Megyn Kelly and her panel dissect the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Nicole Goode, citing DHS confirmation that the officer's prior trauma justified lethal force under Graham v. Connor standards while condemning local officials for inflammatory rhetoric. The discussion pivots to cannabis dangers, where Alex Berenson argues high-THC products induce psychosis in vulnerable youth, linking drug use to mass shooters like Nicholas Cruz and contrasting U.S. prescription rates with France's. Ultimately, the episode connects societal failures in mental health care and drug regulation to escalating violence, suggesting that legalizing marijuana without addressing addiction risks fuels a cycle of psychosis and tragedy. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at New East.
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show.
It has now been over 24 hours since the fatal shooting of a female driver by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
And we're getting a much more clear picture of what happened.
The media all over X, the mainstream have lost their effing minds.
They've lost their minds about this.
The local authorities in Minnesota and Minneapolis are gone.
They're too far gone to be reasoned with.
They're going to get an ICE agent killed.
That's what's going to happen.
They're not going to be happy until an ICE agent is dead.
I realize a woman died yesterday.
I'm sorry, but that was her own doing.
Who among us would not understand that if we did not respond to law enforcement surrounding our car, telling us to get out, we were endangering ourselves.
Who among us would expect to live if we pressed the accelerator with a cop in front of our SUV?
Like, that's what she did.
Everyone would know you are putting your own life in danger.
There's so much to get to.
There is a stunning development that just happened in this story that we, I believe exclusively, just confirmed.
DHS Secretary Christy Noam mentioned in media interviews yesterday that the ICE agent who shot the driver in Minneapolis was involved.
He was involved in a prior incident last June that was very similar to what happened yesterday.
Well, we now have the video of that incident and we've confirmed with the government that this is the relevant video that Christy Noam was referencing.
This is video of the incident she was referencing involving this same officer.
He was dragged during an ICE arrest just this past June and got seriously injured.
This same guy, this poor ICE agent.
Per the Department of Justice, on June 17th, 2025, law enforcement officers attempted to arrest Roberto Carlos Munos Guatemala, a convicted sex offender, on an immigration order.
By the way, this is what ICE officers are trying to do.
This is the terrible work that these lunatics are out there protesting against.
They'd rather have Mr. Guatemala have access to their children, I guess.
Because this agent that they're now demonizing as a murderer was the one who stopped him, along with his fellow ICE agents.
The guy was uncooperative.
He refused to follow instructions.
After warning him several times, an agent who is the same agent involved in yesterday's shooting broke the back window of the suspect's car so that he could open the vehicle from the inside.
The man then accelerated his car.
Look, you can see it's the same agent.
The guy had a mask on yesterday, but same hair.
As he sped away, the agent's arm became trapped between the seat and the car frame.
You can't see the agent in this video we're showing, but we are showing the car rushing away from the scene.
The agent is on the driver's side toward the back, so you cannot see him being dragged, but he's being dragged and that's undisputed for more than 100 yards, while the maniac driving the car is weaving back and forth in an attempt to shake him from the car, completely immune to the thought of running over him or what other damage he was causing.
The agent was eventually jarred free from the car, but suffered significant injuries to his arms and hand.
Look at this.
If you're not listening, if you're only listening to this, you've got to go and check out our YouTube at three minutes after the hour.
His arm looks mutilated.
It's a shot of him in his hospital bed where you can't see his head, but you can see his arms and his legs.
And that arm clearly shows the damage of what he had just been through.
Okay, this is incredibly relevant to what this guy's perception of the danger was.
Now, we'll get into the legal standard, which is more of whether it was objectively reasonable for him to think this woman was going to run over him.
But that incident will play into whether it was objectively reasonable.
Other ICE agents and other cops have been watching this happen time after time.
It's happened over 100 times that ICE agents have been charged, rammed, or dragged by so-called watchers.
They're calling her like an observer.
You know, like we're just, we just have eyes on the cop.
You are much more than an observer, madam.
These guys are putting their lives on the line every day to arrest people like Mr. Guatemala, who was molesting kids.
That's what they're doing there.
That's what Mayor Jacob Fry appears to object to.
Not to mention Governor Tim Walz.
What a shock.
Okay, now we're going to walk you through the key videos from yesterday showing what happened in detail.
That video we brought to you yesterday at the end of our show was ultimately the video that President Trump tweeted out as well.
It is critical.
So many of the people who jumped down the throats of these cops didn't see it or ignored it because it was an inconvenient to show her actually accelerating into the cop who shot her.
But it's all there on tape.
We'll begin with the moments leading up to the shooting.
Currently, there are no videos we've seen showing what happened leading up to the incident.
But there is a witness account that 37-year-old Renee Nicole Goode, she's the one who was shot, Renee Goode, was blocking traffic, hoping to impede ICE investigations.
That's what she was doing there.
All right.
Her wife has admitted it.
Democrats are calling her, as I pointed out, a quote, legal observer wrong.
What's been reported so far about her background makes clear she was there to agitate and her actual job had nothing to do with the law.
She was a poet.
I woke up to some commotion.
I heard some whistles going on out front, so I came downstairs to see what was going on.
Wasn't even dressed.
And there was a car, the Honda pilot that's crashed over there now.
There was a car blocking the two lanes of Portland traffic.
And the ICE agents got out and they were saying, get out of here, get out of here.
She was the main car leading the protest, is my understanding.
I talked to another guy who was driving behind her.
But she was very successful in blocking traffic.
She was doing what she was set out to do.
And so they wanted to get her the hell out of there.
Yeah.
So it looked like she was impeding ICE vehicles.
Definitely.
Yeah.
That was her goal.
This is a sympathetic witness to her.
The clip goes on.
She's very angry at ICE.
If anything, this woman had a reason to lie to make the woman driving the car, Renee Goode, sound better.
But there she is on camera saying, you know, very clearly that this woman who was ultimately shot was leading the protests and impeding the traffic across this Portland Avenue, that she was parked perpendicular to the traffic.
Now that'll get you arrested pretty much 10 times out of 10.
So this is not a fan of ICE, and clearly her eyewitness testimonial is not favorable to Ms. Good.
In this still image, you see a federal agent who we believe is the agent who eventually fires at Ms. Good.
The agent is being followed closely by a female protester.
She has identified herself as Renee Goode's wife.
She has her phone up, likely recording him.
The agent also has a phone in his hand, likely recording her.
Did the agent have a negative interaction with these women that caused him to begin recording too?
We don't know yet.
But clearly something was going on before and it wasn't needlepoint.
We have not yet seen the actual video that was on the cop's phone.
But here's video we do have of that moment and what happened afterward.
Again, they both appear to be recording each other's actions.
You see a gray truck pull up.
We talked about that yesterday.
Two federal agents step out.
The driver of the Maroon SUV, Ms. Good, says, what's going on?
The officers quickly walk up and tell Ms. Good to get out of the car and then to, quote, get out of the fucking car.
Things are escalating.
Good's window is down.
She's looking directly at them.
There is no way she did not hear the commands to get out of her car, repeated commands.
She then puts her car into reverse.
And here is the part of the video with sound of the agents making the commands and her beginning to reverse.
We believe that's her wife yelling no and recording.
Right as Good reverses her car, you're about to see the agent who fired the shot move in front of the vehicle near the driver's side headlight.
It's video.
There's one guy on the side who's blocking the agent at issue, but you can see that there is an agent in front of her car.
That's, I mean, it's right there, black and white.
At first, you only see the agent at the driver's side door and his body is kind of blocking the shooting cop.
He's fighting to get the car door open as Good goes into reverse.
The agent who fired the shots moves into the frame in front of the SUV.
Good is still reversing backward.
She immediately puts it in drive and starts accelerating forward toward the cop.
There was zero hesitation between Good reversing the vehicle and putting it into drive and clearly pressing the gas.
By the way, this cop clearly would have heard the car begin to accelerate.
About two seconds passes between the tires moving forward and the gunfire.
The same agent then fires two more rounds.
At that point, the SUV keeps moving forward before eventually crashing into a parked car.
And the bullet hole that you can see is in the front windshield, the front.
That's where he took the initial shot to stop her from running him over.
The agent, again, who we understand was the one to fire the shot, did walk down toward the crashed SUV before walking back up and telling others to call 911.
There is another angle of the shooting that we brought to you yesterday, which I mentioned, which is key.
This video was obtained by the local ABC affiliate.
We've circled the agent and we've slowed down the video.
Look at this.
I'm sorry, but he's getting run over when he fires the shot.
You can clearly see her hit him.
That's what happens.
It's blurry, but you see him put his foot back to brace himself as he was hit by the car before he fires and moves to the side.
Here's an image of his leg backward, appearing to brace himself.
You've got to watch this on our YouTube channel if you're just listening to this now.
We've added an arrow pointing toward his leg so you can see what we're talking about.
Okay, this guy knew he was about to get hit.
We also noticed something else, something interesting that will be huge if it gets released to the public.
The agent who fires his gun, as I referenced, is holding up his cell phone still.
Still likely still recording when she accelerates toward him.
Here's a closer image.
You see his hand holding what appears to be his phone.
So there is likely video of this incident from the agent's vantage point and, if this does go to trial, that will be extremely important evidence.
From this image you can see where one of the bullets entered again the driver's window.
There's also another video taken by another eyewitness that shows agents telling a man who says he's a doctor that he can't go near the victim to help her.
Watch this coming in.
I get it, but just give us a second.
We have medics on scene.
We have our own medics.
Where are they?
Where are they relax?
You just killed my fucking neighbor.
You caught butter in the fucking face.
You killed my fucking neighbor.
Claim Your Eligibility Now00:02:36
How do you show up to work every day?
How the fuck do you do this every day?
How do you protect Mr Guatemala Lady to molest the children of Minneapolis?
That's the real question.
So now they're they're ripping on the cops because they didn't let some rando who claimed to be a physician they had no idea whether he was have access to the crime scene and the woman who was behind the wheel of the car apparently already dead.
