Dem Party Imploding, Michelle Obama's Failing Podcast, and Debating Khalil Deportation, with Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 1028

Speaker 1 Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Speaker 1 Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, and happy Monday.
It's the start of a busy week as tensions on the Democratic side of the aisle are rising by the day.

Speaker 1 By the way, we're back. We were on vacation last week.
My kids are still on vacation, and I am at the beach, but working. So we will be here all week, both for the MK show and for the AM update.

Speaker 1 Thanks to all of you for watching our baby Lisa special. We really appreciated it and we're really determined to help find that little girl if at all possible.

Speaker 1 Check it out on our YouTube feed if you haven't seen it already.

Speaker 1 And by the way, happy St. Patrick's Day from Megan Kelley.
Great to wish you a happy St. Patty's Day.
I'm sure we'll be celebrating later.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, they're not celebrating over on Team Blue because the tensions on that side of the aisle, as I said, are rising.

Speaker 1 And And quickly, by the day, there's like there's a civil war happening right now within the Democratic Party. And there are calls to oust longtime Senate leader Chuck Schumer.
Chuck Schumer? What?

Speaker 1 He was untouchable. Well, maybe not.
New polls show record low support for the Democratic Party. Plus, a former first lady steps into the world of podcasting and totally bombs.

Speaker 1 We'll get to that with Michelle Obama. Joining me now, my pal, Glenn Greenwald.
He's host of Rumble's System Update.

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Speaker 1 Glenn, great to have you.

Speaker 2 Great to be with you, Megan.

Speaker 1 Okay, so this is very interesting what's happening to the Democrat Party. This morning on the New York Times is the daily podcast.

Speaker 1 They likened it to what happened with Republicans in 2009, 2010, after Barack Obama won in a sweeping victory and won all, you know, the House, the Senate, and the White House.

Speaker 1 And the Tea Party was born and healthcare was shoved down our throats. And the Republicans just wanted one thing, which was to fight, fight, find some way to fight these guys.

Speaker 1 And they were likening that to what we're seeing now with Dems. Here are the numbers, according to the polls we saw over the weekend.
First, there's CNN

Speaker 1 saying that,

Speaker 1 okay,

Speaker 1 let's see. The Democratic Party's favorability rating stands at just 29%, a record low dating back to 1992, and a drop of 20 points

Speaker 1 in just four years since January of 2021, a drop of 20 points and a record low at 29%.

Speaker 1 We saw similar numbers out of NBC, so it's not a one-off. NBC shows the Democratic Party with with just a 27% positive rating,

Speaker 1 55% negative. So they're underwater by 28 points, a record low for the Democrat Party in more than 30 years of polling.
Why?

Speaker 2 It's possible that some of that is being generated by this kind of liberal anks, this kind of dissatisfaction with Democratic Party leadership and this perception that they're quote unquote not fighting hard enough, not fighting Trump hard enough, whatever that might mean.

Speaker 2 So maybe if you ask liberals now, what do you think of the Democratic Party? They'd be more inclined, many of them would be to say, we don't approve of that. But it's clearly much broader than that.

Speaker 2 I think that's just one factor. The problem is, if you ask me, what is the, what was the worst problem with the Kamala Harris campaign?

Speaker 2 It'd be very difficult to answer given how many problems that campaign had. But if I were forced to choose the worst, I would say that She never

Speaker 2 committed to believing in anything, to standing for anything. Americans, by the end of the campaign, were like, I don't even know who she is, let alone what she really believes in.

Speaker 2 Like, what are her real convictions? What motivates her? With Trump, you always know, for better or for worse, from people's perception. He doesn't hide

Speaker 2 what he believes, quite the opposite. So the contrast was extreme.

Speaker 2 And I think in the Democratic Party more broadly, basically going back to 2015, 2016, they've defined themselves by being horrified by Donald Trump, by being aghast by Donald Trump, by being fearful of Donald Trump, by not being Donald Trump, but there's no positive vision, there's no affirmative agenda that Americans can look at and say, oh, this is what I like.

Speaker 2 So, even if you see a softening in approval ratings for Trump, and you see it a little bit, not very much, but on certain issues at least, it doesn't translate into higher support for the Democratic Party because they don't provide an alternative.

Speaker 2 It's just, we're going to fight Trump, but based on what, based on what set of values or policies, or even ideology, nobody knows.

Speaker 1 Right. What are you going to do? And that is actually also reflected in this CNN poll because they asked, name the Democratic leader you feel best reflects the core values of the party.

Speaker 1 And this is among Democratic-aligned adults. The largest recipient of votes was no one.

Speaker 1 30% said no one. No one best reflects the core values of the Democrat Party.
The next in line with just 10%

Speaker 1 was AOC,

Speaker 1 who's just about tied with Kamala Harris at 9%,

Speaker 1 Bernie Sanders at 8%.

Speaker 1 These are all bad numbers. These are clearly not the party leaders if you're only getting 9 or 10%.

Speaker 1 But interestingly, coming in at 4%

Speaker 1 is Barack Obama, who is tied with Jasmine Crockett.

Speaker 1 Yes, Jasmine Crockett, who nobody ever even heard of six months ago, but is out there doing her like dancing videos and trying to be like a new version of AOC.

Speaker 1 But unbelievably, Obama and Jasmine Crockett are tied for who best reflects the core values of the party, which tells us what.

Speaker 2 Well, I think if you look at the people you named, obviously, other than Obama, who's there because he was the president, and Kamala, who's there because she just got done being the nominee, but 9% is pathetic or whatever it was, 8%.

Speaker 2 The three people that you named, AOC, Bernie, and Jasmine Crockett, for all the intense disagreements disagreements I have with them, are people who, in contrast to what I just got done saying, do actually believe in things and do actually say the things that they believe in.

Speaker 2 And I think most of all, what they're doing now is creating this kind of perception, this branding, this posture, like we are going to fight Trump on everything.

Speaker 2 And on some level, what the Democratic Party wants, what Democratic Party voters want, I think this poll shows it. is not just fighting with Trump, but somebody who at least believes in things.

Speaker 2 And that was, you know, Bernie's campaign in 2016 and 2020 stood for a clear affirmative agenda, which a lot of people disliked and a lot of people liked, but you can't deny that he did.

Speaker 2 And I think that's what this is showing above all else.

Speaker 2 You've had this like faceless, kind of soulless, very consultant-driven, artificial set of Democratic Party leaders who are petrified of saying the wrong word, going off script even a single time.

Speaker 2 And then you have Donald Trump just riffing every day on everything without the slightest regard for how people are going to react to the things that he's saying.

Speaker 2 And I think that that is what has made the Democratic Party, which is just like this very limp, neoliberal, vaguely kind of

Speaker 2 trying to be a center-left party, but never really saying much or believing in anything.

Speaker 2 I think that's what you're seeing in these polls among Democratic Party voters is at least the people who are out there making a mock, you know, a mockery of themselves, like Jasmine Crockett, which is why the media loves her, at least they're saying something.

Speaker 2 They don't seem super constrained.

Speaker 1 They're not afraid. Limp is a rough word, but I think you're right.
It applies. That is kind of

Speaker 1 how you feel when you look at the Democrats today. Okay, so let's get to the point that you made.
You're exactly right. Both of these polls, CNN and NBC, seem to try to get at why.

Speaker 1 Why are the Democrats so unhappy? And it is not because Team Blue refuses to compromise with Trump, who has a mandate. to change the country.
It is not that at all.

Speaker 1 The Democrats are mad about any compromise. They want their party leaders to get in there and fight and stop Trump.

Speaker 1 They're still, the party, there is some still some strain within it that is very, very TDS afflicted. This is CNN.

Speaker 1 Most Democratic-aligned adults say the party should focus on trying to stop the GOP agenda.

Speaker 1 And that's, okay, so

Speaker 1 the majority want that. In just 2017, when Trump began his first term, 74%

Speaker 1 of the Dems thought the Dems should work with Republicans. Okay, now it's only 42% who want Dems to work with Republicans.
And just doing the math, it must be somewhere over, you know, 50-58%

Speaker 1 who say, fight, stop the GOP agenda.

Speaker 1 52% of Democratic-aligned adults say the Democratic Party is taking the wrong direction with the Republican Party. And then jumping to the NBC poll,

Speaker 1 similar numbers where they say,

Speaker 1 hold on, here it is.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 No more compromising, they say.

Speaker 1 Almost two-thirds of Democrats, 65%, say they want congressional Democrats to stick to their positions, even if that risks

Speaker 1 sacrificing bipartisan progress. Just 32% want them to make legislative compromises with Trump.
It was almost exactly the opposite in April of 2017.

Speaker 1 59% of Dem said they wanted to make compromises with Trump. Again, now 65% say no, no compromises, which leads us to Chuck Schumer, whose behavior was somewhat ill-timed

Speaker 1 when you look at these polls, which came out after he announced he would vote for the continuing resolution to make sure that the government stayed open for the next six months.

Speaker 1 It's really just kicking the can for a bit before they can have the real fight.

Speaker 1 But in any event, he and a handful, eight Democrats came forward to say, we'll vote through to make sure that the government doesn't shut down.

Speaker 1 And now there's actual talk of bouncing him out as party leader, Glenn.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, here's the thing.

Speaker 2 You had referenced earlier the fact that a lot of Republicans under Obama, especially the second term of Obama, wanted absolutely no compromise with the Obama administration, wanted nothing but pure resistance to everything that he did.

Speaker 2 John Boehner, when he was the House Speaker, used to feel boxed in because he wanted to do deals when deals could be done. But a lot of the base

Speaker 2 was vehemently opposed to any attempt to work with Democrats. And Obama, they wanted an opposition party.
And on some level, Democrats are now in this same position where they don't want to do deals.

Speaker 2 They don't want to join hands with the Republicans and reach compromises. They just want an opposition party.

Speaker 2 I think the big difference is that if you go back and look at the Republicans in the first term of Obama, the second term of Obama, they had it, an agenda.

Speaker 2 Everybody understood what Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney or John McCain, what these people stood for, like what their values were, what their agenda was, the reason why they wanted to oppose the Obama administration.

Speaker 2 I go back to the fact that the Democrats have none of this. They just don't have any kind of affirmative agenda.

Speaker 2 And this is the thing, this difference of the polling, I think, is so interesting between 2017 and now, because ever since Trump got elected to that first term, Democrats and liberals have been feeding now on almost a decade of not just Trump has a wrong ideology or Trump has bad policies.

Speaker 2 Trump is a fascist. Trump is a Hitler figure.
Trump's here to end American democracy. Trump is a stooge of the Kremlin.

Speaker 2 And if you really start feeding on those kinds of ideas and that kind of demonization and come to believe it, I think it makes sense to feel like, oh, we shouldn't be cooperating with Trump.

Speaker 2 The problem is, is that... All of the things that liberals seem to want in these polls, that's all been tried.
What did we hear throughout the last three to four months of the 2024 election?

Speaker 2 Trump is a fascist. Trump admires Hitler.
Trump is going to end democracy. Trump is a stooge of Putin.
These things have all been all over the place and they don't work.

Speaker 2 People don't believe that about Donald Trump. And that's why I think Democrats are so lost, this idea that we need to attack Trump even more.
They have the media who has been doing that.

Speaker 2 The Democratic Party has been doing that. And apparently they just want to double down on this strategy that clearly isn't working for them.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that the Democrats don't necessarily, I don't, I can't tell, but I don't think they necessarily want just to hear about Orange Man bad. You know,

Speaker 1 they don't like Republican ideals. They don't like certain things that Trump is doing.
They do like the immigration policies. The polls show that.
But the economy doesn't poll quite as well.

Speaker 1 So they, I mean, I'm sure they do want Trump fought on certain key things. You had Elon telling Larry Kudlow that we have to take a look at entitlements.

Speaker 1 That led to all sorts of meltdowns in many corners, including Republican ones. Anyway, I can see how they might oppose Trump's agenda, real or perceived.

Speaker 1 But what we hear out of Democrat leaders is so much is just orange man bad. It's just, okay, so what there's very little to attach to in that.

