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

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Speaker 19 Welcome Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Speaker 19 Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Mahmoud Khalil,

Speaker 19 what is he still doing here?

Speaker 19 is speaking out in an interview with the New York Times. And he said the quiet part out loud about October 7th.

Speaker 19 And speaking of quiet part out loud, the Washington Post's fact checker takes the buyout.

Speaker 19 What are we going to do without Glenn Kessler to tell us how wrong Republicans always are? He took the buyout.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Oh my God, I can't wait to see it on full display.

Speaker 19 It's shocking.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 We just saw it. And it's good.
It's pretty juicy. We're going to show you some of that.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Carl Cannon's on Vacay.

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Speaker 19 Call 800-958-1000 or visit tnusa.com/slash slash megan to talk to a real expert at tax network usa take the pressure off let tax network usa handle your tax issues 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

Speaker 19 who who wants to kick it off by saying something about carl no just kidding just kidding

Speaker 19 okay might as well kick it off with glenn kessler because i think this is really interesting i heard you guys talking about on your show too.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 when it comes to his media properties and perhaps even himself.

Speaker 19 I mean, one thing I'll say about his marriage to Lauren Sanchez is it seems seems to have revitalized his testosterone, which tends to make you a Republican.

Speaker 20 Okay.

Speaker 18 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 19 Thoughts on that?

Speaker 24 Well, I do think you're right about, look, the fact-checking thing,

Speaker 24 this was something that

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 I mean, PolitiFact was around longer than that.

Speaker 24 but

Speaker 24 it really did show that

Speaker 24 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,

Speaker 24 you know, with the way that they were conducting themselves in their work.

Speaker 24 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

Speaker 24 over time is that that's when you really started learning about these journalists who were supposed to be objective.

Speaker 24 They would get on X or Twitter at the time and post like this crazy left-wing stuff and just expose themselves. And

Speaker 24 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,

Speaker 24 you know, he wrote this really long thing. I said on our show, I said the first thing you could say is Glenn Kessler really needs an editor.

Speaker 19 Needs an editor. I heard you say that.

Speaker 24 Yeah, because he wrote like 3,000 words on this.

Speaker 24 But he was talking about,

Speaker 24 you know, how he would, when he would fact check Democrats, you know, he would get an earful from

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 And anytime they try and do anything that offends the sensibilities of their readers, you know,

Speaker 24 A, they get Mau Maoed into basically toeing the line, but B, it also

Speaker 24 presents a sort of

Speaker 24 a financial issue for them when people start boycotting and losing readers because maybe they said something nice about President Trump or something.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 19 I mean, what do you think, Andrew?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Most publications have a point of view. And I really think my own opinion is the future is just owning it.
and

Speaker 19 proceeding accordingly and to stop pretending like your 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.

Speaker 22 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

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 So he sort of admits that he thinks that basically the the Washington Post is going to, it's a bad business move to actually try to attract these other readers.

Speaker 22 And the other interesting thing about the piece is at the end he talks about the buyout and

Speaker 22 very, very straightforward about it. I give him credit for this as, hey, you know, at the end of the day, there was a financial incentive for me to take the buyout.

Speaker 22 It wouldn't, because I would have been working for four more years for free if I hadn't taken the buyout.

Speaker 22 So

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 We try to balance articles so you get

Speaker 23 from both sides. But

Speaker 19 finding original reporters who are truly objective and unbiased is very tough.

Speaker 19 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,

Speaker 19 a righties article or a lefties article, but you have both represented, which I really think is the future.

Speaker 19 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,

Speaker 19 frankly, an MSNBC that just owns it or a Fox that owns it. And then you know, you know exactly what the bias.

Speaker 19 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, Tom.

Speaker 24 Yeah, and look, you know, if for people who aren't familiar with real-claim politics, you know, we have in our center column, we list the top 17 sort of opinion pieces.

Speaker 24 They're mostly from the opinion pages and they're arguments.

Speaker 24 And you're right, we 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.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 Today there's something on the redistricting wars.

Speaker 24 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 um and and we try and find the one that we think is sort of most representative of the truth and sometimes it you know based on what the headline is based on what the 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 uh you know, opinion or perspective on what the news is.

Speaker 24 Or if you're just relying on the New York Times Times or just on the Washington Post, you need to have conservative news sources.

Speaker 24 I mean, it's, you know, you go watch Brett Baer's show, for example, which I think is probably the best news show on cable TV.

Speaker 24 And then you watch, you know, one of the 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.

Speaker 24 And, you know, the network news, and they've done this for a long time.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 But there is still some decent reporting that is done in the Washington Post and the New York Times. But

Speaker 19 it's getting more and more like trying to find a needle in the world. And it doesn't have a political angle.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But if they're doing like some big

Speaker 19 expose on some local, I don't know, story where a politician got blown up, you know, and 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.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 19 What should the Post do to appeal to more Fox News viewers? He was asked.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 The nerve of this guy, this guy whose fact 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.

Speaker 19 There's no there or there. Like he's worried about the right wing not knowing the truth if it hit them in the face.

Speaker 22 Well, yeah, I mean, I think, well, the whole, and if you've ever seen this in the post, 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.