They did call 911.
They did have ems on the way, as you heard the the officer say there, there's no obligation to let some rando come over and corrupt your crime scene.
All right, there's not, and there's no obligation to let yourself be run over by a dangerous instrumentality, which is what a car is certainly an suv, but any car that you are being fed so many lies by the mainstream media right now, not to mention the Democrat officials in Minnesota you really do have to pay attention to understand the law and what's real, and that's why we have the panel we do today.
We've got Dave Ehrenberg, Phil Holloway and Ashley Merchant.
They are all lawyers like really great lawyers and hosts of the MK true crime show on the MK Media Podcast network.
If you just google MK true crime or search it on the podcast app, you will see their podcast and it's amazing, you can get all of their expert analysis by subscribing at Mktruecrime.com.
Okay, big things coming soon, by the way, with more announcements to come.
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Guys, welcome to you all.
So this is incredibly frustrating.
Prosecution and Official Duties00:15:24
I want to start with you Phil, because you you're a former law enforcement officer and the the demands that are being put on this ice agent by the local authorities, by the Democrats, by the protesters in the streets, that like in that split second, he should have assessed that she didn't really want to run him over, that possibly he wasn't in mortal danger,
that really there was no need to fire because maybe it was just going to be a gentle runover, something, maybe just a foot and not his entire body, especially now that we know this same guy got dragged 100 yards six months ago at a different ICE stop and was seriously injured.
Like it, it's completely irrational and it's not consistent with the legal standard that's going to get applied to this case.
No, and I want to talk about that legal standard because what we have seen once again, as we typically do in law enforcement shootings, is we see the left and those on social media looking at this through the 2020 hindsight versus the objective analysis that's supposed to apply.
And look, we see this breathless hysteria also setting in rather than this calm, thoughtful illegal analysis.
And I might say, before I tell you that legal analysis, I want to point out Jacob Fry, the mayor there, I wonder if he's like certifiably insane in light of his abhorrent comments that were clearly designed to fan the flames of this hysteria.
The Supreme Court told us in a number of cases, but really the seminal case involving use of force is Graham versus Connor from 1989.
And they clearly said specifically in their ruling that all police use of force must be reasonable and that reasonableness must be judged.
Listen to this, from the perspective of the officer on the scene, from the officer you just showed in those videos in front of that car, hearing that revving of that engine, seeing those tires spinning, and having been through this before and hospitalized and damn near killed, we're supposed to look at it from his perspective, not the 2020 lens of hindsight.
Because these officers, as the court tells us correctly, because I've been there, these are split second judgments.
These are tense, uncertain.
They are rapidly evolving circumstances.
And lots of factors have to be considered, such as what is the suspected crime, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat of safety to not only the officer's safety, but others in the area.
And we saw other officers there.
We saw civilians there.
There's no telling what this woman might do if she's allowed to just gun it and start tearing out of there with her foot jammed to the floor or the accelerator.
And so all of those things have to be taken into consideration.
And that's what we call objective reasonableness, not the 2020 hindsight that we see coming from all of the breathless hysteria on the left.
But that is the law.
And it's a shame we can't wait for an investigation to reveal all these things before you have the mayor and the governor come out there making these really, really reckless and inflammatory statements.
Here's a little of Jacob Fry, the mayor.
Last night, he went on Anderson Cooper and kept the absurdity of what he did is going to be obvious to all three of you.
I'm going to let it play and then I'll get your reaction.
Listen to this, Octo.
There's obviously a huge disagreement about what the videos show.
Have you completely made up your mind or do you still have questions?
I'm not going to preempt the investigation that will be taking place, but I got two eyes.
I mean, what you saw was the victim taking at least like a three-point turn.
This was clearly not with any sort of intention to run somebody over.
You don't need a legal degree to know that that does not authorize the use of deadly force.
That being said, again, I'm not going to preempt an investigation.
That being said, again, the narrative that ICE is spinning immediately after this was that this was purely self-defense, and I'll say it again, is bullshit.
I'm not going to prejudge anything, but everything DHS is saying is bullshit.
Just for a good measure, he did it again with Caitlin Collins in an equally absurd moment.
Let's play that sock 10.
After you told ICE to get the F out of the city, I've seen a lot of Republicans here in Washington criticizing those comments, saying that you're escalating tensions with that.
I'm so sorry if I offended their Disney princess ears.
On the one hand, you got someone who dropped an F-bomb, and on the other hand, you got someone who killed somebody else.
F-bomb killing somebody.
I think the more inflammatory action is killing somebody.
You should also understand the importance of de-escalating tense situations, not killing yanking out a gun.
And so, again, I'm not going to preempt the investigation.
I mean, I wonder, Ashley, how you de-escalate when somebody's ramming their car at you.
Like, what in those in that split second, do you just say, like, please, do you make the prayer symbol with your hands?
Like, what exactly are these cops supposed to do?
Well, and that's one of the things I keep thinking about.
You know, how could he have de-escalated the situation at that point?
And was it reasonable?
Really, what we're looking at, and everybody's talking about when this goes to court, if this goes to court, there's two different ways it could go to court.
I think it's important to sort of distinguish the two different ways.
One is a civil case if the family of the deceased filed a civil lawsuit.
The other is a criminal case if this officer was charged.
And I don't think either of those are likely to be successful.
And the reason is that, you know, the standard that Phil talked about, this reasonableness standard, that's a civil standard.
So the 11th Amendment says you cannot sue the government unless the government says you can sue them.
And there's certain carve-outs.
And one of those is for excessive use of force.
And that's what you were just asking about, this de-escalation.
You know, did they have to actually use de-escalation techniques or was this authorized?
And what the law also says is that you can take into account all of this officer's experience.
And Justice Kagan said that in a very recent opinion, that you can take into account that this officer had been a victim of another brutal car crash, car running down, something dragging.
And yes, dragging, exactly.
So what's in that officer's mind?
You know, what's reasonable in his mind?
The other instance is if he was charged criminally.
And when I see the mayor, all I'm thinking about is they're going to try and do some type of criminal charges.
You know, that's immediately what I'm thinking because we've got this significant tension between state authorities, you know, local authorities and the federal government.
And all we're hearing from everybody local is we want you out, we want to prosecute.
So I'm thinking their probably next step is going to be to try to use some type of a criminal case, you know, something against this officer.
And he's going to be in a position where he's got to defend himself and use self-defense as a theory.
So he's had to defend himself in person.
Now he's going to have to defend himself in court.
But I think he'll be successful.
I mean, this was clearly self-defense.
Would a reasonable officer have thought that he was in fear for his safety, his safety, or other people's safety?
And I want to point out, you know, you were talking about something about how the mainstream media has sort of portrayed this.
I like to sort of play a game with myself where I look at the mainstream media articles and then I go and I actually try to find the videos and I try to compare what I think happened to what I think after I actually look at all the videos.
And my opinion significantly changed.
And it always does, but and I let it on purpose.
You know, I don't say anything.
I don't make a firm opinion when I see just the reports.
But my opinion changed significantly because everybody was shown a very, very edited clip and it wasn't the whole, it wasn't all the clips.
Yeah.
And the clips that you showed a few minutes ago tells a very different story.
When you see the other side of what happened, it is a whole different ballgame for me.
And I think it's a whole different ballgame for everybody.
Yeah.
And I wonder if the mayor has actually seen all of those things, you know, and if he knows about what this officer had suffered from before.
And I'll tell you, that's coming from someone who we file civil rights cases against officers when they are in the wrong.
So, you know, like we are regularly in this office evaluating this standard and talking about it.
And does it rise to that level?
You know, do I wish it would have ended differently?
Of course.
But do I wish that the officers weren't in that situation in the first place?
Yes.
Do I wish that everybody handled it after differently?
Yes, 100%.
But that doesn't mean that it's illegal.
Doesn't mean that it's a crime.
Doesn't mean that it's something that rises to a case for a civil lawsuit either.
Dave Ehrenberg, you're a recovering prosecutor.
And, you know, my understanding is that this is not going to be a state case at all because of the supremacy clause, because you have a federal officer performing a federal duty and that if the state tried to indict him, the feds would assert jurisdiction over this and then would probably dismiss the case.
And ultimately, Trump might pardon him on federal charges.
But we heard just today, this morning, that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension just revealed that federal officials have reversed course because originally, I guess they were sitting back and letting the state handle things.
And the investigation into the killing of this woman will be conducted by the FBI without the assistance of the local state authorities.
And this relates, I'm told, back to 1890 Supreme Court case in Renagel, which established that states generally lack jurisdiction to prosecute a federal officer for actions taken within the scope of their official federal duties, a principle derived from the supremacy clause.
So your thoughts on whether the locals, as angry as they may be, will have a shot at this officer.
Megan, good to be with you and my colleagues, Ashley and Phil.
You mentioned a key phrase within the scope of their official duties.
That gets the local authorities the ability to prosecute if they say that he was not acting within the scope of his official duties.
It was not reasonable.
And they could move ahead and prosecute.
The feds would perhaps try to assert jurisdiction and take over the case, but the state does have the right to move forward with it.
And then it would go into state court.
What would happen because he's a federal official, it would get removed to federal court.
So you'd have a federal judge and you'd have a jury pool that would be from the entire state of Minnesota, not just from that one area.
And so there are advantages to going into federal court.
The judge would not be a local elected judge.
It'd be a federal appointed judge for life.
So no, the state is not out of this entirely.
In fact, state law makes it easier to prosecute a law enforcement officer after George Floyd than federal law does.
So I do think that's a good question.
But that exception, Dave, is for a cop who is not acting within the official scope of his duties.
So you're talking about somebody who's like driving to the movie theater and behaves like a moron or decides to make some citizen, some arrest in his off-duty time and he handles it poorly and he, it's an ex-girlfriend and he behaves inappropriately.