Speaker 1 Here's a montage of the Democrats and pundits melting down over Chuck Schumer.

Speaker 1 And by the way, in Chuck Schumer's defense, the reason he and some eight other Democrats decided to vote for the continuing resolution is they were worried that if the government shut down and the government workers got divvied up into essential and non-essential workers, which is what happens, the essential ones have to keep working even though there's a shutdown, that it would be like

Speaker 1 waving the red flag at the bull with Doge and Elon. Like,

Speaker 1 here is everybody who's essential and everybody else is not. And

Speaker 1 that's just like putting it all on the line. Go ahead and cut the ones who are not.
So that was one of their main concerns.

Speaker 1 But the Democrats are so mad and so determined to fight Trump, they're not accepting those rationales. Here's some of the punditry around Schumer over the past couple of days.

Speaker 1 There is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal. It is a huge slap in the face.

Speaker 3 I've never seen this level of volcanic anger at a Democrat ever.

Speaker 3 Ever.

Speaker 1 Ever.

Speaker 3 We want a Mitch McConnell. We want somebody who's going to stand up to this bully.
Chuck Schumer has radically misread the room.

Speaker 4 He is the wrong man at the wrong time.

Speaker 6 Like, them don't just have a messaging problem. They got a leadership problem.
The Chuck Schumer's of the world, the Hakeem Jeffries, they should all step down.

Speaker 8 This is a real black mark of stain on Chuck Schumer's leadership.

Speaker 5 And I'm pissed.

Speaker 1 As he folded like a paper napkin,

Speaker 5 anyone can primary him.

Speaker 1 Okay, and just one more. Hakeem Jeffries, who's, of course, the Democrats' leader in the House, was asked on Friday: is it time to switch him out to find a new Senate leader?

Speaker 1 And here's how he answered it.

Speaker 6 Is it time for new leadership in the Senate?

Speaker 5 Next question.

Speaker 1 That's significant that he just said next question. Now, by the next day, he had softened that and stood behind Schumer.
But the fact that

Speaker 1 his instinct was not to support Chuck Schumer is very telling.

Speaker 2 I think here's the reality, though, that for me at least is underpinning all of this, which is, and this is something that actually Donald Trump said often and loudly in the 2016 campaign throughout 2015 and the primary and then into 2016 in the election, which is that the Republican Party establishment and the Democratic Party establishment, which is absolutely represented by people like Chuck Schumber and Hakeem Jeffries,

Speaker 2 have a great deal in common with one another. They have differences like on social issues with abortion and trans issues and some of these kind of culture war issues.

Speaker 2 They definitely have differences there that make it seem like they're constantly at each other's throat.

Speaker 2 But when it comes to economic policy, foreign policy, Their differences are really not that great.

Speaker 2 Obama said that too, that, you know, the Republicans are trying to depict him as this radical, and in reality, the Republican and Democratic Parties fight within the 40-yard line. So

Speaker 2 when it comes to these demands that Chuck Schumer and Hawkeye Jeffries or the Democrats or whatever do more to fight Trump and attack Trump, it seems like they just want this kind of

Speaker 2 imagery of fighting, this kind of surface fight, but there's nothing for them to really fight on.

Speaker 2 Now, Trump won in 2016, in my view, because he ran against both the Republican and the Democratic Party establishments, which he had to do, because his main opponent in the primary was Jeb Bush, the ultimate figure of the Republican establishment.

Speaker 2 And he still continues to do that. So there definitely are some differences Democrats have with Trump.
The problem is that what are Democrats going to pretend to stand for?

Speaker 2 They can't agree on that amongst themselves.

Speaker 2 They are. very much shaped by their big donor base that has a lot of views that have a lot in common with the Republican Party establishment.

Speaker 2 And I I think they're just very confused about who they are. And this, that's the problem, Megan.

Speaker 2 It's like, if you don't know who you are or you're afraid to say who you are, you can like wave your fist in the air and fight and say you're going to do this and that to resist.

Speaker 2 But ultimately, no one really finds it convincing because you're not really fighting for anything. You're just fighting for the sake of fighting.

Speaker 2 And I don't think, I think that's what makes the Democrats kind of pathetic right now in the eyes of all. most people is that they're just afraid to stand for anything.

Speaker 2 They're confused about what they stand for, whose interests they serve. They really, they're just a mess.
And that's the big problem to me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a turnoff. And you don't want to be associated with losers.
Like people who fought hard and fought well, but lost, that's one thing.

Speaker 1 But people who, as you say, appear like limp, like a limp party that's afraid and self-flagellating, it's like,

Speaker 1 I don't, that doesn't inspire me to put on the team jersey, even if, you know, these voters who are answering these polls happen to be Democrats when you look at their partisan leanings and their ideology?

Speaker 1 Here is a man who got 1%

Speaker 1 in that poll asking

Speaker 1 who represents our party best, like who actually does stand for our values. 1% got this guy.
You might know him as the recent vice presidential ticket candidate

Speaker 1 underneath Kamala Harris, Harris Jim Walls.

Speaker 6 I would argue that Democratic officials should hear the primal scream that's coming from America is do something, dammit.

Speaker 5 This is wrong.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 well,

Speaker 1 um,

Speaker 1 Kay, but like, what specifically, and why is he getting one percent?

Speaker 2 I mean, think about this, Megan. This is like these people, Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz, ran for president and vice president as the Democratic nominee just three months ago.
And three months later,

Speaker 2 the vice presidential candidate is getting 1% of the vote among Democrats as to who represents the party.

Speaker 1 And Harris Harold was underneath AOC. She's one point under AOC.

Speaker 2 I haven't looked, but I would be willing to stake a lot on the fact that

Speaker 2 when somebody becomes the nominee of a major party, even in

Speaker 2 a few months after that, if you ask people who's the face of the party, a lot of people are going to say that person because it's the obvious choice.

Speaker 2 But I think Democrats do feel that loser vibe, like they need to do something else where they can, I think they're embarrassed about themselves and their party, and they should be and like even in in this in the in in that clip like tim waltz is like you know we have to fight the primal scream people we have to fight

Speaker 2 but how and for what you know and i think right like they they you know when they originally presented tim waltz it was like a gift to the left wing of the party like to the bernie aoc wing But you didn't really see much of that during the campaign because everything that Kamala Harris has always done as vice president, and I think even before senators, what she always, except in that one area that she really knows well, which is criminal law, because of her being a prosecutor, every time she speaks, she feels like she's extremely afraid of saying the wrong thing.

Speaker 2 And they infuse that into Tim Waltz. And there's a lot of Democratic Party leaders who have that sort of hesitation when they speak.

Speaker 2 And even the ones who are now trying to say, let's fight, that let's fight is an easy thing to say. That's still, again, saying, we're not Trump.
We have to resist what Trump is doing.

Speaker 2 But what would you be doing? You know, what do you want to see different?

Speaker 2 And they still seem just very petrified to say out of fear of offending voters and donors and consultants and the media.

Speaker 2 And that ultimately is the thing that not political junkies, but just like ordinary citizens who pay some attention to politics, but not constantly, that's the thing they feel more than anything.

Speaker 1 All right. So two men sensing an opportunity and clearly maneuvering to exploit it.

Speaker 1 That would be Gavin Newsom of California, who's now launched his podcast where he's having on conservative stalwarts. Well, Bannon says he's not a conservative.
He's a populist.

Speaker 1 He's an America first populist.

Speaker 1 But Charlie Kirk is conservative. Those are two of his first two guests.
I have to say I'm really against this. Charlie's going to be on tomorrow.
I'll talk to him about it.

Speaker 1 But I just think what's happening now is he's training for 2028 against J.D. Vance, and every conservative who goes on that podcast is helping him.
They're all helping him train.

Speaker 1 I don't, it's like training Drago instead of Rocky. Like, why are you doing that? You're training the wrong person.
This person actually doesn't respect you or your ideals.

Speaker 1 You're not going to change his mind. You're not going to change the minds of the people who listen to his show.
You're just going to help him. So, anyway, that's my feeling on it.

Speaker 1 But, in any event, I see what he's doing. He's trying to look like he's, you know, moderating toward the center.
He's not quite as far left. He's hearing people out.

Speaker 1 He's taking more reasoned positions on things like boys and girls sports and so on. Okay, that's what he's doing.

Speaker 1 And then there's Chris Murphy from my adopted home state of Connecticut, who was an absolute nobody about a year ago.

Speaker 1 But then he apparently fell in love with some hard left media company wannabe executive who's backed by Soros.

Speaker 1 And she's helping him on his social media. I don't know when their relationship started.
I'm just going to say he's still married. He says he separated from his wife in November.

Speaker 1 No one's filed for divorce. And yet he's reportedly, according to Semaphore, in this relationship with this young hotshot female media person.

Speaker 1 In any event, his social media presence has certainly shot up, gotten better. And now he's suddenly gone from this milquetoast, oh, gee, golly gee Willikers guy, to

Speaker 1 fucking bad day,

Speaker 1 which he said the other day he tweeted out after the, after the Chuck Schumer thing. Let me just give you a before and after.
This is just November. And here's a post that he made on Election Day.

Speaker 2 So I have a few superstitions on Election Day.

Speaker 9 One of them is that I eat lunch at the same Burger King in Torrington every single year. It's worked every election so far.
So I'm not stopping. Plus, chicken fries are really, really good.

Speaker 1 Oh my God. Okay.
And now

Speaker 1 I'm going to take a look at him.

Speaker 1 Which one's the real?

Speaker 7 Come in a bunch of different ways. And if that happens, we need to mobilize not thousands of Americans, not tens of thousands of Americans, but hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Speaker 7 We will have to be out there in the streets

Speaker 7 in a way that America has maybe never seen before. And the only way that Americans are going to decide to take that kind of risk is if they see their elected leaders taking risk as well.

Speaker 1 Okay, the name of the woman is Tara McGowan, the CEO of the left-wing network of digital media sites known as Courier Newsroom. She's 39.
He's 51.

Speaker 1 And now

Speaker 1 his social media presence, numbers, and style have all changed dramatically. His ex-post from Friday after Schumer caved is, hey, I just got home.

Speaker 1 Tough fucking day going live on Insta at whatever time. So what do you make of it?

Speaker 2 Oh, God, it's so cringy. I mean, the contrast between these two things is really interesting, right?

Speaker 2 Because Gavin Newsom is actually angering the liberal base because while you are looking at this from the perspective of like people like Charlie Kirk or

Speaker 2 Steve Mann, I guess you have Michael Savage. I have someone else coming on shortly in that vein that they're helping Gavin Newsome.

Speaker 2 From the liberal perspective, Gavin Newsom is not inviting them on to fight with them or to be confrontational with them, but to kind of placate them, almost be friendly with them in a way that, as you said, is designed to show that he's like a more reasonable guy.

Speaker 2 And they're infuriated by this.

Speaker 2 I don't think Gavin Newsom, he may be helping himself in terms of general election prospects, but in terms of the primary, where you need like the real hardcore militants, he's alienating a lot of people who just a couple months ago were very open to supporting him.

Speaker 2 But I guess, you know, his strategy is: I have to convince Democrats that not just that I'm the candidate they want, but that I'm the candidate that can win.

Speaker 2 Whereas, as you say, Chris Murphy has been told, like, oh, this, the, the, the great approach is to go online and sound like you know a hardcore social media fanatic and you know that making me see this so much like i don't know if you saw like when chuck schumer was doing his rounds of media stuff he has this new book out about the crisis of anti-semitism but of course like in the course of doing this book he's mostly being asked about this this controversy that he's fallen into and he'll do things like i saw this in three interviews at least where he'll be like and the these guys in the white house these bastards and then he's like oh sorry sorry i didn't mean that like as though he's just so enraged that he accidentally called them bastards and then but he did it like three times proving that it was scripted and you know a lot of them did you hear me say bastards

Speaker 2 yeah exactly i called them bastards that's how you know i'm fighting And, you know, he had that like thing where he went and did that chant, like, we will win.

Speaker 2 We will win with those like elderly Democratic members of Congress around him, one of whom was waving his cane.

