Michael Moynihan
Appearances
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
They're looking for answers. You describe in your book, and I've talked to you about it in the past, is... They're looking for a very specific answer and they'll beat you until they get it. So is the purpose just sadism? No. Because if they're looking, I mean, you can say no, no, no. And then when you say, yes, I'm a spy, they couldn't possibly believe that. Yeah, of course they can. They do?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
For decades, the Assad dynasty ruled through unimaginable violence, launching chemical attacks on civilians, silencing dissent with mass imprisonment and torture, and presiding over a civil war that killed an estimated 600,000 people and drove 13 million into exile.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
But no one knew that when you were in captivity, right?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
That's right. If these guys were halfway clever and not just sadistic, they could get on Google and probably figure this stuff out pretty quickly, right?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Do you get defiant at a certain point where, I mean, there's so many times that you've recounted in your book that they said, take a look at the sun. This is the last time you're going to see it. Yeah. Last time you're going to ever see this. And that's pretty convincing when these ISIS, Al-Qaeda guys there. I mean, do you get defiant in the sense that What do I have to lose at this point?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Was there any indications of that?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
In cities across the world, jubilant Syrians have celebrated the regime's downfall as one of the world's most oppressive dictatorships has now collapsed.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Like, yeah, yeah, I did it. And they were masked the whole time? Always? Always.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Thinking that you didn't know.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
It was just the condition in general, the whole thing.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
They bring little kids into the torture?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
You were tortured by children, too.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
And the chief torturer says to the kids... Cables, meaning they were hooked up to a car battery.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
They were six years old in 2011.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
We know that torture exists and has existed throughout humanity and adults do it. I just don't have any frame of reference for children doing it. So it must be a pretty surprising thing when you see that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Is it so deranging in the sense that you're in a dark cell and you don't know when you're gonna be pulled out and tortured and beaten, and you don't know when, if ever, or how it will end, that you start kind of thinking of these things you know, the way that they want you to think about them. Because it's the only kind of reference that you have to anything, right?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Was any of that real? I mean, did you develop any affection in some kind of twisted way because that's the only affection you can develop in a situation like that?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
You talk to... I talk to these people because... The ones that tortured you and imprisoned you.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
By the way, you know, this jihad- In an interest in them personally or just in a journalistic way? Both. Okay, both.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
But not everyone is celebrating. Or at least some people are saying there's reason for caution. That's because the Coalition of Rebel Forces Taking Control of Syria is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a militant Islamist organization which originated as an offshoot of al-Qaeda. Its leader is a Saudi-born Syrian who calls himself Abu Muhammad al-Jolani.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
So when you hear there's a call that was captured by Shin Betar Massad on the day. And it was played ad infinitum. We saw it everywhere, heard it everywhere. A guy calling his family saying, I killed Jews today. Aren't you proud of me, dad? That makes a certain amount of sense to you that it wouldn't make to other people, right?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
In the sense that you understand that how people get to that point, it's not just you're going to have some virgins go.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
And even though- And is everyone that you have kept in touch with, who were your captors and torturers? Are they all still in the cult? Yeah.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
I don't have any problem... This is a regular thing for you.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
They call you on the phone? Yes. Like on WhatsApp or something? They're lonely. They're lonely young men. Why do you do this, though? I mean, isn't it... I mean, it's kind of like... You understand how it's kind of a weird thing to hear, right?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
But not for Christians and Alawites and Kurds.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
So when you talk to somebody this morning who is a member of this group and, you know, whether they were at Jabhat al-Nusra or ISIS or something, what is that conversation? Like, what are you talking about?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
It's not ironic or anything. I miss you. I mean, you don't miss them.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Yeah, no, that's what I assume, yeah.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
But the guys that you talk to and the guys that, you know, you develop some relationship with, I mean, would you want to see them on trial too?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Yeah, but do you have that and also want them to be in front of a judge?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
You had a number of cellmates over your time there. How many of those people survived? Very few.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
You would wake up one morning and they were gone.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Christians have a place in that, but Alawites don't. Shia, no. Definitely not. Definitely not. But there's no way. So we can expect, despite what they say, that a small Shia public will be pushed out entirely or killed or whatever.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
A 21-year-old al-Jilani left Syria for Iraq in 2003 to join al-Qaeda and fight against America. There, he was captured by the U.S. and put into Bukha Jail, which housed some of the most notorious al-Qaeda prisoners. But since emerging on the world stage in the last week, Jelani has indicated that he's a reformed man, leading a moderated organization.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
It's the amazing thing that you survived for a number of reasons, but to point something out, I mean, you escaped and were caught twice.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Tell me about the second time.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
There isn't a prize for them of money? It's just the kind of psychological fear that's instilled in the people that they're ruling over.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Which is what Islam means.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
You escaped and you were caught a second time. When you come back at that point, you must be girding yourself for something really bad.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
But you were a bank card for them. You were an ATM card.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
He insists his al-Qaeda days and their methods — the detentions and torture and forced conversions — are over, and HTS is not going to persecute religious and ethnic minorities. But is it true? Few people in the West might know the answer, as well as journalist Theo Padnos.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Yeah. People like Austin Tice, I mean, their presumption is that it was the Assad regime that took him in 2012. Yeah. And his family has said recently that we have it on good authority that he's still alive. Right. What do you know about that case? I mean, it's probably something that I imagine you look into because it's a similar... It is a similar case.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
How is it that all the narrative has been for as long as he's been gone in the mainstream media that he was captured by Assad and that now that Assad has fallen, there's an opportunity To find him, which you presume that would be quite easy, just walk out, now I'm free, as so many of these prisoners have actually experienced this.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
But what you're saying is that the same people that kidnapped and tortured you are holding him currently. No. Or it's some kind of affiliate group, though.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Why do you think that is? Why can't we see something that seems, you know, you spell it out pretty quickly and pretty easily.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
In October 2012, Padnos ventured from Turkey into Syria to report on the Syrian civil war. There, he was captured by HTS, then known as Jabhat al-Nusra, and held captive for nearly two years. Throughout his captivity, Padnos endured relentless torture at the hands of his captors.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
What is the biggest sort of mistake and misconception that journalists who typically don't travel even to the region and write about this stuff, what is the mistake that they make that you see pretty consistently that drives you crazy?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Did you ever think that these people that were holding you would be in this position today in Damascus?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Do you have any sense of what happened? I mean, obviously, so many people saying Ukraine has a lot to do with it because of the Russians. Israel taking out Hezbollah commanders and Hassan Nasrallah, etc.,
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
They dissolved immediately. There was no fight for Damascus.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
They just surrendered. And these guys who held you have an infinite will to fight. That's right.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Americans and people in general who are trying to figure out what's happening in Syria, if we were to assume that these guys, despite the name change, the Jolani's moderating rhetoric and everything, if we were just to take them as Jabhat al-Nusra, Can you explain to people what the difference between Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS was?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Because you said there's some people that would flow between these organizations.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
A theological distinction, perhaps, but do you think that if you were actually in Raqqa, in the possession of ISIS that you would have survived? No, no. So there is some difference in that sense.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
And so they were like... So if they were flush with cash, you were a dead man.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
And I mean this, and I apologize for asking the question, but psychologically, how do you think you came out of it?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
There's no people involved in those things in the sense that it's life-affirming. Yeah, well, I mean, it could be a rainy night. It could be just bad luck. It could be smoking cigarettes that gives you cancer. But in this sense, to have a renewed spirit and faith in humanity, even.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Yeah, but I would break my faith in humanity and break my spirit, I would imagine.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
When you were getting tortured?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
But there was no rage or anything like that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
And the worst bits of that... you came out of this thinking kind of the same thing. Not right away. Not right away. That's a transformation that happens in America or during your captivity?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
He was savagely beaten into unconscious, given electric shocks, and forced into severe stress positions for hours at a time. That is to say, nothing of the psychological torment inflicted upon him. Today, he joins me to discuss his herring experience, the psychology of jihadists, and what the future of Syria will look like under the leadership of his former captors. We'll be right back.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
You're not being tortured. You're in the middle of the day. You've maybe just eaten. No one's bothering you in your cell. What are you thinking? What does the brain do in that period? I remember, I think that you told me one time you were writing in your head. Yeah. That you were writing novels in your head.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Were you writing in a sort of code or just anything?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
So you didn't know, this is a couple of hours, maybe an hour, a couple of hours before you released and you had no idea. Right. None.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
And so they drove you to the border?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
The people that drove you were the people you knew, the captors that you saw all the time.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Let me ask you one more thing about the future of Syria. I mean, I'm blown away that we started talking and you told me that you've seen your captors on CNN, people that you saw in your torture cells that are active in the current, shall we say, interim Syrian government. That must terrify you in some ways.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
And you think that this current iteration of the Syrian government, whatever it is, that this is a bunch of spin propaganda lies that Jalani and the al-Nusra people have reformed? How much faith do you put in that?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Well, it's hard to say. But you don't expect that... what we saw in the worst parts and the depths of Islamic State and Raqqa is going to be recreated through the entire borders of Syria?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
So they're rational in a way.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Theo, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening. If you like this conversation, please share this episode with your friends. And if you want to support the work we do here, go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. See you next time.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Theo Padnos, welcome to Honestly. Thank you very much for having me. You were a captive of Jabhat al-Nusra, a Al-Qaeda affiliate, and you were released in 2014. Pretty soon after you got back, I met up with you. That was 10 years ago. What is your life like now?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
I mean, the interesting thing now is that people are watching, I'm reluctant to call it the liberation of Syria, but I mean, getting rid of Bashar al-Assad is a liberation. Regardless of who does it, we'll see what happens. But the people who are doing the liberating. are the same people that held you captive.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
You've actually seen on video people in Damascus who are now in control of Syria that held you and tortured you.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
I mean, you've seen this, you know their psychology very well. I mean, you spent two and a half years, right?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Let's go back to that to explain to people how you got in that situation in the first place. You're on the border of Turkey trying to get into Syria at the pretty much at the beginning of the civil war when we consider that it's been going on since 2011. And you get across the border. Tell me what happens when you get into Syria.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
From the Free Press, this is Honestly. I'm Michael Moynihan.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
And so you're... beaten, hooded, shackled... Not right away. Not right away.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Last week marked a historic turning point in Syria.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
Did you know where you were?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
And for people to give them context and if they remember this, the Free Syrian Army, which was promoted by people like John McCain and people going to visit and said, this is not necessarily a secular army, but these are the good guys.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
So speaking Arabic that well worked against you.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
And so they delivered you back to the kidnappers.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Well, it's particularly weird because they've gone the other way on that issue recently. People on that kind of fringe of the party.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Yeah. I mean, people try to put their own views on Donald Trump. I mean, this happens to a lot of people. I just wrote a piece for the Free Press on Bob Dylan. And you can find anyone saying, he's right wing, he's left wing, he's a Marxist, he's a Zionist. And it's like, he's just a musician. Relax. But the thing about it is, people do the same thing with Donald Trump all the time. He's one of us.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
He's like Ron Paul in foreign policy. He's a neo-isolationist. What is the impression that you got from him ideologically when it came to foreign policy issues and the stuff that you were engaged in?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I want to ask you about something he said, because I'd be interested to see what you would do in a situation like this.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Mrs. Donald Trump today at Mar-a-Lago said this about the hostages in Gaza. It would not be good for Hamas, and it would not be good, frankly, for anyone. All hell will break out, and this is if the hostages aren't returned by the time he becomes president. I don't have to say any more, but that's what it is. And then he says that October 7th would have never happened if he were president.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
That's the kind of stuff that you expect. I mean, you've heard this about Ukraine too, the invasion would have never happened. That kind of rhetoric, the kind of bellicose rhetoric, it'll be the worst thing that you've ever experienced if you don't do what I want. How does that fall on your ears when you're in the Oval Office with them? I kind of like that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I totally like it, by the way. I'm sorry, but you're right. Yeah, I mean, and so people would get out.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Now, I have a list of my favorite Donald Trump tweets that I randomly send to friends that just amuse me to no end. But how does that work in, let's take North Korea, for instance. You have, on one level, you have these little rocket man tweets.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And then you have the kind of sycophancy in certain ways because it's kind of easy to flatter the guy and he likes being flattered. I mean, there's a story in the book where This is the most amazing thing to me. I couldn't believe that in the coverage of the book, and I'm going to pick this up, was it a cover of the New York Post that he was signing?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
But he clipped it, and he was going to send it to Vladimir Putin.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And you intercepted it and stopped that from happening.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
So you're like the mailman, Putin's mailman.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And killed a woman who picked up the bottle.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
How does that manifest itself? He starts yelling at you in an aggressive way?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
All right. Let's do this. Do that. All right. Hi, everybody. Thank you guys all for coming. This is going to be slightly difficult for me because rarely do I have the occasion when I'm with someone interesting and important. It's happened before. And I think that I can't contain it for 45 or 55 minutes. I need to do like three hours. I do like a Rogan length. And that's kind of what's in my head.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Just to go back to this question of what he believes, I mean, you know, you leave this job and you talk about it in a very funny way that John Bolton is like looking in the window like, hey, can I do this now? And he was auditioning for the job previously, right?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
But the reason I bring Bolton up is that this has always mystified me, and tell me if I'm completely off base here, but I've always presumed that he hired him because he was on Fox News a lot. And he was talking about foreign policy on Fox News. And that's the foreign policy guy that I see on TV because he's a neoconservative in almost every way.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And people absolutely lost their minds in Bannon world and said, make sure that this guy doesn't get close to anything. And, you know, it's never going to be a second time around with him. But if he's the isolationist guy and he picks, you know, John Bolton as national security advisor, that never made sense to me. Why do you think he did that?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I mean, there's a point where he asked the opinion of his bodyguard, Keith, who had some role too, which I was surprised by. It was some foreign policy issues asking his bodyguard.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
So you're going to allow me to sort through some of the stuff that I want to to talk to HR about. The book, by the way, is fantastic. And I do a thing that I never do. I never read reviews of books until I'm done reading them. On the train up here, I read the one from the New York Times. And I said, they're gonna absolutely slam him. They're gonna hate him.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Russia. Obviously, the attacks on Trump as a Russian agent were ridiculous and unfounded. And, you know, he's obviously coming back into office with a justifiable chip on his shoulder about a number of the people that went after him. You said in your previous book quite presciently that we've allowed Russia to get away with a lot, and it's probably gonna be worse next time around.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And it's in the first chapter of the book. And by the way, there's a quote from Saul Bellow at the beginning of that book, which is like surprising. Only military book I've read with a Saul Bellow quote at the beginning.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
But when you see what happened, and Donald Trump says, and the man with the Ukraine plan, Kellogg, who is obviously an antagonist in this book too, he says, I'm gonna solve all this. Just give me a couple of days. and I can take care of this. When he says something like that, I mean, you know the bluster of Donald Trump.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Is there any part of you that says, yeah, he probably could, or he might be able to get the ball rolling?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And it was a guy from the Nation magazine. famously right-wing magazine. And they loved it. And the thing about it, which I agreed with me, it's brilliantly written. And that's something that you don't often get from a member of the military or somebody who's been in the administration is usually some laborious prose. That is not the case. Read the book. It's fantastic.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
There's literally no way that's going to happen, though, is it?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I mean, the people that voted against Ukraine in April, there were 10, 12 Republicans. Steve Bannon immediately went on his show and said they're traitors to the country.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
As a military man, I mean, it's funny because there's a lot of people that I've spoken to that I think would count as people in the isolationist right who laugh when I say, you know, the Russians are losing this war. They say, how could you possibly say that? But I mean, how many hundreds of thousands of people killed?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I mean, the fall of the Soviet Union was precipitated in some way by the invasion of Afghanistan as a disaster. 16,000 people died. I mean, this is orders of magnitude bigger. In the United States, it dislodged us for multiple generations, the fact that in every one of these is a tragedy of 35, 3600 people dying in Iraq. How do you see that just as a military man
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
that you're basically, it's a World War I type meat grinder. And the number of people dying in this very intractable conflict, like, is there a military solution to this? I mean, do they have to come to the table and just swallow their pride and make some sort of agreement?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
So HR, I just wanted to start out, because of what is going on in DC, we're about to face another Trump administration in how many days now? I don't even...