Speaker 22 And,

Speaker 22 you know,

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 I think that it might be time to retire that as a sort of

Speaker 22 trope because,

Speaker 22 you know, it is just bias sort of dressed up as objectivity. And that makes it all the worse to me.

Speaker 22 You know, it's one thing to sort of have a news story and have it be biased, but another thing 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.

Speaker 22 Right. You know what I mean?

Speaker 12 You know what would be good, Megan?

Speaker 19 Insulting. Correct.
Go ahead, Tom.

Speaker 24 You know what would be good? I mean, if they want to be sort of fair and honest about it, it's fine.

Speaker 24 Have Glenn Kessler, have a liberal fact-checker, and hire a conservative fact-checker and run their columns side by side.

Speaker 24 And they can pick up, you know, and then we 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.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 So hire a conservative fact checker, Washington Post.

Speaker 19 They won't. They won't.
It's not consistent with their ideology. I mean, I've told a story before.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 You need like not

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And you know how many listen to me? None.

Speaker 19 Not one did it because they're too too ideologically committed to their leftist point of view. Okay, here is a little bit.
Here's a preview.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But Steve Krakauer, our executive producer, has said it's a barn burner, it's a good one. Um, and you can watch it as when it posts later today.

Speaker 19 Mark Halperin, next up with Mark Halperin, go ahead and download. You should already be downloading and following that show.

Speaker 19 But here is a preview of his interview with Glenn Kessler, which got pretty contentious.

Speaker 26 How could it be that that I see the post as fundamentally anti-Trump in every day, in every crevice of every story, practically?

Speaker 26 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?

Speaker 22 Well, okay.

Speaker 27 First of all, it's because you're wrong and I'm right, Bart.

Speaker 27 You know, I get.

Speaker 27 you know, I am in the news, you know, I was in the newsroom and I watched how the stories were put together and

Speaker 27 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,

Speaker 27 I will have a,

Speaker 27 based on the comments you've made to me, I will have an open mind to see what I see.

Speaker 27 But I do know

Speaker 24 when

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 26 I agree with you. It's more insidious.
It's more insidious than that.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 He's corrupt. He's a liar.
Look at all the four Pinocchios he gets.

Speaker 26 We need to protect Joe Biden and destroy him. That'd be better instead.
And again, I just go back to Glenn.

Speaker 26 I just go back to two facts. Your audience, by your own acknowledgement and by every indication, is super liberal.

Speaker 19 Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 19 Correct. And listen to him.
Like,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 there's no need to. That's what he's trying to say, Tom.
There's no need for people to openly say that.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 24 That's right.

Speaker 24 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

Speaker 24 fawning over him and giving him all this glowing coverage, and then turned right around and said,

Speaker 24 we're going to hold Donald Trump to account, not let him tell lies and democracy dies in darkness and all that bullshit.

Speaker 24 But Mark makes the good point that.

Speaker 24 It is, these folks don't see themselves as anti-Trump and that they're out to get Trump. They truly, in their own image, seem to, I'm a journalist, I'm objective, I'm just trying to get to the truth.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 And, you know, we've been the beneficiary, I should say, of a couple of hit pieces from the New York Times over the last few years.

Speaker 19 Even though you guys got it right in the polling analysis and the average. Yeah.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 They write the story and then they'll send without including another point of view.

Speaker 24 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...

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 That hasn't been the case for a long, long time.

Speaker 24 The Washington Post, New York Times,

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 19 You know what this is reminding me of, Andrew?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Was it out of Afghanistan?

Speaker 25 My gosh, I don't know why I remember.

Speaker 25 Out of Afghanistan.

Speaker 19 And,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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 came out in the course of the defamation lawsuit.

Speaker 19 We had the guy on the program.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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, shit.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 It was so clear that

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 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?

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 So it's partly ideologically driven. I think that's fair.
But I think it's also driven by the business reality.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 And that drives you into your sort of ideological corner.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 19 So I get it. And 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.

Speaker 19 And I love the folks at News Nation and I appreciate the mission.

Speaker 19 The channel is not enjoying the kind of success I'm sure they'd like to.

Speaker 19 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,

Speaker 19 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 what how I feel about the facts but the facts are knowable and

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I think, you know, I feel like we are doing it and others in a small group are doing it.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 17 had.

Speaker 19 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 factually correct, right?

Speaker 19 Like, or at least trying to be factually correct. They were always boring.
They were never exciting. They never hired interesting personalities.

Speaker 19 I'll never forget Roger Ale talking to Jeff Zucker when Zucker first got hired over there. And he asked Roger for advice.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 24 No, that's exactly right. And you're right.

Speaker 24 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 a plane crash or whatever for sort of the hard news.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 And again, when Trump was elected, I mean, Jim Acosta was, you know, openly declared war on Trump, and he was their prime guy in the White House press briefing room, just

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 He was going on, you know, the late night shows and all that. It was a huge success for him, but it did.

Speaker 24 It alienated and really destroyed the CNN brand to the point where they're hardly distinguishable from MSNBC these days.

Speaker 19 So that's the problem. Like, can Washington Post go back, Andrew?