Speaker 2 And, you know, like,

Speaker 2 you know, they like all these things that they keep asking, like, you know, who's going to be our liberal Joe Rogan?

Speaker 2 Or they see Trump using profanity, and therefore they think that they have to use profanity too, to relate to the ordinary person.

Speaker 2 It doesn't work. Like, the reason Joe Rogan became so popular is because he's so authentic.
He just, he, you know, and he's open to all different things. He's not a partisan.
He's not an ideologue.

Speaker 2 And the reason people like Trump is because they know that even if they don't agree with him, he's never trying to deceive them or bullshit them by like presenting a mask to them that isn't who they really are.

Speaker 2 So when you have, you know, politicians like Kamala, who suddenly change accents based on who she's speaking to, or Democratic members of Congress who never use this kind of language before, who now suddenly want to sound like they're social media influencers, it just, it's embarrassing.

Speaker 2 It's cringy. Yeah, some hardcore Democrats will respond, but mostly it's just embarrassing.

Speaker 1 It's totally cringy. That's exactly right.
Like I, as the audience knows, and you know, I'm not above swearing myself, but it has to be authentic to you. I come by it very honestly.

Speaker 1 I come from a long line of foul-mouthed people. No,

Speaker 1 my Nana, my mom's mom, she had a, she swore like a sailor and passed it down to me. It skipped a generation because my mom doesn't really do it and doesn't love when I do it either.

Speaker 1 But it has to be authentic to you, you know, or you just sound kind of sad and pathetic and like a glomer, like a a wannabe.

Speaker 1 There is a question of whether he, if Chris Murphy is not going to be the answer to 2028 and the Democrats problem, maybe he'll be the answer to the Schumer problem, which is a much easier substitution, right?

Speaker 1 Like Schumer's 200 years old and, as you say, represents this wing of the party that's really anachronistic and kind of just young people in general are over the Mitch McConnell's and the Chuck Schumer's of the world.

Speaker 1 Chris Murphy at least has the advantage of relative youth at 51. And this came up when he was on Meet the Press yesterday.
Here it is.

Speaker 1 Many of your supporters responded online saying you should replace leader Schumer. Is that something that you would consider? Would you consider that role?

Speaker 10 I mean, I don't think anybody's having that conversation right now. What's important is that we meet this moment.

Speaker 10 And what I'm telling you is that if we continue to observe norms, if we continue to engage in business as usual, this democracy could be gone. I don't think we have a year to save American democracy.

Speaker 10 I think the way the president is acting,

Speaker 10 using law enforcement to target dissidents, harassing TV stations and radio stations that criticize him, endorsing political violence, puts our democracy at immediate risk.

Speaker 1 So there's another, like that's been the message for the past few days. We may not have a democracy soon.

Speaker 1 Jasmine Crockett was saying to it too, like, I'm not sure we're ever going to be able to vote again. Like, we, the Democrats need to do something drastic right now, or we're going to lose the country.

Speaker 1 I mean, I don't agree with that in any way, shape, or form, but I, I actually think that message is going to resonate with the blue base. What do you think?

Speaker 2 With the blue base, yes.

Speaker 2 I mean, first of all, I just, I have to say, I find it so funny when you ask a politician who's obviously extremely ambitious, oh, do you think, would you be willing to step up into this like this promotion into this elevated political position?

Speaker 2 And they have to pretend like this is not something I've been thinking about. Like, Chris Murphy is drooling about being the Senate minority leader.
He goes to bed dreaming about it every night.

Speaker 2 And he has to be like, Yeah, that and Tara. Is it not something worth right? Because, yeah, the two of them.
And they may be inextricably linked. But in any event, yes.

Speaker 2 But here's the problem, Megan, is that I can show you in 2016, in 2017, and 2018, all throughout the first Trump campaign, the first Trump presidency, all throughout the campaign again in 2020 and then in 2024, Democrats saying exactly these same things.

Speaker 2 We're not going to have a democracy if Trump wins in 2020. This may be the last election we ever have.
If you asked Chuck Schumer.

Speaker 2 what he thinks about Trump, he would say exactly what Chris Murphy said there, which is like, yeah, I think Trump's an authoritarian. I think he's threatening democracy.

Speaker 2 Chuck Schumer has been saying that. So this is, I think, the Democrats' problem is this is what the base of the party wants to hear.

Speaker 2 And if you want to boost your social media numbers, if you want to get more cable hits, you know, if you want to seem like you're more influential in the party than you were previously, these are the things that you have to say.

Speaker 2 But in terms of actually defeating Trump and not just Trump, but the Trump movement, the Republican Party is led by Trump, this has proven not to work.

Speaker 2 People don't believe that Trump is a threat to democracy.

Speaker 2 Now, maybe with some of the things that they're doing that I actually do find controversial, but not huge departures from the tradition of presidents, that message will resonate more with

Speaker 2 a broader base of people. But I don't think so.
I don't think they will ever come to see Donald Trump as some sort of like Mussolini figure or Hitler figure or someone threatening American elections.

Speaker 2 That's just not how the American people, by and large, perceive Trump. And this is an easy message.
Like he's a threat to our democracy.

Speaker 2 They've been using it for a decade, though, and it's just not working. And I don't understand why they think it's going to work now.

Speaker 1 No. So you mentioned Joe Rogan, and there has been this sort of weird panic on the left.
And her own Joe Rogan, of course, the irony being, Joe Rogan was there, Joe Rogan. He was of the left.

Speaker 1 He was a Bernie supporter.

Speaker 1 They drove him out of the party with their insanity, their woke insanity, the lies about COVID, the crackdowns on Joe for his truths about COVID, all sorts of things, you know, that drove a lot of us further to the right,

Speaker 1 including Rogan. But the answer to their absence absence now of Joe Rogan in their party does not appear to be Michelle Obama.
And

Speaker 1 so far, no.

Speaker 1 She got no percentages whatsoever as the leader of the party, which is interesting because think of all the buzz around her when we thought Joe had to step down after that June debate. He's got to go.

Speaker 1 Could it be Kamala? Well, she's not going to win. What about Michelle? Oh, would she do it? She was one of the main names, if not the main name, mentioned.
But now nobody sees her as a party leader.

Speaker 1 And apparently, Michelle Obama does not see herself as

Speaker 1 a party leader because when she talks about like her time in the White House, Barack running, it's all negative on this new podcast.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's exactly what we thought, that she, it's very clear she hated being.

Speaker 1 uh first lady she hated being in washington she doesn't like the fact that barack was president i mean she just has nothing but negative things to say here's just one small she doesn't she doesn't like openly get, you know, caustic, but she makes it pretty clear that this has never been a good idea in her idea in her mind.

Speaker 1 Here's SOT 15 with her and her brother Craig, who's her co-host.

Speaker 5 Couldn't have gotten through eight years in the White House without my big brother.

Speaker 5 That's another sort of unusual aspect to our lives, our relationship, was this whole, you know, being married to the president of the United States thing

Speaker 5 that none of us kind of banked on. I mean, we knew Barack was smart and, you know, ambitious, but, you know, I think, but you, you talked me into supporting his run.
I did.

Speaker 5 And he was smart enough to know that he needed to come to you and sell you on the idea.

Speaker 4 Barack came to me and he's like, you know, I can't convince your sister. to go along with this.
And I'm like, whoa, whoa, go along with what? And it's like, I think I'm going to run for president.

Speaker 4 And I was like, what?

Speaker 4 I convinced you to not penalize him for being really good

Speaker 4 at what he does.

Speaker 1 There's a lot in there, Glenn. That does not sound like somebody who's in favor of his run for president or frankly in favor of him.
Like he was smart and ambitious.

Speaker 1 Think about if that's how, like, that's why you thought. that your spouse was going to run for and possibly become president.
I mean, he's smart and he's ambitious.

Speaker 1 None of what Barack Obama actually ran on, right? I want to change the world. I want to heal the country, hope and change.

Speaker 1 Like she wasn't buying it. And it doesn't sound like she buys it to this day.

Speaker 2 Yeah. You know, I have to say, there's a part of that with which I can empathize because

Speaker 2 If you run for president, your entire family is subjected to immense amount of public scrutiny. Every aspect of your life is picked apart and disclosed.

Speaker 2 And the role of first lady is not necessarily the freest role. There's expectations of what you're supposed to do and can't do, the decorum that limits

Speaker 2 what you can do. So I'm not necessarily going to say that I think it's outrageous that that wasn't something that she wanted for her life or expected for her life.

Speaker 2 But if that's really how she feels, and there's been reports for a long time that that is how she feels, it has to produce a lot of resentment.

Speaker 2 I mean, he ended up doing what she insists she didn't want him to do. And she did end up being first lady for eight years.
And if that really is the kind of thing that she disliked doing,

Speaker 2 you have to kind of think that there's something in her that's probably pretty angry about that. You know, I also should say.
that she got immense benefits from having had that role.

Speaker 2 She seemed at times to enjoy it. I mean, she was kind of very regal and one might say queenlike in her behavior.
But since then, too,

Speaker 2 both of them got extremely rich.

Speaker 2 They spend most of their time on, you know, Richard Branson's yacht or in Martha's Vineyard at their sprawling estate or in their, you know, multi-million dollar DC townhouse. So

Speaker 2 this kind of like, I wasn't sure I wouldn't want this seems unconvincing to me as well in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 I know. And she's also out on David Geffen's yacht with Oprah.
And then, yeah, her memoir was named Becoming. Look how, look at me becoming with her big face on the front.

Speaker 1 Like, okay, you know, she's a little drunk on her own wine, but not on Baracks, which is just interesting to me.

Speaker 1 At this point, after having been first lady twice, thanks to him, let's face it, Michelle Obama was not some star in her own right.

Speaker 1 She was a lawyer, I think, at Sidley in Austin, in Chicago, which is fine. It's fine.
It's no great shakes. I've been in Chicago.
I've practiced law there for many years.

Speaker 1 So it's fine. It's fine.

Speaker 1 So she took her Harvard law degree and like got a job with a corporate law firm. Fine.
Literally nobody would have known her name if that's how she had chosen to spend her life.

Speaker 1 We know who she is because of him, because he became president. He was a character and had a lot of, there were a lot of reasons behind his election.
But she still, to me, sounds bitter.

Speaker 1 And even knowing that.

Speaker 1 divorce rumors and, you know, she's not showing up for him, whether it's at the Jimmy Carter funeral or the Trump inauguration, basketball game he just went to in LA when visiting visiting their daughters, and then dinner with the daughters was not there.

Speaker 1 Um, here she is talking about it. I would, if it were me, I would say something nice about him.
I would say, like, he's just so charming. It was, it was meant to be.

Speaker 1 He, I knew he could heal the earth in the way he did. There was, there was only one who could do it, and it was my husband, Barack Obama, whatever.

Speaker 1 Then she gets on to talking a little bit about him personally. And this is how that sounded.

Speaker 1 When a girlfriend comes to visit, it's usually like, you got to stay for two days because it's going to take us so much time to

Speaker 5 check up.

Speaker 1 Now, Barack has come in, he's come out, and he's like, Y'all still talking? He'll sit down for five minutes, be like, How are the boys?

Speaker 5 And the flip side is my husband, right? Because he golfs and golfing takes as long as the first session of our, you know, it takes five hours to golf.

Speaker 1 He'll golf with his buddies, come back, and be like, How's X? He's good. It's like, what'd y'all talk about?

Speaker 5 Nothing.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 1 So can I just say she stole that from a comedian who's all over Instagram? That little bit is all over Instagram. Forgive me.

Speaker 1 I can't remember the guy's name, but he does this whole bit about how he goes, he goes golfing with a guy whose wife just died and he comes home. And the wife's like, how's he doing? Fine.

Speaker 1 Well, how would he?

Speaker 1 He knows nothing, right? It's like a thing. So I don't even know if that's real, but my point is simply that to me, none of the clips, because we have 10 of them.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to go through all of them, sound to me like a person who looks at the husband with any sort of stars in the eyes still and it is possible it is possible decades into marriage i can attest to that to still have stars in your eyes for your loved one yeah i mean me too you know i like i i first of all like i do all often want to be a little bit humble about our ability to judge a relationship from afar.

