Legacy Media Bias Exposed and Debated, and MAGA Heir Apparent Rumblings, with Tom Bevan and Andrew Walworth

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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.

Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show.

Mahmoud Khalil,

what is he still doing here?

Is speaking out in an interview with the New York Times, and he said the quiet part out loud about October 7th.

And speaking of quiet part out loud, the Washington Post's fact checker takes the buyout.

What are we going to do without Glenn Kessler to tell us how wrong Republicans always are?

He took the buyout.

He's moving over to Substack, where he and others, formerly in corporate media, get to embrace their bias and finally, finally let us see that they might be a little left-leaning.

Oh my God, I can't wait to see it on full display.

It's shocking.

Mark Halperin, who's part of our MK Media network, just did an exclusive interview with Glenn Kessler, this guy from WAPO, for his next up with Mark Halperin show.

And it's hot off the presses.

We just saw it.

And it's good.

It's pretty juicy.

We're going to show you some of that.

Joining me now, Tom Bevin, co-founder and president of Real Clear Politics, and Andrew Walworth, Chief Content Officer of Real Clear Politics, co-host of the Real Clear Politics podcast.

Carl Cannon's on Vacay.

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Guys, welcome back.

Great to have you.

Hey, Megan, great to be here.

Good.

We can keep some order today without Carl.

That's it.

Who wants to kick it off by saying something about Carl?

No, just kidding.

Just kidding.

Okay, might as well kick it off with Glenn Kessler because I think this is really interesting.

I heard you guys talking about it on your show, too.

I think this is about more than just Kessler taking the buyout.

It's the death of the fact-checker.

The model was flawed.

It was loathed by half the country.

It only targeted half the country.

And it's also a comment on what's happening over at the Washington Post now that Jeff Bezos is going through like a mini Mark Zuckerberg reformation.

when it comes to his media properties and perhaps even himself.

I mean, one thing I'll say about his marriage to Lauren Sanchez is it seems to have revitalized his testosterone, which tends to make you a Republican.

Okay.

Oh, my gosh.

Thoughts on that?

Well, I do think you're right about, look, the fact-checking thing,

this was something that

came basically blossomed around when Trump came into office, right?

And we were constantly getting these, you know, oh, Trump's told X number of lies and PolitiFact and all that.

I mean, PolitiFact was around longer than that.

But

it really did show that

these fact-checkers, you know, it's in the eye of the beholder.

When you're only fact-checking Republicans, never fact-checking Democrats, they lost credibility,

you know, with the way that they were conducting themselves in their work.

And, you know, you mentioned people going to Substack and them sort of exposing their biases or, you know, freeing themselves.

That's one of the great things about Twitter and now X

over time is that that's when you really started learning about these journalists who were supposed to be objective.

They would get on X or Twitter at the time and post like this crazy left-wing stuff and just expose themselves.

And

so I think that was part of the whole loss of credibility of the journalism industry.

And the fact-checking was part of that.

And so, you know, Glenn Kessler,

you know, he wrote this really long thing.

I said on our show, I said the very first thing you could say is Glenn Kessler really needs an editor.

Needs an editor.

I heard you say that.

Yeah, because he wrote like 3,000 words on this.

But he was talking about,

you know, how he would, when he would fact-check Democrats, he would get an earful from

his readers at the Washington Post because that's what these organizations have become.

The Washington Post, the New York Times, they're catering to a liberal audience and they become captured.

And anytime they try and do anything that offends the sensibilities of their readers,

A, they get, they get Mao Maoed into basically toeing the line, but B, it also presents a, it presents a sort of,

you know, a financial issue for them when people start boycotting and losing readers because maybe they said something nice about President Trump or something.

It's a real conundrum that the industry has found itself in.

And Glenn Kuster has been one of the players in that over the last couple of decades.

Yeah.

I mean, what do you think, Andrew?

Is he, and are people at the Washington Post who are getting fired, like on the editorial team or taking the buyout, just coming to grips with the reality, which is it's very hard in 2025 America to have a totally objective news source.

Most publications have a point of view.

And I really think my own opinion is the future is just owning it and proceeding accordingly and to stop pretending like you're objective, like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune and others have been trying to do, even though we know it's not true.

Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting this piece.

Kessler kind of agrees with you because he starts the piece by talking about his meeting with a publisher.

And when the

publisher asks him, how do we get more Trump, more Fox viewers to read the paper?

He says, why would we do that?

That's just going to tick off our base readership.

So he sort of admits that he thinks that basically the Washington Post is going to, it's a bad business move to actually try to attract these other readers.

And the other interesting thing about the piece is at the end, he talks about the buyout and

very, very straightforward about it.

I give him credit for this.

He says, hey, you know, at the end of the day, there was a financial incentive for me to take the buyout.

because I would have been working for four more years for free if I hadn't taken the buyout.

So

interesting piece.

And, you know, I like to think that objective journalism will continue in some way.

And I think if you go to Real Clear Politics, we try to give you some of that.

We try to balance articles so you get

from both sides.

But you must left.

Finding original reporters who are truly objective and unbiased is very tough.

But that's the reason realclearpolitics.com has been my main source of news for the past 15 years is because you pull from both sides.

So I know I'll be reading, you know,

a righties article or a lefties article, but you have both represented, which I really think is the future.

I just, it's just too hard to find reporters in today's day and age who can keep their own points of view and their own biases out of the pieces.

I much more respect, like,

frankly, an MSNBC that just owns it or a Fox that owns it.

And then you know, you know exactly what the biases are.

The ones that are the most irritating are places like the washington post which whatever kessler says is not owning it has not been owning it has been trying to tell us democracy dies in darkness except went totally dark during the biden years top

yeah and look you know if for people who aren't familiar with real clear politics you know we we have in our center column we list the top 17 sort of opinion pieces they're mostly from the opinion pages and they're they're arguments and and you're right we do do sort of, you know, the lefties and the righties and we pair them together and let our readers decide who they agree with or disagree with.

But on the left column, we do these basically sort of news stories and analysis stories and we call them sort of news modules on topics of the day.

There's usually one about the Trump administration.

Today there's something on the redistricting wars.

And those are more news stories, but it's the same concept, Megan, which is You know, we go out and we look at 10 different versions of the same story from one from the Washington Post, one from the Washington Times, one from the Wall Street Journal.

And we try and find the one that we think is sort of most representative of the truth.

And sometimes, you know, based on what the headline is, based on what the lead of the article is.

And so we're able to pick and choose which story.

But if you're just relying on the Associated Press, for example, you are going to get a vastly skewed

you know, opinion or perspective on what the news is.

Or if you're just relying on the New York Times or just on the Washington Post, you need to have conservative news sources.

I mean,

you go watch Brett Baer's show, for example, which I think is probably the best news show on cable TV.

And then you watch, you know,

one of the network broadcasts, ABC, CBS, you know, you name it, and they're presenting completely different perspectives on what the news of the day is.

And, you know, the network news, and they've done this for a long time.

They'll ignore stories that don't fit their narrative or that they just don't want to report, which half the country is really interested in.

We're talking about Russia Gate or some of these other stories.

So you do have to be a real discerning news consumer and you still have to go to conservative sources.

But there is still some decent reporting that is done in the Washington Post and the New York Times.

But

it's getting more and more like trying to find a needle in it.

And they have a political angle.

Like if it's something that doesn't have a political angle, you can maybe trust them, maybe, but like where they don't have a clear horse in the race.

But it's rare, you know.

But if they're doing like some big

expose on some local,

I don't know, story where a politician got blown up, you know, politically speaking, that is, you might be able to trust them.

But like when it comes to national politics or anything involving Donald Trump, do not trust them.

People know that.

And Glenn Kessler, I don't know if he gets it or not.

I mean, you pointed out, Andrew, the point about how he's like, okay, that the question was, how do we appeal to Fox viewers?

What should the Post do to appeal to more Fox News viewers?

He was asked.

And

he writes, I used to cover diplomacy, so I knew how to keep a poker face, even as the hair on the back of my neck prickled.

Prickled is the right word.

We have to remain true to our journalistic principles, I said.

We have to tell the truth.

I paused and added, They may not like that because it would conflict with what they've been hearing.

The nerve of this guy, this guy whose fact checks included giving Tim Walls a pass on his military lies, including dismissing the Biden videos as cheap fakes, and even now is dismissing the Russiagate stories coming out of Tulsi Gabbard as lies made up.

There's no there, there.

Like it, he's worried about the right wing not knowing the truth if it hit them in the face.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think the whole, and if you've ever seen this in the post, they had this Pinocchio's scale that they used, which is really kind of, I guess, seemed clever at the time, but over time kind of boxed them in a little bit.

And,

you know,

I think, as Tom said, that the whole sort of fact-checking movement or trend is it maybe run its course.

And I think that's probably a good thing.

I think that it might be time to retire that as a sort of

trope because,

you know,

it is just bias sort of dressed up as objectivity.

And that makes it all the worse to me.

You know, it's one thing to sort of have a news story and have it be biased, but another thing is to sort of like announce to the world that you are fact checking and then use that to be biased makes it, you know, all the more insulting to me.

You know what?

You know what would be good, Megan?

It's very insulting.

Correct.

Go ahead, John.

You know what would be good?

I mean, if they want to be sort of fair and honest about it, it's fine.