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Knowing what you know from the inside, knowing so many of the people that were involved in the first term, yourself being involved in the first term for over a year, What are your expectations now knowing the man of Donald Trump? Is he a man that's capable of learning lessons and saying, all right, well, I've done this before.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The first year, as you point out in your book, was absolute chaos inside that White House. Do you expect there to be a more kind of stable White House now? in a more kind of sort of a smoothly run operation.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And the reason I ask this is because a lot of people have said, well, the worry about Donald Trump winning is that all the guardrails are off and now you have like D-listers and you know, like sub-Seb Gorka tykes to come in and be crazy. I mean, what do you expect from this White House?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Talk to me a little bit about what it is like in that environment. You were there the first year in the first administration and you read your book and you're like, good Lord, this is a nest of vipers. Everyone's trying to backstab and push people out, et cetera.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Well, you know- He's too nice to answer this question, by the way.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And so, and so I think... But is that anti-neocon faction, for lack of a better phrase, are they more powerful now than they were in 2017 and 19?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Like the Neoconservatives.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
How would you describe just that year in a sort of broad sense of going from the military into the White House and being in a position where there's a lot of newbies there and people don't really know what they're doing. What was that like?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
So we ended on MAGA McMaster. That was what I was expecting that, I guess. Thank you. Appreciate it. Nice. And thank all of you guys for coming. It's much appreciated. And of course, thank you for being patrons of the Free Press. If you're not, you should be ashamed of yourself. Do it now on your phone on the way out because there's more great content coming up. So thank you guys for coming.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Thank you, H.R. McMaster.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Get the book. It's great. Oh, my goodness. Can you get out there?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I mean, that's important because, you know, we talked about this beforehand and it's very clear in the book too, is that you see your job as somebody who has to go in there and implement the president's agenda. But it's clear in the book that you see people around you who have an agenda that they're trying to foist upon the president.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And they're saying, we need to contain this person because he's dangerous. I mean, there's a couple of people in the book that say, refer to Donald Trump as dangerous.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I mean, there's about 15 things I want to talk about there, but let's stay in the present for just a second and look at those picks. The reaction from a lot of people was, these are serious picks. I mean, you have the ones that are less serious, right? And probably concerning to you, people like Pete Hegseth, and it's not to say that he hasn't
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
been an impressive individual in his service in the military, but not a traditional pick, I would say. So when you look at these, I mean, do you see, you know, is there a balance that Donald Trump tries to create with kind of chaos agents and then you?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Like serious people who are like, I'm sure that when you were walking in Philadelphia that day, you opened your last two books with walking in Philadelphia and getting that call. And I'm sure it was slightly unexpected when you first heard that you were in consideration. But what is the logic here?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I mean, did it surprise you that like, you know, Wallace Rubio and some of these other serious picks?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
You're standing in that position where you're like, I get what people are doing.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I mean, it's interesting. You end that on the base. It's in your book. I think it is Bannon and maybe Reince Priebus. We're talking about a line about Islamic terrorism. And you suggested, let's not talk about a faith of Islamic. Let's say it's Islamist. It's more specific. And Bannon gets angry with you, right? Was it Bannon who said? Well, it was just a way.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
It was, I think, a way for him to try to. But he said the base is going to like that line.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And, you know, that's kind of how to get them on your side is that those people that come to your rallies, they want to hear this. And that seems to work. Did you find that that was the tactic that a lot of people used?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I want to talk about a word that is in your book probably more than any other word, including and and the. It is Bannon. Steve Bannon's name comes up a lot in this book, right? No, not that much. It's a lot. I did a count, but it's a lot. And look, I mean, it's a big part of the story because at War With Ourselves, one of those combatants is Steve Bannon.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And I know people have asked you a lot of things about this. The one question I am thinking when I'm reading this stuff, and he ends up leaving the administration before you, right?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And then is now back in, actually.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And what is the position now? Is the...
Honestly with Bari Weiss
H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Yeah. But what do you attribute that hostility to? Because sometimes you have personnel, like personal disagreements, different styles. Is it an ideological thing? Because Bannon's kind of shifting views on foreign policy, for instance. Is that kind of where it came from?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
is cutting its budget for the fire department while they continue to spend money on things like these reparations, exploration committees and all kinds of other insane nonsense. I mean, your heart goes out to the people who are affected by this. It's also the case that you have to wonder about just the systematic response. routine failure by every level of government with respect to California.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
And I think the not so much subsidized, but the state mandated policies, there are a huge problem. That program is nearly tripled over the course of the last couple of years. So this is a massive problem that isn't going away anytime soon.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
And it's certainly not going to get better if they continue to prioritize all of these kind of social programs over the actual things that you need in order to live in this region at all.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
I keep thinking about the fact that California is a place where they plan to do things like outlaw cars that run on gasoline, like these really sweeping, ambitious prohibitions that are aimed at transforming the nature of the state itself and trying to capture the future. It would be wonderful.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
if they adopted that sort of approach to fire mitigation, like something audacious and aggressive that they continued to talk about year over year. I mean, California is, I mean, we, I live in Mill Valley, California now. Mill Valley is similarly at very high risk of fire and actually has a pretty aggressive approach to these things, but is subject to a lot of the same sort of concerns.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
We certainly have our fire season every single year. So it's something that is on people's minds regularly. But there is obviously a need for much more than what's being done currently.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
And I think a lot of people hear talk of sort of climate change in the context of these conversations about wildfires and imagine that mitigating climate change is kind of enough to address this, in which case doing something about fossil fuels will perhaps help to mitigate this problem. And it just, it does not. It is not nearly the same thing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
And you actually do need more of a serious focus on this. The other thing that I think a lot about now is, is at what point, if they don't do something dramatic and audacious, they have to just stop rebuilding in certain places.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
Because if you won't do the things that are necessary to make it feasible to live there in the long run, then perhaps you just kind of give this space back to the wild and allow it to have this natural process. These fires rage annually. It's crazy to think about.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
Yeah, I mean, it's obviously not an illegitimate concern to be worried about the diversity of the forest, obviously. But it is a matter of having some sort of qualified concern for those things and actually attacking the issue in a very serious way. And unfortunately, this is a decades-old problem, as Matt already alluded to. And it's not something that has only become an issue since 2014.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
So the fact that there are these particular moments where the current thing is some unique set of social concerns, whether it be environmental concerns or it be something related to race and racial justice, the fact that there are all of these other distractions is important and noteworthy
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
But it's also the case that they manage to find these distractions because it is easier to govern by expressing this continuous concern for these peripheral issues that don't have any meaningful consequence for most people's lives than it is to actually be held accountable for trying to address the tangible concerns that these communities face, whether it be homelessness or the persistent threat of wildfires, as the folks of L.A.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
are finding out right now.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
What color is the vagina? A couple words too long there, Matt.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
Describing themselves as the first response. Yes. Yes. The greatest heroes, the greatest champions of internet freedom are the fact checkers. You know what's funny? I haven't talked to Mark. I haven't talked to like Jeff Bezos, but I have traveled in a lot of circles with some of the people that they've been friendly with.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
Mark Andreessen and Peter Thiel are people who have known Zuckerberg for years, were early involved in Facebook and were on the board for years. I think there's plenty of reason to believe.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
That a lot of people have over the course of the recent years done many things that they didn't really believe that they should be doing, but they did it out of fear or concern that they simply couldn't get away with pushing back against certain things and they feel newly liberated. to actually push back and assert a bit of power and say, yeah, we're not going to do those things anymore.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
And I think, Megan, you were correct to flag early on that it was not a good idea for Facebook to begin fact-checking political ads, not a good idea for them to outsource responsibility for trying to fact-check the videos that Stossel or anyone else is posting and then flagging them formally Corporately, because there's just way too much opportunity for that to go badly for you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
But when you're guided by people internal to you who are interested in wielding power towards political ends, not merely in the interest of fairness and policing misinformation and disinformation, nearly always with a particular political slant. it's going to result in plenty of bad things for you. It'll hurt your brand in the long run. And that is actually what folks have seen in recent years.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
So it is nice to see the pendulum swing back. I do suspect a lot of that happens to be related to culture. And I hope that we can actually...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
do this in a way that's a bit more stable i think there are plenty of criticisms that one can raise with respect to something like community notes but it does seem to me that it is infinitely better than what facebook chose to do when they again outsource responsibility for this to these ostensibly independent organizations that in many instances have these political biases it is far better to have a transparent process that actually gives people the sensibility
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
that about what those underlying concerns are related to the articles and to make it broadly available and open. And just like in the last election, we saw some of these betting markets give us some of the best information about where the election was likely to go Community notes processes work something like that. So there's plenty of reason to think that that could be a very healthy thing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
And I think reasons for optimism with respect to the kind of culture of free speech reasserting itself. Although I've been assured by some people that that isn't a thing that exists. But I beg to differ.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
I don't know. I don't know if Greenland is particularly maggot. And I don't suspect that statehood is actually in the cards here. But there are some legitimate forward policy and economic issues here. I mean, China and Russia both have a lot of interest in the Arctic region. China has a lot of cutters and can get into the ice and can go look for stuff.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
And there's been essentially this competition to see who can get out there and stake claim to as much space as possible, or at least kind of clog up the routes so that it's difficult for the United States to have access. And the United States is interested in having access to a bunch of rare earth metals that you can kind of only get in places like China and Pakistan or India, Pakistan actually.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
And the fact that some of this stuff happens to be in Iceland as well is of unique interest to the United States. So if what Trump is doing here, and I actually purchased a copy of Art of the Deal in the last 24 hours and a and going through it to try and understand.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
To try and understand. Listen, I'm a little late, but I mean, there's maybe a little game here.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
Trump seems, listen, you could have a ghostwriter and still have particular ideas, and he's running the playbook. I mean, these are grandiose, kind of over-the-top statements. Oh, we're going to annex them. I won't rule those other things out. But if what you really want is a strategic partnership
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
to the exclusion of the Chinese and the Russians, and you want to build up kind of public concern and interest in this issue, you can try to go about this strategically behind closed doors and be very diplomatic, and it won't even be below the fold in the New York Times. Right now, everyone is talking about Trump's interest in Iceland or Greenland. Excuse me.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
It's easy to confuse the two because of the silly way that they've named them. Yes. And the fact that we are talking about it at this point and that it's not just him insisting, I want to control it, and if I don't get it, I'm going to start to put tariffs on Norway.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
He's also saying we're open to other things, and he's sending his envoys, and the envoys are having more strategic, substantive conversations. And the hope here is clearly to try and get some sort of strategic deal.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
I mean, Trump has been talking about this since 2018, 2019, and as soon as he gets back to the White House, or at least within striking distance of being in the White House again, he's talking about it again. This is a serious issue for him. And similarly with Panama.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
He hasn't said that exactly. He hasn't said that exactly. And again, he's just implied it. Like China is spending a tremendous amount of money in Africa and South America. Exactly. Red China. And they're trying their very best to have influence there.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
They have private, well, not private companies, but Chinese owned or linked companies who have some interest in the Panama Canal or at least in the surrounding area. To the extent that the United States is expressing concerns about this stuff in formal ways and in grandiose circus-like theatrical ways is probably not a bad thing on net.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
And as strange as it is to have to acknowledge, if the end result of Trump saying what seemed like completely ridiculous things about acquiring or annexing some other country is that we do end up with a strategic partnership of some kind that is to the advantage of the United States and to the disadvantage of our international adversaries. That's kind of a good thing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
He said he wouldn't rule it out.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
Wow. A fact check though. I think it was brown face and not black face, but yeah, there was one that was very black face.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
Well, I mean, I was thinking a lot about Mayor Bass today and the reporting that I just saw that she had cut the fire department's budget by like $17 million this year, which is not a great look for her. All of the stuff that Matt underscored, being a good California boy, and I currently reside in California, are all things that I'm pretty familiar with as well.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
There was a huge piece back in 2020, and we see this every once in a while, about the Forest Management Service and various other government agencies. So it's federal, state, and local who are fully aware of these problems, who have not nearly done enough to get rid of a lot of this undergrowth, this fuel, this dry fuel that is just waiting to burn.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
I think that what had been recommended back in 2020 was that they'd be burning something like a million acres per year. And they're not anywhere close to that and haven't really gotten much closer to that. At the same time, as you underscored, the fire chief talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, L.A.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
I mean, the argument against it is pretty easy and obvious, which is that Americans didn't sign up for another nation building project. When you've got Lindsey Graham saying, I don't know about this one, man, then you know that you've really gotten to some special kind of place. It's you can't. You can't own a piece of this land.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
You can't run a whole chunk of it and guarantee the removal of debris without deploying American forces. That's just not going to happen. So if that was to take place, we would have our soldiers there, which means our soldiers will die on Gazan soil. I don't see how you avoid that happening. No one has been able to avoid that happening with whoever's in charge of Gazan.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
in its history so it's pretty easy to argue against that on the ram paul terms the argument for what trump did is that he's not going to actually do it that what he's trying to do is kind of a nod to what ben shapiro was saying which is and he trump reiterated this yesterday and he's been saying this since he's been president and president-elect which is that uh october 6th
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
of 2023 was intolerable. We need to think differently about that going forward. And the October 6th mindset is that Palestinians will run Gaza. If that means Hamas is in charge, then I guess that means Hamas is in charge. And the people who live in the Gaza Strip will sort of periodically wage constant war against Israel. That's unacceptable going forward, as is the notion that
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
The neighboring countries are not going to lend a hand in helping out what comes next. The sad thing is, is that neither Israel nor the United States nor people in Gaza and the surrounding area have come up with any plan about what to do with Gaza after this war. The ceasefire deal is not a plan of what to do with Gaza after the war.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
So what Trump is doing, the defense of what Trump is doing is that he's sort of moving the Overton window. He's saying, hey, look, maybe you should take some refugees. Maybe there is a future that we can imagine in which this marvelous piece of real estate on the Eastern Mediterranean is actually used to build positive things and not just terror tunnels. That's to the good.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
The problem with it is that you are using an implied threat And what happens when you have to go through with it? And and it'll be very interesting to see what Saudi Arabia in particular says. I think they woke up at four o'clock in the morning Saudi time to say, no, because Trump Trump was insisting that Saudi Arabia is going to be basically cool with something like this.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
And and as part of their normalization.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
Yes. Jared Kushner has been talking about this for many, many months, variations of this. And Trump, in his extended remarks, if you go and read the transcript, he's talking at some level of detail and talking about having thought about this for a while.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
My prediction of this – and it's always a fool's game, but I'll nonetheless wade in just to try to make us have a sense of maybe where this is going –
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
And also there's some State Department spokesman comments to this effect, that this is an attempt to pressure Saudi Arabia, Gulf states, Egypt and Jordan to the extent that they can participate into being an active participant in a non-Hamas governing structure in Gaza.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
Someone needs to make sure that Gaza is governed and secured in such a way to make real reconstruction possible, a real building, a positive building of society.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
Well, your kids are sweet, though. That's the thing. I'm not sure we're dealing with sweet kids here. And I'm also not sure. And I don't know what Trump's leverage and maybe Moynihan has some insight that currently I lack. But I don't know what Trump's whip hand is to sort of make these people do what he wants. America already gives a ton of foreign aid to Egypt and Jordan and Israel, of course.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
And military sales to Saudi Arabia don't give direct aid, as far as I'm aware. But so but what is the whip hand to sort of make people do this? Is it just like, oh, no, I might act crazy.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
It's more a Gaza, Megan, which should look called by its name. Yeah.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
I think that he is going to pursue a Trump corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, and he's already doing it. America is going to be very assertive in its near abroad and do things that were not contemplated before. I think in the Middle East, he wants to be a peacemaker at heart.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
Yes. James Monroe in 1823 told European powers to get off the Western Hemisphere. Don't install your puppet monarchs. In a late 19th century, Donald Trump's favorite president, William McKinley, prosecuted and won the Spanish-American War. Now suddenly owns kind of Cuba and Puerto Rico and the Philippines, although that one didn't go so well.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
But in that process and after he was assassinated, Teddy Roosevelt installed the corollary, which is basically the U.S. asserts the right to intervene into the internal politics and military situation. Of broader Latin America because it's our near abroad. We have special care of that.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
And I think what Trump is doing right now in making kind of trying to kick China out of the Panama Canal and trying to assert more latitude over Greenland is updating the Monroe Doctrine in a MAGA type way. That was 30 seconds. Okay. I like that. That's pretty good.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
Go ahead, please.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
He says that to Melania every night anyway.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
He also followed that up today, though, right? It's like, you know, the fake news or whatever. It's not true that I have made an agreement to, and then, of course, all caps, blow Iran to smithereens. Yeah. Uh, no, I haven't made that deal. So just to make that clear, um, uh, you know, I want them to succeed. They just can't get a nuclear weapon.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
Um, I, I worry when he does that, uh, not just for my own sanity. Um, but I worry a little bit that he is going to, um, people are not going to take his threats seriously. Um, uh, I, uh, presumed in the middle East, there's a better chance for people to take his threat seriously, although there's the kind of fly trap scenario that a morning hand was looking into.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
But, you know, you also wonder if Iran is saying, OK, well, let's see what just happened with Mexico and Canada. Maybe we'll find a way to make him declare victory with a deal on a nuclear program that is actually kind of beneficial to Iran. I think that he's legitimately a hawk on Iran, which is also something that one who is like a MAGA non interventionist or intervention skeptic should look at.