Speaker 19 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,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I ran one of the most popular features at the Post, an internationally recognized brand.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 Carpathia, i.e.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 23 Well,

Speaker 22 it's artfully written.

Speaker 22 I wouldn't have edited that part of it, Tom. I think that was a nice little paragraph.

Speaker 22 But I think

Speaker 22 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?

Speaker 22 I'm going to say yes.

Speaker 22 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

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 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?

Speaker 22 Why not try to go back to being more objective or being more balanced?

Speaker 22 It certainly works for real-clear politics. So I think it should work for that.

Speaker 24 To do that, though, I think...

Speaker 24 you know, 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.

Speaker 24 and anytime that anything happens they they throw these hissy fits and basically browbeat their managers into

Speaker 24 uh you know reverting to or staying the the sort of liberal course i mean i really do think if 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

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 19 Do the Roger Ails rule. He wasn't hiring people who got their master's at Columbia.
If he did, it was because like he had a soft spot for them personally for some reason.

Speaker 19 They knew the parents or what have you.

Speaker 19 but he knew and he was not looking for journalists i mean like when when i went in into fox news i i remember thinking i was going to dazzle everybody because i was 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 you know how do you deliver a story and can you penetrate the lens and you know are you a good storyteller and all that um 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, is that going to hurt me there?

Speaker 19 Is this going to hurt? I have no idea because Fox is number one and all this.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 They will never have the ratings of Fox News.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 17 I mean, like, seriously.

Speaker 24 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?

Speaker 24 And this idea that, you know, having people who actually represent the MAGA point of view, right?

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 But, you know, I'll look at the Sunday show lineups from time to time and it's the same thing.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 Those are the panels that are appearing on. Face the Nation and Meet the Press and

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 And so in that sense, it doesn't even reflect reality.

Speaker 19 No, at best, they'll put on a Republican who hates Trump. That's the only way you get booked.

Speaker 19 You get interviewed at one of these

Speaker 19 roundtables or seminars, or you get on CNN or MSN. If they're ever going to put a Republican, Republican on, it's got to be old school, the kind that hates Trump and never, never, never a MAGA.

Speaker 19 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 away tomorrow.
But I do care about newspapers. Like,

Speaker 19 I think we need them. I mean, we get a lot of our news from newspapers.

Speaker 19 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,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Same thing the two weeks over Christmas.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And it is kind of important to save these newspapers. Otherwise,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 22 Yeah, well, I buy your point, but at the same time, I'd say, look, you know,

Speaker 22 the newspaper, as we know it, the sort of daily newspaper,

Speaker 22 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 dwarfing the audiences of some cable shows.

Speaker 22 Maybe the future is online. Maybe it is,

Speaker 22 you know, these other platforms. And maybe they just have to evolve to the point where they sort of of fill the hole that the newspapers are leaving.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 I mean, you know, basically, once you take away the classified advertising, that's when newspapers started to fall apart.

Speaker 22 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

Speaker 22 if it's not classified in ads, maybe it's something else. Maybe it's,

Speaker 22 I don't know what it is, but it

Speaker 22 the business model is backpacking.

Speaker 19 It's like some sort of

Speaker 19 backpage.com.

Speaker 19 We're not in favor of that. That was used for sex trafficking.

Speaker 22 Yeah,

Speaker 22 probably not that.

Speaker 23 Yeah, right.

Speaker 21 No, I was trying to think of like the

Speaker 19 newspaper version of OnlyFans. I don't know.

Speaker 25 I'm not sure.

Speaker 19 Anything to drive some sort of revenue. I don't know.

Speaker 19 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 months ago. And,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 They wouldn't hire somebody with a resume like mine, either when I started at Fox or now,

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 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 the young audience,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I think you're right that there is some

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 She thinks that the Times is fooling people, Tom. She thinks that their audience thinks they're objective.

Speaker 24 Yeah, well, look, I understand the

Speaker 24 desire for her to say, well, you know, I'm objective. And you do have these

Speaker 24 folks who have,

Speaker 24 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

Speaker 24 blue-collar folks. This was not an Ivy League, not an elitist type institution.
And after Watergate, you had this sort of generation that came up and viewing journalism as this really noble cause.

Speaker 24 And they're holding the

Speaker 24 powerful to account.

Speaker 24 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's going on and then report it to my readers for better or worse.

Speaker 24 It became this,

Speaker 24 and they had this inflated sense of self that, you know, this institution is,

Speaker 24 you know,

Speaker 24 just

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 23 And it's just led.

Speaker 19 And Tom 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 wanting to be part of those groups.

Speaker 22 Correct.

Speaker 24 Yeah, no, and it's also led to this

Speaker 24 interesting idea, which is very anti-journalist, in my opinion,

Speaker 24 of the last few days that even Leonard Downing of the Washington Post at the time wrote, you know, this idea that there, you know, we can't do both sides. And,

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 And, you know, when we talk to our reporters, Phil Wegman, Susan Crabtree, when they go out to do a story, you know,

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 You quote these people so that they're, 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.

Speaker 24 And most of the media stories, you go out and you read these stories.