Have a, have Glenn Kessler, have a liberal fact-checker, and hire a conservative fact-checker and run their columns side side by side.

And they can pick a, you know, and then we get at least, again, you'd have both perspectives represented.

You could read them both and you could decide which one you agreed with or didn't agree with.

But I mean, every, for every single fact check that Glenn Kessler did on Trump or Republican, you could have done easily another one on a Democratic lie or falsehood that was being told that just got omitted or, you know.

they just passed over.

So hire a conservative fact checker, Washington Post.

They won't.

They won't.

It's not consistent with their ideology.

I mean, I've told a story before, right?

In 2016, I was asked by many of the top big tech companies to go out to Silicon Valley and to speak to their executives about bias in the news.

Like they were all shocked Trump won.

What's, you know, whatever.

We totally missed it.

How do we miss it?

How do we don't understand Republicans?

And I did.

And I said the same thing to all of them.

You need to get actual real live Republicans working on your editorial boards and your editorial decisions and your fact-checking groups and your censorship groups, whatever groups you're having that is touching the news.

You need like not

Nicole Wallace, real live Republicans, the real kind, you know, the kind that scare you, that wear the MAGA hat.

You need those people on your teams if you're genuinely concerned about fighting bias.

And you know how many listen to me?

None.

Not one did it because they're too ideologically committed to their leftist point of view.

Okay, here is a little bit.

Here's a preview.

Everybody should download Mark's show to watch the full because I haven't seen it myself because it was just being taped as we were getting ready for air.

But Steve Krakauer, our executive producer, has said it's a barn burner.

It's a good one.

And you can watch it when it posts later today.

Mark Halperin, next up with Mark Halperin, go ahead and download.

You should already be downloading and following that show.

But here is a preview of his interview with Glenn Kessler, which got pretty contentious.

How could it be that I see the post as fundamentally anti-Trump in every day, in every crevice of every story, practically?

And you say we are down the middle by the book, and the fact that our readers are liberal is because we're in Washington, D.C.

How could that be?

Well, okay.

First of all, it's because you're wrong and I'm right, Bart.

You know, I,

and, you know, I am in the new, you know, I was in the newsroom and I watched how the stories were put together and what

the editorial discussions were.

So now that I am away from the newsroom and I'm going to read it as an ordinary reader,

I will have a, you know, based on the comments you've made to me, I've

an open mind to see what I see.

But I do know

when,

you know, it's not like people in the newsroom are saying, we've got to get Donald Trump.

We've got to write this story.

We're going to slant it in a way that is negative to Donald Trump.

It's more, it's more, I agree with you.

It's more insidious.

It's more insidious than that.

It'd be some ways it'd be more comforting to me if they said, we're not trying to be objective.

We think Donald Trump's bad for the country.

He's against abortion rights.

He's corrupt.

He's a liar.

Look at all the four Pinocchios he gets.

We need to protect Joe Biden and destroy him.

That'd be better instead.

And again, I just go back to Glenn.

I just go back to two facts.

Your audience, by your own acknowledgement and by every indication, is super liberal.

Yeah.

Yes.

Correct.

And listen to him.

Like,

now, now that he's left WAPO, I'm open-minded to see what I see.

Oh, great, Glenn.

We can't wait until you try to exercise your open-mindedness.

Would have been wonderful if you did that while employed by the Washington Post as their fact checker.

But sure, welcome to the team of sanity.

And then

it's not like people in the newsroom are openly saying, let's get Donald Trump.

I mean, and I take Mark's point too, but it's like

there's no need to.

That's what he's trying to say, Tom.

There's no need for people to openly say that.

It is the unspoken mission of everyone who gets hired there and, frankly, of who would want to work there in the first place these days.

That's right.

And this did happen when the media sort of threw in openly, some cases openly, with the resistance when Trump was first elected in 2016 and said, we are going to, after just treating Barack Obama for eight years with these kid gloves and and you know fawning over him and giving him all this glowing coverage and then turned right around and said you know we're going to hold Donald Trump to account not let him tell lies and democracy dies in darkness and all that bullshit

but but Mark makes the good point that it is these folks don't see themselves as anti-Trump and that they're out to get Trump they they truly in their own image seem to I'm a journalist I'm objective I'm just trying to get to the truth and yet through every layer of the journalistic process from the writing to the editing to the choosing of the headlines to the photo editor the choices that they make that layers in all of these biases that they all have whether they're conscious or subconscious that to frame these stories and you know we've been the beneficiary i should say of of a couple of you know hit pieces from the new york times over the last few years

Even though you guys got it right in the polling analysis and the average.

Yeah.

Five days before the election, they tried to dump this story.

But the point I'm trying to make is journalism now is just confirmation of narratives.

They write the story and then they'll send without including another point of view, and then they'll send you something like 20 minutes before they're going to publish and say, oh, here's what we're going to say.

And do you want to respond to this?

Instead of.

what journalism used to be, which was you go out and you talk to people and the facts lead you to where they lead you, whether that's to the right or to the left or whatever.

That hasn't been the case for a long, long time.

The Washington Post, New York Times,

they decide that they're going to run a story that is negative toward Donald Trump because of something he said or whatever, and then they go and just fill in the blanks.

And that's how it gets done.

You know what this is reminding me of, Andrew?

This is reminding me of, I don't know if you guys covered this, but the CNN defamation lawsuit against, it was Jake Tapper's show, but Jake Tapper wasn't in the seat when this aired, if memory serves, I'm trying to remember, but it was definitely on his hour, where they had reporters who were covering this military veteran who was offering services to evacuate people.

Was it out of Afghanistan?

My gosh, I don't know why I remember.

It was out of Afghanistan.

And,

you know, for a fee.

And there's a going rate for this kind of thing.

And he was offering it.

And they were on a story saying he was somehow exploiting people.

And his fee was jacked up to usurious rates.

And he was trying to take advantage of hurting people.

And none of it was true.

And it came out in the course of the defamation laws so we had the guy on the program it came out in the course of his defamation lawsuit that when he responded to the producers who did what tom just said like did the old okay this is our story but we got to on paper at least we got to reach out to this guy and was like yeah i have thoughts none of this is true and i want to give you my side of the story you could see from their internal text they were like oh

you know, this loser wants to talk, which is, of course, exactly the opposite of what a reporter's instinct should be, but they too are just as agenda-driven as these other paper outlets.

Yeah, I remember that story, and I remember the, I think I had this right, there was an email internal saying, we want to nail this effort to the wall.

There was something like that.

It was so clear that

the bias at the start of the whole thing.

But, you know, I think there is something underlying all this that we should keep in mind, and that's that newspapers are a terrible business right now.

And the reason why Jeff Bezos ended up buying the Washington Post wasn't because it was such a great business and he was going to turn it around.

It was basically an act of charity.

And so that sort of undergirds the whole thing.

I mean, Kessler's not wrong in thinking, oh my God, you know, how do you keep this thing alive?

And his theory of the case is that you don't do what the publisher is thinking of doing and try to appeal to a different audience.

You dig deeper into the audience that you have and you try to hold on to them desperately.

I think that's happening across the media.

And I think that's part of what's driving this.

So it's partly ideologically driven.

I think that's fair.

But I think it's also driven by the business reality.

And people in the media have just decided that the way you survive and the way you win is by appealing to a smaller audience, but really appealing to them hard.

And that drives you into your sort of ideological corner.

At least that's the way, that's when I stand back from it.

That's what I think is partly what's going on.

So I get it.

And I like, I'm not against objective news sources.

Like for example, the folks over at News Nation are trying to be down the middle on their news approach.

And I love the folks at News Nation and I appreciate the mission.

The channel is not enjoying the kind of success I'm sure they'd like to.

I don't know what the market is anymore for that kind of thing.

You know, I think people kind of want to hear their worldview affirmed.

My own experience on this show is,

and I think this is the reason behind our success, I'm convinced of it, that we stay factual.

We don't misinform the audience.

Like, it is important to me to not misinform the audience on facts.

I never want my audience to be embarrassed when talking about a story because they have their head in the clouds and have only been spun by, you know, a right-winger or a left-winger.

But also, I have a point of view, so I'll tell them how I feel about the news and how I feel about the facts.

But the facts are knowable, and they shouldn't always be pro-Republican or pro-Democrat.

They should just be facts.

And that is tough to do.

I think it can be done.

I think, you know, I feel like we are doing it and others in a small group are doing it.

But the Washington Post isn't really doing it.

They have surrendered to storylines.

And I think that WAPO's having the same problem now that CNN

had.

Do you remember those two minutes, Tom, when CNN was purchased and the Discovery Group got involved and they said, we're going to try to go back to what we used to be, which was rather boring, but correct, right?

Like, or at least trying to be factually correct.

They were always boring, they were never exciting, they never hired interesting personalities.

I'll never forget Roger Ale talking to Jeff Zucker when Zucker first got hired over there.

And he asked Roger for advice.

I was in his office, and Rogers and he said, You know, do you have any advice for me?

And Roger said, Well, I could certainly use another few hours of Wolf Blitzer.

So they've never had a bunch of dynamic personalities over there, but they used to at least be someplace you could go for facts.

And then they surrendered it under Zucker to ideology.

And then they decided for two minutes to try to go back to the old CNN.

