Here's Representative Ilan Omar, who hasn't posted a single thing on X. She's very active on X. Suddenly, she's gone dark, totally quiet, even though she did post something about the big beautiful budget bill, which happened.
And she posted that after this attack.
And then Fox News caught up with her this morning to see if she would comment and watch what happened.
Congresswoman Omar, you buddy say, can I?
I'm going to go for now.
I'm going to, I'm going to, what it was, I'm going to go for now.
She says, I'm going to go.
I'm going to go for now.
Can we play it again?
Just play it one more time.
Congresswoman Omar, you buddy say, can I?
I'm going to go for now.
Wow.
That's it.
It wasn't a provocative question at all.
It was as neutral and vanilla as you could possibly ask.
She couldn't muster.
I condemn it.
And I'm so sorry for the two victims.
She couldn't even muster that.
This woman needs to be voted out of office immediately.
I cannot believe that she actually is a sitting U.S. representative in the House of Representatives.
No comment from Ilhan Omar is probably the best thing she could have said here because we all know what she really thinks.
I mean, this is the woman who on video was laughing about people speaking negatively of al-Qaeda.
You remember that video?
Oh, they say al-Qaeda.
You know, this is a woman who has extremely radical views and obvious sympathy with Islamists and the Free Palestine movement and the Intifada broadly.
So we know what she believes.
She's not even just some fringe radical, as you point out, Megan.
This is a sitting member of Congress.
And I want nothing to do with her views.
I really want nothing to do with her.
And while we're booting radical grad students out of the country, we should probably boot these radicals out of Congress.
You know, the left for a long time has been telling us that it's white men and it's the right that perpetrates violence in the United States.
Somebody on Twitter on X pulled this old sod of Nicole Wallace making this point a couple of years ago.
Here she is.
Oh, no, we don't have it.
Okay, we'll get it.
We'll get it and we'll drop it in.
Okay.
In any event, you know I'm right.
The left has been making this point for a long time about how it's white men that we need to fear.
It's right-wing conservatism.
That's the biggest danger to us in the United States.
Like, okay, now we've had Luigi.
Now we've had this guy.
How many more do we have to have before they actually start paying attention to their rhetoric, their messaging, and their lionization of guys like Luigi, right?
Which leads to other people thinking, maybe I'll be lionized too.
Maybe I'll have a fan club.
Maybe I'll have a GoFundMe.
And I'll bet you dollars to donuts, this guy's going to get a GoFundMe to support him probably tomorrow.
That's probably why Ilan Omar withheld comment.
She's busy setting it up for him.
Of course.
You know, I'm glad actually, I think that was a gift you gave to me that we don't need to listen to Nicole Wallace right now, Megan, because you don't need to go very far to disprove her claim that white men are the great violent threat in the country.
You can look at crime statistics and you can listen to what other people are saying.
But this has been true for a long time.
The left made much hay over January 6th, the worst day in the history of this or any republic.
But of course, not only was that not the worst attack ever on the Capitol, it's probably not even in the top three.
And when you look at violent attacks on the Capitol, including congressmen being shot, they were almost always perpetrated by radical leftists.
The radical left has embraced political violence going back at least to the French Revolution when the term left in a political sense was first invented.
So this is a long-standing problem, and there's no surprise whatsoever.
You have to ask yourself on this particular issue, the Intifada and the Free, Free Palestine movement, what are they really saying?
They're saying that we need to get rid of the state of Israel.
Because even if you say, okay, hold on, you don't think that the state of Israel was justified in going to war against Gaza after the Gazans attacked them on October 7th, a couple of years ago?
They would say, well, it didn't start then.
You know, actually, some of them would even defend October 7th as a justified response to Israeli oppression.
And if you keep scratching that deep enough, you get down to their ultimate claim, which is that the state of Israel has no right to exist.
They shouldn't have been there in the first place.
And I say, okay, I'll keep an open mind.
What's the argument for that?
Because when I look at the foundation of the state of Israel, I see the Balfour Declaration.
So the empire that controlled the land, the British Empire, said the Jews can have a territory in this land.
Then I see the UN establishing the state of Israel.
So if you believe in international law at all, I guess you'd have to recognize that.
And then the Israelis fought a war in 1948 to take the land.
So even by the law of conquest, you see the establishment.
And so you might say, well, I don't like how that war turned out or the subsequent wars.
You might say, I don't like the UN.
You might say, I don't like the British Empire.
But if you accept the most basic premises of our international system, going back to the peace of Westphalia, it's really hard to make a coherent argument for the ethnic cleansing that the Free, Free Palestine movement wants to effect.
So then at that point, with logic gone totally out the window, all that the political movement can come down to is a kind of senseless violence where they're going to start murdering civilians to affect political ends, which is the basic definition of terrorism that was always built in.
And if you've fallen for this kind of rhetoric up until this point, I think at this moment, you have to say, all right, this is a bridge too far.
And as is often the case in politics, you kind of have to pick a side.
Yeah.
Okay.
So she must be watching because Ilan Omar literally just dropped the following statement on X.
Oh, she's Megan Kelly.
Yeah, she's a Megan Kelly show and Michael Knowles fan.
She writes, I am appalled by the deadly shooting at the Capitol Jewish Museum last night, holding the victims, their families and loved ones in my thoughts and prayers.
Violence should have no place in our country.
I don't believe her.
I don't believe her at all.
Otherwise, she wouldn't have paused before turning to that Fox News reporter saying I'm going to.
It wasn't a tough question.
It's so easy.
Even if you are the most pro-free, free Palestine person in Congress, and she might actually hold that title.
She's definitely up there.
At the very least, you're asking, couldn't you just say, oh, yes, we're praying for the victims, Rick, we ask Scott and Pache, you know, I'll say a prayer and move on.
If you can't muster even that most basic, I mean, look, when any political opponent gets sick, Joe Biden just got sick.
He's just announcing he had cancer.
Every single Republican I saw, no matter how much they despised Joe Biden, they said, okay, we say prayer.
Cancer's awful.
You know, he's a fellow human being.
You know, I'll raise him up in prayer.
That's the most basic thing you could possibly say.
She couldn't muster that.
It just shows the level of contempt with which she holds her opponents.
Yeah, no, it's obvious.
It's been obvious to us for a while.
There was the moment when Fox reporter Hillary Vaughn, do you remember this, caught up with her asking about Hamas terrorists?
This was from 2023.
She was all over the internet and all over our show just for her insensitivity to what had been done to the Israelis, what was being done to Jews on college campuses here.
Here was this moment.
How can they have a ceasefire if they're trying to wipe out this crazy lady?
No more voters.
Ignore this crazy lady.
Don't worry about her.
That's what Ilan Omar finally said.
I can't, I mean, like, it's really kind of scary that this woman is in the U.S. Congress.
I realize the bar is kind of low, but it's, she's as low as they come.
I mean, truly, we have a true anti-Semite sitting there voting on legislation as we speak.
Well, ironically, Ilhan's point of view is actually the way that I view Ilhan Omar.
I said, don't worry about this crazy lady.
Forget about her.
Ignore her.
Maybe boot her out of Congress when you have the chance.
Isn't she the one who put up the Somalian flag outside of her office?
Like, cool.
Okay, great.
All right.
So that's her.
And honestly, I mean, our prayers, not just to the families of these victims who had everything in front of them, everything in front of them.
By all accounts, especially I've been hearing so many testimonials to him.
What they're saying online is that his mother was Christian, his father was Jewish, and he was Israeli, I think a dual citizen.
And she was Jewish, the girl, but they were about to get engaged, that he was reportedly just such a sweet guy.
And somebody posted the last posts online of this guy and the suspected shooter.
And his last post was so sweet.
It was like completely pro-America, very different from the guy who shot him.
Hold on a second.
Let me just see if I can find it.
It was disturbing.
Yeah, here it is.
Marina Medvin posted this on X.
The tweet of this Elias Rodriguez was the last one.
Oh, no, not the last one, but a recent one.