Then you can make the argument he wasn't acting within the scope of his official duties and we can go for him.
There's no question this guy was acting within the scope of his official duties here.
The state's not going to win that argument.
This, if at all, will be a federal case, which is very good for him.
Well, it's up to the judge to decide whether or not the state can make its case that this was so outside any reasonable test that he is not acting within his scope and he could have easily just walked aside.
He didn't have to shoot into the car.
You know, it's interesting how different people seeing this video, it's like a Rorschach test to see how they interpret it.
The law does allow, and I've done a lot of these cases, Megan, as state attorney, because I have to review these cases at the local level.
We had about 100 of them.
And I would say, based on what I saw, that there's enough here to at least take it to a grand jury and let them make a decision.
I don't think it's as clear-cut as Christy Noam or you guys have been saying.
By the way, just if I can go back to Christy Noam, I agree with Phil and with Ashley that I wish that our elected officials would have handled this differently.
We need someone to take down the temperature, and they're just ratching it up.
And that includes Secretary Noam, to be fair.
I mean, she said that she instantly started blaming Biden and the locals.
And she said that Miss Goode weaponized her vehicle and intentionally attempted to run a law enforcement officer over and ram them.
I think that's a little premature to say that.
I didn't see that in my video.
I saw that she was trying to drive away.
She was given an order to stop.
She was giving conflicting orders.
One said, stop.
Another said, get out.
And she was trying to drive away.
The wheels were turning.
So I'm not so sure that.
Get out is not inconsistent with stop.
Get out of the fucking car is what they said.
That's not inconsistent with stop.
Well, apparently there are eyewitnesses, and you can hear on the video where one of them says, Yeah, get out of the fucking car.
The other one, though, says, get out of here.
And so perhaps she was trying to get away from it.
I know that eyewitnesses said that, but I have to tell you, it's very annoying watching these eyewitnesses appear all over CNN right now because, you know, here's what happened.
There was an officer and he moved.
Shut up.
We have a video.
No one cares what the fuck you saw.
Sorry, with your, from your poor vantage point.
And now with revisionist history, want to tell, we can see it.
It's on tape.
It is not additive to have these rando witnesses, all of whom are part of the protest crew, Phil, try to tell us, oh, this is how it went down.
We can hear, we can hear what the officer commanded.
It's on the tape.
And very obviously, this woman knew that they wanted her to stop and to get out of the vehicle.
And there's no, the reason Christy Noam said she intentionally tried to ram the guy is because she's putting two and two together.
The cop was standing in front of her vehicle and she pressed down on the gas.
You only need an IQ slightly above that of a hamster to realize it had to be intentional.
Yeah, so these witnesses, such as they are, they're certainly not objective witnesses.
They certainly aren't trained in the law, no matter how much they try to portray them as legal observers.
And so we do want to take that with a grain of salt, but we can use the variety of videos that are out there.
That's just part of the investigation.
But, you know, I want to point back to something that Dave mentioned.
What Dave was laying out was the blueprint for if the state wanted to bring charges, they would do like they did to Giuliani and those in the Trump Rico case here in Fulton County.
They would bring stake cases and they would say that their behavior, their conduct was inconsistent with their federal duties.
And therefore, you know, it's not, therefore, they were acting outside the scope.
I'm not saying that that's a winner of an argument.
I'm saying that's what they're going to do.
So they could conceivably get an indictment and then it would be removed, as Dave said.
But the state prosecutor stays with the case.
So Trump could not come in and issue a pardon.
It would be in federal court with a federal jury, drawn from the federal jury pool, I guess.
But the federal prosecutors would stay on the case.
So this could be if the federal prosecutors would stay on or the state prosecutors.
The state prosecutors stay on.
So this is not something that Trump could come in and issue a pardon for.
That's why you see the FBI and the federal law enforcement taking over all aspects of this investigation.
They're trying to take away any evidence or any ability for the state to have something on which to build a prosecution.
Federal Investigation Takes Over00:15:41
That's what this is all about.
But this all look, the common denominator here in all these cases, and we see it here.
And to Ashley's point, if they just would have complied, if they would have just, you know, not stuck their nose in a place where it didn't belong, such as, you know, law enforcement activity in progress, you can't just barge in and start taking over what law enforcement is doing.
And when you're told to stop, you're supposed to comply because this is the common denominator.
This is what always happens.
And then when the worst happens, then, you know, the left and those who are obviously in protest of the ICE activities, they now have the martyr that unfortunately we kind of all suspected might eventually arise in all of this.
And so now it's all going to become basically a martyrdom thing with them.
They're already trying to make it into that, Ashley.
They're saying, oh, she was a mother of a six-year-old boy whose dad died a couple of years ago.
She was only 37.
That's exactly why 99% of women in that circumstance would never, ever have put themselves in that position because we're all, that's why I believe I can attest to this personally, as a mother, you are more scared when the airplane hits turbulence, even if you're the only family member of yours on it.
You are more scared when you have a near miss in a vehicle when you have children.
It's all about, oh my God, I can't deprive my children of their mother.
And I also want to be there for the rest of their lives.
And especially if you were a single mom, she had no business doing this, Ashley.
Right.
That's the thing for me.
You know, you have to make different decisions as a mother.
I need to be home for my kids.
You know, why do I need to be there?
And this is a tense situation.
Why would you want to put yourself in a tense situation like this?
There are organized protests.
Do you really need to have your car in the middle of a street, clearly blocking folks?
I mean, it was clear.
It was there to block.
There's no reason that she would have been parked other than that.
So she's there to sort of agitate the situation, a situation that doesn't need to be agitated.
Is the outcome awful?
Yes, the outcome's awful.
But should she have been there in the first place?
No.
And when the officer said to stop and open her door, this is what you do.
You put your hands up because if you haven't done anything wrong, then you're going to talk to them.
You're going to have a pleasant conversation and you're going to be on your way.
And that's how it should go down.
You know, the second that she didn't obey that command and that she started to drive her car, that's when things escalated.
That's when things really changed.
And so had she done that simple thing, right?
Had she done that simple thing that I wish she had done?
You know, I wish she was here for her child.
It's awful.
I wish she had just put her hands up.
The police could have made sure she got out, you know, safely.
I mean, the thing that you have to think about is all the thing that the police are thinking about right then.
They are thinking about all the different places the shots could come from, all the different places that the cars could come from.
If there's a bomb, I mean, there's a lot in their head.
And that's why we give them a lot of leeway in the law with this reasonableness standard, because they're thinking of things that we aren't used to.
You know, we're not involved in those type of situations.
They are.
And so when they've got all that going on, they have a heightened, just a heightened level of fear for being run over, especially this officer, you know, since he's had that before.
And so, you know, but I did want to mention on that supremacy clause thing, it's going to be exactly if the state folks do or the local folks do charge this officer, it's going to be just like what we saw with the Trump case, because we had that same argument here in Fulton County.
We had that argument that they were acting, that certain folks in that indictment were acting within their federal scope of duty.
And we had that hearing in the 11th circuit.
We had the hearing in the local federal court.
And then we had that argument in front of the Supreme Court.
And so it, you know, it's one of those things that could definitely happen.
And the downside, anyone in the system knows that when you're charged, you're already losing because you're having to hire a lawyer.
You're having to get arrested.
You're having to get arranged.
You know, you've got that thing against you.
And so even if the local government shouldn't be able to charge because of the supremacy clause, doesn't mean it's going to stop them.
And once you get a charge, you are losing at that point.
You know, you may not be going to prison in the long run, but once you are criminally charged, that is significantly going to affect your life.
The difference, of course, is that, you know, during the Trump cases, Trump was not president, and those guys had absolutely no promise of an out clause when it was a state prosecution.
I think this guy's got a very good argument that this should be decided under federal law, that the supremacy clause should apply, that the state has no business prosecuting him.
And if it stays at the federal level, I think Trump won't pursue a prosecution, but B, will pardon him if it goes further.
I do want to point this out, though.
Dave, let me talk to you about this since you seem more empathetic toward the narrative of the woman driving the car.
There was a case in Baltimore.
It happened in 2018.
The cop was named Amy Amy Caprio.
She responded to a call about a suspicious vehicle.
A second call confirmed that a home was being burglarized by four suspects associated with the vehicle.
It was later determined to be a vehicle that had been stolen, a Jeep Wrangler.
Officer Caprio arrived at the area.
She located the suspicious vehicle, the Jeep.
She then followed the vehicle into a cul-de-sac where the suspect driving it turned the car to face Officer Caprio's patrol car.
She exited her vehicle with her weapon drawn and ordered the suspect out of his car.
The suspect opened the driver's door of the Jeep as though he was going to comply with her order.
When she began approaching the suspect, he immediately retreated back into the Jeep, and this is what happened.
It's on tape.
It's disturbing.
As the Jeep continued to advance, Officer Caprio got off one shot.
WJZ won't show the rest, but a somber jury saw and heard Amy Caprio dying from massive crushing injuries.
In about two seconds, that guy took her life, not by some massive acceleration, not by some dramatic movie-like ramming, just by a quick acceleration right into her.
You can see she's got the weapon drawn.
She did not see it coming, and there was absolutely no time for her to save her life.
She should have fired.
She should have shot him in the face the same way this cop did.
And I just think the average juror is going to understand that these cops put their lives on the line to protect the communities every day, and that unlike us, they're not in their air-conditioned studios, you know, completely safe with their cup of coffee, making these judgments.
They have a split second to decide whether their life is in danger or not.
Megan, that is such a tragic case you bring up.
I remember that one.
And courts look at what's called the totality of the circumstances, including the events leading up to the shot.
In the Caprio case you mentioned, there's a difference here.
The officer there was in a cul-de-sac.
She did not have the ability to easily get out of the way.
She was cornered, had limited mobility.
The argument for the prosecutors, and I agree with Phil and Ashley, that state prosecutors could pursue this case.