The Megyn Kelly Show
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with some level of concern. I mean, what was the Iraq war actually kind of about at the beginning? It was to make sure that Iraq didn't get a nuclear weapon. And Donald Trump, I think the more significant thing that he did yesterday in the White House was actually not the Gaza comments. It was recommitting the U.S.
The Megyn Kelly Show
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to sort of maximum pressure on Iran if they get anywhere close, not just to a nuclear weapon, but with being too aggressive in their ballistic missiles program and And elsewhere. So what does that mean? I think probably what that means is that he would let Netanyahu or Israel do what is necessary from their point of view to make that not happen.
The Megyn Kelly Show
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But are we committing the United States to act militarily if Iran gets close to a nuclear weapon? And what does that mean? That's that's difficult.
The Megyn Kelly Show
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No, Chuck.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
And some of that, some 6.4 million of that happened under during the Trump administration or like that's what the level was. In Trump 1.0, it's still like, why? Why is this happening? The government should pay for this. I think one of the things that Elon Musk is doing right now as installing Doge into the U.S. digital services organization, which was started under Obama.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
created under Obama to help fix the problems with the Obamacare website, but then became this sort of government deficiency thing. By doing that, he is sort of seeing how the machinery of payments and tech happens with the government. This is sort of the difference between him and Vivek Ramaswamy about what to do with Doge.
The Megyn Kelly Show
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Vivek, I think, was more concerned with executive orders and looking for these kind of efficiencies. And Musk is like, let me get inside the tech. And we're seeing the fruits – and I was initially on the side of Vivek Ramaswamy's approach towards this. We're seeing the fruits of the Musk approach this week.
The Megyn Kelly Show
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And part of this, from my point of view, is not good just in the sense of you don't want to suddenly have the U.S. not have its websites that you can look up information about from database sets and stuff. And also you shouldn't suspend payment of services that have already been given. However, part of it has been really good – in terms of people going, what? We pay for what now?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
Which organization? We've had a lot of listeners in places like Poland and Hungary come back with reports of like, oh, that's interesting that this magazine or this civil society opposition group suddenly is saying that we can't pay our employees because the checks didn't come through from USAID. It's like, what are we actually funding out there? I would point out USAID is $44 billion a year in
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
The estimated cost to rebuild Gaza is north of 80 billion dollars a year. So it's not necessarily about, you know, we're going to reduce the size and scope of government just if we do this. However, it does show a thing that has existed and has been kind of put on steroids since the time of George W. Bush and the faith based initiative programs.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
Government loves to give money to private charities, nonprofit groups, civil society groups. And it does that a lot in big cities like New York. It also does this in overseas in ways that most people are not aware of. And I think a lot of it is pretty skeevy.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
It ends up sort of rewarding your political allies, allowing people to have a job when their administration or with their political team is kind of out of power. And a lot of it's gross. And so what Elon Musk is doing is sort of giving a margin call, wake up call, about the mechanics of that. And I think that is it is pretty useful.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
You can't, I don't think, shut down USAID without having an act of Congress. It is statutorily authorized by Congress twice.
The Megyn Kelly Show
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Walter Kern. Yeah.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
It's an 80-20 issue. I once interviewed Rand Paul. He's like, in politics is a search for 80-20 issues to be on the right side of. And he was using it at that time talking about both foreign aid, U.S. foreign aid, and also in his opposition to the Syrian war back when Barack Obama and John Kerry opposed. We're drawing red lines.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
They wanted to intervene into Syria, but the American public did not have an appetite for that back in 2013. I predict that we're not going to hear much about this beginning in about 24 hours because precisely it is an 80 to 20 issue. And also he does have broad authority under Title IX.
The Megyn Kelly Show
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This is the fourth successive presidency that has changed Title IX, the interpretation of Title IX, beginning with Barack Obama, disastrously, in my view, changing the due process requirements to adjudicate campus sexual assault cases back in 2013, I think it was, or 14, which Trump, to his credit, changed back. And then Biden changed back and then Trump changed back.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
But Title IX is about like the big portion of it is about women's sports in college. So it kind of makes sense to interpret it to have to do with women. So yeah.
The Megyn Kelly Show
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Because it's an 80-20 issue, because it's sort of been like a paper tiger, it's been based on the pushing through these things has been based on people's silence in not taking the JK Rowling approach because it wasn't worth the hassle to raise your voice about it. Megan, I don't know if you know that sometimes you get blowback if you bring this up in certain areas of the media.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
So I think it's going to take place. It's not going to be challenged at all. I don't think legally there's not going to be a leg to stand on it. And people are going to take the L just like the word they're removing pronouns very quietly from their Twitter bios.
The Megyn Kelly Show
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Well, just to reiterate what your other guest had said, like the category of media that you are in and thriving in is it's terrific to watch. And a lot of it is due to two things that I think people consistently underrate is having a sense of humor and and working your damn ass off, as does everybody who works for you. And that's work ethic and fun. Turns out people respond to it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump Floats America Taking Over Gaza, Major Girls' Sports Executive Order, and Celebrating Episode 1,000, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1000
So congratulations. It's very well.
The Megyn Kelly Show
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But there is actually not a small deal. I mean, like, no decisions were made from that. And we don't know who did them. And one of one of the decision makers was exactly wrong claim.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
That is the weirdest moment. Like, I mean, as Matt said, there were real consequential decisions being made and it's not clear who was making those decisions. And this highlights and underscores that Biden did also have a moment like this, though, back when he was vice president, where he's publicly talking about student loans and and federal subsidies for higher education.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
And he just kind of candidly acknowledges in public, in full view of everyone, in front of a battery of cameras. Yeah, I mean, they've raised the prices of college. I'm sorry. Federal subsidies raise the prices of college. So every once in a while, the truth just slips out there. But apparently other people are just telling, no, no, no, this is what you actually believe.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
We live in a TikTok world, Boynehan. He was just the head of his time.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
It's avoidable if your chief of staff, who is one of the only people in your inner circle, along with Dr. Jill for two, three years, if that chief of staff, instead of protecting, encasing the president of the United States in bubble wrap, says to people in 2021 that, That this is happening because it is happening in 2021. He is witnessing it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
It was not a surprise that suddenly came down from the heavens in the summer of 2024. This is something that has been long gestating that we've all noticed and that certainly he noticed more than Kamala Harris also noticed and then pretended not to and didn't really get many questions about it until like 88 days into her presidential term.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
So the way that you avoid this is that you tell people ahead of time, you note that he's the oldest president in history and that he said he was only going to really run to forestall Donald Trump. And you start looking for alternatives. Ron Klain chose not to do this. His tears are delicious.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
and are openly lying. I mean, for Kamala Harris, Joe Biden's cognitive decline was pretty much her January 6th. Like she could never admit the truth about this publicly. Obvious political reasons, but still you are actively lying to the American people as you're running for office. And you're lying about one of the most transparently false things imaginable. My boss is always great.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
He could totally do this job. He should be running. I mean, he's great. He could totally do this. There was never any problem. No. To the extent that's true, you believe that's true, you're only demonstrating that you do not have the judgment to be president of the United States.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
And to the extent it's not true, then you are, again, just another duplicitous liar who is willing to say just about anything if it means that you get elected and get to stay in power.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Yeah, interestingly, in Wisconsin, voter ID manages to win pretty easily as well. So, you know, it's the sort of thing where- Can I say something about that, Camille?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
And I was actually underscoring it for the other reason. I mean, I think you had Elon kind of just sky, what is it? Skydive in, what is it? What do we call it? I don't know. Helicopter. He helicopters in.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Parachute in, by the way. Like Scrooge McDuck. He shows up and he tries really, really hard to move the needle in this election. And to the extent he did move the needle, it seems like he probably moved it in the wrong direction. Like he energized Democrats in Wisconsin and that doesn't bode well. And I think that it's interesting. I would completely agree. Republicans won handily in Florida.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
They should have won more handily. And for Democrats, they definitely won in Wisconsin. They kind of managed to bloody Republicans in Florida in an obvious way that is hard to deny. And for Republicans, I mean, eking out that win in Florida, it certainly could have been worse for them. But this isn't really good.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
What can I turn to when there isn't Megyn Kelly this past week and a half?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
You have great judgment. Thank you. Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Yeah, that's a silly standard. Yeah.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
And creating organizations like Soros has done over the years is a lot more influential than just showing up at a thing. The Kochs got a lot of pushback over the years for creating organizations. They didn't go on stage much either.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Yeah, yeah. Definitely depending on when you bought it because the big drop in the stock, it's still doing pretty well if you bought it a year ago. But yeah, Elon's problems here with respect to Tesla are very complicated. I, too, own one. But I, on the other hand, discovered that my loan to value is absolutely terrible. So I just park it in Oakland overnight.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
And I'm hoping that someone will actually set it on fire. But I'll tell you, once they destroyed that car, I would go buy two new cars.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
I don't know. In Oakland, we get it in. No, it's just not political. Never you mind. I think they'll get around to me. Maybe I just have to wait another week or so. Yeah, I will go buy two new Teslas as the president. Yeah, I love Teslas. They at least won't be impacted by the 25% tariffs that are coming. So that should make things a little easier.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
This is the third Juneteenth coming for us now.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Ron Klain is one of the biggest modern villains in American politics, and this just underscores his absolute duplicity. He was described in a lot of reporting. Wall Street Journal was probably the best on this before it was popular to talk about Biden's, not just his cognitive decline, but the shrink wrap, the bubble wrap, Operation Bubble Wrap, it was literally called.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Still get a chill when I hear like Mandela talking about that, about that stuff. Not so much.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
The Seinfeld of the Senate giving his filibuster about nothing. It just, it did not land all that well for me.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
to protect him from, I don't know, having meetings with anybody. Ron Klain was the lead of that. He was described as having more power as a chief of staff than just about any modern chief of staff. He would play, he would run interference anytime someone dared suggest that Biden had any cognitive problems. And he was still saying this in August last year.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
What? Were you in there?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Yeah.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Based off of C-SPAN and starts paying attention. I shout out Cory Booker for reminding us that the Senate exists, exists, because I haven't seen any news of that for years. But I was thinking back to the last time that I remember someone being captivated by an actual filibuster. It's when Rand Paul filibustered 12 years ago, and very rightly so. Like, it was an actual filibuster.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
I want to stop a thing from happening. What was the thing that he wanted to stop from happening? John Brennan being nominated to the head of the CIA. Oh, that was a good one, Rand.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
He was complaining that they've been forced out Biden in August of last year and saying that he was fit and sharp and all of this. So I enjoy him attempting to salvage what remains of his reputation. But he's a bad person.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Liar. And it was a good one. And it actually kind of it was sort of unplanned and more people joined as they went on. And it became a critique of NSA surveillance and the ability for the Obama administration to drone American citizens without due process. Due process is something that we should champion regardless of who is president and president. Rand Paul reminded us of that.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
But Cory Booker could have, if you think of what is happening this week in the Senate, in American politics, in American life today on National Liberation Day, which is an absolutely comically ridiculous way to describe the imposition of import taxes in a nearly unprecedented sense. But the Senate right now has a bill on the floor co-sponsored by Rand Paul.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
And just as we were talking now yesterday, endorsed by Mitch McConnell, very interestingly enough, to undeclare a national emergency, which is the fake reason that Trump is using to do tariffs against Canada, the national emergency of the 19 kilograms of fentanyl that came across the border last year.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
So he could have been working with Republicans who are defecting right now on a bill that would actually limit the president's power in a meaningful way, in a way that also would have some symbolic repercussions
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
resonance because you would see for the first time really any republicans showing any spine in opposition to trump and instead he gave a 25-hour speech and talked about his water tablets and whether he like pooped on his own shoes um it's not as effective look at me yeah it was a lot of detail about like how he hadn't eaten in a certain amount of time before and then suddenly you're thinking about cory booker's colon and supposedly it's supposed to be inspirational to you you're like
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
He lacks tact in the most profound way. That is actually the thing that makes him uniquely annoying and frustrating. And I think Matt is exactly right. He could have used this in a way more tactical way
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
If all he's trying to do is engage in this kind of project of self-aggrandizement and strengthen his bid for supremacy in a leaderless party that is apparently was being drug around by the nose by Jasmine Crockett for about a month and a half. So at least that moment seems to have passed for now. But I will say if I could say one positive thing, it's that he broke Strom Thurmond's record here.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
and Trump's record from the 1960s is when he was filibustering.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
The Civil Rights Act, yeah. So, you know, along the grounds of states' rights, defending the rights of the states to actively discriminate, and of course, the Southern way of life, as Trump described it as the time. Trump seems to have found religion on these matters later in life, so I don't, you know, whatever, hold it against him.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
But I'll give him points for having at least dislodged that record. This is a slightly less embarrassing thing for someone to have done publicly.