And two things happened.

Chris Licht got fired, who was trying to do it.

You remember first he demoted and then fired Don Lemon.

He got rid of Stelter.

He tried to like have that town hall with Trump, with Caitlin Collins, where she decided to be like this hard partisan as opposed to objective news.

But he was trying to like put Trump on CNN.

They had a leftist meltdown of their audience.

And then they immediately switched back to just, okay, we're leftists.

We're MSNBC by different call letters.

Because once you've alienated half of your audience and basically told them that you hate them, Tom, it's very, very hard to get them back.

No, that's exactly right.

And you're right.

CNN did have for a long time, they had a sort of centrist brand and they were known for you tune into them when you wanted, you know, when there was a natural disaster or plane crash or whatever for sort of the hard news.

And they went away from that and they started hiring some person because I think they saw the success of Fox and of MSNBC and they thought, oh my gosh, here we are stuck in the middle.

And, you know, that's where you get run over.

And so they decided, they made a conscious choice to sort of move in that direction.

And again, when Trump was elected, I mean, Jim Acosta was, you you know, openly declared war on Trump, and he was their prime guy in the White House press briefing room, just

brand standing day after day after day.

Exactly.

And by the way, he became, you know, he wrote books about it.

He became very famous, earned himself a lot of money, a lot of notoriety.

He was going on, you know, the late night shows and all that.

It was a huge success for him, but it did.

It alienated and really destroyed the CNN brand to the point where they're hardly distinguishable from MSNBC these days.

So that's the problem.

Like, can Washington Post go back, Andrew?

Can they, if Jeff Bezos wants to do the Zuckerberg thing and bring the Washington Post back to where it was, I don't know, decades ago,

I mean, many people would argue it's always had a strong left-wing bias, but I would say not as strong as today.

I mean, it's just, it's gone, you know, it's gone full Rachel Maddow.

But can it be corrected?

You know, Kessler in this piece is lamenting that all of the, I'm reading from the piece, the post-liberal columnists generated huge traffic.

That's because of the liberal slant of the readership.

And now they've all quit.

Every day, I checked the daily traffic numbers, and year over year, it was like being on a water slide with no bottom.

I ran one of the most popular features at the Post, an internationally recognized brand.

I loved working there, but now working at the Post feels like being on the Titanic after it struck an iceberg, drifting aimlessly as it sank with not enough lifeboats for everyone.

The

Carpathia, i.e.,

Bezos, and that was the ship that was, you know, well, he gets to it, appears too far away and too distracted to help.

And the captain is shouting commands that the solution is a different ship.

Well,

it's artfully written.

I wouldn't have edited that part of it, Tom.

That was a nice little paragraph.

But I think

the question you asked is: you know, could they shift to the middle and would that help the brand?

Would that help them build back their audience?

I'm going to say yes.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but it seems to me that what they're doing now isn't working.

And you see that

you see that across the board.

I mean, CNN isn't working.

MSNBC isn't working.

The Washington Post isn't working.

Arguably, the New York Times isn't working the way it used to.

NPR isn't working.

None of these sort of people who are groups that have sort of latched on to sort of ideology first as their sort of lodestar are having trouble.

So yeah, heck, why not?

Why not try to go back to being more objective or being more balanced?

It certainly works for real clear politics.

So I think it should work for that.

To do that, though, I think.

you know, we've we've seen these newsrooms be captured by all of the sort of young woke journalists that are coming up out of, you know, Columbia Journalism School and the like.

And anytime that that anything happens, they throw these hissy fits and basically browbeat their managers into

reverting to or staying the sort of liberal course.

I mean, I really do think if Jeff Bezos was serious about that, if the Washington Post is serious about that as a strategy, they would have to absolutely clean house.

I mean, hire everybody and start from scratch and start

hire some editors who are conservative and some who are liberal and hire some journalists who come from Hillsdale as opposed to just Columbia and really sort of rebuild the ethos at the Washington Post to be sort of bipartisan as opposed to what it is now, which is completely captured by progressives.

Yeah, the first thing you do is you stop hiring anyone who has a master's in journalism from a U.S.

institution.

That's the absolute first thing you do.

Do the Roger Ails rule.

He wasn't hiring people who got their master's at Columbia.

If he did, it was because he had a soft spot for them personally for some reason.

They knew the parents or what have you.

But he knew, and he was not looking for journalists.

I mean, like, when I went into Fox News, I remember thinking I was going to dazzle everybody because I had a law degree and I'd practiced law for 10 years.

No one cared about that.

Of course, I learned all they really care is about your resume tape and how do you deliver a story and can you penetrate the lens?

And are you a good storyteller and all that?

And then I was like, I always felt like, okay, am I, because in journalism, it's turned very elitist.

You know, if you look at the resumes of virtually anybody over at NBC, it's Harvard and Yale and Princeton.

And I went to Syracuse and Albany Law, and I felt somewhat like, am I going to hurt me there?

Is this going to hurt?

I have no idea because Fox is number one and all this.

No, to the contrary, it was a big bonus at Fox.

They wanted people who weren't from those institutions, who didn't think they were better than everybody.

And it's still part of the Fox News formula to find people on air who you feel like you could have a beer with.

The other channels just don't get it.

They will never get it.

They will never have the ratings of Fox News.

And the Washington Post, I don't know, as much as I criticize Lauren Sanchez, they could probably use a hefty dose of this woman in changing the editorial over there.

I mean, like, seriously.

Megan, can I say one more thing, going back to what you said about like giving advice to these folks and them not taking it?

And this idea that, you know, having people who actually represent the MAGA point of view.

You still see that if you watch any of these Sunday shows, and I stopped watching them years ago because they're just not, they don't make news and they're not really informative.

But, you know, I'll look at the Sunday show lineups from time to time and it's the same thing.

It's like, it's like two sort of liberal journalists and one liberal political operative and then like an establishment Republican or an anti-Trump Republican.

Those are the panels that are appearing on Face the Nation and Meet the Press and

This Week.

You know, it doesn't have rarely do you have someone who actually represents Donald Trump and the MAGA point of view talking about these issues.

And so in that that sense, it doesn't even reflect reality.

No.

At best, they'll put on a Republican who hates Trump.

That's the only way you get booked.

You get interviewed at one of these

roundtables or seminars, or you get on CNN or MSN.

If they're ever going to put a Republican on, it's got to be old school, the kind that hates Trump and never, never, never a MAGA.

It's just, look, my concern, I don't care about CNN or MSNBC at all.

I literally do not care if they dry up and go away tomorrow.

But I do care about newspapers.

Like,

I think we need them.

I mean, we get a lot of our news from newspapers.

It's like there is a role in America for the shoe leather reporter who has time to go out there and contact sources and craft stories and get stories.

I mean,

is there, it's almost like the month of August, Andrew.

Is there any news if the reporters don't report on it?

You know, like

everything slows down because people go on vacay.

Same thing the two weeks over Christmas.

We need reporters.

Without the reporters who are out there, and it tends to be newspaper print reporters, the news dries up.

So I do think there's a place for these people.

And it is kind of important to save these newspapers.

Otherwise,

I don't want all of my news coming from podcasters who don't tend to have a model that allows for that kind of in-depth.

time-consuming, you know, nuts and bolts reporting.

Yeah.

Well, I buy your point, but at the same time, I'd say, look, you know,

the newspaper, as we know it, the sort of daily newspaper,

its time may have come and gone.

And maybe, you know, there's Kessler going on to Substack and people tuning into your program and, you know, dwarfing the audiences of some cable shows.

Maybe the future is online.

Maybe it is.

you know, these other platforms, and maybe they just have to evolve to the point where they sort of fill the hole that the newspapers are leaving.

It does seem hard to me.

I mean, if you think about it, you know, what drove newspapers for a long time was classified advertising.

I mean, you know, basically, once you take away the classified advertising, that's when newspapers started to fall apart.

Maybe there has to be a totally different business model that would provide the kind of revenue that you need to support the kind of investigative journalism that you're talking about.

And

if it's not

ads, maybe it's something else.

Maybe it's,

you know,

I don't know what it is, but it's the business model.

Backpage

is like some sort of

backpage.com.

We're not in favor of that.

That was used for sex trafficking.

Yeah,

probably not that.

Yeah, right.

No, I was trying to think of like the

newspaper version of OnlyFans.

I don't know.

I'm not sure.

Anything to drive some sort of revenue.

I don't know.

I also think, like, you know, Tom, as you know, I went on with the New York Times and gave an interview to Lulu Garcia Navarro over there a couple of months ago.

And,

you know, I liked her.

She was a nice person, but she was just so not getting it about like.

where news is going.

And she was part, she's part of a dinosaur model.

And I think it really is, it's the problem of the Times.

It's the problem of the Post.

We're like, they really don't think they're biased.

They think they're reporting the truth.

They wouldn't hire somebody with a resume like mine, either when I started at Fox or now,

because they think they know better.

And they think if they hire kids from these elite so-called universities, they're going to get truth tellers and that not owning your bias is really important

to projecting and even maintaining objectivity.

And she and I got into this back and forth of like, no, it's exactly the opposite.

The audience today, especially if the young audience,

needs you to acknowledge that you have a bias and be honest about it.

We've pulled some of the discussion.

Here's a taste of it.