Speaker 2 I mean, there were certainly all kinds of speculation that the Clintons were going to divorce the minute they got their chance.

Speaker 2 And here they are, you know, in their mid-70s and they're still married and

Speaker 2 yeah i mean exactly oh there was all kinds of you know speculation about melania hating trump and wouldn't even you know

Speaker 2 and the reality is like even if you do love your spouse there are times you're going to fight with them and they're you're new the the only reasons that you get those negative emotions is because you love them and care enough what i find weird megan

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 2 i can't imagine going on a podcast publicly and talking about what obviously i do think those resentments are real that she's sharing like these kind of like complaints about your husband.

Speaker 2 Not like, you know, you could do it in a light way, in a humorous way, like the differences between a husband and wife or whatever.

Speaker 2 But she seems like that is pretty, I don't know, pretty intimate and pretty deep about what she seems to find.

Speaker 2 unsatisfying about her her marriage to Barack Obama in a way that I don't know, it just makes me uncomfortable.

Speaker 2 Like that's the sort of thing that you work on with a marriage counselor or in therapy or something.

Speaker 2 Why is she saying so much as you say like that's very negative um the only reason we know her is because of her husband um and yeah you're right you know i went worked for a major law firm uh when i graduated law school on on wall street and it you know i left in two years because it was so soul crushing and all of this that she's complaining about is what lifted her into this figure that she benefited from in so many ways.

Speaker 2 Like she writes books and they go to the New York Times bestseller list because she was married to Barack Obama. I don't know.
I find that strange.

Speaker 2 Like you have to have a lot of negative resentment inside of you toward your husband.

Speaker 2 If you start a podcast and you immediately start kind of complaining about what happened inside your marriage and blame him for it.

Speaker 1 Right. Right.
That, well, that's to me what she embodies. She's constantly negative and full of grievance, notwithstanding the enormous riches that this country has rained down on her.

Speaker 1 This country has done nothing to her other than treat her, as you point out, like royalty.

Speaker 1 Even though she said, this is the first time in my adult life, I'm actually proud of my country when he got either nominated or elected, whichever doesn't make a difference.

Speaker 1 First time ever, really, this country where you got, you went to Princeton, you went to Harvard Law School, you wound up a successful lawyer.

Speaker 1 You never found a way to be proud of your country before that. Okay.

Speaker 1 And ever since has been bitching about her life on the yachts and in the multi-million dollar home in Martha's Vineyard and the homes in Hawaii and Chicago and D.C.

Speaker 1 and the still controlling the levers of power and going up as the star speaker at the DNC, she's still bitter. Check back in, still bitter.
Okay, we're still not over it.

Speaker 1 There's no amount of money or political power or success or number of memoirs called becoming, maybe we should just say it. Beautiful, stunning.
That'll be the next for the follow-up.

Speaker 1 That's going to make this woman less bitter. I think it's who she is.

Speaker 1 And honestly, like this podcast, now it's getting, I don't know, the second episode had 14,000 views with, or she had Issa Ray on there, 14,000 views a couple of days into it.

Speaker 1 That I realize she's just getting started, but that's, that's embarrassing for the former first lady, for the woman who was almost president, being talked about as to step into the Joe Biden shoes.

Speaker 1 And so something's happening. I think with Barack Obama at 4%, Michelle Obama not even on the list, and this podcast struggling to put real numbers on the board.

Speaker 1 I think the Democrat Party is over the Obamas.

Speaker 2 Yeah, honestly, that really struck me too. I I mean, I'm, you know, over the last, I think, like six years now, it's kind of almost been like a conservative

Speaker 2 paranoia that the Democratic Party was maneuvering constantly to get rid of whoever was going to be their nominee and replace him with Michelle Obama.

Speaker 2 That was in 2020, what we heard, in 2024, what we heard, because a lot of polls showed that she had this kind of popularity. But I think it was very surface level.

Speaker 2 Like, it's easy to be popular if you've never run for office before, if you haven't really staked out a lot of positions and haven't had to.

Speaker 2 We saw that with Kamala Harris, the way, you know, at first she seemed like she was this cultural phenomenon, and then she had to say what she believed in and couldn't, and it all kind of collapsed.

Speaker 2 But I, you know, I see it the other way.

Speaker 2 It's like I could see huge numbers of people turning into Michelle Obama's podcast at the start just because, oh, it's something new and we're, we find this person interesting.

Speaker 2 And then tailing off as she becomes less interesting. The fact that it's starting with these pathetic numbers,

Speaker 2 you know, I think it does illustrate what you're saying.

Speaker 2 I saw a clip where she and her brother were debating whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich and trying to, you know, it's like, and again, this is what I mean.

Speaker 2 It's like, Michelle Obama lives the ultimate jet-setting life. She hangs around billionaires all the time.
She's at the most, you know, like ostentatious gala.

Speaker 2 She's wearing, you know, $50,000 and $100,000 gallons everywhere. And so I'm trying to try and be relatable by talking to your brother about such a boring, you know, is a hot dog a sandwich?

Speaker 2 Wow, you think it isn't? What? This is like, I just, no one's going to listen to this. Why would they?

Speaker 1 Exactly. I'll give you one more sound bite of Michelle with brother Craig and why they wanted to do this podcast, SOP 14.

Speaker 5 You know, some people react like,

Speaker 8 you're doing a podcast with your brother.

Speaker 1 Why would you do that? I don't really.

Speaker 5 But our dynamic is so, in my view, unique.

Speaker 5 I think there are plenty of siblings who have great relationships, but, you know, I think when we think back to where that came from, we think about, I think about just the physical closeness that we had.

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 we weren't wealthy. Right.
And dad was working class. We lived in the same apartment our whole lives and had to grow into that.
And as a result, you and me,

Speaker 1 we were physically close growing up. Because they lived in a small apartment, you see.

Speaker 1 Now, this is why Brother Craig is the co-host of this podcast, which let's face it, no one cares about Brother Craig. We don't know Brother Craig.

Speaker 1 If she were doing this with Barack, she might actually get some numbers on the board or with one of the daughters. You know, I think people are mildly interested in the daughters.

Speaker 1 But Brother Craig, I'm sorry, we don't know him. No, don't care that you were physically close, whatever that means under a roof growing up.

Speaker 1 I just feel like, look, maybe this is the new Joe Rogan thing. Maybe she too, like Chris Murphy dropping a fucking tough day.

Speaker 1 And this is Michelle Obama trying to be like her authentic self to be the new Rogan, Glenn. But to me, the whole thing is just evidence of, you know, Democrats untethered, right? Like

Speaker 1 not understanding the way forward and just kind of throwing at the board. I'll give you a last word before we go to break.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's nothing charismatic about Craig, brother Craig.

Speaker 2 Although I will say, like, that is why I kind of thought she was being authentic in these complaints and grievances about Barack Obama because she does seem close to her brother.

Speaker 2 She does seem to be talking to him in this way that maybe is more intimate. She'd be willing to say things to him that she wouldn't be willing to say to a generalized interviewer.
So I don't know.

Speaker 2 Maybe that's what they thought was going to be the appeal of the podcast, but it just seems very narcissistic. Like just these two siblings talking about themselves and their relationship.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Talk about something that matters to the rest of us. Like talk about the news.
Talk about policy. Talk about something that matters to other people.
By the way, it's very interesting.

Speaker 1 Without her speech writers, she's a shadow of the woman we saw on stage at the DNC and elsewhere, where she gives these rousing speeches. She knows how to deliver it.

Speaker 1 She pauses it right just the right moment. When it's just her, it's very flat.
Okay, Glenn stands by. He stays with us.
We'll get into Mahmoud Khalil, on which Glenn and I disagree.

Speaker 1 So that ought to be interesting. And much, much more, the New York Times actually speaking the truth now on COVID without acknowledging all of their falsehoods on the matter for years.

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Speaker 1 So, a lot going on. We just sort of covered the Dems on Team Red and what Donald Trump is doing.

Speaker 1 The most recent legal controversy is not Mahmoud Khalil, which we'll get to, but these deportations of alleged gang members from Venezuela. So, Trump and Tom Homan and Christy Noam got some 250 or so

Speaker 1 alleged gang leaders onto a plane to be deported to El Salvador because the president of El Salvador has agreed to take them.

Speaker 1 We're paying him some $6 million and he's agreed to take these folks, which most I think Americans would say, cool, great too.

Speaker 1 But not

Speaker 1 these particular people because they filed a legal challenge and said, you can't deport us. We are challenging your deploying the, quote, Alien Enemies Act against us.

Speaker 1 So, what happened was Trump signed a proclamation to deploy this thing. It's from 1798.
It's been deployed for the first time since World War II to remove these alleged gang members.

Speaker 1 It's only been used three times before to bar citizens of hostile enemy governments from the United States.

Speaker 1 And only during a declared war, Trump alleged that this gang is conducting irregular warfare against the U.S.

Speaker 1 He's declared them a terrorist organization, them and the court and the cartels.

Speaker 1 And he's also claimed that they've conducted an invasion against the United States and therefore says he can deport them without really doing anything.

Speaker 1 You can just stick them on planes and send them out of the United States. So that is what has happened.

Speaker 1 Then they went into court, the ACLU and this group representing them Democracy Forward filed a lawsuit on behalf of these alleged gang members at 2 a.m. on Saturday and saying, you can't do this.

Speaker 1 You don't have the authority. And a judge, this judge, James Boesberg, chief judge in the District of Columbia, appointed by Barack Obama, sided with the plaintiffs saying,

Speaker 1 you cannot do this. And as he heard that there were three flights departing, like at that moment or within moments to take these immigrants to El Salvador, he said,

Speaker 1 you have to stop it. You have to immediately halt the removals and return the flights to the United States, any flights that are in the air.
My head is going to explode.

Speaker 1 This is so beyond the pale that he does not have this authority. This is absolutely outrageous in my view.
And the Trump administration said,

Speaker 1 I got a whole lot of for you, which is giving you the Italian sign under the chin for no, to put it politely.

Speaker 1 The flights have already left U.S. airspace.
They're in international airspace, though there's a dispute about, in particular, whether the third flight had, in fact, already left U.S. airspace.

Speaker 1 The first two look like they actually had. In any event, then the president of El Salvador posted a picture of these now prisoners coming into his jail saying,

Speaker 1 oopsie, too late to this judge.

Speaker 1 And as I review this Alien Enemies Act, Glenn, there's been, it's old, but there's Supreme Court precedent on it saying there is no right for judicial review for good reason, because they do not wish the president's powers in this particular department when it comes to wartime powers to be reviewable by a court.

Speaker 1 And the high court said like pretty explicitly, while we know that that will lead to

Speaker 1 some bad decisions or some bad results, we don't care. They wrote as follows.
The Alien Enemy Act precludes judicial review of removal orders.

Speaker 1 This is years after World War II had ended, they wrote, in a case, such great war powers may be abused, no doubt, but that is a bad reason for having judges supervise their exercise, whatever the legal formulas within which such supervision would nominally be confined.

Speaker 1 Accordingly, we hold that full responsibility for the just exercise of this great power may validly be left where the Congress has constitutionally placed it on the President. of the United States.

Speaker 1 Not only did this guy review what Trump did, he's calling back flights of alleged gang members to the United States. To me, it's extraordinary.
What are your thoughts?

Speaker 2 Okay, so there's some things I agree with in what you said and some things I don't. So you repeatedly said, and I think it's totally appropriate, that these are alleged gang members.

Speaker 2 One of the reasons I stopped practicing law and started writing about politics and became a journalist in 2005, 2004, 2005, was because

Speaker 2 there were a lot of what I regarded as excesses, attacks on civil liberties in the name of the war on terror. One of the leading ones of which was that they were putting people in Guantanamo.

Speaker 2 None of those detainees at Guantanamo ever had any even one-time right to go into court and contest the allegations against them that they were part of terrorist organizations, that they had participated in Al-Qaeda or any attacks on anyone.