And even if it does go to federal court, it's still state prosecutors, that there's a created danger factor here.
So what they'll argue is that for the ICE agent to intentionally shoot someone like that because he was in threat of a reasonable fear of his life, you have to show that he didn't have a clear out.
Ms. Caprio didn't have a clear out.
She was in a cul-de-sac, was cornered.
He chose to fire.
He could have stepped aside.
And if you look at the manual from the, well, but if you look at the, here's the problem.
There's another problem with that, Megan, is that there was an updated manual for the Department of Homeland Security that said that you can't create the risk.
You can't actually stand in front of a car and perform an arrest?
Now, in this case, the argument's going to be that the ICE agent intentionally stepped in front of a moving car to justify the shooting, and that would be a problem.
So that's it wasn't moving.
When he was standing there, it wasn't moving.
They were effecting an arrest.
She was stopped.
Then she chose to ram him.
That's what actually happened.
I know in this theoretical land where she's driving down the road, he's not allowed to put himself in front of the car and then say, okay, I shot her to protect myself.
That's not what happened.
Well, but he did get in the path of the vehicle and then her wheels started turning to what looked like she was trying to get away.
Now, I'm not saying that she shouldn't have complied.
She should have complied.
But the fact that her wheels started turning and that he shot once, he shot three times.
So apparently the first shot he may be able to get away with, but the second and third.
I totally disagree with that.
I totally disagree with that.
Let me just say that the law is if you if deadly force is appropriate, they don't judge you based on one bullet or three.
The only question is whether you had a reasonable fear for your safety or that of others.
And if the answer to that is yes, you don't get thrown in jail because you fired three times instead of one.
Go ahead, Phil.
Yeah, I must disagree with my good friend Dave with all due respect.
He's doing the thing.
He's using the 2020 hindsight that we can have to fly spec the officer's actions and how he reacted.
He's doing exactly what the Supreme Court says you're not supposed to do.
And Ashley was right earlier.
She's this does come from a civil case, but it is applied also in criminal cases throughout the United States.
It's objective reasonableness from the standard of the officer.
Is your life reasonably, are you reasonably in fear for your life or the safety of others nearby?
And, you know, specific things like that, where you're picking it apart with the 2020 lens, perfect lens of hindsight, is not the appropriate analysis.
And so, Megan, you're absolutely correct.
Once lethal force is authorized, you can use lethal force no matter what that looks like.
You don't get a demerit for firing more rounds than you needed to because anybody who's ever gone to the firing range, particularly a law enforcement training firing range, and you're doing some type of shooting under excited circumstances, you don't have, you don't know which of your rounds may have hit where they're supposed to hit.
So you need to fire multiple rounds.
That's in fact what law enforcement is taught.
So it's the only shoot him in the leg.
You should have just shot him in the leg.
Oh, that's nice.
Eliminate the threat.
Eliminate the threat.
First of all, you don't get limited shots.
The first shot, like I said, I'm not saying it's justified or not.
I'm just saying that is a better argument.
I still think that since he could have stepped away, since the wheels of the car were turning away, it wasn't a high-speed moving vehicle.
I think he could have avoided the car.
There were lesser means than to shoot her dead.
So I think that this is the kind of case.
Crazy talk.
He should have been.
So you're sitting there.
You've already been dragged six months earlier to within an inch of your life.
The car, instead of complying, suddenly now is accelerating.
And what you should do is look down at the wheels and see which way they're going.
Okay, wait, I think she might be getting ready to take a left, not to ram me.
That's insane, Dave.
It happened in two seconds.
Well, it is true that you do give him the grace of what's happening in that moment.
And Phil is right.
You can't be a Monday morning quarterback.
But I saw the video like you all did.
It didn't look like to me she was trying to ram.
It looked like she was trying to get away.
And he had a chance to move away from her.
Did she not see the fact there was a cop in front of her car?
Well, she, yeah, well, one of them, apparently, Corey and the witnesses said, get out of there.
And so she's trying to get out of there.
The cop who pushed this.
The witness bullshit.
I've had it with the witness bullshit.
We have tape.
Here's, you sound like CNN's Whitney Wilde, who's an idiot.
Sorry, but she is.
Her reporting has been so pathetic.
I mean, everything she touches turns to crap.
But here's her report on CNN yesterday.
I was like a maniac watching CNN and MSNBC yesterday.
I like who's texting my team nonstop because the examples of terrible reporting and bad behavior were Legion.
Here's one from her, SAT 20.
I spoke with one man who saw it play out, and that man told me that he did not see anything that he believed suggested that any of those ICE agents were ever in grave danger.
Let me walk you through what we're seeing here on the ground right now.
There has been a crowd here for several hours in the aftermath of the shooting.
People here are very angry.
What you're hearing now is, you know, a lot of anger that's being directed toward the Minneapolis Police Department.
Okay, Phil.
By the way, this is the same woman who decided to cross-examine Nick Shirley on his report on the Minneapolis fraudsters running the daycares.
Are you true?
Are you true?
That was her big Walter Cronkite moment while she was cross-examining Nick Shirley.
Do you speak English as your first language, Whitney?
Because that's an incomprehensible question.
And now she's back saying, well, I spoke with an eyewitness who said he had no grounds to shoot.
Oh, well, thank you so much.
That's so illuminating.
That's terrific.
Thanks.
You found some rando who's against the cop.
Truly advancing the discussion, CNN.
Go ahead, Phil.
Yeah.
So once again, let's just talk about eyewitnesses.
I mean, we've talked about on our MK True Crime show, we've talked about eyewitnesses and the inherent unreliability when they're simply trying to give a recollection of what they saw factually when something occurred in their presence.
And it's just oftentimes not reliable.
But when these people go so far as to then give the legal analysis in conjunction with it, when they have no training or no knowledge or anything about what the law actually says, then it just becomes theater of the absurd.
And the fact that you have left-wing media going out and giving these people a voice and allowing them to say this and on their air, it's just more of the echo chamber.
And the only thing that that does is it serves to continue to pour gasoline on the flames that are already starting to rise up of civil unrest.
And I guess what they want in Minneapolis is I guess they want more George Floyd 2.0 riots to hit the streets.
I think that the politicians there think that that somehow helps their cause, if you will.
But I think it's a good idea.
Truly, Phil, would you behave any differently?
If you wanted riots, would you behave differently than Mayor Fry is behaving?
No, if I wanted riots, I would do exactly what he did.
And that's the only conclusion that I can draw from watching him and the governor out there walls as well, is that they seem to want and thrive in this type of civil unrest.
And I think that's insane.
I think it's irrational for any mayor to want that for their community.
What they would, what they would should say, and a rational person would say, even a Democrat, if they were rational, I'm sure that Dave, if he were the governor there, he would say, look, let's just come.
Let's wait and see what the investigation reveals.
Dave's not going to go on there.
No other reasonable person is going there and say, you know, they need to get the fuck out and that they are the ones causing the problems.
That would not happen if you had reasonable and rational people at the helm of government in that location.
And it's not just the legal Democratic governors.
It's also the media, actually.
One of my insane, just pulling my hair out moments yesterday was watching MSNBC.
Here's Katie Tur, who decided to book the former Minneapolis police chief who was there during the George Floyd saga.
Listen to this exchange, SAT 22.
Joining us now, former Minneapolis chief of police, Medaria Arredondo.
Does this feel like deja vu to you, sir?
Shared Blame in Crisis00:02:43
You know, first, thank you for having me.
You know, sadly, it does.
As it's been mentioned by your reporters on the ground, you know, it's been five and a half years and the city is still trying to heal.
This feels for many out here in Minneapolis like a fresh wound reopened.
Clearly, from Mayor Jacob Fry's press conference today, anger is probably an understatement in terms of how he's feeling.
I mean, they're just dumping the kerosene on the fire, actually.
They really are.
And this really needed de-escalation.
And you know what's interesting, listening to Dave's point, listening to your point, Megan, both can be true.
Both of these facts could be true.
She could have not intended to run over that officer.
Like Dave said, he doesn't believe she intended to.
And the officer could have believed she'd intended to.
Both of those can be true.
Yes.
And if both of those are true, it's still not wrong what he did.
And so that's a way that this could be de-escalated, you know?
And the local government could accept both of those as true.
I mean, we don't have to say we think she was trying to run over that cop.
She doesn't have to have been trying to run over that cop.
But if he thought she was, that's enough.
And it could just stop there.
And then we wouldn't have this risk of bringing in the National Guard against the federal troops, you know?
I mean, if we just take it down a notch, the local government just takes it down a notch, doesn't equate it to, you know, to awful, horrible shootings from years ago.
And just think about it.
This could have just been an accident.
Bad things happen.
People make mistakes.
It doesn't mean that the officer did something criminal or did something.
It's just that it's a Tinderbox, Dave, because the media and the local officials have been disparaging ICE at every turn for months now.
They are setting the scene for a violent encounter.
I swear it's like they wanted this to happen.
I mean, let me play this one soundbite from CARE.
You know, this is the Council Against or whatever for Islamic Relations.
It's a pro-Muslim group.
And this is their Minnesota director, Jai Lani Hussein.
Listen to this person's reaction to what happened yesterday, 23.
I would just say that this young woman is a hero.
She's someone who stood up to defend her neighbors and then to lose her life.
She's a patriot, a true patriot, and the type of people we need in this country to stand up against bullies like President Trump and these horrible ICE agents who think that they are above the law.
They're not above the law.
Great.
He'd like dozens more just like her, other mothers who are now going to leave their children without moms to raise them.
Hero Stands Up to Neighbors00:03:24
I'm sorry, Dave.
That's irresponsible.
I agree.
I think that when you have a child, you need to be more careful before you're putting yourself in that situation.
At the same time, I do think there's shared blame to go around here.
I think that, first off, on my side of the aisle, the mayor and the governor, I don't know, since when did it become in fashion now to start throwing F-bombs?
I guess that's to replicate Trump.