Death to America with KKK in the America spelling.
And here's Yaron Leshinsky, the victim from May 10th.
We are deeply grateful for the historic alliance with our steadfast partner, the United States, and the great American people who have stood by our side.
I look forward to working with this administration to bring about more security, freedom, and peace with an Israeli flag, an American flag, and two hands holding and shaking each other.
I mean, it's such a different mentality, Michael, to your point.
As you describe this, victims, Megan, I mean, this to me, maybe it's just that I'm not ideological.
I'm not, I don't, maybe I'm not smart enough to figure it out.
But when I look at politics, I think very practically, I think very in a prudential way.
And you see the alleged perpetrator and you see the victim.
And you got to ask yourself, I don't care if you're Jewish.
I don't care if you believe in Zionism, if you accept the religious and historical premises of Zionism.
Many people don't.
Probably most people don't, especially if you're Christian.
But just at a practical matter, who do you have more in common with?
Even beyond questions of justice, who do you have more in common with?
Who do you think is more on your side?
The lunatic shouting free, free Palestine, murdering a young, innocent couple that probably despises America.
In fact, we know he despises America because he sided with the socialists and the communists and BLM.
That's the thing.
The tweet makes it pretty clear.
The tweet makes it pretty clear.
He says it himself.
That person or the victims?
Who do you think you have more?
Who do you think is more on your side?
Which side do you think you should be on?
That's exactly right.
Okay, let's keep going while we're on the subject of CNN failures.
Tapper and Thompson out there pushing this book.
They were on the program on Tuesday.
And notwithstanding the fact that we gave Jake Tapper a very hard time for not being the right person to author this book, Alex Thompson is fine.
He actually can author this book.
He did not only try to cover some of the Biden decline, but did better than anyone in the so-called mainstream in trying to hold Kamala Harris's many flip-flops to account by going to her campaign over and over and saying, do you still stand by taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners?
And she would blow him off.
But Axios had an article from him virtually every day on that stuff.
Okay, so he is continuing and Jake is continuing the press tour.
And he went to Alex Thompson on News Nation and spoke with our pal, Leland Vitter, on Tuesday.
And this, this is so right on.
This is so right on.
Watch this clip in stop five, 15.
Sorry, stop 15.
Media Blamed for Complicity00:10:56
When you were reporting this, did people in his inner circle, did those that you talked to acknowledge that the media, were they surprised by how complicit the media was?
It was interesting.
I had one conversation with someone.
This was after the election while we were reporting this book.
And this person said, listen, yes, we deserve blame for XYZ.
We were hiding him.
But this person also sort of got in my face and they said, listen, the media deserves some blame too.
Like we were sort of amazed at some of the stuff we were able to spin and get on.
It's like the bank robber complaining his safe wasn't locked.
They're just like, you guys, you guys should not have believed us so easily.
And I thought that was like a really interesting, but I also think that's true.
I think the media in a lot of ways just was not skeptical enough and did not remember the lesson that they do it to different degrees, but every White House lies.
Pretty amazing.
Even the Democrats in the White House were astonished at how compliant the media was in spreading their lies about Joe Biden.
I love seeing the media reactions to Tapper's book, which is, golly, can you believe now we're discovering?
I mean, I guess this is actually the point of the book.
We're discovering all these things.
The White House told us that Biden was perfectly fine.
I mean, I know we saw him drooling on himself in the Oval Office, but they told us, they promised us that we didn't actually see and to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
And these are not the droids you're looking for.
So don't blame us.
We're the intrepid fourth estate that has to speak truth to power.
But we were told by the propagandists of the White House to stop looking and we did.
Don't blame them.
Don't blame us.
Hey, buddy, I thought your job.
The whole reason we have to defend the wonderful, brilliant journalists is you're going to ask the questions.
If all you're going to do is take the propaganda line from Democrat, White House, Hookline, and Sinker, why am I even going to tune into you?
I'll just watch the White House.
There's not going to be any difference in messaging.
That's exactly right.
Just turn on C-SPAN.
You know, you can, you can get some direct messages from Democrats without any media filter and make up your own mind.
But they acted.
They really, they really, they helped spread the lies and launder the lies.
And now they're using this Tappert Thompson book to launder their own cover up into a, gee, we're just now learning about this from this book.
This is horrifying information.
Can't believe that this happened to us.
These White House people are really terrible.
Meanwhile, you've got, I am going to make you look at Nicole Wallace because we had two soundbites from her today.
Here she is.
This is by somebody on X who goes by Mazemore.
This is her, the first one under Trump calling for polygraphs of his inner circle on his fitness for office versus under the Joe Biden regime when those so-called cheap fake videos showing actual Joe Biden freeze-ups came out.
Watch.
John Kelly.
We need people to speak.
Kelly Ann Conway.
Absolutely.
Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner.
Let's hook them up to a polygraph.
You know what?
It's a serious offer.
If you're willing, any one of you, hook up to a polygraph.
We'll put it on TV.
You can have my hour.
We'll do one a day.
Is Donald Trump fit for the presidency?
Is he capable of carrying out the responsibilities?
There's a growing and insidious trend in right-wing media, broadcasts, print, and social media.
It is to take highly misleading and selectively edited videos of President Biden directly from Republican National Committee social media accounts and then use those videos to spread messages virally to cast doubt on President Biden's fitness for office.
Cheap fakes, videos of real events that are intentionally manipulated to fool viewers.
Can you imagine the humiliation that she would feel right now if she actually had an honest bone in her body?
Well, fortunately, she'll never have to worry about that.
The irony of her claim, they often use this, the highly, highly edited, selected video.
Yeah, they're selected to show Joe Biden speaking on the rare occasions that you'd actually cover it.
Heavily edited.
What are you talking about heavily edited?
We just play the videos of him.
The irony is her claim really applies to them.
And I'm not even saying it applies to the Democrat committees and the Democrat activists.
I'm talking about when Kamala Harris sits down for a 60 minutes interview and the editors have to go in there and chop it up with extreme precision to make it sound like that woman is not babbling nonsense.
And by the way, she is supposedly in her right mind.
She wasn't even suffering from dementia as Joe Biden obviously was.
So now you're going to see this quasi-mea culpa.
It's not even really a mea culpa.
It's pointing the culpa at the White House and saying, wow, you know, golly, I guess he really was in decline.
It reminds me of John McCain after the 2008 presidential election.
Shortly afterward, when it became clear that Obama was a complete disaster, John McCain was asked a question by a reporter.
He said, there is a survey out that shows that if the election were held today, you would have won that most people wish that you had won.
What's your reaction to that, Senator McCain?
And his answer was perfect.
He said, I guess my answer is, where were you when I needed you?
That's how I was feeling about the media.
Oh, great.
You're covering Joe Biden's decline many months now after he's left office, many, many months after the 2024 election.
Hey, where were you when I needed you?
You know, it's this kind of dishonesty that has completely sunk the corporate media.
I mean, it's just completely sunk them.
That among many other things, but they're, you know, they're not truth tellers.
They're just not truth tellers.
They are Democrat soldiers who they're the same in their marching as the North Korean army is when we see them falling all over Kim Jong-un.
They have the same loyalty to the Democrat Party and are marching in their own way, right?
So now there's an article out today in the New York Times talking about how there's big money over on the left wing going into fund the, quote, the next Joe Rogan.
Like the Democrats are serious about this now.
They've decided they have to compete in our world, in the digital world, and they've got to find, again, quote, the next Joe Rogan.
And it starts with money.
They're taking all their money.
They have way more money in terms of these dark donors than the Republicans do.
They've got to channel it into certain talent to try to create strong voices in the digital lane.
And I got strong feelings about whether this is going to work, Michael, but I don't think.
And then my top line in tossing it to you is I don't think it's going to work.
Among many other reasons, the Democrats aren't authentic and honest.
They are the North Korean soldiers.
And anybody who would be backed by one of these dark money groups to launch his or her podcast will necessarily be owned by them and therefore will be ineffective.