The Megyn Kelly Show
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I'm nothing if not generous.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
I want the best for everyone.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
We love you strong.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
I don't know if I'm being like more fair to him or anything like that, but I do want to try to say like the best case scenario here, and it does seem binary. It's either he's being aggressively duplicitous here or he's a total moron. Like the fact that all of us from so far away
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Could like see Joe Biden's decline in real time and noted regularly and that these people like the best explanation explanation for their or the best accounting of their behavior and their oh my God I can't believe this happened it was so terrible.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
I agree with most of the explication of the situation. And it's one of the things I love about you, that you get all of the details with respect to the kind of nuances of the case. And that's totally appropriate and important. But I want to draw a quick analogy to free expression.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
And I'm on the board of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, America's premier, perhaps the planet's premier civil liberties organization. And people like us, and I mean us collectively, all four of us, and most of the people watching, I'm sure, are rabid free speech defenders.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Is that they just didn't see what was going on they were oblivious to the fact that this man didn't know where he was most of the time and here at least he seems to be admitting. Like we are doing debate prep and the president can't keep up. After 45 minutes, he didn't seem to know where he was or what he was talking about.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
And what that means is that in many instances, you find yourself defending people who are saying awful things or awful people who are saying things that are just fine and ought to be okay. And it becomes a difficult circumstance when most of the time that's greeted with a kind of disingenuous, Well, you think Holocaust denial is great. And it's not that at all. We know that the procedure matters.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
We know that the marginal kind of edge cases matter a great deal. And here we have a somewhat edge case, like a guy with a somewhat dodgy record, an uncertain circumstance with respect to the kind of his legal status and situation, but an admitted mistake on the part of the Trump administration, at least by the Justice Department,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
that there was a clerical error of sorts and they probably shouldn't have done things the way that they did it, which is at the core of much of the consternation about these deportations. It's easy to kind of talk about this in apocalyptic ways that are perhaps too absurd, but it's also important to just acknowledge what is happening here. We do have a circumstance where
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
people who work for the US government will show up, they will tell you what agency they're from, but sometimes they're in masks, sometimes they're in unmarked vehicles, and they will kind of spirit you away. And they'll move you around to different facilities in order to make it hard for you to kind of marshal, mount a legal defense for yourself.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
And then they'll ship you off to a country where we have very credible reports of systematic human rights violations and all sorts of other bad things. Is that the kind of America that we want to live in?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
I don't know. I don't know. There are all sorts of nuances here. And I think just in general, all I'm trying to underscore here is at a minimum, it's relevant that there are technical issues here. It's relevant that there are court objections. And it's relevant that there are kind of public relations issues. But at the core...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
is this idea that there are certain principles that we defend in this country, and sometimes we have to defend those principles even in contexts where there are people who are perhaps a little noxious, when there are circumstances that make this less than ideal. And one of the things that I'm kind of most frustrated by is like J.D. Vance's response to this.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
He couldn't understand that when he looked into the camera in a kind of confused way, that wouldn't suggest to people, wow, Donald Trump is saying crazy things. It would suggest to people that this guy really has no idea what planet he's on. And it was I mean, this this should have been a five alarm fire for them in real time. They shouldn't have let him run at all.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Anytime that you say that, you know, I'm normally a favor of due process, but, you know, there is an emergency. My brain goes like, yeah, I remember 9-11.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Right. And I understand that in this particular case, the administration acted in defiance of a court order. And I just can't get with that. You know, there's.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
I don't think I would have cared if he'd been deported to Columbia, to be honest with you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Well, I mean, it's also this this administration and J.D. Vance in particular, they've been cruising for a bruising. They want showdowns with the judicial branch. They like this stuff. J.D. Vance, who has misrepresented this case on several occasions, I think.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Yeah, but he also said it's gross for a gang member, for us to be more worried about gang members than victims of violent crime, which is profoundly disingenuous. No, it's true.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
But certainly while you're in debate prep, even before it airs, you should be calling every single high profile Democrat, you know, leaking this story to every every member of the press you can. Yeah. So that you can try to replace this guy on the ticket. And they did not do those things in real time. They are waiting till now. And that's the part that makes it all look so kind of gross and slimy.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
The left is.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Maybe the left is, but I'm not.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
And I don't know that I would make that claim about the left.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
But he's saying it publicly. That is the response to kind of categorically from J.D. Vance. And I get it. Again, he's a politician. I expect him to make these kind of decisions.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
I can't speak to that. He's right.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
If he'd said it about the Atlantic, he might be able he might be on slightly better footing. But he made a categorical statement and suggested he was in a fight with the Atlantic.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Ted Cruz made a very similar and very similarly sweeping argument to Ted Cruz, who once self-styled as a constitutional conservative. This is not a constitutional way to act in defiance of a judge's order. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Also interesting that like where is Joe Biden? It's not unusual for presidents to go dark after the inauguration. He went to see a play. Barack Obama, you kind of did see him around in 2017. He may not have been giving grand statements. Joe Biden is gone. They've disappeared him.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
He might be in El Salvador. I don't know.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
That's the way you do it. Or to say that they don't want to tell you, but whatever. Like we ask our staffers, we actually don't do endorsements at Reason. The last endorsement they ran was in 1976 or something like that. But I tried to do this when I was at the LA Times too. Like, all right, you know, let's just list all of this. Because one thing, it kind of takes away that as a cudgel.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
But another, if you pull your own... If you poll your own news organization, right? Imagine, Megan, over at not just MSNBC, but NBC News or also at Fox. That would be interesting. Poll all of your journalists. Maybe you don't even have to make it public. If you have 99 percent voting for one party, you've got a screwed up news organization. Why don't you want that information?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
One of the only other outlets that do this is Slate. I don't even know if they did it this past year. But as they went on, it would be like 55 Obama won Gary Johnson. Like the numbers were always Jack Shaver. Yeah. That's useful information. And it's also like showing that you are, uh, you have faith in your audience. You can handle this information. You don't have to run scared from the LA times.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
And I was there was terrified that people would discover something about them. Like, why don't you show it to the world? So like faith in your audience.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040
Can I retract my earlier statement? It's just duplicitous. Just a liar.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Remember, Donald Trump says that the tariffs are going to pay for themselves. On their own, the most lovely word in the English language, according to Donald Trump, is tariff. So why would you ever take them down? Why would you ever use them as leverage? Why not just keep them in forever if they're so consequential to the American economy and in a positive way?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
I mean, there's literally no economists that you can find that believe that trade is a net negative. They think it's a net positive that has some sort of factors that aren't great that you have to account for, you know? the hollowing out of certain American industries that was kind of inevitable in any case. But there was some consequences of free trade.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
But on net, it is a very, very positive thing for the American consumer. And when you see people like American farmers, they export so much stuff, and this is going to really hit their bottom line. And they're worried about it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Yeah, and Ron Johnson was talking about it. And these are much more consequential tariffs than the first time around. So I think that, you know, the Wall Street Journal had an editorial the other day that said it was, you know, we're again back to the dumbest tariffs of all time. We'll see. They do not look good for the American consumer. And we are going to take a hit. It's just going to happen.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
It's just a matter of how much can, you know, the American voter and consumer take of this and how much will they blame Donald Trump in the law room?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And one thing to add to that is that it's not an economic argument. I mean, obviously, the economic argument is a lot harder. So if you're making the argument that it's about fentanyl, like, look, no one in their right mind is going to say, great, we want more fentanyl coming.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
I mean, I think we could all agree that, you know, Canada, Mexico, a more aggressive stance towards, you know, drugs that are killing a huge number of people coming across the border is a good thing. Can you negotiate that in a way that doesn't punish You know, American consumers.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
I mean, we saw today right before we started this, that Ontario slapped on a 25 percent tariff on electricity that they deliver to almost two million households in Michigan. They promised that they would.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And now they've done it. And, you know, that's an immediate thing that people feel in their pocketbook. Is that a long term good? I mean, what is the negotiation here? I mean, is it is this for American manufacturing? I just can't even I mean, is it for fentanyl? It seems like a very, very, you know, slapdash willy nilly policy. But I think people are going to feel really quickly.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
So that's why I said, you know, mentioning it tonight.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
You could also talk to most economists who don't believe trade deficits are even a thing that matters. I mean, that ultimately it is a benefit to American consumers either way.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
I mean, that if there's some equalization is, and again, this is, you know, something that I believe myself, but I am not an economist and should probably talk to an economist about this, but that is a widely held view that trade deficits are not something that is like an actual deficit, which is another thing that we have to, pay attention to at the moment, our real deficit.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
What is a hand clapper? I just aren't your hands for clapping. I mean, we've gone from you lie to President Obama to people bringing in air horns like they're at a goddamn FIFA game. Like what is happening here? This is ridiculous. That was the you lie thing was the most controversial thing of like a month.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Well, some of them don't have balls because they're women. And I believe in those categories, Megan. Tammy Baldwin does not have balls. And that's just a biological fact. A couple of things here. is that, you know, I think last time we were on, Matt was pointing out something that you've pointed out this time, too. It's an 80-20 issue, and those are very rare.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And, you know, even though you're in a blue state, this is a pretty clear issue for people when they have girls. I mean, I have a girl who has just turned 14 years old, is... you shockingly, when you look at me, an exceptional athlete and a very competitive athlete, I was just in Florida for, for a gymnastics meet. I'm all over the country for them.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And, you know, it was funny when we were in Florida, we went to the meet and it was the only meet we'd ever been to where there were men in doing male gymnastics, which is a different thing, by the way. They do rings and they do pommel horse. The girls don't do that because there's a strength issue, right? Those are very strength-oriented things.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And that's the basic thing that do, are we even having that argument still that men and women are fundamentally different? That was, by the way, an argument we had, you know, four or five years ago that I just had my head in my hands and I couldn't believe that This was actually an argument that was being proffered by the people on the other side of this issue.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
But there are two things, as you point out, is one of them is a fairness issue in one of them is a safety issue because there are different sports. You point out hockey. No one ever talks about that. Leah Thomas is going to beat you in the pool. because of obvious biological differences. On the hockey rink, my daughter and I are both obsessive hockey fans. We go to NHL games all the time.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And I would love for her to play hockey when she gets into high school. But that's a different story because people are hitting each other all the time. That is the point of hockey. Like losing a race. I mean, you saw the Four Nations game against the Canadians in the US. They fought. There were three fights for the first nine seconds of the game. This is what the game is. It's a physical game.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And then all of a sudden you're like, wait a second. This is why you saw that with the boxing and the Moroccan boxer. Yeah. Yeah. That like that stuff is terrifying. I mean, to watch that. And if you have a girl that's out there who's 15, 16 years old, that doesn't matter if you're in a blue state or a red state.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
That's an issue that Donald Trump is obviously right to bring up tonight because it's a winning issue. And immigration is obviously a winning issue too, that he has the public on his side in those things.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And it's amazing to me the Democrats just are caught in the same ideology of culture war because like you mentioned Title IX, Title IX is where people have been fighting culture war stuff for the past decade. And it's time that it stops. It's kind of insane because most of the American people are on the side of sanity on this issue.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
It's a, you're, I literally have no idea who that is, Megan. And I, what do you mean?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
I know exactly who she is. I'm lying to you. I have a tattoo of her in my shoulder blade. I know my daughter, she listens to the show sometimes. I don't want her to know that's true. I'm there only in a sort of academic way. That's it. It took me a minute.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
But will they? I think that one final point on this for me is that it's not really an ideological issue. The reason it became an issue nominally of the right was because people on the right were fighting these kind of woke wars and they stopped caring.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
The number of people you talk to that are not on the right that live in New York City who will quietly tell you that they agree with this stuff but are afraid of voicing it publicly is enormous. I mean, you know, we saw today... Martina Navratilova, the famous tennis player who's gay and a very left wing woman, if you follow her on Twitter, was excoriating Democrats for voting against this. J.K.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Rowling is a left winger. People might think differently because they think she is this. issue. She's a liberal person. There's a lot of liberals on the side. That's why it's an 80-20 issue. And one of the gaslighting things is to make people think that this is a right-wing issue.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
It might be handled differently by people on the right, but it is an 80-20 issue because it does go beyond kind of ideological boundaries. And I think people are kind of becoming a little more comfortable talking about it because maybe the administration made it that way, maybe the culture made it that way, but people are less afraid of it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Can I try to take their joy away right now? I love that this guy's like, you all just got fired. Do you have joy? No, I just got fucking fired. What are you talking about? I'm going to sing your job back. It's like, no, please don't. Lord.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Yeah.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Well, I want to agree with you on one thing. It is a lovely lady part, but I want to continue and say that the most amazing thing to me is we have these conversations and you see them with bozos like Steve Schmidt and Chuck Todd about you know, the president's age and should Jake Tapper write this book and Biden, blah, blah, blah. We shouldn't have done this. We shouldn't have done that.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Like modern.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
I mean, you learn things from TikTok, Megan.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Serious tone. Very serious tone. I want to say that it's an amazing thing because I am weirdly probably on Rachel Maddow's side on this one when it comes to I didn't like how it was handled. We talked about it in our podcast. I think Zelensky probably shouldn't been baited in that way and actually said he expressed regret today because of the situation that that resulted in.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