We're trying to outdo Trump, I guess.
You can do it on a podcast, but they should not be doing it as officials.
Yeah, when I was an elected official, I was a state senator and state attorney.
I never did that.
And I guess that's what's going on these days is try to show authenticity.
I don't agree with it.
I do think that part of the reason for the problem is that Trump's policies have been confrontation.
I would prefer de-escalation.
I do think you throw thousands of ICE agents in Minnesota because you want to own the lives.
You're upset about the Somali corruption there.
I do think this is a powder keg.
And I just wish people would take down the temperature.
As a prosecutor, I will say this just to go back where we're saying.
I don't want to dismiss the third and fourth shots.
Apparently, there was a four shot too.
Like I said, I do think the defense is going to wrap all the four shots into one split second moment, as Phil said, because he and Asher are great lawyers.
As a prosecutor, though, I would be looking at shots three and four because by the time those rounds were fired, the car was already moving past the agent and the threat, if there was one, was over.
So, I don't think we should dismiss that outright.
Okay, we'll put a pin in it for now because we're going to take a quick break.
We're going to come back and we've got to discuss what happened yesterday with Nick Reiner, Rob's son.
Standby.
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Back with me now, Dave Ehrenberg, Phil Holloway, and Ashley Merchant.
They are all lawyers and hosts of the MK True Crime Show on the MK Media Podcast Network.
Just go check them out.
Go to podcasts, type in MK TrueCrime, or go to youtube.com and search that, and you will find their great show, which is crushing it.
Public Defender Strategy Shifts00:14:43
Before we move on from Minneapolis and over to what happened at the Nick Reiner arraignment yesterday, I would be remiss if I did not give a shout out to the sign language interpreter who works for Mayor Jacob Fry.
Because I'm sorry, you couldn't miss this woman's performance.
I actually thought it was excellent.
She was channeling his emotions, which I think is her job just right.
You might have missed it, but here, watch.
But I do have a message for our community, for our city, and I have a message for ICE.
To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis.
We do not want you here.
Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite.
People are being hurt.
Families are being ripped apart.
Long-term Minneapolis residents that have contributed so greatly to our city, to our culture, to our economy, are being terrorized.
And now somebody is dead.
That's on you.
And it's all this woman's badass.
Is she not?
I'm sorry.
They can make her bring it.
She's a Grammy.
She does.
She deserves a special shout out because sometimes they're really bad.
And we call them out for that too.
The ones who like, they're too big.
And they're, you know, this woman is just channeling the emotion.
If you were hearing impaired, you watched her, you'd know exactly what was being said and the tone with which it was being said.
So hats off to that lady, whoever she is.
Okay, let's head west to California, where Nick Reiner was supposed to be arraigned yesterday, but instead of getting arraigned, we had an attorney withdrawal.
Alan Jackson, his high-profile criminal defense attorney, the guy who represented Karen Reed successfully and got her not guilty last summer, had been hired.
We talked about, gee, how can he afford this?
I think we all agreed somebody was paying him because he doesn't do pro bono, even if it's going to be for a lot of attention.
And now he bails saying, actually, it's not going to be me.
And he offered a little bit more.
He wouldn't say why.
He said he was prohibited by ethical rules from explaining why, but he's out.
A public defender is in, and he offered the following in SOP 31 on his way out.
I'm legally and I'm ethically prohibited from explaining all the reasons why.
I know that's a question on everybody's mind.
We expect the public defender to step in.
They've already been appointed and very capably protect Nick Reiner's interests as he moves forward through the system.
But be clear, be very, very clear about this.
My team and I remain deeply, deeply committed to Nick Reiner and to his best interests.
What we've learned, and you can take this to the bank, is that pursuant to the laws of this state, pursuant to the law in California, Nick Reiner is not guilty of murder.
Print that.
Print that.
Okay, I just want to say that, Alan, you can save your righteous indignation for a case that doesn't involve a young man who clearly nearly decapitated his parents.
Okay.
Because this is not a media problem for your client.
It's a, you took a knife and murdered your parents.
Loving parents, by all accounts, problem.
So just stop with your, oh, the media print that.
Okay.
All right.
In exit stage left.
Goodbye.
So I gleaned there, Phil.
Actually, this is for Dave, that he made a distinction between factual innocence and legal innocence.
That's why he said pursuant to the law, which I had some friends, multiple actually, send the clip to me confused.
Lay people didn't quite understand.
They thought he was actually saying he didn't do it.
And that's exactly what he wanted them to think, Dave.
Right.
All true.
We're in total agreement on that.
This is a lawyer who is known as a true believer, right?
And you can see by his comments, he didn't have to go there.
He's not working from them anymore.
And yet he had to say not guilty of murder.
Well, okay, if he's legally insane, then he would be not guilty.
If it's manslaughter, he'll be not guilty of murder.
So that's where he's going.
As far as why he withdrew, I think Phil, Ashley, and I are all in agreement.
It had to do with money.
The family out of the estate was apparently paying his fees.
And they probably decided, you know what, it's not worth it anymore, especially if you hire a pit bull like this who may turn the spotlight on the Reiners, the victims, and perhaps try to accuse them of something untoward.
We're not paying for that.
So I think that's the reason why he's out.
It's because of money.
And who is going to drain the family trust down to God knows what, Phil?
I mean, this kind of a defense could cost several million dollars.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, millions and millions of dollars.
And I, look, I, that type of grandstanding is not my style.
I understand other people might be inclined to do it, particularly when they're on the courthouse steps with the cameras rolling.
But that being said, this is, I said this on your AM update this morning.
And to expand on that, look, he would have had to do, there's two reasons.
It could have been a conflict of interest or it's going to be money.
Those are the two things that come out and make sense to me, theoretically.
So he's going to have to do a conflict check going into the case before he can take on a client.
A lawyer is supposed to make sure they don't have any conflicts of interest that would keep him from taking the case.
So presumably he did that.
He's no slouch.
Would have done that and would have known about a conflict of interest, unless in the unlikely scenario that maybe a conflict arose in the last couple of weeks, which seems unlikely.
But he was right there, Johnny on the spot, representing Nick Reiner right after this happens.
And so to me, that suggests that there was some money promised that was not delivered for whatever reason.
It could be that the heirs of the estate have decided that they don't want, presumably this is all in a trust.
They may be trust beneficiaries and they don't want the corpus of that trust being spent on his defense.
And so the heirs may not be in agreement or the money just may not be there.
Or for whatever reason, he did not get paid what he was expected to get paid.
We kind of know it was money, don't we, Phil?
Because they didn't replace him with another story defense attorney out in California.
They replaced him with a public defender.
For now, and there may be a retained lawyer that gets in later, but in the short term, it makes sense for the court to go ahead and have a public defender do the arraignment.
And they can always hire another lawyer later.
But you remember, Jackson was right there going to the crime scene and all this, having the cameras follow him around right after this happened when it was in the spotlight.
And so I'm sure that discussions were had about what my fee is going to be.
But then when Mr. Green did not get delivered as agreed, then, you know, suddenly he has to get out.
And that's, in my opinion, a lot of speculation.
It's educated speculation, but I think that's what happened.
Okay.
So, but what the most interesting thing, because no one really cares about the lawyers, Ashley, but the most interesting thing is the telegraphing of what the defense is going to be.
And it seems pretty clear he is telegraphing that he's going to plead not guilty by reason of insanity.
Now, I really do want to talk about this because we talked about it when this case first went down.
And we talked on this program about the insanely high burden to prove that.
The defense would have to prove it.
Usually in a criminal prosecution, the burden of proof is on the prosecution.
But if you're going to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, the burden of proof is on you as the defendant.
And it's so high.
It's high in all courts in California, very, very high.
We talked about a case in which a guy was like sucking people's blood.
He drank the blood of a rabbit.
Like they were like, no, not, nope, not insane enough for us.
Not you're guilty.
So it's very, very high.
But that was before we learned that he had switched his medication allegedly right before the murders and had been going kind of nuts.
Like his behavior had been escalating.
Will that matter?
That the medication twist?
Yes, it actually could matter significantly.
And the reason is, as a defense lawyer, you have to make an analysis.
You have to really decide if you want to do a self, if you want to do this type of defense, if you want to go forward with a mental health defense.
And the reason is you might end up serving longer in jail than you would otherwise.
Let's just say that he got, if he went to trial without a homicide, without this, this defense, this psych defense, he could get life with the possibility of parole.
Well, let's say that he was committed, that he was found not guilty by reason of insanity and he was committed.
He's not released until he is no longer a danger to himself or others.
If it was a medication issue, he could be properly medicated and then he could be released quickly.
But if it's one of those issues that actually isn't related to medication, it's very hard.
You can't really cure someone.
And so then he would be facing a much longer time in prison, potentially the rest of his life.
So, you know, normally the decision's not that difficult in a case of this caliber.
But if you have a client who's charged with something like, let's say, a theft or a drug case and they have a mental health defense, a lot of times you don't want to use it because they might actually stay in custody in that actual mental facility far longer than they would if they just pled guilty and did the time.
So I think that might have factored in.
I also think this mental health defense might factor into why Alan Jackson had to leave because it's not just the lawyer's money.
When you're a private attorney, you also have to have money for the experts.
And mental health defenses are extremely expensive.
And so the family may not have been willing to pony up all that extra money.
Or if it's the public defender, the public pays for it.
You get court-appointed experts.
So that may have also factored into the decision.
You know, I don't know, though, Phil.
I enjoyed your interview on AM Update this morning.
I listened to it as a consumer because Emily Jashinsky does AM Update on Wednesday nights into Thursday.
And I thought it was good.
And you were making very good points about, we didn't discuss the medication specifically, but they're going to ask whether he knew right from wrong the day of the murders and when doing the murders.
And you were making the point that there is plenty of evidence he did medication or no medication.
Yeah, we actually talked about that.
I think it may not have made it into the final version of AM Update, but Ashley's point's correct.