It also just can't work because Joe Rogan is a response to them.
And Joe is obviously the biggest podcaster in the world, but that's true of all the rest of us too, all the rest of us with pretty sizable platforms.
We are a response to them.
We exist in this space because they failed.
So they say, well, when are the Democrats going to get our Joe Rogan?
You have him.
He's called NBC News or any of the other news networks or CNN or the New York Times or the Washington Post.
You have it.
You cannot complain if you're a Democrat that you have lack of exposure in the media, okay?
We have a handful of people continually suppressed by social media platforms.
And the reason that we are eating these people's lunch is because they lied.
So when CNN complains that their ratings are down after the 2024 election, don't blame me and don't blame you, Megan.
And don't blame Joe Rogan.
We're not the people watching CNN.
I watch more CNN when I'm on your show because we're reacting to clips of these people saying crazy things than I ever would on my own TV.
But we're not the people who tuned out CNN.
We tuned out CNN many, many, many years ago.
The people who tuned out CNN and MSNBC and all the rest of these networks after the election were the liberal viewers who felt jilted and lied to because they were lied to.
And then they look for alternatives.
And now what?
You're going to try to be the alternative to the alternative?
I don't think it's going to work.
It's not going to work.
That's so true.
And by the way, like I've heard you and I certainly on this show too have been very critical of Republican leadership, depending on what they're doing.
The right doesn't tend to have those same rules as the left does.
The right is constantly infighting over who's the right candidate, what's the right approach, which side of the MAGA wing should win, what's the approach on foreign policy.
They're not pro-censorship and pro-the duck march that we see with these weirdos on the left.
It's just not the way.
It's not in the right wing bloodstream.
So I just don't think it's going to work.
And, you know, not for nothing, but Joe Rogan was a Bernie Sanders voter in 2020, 2020.
Okay.
So you had Joe Rogan.
You ran him out of your party by your extremity.
You know, you're just too far out of the mainstream.
They're too radical, Michael.
You know, I heard it once described as a distinction between Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, archetypal Democrat, archetypal Republican.
You could send Bill Clinton into a room and he would find the one issue that 100 people in the room all agreed on.
And you send Rudy Giuliani into a room full of conservatives.
They'd find the one issue on which they all disagreed.
There's nothing conservatives love more than disagreeing with each other.
This is why on the left you have progressives, basically only progressives left in the Democrat Party.
On the right, you have the paleocons and the neocons and the libertarians and the traditionalists and the this and the that and the neopaleo.
And I heard it described that the obscure political monikers are the right-wing version of gender pronouns.
You know, we just all have to fight on every single issue.
Okay, well, that creates some problems in forming political coalitions that work.
That's why what Trump was able to do in 2016 and 2024 was so impressive.
He brought in all these disparate groups who don't seem to get along, but they all voted and actually did something together.
But the advantage of having all that disagreement on the right is the truth tends to get out a little bit.
We're not so in lockstep.
We're not so married to a single ideology that you could see a political event occur right before your eyes and deny it and have that denial enforced by all the powerful institutions that the Democrats have taken over.
And not only does the left control the media, I mean, everything except the digital lane and Fox, but they control all of the media.
Trump Dominates Pop Culture00:05:24
But of course, they control so many of our cultural institutions like Hollywood, not to mention our financial institutions, which largely lean very, very left.
We've seen that with all the woke investing that's been a disaster over the past five years.
Sports and music, music, which is something we don't talk about that often.
I don't know if you saw this Bruce Springsteen rant against the president.
He's as far left as they come.
And by the way, he has really lost his talent.
I'm not saying it just to be mean.
It's true.
He can't sing anymore.
Someone needs to give him the gentle tap on the shoulder and tell him it's time to exit screen stage left.
Here he is in just a bit clip from Manchester, England on May 14th at a concert.
People are trying to hear Bruce Springsteen music.
Who gives two damns what he thinks about President Trump, but he's got to launch into it.
Watch.
In my heart, the America I love, the America I deliver about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and truthful standard.
Corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.
Okay, first of all, you're in England, so get a grip.
They're not rising up against us at all.
We rose up against them and found our independence, Bruce.
I got to show you the Trump response, which is just perfect.
It's a little AI manipulated video.
Let's roll it.
Alex, describe it for the listening audience.
It's Trump swinging his golf club, like at the beginning of a, and then Bruce Springsteen, he trips walking upstairs and he makes it look like his golf ball hit Bruce Springsteen.
So my point, my largest, larger point is just like this.
Yes, we are a reaction to this too.
We are a reaction to their control of virtually every institution in America.
Listen, I'm not going to pretend like I've never listened to a Bruce Springsteen song.
I was raised in New York.
This is a little TMI probably, Megan.
I was conceived in New Jersey.
Okay.
So I've listened to plenty.
Love Thunder Road.
Atlantic City is great, even though the band's version of Atlantic City is better than Bruce Springsteen's version.
But the reason that Trump can get away with this right now, taking a big, prominent rock star, even if he's a little past his prime, or taking a big pop star like Taylor Swift, or taking any of these celebrities that Trump takes on, the reason that Trump can get away with this in a way that no other Republican has been able to is that Trump is a bigger pop star than they are.
This is the first time Republicans have ever had this.
We came pretty close with Ronald Reagan.
He was a Hollywood star.
Trump is even bigger.
Trump has dominated the popular culture.
Network TV was top of the ratings.
He's been in tabloids my entire life.
Major, not only businessman, but major pop culture figure.
And the left is so off-footed by this.
They've always relied on all of their favorite people-not just Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift, but P. Diddy.
Remember that?
Remember the Vote or Die campaign?
That one's probably coming back to bite the Democrats a little bit right now, though it's par for the course.
They would rely on the pop culture figures to drown out the voices of conservative politicians until you get a bigger pop star, even than the ones the Democrats have.
And that's Trump, and he's using it.
I love that he's engaging in fights with these pop stores.
Some people think it's a distraction from the real serious policy.
You know, we need to just wear all of our neckties and have white papers at the think tanks in D.C.
No, man, there's a place for that.
But if you want to speak to a huge portion of voters who are not plugged into all that wonkery, who really do kind of just pay attention to like pop culture and the stuff that's on TV, you finally have a guy in Donald Trump who can do that, who can do it very effectively.
And that golf ball just takes Bruce Springsteen right down.
All right, now in the minute we have left, are you excited for Pride Month, Michael Knowles?
We are just days away now from your favorite time of year.
It's very bigoted of you to even suggest, Megan, that pride is limited to a single month.
You know, it began as a day, then it was a week, then it became a month.
Now there's another month.
October is also another kind of LGBT month.
So we are very close to Pride year.
However, it's losing its corporate sponsorship.
We might have reached peak pride.
Oh my gosh.
I mean, hallelujah.
I hope you're right.
We've got an American Pope and we might have reached peak pride.
We'll find out momentarily because it starts in June, as my 15-year-old very wisely said.
Why did the LGBTQ people get a whole month and the veterans only get a day?
Very good question.
Michael Knowles, always a pleasure, my friend.
Thanks for coming on.
Great to be with you, Megan.
All right, coming up next, an actual Democrat who does criticize her own side, and they criticize her too a lot for coming on this show.
But she does it, which speaks well for her, Anna Kasparian.
You know her, and we haven't been able to ask her about Trump's attempt to lower the cost of prescription drugs.
We'll get into that in much, much more in just a minute with her.
Soul Searching in Politics00:08:04
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President Trump said, after years of rebuilding other nations, we're finally rebuilding our nation.
Washington can finish the job in next year's budget and keep President Trump's promise.
The Everglades Foundation, our advertiser, says that would be good for Florida and good for the Everglades.
Learn more about President Trump's Everglades support project at evergladesfoundation.org.
Fiken.
Start din egenbedrift.
Superenkelt.
So, what comes next?
Joining me now, someone who has a lot of thoughts.
She is the host and executive producer of The Young Turks, Anna Kasparian.
Anna, welcome back.
So, there's some soul searching.