I think you're right that there is some

way that we are seeing things or discussing something different, right?

I guess what I'm trying to understand is what are the rules of this new world that you are inhabiting?

Are you sort of making them up as you go along and you're sort of seeing what it is?

Or do you adhere to some of those old values that you used to embrace?

The only way one succeeds in this medium is by violating all those rules that we used to have in journalism, where you don't really talk about yourself at all.

You don't talk about your opinions.

You might have a bias.

Your only goal is to hide it, not to own it and then get past it with the audience.

It's just a whole new world.

And it's okay.

We used to be much more partisan and openly partisan in our journalism and our media, you know, 100 plus years ago, and we survived that just fine.

And we will survive this just fine too.

What the audience wants from me is my authentic self and no filter.

What they can smell from a mile away is a phony.

So they have no problem with me endorsing Trump, even if they don't like Trump.

What they would have a problem with is me pretending I don't have a horse in the race and going out and trying to deliver the news as though I'm completely objective and I'm just as open-minded to Kamala as I am to Donald Trump.

She thinks that the Times is is fooling people, Tom.

She thinks that their audience thinks they're objective.

Yeah, well, look, I understand

the

desire for her to say, well, you know, I'm objective.

And you do have these

folks who have,

and I think this goes back honestly to Watergate and this whole generation of students.

Before that, you know, the newspaper business was inhabited by, you know, blue-collar folks.

This was not an Ivy League, not an elitist type institution.

And after Watergate, you had this sort of, you know, generation that came up and viewing journalism as this really noble cause.

And they're holding the, you know, the powerful to account.

And they're doing all of these sort of a, it's sort of a good government type thing, as opposed to people just, you know, the old shoe leather reporters, like, I'm going to go out and talk to some people and figure out what the hell is going on and then report it to my readers for better or worse.

It became this, and they had this inflated sense of self that, you know, this institution is

just

above and to your point, elitist.

And they look down on people who don't follow their rules as they were established and all of these things.

And it's just led

also am part of, not just above the regular people, but part of the elite circle that they are getting paid to cover, that they're getting paid to question and be skeptical of, but crossed over to to wanting to be part of those groups.

Correct.

Yeah, no, and it's also led to this

interesting idea, which is very anti-journalist, in my opinion,

of the last few days.

That even Leonard Downing of the Washington Post at the time wrote, you know, this idea that

we can't do both sides.

And,

you know, this moral equivalency that's out there that, you know, newsrooms shouldn't be objective.

They shouldn't try to cover both sides because in some instances, there aren't two sides.

And that just is, you know, I wish Carl was here to talk about this because Carl's been in the news business a long time.

And, you know, when we talk to our reporters, Phil Wegman, Susan Crabtree, when they go out to do a story, you know,

Carl's instructions to them is always make sure that the other side's argument is represented in a way that they would recognize and understand, right?

That's important.

You quote these people so that when they read the story, they feel like they were treated properly and fairly and their voice was heard.

And we just don't have any of that.

And most of the media stories, you go out and you read these stories.

If you read them carefully, you'll find that

the folks that they get, the experts that they get are all totally one-sided.

They don't quote anybody from the other side.

Or if they do, maybe it's, as you said, like an anti-Trump voice or somebody who's not exactly who they are represented to be.

And so

I think the whole structure of our current journalism is just completely out of whack.

But I would say that,

yeah, go ahead, Andrew.

I was just saying, Megan, you know, when I look at what you're doing, Megan,

I agree that you're breaking a lot of journalistic rules, but I also see you and people like you in sort of part of a tradition that goes way back, you know, to Edward R.

Murrow or Walter Lippmann, George Will,

Charles Krauthammer.

I mean, people who are sort of opinion journalists, we used to call them.

I don't know if people use that term anymore, but people who would present objective facts and present an argument with them.

And you knew when you were reading Charles Krauthammer, just as an example, you knew where he was coming from.

But nonetheless, you learned something and he was, you know, he would sort of represent the other side of the argument, but make his argument against it.

You know, I grew up reading George Will.

He was one of my...

heroes.

I love the way he wrote.

Same sort of thing.

I mean, he was writing in the New York Times, right?

And

so there are, you know, that's a tradition I think is worth honoring and

continuing.

And I think that's partly what I see you doing and people like you who are, you know, doing this honestly on air.

Well, thank you.

I mean, it's, I definitely think that my background in journalism has helped me do well in the podcast space because there is a thirst for real facts, for actual truth through commentary.

Because I think commentary does help you retain it better, frame it better, understand why it's relevant to your life better, you know, than just like a straight news report that kind of comes from somebody trying to do just exactly just facts and no context and all, you know, it's just a kind of a more fun, useful way, I think, of getting your news and getting your facts.

The problem for people who are on the left, who are still using only sources like the AP, is they get articles like this one: Survivors of Israel's pager attack on Hezbollah struggle to recover.

Oh,

my God.

That's an actual headline.

That's a good one.

At the AP yesterday.

This would be like us saying, like, the families of the 9-11 terrorists remain in mourning at the loss of their gifted pilots.

I mean, this is a crazy ass bent.

An editorial, Andrew, from the AP, they go on about how

they acknowledge that the attack, this is Israel's detonating the pagers in the pockets of Hezbollah terrorists.

We recognize that group was terrorists, that it wounded more than 3,000 people and killed 12, including two children.

Hezbollah has acknowledged that most of those wounded and killed were its fighters or personnel.

The simultaneous explosions in populated areas, however, also wounded many civilians.

It was well over 90% military fighters, which is rather remarkable for any military bomb drop or attack of any kind, whether you're the United States or Israel.

And they've decided to focus in here on those who were adjacent to the terrorists who are on a, quote, slow, painful path to recovery 10 months later.

Thoughts?

Well,

That pager attack was one of the most amazing stories that I've ever read.

And if you think about it, it is in war you have collateral damage.

It was so about the most closely drawn target you could have.

I mean, you had to have one of these pagers in your pocket, and it blew up, you know, everything around your pocket.

So not a good thing.

But so, you know,

I'm sort of stunned.

I haven't seen that story myself, so I'd love to read it.

But

yes, there is sort of a

there are examples like that of bias that have just gone to so far that they appear ridiculous.

And that's an example.

That's a pretty ridiculous headline, it seems to me.

I mean, it's crazy, Tom.

They say the survivors,

first they say the hours of interviews offered a rare glimpse into the attack's human toll.

I mean, I'm sorry, but we don't care.

They expressly say that everybody they talked to were Hezbollah officials or fighters or members of their families.

You know, if you're going to do the terrorism, you're going to probably die by the terrorism.

If you're going to do the the terrorism from your home around your family, you're endangering them too.

Like, this is an absolutely crazy way in.

This is, I don't remember us doing like the single tear shed for like the al-Qaeda family members or the Hamas family members.

But you, as you know, when it comes to Israel, all the rules are different.

Well, and that's the point I was going to make is, you know,

this story is absurd in and of itself, but it highlights the broader problem, which is the Associated Press and a lot of of the media, right,

the way that they frame these stories and talk about the narratives that they produce and they're constantly relying on the Gaza Health Ministry for

casualty numbers and the like.

Red flag.

Red flag.

Right.

Like, how can we even, how can we even, as news consumers,

How can we trust anything that they print?

How do we know, where can we get accurate information about what's actually happening in the Middle east right now because you know

i approach these stories by and i've done this long enough but i don't know you know if the general public you know realizes that the way that these stories are always framed to to cast israel in the worst possible light and so i always bake that in when i'm reading i'm like okay

uh you know There's probably a seed of truth in here.

There's probably some famine going on, but do we know why it's being caused and what's causing it?

Is Israel totally to blame?

Is it genocide that's happening there?

I mean, you just

there, there's such bias that is baked into obviously our domestic coverage, but this international coverage as well.

That

it's really hard.

The further you get into this, the harder it is to trust anything that some of these organizations are writing about stuff that's going on beyond our borders.

Did you guys see the, while we're on this topic of Israel, this Mahmoud Khalil

is he's been on a press tour, he's a media darling now.

This guy who's here on,

he's got a green card and a visa, but

he's not a U.S.

citizen.

And he was at Columbia.

He participated in the protests that basically took hostage the campus of Colombia and really said to the officials at Columbia, nice university here.

Shame if anything happened to it.

Something will, unless you divest entirely from Israel.

Those are our terms.

Take them or leave them.

I mean, it was truly mob tactics by this group.

He makes no apologies for it.

And Marco Rubio said, you know what?

I, as Secretary of State, have the power under the law to eject somebody who's not here as a citizen,

whose beliefs and behaviors are inconsistent with the foreign policy of the United States, so get out.

Well, he's been embattled in the legal system ever since.

He's got a team of lawyers that OJ would envy,

up and down, criminal and civil.

And they're all representing him for free.

He's got a $20 million lawsuit against the United States right now, saying that he was unfairly detained.

And on top of it, he's on this media tour all over.

CNN, now latest with the New York Times, is Ezra Klein, where he offers the following justification for the 10-7 terrorist attack.

Listen.

October 7th happens.

What do you think that day?

To me, it felt frightening that

we had to reach this moment

in the Palestinian struggle.

I remember I didn't sleep for a number of days and Noor was very worried about

just

my health.

And it was heavy.