He's going to approach this.
Any lawyer, I say he, it could be a she, there's a female court-appointed lawyer now, and whoever the lawyer is, he or she, or maybe the group of them, are going to have to pursue two things.
Was he, did he know right from wrong?
Was he insane at the time this happened, if he's the one that did it?
And even if so, is he now presently competent to stand trial?
In other words, can he, you know, can he assist in his defense?
If he was acutely under the influence of some type of chemicals that caused some type of psychosis at the time, that's not going to excuse him from criminal responsibility.
But even if it did, or if there was something else, we have evidence that shows he took steps to hide his behavior and to hide the crime such that he would have known right from wrong.
And so that's going to, I think, destroy any insanity defense.
Well, I think he kind of went to a hotel, right?
And like he took, they say he like shut the blinds and did all these things right in the aftermath to kind of get himself away from it.
In other words, it's hiding behavior and it's the type of thing that shows a consciousness of guilt.
But as far as the competency to stand trial, if he's under the influence of drugs to the point that he's not going to be able to do it, which just to be clear is a different issue.
It's a different issue than pleading insanity as your main defense.
They first have to cross the bar of, can you even stand trial or are you too far gone to even do that?
They would do both.
And if he's under the influence of substances to the point that he can't assist his lawyer, well, that's temporary.
You put him in jail and you remove access to the drugs that he's on, at least the ones that, you know, the illegal drugs that cause psychosis, then that can pass.
That can be a temporary kind of situation that resolves by the time he goes to trial.
Dave, your thoughts?
I would argue that his actions in advance of the murders also shows that he was not legally insane because he had a heated argument at that party with his parents.
So there's the motive.
Got in a fight and he acted on it.
So I think based on what Phil said, which is his attempts to evade afterwards and his actions beforehand, it shows that he knew the difference between right and wrong.
It's going to be very hard for him to be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Much easier for him to be found not competent to stand trial, which is a different standard, as you guys said, which is whether he can assist in his defense and whether he understands the nature of the proceedings in front of him.
So that the public defender may just try to say he's not competent.
Let's see the mental institution for years.
Well, you get sent off to a mental institution until you're brought back to competence.
And in Florida, which I think California is similar, that this could take years.
That's why this trial isn't happening anytime soon.
And if he's never brought back to competency, then he could be set free at some point.
Are the mental institutions to which these folks who are in this situation get sent like a club fed?
You know what I mean?
Like, can the system be gamed where you're off on like the Martha Stewart type camp where, you know, it's not so bad?
They're ugly facilities.
You don't want to be there.
There is a term they use in the law called malingering, where they decide that you're faking it.
And there are people who fake it.
But as far as the institutions, no, you don't want to be in these mental institutions.
It's not pleasant.
No, and they can force medicate you.
So let's just say he's not competent and maybe he needs medicine and he doesn't want to take it.
They can actually do a hearing to force Medicaid.
So, you know, they hold you down and inject you with psychotropic.
So he is going to be forced to sit for a trial at some point.
And I mean, I think we all agree.
He'll make sure he's going to go with an insanity defense and he's going to blame.
They have competency, competency school.
It's crazy, but they actually at the mental health facilities, they have what's called competency school and they will sit people in a classroom and they're like, that's your lawyer.
That's a judge.
These are how to answer the questions.
Here's how to sit there.
And they give you so much medication.
So, I mean, you're clunked.
It's trying to get you found competent or are they trying to teach you how to be found incompetent?
They're trying.
It's once you've been found incompetent, they're trying to make you competent so that you can sit in court and look competent, really.
I mean, they're just trying to get you out of the facility.
Yeah.
Okay.
They just want you out.
Well, it doesn't look good for Nick Reiner, but so he hasn't technically been arraigned, right?
That's all been postponed given the fact that the lawyer withdrew.
Now we've got a public defender and we'll see what the next move is.
But I mean, I think it's fair to say it's not looking good for Nick Reiner as of today.
Pharmacy Savings for Families00:03:52
Very spirited debate and segment.
Thanks, Dave.
Sorry if we were too hard on you, but you always keep it interesting.
Love y'all.
Thanks so much for being here.
Good to see you.
Love the show.
Thanks, Megan.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for advice.
Likewise.
Go over, check out mktruecrime.com right now, and that'll give you all the places you can subscribe to our latest hit show.
These guys are making it a huge success and they cover everything.
They'll be covering this, of course, this week, but all the latest crimes and it's great legal analysis and they all fight over there in like a fun way and a respectful way, as you just saw here.
It's very high quality crime programming.
Coming up, a deep dive into the dangers of today's cannabis with Alex Berenson and he knows of what he speaks.
Don't miss this.
Been wanting to do this segment for a while.
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Hey everyone, it's me, Megyn Kelly.
I've got some exciting news.
I now have my very own channel on Sirius XM.
It's called the Megan Kelly Channel, and it is where you will hear the truth unfiltered with no agenda and no apologies.
Along with the Megan Kelly show, you're going to hear from people like Mark Halperin, Lake Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily Duschinski, Jesse Kelly, Real Clear Politics, and many more.
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Risks of Potent Cannabis00:15:20
Now we're going to turn to a topic I've been wanting to get to for a long time, and that is the topic of cannabis marijuana.
Last month, President Trump signed an executive order that aims to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III substance instead of the Schedule I classification it holds today.
That makes it easier to get.
The order also called for additional research to be done about the benefits alleged of medical marijuana.
Well, my next guest has been sounding the alarm on the dangers of today's marijuana for years.
Cannabis in particular is how he likes to refer to it.
His name is Alex Berenson, and he has been right about so much it's almost scary.
He's an independent journalist.
He is author of Tell Your Children the Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence, and also Unreported Truths on Substack.
Alex, it's an honor to have you.
Love your reporting.
You're literally saving lives with your reporting and you take so much shit for it.
I just deeply, deeply respect you and follow you avidly.
You were right about like so much during COVID.
They banned you, they censored you, they smeared you.
And all along you were trying to save lives.
And you've been sounding the alarm on marijuana for a long time now.
And when these cases keep coming up of these shooters, and everybody says, What can we do?
It's a free country.
You know, like people, you can't like what?
Okay, the Republicans say fortify this off-targets and we need more mental health.
And the Democrats say, seize all the guns.
And you're over there jumping up and down going, Hello, hello, hello.
I see a common theme in virtually all of these.
Would somebody please listen to me?
And that is one of the many reasons I wanted to have you on.
So you pick it up from there.
Well, sure.
I mean, so look, it's interesting because Tell Your Children came out in 2019, the beginning of 2019, and the left, you know, they jumped it, right?
They hated the book.
They hated the science.
They said I was, you know, I didn't know what I was talking about.
I was making things up.
I mean, I think the book is its own best evidence.
This, you know, it's an accumulation of studies that were done really over the last 30 years and talking to psychiatrists and talking to people with mental illness and their families about how you know that cannabis, marijuana, which, you know, a lot of people just use pure THC now.
They use vapes.
That certainly, if you use that over time, and if you use a lot of it, and unfortunately, if you start when you're in your teens, your early teens, especially, you're at higher risk for developing severe mental illness.
Now, there's a lot of other issues around cannabis, but that was the one that I focused on in the book, because to me, that's the one that you, you know, you can't really fix, right?
And a permanent psychotic disorder, schizophrenia in particular, that's not something I would wish on anybody.
I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
It ruins people's lives.
It destroys families.
It's very difficult societally.
So when people talk, well, you know, marijuana, maybe it makes people fat or it makes them lazy.
or it kind of, you know, ruins their motivation.
All those things are pretty clearly true too.
But to me, the problem that has the greatest societal impact is this issue of psychosis.
And it's also very, very clear.
I don't think anybody would disagree with this, that psychosis is a risk factor in violence.
Okay.
And it's a risk factor in two particularly bad kinds of violence.
The first kind is violence against essentially innocent family members.
So people, you know, the crimes where the cops say, we don't understand why this happened, or the neighbors say, we don't understand why this happened.
You know, this, this 18-year-old kid slaughtered his family in their sleep.
And we just don't get it.
That's almost always psychosis driven.
And when I say almost always, I mean almost always.
And so that's one kind.
And then the other kind is the kind that you were mentioning at the beginning, which is crimes against strangers.
And those can be, they can be stabbings, they can be shootings, but crimes where, once again, it doesn't seem like there's any like sense to it.
And the reason is there is no sense to it.
It's being driven by something inside this person, voices, a feeling that they almost cannot control, even if they know it's wrong.
And so they're, you know, then there'll be a big legal fight afterwards about should this person go to a, you know, a psychiatric forensic hospital for the rest of their lives?
Should they be in prison?
But it's too late at that point.
The damage has been done.
So that's what I wrote about and tell your children.
And I will say that in the last seven years, and the book came out basically seven years ago to the day, the evidence has only mounted.
And I would say even people on the left, and they probably still think that cannabis should be legal, that THC should be legal.
They don't really dispute this anymore.
And that's why I'm sort of so upset by what the president did last month, because I think there's just so much evidence that this is a mistake societally.
And I think, you know, look, this is not his issue.
He's got tons of other things to worry about.
And he's got some people giving him a lot of money and whispering in his ear, hey, this is not a bad thing.
And, you know, it's just not, I doubt that he, that he is up on the ins and outs of this.
And it's unfortunate.
Yeah, President Trump's never smoked a joint in his life.
Exactly.
Yeah, he's not, he's not a big pot pusher.
I'm sure you're right.
He's got some constituency that really wanted it.
And he figured, like a lot of people do, medical marijuana, that's good.
You know, like a lot of people like it.
It brings comfort to cancer victims.
Why would I not make that easier for suffering people to get?
And the answer to that is what?
Well, so, so unfortunately, when you actually look at cannabis and THC in clinical trials, for example, as everybody knows, we've had a terrible opioid epidemic in the United States the last 20 or 25 years.