Speaker 24 If you read them carefully, you'll find that, you know, the folks that they get, the experts that they get are all totally one-sided.

Speaker 24 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

Speaker 24 I think the whole structure of our current journalism is just completely out of whack.

Speaker 22 But I would say that,

Speaker 20 yeah, go ahead, Andrew.

Speaker 22 I was just saying, Megan, you know, when I look at what you're doing, Megan,

Speaker 22 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 Armura or Walter Lippmann, George Will,

Speaker 22 Charles Krauthammer. I mean, people who are sort of opinion journalists, we used to to call them.

Speaker 22 I don't know if people use that term anymore, but people who would present objective facts and present an argument with them.

Speaker 22 And you knew when you were reading Charles Krauthammer, just as an example, you knew where he was coming from.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 He was one of my heroes. I love the way he wrote.

Speaker 22 Same sort of thing. I mean, he was writing in the New York Times, right? And And

Speaker 22 so there are, you know, that's a tradition I think is worth honoring and

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 19 Well, thank you.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 20 Oh,

Speaker 21 my God.

Speaker 19 That's an actual headline.

Speaker 18 That's a good one.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 An editorial, Andrew, from the AP, they go on about how

Speaker 19 they acknowledge that the attack, this is Israel's detonating the pagers in the pockets of Hezbollah terrorists, we recognize that group as terrorists, that it wounded more than 3,000 people and killed 12, including two children.

Speaker 19 Hezbollah has acknowledged that most of those wounded and killed were its fighters or personnel.

Speaker 19 The simultaneous explosions in populated areas, however, also wounded many civilians.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 22 Well,

Speaker 22 that pager attack was one of the most amazing stories that I've ever read.

Speaker 22 And if you think about it, it is in war you have collateral damage.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 But so, you know,

Speaker 22 I'm sort of stunned.

Speaker 22 I haven't seen that story myself, so I'd love to read it. But

Speaker 22 yes, there is sort of a

Speaker 22 there are 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.

Speaker 19 It seems like it's crazy, Tom. They say the survivors,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 They expressly say that everybody they talked to were Hezbollah officials or fighters or members of their families.

Speaker 19 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 terrorism from your home around your family, you're endangering them too.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But as you know, when it comes to Israel, all the rules are different.

Speaker 24 Well, and that's the point I was going to make is, you know,

Speaker 24 this story is absurd in and of itself, but it, but it highlights the broader problem, which is the Associated Press and a lot of the media, right, the way that they, the way that they frame these stories and talk about the narratives that they produce and they're constantly relying on, you know, the Gaza Health Ministry for, you know, casualty numbers and the like.

Speaker 19 Red flag. Red flag.

Speaker 24 Right. Like, how can we even, how can we even, as news consumers,

Speaker 24 How can we trust anything that they print? How do we know, where can we get accurate information about what's actually happening in in the middle east right now because you know

Speaker 24 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

Speaker 24 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?

Speaker 24 Is Israel totally to blame? Is it genocide that's happening there? I mean, you just

Speaker 24 there, there's such bias that is baked into obviously our domestic coverage, but this international coverage as well, that

Speaker 24 it's really hard.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 19 Did you guys see the, while we're on this topic of Israel, this Mahmoud Khalil

Speaker 19 is he's been on a press tour, he's a media darling now. This guy who's here on,

Speaker 19 he's got a green card on a visa, but

Speaker 19 he's not a U.S. citizen.
And he was at Colombia. He participated in the protests that basically took hostage the campus of Colombia and really said to the officials at Colombia, nice university here.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 He's got a team of lawyers that OJ would envy.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And on top of it, he's on this media tour all over CNN. Now, the latest with the New York Times is Ezra Klein, where he offers the following justification for the 10-7 terrorist attack.
Listen.

Speaker 15 October 7th happens.

Speaker 18 What do you think that day?

Speaker 29 To me, it felt frightening that

Speaker 29 we had to reach this moment

Speaker 29 in the Palestinian struggle. I remember I didn't sleep for a number of days and Noor was very worried about

Speaker 29 just

Speaker 29 my health.

Speaker 29 And it was heavy.

Speaker 29 I still remember, I was like,

Speaker 29 this couldn't happen.

Speaker 18 What do you mean we had to reach this moment?

Speaker 15 What moment is this?

Speaker 29 The situation in the West Bank and Anghaza. And you can see that the situation is not sustainable.
Unfortunately,

Speaker 29 we couldn't avoid such a moment.

Speaker 19 It's unbelievable, Tom. We had to reach the moment where we burned the babies.
It was unavoidable. It's regrettable.

Speaker 24 But yeah, who's we, buddy? Who are you talking about? We.

Speaker 24 Certainly not me.

Speaker 24 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

Speaker 24 so I think he just kind of exposed himself further here as, you know, folks had been,

Speaker 24 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

Speaker 24 and do the kind of things that this guy has been doing. So it was pretty outrageous.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 25 I mean,

Speaker 24 it's really hard to fathom.

Speaker 19 Get out. Get out.
Get out. Go home.
We don't want you. Get out.
You clearly hate America. It's mutual.