Speaker 2 And as it turns out, a lot of them, even the U.S. government admits, were actually innocent.
That's why we ended up letting them go in so many cases, because they actually were not terrorists.

Speaker 2 They were not part of members of terrorist organizations, and yet they were snatched away from their countries, brought to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, put in very repressive conditions, treated quite brutally.

Speaker 2 And I understand that in wartime, some of those things are going to happen.

Speaker 5 You...

Speaker 2 you know, are going to bomb some place where a lot of the enemy combatants are, and you're going to end up killing a lot of civilians.

Speaker 2 And of course, you're going to end up imprisoning some people unjustly.

Speaker 2 But I think we have to be very careful for that reason about when we really declare something as a war and when we don't precisely because the powers of the government escalate dramatically.

Speaker 2 Are we really at war with these gangs or are these gangs more like horrific and violent criminals?

Speaker 2 And I think one of the things we have to realize is that human institutions, by definition, are going to make mistakes and are going to err.

Speaker 2 And these are not people just being deported, which would be fine if they were sent back to their countries of origin.

Speaker 2 They're being put into a prison that is probably five times worse than Guantanamo in El Salvador.

Speaker 2 And if some of them are not actually gang members and there's no opportunity for them to contest the charges against them, you have to say that is an unjust outcome.

Speaker 2 And the question is, if it's not a judge who decides when a president is acting unconstitutionally, exceeding his powers under the constitution, who is it who judges that?

Speaker 1 Congress. Congress would have to impeach him.

Speaker 1 That's the way it works. If the judge doesn't have the purview to step in, as the Supreme Court has made it clear, they do not.

Speaker 1 They do not, not in this department, then the remedy is impeachment against the president. That's the way the separations of powers work.

Speaker 2 Except there were a lot of times in every Democratic presidency, including Joe Biden's, when conservatives went into a district court to argue that Joe Biden was exceeding his powers under the Constitution, like when they were coercing big tech companies to censor American citizens.

Speaker 1 Well, that's different. But that's different.

Speaker 1 That's different because this is, as I understand it, as I understand it, the reason that this was given, you know, the sort of no judicial review blessing is because it speaks to foreign policy during a time of war.

Speaker 1 So that's when the president's foreign power... foreign policy powers are at their peak and not reviewable.

Speaker 1 A judge cannot review President Trump saying, I'm going to bomb the Houthis or we're at war with Iran or whomever. That's That's not reviewable by Article III judges.

Speaker 1 And that, like, there are limits to the separations of powers and where a president can be checked. And when it comes to foreign policy, he's at the apex of his independent power.

Speaker 2 Right. You're absolutely right.
He's at the apex. The question is, is he without constraints?

Speaker 2 I mean, in 2008, the Supreme Court in the Bumedini case actually did rule that the detainees at Guantanamo had a one-time right of habeas corpus to go into a federal court and argue that their detention was unjust, even though we basically were treating that as a war, the war on terror.

Speaker 2 I guess what I'm saying is if all a president has to do is treat any kind of criminality or any kind of social problem and just declares it to be a war, like an actual invasion or a war, I don't think this is the sort of thing that most Americans think of when we think of wars being at war or the kind of precedent that has traditionally

Speaker 1 recognized this.

Speaker 1 I agree with you on the term war, but he's also declared it an invasion. And that's really what's going on here.

Speaker 1 I mean, he declared this an invasion, given the fact that we had between 10 and 20 million illegals come in under Joe Biden. And that's, I mean, that's covered in the Alien Enemies Act, Invasions.

Speaker 1 And he's using that declaration to say, you're out, and I'm not going to cross T's and dot I's. I'm putting you on a plane.
And it's not like they don't know anything about these guys.

Speaker 1 Today they put out the numbers.

Speaker 1 261 were sent to El Salvador, El Salvador. 137 were deported under this act.

Speaker 1 They know who these guys are.

Speaker 1 Like the government is saying, these are gang members.

Speaker 1 I say alleged because I have no idea, but the government is saying we've done our homework, Tom Homan is saying, and they're one, definitely illegals, and two,

Speaker 1 members of

Speaker 1 criminal gangs that we've declared terrorist organizations. So there's a few things.
They're alleged terrorists.

Speaker 1 They're allegedly part of this war. And they're allegedly part of this invasion.
I just think there's no question that Trump is going to be upheld here. He has the power to do this.

Speaker 1 And I actually think this judge could be in serious trouble. I actually think this judge may get admonished by the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals. And if not by them, then by the U.S.
Supreme Court.

Speaker 2 I don't necessarily disagree with your prediction about what the court's going to do, the Supreme Court is going to do.

Speaker 2 This is a Supreme Court that has given great deference to presidential power, especially when it comes to foreign policy and war, not just now, but as you say historically.

Speaker 2 The one thing I want to quibble with, though, is that I remember being told that we don't need to worry about Guantanamo because it was only the worst of the worst that were being put there.

Speaker 2 They were all terrorists. The government knew they were terrorists.

Speaker 2 And it turned out a lot of the people, not just a few, but a lot of the people who were put there ended up being falsely accused, which is always going to happen.

Speaker 2 Now, maybe we say, look, we don't care between,

Speaker 2 you know, allowing people to be in our country and just punishing them. unjustly based on false accusations.
We prefer the latter.

Speaker 2 But I do think, you know, because deportations usually, which nobody objects to, that's what Trump ran on, means taking these people and sending them back to their country of origin, but they're not put in a prison.

Speaker 2 Here, they're being sent to on purpose, one of the most repressive prison systems in the world, which is the drug dealing and terrorism prison in El Salvador.

Speaker 2 And if they're not really gang members, if they're just in the country illegally,

Speaker 2 is that a just outcome? And is that an outcome that even if it's unjust, we're willing to live with for the ability to solve the broader problem? I'm not that convinced.

Speaker 2 I don't like people being unjustly accused or punished.

Speaker 1 Get out. That's my feeling.
As you know, get out, but not necessarily to an El Salvadoran prison.

Speaker 2 That's the difference.

Speaker 1 Get out to anybody who will take you. If you can go to Canada, go to Canada.
That's why just stay out of the United States. That's all I care about.

Speaker 1 Like, don't come here illegally, or you could wind up on a midnight flight to El Salvador. It's not going to end well for you.

Speaker 1 And if Tom Homan has reason to believe you're part of Trenda Aragua, so much the worse for you.

Speaker 1 Like, don't do anything that's going to make Tom Homan think that, because it got so out of control under Joe Biden that we're now at this point.

Speaker 1 Invasion, extraordinary powers, flight, you're gone, and federal judges are losing their minds. Okay, which brings us to Mahmoud Khalil.

Speaker 1 So the audience, I think, knows my stance on this because I did a weekend podcast. If not,

Speaker 1 the short stance is I believe the government has every right to deport him, notwithstanding the fact that he's a green card holder and married to an American, which is really kind of an irrelevance legally.

Speaker 1 But the green card is not an irrelevance. And

Speaker 1 he's deportable under several different statutes. He's done a number of things that can get him deported.

Speaker 1 I think some of his speech is grounds enough, but he's actually behaved in a way that could get him deported. You can get deported for a lot of things, even when you're a green card holder.

Speaker 1 It's a privilege. It's not a right.
And Trump had every right to say, you're out of here. And I know you disagree.

Speaker 1 And you think it's a First amendment case which i don't think so explain why you think that and and why you defend

Speaker 1 them in general

Speaker 2 sure i mean first of all you know i i've been defending free speech as probably my most important value not just as a journalist but as a lawyer for 30 years i remember being inspired by what the aclu did in skokie illinois where they defended the right of american nazi party members to march through skokie which was a town of Holocaust survivors wearing Nazi uniforms, even though the lawyers who did that were Jewish lawyers and they had Jewish donors.

Speaker 2 It was a very overwhelmingly Jewish group, and they still defended the right of free speech of the people who were Nazis, who only 30 years before had tried to exterminate Jews from the earth.

Speaker 2 Because I think the principle is so important.

Speaker 2 And I've seen many times people say they believe in the principle when it comes to their own allies, and then suddenly start finding ways to justify censorship by saying it's incitement or it's something else when it comes to the views they most disagree with.

Speaker 2 And I think that's what is important to recognize here: the Trump campaign, the Trump administration made very clear that they intend to go after and punish in a lot of ways people who are protesting the Israeli war in Gaza or Israel itself, because the Trump administration are strong supporters of Israel.

Speaker 2 So we have to recognize the people they're going after have views that the Trump administration vehemently disagrees with.

Speaker 2 In the case of Mahmoud Khalil specifically, I've heard a lot of accusations about him that he is a supporter of Hamas, that he engaged in intimidation of violence. There's no evidence of that.

Speaker 2 It is true that some of the protesters at Colombia engaged in bad acts, but you can't impute those to Mahmoud Khalil.

Speaker 2 And there was, I don't know if you saw, there was a, there was Wall Street Journal reporting yesterday about who Khalil Khalil is.

Speaker 2 And a lot of the Jewish students at Columbia who are part of these encampments, part of these protests, and they did have a ton of American Jewish students as part of them.

Speaker 2 I've interviewed them, all stood up for Khalil and said, The reason he was the mediator between our group and the administration is because he's trusted by all sides.

Speaker 2 He has defended Jewish students before. If he hears an anti-Semitic claim, he'll denounce it.

Speaker 1 He's actually been at the Shaban Sanders that they were holding.

Speaker 2 I'd like to know specifically on the record what he has done that makes this claim that he's a Hamas supporter or incited harassment and violence against Jewish students justifiable.

Speaker 2 Because I've looked very carefully and I don't see anything. He went on CNN and said his

Speaker 1 oral is basically a branch of Hamas. That's one thing.

Speaker 2 Megan, the UNRWA was funded by the U.S. government for decades under both political parties.
It's a part of the U.N.

Speaker 2 And I don't

Speaker 1 agree with that. It's very aligned with Hamas.
You can't deny that.

Speaker 2 I mean, if you're going to say that people who go work for the U.N. are now suspect of being terrorists or whatever, you know how many employees of the U.N.
are and of UNRAW institutions.

Speaker 1 Even Joe Biden cut ties with UNRWA because it was working with Hamas post-10.7.

Speaker 1 Even the Democrats did that. This is not a partisan position.

Speaker 2 Well, Israel is not a partisan position. Joe Biden fed Israel the arms and the money that they used to wage the war in Gaza.

Speaker 2 Joe Biden has long been one of the most stalwart supporters of Israel in all of Washington.

Speaker 1 Netanyahu was a good idea. I agree with that.

Speaker 1 To some extent, I agree with that. But we're getting sidetracked because even though the guy worked for UNRWA, which I do believe is working for Hamas,

Speaker 1 we can table that. We can put that to the side.
I don't think there's any question this guy supports what Hamas did on 10.7.

Speaker 1 Any question whatsoever. He was

Speaker 1 wearing a shirt.

Speaker 1 First of all, he worked for UNRWA.

Speaker 1 Second of all, he referred to it as armed resistance, what the Palestinians did. He said that.
It's on tape. That we aired it on the show on Saturday.

Speaker 1 That's not arms resistance. That's terrorism, what happened on 10.7.

Speaker 1 But you don't need any of that.

Speaker 1 I'll give away all that, what I just said. Let's just look at what he did as the spokesperson for this group, Columbia University Apartheid.

Speaker 1 I can't remember the acronym, but it's, you know, the group, C-U-A-D, I think it was, divest. And he served their spokesperson.

Speaker 1 That was the group that took over Hamilton Hall and engaged in the encampments on Columbia University. Hamilton Hall alone had so many crimes we could spend all day talking about.
Was Khalil there?

Speaker 1 He was.

Speaker 1 Not that we know of. We don't believe he was there, but he was the chief negotiator.
No, it matters.

Speaker 1 When you're the spokesperson, that's literally written into the immigration and the terrorism statutes. If you are the spokesperson for a group that espouses or supports terror, you're out.

Speaker 1 That's all they have to prove. Spokesperson is enough.
And he was the spokesperson by every account that you hear of his behavior. He was going in there daily.