And, you know, people thought, hey, if we legalize cannabis, it will lead to less opioid use.
Unfortunately, when you actually study this, you don't see very good substitution.
What you see is that people who use cannabis often continue to use opioids.
Sometimes they use more opioids.
They don't really say that their pain levels have gone down.
It turns out that, you know, unfortunately in general, and this is true of cannabis, it's true of opioids.
It's true of other painkillers, getting on pain, getting lasting pain relief from any drug is really difficult to do.
Over time, your body adapts to it.
And you ultimately oftentimes have just as much pain as you did before, plus you have whatever the negative side effects of the drug use were.
And look, if somebody has cancer and they're a few months from death, if somebody is terminally ill in some other way, they have ALS, whatever it is they might have, and a little bit of whether it's cannabis or opioids or something else is going to relieve their pain.
I don't think any of us would deny them that.
That is not what the industry is selling to.
They're selling it.
Young people, they're selling large amounts of cannabis to people who are physically healthy, usually, at least when they start using.
And that's where they make their money.
This is all a sideshow.
And, you know, one thing, the proof of this, by the way, is that so the industry, if you look at the stocks, because these are some of these are publicly traded companies, they went up before the president signed this order telling the DEA to deschedule cannabis, to reschedule it from one to three, as you said.
Since then, the stocks have actually gone down.
And the reason is that the order actually is crafted in a way the industry doesn't like because it's so focused on medical marijuana.
And people have realized, hey, you know what?
Because so much of our sales are just recreational, this doesn't actually help us that much.
Good.
So the medical marijuana thing, it is, I take your point that it's really maybe, it may not be helping people as much as they represent to us.
But I did see something interesting about young people recently, and it seems directly linked to this.
The alcohol sales present day, especially for young people, but across the board, are way down.
They're lower than they've been in decades.
And that's the good news.
Nobody would say alcohol is good for you.
Though it can be a social lubricant in that way, it is good for very introverted people.
Okay, whatever.
But the cannabis sales may be replacing that.
I didn't see like a corresponding chart, but the concern is that a lot of those young people in particular are instead turning to like gummies.
And that's not good news.
No, it's not.
And this idea that cannabis is way safer than alcohol is demonstrably untrue.
So here's what I say.
People say in the cannabis business, well, nobody ever died of smoking too much pot.
And it is true.
Nobody ever died where, you know, maybe there's a case of, you know, a five-year-old who ate a ton of gummies and had a seizure and died.
It's very rare.
We'd all agree about that.
Okay.
Whereas if you drink too much alcohol, your liver can fail.
You can die.
But that does not mean that cannabis overall isn't dangerous.
And it's dangerous in some of the same ways that alcohol is, meaning it can cause traffic accidents.
It causes violence, as we said, it's associated with high risks of suicide.
It's associated with mental illness.
It also increasingly people are realizing cardiologists have done a lot of work.
It's associated with heart attacks, believe it or not.
And one reason we haven't seen that as much as we would have as much as we have, well, we've seen some of it.
We're likely to see more of it.
But the reason kids and young people are obviously very low risk from heart attacks, but it does increase that risk, it seems to.
So cannabis is not risk-free.
I would say overall, it's kind of, if you look at all the risks together, it's roughly the same physical and psychiatric risk as alcohol.
So then people say, well, okay, but alcohol is legal, cannabis isn't.
And to me, that is the best argument for legalizing cannabis, but it's not a good enough one.
And here's why.
We don't have to legalize cannabis.
We're choosing to do this.
The U.S. and Canada are basically the two countries that have chosen to do this.
The rest of the world is not following along.
And even a country like Germany, where they did move actually to legalize, they've now moved away from that.
Netherlands and Amsterdam, same thing.
They are not moving further around or further down the drug legalization road.
Well, how can you say that it's the same danger as alcohol?
Because alcohol, you can have three glasses of wine over the course of a week and you don't have any risk of psychosis or, you know, like that.
It seems like there are millions of Americans who drink alcohol and they don't have any of those issues anyway.
Let me try to be fair about this.
The equivalent of that would be somebody who, let's say, takes one small gummy a week or, you know, a couple a week to try to sleep.
Okay.
If that's your only use of cannabis, are your, you know, risks of becoming psychotic very low?
Yes, they're very low.
They're not zero, but they're very low.
The problem is cannabis is addictive.
Okay.
Cannabis is addictive.
The evidence actually is that it's more psychologically addictive than alcohol, less physically addictive, more psychologically addictive.
So when we open this to 18-year-olds and we say it's medicine, that encourages them to use in a way that gets them in trouble.
I mean, look, look, almost any drug, if you use it just once in your life, the risks of terrible side effects are low.
I mean, obviously fentanyl and some of the opioids, that's less true.
But the problem isn't the person who's able to use once or a handful of times and stop.
The problem is that drugs have their own logic.
Okay.
And that's true of cannabis.
It's true of alcohol.
It's true of other drugs.
And that logic is one word, Megan.
It's more.
And so as a society, when we think about drug use, we have to think about discouraging drug use across the board.
And when we legalize cannabis, we're doing exactly the opposite of that.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that the U.S. and Canada, which are, again, the two countries where this movement has gone the furthest, are the two countries that have the worst problem with opioids.
I am, you know, I think there's a bigger issue here that I would like to write another book about.
And I'm searching to find the time to do that, which is just about sort of the U.S. attitude in general towards drug use and drug abuse.
And I think we are on a horrible path.
Can you talk about the amount of THC that's in your average joint now versus in 1975?
Sure.
This is a great point.
So 50 years ago, if you smoked, you know, if you smoked a joint, it had a few milligrams of THC in it.
Now it might have 100 milligrams of THC in it.
The reason is that the industry has gotten really, really good at making what they call flour, herbal cannabis, a lot stronger.
So it used to be, let's say, 1% to 3% THC.
Now you couldn't sell that in a store.
You'd be laughed out of the store.
It's mostly 20% to 30% THC, but it's not like joints have gotten smaller.
So it's just much, much easier to consume a ton of THC than it used to be.
The other issue is that a lot of people don't even use flour cannabis anymore.
They just vape.
So that's basically just ingesting a chemical, either inhaling it, you know, eating it in a brownie, possibly literally putting a little tincture on your tongue.
That's just pure THC.
And the idea, one of the things that people who use cannabis say is, oh, it's a plant.
It's natural.
This stuff is no more natural than anything else that comes out of a lab.
It's extracted from the plant.
And it's in some cases, actually, it's chemically altered in the extraction.
So the idea that this is a natural substance is not true either.
So I want to graduate to psychosis in a minute, but let's start first with it just turns you into an utter loser, which is not articulately put, but you've been making this case for a while.
I mean, I have, and look, I don't know if you have anybody in your life.
Have people in my life okay, who went to college, who graduated who, who lives, seem to be on a you know a path of getting a job, getting married, having kids.
Some of those people essentially, their lives ended in their mid 20s, right.
So now unfortunately, i'm in my 50s, they're in their 50s.
These people don't work.
They, you know, they worked for a few years into their you know 30s.
Maybe they saved some money, maybe they worked on Wall Street, maybe they just live sort of you know, low to the ground and don't have big expenses.
They're not married, they certainly don't have kids, and and and pot, you know, has been the focus of their lives for decades.
And even if they're not psychotic they're, they're, they're difficult to deal with because because basically, they're sort of oddly oriented towards the world at this point and and their lives don't seem to have gone anywhere.
Drug Abuse and Psychosis00:14:56
And it's actually very depressing and distressing to see.
And so I mean again, I can think of not one, I can think of several people who I know uh, who went this path, and I suspect you might, you can too, and I suspect everyone in your audience can and, by the way, this is one reason to me that cannabis is more insidious and it's and arguably, more dangerous than alcohol.
If you drink enough to mess up your life, you know it right.
You have physical withdrawal symptoms.
You smell bad because you've been drinking too much.
You you put on weight.
You know large levels of alcohol are not good for you.
If you smoke pot all the time, you know you wake and bake, you spend your days getting high because it's not as physically damaging, you can sort of convince yourself, oh, this is just my lifestyle and my choice, I like living this way and you're not actually like forced to confront what it is you're doing to yourself.
Um, I don't have anybody like that in my life, but I do recall distinctly when I was better than mine.
I you know i'm very anti-drug.
I do drink alcohol but and I realize this is a drug, but i'm i've.
My mother just did a very good job of really stigmatizing anything beyond alcohol for me, which was a gift.
But I do recall in my late 20s going on a ski trip with a good friend of mine and a couple girls I knew from college and one of their boyfriends this is out in like Vale was such a pothead I couldn't believe how addicted he was to it.
I mean, he couldn't go a half an hour without having another hit and it was so disruptive to his life and, as a result, to our whole trip out there.
Like you get into the gondola, he'd have to light something up, you'd get to the bottom of the ski run, he'd have to have another.
It was like I had no idea until that moment how addictive it could be, right and yet, and yet he you know he was presumably presenting it to himself and to his girlfriend and to all of you is I just like getting high?
Yeah, and when you're in your 20s it's kind of like there's not a big stigma with that.
You know, everybody's kind of like yeah whatever, you haven't read Alex's book, and you did, you think it's harmless and it's not.
Which leads me to the second point, and that's the psychosis that, a couple of years ago, I had on this wonderful man named Roland Griffiths, and Rolin created the clinic at Johns Hopkins University, testing like psychedelics, Um, you know, mushrooms and MDNA.
I always screw up the letters, but you know, the actual like shrooms that people are taking now for these trips.
And they're doing it there in a controlled setting in a way to treat depression, to help cancer patients who are just like terminal to feel better about what's next, you know, on the other side.
And it's really, they were having wonderful results.
And then it was very sad because Roland himself got colon cancer and died.
And I had him on when he knew that was going to happen.
It was a very emotional interview.