But I absolutely would never say and you didn't hear us say in the two hour podcast that we did about this at any point. that this was a result of some conspiratorial Donald Trump is under the control of the FSB. This stuff has been debunked time and again.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And this is the reason that despite the fact they're in opposition, and as Megan, you know this very well, is that when you're in opposition network and opposition magazine, newspaper, whatever, you tend to have circulation and viewership numbers that go through the roof when you're in opposition. Theirs have cratered. And the reason is, is that people might not like this
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
You know, people might not support the way Donald Trump handled this and J.D. Vance handled this. But I don't think that the the instinct is to say they are under the control of the Kremlin. I don't. That's not why. And it's actually a pretty embarrassing and juvenile way of thinking of it at this point after it's been thoroughly researched and debunked. But there are other reasons.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
that people can make, in my opinion, a desperately wrong call vis-a-vis Ukraine. And I don't think the only explanation for that is the man must be either a fascist or a Russian stooge. That is clearly our answer.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Donald Trump is giving Democrats a lot of openings. It doesn't matter if you agree with them or not. There's just a lot of openings because there's a lot happening. What are they doing in response? I mean, where is the political strategy here? We're going to have noisemakers and we're going to throw egg crates. And what are you talking about?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Seriously, you've had the time now to assimilate this defeat from November. Notice, by the way, that Donald Trump is actually keeping his promises in an aggressive way, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't. But the way in which he's handling it Elon Musk, all this stuff. There's so many openings. I see people burning Tesla chargers in towns that are one away from where I grew up.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
But I don't see a lot of strategy when it comes to policy and when it comes time to fighting back. I mean, you notice MSNBC, they're like, all right, we're going to get rid of Joy Reid. And then we're going to replace her with another Joy Reid.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
I think on that point, there's a language issue and a big language issue. I mean, Zelensky is a not a great English speaker. And what he was trying to convey in that moment where Donald Trump lost it with him is that Trump had previously said, you know, I watched all 45 minutes of it, had said the the ocean between us. And that had come up two more times.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And Zelensky brings it up that last time that kind of sets Trump off. And what I took him to be saying, and this is a kind of a boring thing that people have said for years, is he's trying to express that if we allow the Russians to do this, they'll be emboldened and that will come to other countries, including America. The ocean won't protect you. And I think that that was a more benign thing
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
than maybe Trump read it. And I've rewatched it a bunch of times. And every time I rewatch it, I realize the clumsiness. I mean, you notice right afterwards, he goes on Brett Baier's show. In about three or four pretty basic words, he has to consult with the translator off set. who yells what the words are. And he said, okay, okay. And he continues his answer.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And this is like all these people, it's like the exact same strategy you guys had for the previous Trump administration and the previous four years of Joe Biden in which you fought the future Trump administration. I mean, I don't see any strategy here from Democrats whatsoever.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And it's just like, it's the reckless thing, which I said previously on our podcast, is that doing that in that situation in such a kind of hinge moment when your language skills are questionable and not a hundred percent. I mean, anyone who speaks a foreign language understands that when you're not like a fluent speaker, you're going to miss a lot of tone and intonation.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And I think that that was a huge problem. I mean, I think if Zelensky grew up in Queens but happened to be the leader of Ukraine, much like the leader of Estonia grew up in New Jersey in the past, then it would have been a completely different exchange. I mean, judging those tones and everything, it became quite difficult. You should not have done it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Well, I don't think it's offensive. I think that what Zelensky is... And again, I think that probably Rachel Maddow and I have pretty substantive differences on this. No, I know. I'm on the Ukrainian side on this, and I think that Putin and the gang in the Kremlin are horrible, monstrous dictatorship, and it's what it is. They are actually a dictatorship. But I will say this, that...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
When it comes to what Zelensky was asking for, and he kept on interceding and saying this, and it's a frustrating thing for Ukrainians, is not getting a security guarantee because they've had security guarantees in the past. I mean, they made a security guarantee by giving up their nuclear weapons after the Cold War that we give up our weapons and we have the protection that we need.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And none of that has come to bear. I mean, you see that he mentioned- But let me ask, okay, but let's have a backup.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
No, nobody does. No.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
No, I don't want American soldiers over there either. I don't think that's the only way of doing it. I mean, Donald Trump, of course, is saying that there is a way of doing that, that it would deter people in the Kremlin if we had Americans working on the ground there, which I just don't believe because we had Americans working in Kiev when they were trying to surround it in 2022.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Well, there's no conversation about a number of things. There's no conversation about the status of various Ukrainian cities that are under Russian occupation. There's no conversation about the tens of thousands of children that have been stolen from Ukrainians. I mean, this is not a controversial thing. People understand that this happened. I mean, those are two huge things.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
I mean, if the argument is you give us minerals and then what? What do we get for it? There's no negotiation there. It doesn't appear that there's much negotiation there.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Well, we don't know if that's I mean, there's the contours of that deal are unclear to anybody, both people involved and people like myself.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
I was going to say, you know, it plays into the conspiracy theory when you said it's very abnormal for J.D. Vance to be there. And they didn't sign that beforehand when Zelensky said, quite frankly, that he was willing to sign it. So I do understand those conspiracy theories that he was baited into it in some way because it just, the chronology of it is kind of strange.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
But that's all I want to say.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
himself, who has always had a very, very negative idea of Zelensky and the war in Ukraine, where Trump has been a little more kind of, you know, not on one side or another, more willing to kind of negotiate a deal. I mean, the entire thing that he says is that, you know, until until you say we can promise peace, until you want to work towards peace, I cannot give you the weapons of war.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
I mean, that is and as you pointed out, Megan, I mean, that is part of that deal is that we will give you the weapons of war if you promise peace. I don't think that that's something that J.D. Vance has ever wanted at all. So, I mean, that strikes me as more plausible, less plausible than it was Trump, you know, in some kind of nine. I hear you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
So I actually think... But isn't the mineral... Isn't it a better thing if he announces it tonight and says, not only did I get the deal, but I played hardball. You saw it on television. He would have just postponed it to today. That's how I negotiate.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
That doesn't make sense. I don't think there's a chain of events there. I just think that right now, Donald Trump is probably, you know, likely to say, yeah, I'll sign that deal. Because not only is it the deal that they had worked out before and that he wanted and Zelensky agreed to, but if you get it now... Zelensky came back begging. He came back begging. He's been begging for three days.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
That's what's going to make the deal before. If you get it now, you come back and say, look at the negotiation. I played such hardball with them that they came groveling back.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
It was easy for me.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
No, no. Well, what part of that is new is that him talking about it, if you want an example, like, by the way, nobody looks at this stuff as like, oh, he knew this is bravery. It undermines people's confidence in the mainstream media that doesn't need any more undermining. I mean, the opinion polls are like 18 percent below Congress that people believe the mainstream media.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
And this is somebody saying, I knew this for a long time. I thought this for a long time and I decided to not make it public. I decided not to talk about it. Why not? Because you were a straight newsman? No. You were talking about other things.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
I guarantee you, if you go and look at what Chuck Todd said for the past eight years, you're definitely going to find some things that are sharp elbowed and that have opinions. But that opinion was left out. What do you think that people, when they see that, they're like, yeah, there is a kind of conspiracy in the media of silence because they don't like Donald Trump. They don't want him to win.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
So therefore, let's thumb the scales for this guy. It's kind of gross.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
You know, I mean, this is a guy that literally said that he saw the Lincoln Park project as generational wealth. What is it required to have generational wealth is to, you know, be fighting Donald Trump all the time. Did he get fired?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Well, it was a grift when he was there. And I think that he left under under a cloud. But, you know, it's amazing that this is the same person that that was talking about how he's going to get wealthy from being being the anti-Trump man. It's amazing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Well, Camilo, the pants were fitted just right because then you realize that he doesn't bring it. Yes. Oh, maybe maybe put it on full screen. No, that's fine. We're OK. A lot of money. One problem you can't solve. Wow.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
Maybe. Yeah. You got a lot of cash. Maybe buy a very fancy sock and put it in there. He's not. He's unashamed. Leave him alone.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
I mean, they're huge tariffs. This is the time for him to tout them today. He should do it today because the tail of this is not going to look good for him. And we already see this echoing out into certain input costs. I mean, we've seen a lot of numbers in this.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
The Wall Street Journal has been covering this pretty closely, is that in anticipation of these tariffs, the input costs for a lot of things, a lot of American manufacturing have gone through the roof.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd New Resistance Efforts for Trump Address, and Dems Vote Against Protecting Women's Sports, with the Fifth Column | Ep. 1018
You have also seen a lot of Republican congressmen, Republican senators talking both off the record and on the record that they're really fearful of what this is going to do, particularly in agriculture, because we always think about this as an export thing only. I mean, import thing only. We want to put barriers up because someone's being unfair to us and we will reap the benefits.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Bizarre Group Chat Details, Media Compares Trump to Nixon, and MK Media Launch, with Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi | Ep. 1034
Did Jeff Goldberg somehow, did he create a hoax that allowed him to become part of this signal thread? Please answer the question. Don't insult the intelligence of the American people. Did he invite himself to the Signal thread? I don't know how he was invited, but clearly he was added. Clearly it was. Finish your sentence, please. Clearly he was added to the Signal group.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Bizarre Group Chat Details, Media Compares Trump to Nixon, and MK Media Launch, with Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi | Ep. 1034
You don't know that the president's national security advisor invited him to join the signal threat? Everybody in America knows that. Does the CIA director not know that?
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
It's quite clear that what these people mean by democracy is really just liberalism. or leftism or this extreme political ideology that ironically now shuts out most of their constituents that is ironically totally opposed to the democracy.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
And so when democracy prevails in America and most people say, we don't want this nonsense, we want Trump, we want Vance, and we want to see that in the rest of our civilization as well. This is really shocking because you can see, especially in Germany, how practically this kind of leftism has been implemented in their political order. And so if the U.S.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
comes in and says, hey, we've been underwriting all of this for many decades. You have betrayed our shared Western values, and we are not going to underwrite this anymore. And by the way, he who pays the piper calls the tune. So get with the program. It's no surprise that there were many tears at the Munich Security Conference after Vice President Vance spoke.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
not it certainly isn't a parking ticket they get but you take the mike wallace approach if your objective is to come to the truth and you can do that either by attempting to be objective and neutral or by taking the opposing view you know and playing the devil's advocate in the conversation but but that is not what the establishment media have been after here it's certainly not what this cbs interview was after when it comes to germany
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
She was not trying to come to the truth. She was trying to advocate a position, a radical position that most Europeans and most Americans would reject. But she's playing the partisan here, okay? This is partisan activism par excellence. And most Americans are going to look at that and say, this is horrifying. We don't want anything to do with it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
But I think that also helps to explain why for many of the establishment media outlets now, Their ratings have collapsed. And for the establishment liberal politicians, their voter bases have collapsed. And it's why Americans voted for an alternative. There's also just a basic handling of the facts that the left seems to have lost.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
You know, Mike Wallace basically knew what he was talking about in this case on CBS. Yet poor Margaret Brennan was discussing free speech in Germany. Megan, the claim that she made, I'm not a scholarly historian or anything like that. I've got a meager undergraduate degree, okay?
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
But I think if you took remedial history in the sixth grade, you would know that the claim that Margaret Brennan here made was completely insane.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
I don't. Yeah, I actually don't know that. I don't know. I understand that in our modern culture, the only historical event that anyone can make any comparisons to is World War II. Every opponent is Hitler. Every political incident is the brink of the Holocaust. This is how our degraded modern media apparatus debates things. So I'm going in already with very low expectations.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
but even as people constantly invoke hitler and the holocaust and everything have you ever once heard the suggestion that the holocaust was caused by an abundance of free speech you know if you just look at the year 1933 you can point to a few acts of the nazi party uh the editors act which said that only arians could be journalists the banning as marco ruby alluded to there of the other political parties so you had a totalitarian state
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
and the Reichstag fire decrees, which severely curtailed civil liberties. Just that alone would seem sufficient to knock down whatever point Margaret Brennan thought she was making. But happily for her, she wasn't even aware of those basic facts of history. And I fear that many of her liberal viewers will be similarly ignorant.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
So they have to be corrected by the Secretary of State on really basic facts of history.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
The face of it. I recently did a segment on CBS Mornings on the morning news program, and I thought it was very fair. I thought it was actually a very well put together, balanced segment. I thought they did a really, really great job. And so I thought, oh, good, maybe CBS is really moving in this great direction.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
But what's bizarre is morning shows tend to be a little lighter, you know, kind of there's just a bit more levity. And you expect 60 Minutes or the serious evening news shows. Those are going to be hard hitting. And in this case, it was exactly the opposite. I mean, 60 Minutes is one of the most serious news properties in the history of television journalism. It used to be. I don't know.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
I don't know what has happened. But this is not helping the credibility of the establishment media in the least.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
Of course, you know, even that naughty joke about the migrants playing in electrical fields or something, that's a that's a dark joke. It's a dark joke. It's like an Internet meme. It's the sort of thing that statistically everyone on the Internet has engaged with at some point.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
And so I'm not I'm not saying that that should be the opening speech of a state dinner or something like that, but it's a crude, nasty, dark little joke. OK. And so what is the consequence of that? I don't know. Some people giggle or something. Now look at the consequence, not even just in Germany, but throughout Europe, of banning basic speech. J.D. Vance talked about that in Munich.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
You had Christians who would pray silently in their own minds, 50 meters away from abortion mills. Those kinds of people are arrested. You would have people who object in any way to mass migration. Those kinds of people would be harassed by the government. You would have families in Northern England who are objecting to their children being brought into rape gangs by migrants.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
You would see the force of the law come down against them and the supposed threat that they pose to multiculturalism rather than against the migrants. To your point, Megan, Who are we to privilege here? Someone who's offended by a naughty joke or an internet meme? Or the people whose kids have been stabbed by migrants as has happened throughout Europe?