Speaker 1 to speak with Columbia University administrators saying, this is what we need. You need to divest entirely from Israel or you're going to get more Hamilton halls.
That's it.

Speaker 1 That's all we need to deport him.

Speaker 2 Okay, let me just say this is so important about what these protests were in general and what the one at Columbia was, because I've interviewed a lot of Columbia students who participated and even organized these protests.

Speaker 2 Once again, many of whom are Jewish, many of whom are American Jews. There's tons of American Jews who were vehemently opposed to the Israeli war in Gaza and who went out and protested against it.

Speaker 1 But a lot of the ones who show up are like Jewish voices for peace, which is as Hamas supporters. They count.

Speaker 2 They count.

Speaker 2 They still count as being Jewish. And maybe it's just a job.

Speaker 1 This does not pretend that they represent the dominant Jewish voice on the issue. No, but

Speaker 2 they represent a significant minority. They had Shabbat dinners inside the encampment at Columbia because of how many Jewish students were there.
Here's, and Khalil would go.

Speaker 2 Here's what the Wall Street Journal said. Khalil is someone who would even step in front of an aggressor to protect Jewish students and who is a believer in nonviolence.

Speaker 2 And here's what an American Jewish woman at Columbia said. I can state with full confidence that Mahmoud has never expressed support for Hamas.

Speaker 2 And she said she's an American Jewish woman who believes in the importance of Israel as a Jewish homeland. And it talked about how often he would attend the Shabbat dinner inside the encampment.

Speaker 2 I think, like, let me just use

Speaker 1 a concentrate, Glenn. You're talking like inside the encampment.

Speaker 1 So, yes, he would go and participate in this probably Jewish Voices for Peace Shabbat dinner, which again, they're hard partisan Hamas supporters.

Speaker 1 While he was stopping, while this group that he was affiliated with was stopping Jews from attending the buildings they wanted to attend crossing campus when they wanted to cross campus professors too like i'm sure i'm

Speaker 1 super glad he had shabbat dinner while he was stopping jews from exercising their rights on the campus

Speaker 2 you have no proof that he was ever stopping jews from

Speaker 2 okay okay see so that means like i what i've spent you know two or three years arguing with liberals by arguing that they had wildly overstated what january 6th was and had unjustly prosecuted the people who who were there, especially the ones who never engaged in violence.

Speaker 2 And what they would tell me is, what do you mean? Here are the people who are beating police officers. This was not a nonviolent protest.

Speaker 2 And I would say, okay, well, punish the people who used violence against the police officers.

Speaker 2 You can't impute that to the entire protest.

Speaker 1 No, you're taking, you're taking the worst.

Speaker 1 You're talking about terror and immigration. No, you're in it.
We're talking about apples and oranges.

Speaker 1 That's a very different thing. You can't charge somebody with crime by like thought or by affiliation unless it's an actual conspiracy.
But we don't have to prove that he committed a crime.

Speaker 1 We don't have to prove that. Although I believe he probably did.
If he's the spokesperson for this group, then you could prove. You could allege extortion.
You could allege conspiracy.

Speaker 1 Now, Alvin Bragg is unlikely to do that, but that doesn't mean crimes haven't been committed by this guy. We'll have to see where the evidence goes.

Speaker 1 They're looking into that right now, including the DOJ. But you don't have to prove a crime.
It's enough that he did it.

Speaker 1 If he did these things, if he acted as a spokesperson for this group that did commit crimes on the campus of Columbia, he's out.

Speaker 1 You can get him out under numerous provisions under immigration law for criminality, for supporting terror, for espousing terror, and then ultimately for the Marco Rubio Secretary of State thing that says if you're a threat to foreign policy, you're gone.

Speaker 1 You don't have to prove anything other than Marco Rubio reasonably believes that.

Speaker 2 The Bill of Rights still restricts what Marco Rubio can do, even though he's the Secretary of State. The Bill of Rights applies to green card holders.
The Supreme Court has said that for 120 years.

Speaker 2 And if Joe Biden had said, I'm deporting Jordan Peterson because he's expressing a lot of dissent to my views and participating in protest against our policy and I deem him a threat to foreign policy, every conservative in the country would have said that is a threat to the Constitution to do.

Speaker 1 I think the important thing here is to be reasonable.

Speaker 1 Okay, there's nothing unreasonable about saying being the spokesperson for an on-campus terror group means you violated your terms of staying here and your green card is getting away from the terrorists.

Speaker 2 I think you're wildly mischaracterizing the point of this protest. I remember very well in 2002, people who are opposed to the U.S.
invasion of Iraq were told, oh, they were Saddam Hussein supporters.

Speaker 2 And they would say, no, we're not Saddam Hussein supporters. We just don't think the U.S.
should invade Iraq. Same thing now.

Speaker 2 If you don't support financing Ukraine, you're told, oh, you're a Putin supporter. And you say, no, I'm not a Putin supporter.
I just don't want the U.S. involved in this war.

Speaker 2 That's a strong protest were about Astronomy.

Speaker 2 Because these protests were against

Speaker 1 really important in Gaza. They were not defending Hamas.
They were just read you that Colombia divest. They were demanding that Colombia.

Speaker 2 That doesn't mean that you know that that

Speaker 2 they

Speaker 2 the anti-Israel protesters modeled themselves after the student movements in the 1980s that were against the apartheid regime, the main demand of which was we demand that you divest from apartheid South Africa.

Speaker 2 That's what these students are demanding. We demand that is a peaceful protest, not a biologist.

Speaker 1 The American students cannot be deported for having done that. But someone here on a green card can be.

Speaker 1 If they had, he's the Trump is not running around trying to deport people who protested on behalf of the Palestinians in Dearborn, Michigan without committing crimes. He is not.
Not yet. Not yet.

Speaker 1 The reason this guy, and he's not going to, Glenn, let's be honest. The reason this guy got caught in the crosshairs is because they unleashed hell on that Columbia campus.
They behaved criminally.

Speaker 1 His group, of which he was a spokesman, whom he was defending and making demands on behalf of, in dealing with the university daily. That's why he's getting deported, not because he's pro-Palestinian.

Speaker 2 I'm having trouble about this issue of, is criminality necessary? You keep accusing him of committing a crime.

Speaker 2 Megan, hundreds of Columbia students, hundreds, maybe thousands were arrested throughout 2024 when the administration would call the NYPD on them.

Speaker 2 khalil was never even arrested as part of those protests because he was never one of the aggressors he was the mediator he was somebody that the administration trusted that the protesters trusted to try and bridge and de-escalate that was his role to try and depend that's about that is not at all supporter that is

Speaker 1 you say Yeah, no, he does look like a Hamas supporter to me. Of that, I have very little doubt.
I agree.

Speaker 2 He does look, that's the thing. He looks like a Hamas supporter to you, but that doesn't make him one.
A lot of people look like a...

Speaker 1 I'm not talking about his appearance i'm talking about the t-shirt which has some guy with the head exploding and his behavior at on which is basically a hama an arm of hamas just ask joe biden that's why we pulled our support there are there there is evidence that he's a hamas supporter but i to prove that so i there's it's pointless to spend too much time here um we have deprived somebody we've pulled somebody's green card because he has schizophrenia tell me We can pull people's green cards for things like that for violating the terms of their visa.

Speaker 1 We said, you know what, you violated the terms that we gave you the permission to stay here. So it's over.

Speaker 1 But we can't pull it for somebody who's the spokesperson for a group that's banging down the doors, that's smashing windows with hammers, that's intimidating Jewish students on campus. That's a farce.

Speaker 1 Marco Rubio can do it. Pam Bondi can do it.
President Trump can do it. You can do it whether he's committed a crime or whether he hasn't, whether he's just engaged in these behaviors.

Speaker 1 And by the way, just because he wasn't charged Alvin Bragg doesn't mean he did not commit extortion or he wasn't ever arrested, even though hundreds of

Speaker 1 hundreds of New York

Speaker 2 of Columbia students were arrested. He was never, I think it matters a great deal because if you're not then deporting him because of criminality,

Speaker 2 you're admitting that you're deporting him because of his views. And the view that is most sacred in the Trump administration, this is why you're going to debate Trump.

Speaker 2 No, but

Speaker 2 there's no, but

Speaker 2 if that's these claims, they have to be proven. If you're saying, oh,

Speaker 1 not even the Trump administration is saying that would not have been in Hamilton. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
You're misstating it.

Speaker 1 A conspirator would not have been in Hamilton Hall necessarily. The conspirator may have been.

Speaker 1 He wasn't in Hamilton Hall.

Speaker 1 He was not.

Speaker 1 That's my understanding. I've already said that.
I've already said that. I've already said that.
That's my understanding.

Speaker 2 He did not. He did.
He was not. All of them got arrested who occupied the menu.

Speaker 1 Why are you arguing with me? I already gave you this point.

Speaker 1 I already gave you this point. It's pointless for us to keep going back and forth.
What I'm saying is that, of course, the cops wouldn't have arrested him. He was the negotiator.

Speaker 1 He was the spokesperson. He was the one in there with Columbia saying, sure is a nice university you have here.
Shame if anything happened to it. You could charge conspiracy.

Speaker 1 You could charge extortion. Whether it's been done or not is irrelevant.
He violated the terms of his permission slip to be here, and he can be deported for that alone.

Speaker 1 Never mind whether he actually crossed a criminal line. I just, I don't actually espouse or supported terrorism.

Speaker 2 The reason reason you need to turn him into a Hamas supporter is because Hamas is a designated terrorist organization, and that's how you then claim that he is deportable.

Speaker 2 But he has never been a Hamas supporter. He's an opponent of the Israeli war in Gaza.
His argument is, is that the war has been incredibly indiscriminating, that it's a war crime.

Speaker 2 The International Criminal Court agrees with him. Many countries around the world agree with that view.
He was protesting against a war, not in favor of a terrorist group.

Speaker 2 And that is why you think Jewish students are in favor of hamas i don't know i know a lot of jewish opponents of israel i don't know a single one of them who thinks that what hamas did on october 7th voices is justifiable jewish voices for peace is almost impossible

Speaker 1 then if they support hamas jewish voices for peace well listen alan dershowitz that is an anti-war group alan dershowitz he's Alan Dershowitz goes off about this group every other day, what they've done to him, how they've targeted him.

Speaker 1 Look,

Speaker 1 don't say like, oh, well, they're Jewish voices and they're against, they're in favor of Mahmoud Khalil. If they're Jewish voices for peace, they're totally unpersuasive to me.

Speaker 1 They've got a dog in this hunt. We've seen that repeatedly with that group.
It's fine. He doesn't, I do think he's a Hamas supporter.
100%. I believe that.
But it's not necessary to my argument.

Speaker 1 If he associates with terror, if he poses a threat to the United States, either or, he can be deported. If he endorses or espouses.
terrorist activity, he can be deported.

Speaker 1 If he violates the term of his visa, he can be deported.

Speaker 1 Or if the Secretary of State has reasonable grounds to believe that he poses a serious adverse foreign policy consequence to the United States, he can be deported. He's done.
He's out.

Speaker 1 This is not going to work out well for him. And his hopes of becoming an American citizen are over.

Speaker 2 I do think it's important to note that support for Israel was one of the top two or three priorities of many top Trump officials. They campaigned on it.

Speaker 2 Miriam Adelson and other pro-Israel groups gave them a ton of money to make sure that that was a priority.

Speaker 2 And I think it's a huge coincidence to believe that they just suddenly found immigration problems and exactly the group that most opposes the policy that they most cherish.

Speaker 2 And I think that's where the free speech issues come in.

Speaker 1 I'm going to give you a point on our earlier discussion about

Speaker 1 the Trenda Aragua alleged gang members being deported, because I did ask my team, I'm like, what happens to them when they go to El Salvador? Which is, I confess, a question I had not asked myself.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 here's what the Associated Press is reporting: that the El Salvadorian justice minister has said that those held at this facility will never return to their communities, but will only be held for a period of one year, but it's renewable.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 you know, if you're going down the lane of they may not be guilty, I concede this is potentially problematic with the justice that they'll be facing on the other end, but I stand by the fact that Trump had the right to do it in any event.