I don't know if that's real?
Is it real soul searching?
Is it like just desperate darts at a board stuff?
What's happening right now as the Democrats deal with this tapper book, in addition to the other books that have come out, and just the reality of Trump governing?
There needs to be some soul searching.
I question whether that's really taking place right now within the Democratic establishment.
And unfortunately, what I'm seeing in liberal media is this effort to provide cover for what the Democrats did in the last election cycle while simultaneously condemning the authors of any book that sheds a negative light on the Biden administration and the Biden camp.
And to be quite frank with you, I'm just tired of political figures, whether we're talking about Democrats or Republicans, who are more interested in their own political ambitions, in their own money-making capability, as opposed to serving as public servants to do what's right for their party, for their constituents.
I just see this whole situation as one big egotistical mess.
And the party will continue losing as long as they fail to take a moment, just a beat, to self-reflect and figure out what they need to do to reform to move forward and be a far more appealing party.
Right now, they are not an appealing party.
The polls indicate that.
You know, it's funny because when we watch the Democrats these past four years and earlier than that, too, we pointed out many times when things weren't going Joe Biden's way in the polls, for example, while he was just president or while he was running.
They would constantly say, We've got to change the message.
Like, people aren't understanding how great he is.
Like, it's the messaging that's the problem, as opposed to the underlying policies or like the actual choices he was making, open borders for one.
And now it seems like they're in the same damning cycle where the reports are: what we need is more online influencers.
You know, we what we need is our own Joe Rogan.
So, we're going to throw money at developing a Joe Rogan type on the left.
And from my perch, all I can think is that's not it.
When you get your well-funded left-wing guy who is a man's man who's into like martial arts and mixed martial arts and is cool and is funny and somebody that other guys can look up to, he cannot then spend the two hours saying you can't say that word and you can't say that word.
And we have to begin with a land acknowledgement every day.
And that's where the Democrat Party largely is right now.
Well, it's thought of as the party of scolds, and they do need to move away from that, especially if they're looking to build a coalition large enough to win critical elections.
And really, I think a lot of Americans are fatigued by constantly like looking over their shoulder, worried that they might say the wrong thing, worry that they might be cast off as some sort of bigot or racist because they accidentally used a word that's no longer in vogue with the whole of the Democratic Party.
Look, I think most Americans are good people.
And I think, you know, when culture changes, we have to have some grace with individuals to change along with it or to adapt with those changes.
I think most Americans are good people who are not bigoted, who are not racist, who are not hateful, but want to live in a pluralistic society that treats all sides and all identities fairly.
And what you kind of see with the Democratic Party right now is just this hyper emphasis on all the things that this country has done wrong in the past, what needs to be done moving forward to right those wrongs.
And in the meantime, there's just a lot of hateful rhetoric being spewed at people who might have identified as Democrats their entire lives, might have voted as Democrats their entire lives, but there might be a social issue here or there that they're not comfortable with, or maybe they're worried about what they're experiencing in the big city that they're living in that's currently being run by Democratic lawmakers, Democratic governor or mayor, and they want to see some changes and reforms.
But if they voice their opinion on those reforms, they'll get dogpiled all over the internet and they'll made to be, they'll be out, you know, made out to be like a terrible person.
And I just, what I'm seeing on the right right now, and again, I don't know if this is just what happens to be part of the culture on the right or if it's a, you know, political strategy.
There's less judgment and more openness to absorbing people into their party.
And that's how you win.
That's how you win.
Now, look, I'm not saying, oh, Democrats need to throw their principles out of the window.
They should, you know, absorb, you know, a Nazi or a self-described Klansman.
No, I'm not saying that.
But you and I both know that there are all sorts of people who have lost their jobs, who have been made targets by the left because of the fact that, hey, you know what?
I wanted police reform.
I didn't want to abolish the police.
Hey, you know what?
I see a place for prisons in our society.
I do want prison reform, but I don't want to abolish prisons.
Those are the type of people who tend to get attacked.
And I know that because I happen to be one of them.
Yeah, exactly.
Or on the BLM front, like I'm happy to be more inclusive of people, but don't tell me our goal is to dismantle the nuclear family.
Like it's an evil.
Right.
And, you know, I would just warn the right about what they're currently seeing on the left, because I do see some pretty prominent figures on the right who have kind of taken on that purity culture where they're looking to do purity tests of people on the right.
And if you're not perfectly in line with what the right wants or what the Trump administration wants, well, you're not welcome.
You're not wanted.
And if that type of culture festers, well, conservatives are going to lose too.
You can't, you can't have that.
I mean, there are some people who are diehard MAGA who will still hold it against people who are pro-DeSantis.
Identity Politics vs Coalitions00:15:23
You know, I see that still on Twitter.
It's like, what is the point of that?
You know, like Trump has won.
Take the W, run with it, build the coalition.
I mean, who cares what happened during the primaries?
But I would say in general, you're right that Republicans are much more accepting of different viewpoints and different political philosophies than I've seen over on Team Blue, who resemble North Korea to me in their efforts to make people tow the party line and continue the right messaging and get Joe Biden across that finish line.
We don't care how infirm he is.
This New York Times article from two days ago is titled, Democrats Throw Money at a Problem, Countering GOP Clout Online.
And this is speaking to that effort to find the new Joe Rogan.
At donor retreats and in pitch documents seen by the Times, liberal strategists are pushing the party's rich backers to reopen their wallets for a cavalcade of projects to help Dems, as the cliché now goes, find the next Joe Rogan.
They're trying to energize glum donors and persuade them that they can compete culturally with President Trump if only they throw enough money at the problem.
The quiet effort amounts to an audacious skeptics, might say desperate bet that Democrats can buy more cultural relevance online.
And it ends with hoping to move away from the current didactic hall monitor style of Democratic politics that turns off young voters.
And they will focus on directly funding influencers and co-producing their content, opening a creator talent agency and starting by inking deals with four flagship creators, according to a business plan share with the Times.
Now, you are in this space like one of the OGs, the Young Turks has been around a long time since I was on Fox.
And you tell me whether it can be recreated with just a deep pocket and some handpicked selection by some unknown Democratic donor group.
Megan, if I could be a mouthpiece and rake in the big bucks, I mean, I don't know if I would do it, but I know that I'm not capable of doing it, right?
So part of the reason why I find myself in this terrible situation that I'm in, where I'm basically rejected by the left, but I don't fit in with the right, really.
Like I, you know, so I'm like kind of in no man's land right now.
And it's not fun.
It's pretty awful.
But the reason why I'm there is because I have to be authentic.
I have to be honest with my audience.
It's both selfish because I can't help but just tell people how I actually feel about the issues we talk about, but it's also because I respect my audience.
I want my audience to know the truth.
And so if I see the left doing something that's counterproductive, if I see something that I don't like, I'm going to speak out about it.
And the reason why I do that is because there's still a little bit of hope that maybe they'll learn some lessons.
Maybe they'll heed the advice and, you know, recalibrate some of their behavior and some of their policies so they can, you know, attract a broad coalition of voters to support them.
But instead, what I've noticed by the Democratic Party is that rather than self-reflect, they like to lash out.
They see us as their public servants instead of them being our public servants.
And that is a huge, huge problem.
So I want to reiterate, I don't fit in on the right.
I have some pretty serious like left-wing policy preferences.
But culturally speaking, the left I find repulsive at times and intentionally so.
I mean, they're intentionally behaving that way.
And it's totally selfish because it's more about how they feel and how they want to purge certain people out of the party as opposed to thinking about what they need to do to, again, attract a broad coalition of Americans who are willing to buy in to their agenda and program.
Yeah.
I mean, I see it now.
It's like one of the reasons I'm thrilled that nobody owns one share of my company other than me.
I don't have any investors.
I'm the only investor.
And because then no one owns you.
You know, the people who advertise on my show, you know, Genyasell doesn't call me up telling me what to say about presidential politics.
They just want the platform to sell their makeup.
And it's a great brand and I'm happy to endorse it.