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
How about we pay attention to the serious issues from actual European citizens here? Well, the liberal elite on that continent won't do it. So the constituents are voting against the ruling liberal elite parties. And the only thing that they can do to hold on to their power is to further clamp down, to tighten their grip.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
And so it's a breath of fresh air for America and for Europe when the vice president comes in and says, hey, we're not going to put up with this anymore.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
The best excuse that I've heard the European left come up with here, and the American left, I guess, is that, no, he wasn't just crying because they were all so upset by J.D. Vance. It's really because, you know, he's going to be leaving this post soon. And so it was just a kind of a broader overwhelming with emotion to which I would respond.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
First of all, seems a little dubious to me, given the actual news reporting that came out of that conference. But second of all. Also, even if that were the case, yeah, that's ridiculous, man. Are you kidding? This is Europe. This is the Munich Security Conference. If you're Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, are you now cowering? Oh, no. The Europeans, they might flood me with tears.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
I hope I don't drown. Good grief. What a pathetic showing from Europe.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
I would say just as a numbers game, statistically, any of us could be the child of Elon Musk. When we're trying to adjudicate the claim as to whether or not the baby is really Elon's, statistically, really any child you come across in the street could have been sired by the head of Doge. You know, I actually ran into Ashley at one of the inauguration events in D.C.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
because Ashley is pretty well known among conservative media. She's an influencer. She's an influencer. You know, she's involved in the island, right? She had a book.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
on kind of making fun of transgenderism children's book and so people are are aware of her and she's very active on twitter and elon's very active on twitter and so i guess i'm not terribly surprised that the two of them linked up in some way given uh how prolific elon is at producing many things children included and and so i i guess my biggest political takeaway from the whole story which uh you know
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
generally men are not all that tuned into these kinds of stories you know it's also not exactly a man bites dog story so i've paid a little bit of attention to it and my biggest takeaway is a political truth that has existed since classical antiquity up to the present Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
That is a lesson that not only the billionaires should know and the people in media and politics should know, that is true for everyone. It does seem to appear to be what's going on here. As has been reported, Ashley St. Clair says that she feels jilted or ignored. And it's not just right wing influencers who are going to act out and lash out when that occurs. That's a lot of women.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
Well, I think also to your point, Megan, whatever you think about Elon and his views on natalism, which I think Elon is totally right that we have an underpopulation problem. And I think he's right that people should have more children. I would encourage people to do it the old-fashioned way. You know, I'm a...
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
mackerel-snapping papist myself, so I think marriage is a lifelong union of a man and a woman ordered toward the procreation and education of children and also for the mutual support of the spouses. But people across geography, across social classes, across everywhere are broadly confused about these questions, in part because the revolutions, especially the 1960s,
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
really blew up our moral and ethical thinking on these matters. So I actually have a great deal of sympathy for people who are really confused about it. But regardless of what you think about what Elon does, you can't say he's hiding the ball, okay? He is very clear about his views of natalism and IVF. So yeah, people know exactly what they're getting going into it. That's the thing. Yeah.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
I agree with you, Megan.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
I've long said, Megan, my fallback plan, if my cigar company or if my podcast doesn't work out, is to be impregnated by Elon. Scientifically, they haven't figured out how that's going to work yet, but there are a lot of people. I mean, we're kind of joking about it. There are a lot of people who in our kind of wild kind of ethical thinking these days, we all think we have to reinvent the wheel.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
But I think one of the lessons of conservatism is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel, that the old institutions and the old behaviors have endured for a reason. And so I think a lot of people, would be totally willing to offer grace to a single mother.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
A lot of people are even willing to offer grace to people who have kind of avant-garde and bizarre views of having children and things like that. But all of this seems to me to be a recommendation of the old way of doing things. That actually the way that people have... gotten married, had kids, lived their lives for statistically all of history, those have worked out pretty well.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
And so if there is some political lesson to be drawn from this, and we're talking about multiple public figures, so there are political lessons to be drawn, seems to me that maybe sticking with the old way of doing things is a good idea. And in fact, that's my recommendation when it comes to most subjects.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
Megan, wonderful to be with you as always. See you next time.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
Wonderful to be with you, Megan. Thank you for having me.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
Well, first of all, even the notion of the far right-wing parties in Europe is largely fake news from the establishment media. In Germany, the right-wing party, Alternative for Deutschland, is run by a lesbian libertarian who thinks that Hitler was a communist, okay? So even when we're talking about the particular scary right-wing party that they're all worried about, even that
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
is just a kind of normal right-wing party in the libertarian modern sense of things and so when jd shows up to munich i think this i've been calling his speech the tear down this firewall speech you know reagan goes to the brandonburg gate says tear down this berlin wall well jd he said there's no room for a firewall in a democracy and a lot of the american listeners probably didn't know exactly what he was referring to but the firewall in germany
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
Germany is the leader of Europe. So, you know, it's really more broadly European. The firewall is this notion that the left wing and center parties can't work with the right wing parties.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
But this creates a major problem for European democracy, because in Europe, just as we've seen in America, the people increasingly are voting for the right wing parties because the left wing parties have failed them. and have opened up Europe's borders.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
And when the migrants have come in and committed all sorts of crimes, including the particularly heinous crimes that we saw in the United Kingdom with the grooming rape gangs, you saw the politicians not defending the citizens of the countries, but actually attacking the citizens of the countries and defending
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
mass migration and the rape gangs and all of these hideous crimes so it's no wonder that people are looking for an alternative and they're turning to the right and what jd vance went to say in munich is look you people all prattle on about democracy all the time and yet when the people actually vote all you liberal elites out of office you deny them you call them a threat to democracy
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
You censor them. In some cases, you arrest them in midnight raids over things that they've posted to Facebook. And we are not going to tolerate that anymore. And I think the reason that the left is rending its garments and gnashing its teeth over this speech is that what J.D. Vance was saying here is that Europe needs to fundamentally change its political order.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
Its political order right now is anti-democratic. It's extremely left wing. It's leading to a civilizational suicide. And the United States, which secures all of Europe and is the global hegemon, we are not going to stand for that anymore because we've seen the consequences of that kind of liberal hegemony in America. People absolutely hate it. The majority of Americans voted against it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
And we're not going to tolerate those kinds of abuses in Europe either.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
I love the appetite that you saw from the interviewer here. Oh, they didn't know that it was illegal, really, and then you showed up and you got them. If only we could bring these great ideas. She's obviously eager, like so much of the left, to import.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
this kind of european police state into america to go after the dastardly online trolls who in any way question in a just way or an unjust way the liberal hegemony over our political order and you can tell there's been a push for many years in america from the left for this and the american people have rejected that most notably in november when they they voted with the popular vote to elect trump and the republicans
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
but you see the germans doubling down on this at that munich security conference that jd vance spoke at you had the president of germany come out and say that he will not allow social media to subvert his democracy and and it forces you to ask the question What does he think the word democracy means?
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
I'm not the first to make this observation, but when liberals constantly invoke this term democracy, I don't think it really means what they think it means, or at least what we think it means. Because they've been arguing for years now that when Americans elect Donald Trump, that's a threat to democracy. Of course, by definition, that just is democracy when the people vote for someone.
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
or when the Hungarians elect Viktor Orban, that's a threat to democracy. When the Italians elect Giorgio Maloney, somehow that's a threat to democracy. When the Brits vote for the Brexit because they don't want mass migration coming in anymore, they want a more accountable government, somehow that's a threat to democracy.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Tulsi vs. the Establishment, Kash on Hot Seat, and RFK's Final Push, with Glenn Greenwald, Calley Means, and More | Ep. 996
Was Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States of America?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Tulsi vs. the Establishment, Kash on Hot Seat, and RFK's Final Push, with Glenn Greenwald, Calley Means, and More | Ep. 996
This is not a moment for social media. It's not a moment to propagate theories, conspiracy theories or attacks on journalism in the United States. This is when you need to answer the questions of the people whose votes you're asking for. As my colleague said, this is not about you. It's about the people that serve the intelligence agencies of the United States.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Tulsi vs. the Establishment, Kash on Hot Seat, and RFK's Final Push, with Glenn Greenwald, Calley Means, and More | Ep. 996
Is Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States of America? That is not a hard question to answer when the stakes are this high.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Tulsi vs. the Establishment, Kash on Hot Seat, and RFK's Final Push, with Glenn Greenwald, Calley Means, and More | Ep. 996
Is Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States of America?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Tulsi vs. the Establishment, Kash on Hot Seat, and RFK's Final Push, with Glenn Greenwald, Calley Means, and More | Ep. 996
Apparently you don't.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Tulsi vs. the Establishment, Kash on Hot Seat, and RFK's Final Push, with Glenn Greenwald, Calley Means, and More | Ep. 996
Are you aware that your comments about proxy wars and Russia's legitimate security concerns, to quote your own words, are in alignment with what the Russians have said to justify their invasion of Ukraine?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Tulsi vs. the Establishment, Kash on Hot Seat, and RFK's Final Push, with Glenn Greenwald, Calley Means, and More | Ep. 996
You basically said that Putin was justified in rolling over the peaceful border of Ukraine the first time since World War II that a free nation had been invaded by a totalitarian state, and you were there at 11.30 p.m. that night. To say that you are with them, not us. Can't we do better than somebody who doesn't believe in 702?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Tulsi vs. the Establishment, Kash on Hot Seat, and RFK's Final Push, with Glenn Greenwald, Calley Means, and More | Ep. 996
Can't we believe that somebody who can't answer whether Snowden was a traitor five times today? Who made excuses for Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine? I'm questioning her judgment. That's the issue that's at stake here.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
Of course, of course. You know, the...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
The people to blame here for creating these kinds of conditions are not only the ones who look the other way, but yes, as you mentioned, these really bad actors who have pushed terrible behavior, who have encouraged the worst kind of lawlessness that is contrary to the good of the individual and to the good of society, and who have been given grants and prizes and all sorts of plaudits for it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
I remember walking by that BLM Plaza. in DC. This is such another level of social degradation. Not only are we tolerating this kind of disordered behavior, but we're actually exalting it. We're saying this is a great thing. People are going to be led. This is where the hyper individualism of the left and the right just totally breaks down. We are social creatures.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
We've known that since good old Uncle Aristotle. And so we are going to, we're going to follow the leader. We're going to behave in ways that our neighbors behave. And so we have a real question before us, which is, what kind of country do we want to live in? What kind of society do we want to live in? That is your business, all right? The society that we grow up in is your business.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
You as a citizen have a right to certain standards. And so when you look at all of the risk factors for this kind of behavior, fatherlessness, of course, we've talked about, The soft bigotry of low expectations, as it's called, in education. Exactly.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
The encouragement of vice and the mockery and dismissal of virtue on the grounds that we can't be moralized or we have a separation of church and state or whatever kind of ahistorical nonsense the radical left pushes. Well, the consequence of that is that you're going to live in an increasingly anarchical kind of society that isn't good for anyone.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
It damages the people that it supposedly intends to help. You certainly saw that with BLM. But let's not forget the innocent people here as well. It also damages the innocent. And that is deeply unjust. And if the government can't do something about that, then the government is shirking its chief responsibility.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
The excuse might as well be that manifestos are always saved as PDF files. And this was a doc X, so not a manifesto, not going to release it. It's so flimsy. It contradicts what they've been saying for years at this point. But of course, they were going to ignore the central feature here. We've been talking about red flags. We've been talking about the...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
ideological and cultural insistence that we not acknowledge what's before our own eyes so in this case you want to know what a red flag might be that you have a a person who is as mentally ill as it is possible to be a person who doesn't understand some of the most basic aspects of her own identity i would like to know that as the parent of someone who is at a school i would like to know if there are really crazy people
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
People who not only have a flawed perception of reality but who are part of a group that is singularly violent and committing violence not only against others but notably at unmatched rates against themselves. A group of people that has a real problem that a caring society would try to fix and remedy rather than affirm and make worse. That's the sort of thing that I would like.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
But that has to be ignored because the culture tells us that we have to exalt falsehood and we have to deny truth. So then when one of these people flies off the handle, we all have to act surprised. I have been going out and speaking in public. for, I don't know, 10 years or something now is just part of my show and part of my public life.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
I've been attacked precisely on two occasions physically. Both times it was because I discussed the question of transgenderism. One time was right at the beginning of my speaking.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
The other time was a couple years ago, some Antifa guy was so furious at my observation that transgenderism isn't real that he tried to blow me up when I was giving a speech and he seriously injured a female police officer. I've talked about a lot of other issues and it's not just me, there are many people on the right for whom this is the case.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
The minute you question the trans ideology, these people who are so obviously and notably insane will fly off the handle. Can we say that? I'll probably be censored from social media for acknowledging that right now.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
Without question. And my question to them, by the way, who say that we need to lie to people in order to mollify them, that lies will set you free and the truth is cruel, a complete inversion of what we've known in our civilization for thousands of years. My question to them is, who does that serve?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
Is the trans-identifying girl who shot up the school and then was happily killed by a police officer, is she better off because of that? How about this kid, the perpetrator just yesterday, who murders a 17-year-old promising kid because he flies off the handle? Is he served well by just ignoring red flags?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
And that guy's life is over as well, and he's got to live with the grievous sin of having taken another life. Who benefits from living in a society full of lies? Nobody does. I mean, it's a total Faustian bargain. Give up the truth, live in lies, and then at least some people will be happy. And the conclusion of it is none of us are happy and the whole society is degraded.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
Just to be yourself is the hardest thing to be. And I thought, no, that's not true. Like being a mathematician is harder, probably, or a welder or like a marathon runner. It's actually not that hard to wake up and be yourself. And the irony, of course, is the people at this awards gala are insisting upon not being themselves and not living in accord with their true nature.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
This is the thing. Unless these people are multiple, you know, my name is Legion for we are many, which is a totally separate problem, by the way, then we need to live in accord with reality. Because at a really basic political level, if we all have the right to our own subjective identity, then we can't communicate with each other. We can't know anything about each other.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
and we become a grunting, roving bands of baboons. Even worse, because we deny our own natural instincts and society becomes totally incoherent, as you may have noticed, Megan, it has.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
Pleasure. Pleasure's all mine, Megan. And even with all the crazy weather in Nashville, I'm glad I could beam into you from my home office. And I hope my screaming children at least made a good starring run on the show for the audio.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
Everybody's safe other than my poor wife who's chasing toddlers around the home. But everyone else is good.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
The fact that you even have to walk on eggshells to state this obvious fact about the case shows you in no small part how we got to this place in the first place. It's just a horrible story. What amazing grace from this boy's father who says, I already forgive him, which is to say, vengeance is mine, says the Lord, and I will repay. Their foot shall slide in due time.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
That is not to say that the boy should not be arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned for life at least, if not more. And the very fact that that has not happened is part of how we got here in the first place. This question, how was this boy raised? Well, you're not allowed to ask that question. Specifically from the racial angle, which the establishment media will not speak about.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