Speaker 1 But I concede there's some problems there on the due process end over in El Salvador. What a shock.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's move on because we have problems of our own here in the United States, and they relate to the New York Times in many ways. But here's today's way.

Speaker 1 Unbelievably,

Speaker 1 unbelievably, the New York Times comes out with a piece dated yesterday, March 16th, by opinion columnist Zainep Tufecki.

Speaker 1 We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives. We

Speaker 1 were badly misled. Somebody online changed it to, we badly misled you

Speaker 1 about the event that changed our lives. And that's a much more accurate headline from the New York Times.
Glenn, this is so infuriating to me.

Speaker 1 The whole thing.

Speaker 1 is about stuff you've known, your audience has known, me and mine too, and most people who have been independent thinkers, or certainly as part of right-wing media, people who listen to Rumble, we've known this for years, since 2021.

Speaker 1 But here they are, 2025, with an

Speaker 1 aha moment on the lab leak as the origin of COVID and how those in charge misled us. I'll just give you a couple of highlights from the piece and then let you take it.

Speaker 1 She starts by pointing out in 2020 when people started speculating about a lab accident being the spark behind the pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks.

Speaker 1 By whom? Again? Zaynep? Who is treating them like kooks and cranks? Could it have been the New York Times? Anyway, okay.

Speaker 1 Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory,

Speaker 1 insisting the virus had emerged from animals.

Speaker 1 And when EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was doing this so-called gain of function research, no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

Speaker 1 So the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transition. It certainly seemed like consensus.

Speaker 1 We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter. She's speaking of Don

Speaker 1 McGann, who worked for the New York Times, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications.

Speaker 1 The reason she wants us to know that it was probably a lab leak and that we were so grossly misled is because

Speaker 1 people need convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away,

Speaker 1 basically. Now that RFKJ is in charge of HHS and she's seeing like measles and other problems that she cares about.
So she really, really wants us to trust our public health entities again.

Speaker 1 Not him, but like the scientists and the Nobel laureates and the Dr.

Speaker 1 Fauci's of the world, because they must have credibility in the wake of all these online influencers or bad faith actors who she later refers to as follows.

Speaker 1 I think she means you and me and others like us.

Speaker 1 Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren't just earnestly making inquiries, they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention.

Speaker 1 She goes on to say, these half-truths and strategic deceptions made it easier for people with the worst motives to appear trustworthy while discrediting important institutions where many earnestly labor in the public interest.

Speaker 1 My God, Glenn, this thing has it all. You take it.

Speaker 2 I think you picked out the most important section, which is it's in that last one, it's sort of an attempt to acknowledge that the people

Speaker 2 questioning and then dissenting from the pronouncements of Dr. Fauci and that entire establishment he leads ended up being correct.

Speaker 2 But she still has to preserve the idea that the only trustworthy views are found in places like the New York Times, not in that dirty sewage of independent media.

Speaker 2 So she has to say, even though they were right, they kind of were had bad motives and were trying to discredit institutions.

Speaker 2 Obviously, the people who discredited these institutions, these scientific institutions, are the people who led them. And it wasn't just that they got it wrong.

Speaker 2 It's that they, the whole thing, you know, starting all the way back in 2020 with that lancet letter that was engineered by peter dasik at eco health alliance who had a financial interest and a reputational interest in ensuring that nobody thought it was a lab leak since he himself had money to work with wuhan on the very research that likely caused the leak they allowed that person to be the sort of objective source they hid his key role and that that's the letter that said anybody suggesting a lab leak is engaged in racist disinformation and conspiracy mongering against our chinese colleagues and they pretended to have a certainty about the origins of the covet virus that they knew they didn't have because internally all these people including some of the ones who signed that were saying actually i think a lab leak is more likely and fauci convinced them all that like for the sake of science or something they have to lie to the public and that's exactly what they did And even though I'm not going to sit here and say I knew from the very beginning that it was a lab leak, I'm not a scientist, I'm not an epidemiologist, I did observe and complained about the fact that there was no

Speaker 2 permission to debate these questions. If you had raised the issue of a lab leak, including for Muhan Lab, you would have been censored off the internet by every major big tech platform.

Speaker 2 They didn't permit any questioning or debate about them. They destroyed people's reputations.
And as it turns out, they were the ones who were wrong and not just wrong, but corruptly wrong.

Speaker 2 Now, this particular op-ed writer has had some instances where she was deviating from COVID orthodoxy, but you cannot write an op-ed like this in the New York Times without acknowledging that the leading institution preventing this discussion, destroying people's reputations based on their correct opinions, was itself the New York Times and corporate media outlets like it.

Speaker 2 It's this attempt to rewrite history and say, oh, we're here to tell you the truth now so you can trust us when it's very easy now.

Speaker 2 to say all this now that intelligence agencies have come out and said they think it's a lab leak and that's what's going on is an attempt to salvage reputations not to be truthful.

Speaker 1 And it's so

Speaker 1 belated. I mean, even other mainstream news organizations have published this kind of piece years earlier.
Like they are literally the last to the party.

Speaker 1 And now they want credit for saying, oh, we were misled. We had no idea.
And you mentioned the Times' own past sins, Apurva Mandovelli,

Speaker 1 who is, she's their COVID reporter. She replaced that guy, Don.
I think his last name is McGann. I remember, if memory serves.
In any event, she replaced him, McNeil,

Speaker 1 McNeil, sorry. I think McGann might have been a White House lawyer.
Anyway,

Speaker 1 she's their COVID reporter.

Speaker 1 In 2021, not only did she dismiss the possibility that this thing came from a lab, but she claimed to say otherwise was racist. She tweeted out the following.

Speaker 1 Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. Guess who's not mentioned in Zaynip Tufecki's piece? A poor of a Mandevelli.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's insane what they've done to us here.

Speaker 2 I mean, it was such grotesque politization of the science. I'll never ever forget how they said you have to stay at home.

Speaker 2 You cannot leave your home under any circumstances, even if it's to go to your parents' funeral. You're a grandma killer.
You're a sociopath if you leave your home.

Speaker 2 And then the Black Lives Matter protest erupt in the middle of 2020, four months later, and they're like, not only can you leave your home, you should leave your home because it's a huge public health risk to allow racism to fester.

Speaker 2 And they just radically revise their quote unquote expertise based on their political agenda. And this is exactly this, you know, it's so ironic, Megan,

Speaker 2 because their view of how COVID spread, which was, oh, these Chinese people have filthy, disgusting, unsanitary wet markets and that's, and they eat bats.

Speaker 2 And that's how this actually escaped was a much more racist theory than the view that, you know what, the Chinese have a very sophisticated research lab that we in the United States fund and work with.

Speaker 2 And perhaps they used, you know, insufficiently careful procedures. And the lab, that was the way more racist view, the one they were pushing.

Speaker 2 But ultimately, it didn't matter which was the racist view or not.

Speaker 2 The only thing that mattered was what actually happened.

Speaker 2 And by exploiting racism and xenophobia against the Chinese, these journalists prevented the truth from even being discussed, let alone being let out.

Speaker 2 And I hope nobody falls for this now that the New York Times is on the side of truth. They're just engaged in reputational rehabilitation.

Speaker 1 That's it. I mean, you read this piece and it's just, it's so infuriating.
And she writes, only an honest conversation will lead us. forward.
Right.

Speaker 1 So you need to get honest, New York Times, about your role in all of this. And this piece doesn't even come close.
At no point, it doesn't acknowledge any of its own bad reporting or mistakes.

Speaker 1 I mean, the number of, I just went, I just did like a quick search of New York Times pieces. This one is from,

Speaker 1 hold on,

Speaker 1 July of 2023. By this point, we had...
plenty of reason.

Speaker 1 We already knew about the conspiracy behind that Lancet piece and the other nature piece and the collaboration amongst Fauci and these virologists to say it's definitely not the lab league.

Speaker 1 We already knew. We knew about that a year plus earlier.

Speaker 1 But in July of 2023, once again, they're saying, oh, two virologists testified that they remain convinced that the coronavirus was natural in origin and said Fauci did not exert influence over a study they wrote.

Speaker 1 And they're completely on the side of those virologists trying to tell us that

Speaker 1 this originated not in a lab, but... in nature, just like Fauci maintained.
Glenn, it's always a pleasure. I always feel spicy today, but it's great to disagree.

Speaker 1 And I love that our audience gets to hear your POV.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we're both very passionate and spirited advocates of things we believe. And I love the fact that we can have those conversations.

Speaker 2 And it only, for me, at least enhances my respect for you. So I really appreciate you having me on to do that.

Speaker 1 Likewise, likewise. And I totally,

Speaker 1 I love hearing that point of view, especially from the point of Palestinian protesters, because that.

Speaker 1 You are allowed to support Palestine. You are allowed to be against Israel.
Those are all fine things to do and be and say. And it's just, you know, now when you cross over into,

Speaker 1 you know, potentially more Hamas support, but that's in dispute.

Speaker 1 And when you're not a citizen, things change because there's not equal rights between green card holders and American citizens. Not yet.
Glenn, a pleasure. I'll see you over on Rumble.

Speaker 2 Great seeing Megan. Thanks.

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Speaker 1 I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.

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Speaker 1 I'm going to stay for a minute on this New York Times thing. Okay, I just got to talk to you about this for a minute because my blood is boiling over this.
I'm so angry.

Speaker 1 They, they, of course, it wasn't the New York Times. It wasn't only the New York Times.

Speaker 1 The Post has got a great piece from last June, I think it was, where they just ripped these folks to shreds because they are too, a New York Times writer was blaming partisan politics for the lab leak cover-up.

Speaker 1 There was a piece by an op-ed person back then.

Speaker 1 They ran a molecular biologist essay, Alina Chan, back then talking about this. So this person blamed partisan politics for

Speaker 1 covering up. that this was a lab leak.
And the Post pointed out at the time, it wasn't just New York Times. It was CNN.
It was MSNBC. They called the lab leak a debunked conspiracy theory.

Speaker 1 NPR falsely asserted, quote, scientists debunk lab accident theory of pandemic emergence.

Speaker 1 Reading here from the New York Post, again, June of 24. Social media companies outright censored lab leak claims.

Speaker 1 Facebook banned a post-opinion column by Stephen Mosier for speculating on the possibility that it was a lab leak.

Speaker 1 They write as recently as Monday, again, in June of 24, an AP story bizarrely claimed, quote, many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature, and quote, there's no scientific information backing the lab leak explanation.

Speaker 1 It's just,

Speaker 1 it's unbelievable how we were gaslit. And the New York Times wants to pretend that it was just the experts.

Speaker 1 It 100% was the experts, but that the media had no role, that they were not complicit, but they were fully complicit. And Glenn's exactly right.

Speaker 1 Now they're desperate to try to cleanse their own hands because they need to have credibility going into the Trump years, especially under the awful, evil RFKJ, to tell you when our leaders are misleading us.

Speaker 1 That's what's happening here.

Speaker 1 It's infuriating. They have no credibility.
No one believes them anymore. No, not those experts who ran these institutions under Joe Biden.

Speaker 1 I believe public health and the trust in it will resurrect slowly now under RFKJ,

Speaker 1 at HHS, under Bhattacharya, at NIH, and under McCary at FDA. I believe it will resurrect, but it's going to take some time.

Speaker 1 And by the way, the election of President Trump was a middle finger to all these institutes too.

Speaker 1 In part, it was America saying, F you and what you did to us, you lied to us over the most consequential things affecting our lives, our health care, our loved ones dying, and our ability to see them, our children and their wellness in schools, the masking on toddlers, non-stop.

Speaker 1 F you,

Speaker 1 you're all fucking fired. All of you fired.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it's like it's all baked in. And now the New York Times has to try to whitewash what it did.
So you'll believe it when it tells you that Kennedy's evil and you need to trust them.

Speaker 1 You need to trust the Times.