But my point is they don't control me and none of them would ever try.
They'd be booted off the show immediately.
And so it's like by definition, the way they're going about this will not work.
You cannot have like the Democratic apparatus create this star who then can somehow become a Joe Rogan because you can't become a Joe Rogan if you're owned by anybody, if you're sent out there with any agenda other than the one you just outlined, which is to tell people your honest opinions and the facts as you know them.
Right.
And Joe Rogan's popularity is not manufactured.
It was organic.
And the part of the reason why it's organic growth, organic popularity is because he's willing to sit down and have conversations with almost anyone.
I mean, one of my friends, his name is Ben Burgess.
He's a self-identified Marxist.
Joe Rogan interviewed him.
Joe Rogan will interview people from across the political spectrum.
He'll interview people who have nothing to do with politics at all, but they're in a field of work that's super fascinating.
That's the way that he grew a massive audience, a massive diverse audience.
Now, of course, because of the fact that he had endorsed Donald Trump in the last election and prior to that had been critical of some of the transgender policies as it pertains to women's sports and minors, the left had kind of turned on him earlier.
However, he still has this massive audience.
I'll listen to the podcast when he has a guest that I'm interested in hearing from.
And if they think that they're just going to throw money at a problem, the Democrats, and manufacture the next Joe Rogan that's going to help them win elections, I think they're just going to be wasting a lot of money.
And they're just going back to what I believe is the biggest issue within the Democratic Party at the moment right now, which is the political bribes, right?
You're going to raise money.
Okay, great.
But that money comes with strings attached.
They know that.
And oftentimes those donors want goodies that the voters do not want.
And that's why you had Kamala Harris trying to like, you know, do this ridiculous balancing act where she's trying to appease the donors without upsetting left-wing voters, but the voters weren't buying it because guess what?
Voters are way smarter than our politicians know.
Well, what do you make of that on that front?
Because you were the first person I thought of when Trump announced his executive order on negotiating on drug prices.
And you had said your last appearance here, like, hello, why is nobody focusing on that?
It was a Bernie issue.
Trump's trying to take it on.
Trump did try to take it on once before and it got struck down legally.
And this may too, as an executive order, it really has to be done legislatively.
But yes, he's probably, you know, this is the time right now with the big, beautiful bill.
But what did you make of what Trump did?
Well, first off, you know, if he's genuine and sincere about wanting to lower pharmaceutical drug prices, obviously I commend him.
You're absolutely right in that he wouldn't be able to do this unilaterally.
He would need Congress to act.
I think one of the biggest issues right now is that you have Republican lawmakers in Congress who are bribed, bought by the pharmaceutical industry.
And they essentially said immediately after Trump, on, I believe it was on May 11th, when he had hinted that he was going to sign this executive order, you heard from Republican lawmakers who essentially said, no, this is dead on arrival.
We're not going to include this in our budget bill.
There's no way we're going to do it.
Even though negotiating for lower pharmaceutical drug prices or implementing a policy, the most favored nation policy that would cap pharmaceutical drug prices in America to that of the country that's paying the least amount, you know, that would save the most amount of money in taxpayer money when it comes to our Medicare system.
But all these fiscal hawks, right?
The so-called fiscal hawks who wanted to torpedo Trump's agenda didn't propose that.
And I wonder why.
Why aren't you proposing for the Medicare to be able to make the big pharma money?
It's so annoying.
Yes.
The Republicans are not above that sort of grift either.
Both sides love it.
If you are lining their pockets, their political future is more important to them than doing the right thing.
And so that's the problem.
But look, I like that he's trying.
And if he doesn't try to get it into this big, beautiful bill, it's not going to happen because that EO will probably meet the same fate as the earlier one did.
On the subject of the Dems, Bernie, the Medicare prices and the prescription drugs, he went on the flagrant podcast recently with our pal, Andrew Schultz, and they had a really interesting discussion.
Here's a bit where he's talking about the problem within the Democrat Party.
It's SOT 19.
The problem I think a lot of voters had is like they didn't even know if it was her.
We didn't even know if Biden was president.
We didn't even know if these were her talking points.
And we felt that over the last four elections, Democrats, we felt that we didn't have a say on who could be president.
We talk a lot about the Republicans being autocrats and oligarchs and taking over democracy.
But from the Democrat perspective, and I'm a lifelong Democrat, I felt like the Democratic Party completely removed the Democratic process from its constituents.
And I think they need to have some accountability to that.
No argument here.
But then could we not also say if ostensibly there hasn't been a fair primary for the Democrats since 2008, are they not also a threat to democracy?
We often hear.
Fair enough.
That is, that is.
Yeah, I'm not going to argue with that point.
I love the way he talks.
The accent is just so, so great to listen to.
He's not wrong, right?
I mean, he, he of all people has standing to say that because it happened to him twice.
Yep.
Yeah.
I mean, Bernie's back.
And what I mean by that is he's realized that you can't really play nice with the Democratic establishment and expect to get your policy priorities passed, expect them to help you out in whatever your agenda might be.
And, you know, 2015, 2016, Bernie, when he was running in the 2016 race, was a little different from 2020, Bernie.
And what I mean by that is as soon as the Democratic establishment saw an economic populist like Bernie Sanders gain the kind of momentum he did, they cynically used identity politics to crush him.
Oh, you're not addressing, you're not addressing BLM.
I mean, I remember during one of his campaign rallies, two people from BLM just jumped on stage, interrupted the entire event, you know, called him out for allegedly not caring about black bodies or black lives.
And it was just utter, ridiculous, cynical use of identity politics to crush someone.
And in the end, I mean, what did the party get?
In the end, Trump got elected in 2016, of course.
Then in 2020, you have Joe Biden, who was able to run from his basement because of COVID.
But the only reason why I think Biden won in that election or in that race is because of the fact that many Americans didn't like the way Trump handled the coronavirus.
So I think by the time you get to 2024, people were just done with Democrats because they're sick.
Honestly, people are sick of the identity politics.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't fight for a just cause.
If you see instances of discrimination, obviously something should be done about it.
But it wasn't really about doing something about discrimination or doing something about our broken law enforcement system or anything like that.
It was used cynically to crush economic populace within the Democratic Party.
But now what I'm noticing with Bernie and AOC, by the way, is they've kind of shed a lot of that rhetoric because they...
She did, exactly.
And I mean, it's look, if AOC is willing to self-reflect and realize, okay, I was pushing for things that most Americans, including Democrats, weren't into, and I need to go back to the bread and butter issues.
Great.
I think that's a good way to kind of move forward for Democrats.
But I mean, she needs a long runway to kind of rebrand herself as an economic populist similar to who Bernie Sanders is.
Here he is speaking to some of these issues that you just outlined.
Here's SAT 20.
You have a question we want to ask about what happened to you in 2016 with this Bernie Bros movement where your followers are seeing they have a racism problem, a misogyny problem.
Do you think that's a super PAC thing behind that?
That was the Democratic establishment.
That was the lot of young people.
We had people of color and they create this kind of myth with the help of the corporate media and all that stuff.
You know, it's kind of interesting to that note is during this election, the podcast space, which the Democrats largely avoided, they feel had some influence in the election.
And they started to label us the podcast bros and said that we were sexist and we were racist and bigoted.
It's almost like it's the exact same strategy to get you out of there.
Yeah, that's what the liberal elite China does.
And then I'll give you one more because he followed up on no one wants to keep doing this identity politics thing anymore in SAT 21.
And then you got to what we call identity politics.
You're black, you're wonderful, you're tremendous, you're gay, you're the greatest human being on earth.
And rather than saying, what do you stand for?
Exactly.
Gay, that's fine.
Who cares?
What do you stand for?
Yeah.
You know, is every gay person brilliant and wonderful and great?
No, of course not.
Everybody's a human being.
So the issue is what do you stand for, which gets you back to what we discussed earlier, class politics in the sense of which side are you on?
Are you going to stand with working families?
Are you going to raise the minimum wage to a living wage or not?