Anyway, my point in telling you this is he said they screen so carefully for anybody who wants to join the program for any history at any level of schizophrenia in your family.
Because if it's, if you have it back three generations, just like one grandma, you have a much higher likelihood of having a psychotic break during the doctor-controlled segment from which you never return.
I like that's the part that never I never forgot.
You break, you never come back.
And you seem to be saying you've seen evidence of this with regular old pot too.
Yes.
So, so here, so here's the thing: the psychedelics, obviously, they're designed to produce a psychosis-like experience.
Cannabis isn't exactly designed to do that, but in many people, and particularly with this higher strength, you know, higher in THC, more potent cannabis that we were just talking about, it can do this.
And here's who's vulnerable: if you have any, you know, sort of pre-existing psychiatric illness, if you have any psychiatric illness, certainly if you have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder in your family, if you use in your early teens,
in your mid-teens, and if you use heavily, if you're in, if, if you're in those categories and if they overlap, you are at surprisingly high risk, certainly have intermittent psychotic episodes as a result of using cannabis.
And again, psychosis is a break from reality.
So it could be you're hearing voices shouting at you.
It could be you're hallucinating and visualizing, you know, stuff that's not there.
That's that's more rare for cannabis than it is for the psychedelics, but it can happen.
It could just be, and this is actually the most dangerous both for the person and the people around him, that you're having these very, very negative thoughts of, oh, you know, my mother's not actually my mother anymore.
A robot has replaced her, or my friend is actually a covert police officer.
Anything like that is extremely dangerous.
So those thoughts are what psych or what THC use can produce in people.
And if you ever have that happen to you, even once, you should never use again.
But the problem is the industry, and this was part of their strategy to get cannabis legalized, promotes cannabis as medicine.
So who are they selling it to a lot of the time?
They're selling to people with sleep disorders or people with anxiety or people with depression.
The exact people who should not be using this stuff.
My position on cannabis is: if we want to legalize it, I'm not in favor of legalizing it, but let's legalize it like alcohol, where it is something that we're going to use recreationally to get high, to have a good time.
I mean, it's not a very good social lubricant, but let's use it that way.
Instead, the industry sells it as alcohol, as a medicine, and that encourages exactly the wrong people to use it.
And some of those people will get psychotic.
And if they continue to use, they have what epidemiologists call very high rate ratios.
But what that means is your risk of becoming permanently psychotically ill of developing schizophrenia is really high.
Okay, so that leads me to Nick Reiner, which is the man we discussed right before you came on with our legal panel.
Here he is in 2018 on the Dopey podcast, smoking weed.
Listen here.
I said, I'm not doing dope.
So what are you doing?
What are you doing?
Oh, well, I'm smoking a little weed, taking a little adder all.
Okay.
So that's what everybody's doing.
So answer the question.
You smoke weed to chill, basically, right?
Yeah, but I get out of it when anybody else gets out of doing any drug.
It's, yeah.
It's like, why does anybody do any drug?
But I'm just smoking weed to prevent myself from doing any other sort of hard thing right now.
Right.
It's taking the spot.
And it's a preventative measure.
Very interesting.
He's using it like an opioid addict might use Suboxone.
Like, this is my gateway drug out of my opioid addiction.
I mean, I'm so glad, you know, that clip should be played in every high school, in every junior high school in the country, right?
Because you hear it all there.
First of all, he's essentially saying, oh, you know, weed, weed, cannabis, CT.
It's not a drug for me.
It's something I'm using to avoid other drugs.
He also throws an Adderall in there, which, you know, Adderall is not methamphetamine, it's amphetamine.
It's a very powerful stimulant.
So we have this guy who's a drug addict, who would say he's an addict, who would acknowledge that he can't use opioids and that methamphetamine has been a big problem for him in the past too, is telling this group casually, oh, I use amphetamines.
I use cannabis and somehow that's okay.
I've exempted those in my own mind and they're actually good for me.
This is denial on an individual level and it's the same denial that we have on a societal level.
And we really have to, you know, whether it's you, whether it's me, but parents have to and schools have to.
And, you know, the president, obviously, again, this issue is not top of mind for him.
We have to, as a society, say, this is not a good way to do business.
This is not good for our kids.
It's not good for society.
It's not good for anyone.
And we're not going to allow ourselves to make these excuses about drug use.
It's not harmless.
This is not harmless at all.
No, it's the opposite of harmless.
And if you want to use it, don't pretend that it's for your ADHD or for your anxiety.
Just say, I like getting high.
You know, it's fun to be high and I'm going to take a risk with it.
I mean, again, that would be, that's a bad idea, but it's better than where we are right now.
Yeah.
The other case, and we could be out here all day talking about the cases of violence where we later found out that the young man in virtually all cases was a huge fan of cannabis.
But the one that comes to mind is the shooter in the Minneapolis school shooting that happened just this past year, where he shot the children in the church connected to the school.
And then his videos, this is a man pretending to be a woman.
He declared himself to be trans, but it also came out how addicted he was to marijuana.
And he posted these videos of himself as a demon.
And you can see the smoke.
We have it here.
This is him filming his own manifesto.
And you can see for the listening audience, him blowing smoke.
And he's talking about how he's smoking pot while he's doing some of these videos that there were lots of them.
And then we saw the demonic stuff.
And you were jumping up and down on this.
The Dallas ICE shooter, that didn't get as much attention because it was a few days after the Minneapolis case.
That guy was a heavy pot user.
A lot of people don't know that Nicholas Cruz, the Parkland shooter, was a heavy, heavy cannabis user.
I think he was also using Adderall.
The cannabis-adderol combination is a nasty combination because both those drugs can produce psychosis individually and they're pretty additive because pot, the one good thing about it from a violence point of view is it tends to knock people down a little bit.
It makes you sleepy and lazy.
But of course, amphetamines have the opposite effect.
We'll see with Reiner, but it seems clear from what has come out with him that his lawyer has now left the case because I think he does not want to pay millions of dollars for a defense lawyer when they're pretty angry, obviously, at what Nick Reiner and what he allegedly did.
But the lawyer appeared to be setting up a drug, I'm sorry, a mental illness defense.
Definitely.
And so one of the things that I think actually got us talking about this, you and me, was this idea that that defense, then the prosecution has to openly say, hey, this is not organic mental illness.
This is not organic schizophrenia.
This was caused by the drugs Nick Reiner was taking.
And if the trial does go that way, I think a lot of Americans for the first time are going to be presented with the cannabis psychosis violence connection for the first time.
They're really going to see it.
But yes, there are many, many of these cases.
And unfortunately, a lot of them are very hard to read about because, again, often the violence is against, it's against somebody's parents or worse, the worst of all is when it's against children.
And so I think our tendency as a society is just to turn away and say, well, this person was just crazy or this person was just evil and not to realize that we have opened up sort of the gates on this by encouraging cannabis use by vulnerable people.
And you know what else?
Because we scratch our heads and we say, why?
Why do we see so many school shootings now?
So many mass shootings now.
And without even knowing who did the shooting, in 95% of the cases, you can tell, it's going to be a young man between the ages of 18 and 25 who probably didn't have too terrible childhood, but had some sort of a psychotic break.
I mean, you can kind of tell me that.
I mean, that's definitely how it feels.
And no one's talking about this, Alex.
Nobody's saying.
Maybe they're a little older.
I can tell you this, whenever there's a woman, and it is very rare that it's a woman, I don't mean a trans woman, I mean an actual woman.
It's even more likely because women, as a rule, don't commit that kind of violence.
So there's almost always psychosis involved.
No one's talking about the fact that what else has happened during this time that we've seen these school shootings and these mass shootings rise, the increase of THC in marijuana and the increased use of cannabis in gummies and in cigarettes, whatever, all of it, in vaping.
And on top of it, the Adderall is interesting because we've seen ADHD, or at least, you know, diagnoses of it skyrocket, which almost always comes with a possible prescription for Adderall.
And I'll bet you most parents have no idea that if they put their kid on Adderall, they need to be really careful about making sure he does not or she does not also get into pot.
I mean, I think unfortunately, most parents or a lot of parents, too many parents who turn to Adderall or Vivance or any of the ADHD, the stimulant drugs, don't realize that what they're giving their kids is amphetamine.
And, you know, it's either amphetamine or something so chemically close that it might as well be amphetamine.
And I just, I mean, other countries don't do this, Megan.
In France, the prescription rate of amphetamine is about 1/30th of what it is in the U.S.
And again, it's not because these aren't rich countries, it's not because they don't have access to health care, they just don't have a societal compulsion to give people amphetamine, um, to give kids amphetamine.
And I'll tell you something else about this: there's a great book called Dope Sick, and you know, we've not really talked about opioids, which is the other terrible crisis in this country.
But Dope Sick is about the opioid epidemic in southwestern Virginia and West Virginia.
You know, it's about 10 years old, but still a very good book.
And one of the things, as you read Dope Sick, is the woman who wrote it says, Well, this child started with an ADHD diagnosis.
This child started with Adderall.
This child started with Vivance.
ADHD Diagnosis Controversy00:01:35
And here's the thing: if you tell a 10-year-old, hey, you know what?
Like, yeah, you're not behaving great.
The solution to your behavioral problems is this drug.
And by the way, it may pep you up.
It may give you a little more energy, but it'll also give you more focus.
What you're telling that child is the answer to your problems comes in a pill.
And so, what do you think that child's going to do five years later when they're at some party and some friend of theirs is like, hey, I've got some, you know, I've got some Xanax or I've got some Viking.
And they're feeling maybe socially.
You'll feel good.
We've told kids this solution to their problems.
And then they take drugs.
I mean, it's our fault.
I gotta run.
My apologies, Alex.
I gotta run, but I loved this discussion.
And please come back.
You and I can be the old, uncool people talking about this.
I'm glad to.
Happy to.
Anytime.
All the best to you.
Thanks for everything you do.
We're back tomorrow with Link Lauren and Jesse Kelly.