Speaker 20 Move along.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 22 Well, you know,

Speaker 22 I would get one less lawyer and maybe one more PR professional involved because it's disastrous for his brand, so-called, right now.

Speaker 22 He also said that anti-Semitism on Columbia, at Columbia campus, is manufactured.

Speaker 22 He said that, you know, from the river to the sea and globalizing the into Fodder,

Speaker 22 he defended both terms. So

Speaker 22 pretty disastrous. And yeah,

Speaker 22 I think it's time for him to leave.

Speaker 19 Good point. Might need the crisis PR.

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Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 We're only on the five-year mark. It was done in 2020 last.
And

Speaker 19 this is very interesting because

Speaker 19 there's a question about what, if anything, it could do to our electoral politics. Here's the True Social Post.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 People who are in our country illegally will not be counted in the census. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Now,

Speaker 19 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 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.

Speaker 19 But there's also the question of whether you can exclude illegals

Speaker 19 for those purposes. Like,

Speaker 19 you do not have to let illegals vote, but the Constitution seems to read that they are supposed to be included.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So what do we make of this, Andrew?

Speaker 19 Do we think the census and redoing it at the midway point is going to have electoral consequences?

Speaker 22 Well, I'm not sure he's talking about redoing it before 2030.

Speaker 22 That would be a big change.

Speaker 22 The Constitution, you're right, the Constitution calls for

Speaker 22 a census every 10 years, and we do use that to apportion.

Speaker 19 He says to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate census.

Speaker 16 Immediately.

Speaker 22 Yeah, well, maybe, maybe he's, well,

Speaker 22 that would be a big change. And then how you would use that, I don't know.

Speaker 22 Boy,

Speaker 22 that's a whole different constitutional question of whether you could speed up the census in order to

Speaker 22 change the numbers.

Speaker 22 I seem to be that would be a hard, hard, hard lift. It's going to be a lot of fun.

Speaker 22 Yeah, I mean, it's a hard enough lift because, as you point out, the Constitution, the language is kind of clear.

Speaker 22 It says you have to count everyone in the country, and it doesn't distinguish between the two.

Speaker 22 But the political consequences of this, and Ben Weitengarten's piece is well worth reading on this.

Speaker 22 And Pugh has done a study on this as well.

Speaker 22 California and Texas, I think, would both lose seats. Wisconsin and a bunch of other states would gain seats.
So it would change.

Speaker 22 the electoral composition and could change control of the House. And we're seeing that right now with all this

Speaker 22 sort of redistribution argument that's going on, redistricting argument that's going on in Texas and other places now. So

Speaker 22 this is all part of that same argument.

Speaker 22 And I do think, though, Trump has a point. And the point is that

Speaker 22 if you don't count voters and then

Speaker 22 you provide

Speaker 22 these seats based on that number, you're sort of jipping voters. You're sort of

Speaker 19 might be why does my vote get diluted?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 23 Right.

Speaker 22 Well, actually,

Speaker 22 I think it's the opposite. I think you get more representation

Speaker 22 because they're counting people who don't vote. So

Speaker 22 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

Speaker 22 the courts have ruled on this before, and it seems to me that changing the census is pretty tough.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 citizen, is my vote diluted or does it count more?

Speaker 19 I can't do the math like that. I don't have to.
I think it counts more.

Speaker 19 I think it counts more. Tom, you went to Princeton.

Speaker 23 Would you like to resolve the explaining? No,

Speaker 24 I wasn't a math major.

Speaker 25 No.

Speaker 19 None of us was. That's why we're in journalism.

Speaker 22 That's right.

Speaker 23 Look,

Speaker 22 this is, I think

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 There's no question about that. It might go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Speaker 24 And because Democrats, I don't think, want to partake in anything that would discount the counting of folks who are here illegally,

Speaker 24 because it could drastically alter

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 If California loses votes, that's a Democratic state. If Arizona loses votes, that's a swing state.

Speaker 24 New Mexico.

Speaker 19 Yeah, because just to be clear, because if we're talking about eliminating illegals from the count,

Speaker 19 it doesn't necessarily mean

Speaker 19 like Republicans benefit or Democrats benefit.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 23 Keep going. Correct.

Speaker 24 So we don't know exactly how this might actually affect the outcome of,

Speaker 24 you know,

Speaker 24 the composition of the House or the composition of the Electoral College. I mean, it would be, but it would be interesting.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 19 So

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 22 That's right. And right now,

Speaker 22 if you have a diplomatic visa, you're not counted. So, I mean, there are exceptions to the rule even now.

Speaker 22 Right. So, yeah.

Speaker 19 It makes no sense to be counting illegals. It doesn't.

Speaker 19 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 in the census.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 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,

Speaker 19 what is it? They say that they're,

Speaker 19 Kamala Harris only got 53% of the vote, but Democrats occupy 82% of the state's congressional seats. So, how did that happen, Tom?

Speaker 22 Well, right.

Speaker 24 And, you know, it was ironic. J.B.
Pritzker went on, he's, you know, having his moment now because he's, you know, the father figure to all of these fleeing Democrats. He went on Colbert.