I still remember, I was like,

this couldn't happen.

What do you mean we had to reach this moment?

What moment is this?

The situation in the West Bank and Angaz.

And you can see that the situation is not sustainable.

Unfortunately,

we couldn't avoid such a moment.

It's unbelievable, Tom.

We had to reach the moment where we burned the babies.

It was unavoidable.

It's regrettable.

Who's we, buddy?

Who are you talking about?

We.

Certainly not me.

Yeah, I mean, the idea that we couldn't avoid this moment where babies were burned alive and killed, parents, you know, hostages taken.

Of course, we could have avoided this moment.

And

so I think he just kind of exposed himself further here as, you know, folks had been,

his detractors have been saying for a long time that this guy really, and this was sort of Marco Rubio's point is, you know, when you're here on a student visa, when you're here as a guest of the United States, At a minimum, we should expect you not to agitate against the United States

and do the kind of things that this guy has been doing.

So it was pretty outrageous.

I mean, even just listening to that again for the second time now, I'm actually more pissed off about it than I was the first time.

I mean,

it's really hard to fathom.

Get out!

Get out!

Get out!

Go home!

We don't want you!

Get out!

You clearly hate America.

It's mutual.

Move along.

You don't need to be here.

This isn't even our fight.

Get out.

It's so annoying, Andrew.

You take in the last 43 minutes before break.

Well, you know,

I would get one less lawyer and maybe one more PR professional involved because it's disastrous for his brand, so-called, right now.

He also said that anti-Semitism on Columbia, at Columbia campus is manufactured.

He said that, you know, from the river to the sea and globalizing the into Foddawar,

he defended both terms.

So

pretty disastrous.

And yeah,

I think it's time for him to leave.

Good point.

Might need the crisis PR.

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Trump sends out a post saying he wants to change, well, not changed, but he wants to conduct a new census, which is only supposed to be done every 10 years, technically.

We're only on the five-year mark.

It was done in 2020 last.

And

this is very interesting because

there's a question about what, if anything, it could do to our electoral politics.

Here's the True Social Post.

I've instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate census based on modern-day facts and figures, and importantly, using the results and information gained from the presidential election of 24.

People who are in our country illegally will not be counted in the census.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Now,

you've got our CPs, Ben Weingarten, your guy, writing, this could have significant political implications because the census count is used to apportion House seats, determine the number of votes each state gets in the Electoral College for selecting the president, and drive the flow of trillions of dollars in government funds.

But there's also the question of whether you can exclude illegals

for those purposes.

Like,

you do not have to let illegals vote, but the Constitution seems to read that they are supposed to be included.

You're supposed to just count all persons in the United States, which is going to be a legal battle in the same way it's a legal battle right now over Trump and birthright citizenship.

So what do we make of this, Andrew?

Do we think the census and redoing it at the midway point is going to have electoral consequences?

Well, I'm not sure he's talking about redoing it before the 2030.

That would be a big change.

The Constitution, you're right, the Constitution calls for a census every 10 years, and we do use that to apportion.

He says to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate census.

Immediately.

Yeah, well, maybe, maybe he's, well,

that would be a big change.

And then how you would use that, I don't know.

Boy,

that's a whole different constitutional question of whether you could speed up the census in order to

change the numbers.

I seem to be that would be a hard, hard, hard lift.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

Yeah, I mean, it's a hard enough lift because, as you point out, the Constitution, the language is kind of clear.

It says you have to count everyone in the country, and it doesn't distinguish between the two.

But the political consequences of this, and Ben Weitengarten's piece is well worth reading on this, and Pugh has done a study on this as well.

California and Texas, I think, would both lose seats.

Wisconsin and a bunch of other states would gain seats.

So it would change.

the electoral composition and could change control of the House.

And we're seeing that right now with all this

sort of redistribution argument that's going on, redistricting argument that's going on in Texas and other places now.

So

this is all part of that same argument.

And I do think, though, Trump has a point.

And the point is that

if you don't count voters and then

you provide

these seats based on that number, you're sort of jipping voters.

You're sort of

why does my vote get diluted?

Because I live in a state with a ton of illegals who don't have the right to vote and whose interests are really not in my head or heart when I go into the ballot box.

Right.

Well, actually,

I think it's the opposite.

I think you get more representation

because they're counting people who don't vote.

So

it's anyway, pretty complicated stuff, but I don't think it goes anywhere.

I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but it does seem to me that

the courts have ruled on this before, and it seems to me that changing the census is pretty tough.

I'm trying to do the math that you just quickly did.

Does my vote get diluted?

If I live in a state like New York or California where there's a fair amount of illegals and I'm a U.S.

citizen, is my vote diluted or does it count more?

I can't do the math like that.

I don't think it counts more.

I think it counts more.

Tom, you went to Princeton.

Would you like to resolve the explainer?

No,

I wasn't a math major.

No.

None of us was.

That's why we're in journalism.

That's right.

Look,

this is, I think,

Trump makes a good point.

And once again, in a very Trumpian way, right?

Which is going to outrage the liberals.

And, oh, he's breaking all these norms and he wants to rig the system and do all these things.

But, and I don't know where this goes.

Legally, it's going to be tough.

I think it will absolutely be challenged in court.

There's no question about that.

It might go all the way to the Supreme Court.

And because Democrats, I don't think, want to partake in anything that would discount the counting of folks who are here illegally,

because it could drastically alter

the composition of some of these states.

Now, again, but we don't know.

I mean, this is one of those things.

Like, if Texas loses votes, that's a Republican state.

If California loses votes, that's a Democratic state.

If Arizona loses votes, that's a swing state.

New Mexico.

Yeah, because just to to be clear, because if we're talking about eliminating illegals from the count,

it doesn't necessarily mean

like Republicans benefit or Democrats benefit.

It means certain states are going to lose House members and also electoral votes because the power of your vote, like you get more electoral votes, the more citizens or the more people, again, persons you have living within your borders.

Keep going.

Correct.

So we don't know exactly how this might actually affect the outcome of,

you know,

the composition of the House or the composition of the Electoral College.

I mean, it would be, but it would be interesting.

And I do think even though the Constitution says, you know, count all persons here, I don't know that the founders were counting on the fact that there would be, you know, I don't know, 15, 20 million or more people here illegally.

So

I think that that's the argument that the Trump administration will make, and we'll see whether they're successful in that or not.

That's right.

And right now,

if you have a diplomatic visa you're not counted so i mean there are exceptions to the rule even now uh right so yeah it makes no sense to be counting illegals it doesn't and i mean like i don't know how that'll shake out or whether it will be beneficial to write you know red america or blue america but it does seem

stupid and backward to be counting people who cannot vote and have no right to public funds and so on uh in the census.

Okay.

Although in some states they're trying to create them more and more.

While we're on that subject, I've been listening to you guys in the redistricting fight down in Texas.

I mean, I do think it's really interesting because everybody's basically said all this nonsense that the Trump administration said, oh, well, those districts created, they were created based on racist criteria, so they must be redone.

And then Abbott was like, yes, sir, I agree.

Racism runs amok.

We're going to redo them ASAP.

And suddenly they come up with five new House seats for Republicans.

Okay, I see what's happening.

But

listening to you guys, like who are much closer to this, especially Utah in Illinois, you're basically saying the only reason he has to do this is because it has been done to the Republicans by the Democrats in every state, that this is the Dems game of redistricting their states to make the districts look like little slivers of, you know, a spoon handle in order to get them as Democratic as possible to the point where you have states like Illinois, where,

what is it?

They say that they're Kamala Harris only got 53% of the vote, but Democrats occupy 82% of the state's congressional seats.

So, how did that happen, Tom?

Well, right.

And, you know, it was ironic.

J.B.

Pritzker went on.

He's, he's, you know, having his moment now because he's, you know, the father figure to all of these fleeing Democrats.

And he went on Colbert.

And Colbert actually, to his credit, put up a map of Illinois and was like, look at these crazy districts.

Like, what's going on with you guys?

Like, what?

And J.B.

Pritzker kind of yucked it up.

It It was like, oh, we had a kindergarten class decide.

Well, no, actually, they had, they have super majority control of the state legislature, and they redrew these districts to be as favorable to Democrats.

Like, look at this one.

There's this, like, just looking at the map of Illinois right here for the list.

Yeah, so it's Illinois 13.

It starts, it starts in basically down in sort of the suburbs of St.

Louis area and goes up through the middle of the state, almost bisects the entire state.

It goes all the way up.

It's like a snake.

Yeah, exactly.

And then, and then the other district has to curl all the way around around it to go back i mean it's it's really absurd democrats have abused this privilege uh you know the gerrymandering um they've abused gerrymandering for decades and

when they do it right they're just you know this is democracy in action and when republicans retaliate and do this right it's they're suppressing the vote and they're you know killing democracy so it's all a big game it's all a big you know sort of hypocrisy now the one thing that they this is what jb said the other night and the one the the the real outrage is that, you know, Republicans are doing it mid-census, right?

They're doing it five years, not waiting for the full 10 years, but it has been done before.

It's rare, but it, but it has been done, including by New York, I believe, like in 2024.

So, again, Democrats do not have clean hands on this at all.

And so, for them to sort of take this moral high ground, once again, it's all just sort of virtue signaling and posturing.