Speaker 1 I just just want to go back for a second. Just give me three minutes on this, okay? Because the Times comes to this realization in, what are we in now? March of 2025.

Speaker 1 It's literally been five years since these lies were told. And I went back just to see.

Speaker 1 It was June of 21 that we had on our show Josh Rogan, who worked at the Washington Post,

Speaker 1 did work at the Washington Post and does, that's fine,

Speaker 1 to their credit. They employ Josh, but he wrote a book on his own that took a dive into this.

Speaker 1 And he did some articles in the Post, also raising questions about whether this was from a lab and the Wuhan lab and how secure it was and the so-called bat lady there and how she was working with EcoHealth Alliance, which was U.S.

Speaker 1 government funded. on gain of function research, which is the very same kind of research that caused the coronavirus.
And we had him on in June of 21, 21, you guys.

Speaker 1 June, it was one year into the pandemic.

Speaker 1 Now we're four years post that. And the New York Times is like, oh,

Speaker 1 we think it was from a lab. We were being misled.
How did that happen? How are we so misled? How did all these experts mislead us on EcoHealth Alliance? It's just willful blindness.

Speaker 1 at best on their part. More than likely, it was an active cover-up because they had a vested interest in the messages that were being handed down.
They were pro-cover, pro-lockdown.

Speaker 1 They were pro these over-the-top so-called health procedures, and they didn't want anything undermining the message.

Speaker 1 And just like this accidentally happening, you know, could accidentally happen to anyone, anywhere, worked with their narrative.

Speaker 1 And plus, they couldn't have their experts undermined in any part of the message. If Fauci was wrong about this being a naturally caused virus, then he could be wrong about masks.

Speaker 1 He could be wrong about distancing. He could be wrong about lockdowns and school closures, right? He needed to be upheld at all costs.

Speaker 1 And by the way, she doesn't even fucking mention Fauci in her piece. She mentions Francis Collins, but she keeps Fauci's fingers squeaky clean, which they're definitely not.

Speaker 1 All the stuff she mentioned with Francis Collins, Fauci did too. And I'm not, that's not my opinion.
Go back and look. He can come sue me if I'm if I'm saying the wrong thing.

Speaker 1 He is also outed in the Francis Collins emails that Republicans got their hands on in 2022 that showed all of this coordination with the virologist behind the scenes.

Speaker 1 They both were in there trying to get them to not say lab leak. That was outed by Republicans in 2022.
It was January. of 2022 after the Republicans found those emails.

Speaker 1 They had taken over control of the house. They demanded all these emails and then they released them.
That we knew all of this for sure. And I did a talking points memo.

Speaker 1 Steve, find me the number of that episode if you have time.

Speaker 1 You can go back and look at it. It was one of the best pieces we ever did on the show.
One of the absolute best.

Speaker 1 And it lays out exactly how they did it, how they whitewashed lab leak right out of the conversation or tried, how they pressured these virologists who the early signs from all of them and emails were saying, holy shit,

Speaker 1 this looks like lab leak, that we manipulated this thing in the lab. I cannot get past it into definitely not a lab.
Lab leak theory is racist. It was natural origin.

Speaker 1 It was there in the emails, black and white. January 2022.
That's three years ago, New York Times. Where was your piece then? You spent the next three years doubling, tripling, quadrupling down.

Speaker 1 on natural origin. They're so dishonest.
And now she wants credit for like being the one to, you know, speak truth to power and kind of own how they'd been misled. Oh my God, what a lie.

Speaker 1 She doesn't even go over the times of sins. Even to say we were mistaken, we were misled.
Episode 241, if you want to watch it, here's a sample of our broadcast in January.

Speaker 1 I think it was January 14th, 2022.

Speaker 1 House Republicans finally got their hands on emails between doctors Fauci, Collins, and some of the world's top virologists.

Speaker 1 It turns out the very officials who dismissed that as a fringe conspiracy theory in the press were being told exactly the opposite by the world's top experts as early as February 2020.

Speaker 1 They had studied the virus's genetic makeup, you see, and found the insertion of a genetic sequence that makes a virus more transmissible, a furin cleavage site.

Speaker 1 One of those scientists on that call with Fauci and Collins, a Brit, Sir Jeremy Farrar, sent a follow-up email to Collins and Fauci the next day, expressing support for the lab leak theory.

Speaker 1 He relayed the thoughts of two more experts, Robert Gehry of Tulane University and Michael Farzen of the Scripps Research Institute. Robert Gehry, he said, can't think of a plausible natural scenario.

Speaker 1 And Farzen was, quote, bothered by the Furin site and having a hard time explaining that outside the lab.

Speaker 1 Christiane Anderson of the Scripps Research Institute put the lab leak theory at 60 to 70 percent likely.

Speaker 1 Two days after those scientists went to Collins and Fauci and told them this thing likely came from a lab, five of them authored a paper. They did a complete 180,

Speaker 1 concluding that this virus was clearly, quote, that's a quote, clearly not from a lab, and clearly not manipulated by man.

Speaker 1 Fauci wanted the lab leak theory gone. He later called it a shiny object, reassuring colleagues it would go away.
Fauci was behind much of the U.S. funding in China.

Speaker 1 He admitted approving grants for EcoHealth Alliance, a group that researched coronaviruses in the Wuhan lab.

Speaker 1 EcoHealth's CEO, Peter Dasek, was one of the first to beg officials to reject the lab leak theory.

Speaker 1 And tellingly, he warned that the public release of the virus's genetic sequencing would bring, quote, very unwelcome attention. We laid it all out for you guys.
January 2022.

Speaker 1 If you're a New York Times reader, you're reading it in March 2025 for the first time.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, but this is just such a dereliction. All the stuff.
You heard me talking back then about Jeremy Farrar. Here she is in her piece.

Speaker 1 Spooked, the authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization.

Speaker 1 Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied.

Speaker 1 She talks about Christian Anderson, who you heard me mention there, and how he wrote internally in the Slack messages between them.

Speaker 1 The lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.

Speaker 1 All the same names, Peter Dazik, who you heard me mention there. She finally has gotten around to all of them.

Speaker 1 Three

Speaker 1 years

Speaker 1 after this was known, thanks to those House Republicans who got their hands on the emails, who I'm sure she just totally ignored as what, some of these terrible influencers acting, quote, in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science to inflame public opinion.

Speaker 1 That's her just trying to justify why they didn't do any of this.

Speaker 1 She writes, that's also why it might be tempting for these officials or the organizations they represent to avoid looking too closely closely at mistakes they made, at the ways that, while trying to do such a hard job, they might have withheld relevant information and even misled the public.

Speaker 1 Okay, that look at her still bending over backward to run cover for these people who 100% actively misled us. Fauci is a villain.
He's a villain. What

Speaker 1 sparked Bobby Kennedy's resurrection from the disinformation dozen leader to the health secretary right now? It was his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, again, who she still doesn't mention.

Speaker 1 When she's going over the list of people who misled us, even Francis Collins just gets barely a passing mention. It was Fauci.
It was Francis Collins. It was the CDC.

Speaker 1 It was all these virologists who are being controlled by Collins and Fauci. Those are the villains.
Still, the New York Times won't admit it. Still, they run cover.
She mentions Robert Gehry.

Speaker 1 He's also, I think, referenced in this piece. We had him on the show in 2022.

Speaker 1 We were stunned. He agreed to come on, quite frankly.
And here's a bit of how that went.

Speaker 1 Forgive me. Wasn't it just days? Wasn't it just two days later that you reversed yourself and said, actually, no, okay, I forget what I said about it coming from a lab.
I now say that.

Speaker 6 It wasn't really a reversal. I mean, it's what scientists do.
You know, we kick around ideas, you know, we have, you know, private conversations. Sometimes you're you're playing devil's advocate.

Speaker 6 I mean, that's pretty much what I was doing in that, in that one email. You know, what kind of thing?

Speaker 1 Well, what happened in those 48 hours? What changed? What did you see?

Speaker 6 Well, you looked at the genomes of the viruses more closely.

Speaker 1 That, too, is a spicy interview where I really pressed him on his sudden reversal and how much influence Fauci and Collins had over him. It's all spelled out now.

Speaker 1 I mean, literally, Fauci, I think, has one mention in this piece. One.

Speaker 1 It's just, it's really infuriating. And look, as Glenn said, it is, this isn't like some long infomercial for independent media.

Speaker 1 It's just the facts of why nobody trusts the New York Times or CNN or MSNBC anymore.

Speaker 1 They failed us at one of the most consequential moments in U.S. history.

Speaker 1 They failed us. And instead of doing a true mea culpa, like a true,

Speaker 1 we screwed it up and we're sorry, they just now want to say, we were misled.

Speaker 1 Look, I like Jake Tapper. We're friendly, but he did something similar.

Speaker 1 He could have come out with that book and said, I want to own all my own mistakes, my own failure to question the lies being pushed on us by officials at the White House about Joe Biden's health.

Speaker 1 But instead, he just tried to join on with the, we were misled crowd. I was, you know, I was one of the innocent without acknowledging, And I misled you.

Speaker 1 I misled you

Speaker 1 when whole swaths of other media got it.

Speaker 1 They happened to be right of center or independent who got the issue with Joe Biden's health because we could see it with our own eyes, who got that this thing likely came from the Wuhan lab where they were studying.

Speaker 1 fat coronaviruses and how to make them more dangerous to humans. It's just

Speaker 1 there can be redemption after massive fails, including in journalism. But there must first be an acknowledgement of the failure, of the sin, in the case of the New York Times here.
Without that, no.

Speaker 1 Apology not accepted. Maya culpa rejected.

Speaker 1 And you've made no progress with us whatsoever, whatsoever. None.
We distrust you more than ever when you do things like like this.

Speaker 1 All right, to end it on a happy note,

Speaker 1 and this is likely one of the many reasons why

Speaker 1 we officially became an award-winning podcast recently, because even some outsiders are recognizing the good work that goes on here at the MK show.

Speaker 1 And frankly, just the trust that we have with our audience, which is thanks to all of you.

Speaker 1 Wanted to mention last week, we were nominated for an iHeart podcast award. I love the people at iHeart, I have to say.
I know some of them, and they are good people.

Speaker 1 The woman who runs it is awesome, Julie. And we were nominated for best political podcast.
We were up against some interesting competition. Pod Save America.
That's the former Obama guys, left-wing.

Speaker 1 The NPR Politics podcast. You know about them.
Breaking Points with Crystal and Sager and the Native Land podcast.

Speaker 1 The winner was determined by a vote of a, quote, panel of blue ribbon podcast industry leaders, creatives, and visionaries. And guess what? We won.
So that was exciting. That was fun.

Speaker 1 Two of our great, great producers who helped make the MK show possible, Lauren and Allison, were down there in Austin, Texas to accept the reward. There they snapped this pic of the slide.

Speaker 1 And oh, we got to put their picture up, Steve. We'll get, we'll put their picture up of, there they are.
Look, that's Lauren in the green dress. And there's Allison on the right.

Speaker 1 She's our booking producer.

Speaker 1 These are two of the great people who make the show possible. We thought it'd be great to send them down there because why shouldn't they receive the award if we want it?

Speaker 1 We actually have got real hardware.

Speaker 1 And those are some of sort of the, you know, the sort of nameless folks who you guys probably don't know as well.

Speaker 1 You know, Canadian Debbie, you know Steve, but Lauren Labruna and Alison Jordan are just two of the many others who help bring you the show every day.

Speaker 1 And I'm thrilled they got to be there and have fun in Austin. And they ran into Zach Levi among others down there and had a great time.
So in any event, thanks to all of you for making that possible.

Speaker 1 Thank you to the iHeart voters and the iHeart crews for thinking it up in the first place. Okay, enough about that.
We will be back tomorrow with Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 1 Looking forward to asking him about going on Gavin Newsom's podcast. Is that a good idea for conservatives? Would love to hear from all of you before Charlie comes on.
Send me an email, would you?

Speaker 1 Megan at MeganKelly.com. Is it a good idea or not? And then listen to our discussion with Charlie tomorrow.
See you then.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.