Speaker 24 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?

Speaker 19 And J.B.

Speaker 24 Pritzker kind of yucked it up. It was like, oh, we had a kindergarten class decide.
Well, no, actually, they had super majority control of the state legislature.

Speaker 24 And they redrew these districts to be as favorable to Democrats.

Speaker 19 Like, look at this one. There's this, like, just looking at the map of Illinois right here for the list.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 17 It goes all the way up. It's like a snake.

Speaker 24 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 24 And then, and then the other district has to curl all the way 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

Speaker 24 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 and 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?

Speaker 24 They're doing it five years, not waiting for the full 10 years, but it has been done before. It's rare, but it has been done, including by New York, I believe, like in 2024.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 It has kicked off, though, this real interesting national debate and discussion where you've got now all these other states are 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

Speaker 24 for the texas democrats to sort of cry foul and then flee to illinois is almost too perfect for for words i mean if you had if you had imagined it, people would say, this is, you know, you got to send it back for a rewrite.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 25 Who would do such a thing? Right.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Yeah,

Speaker 19 so that'll be interesting. What are they going to do? Are they going to arrest them, like drag them back to Texas?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I want to switch gears, though, Andrew, because we don't have that much time. Speaking of J.D.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 the other day when he was asked on Tuesday in SOT 7. Listen.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 12 Do you agree that the heir apparent to MAGA is J.D.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 31 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

Speaker 31 probably favored at this point.

Speaker 19 Any thoughts on that, Andrew?

Speaker 22 Well, you know,

Speaker 22 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,

Speaker 22 which is not to say who is the next presidential nominee for the Republican Party, two different questions.

Speaker 22 And then in his answer,

Speaker 22 it sort of sounded like at the end of it that he was sort of aliding to the second, he says, where, you know, he would be favored. Well, that's a political term.

Speaker 22 So, you know,

Speaker 22 it's always dangerous to try to parse the president's language too carefully. But I thought that was a really interesting statement.
And I think

Speaker 22 so I think clearly he was

Speaker 22 answering it honestly, which he does from time to time. And he was saying that, yeah, that's what he thinks, that J.
Davance is the leader.

Speaker 22 But to put Marco Rubio as a potential leader of the MAGA movement, Again, that's it.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 19 he clearly hasn't, in his own mind, made up his mind on who he really wants to pass the baton to.

Speaker 22 Yeah, and the question, of course, is who's at the top of the ticket and

Speaker 22 who's the number two slot.

Speaker 22 I think those two principles might have different things. I don't think J.D.

Speaker 24 wants to spend another four or eight years as vice president.

Speaker 22 Yeah. No.

Speaker 17 But he's a lot younger than Marco.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 22 But I think that

Speaker 22 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,

Speaker 22 you know, to being,

Speaker 22 you know, at the head of the MAGA movement. I mean, that's pretty extraordinary, pretty deft politics on his part.

Speaker 19 Very.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 I don't know

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Vance would have been quite happy to hear him say that. And by the way,

Speaker 19 here's some more support for J.D. Vance as the heir apparent from CNN's Harry Enton.
Take a listen to SAT 7B.

Speaker 19 Where does he stand on this?

Speaker 32 You know, I'm going to quote the esteemed scholar Larry David and say, pretty, pretty good. J.D.
Vance at 40%.

Speaker 32 There's no one even close to him. Ron DeSantis back at single digits at 8%.
Donald Trump Jr. back at 7%.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And when you're dealing with fields that are five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, upwards of north of twenty, and all of a sudden you're telling me that the early poll leader who is J.D.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 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 HHH.

Speaker 32 That's a real acronym for him. How about Bush the First 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.

Speaker 32 So it's not just a polling. Historically speaking, if J.D.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 19 Tom, thoughts?

Speaker 24 Well, not to nip pick Harry, but Kamala didn't really win.

Speaker 19 True, she did not even win her party's nomination. She did win

Speaker 19 the nomination.

Speaker 24 But look, he makes a good point, which is, look, J.D. Vance

Speaker 24 has done a good job as vice president, I think, in the eyes of Trump supporters. And Trump clearly,

Speaker 24 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, has the highest profile now.

Speaker 24 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,

Speaker 24 or he might have some vulnerabilities, we need to know where

Speaker 24 the country is going to be, where the, you know, Trump

Speaker 24 presidency is going to be, where the economy is going to be when J.D. Vance, because that's always the problem, right?

Speaker 24 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,

Speaker 24 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

Speaker 24 in terms of his being in the MAGA movement. Yeah.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Probably until the very, very, very end, and maybe not even then. We'll have to wait to find out.

Speaker 24 He might just say that he's going to run for a third term in the end, right?

Speaker 19 Yeah, he says he probably won't.

Speaker 20 He says he probably won't.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And now we have

Speaker 19 Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.
I'm sorry, just going to say it.

Speaker 19 He's too fat to be president. I'm sorry, but he is.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 21 I did want to get your thoughts, however,

Speaker 19 on his possible run because

Speaker 19 there's a you guys have this up at Real Clear Politics today. J.B.
Pritzker's presidential ambitions are sinking him at home. And there's a piece about how

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 22 Well, I think it's the same problem sort of any blue state governor has right now.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 They don't have to sort of explain why they didn't tell the country about Biden's

Speaker 22 declining acuity.