And it has kicked off, though, this real interesting national debate and discussion where you've got now all these other states or you know gavin newsom in california is going to do something and um you know jd vance is going to indiana to see if they can maybe squeeze another republican seat out of there which is already a heavily republican state so um it'll be interesting to see how this all ends up working out but yeah i mean to hear the democrats a

for the Texas Democrats to sort of cry foul and then flee to Illinois is almost too perfect for words.

I mean,

if you had imagined it, people would say, this is, you know, you got to send it back for a rewrite.

Yeah, it's all well and good until they sit down at the dinner table and say to their fellow Democrats in Illinois, can you believe this gerrymandering?

This is a nightmare.

Who would do such a thing?

Right.

This is so wrong.

Now we just got news before we came to air that they've authorized the FBI to go track down the rogue Democrats.

Yeah,

so that'll be interesting.

What are they going to do?

Are they going to arrest them, like drag them back to Texas?

Because they can't have a vote on the newly proposed lines without these Democrats in the state.

That's why they fled to prevent there from being a quorum.

So things could get even dicier there.

I want to switch gears, though, Andrew, because we don't have that much time.

Speaking of J.D.

Vance, Trump commented, and it's a very interesting comment, and you have to listen to the exact wording, but he commented on J.D.

Vance and his future role

the other day when he was asked on Tuesday in SOT 7.

Listen.

This weekend, Secretary of State Rubio said that he thought J.D.

Vance would be a great nominee.

You could clear the entire Republican field right now.

Do you agree that the heir apparent to MAGA is J.D.

Vance?

Well, I think most likely, in all fairness, he's the vice president.

I think Marco is also somebody that maybe would get together with J.D.

in some form.

I also think we have incredible people, some of the people on the stage right here.

So it's too early, obviously, to talk about it, but certainly he's doing a great job and he would be

probably favored at this point.

Any thoughts on that, Andrew?

Well, you know,

we played that clip and talked about it because it's so fascinating.

And the question was whether he would be the whether he's the heir apparent to the MAGA movement,

which is not to say who is the next presidential nominee for the Republican Party, two different questions.

And then in his answer,

it sort of sounded like at the end of it that he was sort of aliding to the second, he says, where, you know uh he would be favored well that's that's a political term um so you know

it's always dangerous to to try to parse uh the president's language too carefully but i thought that was a really interesting statement and i think uh so i think clearly he was answering answering it honestly which he does from time to time and he was saying that yeah that's what he thinks that that uh jance is the leader but to put marco rubio as a potential uh leader of the maga movement.

Again, that's...

By the way, Trump always does.

It's very interesting.

I've been noticing this for a while from him.

Whenever he's asked this question, he mentions both of them.

And

he clearly hasn't in his own mind made up his mind on who he really wants to pass the baton to.

Yeah.

And the question, of course, is who's at the top of the ticket and

who's the number two slot.

I think those two principles might have different.

I don't think JD wants to spend another four or eight years as vice president.

Yeah.

No.

But he's a lot younger than Marco.

Yeah.

But I think that

Rubio being positioned as a MAGA guy, that's really interesting because it does mean, I mean, he's about the one guy who sort of went from being a bushy, really,

you know, to being,

you know, at the head of the MAGA movement.

I mean, that's pretty extraordinary, pretty deft politics on his part.

Very.

I know I heard you guys talking about it on Real Clear Politics about how, I think it was Carl who was saying he started off as like a tea party, darling.

And then he asked him or somebody asked him, like, how'd you manage that?

And he said, I don't know.

They just voted for me, you know, like he, but he's maneuvered it.

I mean, he went from Lil Marco, which Trump used to say, Lil, with an apostrophe, Lil Marco,

to mentioned in every breath by Trump as possibly the heir apparent.

Though this one clearly seemed to favor Vance, Tom, which, you know, obviously I'm sure J.D.

Vance would have been quite happy to hear him say that.

And by the way,

here's some more support for J.D.

Vance as the heir apparent from CNN's Harry Enton.

Take a listen to SAT 7B.

Where does he stand on this?

You know, I'm going to quote the esteemed scholar Larry David and say, pretty, pretty good.

J.D.

Vance at 40%.

There's no one even close to him.

Ron DeSantis back at single digits at 8%.

Donald Trump Jr.

back at 7%.

But keep in mind that early favorites have actually gone on to win the nomination 63% of the time, those who have run since 1980.

And when you're dealing with fields that are 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, upwards of north of 20, and all of a sudden you're telling me that the early poll leader who is J.D.

Vance, that those win more than 50% of the time, that is why I say it looks pretty gosh darn good or pretty, pretty good for the man from Ohio.

How about vice presidents, sitting vice presidents, the last five sitting vice presidents who ran?

Richard Nixon in 60, he won.

How about Hubert Horatio Humphrey in 68?

That's That's HHH.

That's a real acronym for him.

How about Bush I in 88 won?

Al Gore in 2001.

Kamala Harris in 2024 won.

All of the last five sitting vice presidents who ran for their party's nomination won.

So it's not just a polling.

Historically speaking, if J.D.

Vance gets in this fight and he's the sitting vice president, the history books say, hey, he's got a pretty gosh darn chance of going all the way, at least the general election, because five out of five.

Tom, thoughts?

Well, not to nitpick Harry, but Kamala didn't really win.

True, she did not even win her party's nomination.

She did

the nomination.

But look, he makes a good point, which is, look, J.D.

Vance

has done a good job as vice president, I think, in the eyes of Trump supporters.

And Trump clearly,

you know, thinks highly of him.

And I think Trump is right.

He just based on, you know, if you were a neutral observer, you'd say, yeah, I mean, he's, he's, he's, has the highest profile now.

He has the highest name ID.

I mean, he's going to be in poll position to win the nomination.

The only reason that he might not be,

or he might have some vulnerabilities, we need to know where

the country is going to be, where the, you know, Trump

presidency is going to be, where the economy is going to be when J.D.

Vance, because that's always the problem, right?

He's going to be basically running for a Trump third term, even though they're non-consecutive.

And so that could be a real asset to him with the Republicans, or depending on how things work out,

it might be a bit of a drag on him.

So we'll see.

But clearly he is the guy, and I think he knows that.

And I think Trump was sort of intimating, look, an advanced Rubio ticket would be ideal

in terms of his behind the MAGA movement.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It would be dreamy.

But there's no way the guy who ran Celebrity Apprentice for all those years is going to give up the contest this early.

We're seven months into Trump and his second term.

He's the star.

He would like to remain the star.

There's no way he is going to let somebody else become the star by naming them the heir apparent, probably until the very, very, very end, and maybe not even then.

We'll have to wait to find out.

He might decide that he's going to run for a third term in the end, right?

Yeah, he says he probably won't.

He says he probably won't.

Okay, let's take a look at Team Blue because every other day we have another one sort of sticking their head up, kind of going to South Carolina, or let's say in Ram Emmanuel's case, coming on the Megan Kelly show, and so on.

And now we have

Illinois Governor J.B.

Pritzker.

I'm sorry, just going to say it.

He's too fat to be president.

I'm sorry, but he is.

I don't make these rules.

I just know them.

You can be too short to be president, and you could be too fat to be president.

And I think he might be both.

It's a double whammy.

I don't understand why it doesn't get on the shot.

Being that obese is a surefire way to die early.

I say this to you as a fan, J.B.

Pritzker.

No, I don't.

I'm not your fan.

I'm not your fan at all.

But as a fellow American, I urge you, go on the shot, do something.

In any event, this isn't why I had you on, Andrew.

I did want to get your thoughts, however,

on

his possible run because

there's a you guys have this up at Real Curve Politics today.

J.B.

Pritzker's presidential ambitions are sinking him at home.

And there's a piece about how

he's flailing with his own general election voters in Illinois as he tries to create more of a national profile for himself.

So what's going on there?

Well, I think it's the same problem sort of any blue state governor has right now.

The advantage they have is that they're not tied to the Biden administration.

So they don't have to, they weren't in the cabinet.

They don't have to sort of explain why they didn't tell the country about Biden's

declining acuity.

But at the same time, they've got to defend these records of what they've done to their states.

And, you know, Tom lives in Chicago, so I'll let him

tell you more about what it's like to live under the Pritzker regime.

But it's not an easy

case to make to the broader American public.

He does seem to have thrown himself in all the way to the left, though, which I think is interesting.

I mean, he's really

going to be.

Trans thing, the Sanctuary City,

defending these Texans.

He's decided that's where he's going to go.

And

for a die-in-the-world billionaire, it's kind of interesting.

Quite the contrast from Ram Emmanuel, Tom.

Yeah, for sure.

And look, JB's running for re-election

as governor for his third term.

Now, that doesn't preclude him from running for president in 2028, although he'd have to make a kind of a quick turn there.

But at the same time, this new poll from M3 Strategies that came out that we have this piece on the site today, shows him underwater for the first time.

You know, he's normally, because it's such a blue state, he's been viewed favorably, and he's at like 47.50 now.

So there is some discontent, I think, among folks in the state.

And

we have all sorts of problems.

you know, people fleeing the state and all of those things.

JB likes to present it as we've made so much progress, but there's more progress to be made.

Unfortunately, for the Republicans, there's no one really there to challenge him.

They don't really have a marquee challenger, and JB's got millions and millions of dollars.