Are you going to guarantee, fight to guarantee health care to all people or not?
Are you going to demand that the wealthiest people start paying their fair share of taxes or not?
Those are the issues.
And no one cares what color you want, you know, what your gender is, et cetera, et cetera.
Go ahead, Anna.
No, well said.
Well said.
That's the Bernie Sanders that I supported in 2015 and 2016.
I also voted for him in the primaries in 2020.
But by then, he had allowed the Democratic establishment to essentially tinker with his campaign.
So he was kind of paying lip service to the culture warriors who really, in my opinion, don't really give a damn about the causes that they allegedly fight for.
They're more interested in having an excuse to go around scolding people and destroying campaigns of politicians that actually want to be public servants, who actually care about working class families in this country.
And that was absolutely disgusting that that happened to Bernie in 2016 and to some extent in 2020 as well.
Cover-Up of Cognitive Decline00:15:42
But what you heard from Bernie right there, in my opinion, is a winning brand of politics.
Americans want to be left alone when it comes to their personal lives.
Okay.
They don't want to be judged because they're living in a traditional conservative household.
They don't want to be judged if they happen to be gay and want to marry a partner of the same sex.
They just want the government out of their personal lives entirely.
But there is a role for the government.
The role for the government is to protect the American people, not only from criminals, not only from foreign threats, but also from corporate greed.
And that was the message of Bernie Sanders' campaigns.
And the corporate Democrats loathed him.
And so they used identity politics cynically to destroy his campaigns, his possibilities.
Why did they loathe him?
But like, why?
You should ask their corporate donors.
You should ask Third Way.
Third Way, a think tank that essentially helps to aid and abet the neoliberalism brain rot that has infected the Democratic Party.
They're big and their build is more moderate.
That's what you always hear about Third Way.
They're the more moderate Democrats.
They're just pro-corporate.
They're just pro-corporate.
And it happens on both sides.
Okay, I want to keep going.
The Tapper Thompson book, the Democrats using it.
I said this the last hour to sort of whitewash their own complicity, the media is.
I didn't know.
Oh my God, there's so much new information in here.
Now I finally know.
And I'm angry that it was hidden from me.
Very, very angry.
And, you know, we're all sitting over here like, who do you think you're kidding?
This was no better exemplified anywhere than when Tapper went on and sat across from Morning Joe and tried to absolve Morning Joe of his best Biden ever rant in the following exchange.
Watch.
Now, one thing in your specific case, Joe, our reporting indicates that Joe Biden, who, as you know, is a frequent viewer of the show, saw when David Ignatius wrote that column in, I think, August 2023, saying that Joe Biden should not run for reelection because of what he had been hearing about this.
You largely agreed that you had been hearing things about this, but that there was really no alternative, that Kamala Harris was not up to the job.
That's what Democrats were telling you behind the scenes.
Joe Biden saw that.
Joe Biden said to staffers that he wanted to convince you that you were wrong.
And he focused on you like you were a constituency, like you were farmers in Iowa, like you were the Kiwanis Club in New Hampshire.
And he made sure that you thought differently.
He made sure that you thought differently.
I think he did this with a couple people.
I think he did it with Meacham.
He might have done it with Evan Osnos.
He knew that there were people that had to be convinced that he was fine.
And he tried to prove that to you.
Your thoughts on that.
And this is, I think this is pathetic.
It really is.
I mean, it's just, it's not even difficult to figure this out.
It's journalism 101.
You can't just take what any politician says at face value.
So if a politician tells you they're passing this incredible bill and it's full of all these wonderful provisions that are going to improve the lives of Americans, should a journalist serve as a stenographer and simply jot down the quote without fact checking it?
I mean, look, I get what Jake Tapper is trying to get at here.
No, no, but the Biden camp was telling us X, Y, and Z.
Okay, why are you so gullible?
Why are you willing to believe what a political campaign that has an interest in lying to you has to say?
And you're willing to literally ignore what you see with your own two eyes, what you hear with your own two ears.
Come on.
That's the thing.
It's like, it reminds me of the Hitler was always very nice to me.
It's like, okay, sure.
I'm sure Hitler found a journalist or two he wanted to manipulate and was totally sweet to.
But then your eyes and your ears, your ability to see and hear other people's stories lead you to understand Hitler's not a good man.
Okay, I'm not saying Joe Biden is Hitler.
I'm just saying like your only evidence of somebody and who and how they are is not just your own one-on-one interactions with them.
It can be a counterpoint.
You can say, every time I've been with him, he has seemed sharp, but you're, you're a hack if you just go out on the air and demand that they roll the tape and everybody has to believe you because this is the best Biden ever.
Notwithstanding what 77% of the American people were seeing and saying in the polls, they knew he wasn't up to the job.
It's just such hackery.
So how do you see the latest revelation about his health announcement?
And do you believe him that he didn't have a PSA test since 2014 and that this was all a big surprise to him that came just on the eve of this book hitting and the HER report coming out?
I've listened to now several doctors in various interviews talk about the likelihood that Joe Biden didn't know about his condition until he announced it.
And the vast majority of them. disagree that he just found out about it.
I'm not a medical expert.
What I am an expert in is the fact that the Democratic Party has been lying to us.
There was a cover-up about his cognitive decline.
Why am I to just believe at face value that he just found out about this diagnosis when he announced it?
He has no credibility.
And why aren't the statements signed by a doctor?
Why do both of the statements that came out, the first announcement and then the clarification about when he allegedly last had a PSA test come from?
The office of the Bidens, like the Biden office.
No name, no doctor.
No one is actually looking us in the eye and saying this is true.
That's a good point.
I hadn't thought of that, but you're right.
I mean, if you wanted to prove it, you could have some sort of evidence, some sort of note indicating that he wasn't given the test to, you know, find.
Have Dr. Kevin O'Connor come out and say, let me take all your questions.
He didn't want it.
We figured he was of a certain age.
We stopped doing it.
I explained to him, these are the risks.
He said, it's fine.
We would be able to hear the ring of truth if it were true.
There's a reason they're not doing it.
On top of all that, Dr. Keith Ablo came out.
He actually did a very interesting show the other day on how he's had prostate cancer and was making a couple of points.
First, just FYI, we had Dr. Nablo, Dr. Drew.
Forgive me.
Dr. Drew was making the point that he's had prostate cancer and that the first line of defense is this, it's called ADT, and that it causes all sorts of side effects that jibe with what looks like cognitive decline.
And so from his standpoint, you know, more questions have to be asked.
Here's a little bit of that in SOP 13.
The thing that concerns me is we've seen him decline over the last two years rather significantly.
And one of the things that happens with metastatic disease, the first line of treatment is something called androgen deprivation therapy.
That is where we block the testosterone essentially.
We used to actually castrate men with this, but now we do androgen deprivation therapy, ADT.
Side effect of ADT is cognitive flowing, sometimes frank dementia, falls, muscle wasting.
If somebody's Parkinsonian, they're more likely to fall.
All the things we have seen over the last couple of years could be explained on the basis of androgen deprivation therapy by the same token.
There's a lot of controversy about the autopen and should he have used it and did he know what was going on.
Parkinsonisms makes you lose the ability to write your name very often.
They would have a perfect defense there.
And just by saying, you know what, the president no longer could sign his aim, so he had to use the autopen.
He approved every single one of these parts and said, we don't know what happened.
Okay.
So the other thing that's very interesting about that, Anna, is we had a doctor on the program, Samadhi, David Samadhi, who is like the prostate cancer surgeon to go to, if you get this.
And he said, the fact that that initial statement said that the cancer is responsive, it's hormone responsive, means they've tried it.
Because he said, you don't know that until you've actually given, I think, ADT, the thing that blocks the testosterone.
There is no way they could say it's responsive to hormone treatment without having given it to him and seeing the PSA test numbers go down, down, down.
So all of that, I think, is actual, like that's as close as we're going to get to real evidence that he is still lying to us.
And so I love your thoughts on that.