They probably won't speak about the case because of the races of the perpetrator, the alleged perpetrator and the victim. You know, one has said that we cannot ask how we got to a place where 70% plus of black children in the United States are born out of wedlock. We're not allowed to ask that. That's politically incorrect. It's none of your business.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
Well, it is my business because I live in society and there are obviously downstream effects. I don't know the particulars of this guy's family situation. Maybe he just ran, he went totally off the handle. Maybe he had some mental health crisis or something. We're not allowed to talk about these things either.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
We have to now elevate insanity as some kind of social currency or even pretend that patently absurd things are true. That's pushed by our elite culture. If the boy ever did show any warning signs at school, that cannot be punished. You could probably get the teacher in trouble
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
if a person of a favored demographic is ever punished, brought to the school counselor, even if it would be for his own good. We're not allowed to talk about any of these things. And so in a very real sense, political correctness, the leftist, especially racial ideology, has created this environment.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
And the most insidious part of it all is that the elites who are going to be chattering about this today
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
will never have to face the consequences of these kinds of behaviors, policies, and ideology because they're going to send their kids to the really fancy rich school where everyone has two parents and an intact family and violence is not tolerated and they will be totally insulated from the effects of their radical social engineering.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
Meanwhile, the people who don't live in the gated communities, the people who have to live with the effects of not punishing perpetrators, not looking out for red flags and putting kids into course correction and education.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
The people who won't even arrest criminals on the streets, who instead, when you have a case, to use a recent example of Daniel Penny, for instance, on the New York City subway, protecting innocent people from a perpetrator, what is the very first thing that the liberal prosecutors do? They go after the good guy who was protecting the bad guys. Because of all of this, you have real...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
victims, in this case a 17-year-old kid had his whole life in front of him, in this case the boy's family, who looks around and the tragedy on top of the tragedy here is that these kinds of incidents are all so predictable.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
Are you telling me that there is no warning sign here? That's my question to everyone involved at this school, in this perpetrators, alleged perpetrators community. You're telling me there was no warning sign? I have a hard time believing that. As you say, Megan, the hair trigger to go off because someone says, excuse me. And by the way,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
I think a lot of people have seen this kind of thing from individuals where you just know. Often you won't even go approach them on the street. You just know all of the red flags, all the warning signs. But in this culture, we're not allowed to mention that. We're not allowed to condemn certain social arrangements and pathologies. We're not allowed to say that
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
growing up in a two-family home, for instance, where the virtues are cultivated and the vices are suppressed, that that's better than the alternative. Frankly, we're no longer even allowed to admit that there's a difference between vice and virtue. Certainly, when you add the racial aspect into this, then you're not allowed to say peep whatsoever. And so the people...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
who ignored those red flags out of cowardice and radical ideology. They have blood on their hands and not just in this case but in many similar cases around the country. How many more of these kinds of incidents are going to have to occur before we gain the courage and the clarity again to say, you know, Certain social pathologies really need to be suppressed. There are better ways to live.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
It's not just you do you and I'll do me. We live in a society. And so when people get married, that affects me. When people get divorced, that affects me. When people have children out of wedlock, That affects me. When people have children within wedlock, that affects me. When the law is enforced, that affects me. When children are educated in a proper way, that's going to affect me too.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Maher's White House Visit, and Senseless High School Student Stabbing, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian
Because I live in society, and I as a citizen in this country, and as a person with conscience, as a rational creature, have a right to express how we ought to live for the common good. That view has been so shunned from society, certainly by the left, and it's been tolerated by the right. And this is the... totally predictable result of that.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
Am I wrong? Just stop it. So I don't know. Like Elon flies rockets to Mars. He might be a little overqualified for this job. But I love how Elon is now like generic IT guy for the entire government. Like his shirt says. It's like the way you guys treat me around here. Like the internet goes out and you're like, Duncan, the router. Did you hear that? Did you plug it in?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
What I love most about it, Smug, is you can tell he's enjoying it. He's getting a crack in the smile as he's going back. He's like, oh, I got a receipt for that one too.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
Like objectivity gets in the way.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I what I love most about that exchange is like we all had this buddy in college who would black out so much. And then the next the next day you'd have to walk him through his name. And he's like, oh, no, I. That doesn't sound like me at all. I'd never do that.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
National public radio. I'm not surprised at all that she has no memory of tweeting any of those things because people like this, life is theater for these people. And they're just acting, right? And so, yeah, when you're an actor, sometimes you forget your lines. Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
Right. And you admit that in a public hearing. It's like she doesn't know anything about the BLM tweets. She doesn't know anything that's happening in NPR. The only thing she's 100% sure of is that she's tweeted that Donald Trump is racist.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
That's so funny. She sounds like Penelope Cruz.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
Oh, man. That's me Saturday night with a bourbon.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
Yeah, you said you love Jasmine Crockett. I love Ilaria. I love her so much. I love that she tries to sound like Penelope Cruz. It makes me want to buy a Cessna and start running drugs.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
She's doing it for the love of the game.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
And Portnoy is a heck of a. Right. a showman. He is, he's a heck of a showman, but he's no showman compared to Donald Trump. And that's my recommendation to the Trump administration is like change the conversation. You just, you just arrested one of these top gang leaders of Ms. 13 in Virginia. I don't bring them into the briefing room. You know, we can dissect all of his tattoos.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
It's all a little much, you know, all of the stuff, the ads that, you know, the video in front of the prison. And the reason why back to Holmes's point is like it seems sort of excessive in spiking the football and you're getting out ahead of the Trump administration. Let Donald Trump talk about how he wants to talk about the El Salvadorian.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
The one thing I would say in her defense, the one thing I would say in her defense is like the PSAs. If it gets people to self-deport, fantastic. If that video, you know, in front of those criminals gets less migrants to try to cross the border and smuggle drugs into this country, good.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
What is the important calligraphy on his chest?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
Thank you. Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
Thank you. Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Absurd Signalgate Spin, NPR Exec Grilled, and Biggest Media Hacks in America, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 1036
The thing that really shocks me about this story, you know, Disney and all these media companies, they invest hundreds of millions of dollars into these projects, right? Have they ever thought about maybe like a little bit of like, I don't know, vulnerability study, opposition research, that sort of thing before you go and hire some Zoomer who's a lunatic?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
Yeah. Thanks, Anchorman. We've heard the Democrat talking points before. We don't need you anymore.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
I'll tell you what, Megan, I'd like to know the chain of custody on that because I believe that he made that at his house.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
I mean, that's it's as good a proof as you can get that the deterrence works. Another thing that they did, Megan, is they shut off that CBP one app that CBS was so happy about during the J.D. Vance debate. That stuff works and it actually is having a material impact right away.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
Yeah, it's not just it's not just energy, Megan. I mean, he has all of these impromptu flourishes of showmanship. Did you see how he handled the signing of these executive orders? He pulled his staff secretary into the frame and had him describe, hey, just tell us a little bit about what I'm signing here. Oh, yeah, that sounds great. That sounds great. OK, what's this one?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
It was incredible. And the press is like, oh, this is not how it's supposed to work. The staff secretary is supposed to be seen but not heard. We shouldn't be the ones talking, not Trump. And it's like, no, idiots. Trump is here and he is different. He's exactly what people wanted.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
Megan, I will tell you my first reaction to this is that the legacy media learned absolutely nothing about what they saw over the last year that's happened to their industry. People are running away from them in droves because they're tired of being misled. by basic articles.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
They open up a newspaper because they want information, not because they want some somebody's editorial opinion fashioned as a news story.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
Right.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
Here's the thing. I don't think they will ever change. I really don't. I mean, I worked as a press secretary for my entire career. I do not think they will ever change because the culture of newsrooms in New York is so far left. It's unfixable. The only thing that will change and is changing right now is the movement of audiences away from legacy media and towards media like
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
Your show, Megan, people want to know that they can get information. It's reliable and that you actually ask tough questions and you actually get the facts and you're not satisfied until you get that. And that's that's all an audience wants is reality.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
If it is true and he leaves Michelle Obama high and dry and she's dissatisfied, I cannot wait to learn about all of these secrets that Barack Obama has kept hidden over the years from Michelle Obama and her pals. Because, you know, there's a whole past on Obama that nobody has written about. But she could be a first person witness.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
I mean, the Clintons can be there together. What is going on with the Obamas?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
They did a fist bump. I mean, that's, that clears everything up, right?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
The other thing is, Robin Williams was robbed because his performance as Mrs. Doubtfire was unforgettable. So if anybody should want an award, it's him.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
Makes himself sound like he's Jim Valvano. You know, making the cancer cannot take my soul speech.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
Right now, I think the headline is a triumph. And I think it is because Trump earned that. I mean, if you think about all of the ups and downs of the last 10 years, nobody in some like back room decided that they were going to engineer Trump into that job. No, everybody was against him the entire time. And he kept coming back and he kept fighting.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
And now he's got the press basically crying uncle on the front page. I think it's a triumph.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
Yeah, and there's no better damage.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
Yeah. No better demonstration of competence with the fast start. I mean, those executive orders didn't just magically print and perfectly embossed fonts right off of the printer on day one. I mean, there were a lot of people who nobody will ever know their names who worked so hard to put that stuff together and thought about, oh, this is how the deep state's going to react against us.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
How are we going to structure this so that we can have the most success possible in you're never gonna know their names, but what they- And withstand the legal challenges, Ashbrook.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
So here's something that we've been warning about on the show for years. It's been widely reported that the left Soros, you know, even overseas billionaire donors to the left have put in place prosecutors across the country, the Soros prosecutors that have been widely reported. But there's been a similar problem with judges.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
A prime example, one of the judges at the forefront of trying to subvert the will of the American people and fight President Trump is Jack McConnell in Rhode Island. Now, Jack McConnell was a major donor to both senators from Rhode Island, including Sheldon Whitehouse, who, after he donated the money, then nominated him to be a judge.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
So they have their own patronage system, and they've used that to capture a significant portion of the judgeships in this country. So when you see this kind of behavior, like you said, it's... blatantly against the constitution, what they're trying to do here.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
They're subverting the will of the American people, but that patronage system is almost like the fail safe that the Democrats have put in control that if there's ever a Republican in office, if someone ever tries to stop the gravy train that we've been rolling with, we have, this is our last line of defense.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
And I mean, I think he brings up a really good point is the incentive structure in DC is push paper around gun for the next promotion. Why aren't those 7,000 people out in the field? They're in DC trying to, you know, work their little networks and, and, and be buddy buddy by tipping off gang members in Colorado. They should be in Colorado handcuffing them. It makes no sense.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
So one of the reasons I chose to get a house in North Carolina is I don't have to deal with DC and DC won't stop dealing with me, but I do apologize for being late.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
Thank you. I mean, you are too kind, but I mean, we would be remiss if we didn't bring up that. In this entire media sphere, you've probably been the most generous with everyone on the right, elevating voices. And in a more macro image of RFK success, when you saw the Democrats and the left focus on deplatforming and trying to shut down voices and trying to shut down discussions,
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
All that led to is this massive blowback we saw last year where now you have Democrats scrambling saying, why don't we have our own Joe Rogan? Why don't we have our own independent? Yeah, because they took over. They captured the institution because your tools, tools of the state.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
That's why folks like you put up their own shingle and start this own massive audience and have this tremendous influence and opportunity for people to have these discussions. That's where this victory came from in 2024.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
Don't folks go to jail to get their kids in college these days? Right, right.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
I mean, it's wild. She just pretty much said the whole problem here. It's like if you hire the plumber and he climbs up from under the sink and says, now let's talk about how you've decorated the place. It's like, What are you talking about, man? I gave you a job.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
I think the real victim in all of this is Ryan Reynolds. I was going to say the same thing. Like he's coming home. He's trying to sell some cell phone plans. He's trying to sell some gin. And she's like, I need your help. Little dragon. We're going to ruin people today.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
She's like, I need you to get on a zoom with Taylor Swift and we're ruining lives tonight.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
This is, this is the kind
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
That's the thing, is we've gone through four years of a federal government that completely ignored its own citizens. I mean, American citizens. And all this money is being shoveled to Manhattan, some of the most expensive real estate on Earth. to house illegal aliens in hotels that are charging 700 a night at full occupancy. So the hotel owners love this deal.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
The people of New York who have suffered, I've had multiple friends, I've had family members who left New York City because of all the crime that's going on there. So the citizens weren't the concern of the government. And now you actually have a president who cares about the citizens, and what you're seeing is these entrenched interests trying to keep the status quo that they've had of
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK Confirmed, Trump Makes Kennedy Center "Hot" Again, and Unearthed Blake Lively Video, with Ruthless Podcast | Ep. 1007
American citizens being ignored. Western North Carolina is a prime example of how FEMA pretty much abandoned those people. And we have examples of, for political reasons, they were abandoned. But they want the $59 million to be paid to people who broke the law and entered the country. It doesn't make sense.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
of a ceasefire and a stop to the fighting in gaza but yet are aghast that president trump is doing saying moving however it takes they don't want to see it so so what's the alternative solution that anyone has on the right or the left that's the good question because i i don't understand if there's no world in which we're letting ukraine into nato who's opposed to peace
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
I mean, that's almost laughable, Megan, that... President Trump is just going to give it all up to anyone. And if we look at what we had under Biden's lack of leadership, do you want that? Or do you want someone who is going to go toe-to-toe with Putin, with Xi, with Kim Jong-un? I'll tell you where my confidence, my vote is. Explain this to me. I think part of this was that we moved so quickly.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
We had that confidence-building measure with the release of Fogel. That was in the works. That happened. That was great. And then, I mean, what was the last prisoner exchange we had? The world's largest arm dealer for a basketball player? That's right. So we essentially get that for nothing as a tremendous step forward.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
We have a call with both leaders the next day, and then we're in Saudi Arabia, and the world— You know, it didn't feel like this was the normal process that happens over months and years. I'll say another underlying premise here is time is not on anyone's side. Right. The death and destruction is happening. The threat of escalation is always there. Zelensky's political situation is worsening.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
And we have an issue here of we're not going to give endless aid and other hundreds of billions of dollars. So I think everyone— Russia's economy continues to worsen with inflation, with interest rates at 25 to 30%. So everyone should be incentivized to come to the table.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
also stated that he is perfectly willing to tax, sanction, and tariff the Russians as well. They've demonstrated a willingness to come to the table. Not everyone's going to like all the terms. We now need Zelensky at the table. Not everyone's going to like all the terms. And how we get there is the process that's unfolding.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Who on earth? Any aspect of the spectrum thinks that China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran getting tighter in terms of military cooperation, technological cooperation, economic cooperation is a good thing. No one that I know of.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
And so if we start having different relationships, and there is the prospect of a bilateral relationship with the United States and Russia that is very different and much less threatening,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Though the war should have not happened, it really shouldn't, and it didn't happen under Trump's first term, we can unpack how that deterrence failed. Everything from Biden saying, well, maybe if it's a minor incursion,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