He's already spent a couple hundred million getting himself elected the first two times.

So he's probably,

you know, going to win re-election, but

the bloom is definitely off the chubby rose, as we say.

Yes.

Oh, my God.

Congratulations, J.B.

Pritzker, because you've given Tom Bevin the highest gas taxes in the country, the highest property taxes in the country.

And I can say, as somebody who lives in the Northeast, that's a real feat.

Congrats, because that's tough to do.

He's embraced the teachers' union.

He's screwed over the kids.

He loves the trans,

the transing of children, the illegals, all of it.

Pick your issue.

He's like

Donnie in

the big and tall store.

Okay.

But only in the big, only, only there for the big part of it.

Okay.

I have two things more I need to to get through with you.

Trump is making some intimations about possibly playing a bigger role in the New York mayoral race, possibly getting involved to try to help maybe Andrew Cuomo defeat Momdani.

Now, this is based on reports by at least one Republican congressman from New York who Trump asked, like, if I were to get involved, who would I help?

And one other person he asked.

And both apparently said Cuomo.

Curtis Lee was a Republican who cannot win, sadly.

And

Eric Adams' numbers are in the basement.

He's got like a 7%.

He's got zero chance to win re-election.

I'm sorry.

It's not going to happen for Eric Adams.

I cannot back Andrew Cuomo in any way.

I can just let nature take its course.

But this guy's too radical to be mayor, mumdomy.

In any event, Trump's thinking about it, Andrew.

But the question is, with New York, you know, going

like 90% for Kamala Harris,

how helpful can Trump be in stopping Democrats from doing what they want to do?

I think the only thing that he could do that would be helpful is if he could convince Eric Adams to drop out and maybe Curtis Lewa as well.

That's about it.

I think his endorsement or anything,

you know,

it wouldn't help Cuomo if Donald Trump came out and got the three Republicans left in Manhattan to say, oh, gee, I'll vote for Andrew Cuomo.

I don't think

that's going to help us.

So, yeah.

But I think, I mean, the interesting thing about Cuomo is before,

you know, if you looked at the early polls, he was clearly the leader.

Everyone thought he was going to sail to

victory in this.

And then he ran this horrible, horrible primary campaign.

If he were running a better campaign now with better negative research and that sort of thing, would it be different?

Maybe.

It just seemed a little late to me.

And he doesn't seem to have sort of

corrected his campaign to the point where he's going to be competitive with Mondami.

I think it's Mondami's to win at this point.

I know.

Me too, sadly.

Now, this is unfortunate because I really wanted this question to go to Andrew first.

Maybe I'm going to do it.

I'm not going to be fair and balanced here.

I'm sticking with Andrew.

I need your opinion, and I need it fast on Sidney Sweeney, my friend.

Thank God, Megan.

I appreciate that.

Oh, God.

Here's my way in.

Here's my way in.

Vox, Vox has a piece up titled Sidney Sweeney and the Unsettling Legacy of the Blonde Bombshell.

You remember the Rolling Stone yesterday and the guys at Pod Save America were trying to tell me that this is a right-wing manufacturer controversy, that there are actually no leftists upset about Sidney Sweeney.

And then we get this.

She's part of the unsettling legacy of the blonde bombshell.

This is written by a party, obviously, this is all Dems, trying to win back young men.

Unsettling legacy of the blonde bombshell.

Sweeney represents a modern version of the blonde bombshell, a loaded cultural cultural symbol tied to white femininity, sexuality, and American nostalgia.

Marilyn Monroe defined the blonde bombshell for the 20th century.

Sweeney updates it for the 21st, and in doing so has become just as culturally divisive.

Yes, because that's what Marilyn Monroe was known for: dividing the culture harshly and politically, and not just being a uniformly admired sex symbol, the most admired to ever walk the face of the earth.

Thoughts, Andrew?

Well, I think if the left thinks that sex doesn't sell anymore, they're wrong.

Sex will always sell.

And she's a sexy woman.

And

I like the ads personally.

And I thought that the sort of food jeans were great.

So there you have it.

Tom, I managed to get him to comment on it.

I feel like I accomplished something here.

You did.

That's great.

I was following your Twitter back and forth or your ex back and forth with with the Podbros.

And it's like, it's almost the exact opposite of reality, like that somehow this was a Republican, a right-wing manufactured thing.

I mean, it was, it was the way the left treated this, and again, it shows they just, they, they haven't learned their lessons necessarily, and they're still looking for things to be outraged by, things that are, you know, even silly and make them look.

even worse than people possibly imagine.

I mean, this whole controversy came because, because folks on the left decided that this was eugenics.

They read into this.

This was eugenics and it

shouldn't be stood for.

So

here's more.

Here's more.

Not learning lessons.

Here's more.

By the way, this is written by a woman named Constance Grady, who I'll get to in a second.

Back to Sweeney, she writes, her very existence in the public eye revives debates about race, desirability, conservatism, and modern feminism, much like Monroe did in her time, though through different lenses.

It's a highly charged encapsulation of American fantasies and fears about white

femininity, what a nice white lady should be, and what we are afraid she might be.

This is about people's fear of white people, according to whitey Constance Grady, who is as white as the driven snow.

She goes on to say, Marilyn Monroe represented the idealized post-war American woman, desirable, white, submissive, yet powerful through beauty.

Sweeney revives the persona in this new era, becoming a vessel for contemporary culture war battles over race, gender, and politically, and a political identity.

So I wondered, Tom, who is this Constance Grady?

She's been at Vox for nine years.

She's a senior correspondent.

She covers books, publishing, gender, celebrity.

and theater.

She went to the University of Chicago.

Oh, boy.

Guilty.

I mean, they're not as bad as others, but they're still.

Okay, here are some facts about her.

She wrote articles like in April of 25, The Strange Link Between Trump's Tariffs and Incel Ideology.

Incel, I say.

Yes.

Trump's tariffs and incel.

I mean, you got to give her points for ingenuity on that one at least.

Trump's petty revenge on the Kennedy Center.

Why the Met Gala still matters.

Jon Stewart is as funny as ever.

And then this one from July of 2023.

Something you almost commissioned.

I have it on good authority at Real Clear Politics.

A long history of kids doing weird stuff to Barbie.

Yes, Constance delve deep into the following.

Did you decapitate your Barbies or make them kiss?

Barbie was for ripping apart and pulling, putting inexpertly back together.

She was for removing heads and limbs.

She was for microwaving.

She was for chopping off her doll hair.

She was for doll orgies.

Constance, oh, Constance, sweetheart, you're saying too much.

As Jezebel put it in 2007, growing up, everyone did dirty things with their Barbies.

Oh, sweetheart, you rip her apart.

You make her have sex.

What else can you do with her?

What else can you do with the problem of what you're going to grow up to face?

So this is a sick person.

This is who Fox has telling us Sidney Sweeney is a problem because she's the blonde bombshell, which is a loaded cultural symbol tied to white femininity and sexuality.

The horror.

Well, to the earlier discussion we were having, at least she's owning her liberalism and her progressivism, and she's not hiding it at all, even if it's making her look sort of silly.

She's psychotic.

Yeah.

I had many a Barbie Constance.

I never did dirty school with them or put them in the microwave.

I might have cut one's hair at one point or another, but that's about beauty.

She went full Lena Dunham on like the weird sexual perversions of her own childhood.

Good luck, Constance.

That's not what most of us did with our Barbies.

Andrew, am I right or not?

Well, Andrew, what does America do with its barbies?

I have three daughters,

and I'm sure they did things with their Barbies, but I don't think they did a lot of that stuff.

I hope.

I don't know.

I mean, this is just a level of sort of like left-wing cultural critique that, you know, that gets ridiculous.

And I think

that's a good thing.

There's a lot of that these days.

Yeah.

And I guess maybe, you know, it does get people like us to talk about it, though.

So, I mean, that's Carl's.

It's really going to be sad he missed this one.

Oh,

Carl is dying.

I hope he's listening right now.

He's probably dying.

He would have loved the Washington Post conversation.

I know.

Well, we'll round back with him on it when he comes back the next time.

I mean, I will say this.

I know a fair amount about Marilyn Monroe.

This is completely misstating her actual role in the culture and her legacy.

She was not a controversial figure.

She was pretty uniformly beloved.

She had a very unique ability of being incredibly sexy and a sex symbol by any man's measure

while non-threatening.

I think this is part of

why she was beloved.

Women wanted to be her and men wanted to be with her.

And it was both like the combo of incredible sex appeal and luminous

takeovers of any room she was in, but also this little girl-like quality to her, which was non-threatening, was submissive in its nature, and made women marvel at this combination that was also part of why men found her so attractive.

Yeah.

Well, you know, Madonna always comes to mind when I hear these conversations.

Well, you know,

she's sort of viewed as this sort of great icon of the left and

trans

not transsexual, but she transcended a lot of categories and people seem to love her.

So, you know, maybe Sidney Sweeney's just the Madonna of our age when maybe we look at it.

Oh my, that's a hot take.

I thought Andrew was about to break some news of Madonna there, Tom.

I mean, there's no limit to your scoops over at RCP.

Well, we know, we know how you feel about J-Lo trying to act like she's a sex symbol at 55.

Madonna seems to be, he's even older than that, still trying to get make news by being outrageous.