Speaker 22 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

Speaker 22 tell you more about what it's like to live under the Pritzker regime. But it's not an easy

Speaker 22 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 kind of interesting.

Speaker 30 I mean, he's really

Speaker 18 going to be.

Speaker 22 Trans thing, the Sanctuary City, this, you know, defending these Texans.

Speaker 22 He's decided that's where he's going to go. And

Speaker 22 for a die-in-the-wall billionaire, it's kind of interesting.

Speaker 19 Quite the contrast from Rob Emmanuel, Tom.

Speaker 24 Yeah, for sure. And look, JB's running for re-election

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 But at the same time, this new poll from M3 Strategies that came out that we have this piece on the the site today, shows him underwater for the first time.

Speaker 24 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

Speaker 24 we have all sorts of problems.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 He's already spent a couple hundred million getting himself elected the first two times. So he's probably

Speaker 24 going to win reelection, but

Speaker 24 the bloom is definitely off the chubby rose, as we say.

Speaker 19 Yes. Oh, my God.

Speaker 19 Congratulations, J.B. Pritzker, because you've given Tom Bevin the highest gas taxes in the country, the highest property taxes in the country.

Speaker 19 And I can say, as somebody who lives in the Northeast, that's a real feat. Congrats, because that's tough to do.

Speaker 19 He's embraced the teachers' union. He's screwed over the kids.
He loves the trans,

Speaker 19 the transing of children, the illegals, all of it.

Speaker 19 Pick your issue. He's like

Speaker 19 Donnie in

Speaker 19 the big and tall store.

Speaker 18 Okay.

Speaker 19 But only in the big, only there for the big part of it.

Speaker 20 Okay.

Speaker 19 I have two things more I need to get through with you.

Speaker 19 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 Mom Dani.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And both apparently said Cuomo. Curtis Lee was a Republican who cannot win, sadly.
And

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I can just let nature take its course. But this guy's too radical to be mayor, mum domi.
In any event, Trump's thinking about it, Andrew. But the question is, with New York, you know, going

Speaker 19 like 90% for Kamala Harris,

Speaker 19 how helpful can Trump be in stopping Democrats from doing what they want to do?

Speaker 22 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,

Speaker 22 you know,

Speaker 22 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

Speaker 22 that's going to help us. So, yeah.

Speaker 22 But I think uh i mean the interesting thing about cuomo is before

Speaker 22 you know if you looked at the early polls he was clearly the leader everyone thought he was gonna sail to uh victory in this um 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 course correct corrected his campaign to the point where he's going to be competitive with Mandami.

Speaker 22 I think it's Mandami's to win at this point.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I'm sticking with Andrew.

Speaker 19 I need your opinion, and I need it fast on Sidney Sweeney, my friend.

Speaker 23 Thank God, Megan. I appreciate that.

Speaker 11 Oh, God.

Speaker 19 Here's my way in. Here's my way in.

Speaker 19 Vox, Vox has a piece up titled Sidney Sweeney and the Unsettling Legacy of of the Blonde Bombshell.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And then we get this.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Sweeney represents a modern version of the blonde bombshell, a loaded cultural symbol tied to white femininity, sexuality, and American nostalgia.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Thoughts, Andrew?

Speaker 22 Well, I think if the left thinks that sex doesn't sell anymore, they're wrong. Sex will always sell.

Speaker 22 And she's a sexy woman. And

Speaker 22 I like the ads personally. And I thought that the sort of blue jeans were great.

Speaker 16 So there you have it.

Speaker 19 Tom, I managed to get him to comment on it. I feel like I accomplished something here.

Speaker 22 You did.

Speaker 24 That's great.

Speaker 24 I was following your Twitter back and forth or your ex back and forth with the Podbros.

Speaker 24 And it's like, it's almost the exact opposite of reality, like that somehow this was a Republican, a right-wing manufactured thing.

Speaker 24 I mean, it was, it was the left, 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.

Speaker 24 even worse than 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

Speaker 24 shouldn't be stood for. So

Speaker 19 here's more. Here's more.

Speaker 23 Not learning lessons.

Speaker 20 Here's more.

Speaker 19 And by the way, this was written by a woman named Constance Grady, who I'll get to in a second.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 It's a highly charged encapsulation of American fantasies and fears about white

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 She goes on to say, Marilyn Monroe represented the idealized post-war American woman, desirable, white, submissive, yet powerful through beauty.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So I wondered, Tom, who is this Constance Grady?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 20 Oh, boy.

Speaker 16 Guilty.

Speaker 19 I mean, they're not as bad as others, but they're still.

Speaker 20 Okay, here are some facts about her.

Speaker 19 She wrote articles like in April of 25, the strange link between Trump's tariffs and incel ideology.

Speaker 19 Incel, I say. Yes.