And then also on, there's more chatter in the Times about how, sorry, this is from the Bulwark saying every Democrat from now on is going to have to be under the age of 70 and they're all going to have to show, you know, their colonoscopy exams.
It's going to have to be full revelation in order for anybody to become the next nominee.
I don't think that's fair.
I wouldn't implement a policy like that.
You know, as I was listening to you talk about the likelihood of Biden having known about his condition, having gone through that treatment, I couldn't help but think about all the enablers around Biden who encouraged him to run for reelection and who kept lying to all of us on television in their interviews.
You know, Mike Donnellin, his chief strategist, happened to be one of them, and I want to just briefly talk about incentives and disincentives, because Donnellin didn't care about the American people.
Donalin I I, I would venture to say doesn't even give a damn about the Bidens, or Joe Biden, with whom he's had a relationship with for a very long time.
I would venture to say that Donalin saw his reelection race as a money making opportunity because, as we've learned from Tapper and Thompson's book, he was paid disproportionately uh, compared to other campaign workers.
He was paid what?
Four million dollars?
Because yeah, because Biden told uh, the campaign pay Donalin whatever he wants.
Well, he asked for four million and he got it.
So if you see a money making opportunity where you can rake in millions of dollars, would you engage in elder abuse?
I would venture to say that most people would be disgusted by that and would not, but Donnellin had no problem doing it knowing what Biden's condition was.
He's very close to Biden.
I don't believe for a second that Mike Donnellin didn't know what Biden's condition was.
No no, and the reporting in the book is that he fully knew and was actively engaged in trying to cover it up.
Um, here's the other question, though, does the Democrat Party, you know, keep in mind we're, we're under the auspices of, oh my god, we're now figuring it out so horrible.
That's what.
Okay, this is the routine we're getting right now.
How do they nominate Kamala Harris for anything?
How do they nominate Pete Buttigej or any other Biden cabinet member for anything?
Because they all have the stank on them.
Look, I feel the same way when it comes to Mourning Joe.
How the hell is Mika Brzeynski and Joe Scarborough still employed at Msnbc?
I mean, isn't that a stain on the mark of that cable news network?
Like, let's just.
I mean, they lied the loudest in the lead up to the election but okay, the most vigorously.
I think that the establishment, the Democratic establishment, is going to hope and bank on people having short attention spans and just rally around Kamala Harris or whoever was in on the cover up.
Um, I don't know if it's going to work.
I would venture to say that it would be far, far better for them to look for new, fresh faces.
You know, make room for new leadership.
But I mean, it's like Gollum in the ring.
It's like oh precious precious, it's power and they don't want to let it go.
And they've got to let it go if you care about the country, if you care about doing what's best, if you want to, for once in your life, actually serve as a public servant, do the right thing and make room for fresh, new leadership.
But I they're not going to do that.
You know, I asked him Tapper, when he was here, because he was telling me that these people who are in his book now lied to him when it was pre the election that he tried and they were lying.
And I said, you know, what are you going to do with, like these cabinet secretaries and these other sources too, who now come on your show and you know they're liars?
You know they lied to you to protect him and their electoral chances.
You know it.
It's not like you just suspect it.
Now you're telling me, you know it.
So do you book them again?
Do you give them the platform on CNN?
And he said he'd have to think about it.
I mean, there's really nothing to think about?
The answer is no.
According to his theory, they're responsible for his humiliation too.
Right look, politicians lie, as we know.
All politicians lie on both sides of the political aisle.
So if you take a pledge to never interview a politician who has lied publicly or lied to you, you're never going to have an interview with a politician again, so I can kind of see where he's coming from.
What I would look out for though um, as anyone watching Cable NEWS, I know that that audience is quickly dwindling, but nonetheless, if you still watch Cable NEWS and you're still willing to give someone like Jake Tapper a chance, pay close attention to whether he fact checks politicians, whether he asks tough follow-up questions or whether he's willing to just accept what figures from one political party have to say at face value, because I think that's what the problem was.
You know he had no problem calling out the lies of Republican lawmakers or members of the Trump camp but, for whatever reason, there seemed to be this favoritism toward the Democratic party and Democratic figures, and that's where he got himself into a lot of trouble.
The other thing I would say and this isn't just for the media.
This is just for voters of all political persuasions.
You know there's a lot of tribalism in the country.
I fell in that trap for a long time as well, where I thought, you know, Republicans are lying about everything and i'm not going to believe anything they have to say they're just making things up.
Well, because I had that mindset, I actually missed some of what was going on in the country that they were trying to raise some alarm about, and so don't automatically assume that your political opponents are bringing up issues that don't really exist.
They might be exaggerating, there might be some hyperbole, but it's worth digging into to see if there's a legitimate concern, and I say the same for Republican voters as well.
Don't just write off Democrats as individuals.
You should listen to, and i'm specifically talking about voters here.
Right, love your fellow American regardless, Regardless of their political affiliation.
Okay, obviously there are exceptions for people who make a point to be hateful, loathsome human beings, but I don't think the majority of Americans fall in that category.
When it comes to people in positions of power, whether they be Democrats or Republicans, hold them accountable.
Fact check them.
Don't just believe what they have to say at face value.
And happily, our audience is doing that right now as they listen to our guest this hour.
Anna Kasperian, standby.
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Anna, we've talked before about men and women's sports, boys, and girls sports, and there's another instance of it that caught our attention that I wanted to raise.
Out in California, they're still doing this, notwithstanding the Trump executive order.
He's fighting the main governor to try to make her stop it, both at the college, which has largely been taken care of, but not entirely, and also the high school, which has not been taken care of level at all.
And in California, where Gavin Newsom wants us to believe he thinks this is very unfair, he's completely allowing it with no consequences.
So they had a California girls track meet.
It was, let's see, the finals, the southern section of California finals for track and field events this past Saturday.
And there was a girl named Reese Hogan, who has been working her butt off for the past several years doing track since her freshman year.
She's a junior now.
We found a little background on her.
In her sophomore year, she started taking track more seriously.
She recently got a private coach.
She puts in a ton of hours with that trainer.
She also does volleyball, both beach and club, and has to balance all that while continually training for track.
She trains every single day for track.
And she was on her way toward winning this regional final.
So she landed her personal best in the triple jump and a school record too of 37 feet two inches at the southern section finals.
Personal best school record.
She did not, however, win first place in the triple jump because a male did, someone who goes by the name of A.B. Hernandez, who's also a junior.
And this boy won the event by over four feet, 41 feet, four inches, which is a mile in the triple jump.
He crushed her.
We happen to know that she and many of her other female athletes did not know the first year AB started competing that he was actually a biological boy because he didn't tell anybody.
But then when they started watching him perform, it became very obvious he was far outmatching these girls.
Unfair Competition for Girls00:13:22
And nonetheless, they allowed this guy to go atop the winner's podium and stand in the first place slot.
And everybody cheered for him like he was the legitimate winner.
And when he stepped off of that top most elevated post, she, Rhys Hogan, got up there and stood.
I'm actually kind of emotional about it.
She stood atop that podium so she could receive the applause for being the actual winner.
I'm just so tired of this.
I'm so tired of this.
He also won the long jump title, which he also stole from another girl.
What do you make of it?
I think there's a reason why 80% of Americans are not in favor of what you just described.
80% of Americans, according to polling, find it to be deeply unfair because biology does matter.
I don't think that transgender people should be treated inhumanely, but I also don't think that we should create situations in which women are treated unfairly.
And in this case, it's just unfair.
It's that simple.
And by the way, the governor of California, Gavin Newsome, says that it's unfair.
And I don't think it makes him look better to, on one hand, say it's unfair.
And then on the other hand, to just allow it to keep happening in the state of California.
But he wants to have his cake and eat it too.
And I don't think it's going to work out that way because simply calling it unfair is enough to get the activists riled up and angry with you.
And you've done nothing to protect the fairness of women's sports in the state of California.
So basically he's made everyone angry.
No one's happy.
And the unfairness continues.