No, it's too late.

Like you, you can have sex appeal.

You got to go the Ann Margaret way, okay?

There's been no sexier woman on earth, as far as I'm concerned, than Anne Margaret at her peak.

And as she aged, she still was very saucy.

She was gorgeous, still gorgeous.

She's still here.

She's still around.

But she started to dress.

She'd have a little bit more fabric.

It's fine.

You know, she wasn't like trying to always show off her God-given gifts.

And she always had that playful sex kitten way of talking and being and like interviewing.

But she realized at some point, you take off like the

waist-high leotard and you put on like a skirt and, you know, like a nice blouse.

At some point, that's how you approach your life.

At a bare minimum, you don't shove your crotch into the face of 13 dancers.

Jennifer, don't get me started again, Tom.

I got to go.

Sorry.

Okay, goodbye.

I triggered you.

Yeah.

Okay, coming up.

America's nicest judge in the world is here.

Why are we inviting an 88-year-old judge on the Megan Kelly show?

Because he's about to drop a bunch of wisdom bombs that will light up your day.

He's awesome.

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He is known around the world as America's nicest judge, a man whose compassion and understanding on the bench have touched millions.

Judge Frank Caprio spent 38 years in Providence Municipal Court, turning everyday traffic cases into heartfelt moments on his show, Caught in Providence, showing that kindness and understanding really can transform lives.

And now, at 88 years old, he is sharing his journey from humble beginnings to a national symbol of empathy in his book, Compassion in the Court, Life-Changing Stories from America's Nicest Judge.

Judge Frank Caprio joins me now.

Judge, welcome to the show.

Great to have you.

Oh, it's my pleasure to be here.

Thank you for the opportunity.

All right, so how does one become a nice judge?

Because when we think of judges, that's not where we go.

Oh, it's very easy.

First, you have great parents who treat you, you know, like human beings instead of an apostle.

And you follow their footsteps.

And

whatever lessons they taught you as a child, you...

then incorporate into your life in treating other people that way.

Some people think, for example,

if you come from a position of power, like a judge, that you have to use that power, you know, in adverse ways.

I never thought that.

I thought it was a tool for good.

I thought it was a tool for understanding people,

for helping them if I could, to let them know that I understood their problems.

And that was basically it.

So, Judge, you were born then, what, in 1937?

1936.

1936.

Okay, so you've seen a lot.

You've been around the block.

You did not come from a family of privilege at all.

Can I just ask you broad view:

how do you see the dramatic changes in the world over your 88 years, you know, from your childhood to now?

What describe like the massive change you've seen?

The thing that impresses me the most

is the lack of understanding

and civility among people.

I was brought up in a working class family

and

you know my dad was a milkman.

I delivered newspapers.

I helped him on the truck

and it always was

the lessons for my dad were

treat people honorably and with respect and compassion and understanding.

Now he didn't tell me in those words.

I just had the opportunity to watch him,

you know, how how he treated people.

And that's how I ended up treating people the way I do.

And it was just a lesson from my parents and the way I was brought up.

Do you feel like, what do you, what differences do you see in the country, right?

Because it seems like if you were born in 36, then you were graduating high school, what, around 54, 1954.

And we were less populated.

We were less overwhelmed, I think, with the number of bodies when we tried to travel and we got on roads.

But we were finding each other back then.

We had the bowling leagues and we had, I don't know, parades and we had like a shared patriotism.

I feel like that's all changed so much.

Big changes that I've seen in my lifetime are the breakdown of the family unit.

The basic unit of society is the family unit.

You know, that's what youngsters see.

That's the first impression that they have when they're born and they're brought into this world.

And I think unfortunately the family unit, the substance of the family unit has broken down over the years.

And I think that's a shame.

How important is that?

You know, like family dinners and time together and, you know, an intact mother and father unit in the home.

You cannot

import

the importance of that enough.

Just the family unit being being together, the togetherness,

the love of each other,

being together for all major events and enjoying them together is just something that I think is lacking in the world today.

How many cousins did you have growing up?

It was a big number, right?

Cousins?

Oh, my cousins numbered over 30.

Over 30.

My father was one of 10.

My mother was one one of eight.

Wow.

Providence the whole whole life.

All I knew were going right.

Lucky, lucky you.

So your dad did the right thing because he wound up showing you what it was like to be a milkman and what it was like to make a living,

you know, doing honest work, though not

work that will make you rich.

So how did you use that when you got on the bench as a judge?

You know, it's interesting you asked that question because the very first day on the bench, very first day, a woman came in

and the fact of the matter was she was arrogant and she had three kids.

And that was my first day on the bench.

And I asked my dad if he would come to the court to view my proceedings and he came.

So here I am.

I'm a judge now.

I got the robe.

I'm in the court.

You know, my father's watching me.

So I'm going to show my dad what a great judge I can be.

So this woman woman came in and she had

four parking tickets and she

was a little rude and she said, I just don't have the money.

I have three kids and I don't have the money and I'm not paying them.

It's my first day on the bench.

I'm here.

My dad's in the courtroom.

I'm going to now make my mark.

I'm not going to take.

any kind of gut from anybody.

And so I get into a conversation with her.

And finally, because she is so arrogant and rude, I find her the full amount of money without cutting her any kind of a break.

Now the court is over.

And I can't wait to talk to my dad because my dad now sees me with a robe.

I'm a judge.

And I didn't take any guff, you know.

And I said, dad, how did I do?

And he looked at me.

He said, how did you do?

He said, that woman, how could you do that?

I said,

what woman are you talking about?

He said, the woman that you

find her the full charge.

I said, that.

She was arrogant.

She was rude.

He said, you don't understand.

He said, she was scared.

And she didn't have any money.

And now she may not be able to feed her children tonight.

She may not be able to pay the rent.

She may not be able to pay any of the bills.

He said, you can't treat people people like that.

That's not the way you were brought up.

My very first day on the bench, my very first day, my very first client, my dad, straightened me out.

And

there was a reason you were given that case in front of your dad while he was there to remind you, right, of

that other piece of having power, right?

Knowing when to exercise it and knowing when benevolence is a better way.

This is a picture of you on the bench, 38 years on the bench in this role.

What's the number one case do you remember?

Like, is that the one that you remember because it was your first, or was there another one that taught you something?

I remember several, but the one that I remember the most is a gentleman who came in.

He was 96 when he came in.

He was driving his son to get treatment.

And

we actually bonded with him and invited him to our house.

And

it was a very wonderful experience.

Wow.

I mean, this is like, you don't hear about stories like this with a judge inviting a litigant in front of them, a constituent to come over for dinner.

But you know what?

That's Italian, too.

They always want to feed you.

When you're Italian,

that's not that unusual.

I know you say in the book.

A person's worth is defined from learning from mistakes, not from the mistakes themselves.

Can you talk about that?

I'm sorry, I didn't hear the beginning of that.

In the book, you write about how a person's worth is defined from learning from their mistakes.

Not the mistakes themselves, but from taking some time to learn from the mistakes.

I mean, can be easier said than done, but what do you mean by that?

Well,

we don't learn by our victories.

Sometimes we get consumed by them and we feel that

we have this power that we really don't have.

you know so but understanding people's everyday problems

you know i i had the

privilege of working with my dad on a milk truck you know when i was 12 years old and delivering newspapers in a working class neighborhood where people really didn't have any money And many of them couldn't even afford to pay for the newspaper.

And the question that I had to resolve was, what did I do?

Did I stop delivery or not?

And the lessons that I took were the lessons that I learned from my dad.

And it wasn't that he sat me down and said, listen, you treat somebody this way or that way.

It's the way he treated people every single day.

And

it was those experiences that formed my thought process.

Did it ever make it hard for you to issue a harsh punishment against someone in front of you?

Because you are so nice and you view people through such a sympathetic lens?

It did, as a matter of fact,

sometimes that they challenged you.

I actually had a woman come in, you know, and she

challenged me.

I can't afford to pay it, I'm not paying it.

So I said,

you know, what do I do in this situation?

So, anyway, we worked it out.

Did she come over to your house?

No, no, she never got an invitation.

Not everybody does.

Listen, I mean, it's great that you wrote this book, Judge.

I mean, I love when people who have a lot of wisdom to give actually put it in writing.

And I know that

you've been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

So it must have been important to you to write down these stories and these thoughts.

I hope you have big plans for the coming months involving your family and everyone who loves you.

I thought that I would share my early life's experiences

that would help other people who are in the same situation.

My dad was one of 10, my mother was one of eight.

With all my cousins and aunts and uncles, you know, we were a very close-knit family.

And when I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, You know, it was a very traumatic time in my life, not only in my life, but in the life of my family on both sides.

And I try to

conduct myself in a way that would reflect great credit upon my family and upon how we treat things.

I'm sure they love you very much.

Listen, I thank you for your public service.

It's hard to get smart, kind, well-meaning people like you to serve in public service for their whole lives.

Thank you for doing it, sir, and all the best with it.

And the book, too.

It's called, again, Compassion in the Court, Life-Changing Stories from America's Nicest Judge, Check It Out, Frank Caprio.

Thanks to all of you for joining us today.

We'll be back on Monday.

Have a great weekend.

Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.

No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

Bubba Wallace here with Tyler Reddick.

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