right then maybe it won't be so bad to the giveaways on nordstrom after the colonial pipeline hack i mean there are all kinds of things uh that that i think led to deterrence failing then we have this incremental uh just a little bit here a little bit there that essentially drug this war into a world war one style trench warfare endless stalemate uh
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Again, if you don't like this approach, President Trump's approach, then what is the alternative plan? Right. To continue this forever? What will the war situation look like at the end of this year or next year?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Well, look... he's focused on moving forward we can and and this you know came up in the in the riyadh talks as well this kind of long drawn out and we could go back hundreds if not over a thousand years of this side did this that side did this 2014 what happened in the minsk one minsk two uh and really why those i think those
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
talks were a good next step is we kept bringing it, Secretary Rubio, me, and Steve Witkoff back to, okay, let's move forward. President Trump is ready to move forward.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
What's that?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
No, I mean, he said it repeatedly.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
I'm repeating what he has repeatedly said. Russia invaded a neighbor, Georgia, under Bush. Russia invaded its neighbor Ukraine under Biden, and Russia invaded its neighbor under Obama, but not under him. Those are his words. They invaded. Yes. Right. Now we can get in debate of who provoked who or what have you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
What I would say to the left or say to anyone is you can't get both sides to the table in a deal if you're trashing one side or the other publicly. And at the same time, if both aren't willing to come, then, you know, we've got all kinds of carrots and sticks and leverage the president's willing to use.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Isn't it?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
No, the Israelis have evidence that they were executed. They were brutally executed.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
I don't know if that's... Yeah, I don't want to get into that level of detail for the sake of the families, but this was not an errant airstrike.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
That's the point. And by the way, just so the... I mean, it wasn't that long ago. that we had college campuses, professors, administrators, literally celebrating Hamas, flying their flag, wearing their colors, cheering them on. And where are those people now? Are they still...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Yeah, thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
They fully intend to have more October 7th if given the chance. So we have to get as many people out as we can.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
The president's been a little busy these days. We told him a few days ago, Mr. President, you know we have four years, right? Right. You think about just what we've done in the last month. I think we did more in a month than Biden did in all four years.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Well, first, we have to address what has happened in the radicalization of a whole generation. And this was largely done under the auspices of the UN and UNRWA, who has UN-funded teachers in these schools teaching these children to not only hate Israel, but hate America and really just hate the world. And to love death.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Yeah, and to love death, we also have them being rewarded and paid, financially incentivized to do this for the payments of families that is often done with aid dollars. And one of the reasons that we once again have cut that back off and we've defunded UNRWA. So let's recognize that for what it is and one of the reasons that we have this problem.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
There's – what President Trump is speaking to is a practical reality. When we looked at drone footage of Gaza flying over the miles and miles and miles of just rubble, the place looks like Hiroshima. It has been devastated, coupled with no sewage, no water, unexploded ordnance everywhere, all from a war that Hamas started.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
But how do you rebuild that place with nearly 2 million people sitting on it? How do they even survive for the 10, 15 years it's going to take? So this is, once again, you don't like this plan of somehow offering these people a better solution, a better life that they've never really been offered. We understand the ideological and emotional attachment to the land, but this is just practicality.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
And if not the neighbors, then you have countries like Indonesia, you have countries like Malaysia, you have countries like Azerbaijan and others that, and this isn't mandatory, but it should be voluntary. If they want to leave and the entire world you know, kind of heartbreaks for these people, then let's step up and have real solutions.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
And what we saw after the visit of King Abdullah of Jordan was the Arab world is pulling people together. They're pulling themselves together and saying, OK, we're going to come to President Trump with an alternative plan.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
gaza era it'll be the gaza era you know we're going to send they're going to send them to egypt and jordan we're going to rebuild it's going to be beautiful beirut was called the you know the paris of mediterranean everybody's i mean alan dershowitz who's been going there for 60 years is saying it was like singapore could have been i'll tell you what happened he said listen so we're going to invest billions of dollars the united states will be somehow be a part of it how do we prevent this insanity from happening all over again
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
So say you shift these people around, you clear the rubble, you invest billions to rebuild, and another October 7th happens, and here we are. They're very determined to kill Jews. We've been hearing the same old talking points for 70 years, and it keeps happening over and over again.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
So if he kind of shakes things up and proposes something radically new, which he did, but he also sees an opportunity, though.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
I think both can be true. Right. Both can be true at the same point. You can actually chart a vision to have this beautiful piece of real estate right just south of Beirut, which used to be called the Paris of the Mediterranean. If we clear up the security situation, we get the international community to actually fund the rebuilding. How do we prevent the same old thing from happening again?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
And how do we chart an actual positive future? And perhaps that has to kind of break some historic China. That's okay. Come back with a different plan. And that's what people are doing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
those like literally those conversations i'll see uh bb's national security advisor monday uh uh now ambassador whitcoff is is is talking to them today i mean this is a moving fluid hour by hour situation uh and if we need to get as many hostages out as we can at the same time we make sure hamas never exists to do this again.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
I could see, look, thanks partially, well, they all do. Europe is going to be harder. I mean, that is a tough, tough situation. And the president has said this as well. Iran is on its back foot. We have a historic opportunity in Lebanon now with the Aoun government. Christian Arab-led government. We have the fall of Assad, the decimation of Hezbollah.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
We have a tremendous opportunity in the Middle East. We have to make sure that this never happens again to Israel, and we will always stand with them. But we can see that pathway to get back to where we were the first term, which was the Abraham Accords.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
And the more we get back to talking about data centers and fiber and infrastructure and those conversations that become bigger, these historic animosities become smaller and smaller. That pathway is going to happen. We just started this
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
know first step of a process of bringing the war in europe to an end uh and charting that future uh we've seen the introduction of american leadership in the western hemisphere again and that's from the arctic all the way down to the border down and taking on the cartels to the panama canal also known as our 51st state and also known as greenland right it's a combo they could be 51 and 52.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
The reality is the Danish government has treated Greenland like a, you know, like kind of a backwater. They don't have the defense assets over there. We see Russian icebreakers. We see the Chinese trying to get a hold of critical minerals. We see now shipping and fishing and other things happening to the north of our neighbor in Canada.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
By the way, Canada is near the last in terms of defense spending itself. What a shock. Shocker. Trudeau came to the dinner and said, no, no, we're on a pathway to get to the minimum 2% 10 years from now. That was a commitment they made 10 years ago. So just, it's unacceptable. And we also see Panama moving away from China.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
I've heard general after general when I was in Congress and Admiral come to the table and pound the table about China and the Western hemisphere and our food, energy, ports. And now within a month, We have the country overseeing the Panama Canal saying we're coming back to the United States. We're moving away from China. One month. So all of this is in train. It's moving in the right direction.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
It's all moving in the right direction. It's not going to happen overnight. We told the president we have four years. He said, no, we don't. We're doing it right now.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Thank you so much, Mike, for being here. My pleasure.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Well, this notion that he hasn't been consulted, I've just got to push back. It's just not true. Just a week ago, President Trump in the Oval Office had Putin on the phone for the, I mean, the first time they've engaged since the prior administration had him on the phone and then Zelensky on the phone within minutes.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Both of them said only President Trump can bring this war to a conclusion and you can't get us to a ceasefire and get this war to end if you don't talk to both sides so it is an age-old kind of you know approach in diplomacy called shuttle diplomacy you talk to one side then you talk to the other oh by the way uh we just got to a ceasefire and we see hostages being released in the middle east
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
We talked through intermediaries, through the Qataris, through the Egyptians, to Hamas, and then we talked to the Israelis. The United States has taken this position of shuttle diplomacy for quite some time. So people might be frustrated about how it's going, but...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Trump, just in a very short amount of time, has taken this conversation from endless war, as long as it takes, open-ended, death and destruction, you know, all over Europe and expanding now with North Korea to is this war going to end to it is going to end and now we can debate about how.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
So to your point on Zelensky, what has he heard the last three years? You know, blank check as long as you want. You know, what's the end state? What's the strategy? What does victory look like? It was just completely open ended. And oh, by the way, what he heard from Biden was the United States really doesn't have a say. You have a say. And now he's hearing something very different.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
I think that's difficult to hear that this is going to end and you need to get to the table. In terms of the criticism, look, we've been dangling NATO membership in front of Ukraine since 2008 for 17 years. And behind the scenes, not everybody in NATO is on board with that. And I don't think the American people are on board with that.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
with us bringing Ukraine into NATO in the middle of a war, which then obligates US troops to get involved. So what we did and what Secretary Hegseth did was state the obvious, talk to the white elephant in the room, and if we're going to get to the negotiating table with the Russians quickly,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
I think that needed to be said and everybody in the room knew it, even though they were kind of aghast and clutching their pearls in Europe. And then the other piece was on the borders. But does anyone and I've asked this of my European counterparts, is anyone willing to go to the microphone and say that we're going to expel every Russian from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Because that's essentially what the 20 the the 2014 border pre 2014 border was. No. I mean, it's a statement of reality, and that's the reality that we're living in, whether it's what's going to happen to 1.8 million people living in death and devastation in Gaza. Like, can that really happen for the next 15 years? Or this. I mean, President Trump's very common sense.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
We're taking these issues head on. And I think no one should be – of the notion that somehow he's going to get played by President Putin. That is not going to be the case. He's the dealmaker in chief. And if it weren't for him, we wouldn't even be having these conversations.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Well, this is always, just in an objective look at it, going to be some type of territory, particularly after Ukraine's counter offensive in 2023 failed. And again, we're talking all of Crimea here, some type of territory for some type of security guarantee. We fully support France now saying that they'll get involved in the security guarantee. Macron is coming to the White House.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
UK saying that they will get involved in the security guarantee. There are some fundamental first principles here. One, this is a permanent end to this war, not another temporary stop like we had from 2014 to 2022. that there will be security guarantees involved for the future of Ukraine so that we ensure that this doesn't start up again. There will have to be some type of territory concession.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
By Ukraine? I think or by Putin, because I thought we're on the list. I guess by by both. And so he's going to have to give back. We can't even get to that conversation unless we engage both. No, no, I get it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
I mean, it's ridiculous, right? But that's what we've heard all week. Oh, my God, I can't believe you talked. And then I went to Riyadh with Marco Rubio and others and furthered those discussions.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
We just talked about security guarantees that you said right out the bat, Russia's not going to be happy.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
And then I think the final piece, which is the back and forth with Zelensky this week, is he himself came to New York last September, he's Zelensky, and started talking about critical minerals, partnerships. I mean, that was his idea as part of his victory plan that he proposed, including talking to President Trump about it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
So now to act like this came out of the blue, we found a bit puzzling when we personally sent our treasury secretary there to say, okay, let's do a deal. What are you offering? And I can't think of any better security guarantee than to be invested with the United States of America. As I said at the press conference with Caroline Levitt,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
they have an aluminum plant that could satisfy 100% of the United States imports if that thing was fully operational. They have critical minerals like gallium and tritium and vast reserves that could satisfy a third to a half of our import needs if they were at full capacity, if we had an investment mechanism. So
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
What I've been on the phone all week with President Zelensky's team is saying, you need to see this as growing the pie. And 50% of a much larger pie is better than 100% of what you have now, which has been you know, essentially devastated or undeveloped. So to be co-invested with us for the long term, I think is a tremendous opportunity for them.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
And we have to restructure the conversation around our aid. The Europeans are doing it in the form of loans. They're actually paying for their loans on the interest of frozen Russian assets
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
yet all of ours have been grants now for three years uh you know i mean the american taxpayer deserves some type of recoupment and if we do that in a way that's mutually beneficial then that's good for everyone that wasn't even discussed under the biden administration it was just handouts and now finally we're talking about what what about us yeah what about what about you know
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Not only are they saying they're willing to do it, they're putting operational plans in place with the NATO Secretary General and President Trump and I and others have openly said, again, a first premise is Europe has to take more responsibility. for their own security.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
The capability question is why they have to invest in their own defense. The other thing we've said that is unacceptable is we have a NATO summit heads of state summit this June, and we will still be at a third of all NATO members haven't met the minimum of 2% of GDP that they pledged to do a decade ago, over a decade ago. They just want us to take care of it. They just want, right?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
This is a lot of kind of, you know, chirping and hand-wringing about what the United States should do with its taxpayer money. Yeah. And they need to come to the table, and both Macron and Prime Minister Storm of the UK and the NATO Secretary General have said this was a kind of a shocking wake-up call. Guys, you've been hearing us say this now. We meant it. We meant it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
And President Trump means it. And I mean it. And Secretary Rubio means it. Pete Hegseth means it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Two different conversations about security guarantees of European troops right on the edge of a hot war in Ukraine that is not a NATO member versus defending our NATO allies if attacked. Those are two separate conversations. We support NATO. We support Article 5. But you've heard President Trump's
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
He looks at it, if you had a club and only half to two-thirds of the members were paying their dues, what are the other ones going to do?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
And I have to tell you, I mean, just my own experience as a Green Beret, a special operations officer with multiple tours in Afghanistan, when we were there with our NATO allies, we called them, we had the fighting allies. the British, the Canadians, the Danes. And then we had others, frankly, that were kind of in the more peaceful parts that wouldn't even allow us.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
I tried to call a medevac from Germany where we needed help. They wouldn't allow them to come. We tried to call for air support for some other allies, and they weren't allowed to do offensive operations. I guess only if the plane was shot at. They have what was called national caveats. So you have kind of my generation with Secretary Hegseth and others
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
that have seen this kind of you know play out on the battlefield and that's not to criticize the troops they were constrained by their governments and if we're all in this together then we're all in this together so what's your advice to vladimir zelensky in trying to deal with president trump right now because to me it seems like he's gotten very provocative and may not fully understand who's calling the most important shots that's right uh number one
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
The first, second, and third thing coming from President Zelensky needs to be appreciation for the American people, to appreciate what happened after the 2014 invasion. The Obama administration literally threw blankets at him. Who was the first to actually arm the Ukrainians? President Trump. Russia has invaded a neighbor under Bush, under Obama, and under Biden.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
It did not happen under the first Trump term, and he's going to end it in the second Trump term. So I think just an appreciation for that relationship. You are not going to criticize President Trump into getting your way. Seeing that kind of backfire, I think, pretty spectacularly. But thirdly, appreciate that this is the opportunity
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
the opportunity that this is to be co-invested long-term to really benefit all sides from the critical minerals and resources they're blessed to have. Let's view this as an opportunity going forward.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
Well, look, I think that he is enormously frustrated with Zelensky. He sees that martial law has been in place. I do think elections need to happen at some point. And all of these things can happen once we get to a ceasefire. I think President Zelensky, again, needs to understand that this is a very different dynamic now.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Michael Waltz on How Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Happens, and Karoline Leavitt on Sparring with the Press and Being a Working Mom | Ep. 1011
This isn't just as long as it takes, as much as it takes, and you do whatever you want to do. We are determined to end this war. President Trump is going to do that. And what astounds me is the kind of these critical voices that were so demanding of