Yep.
Here he is, just as a reminder on his own podcast, telling Charlie Kirk how unfair he thinks this would be.
Would you do something like that?
Would you say no men in female sports?
Well, I think it's an issue of fairness.
I completely agree with you on that.
It is an issue of fairness.
So it's deeply unfair.
Would you speak out against this young man, A.B. Hernandez, who right now is going to win the state championship in a long time?
I can see you wrestling with it.
No, I'm not wrestling.
I'm not wrestling with the fairness issue.
I totally agree with you.
So that's easy to call out the unfairness of that.
There's also a humility and a grace, you know, that these poor people are more likely to commit suicide, have anxiety and depression.
And the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with as well.
So both things I can hold in my hand.
How can we address this issue with the kind of decency that I think is inherent in you, but not always expressed on the issue?
He's done nothing.
And Charlie raised this athlete.
And let me just give you one other thing.
There's another athlete named Katie McGinnis.
She's a track and athlete senior in this same region.
And last Saturday, Katie's long jump leap of 18 feet 0.95 inches was she was jump.
She had jumped further than any girl across all four divisions that she was competing against.
18.
18 feet.
That's crazy.
Wow.
18 feet and nine and a half inches.
It was, I think, yeah, it was her goal.
She accomplished her goal of being a champion, but she was not recognized as such because there was one person who did better.
And that was the boy claiming to be a girl, A.B. Hernandez, who not only took the triple jump medal from Reese Hogan, but the long jump medal from Katie McGinnis, who also has been training for years for this.
The long jump is her best event.
She has the longest long jump in California amongst all high school girls.
She trains every day, six days a week, year round.
She's been training for four years.
She's broken school records up and down the board in track.
And no girl in all of California can jump farther than Katie.
Only this boy, A.B. Hernandez, can do it and did do it.
And these Californians still cheered.
And Gavin Newsom did nothing, Anna.
Yeah, I mean, Gavin Newsome is a slimy snake of a politician.
And I don't really know what he believes.
All I know is the person he fights for the hardest is himself.
And so he'll say anything to anyone if he thinks it's going to help him politically.
And in the meantime, people in his state continue to suffer.
I want to just, you know, not to deflect, because I think this is unfair and it's gross for him to say so, but then do nothing about it.
But I just want to give you a sense of how poorly he has governed this state.
Because now California, the highest tax state in this country, is facing a $12 billion deficit.
So he put out his budget proposal.
He is proposing to make Medicaid recipients, the poorest Americans among us, pay $100 a month in premiums to get Medicaid benefits.
So he's essentially punishing the poorest among us for his poor governance.
He's a terrible politician, terrible person.
Yeah.
And meanwhile, these girls continue to suffer.
And while he gives lip service when he's across from Charlie Kirk, including with respect to this particular athlete, this boy poison is a girl, he does nothing to help them, nothing.
And by the way, on that subject with Katie McGinnis, who did the 18 foot, nine and a half inch, 18, nine and a half inch jump, her dad points out she can jump farther than any girl in the state of California.
She's an elite jumper.
On the other hand, there are 780 boys in California this year who have jumped Katie's personal record of 20 feet four inches or further.
It is much easier for the boys.
They're taller.
They're stronger.
They have more musculature.
Their bones are longer.
There's all sorts of reasons why they beat us.
And it's no insult to the girls to acknowledge that it is one to force them to compete under these circumstances.
Anna Kasparian, thank you.
Thanks so much.
It's great to see you.
Good to be here.
Tomorrow, Maureen Callahan's here.
You're going to love it.
Before we actually go, I just, I just wanted to continue on with that.
I just have a couple of other thoughts.
We've talked a lot in this show about the dangers to women.
You know, the basketball players from that school, Lowell in Massachusetts, who were injured when that trans player, a boy pretending to be a girl, hurt them with the KIPP Academy.
Remember that?
We've talked about the girl, the field hockey player in Massachusetts who had her teeth knocked out and severe facial injuries from playing against a biological boy.
We've talked at length about Peyton McNabb.
There have been many other, many other situations.
And that's really, that's reason enough.
Just the obvious risk of putting your girl up against a post-pubescent boy or even mid-pubescent boy.
Who even has to argue it?
I mean, it's obvious.
It's obvious what the risks are.
But the unfairness is what we saw in this California situation.
Track and field, there was no danger to these girls of A.B. Hernandez hurting them on the long jump or the high jump.
What is so powerful, so powerful about watching Reese Hogan step up on that top platform is the thing I try to always mention when we discuss these stories, which is they're not just stealing medals and potential scholarships.
They're stealing the glorious feeling of victory from these girls.
They're stealing the joy and confidence builder of winning, which is something which matters.
How do you build a winner?
Is it you just come in second place all the time?
Just come in second, no matter how hard you work, how hard you train, how many days a week, how much you sacrifice, and they do sacrifice.
They sacrifice their physical health.
I guarantee you these girls have had injuries that they've had to nurse back because they've trained so hard.
They sacrifice their grades oftentimes because if you're an elite athlete like this, you don't have time to study the way the girls who aren't doing this do.
So you are taking the hit on the academic front in all likelihood.
You sacrifice time with your friends.
You're not going out to the late night parties on Fridays that happen even when you're in high school that are so fun and can be kind of important to making friends or finding a boyfriend.
You're not doing that.
You're going to bed early because you have a very early morning track meet.
I mean, I know, I know a lot of these girls and they are gunners.
They want it.
They've got ambition.
They've got drive.
They've got commitment.
And they deserve the chance to cross the finish line first.
They deserve the ability to feel The feeling that comes from hearing your name read out as the winner, from seeing your personal best high jump, be obviously the winner because it's not just your personal best.
You bested every other girl in the state, but yet you still can't win in California.
You don't get the blue ribbon.
You don't get the first place trophy.
You don't get your name mentioned first in the newspaper articles.
It's wrong.
It's wrong.
I don't give two shits how good it makes A.B. Hernandez feel.
You're a cheater.
You're cheating, sir.
I'm sorry your school doesn't appear to have an open category.
That's not the problem, or shouldn't be at least, of Katie McGinnis and Reese Hogan.
You can still run with the boys, which is where you belong.
It's just so wrong.
And the fact that this girl, can we just see the video again?
Or she gets up.
We only have five seconds of it.
She gets up on top on the top platform.
She kind of just sneaks up after it's over.
Let's watch it.
It's awful.
It's awful.
She's kind of almost embarrassed about it, you can see.
And she shouldn't be.
There's nothing, she has nothing to be embarrassed about.
Gavin Newsom does.
A.B. Hernandez does.
The school district does.
Shame on them.
Because even if you could give these girls the scholarships they deserve.
And by the way, don't think it's not happening.
Don't think it's not happening that they're recruiting more and more boys to play girl sports because it means you're going to win.
It means you're going to win.
I mean, I told you the story.
In Westchester County, I was told by a parent at a school, a private school there, they got rid of their athletic director because that athletic director was not recruiting enough boys to play girls hockey, ice hockey.
And that's a disadvantage now.
So it's just you're depriving them of something much more fundamental.
You are depriving them of confidence builders that girls must have to become their strongest best selves, that girls are entitled to.
It's their right.
It is literally their right if they're the best long jumper or high jumper in the state of California amongst all girls to have the top trophy, the blue ribbon, and the top podium.
And everyone knows it.
I don't know.
And when we elected Trump, he's fighting the good fight.
That Cretan Gavin Newsom wants credit for being on our side, but doing fucking nothing.
Nothing about it.
I'm starting to rethink whether we should go on his show.
You know what?
Maybe I should make a lobbying campaign to go on and we can just spend the whole time talking about this.
You know, I always say like my goal in an interview, if I'm doing it right, is not to emerge with the person's jugular, figuratively speaking.
It just might be if I were to sit across from him.
Anyway, I just wanted to add that because I didn't feel like I'd fully expressed what was so horrifying about that situation and why her sneaking that moment on the top platform was so compelling and moved me so much.