Speaker 19 Trump's tariffs and incel. I mean, you got to give points for ingenuity on that one at least.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I have it on good authority at Real Clear Politics. A long history of kids doing weird stuff to Barbie.
Yes, Constance delved deep into the following.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 She was for chopping off her doll hair. She was for doll orgies.
Constance, oh, Constance, sweetheart, you're saying too much.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 19 What else can you do with the problem of what you're going to grow up to face? So this is a sick person.

Speaker 19 This is who Vox 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!

Speaker 24 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

Speaker 23 perverse.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 23 Well, Andrew,

Speaker 19 what does America do with its barbies?

Speaker 22 I have three daughters

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 I mean, this is just a level of sort of like left-wing cultural critique that, you know, that gets ridiculous.

Speaker 22 And I think uh i think that's a lot of that these days yeah and i i guess maybe you know uh it does get people like us to talk about it though so i mean yeah that's carl's is really going to be sad he missed this one oh carl carl will is dying he 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.

Speaker 19 She was pretty uniformly beloved. She had a very unique ability of being incredibly sexy and a sex symbol by any man's measure

Speaker 19 while non-threatening. I think this is part of

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 22 Yeah. Well, you know, Madonna always comes to mind when I hear these conversations.
Well, you know,

Speaker 22 she's sort of viewed as this sort of great icon of the left and, you know, trans, trans.

Speaker 22 not transsexual, but she transcended a lot of categories and, you know, people seem to love her. So I, you know, maybe Sidney Sweeney's just the the Madonna of our age.

Speaker 18 Maybe we look at that.

Speaker 22 Oh, my, that's a hot take.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 24 Well, 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 make news by being outrageous.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 It's fine, you know, she wasn't like trying to always show off her God-given gifts.

Speaker 19 And she always had that playful sex kitten way of talking and being and like interviewing.

Speaker 19 But she realized at some point, you take off like the waist-high leotard and you put on like a skirt and uh, you know, like a nice blouse.

Speaker 19 At some point, that's how you approach your life. Um, 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 gotta go.

Speaker 22 Sorry.

Speaker 25 Okay, goodbye. I triggered you.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Okay, coming up.

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Speaker 19 I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.

Speaker 19 It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today.

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Speaker 19 He is known around the world as America's nicest judge, a man whose compassion and understanding on the bench have touched millions.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Judge Frank Caprio joins me now. Judge, welcome to the show.
Great to have you.

Speaker 28 Oh, it's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for the opportunity.

Speaker 19 All right, so

Speaker 19 how does one become a nice judge? Because when we think of judges, that's not where we go.

Speaker 28 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

Speaker 28 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,

Speaker 28 if you come from a position of power, like a judge, that you have to use that power, you know, in adverse ways.

Speaker 28 I never thought that. I thought it was a tool for good.
I thought it was a tool for understanding people,

Speaker 28 for helping them if I could, to let them know that I understood their problems. And that was basically it.

Speaker 19 So, Judge, you were born then, what, in 1937?

Speaker 28 1936.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Can I just ask you broad view:

Speaker 19 how do you see the dramatic changes in the world over your 88 years, you know, from your childhood to now? Describe like the massive change you've seen.

Speaker 28 The thing that impresses me the most

Speaker 28 is the lack of understanding and civility among people.

Speaker 28 I was brought up in a working-class family.

Speaker 28 And,

Speaker 28 you know, my dad was a milkman. I delivered newspapers.

Speaker 28 I helped him on the truck.

Speaker 28 And it always was

Speaker 28 the lessons for my dad were, you know, 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,

Speaker 28 you know, how he treated people. And that's how I ended up treating people the way I do

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I feel like that's all changed so much.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 28 That's the first impression that they have. when they're born and they're brought into this world.

Speaker 28 And I think unfortunately that 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

Speaker 28 you you cannot uh import

Speaker 28 the importance of that enough

Speaker 28 Just the family unit being together, the togetherness,

Speaker 28 the love of each other,

Speaker 28 being together for all major events and enjoying them together is

Speaker 28 just something that I think is lacking in the world today.

Speaker 19 How many cousins did you have growing up? It was a big number, right? Cousins?

Speaker 28 Oh, my cousins numbered over 30.

Speaker 28 Over 30.

Speaker 28 My father was one of 10. My mother was one of eight.

Speaker 23 Wow.

Speaker 19 Providence, the whole life.

Speaker 28 All I knew were going right.

Speaker 19 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,

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 28 You know, it's interesting you asked that question because the very first day on the bench, very first day, a woman came in

Speaker 28 and 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.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 28 So this woman came in and she had

Speaker 28 four parking tickets and she

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 28 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 cuff from anybody.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 28 Now the court is over.

Speaker 28 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 cuff, you know.

Speaker 28 And I said, dad, how did I do?

Speaker 28 And he looked at me.

Speaker 28 He said, how did you do?

Speaker 28 He said, that woman, how could you do that?

Speaker 28 I said,

Speaker 28 what woman are you talking about?

Speaker 28 He said, the woman that you

Speaker 28 find her the full charge.

Speaker 28 I said, that. She was arrogant.
She was rude.

Speaker 28 He said, you don't understand. He said, she was scared.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 28 He said, you can't treat 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.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 28 a whole different story. Whole different story.

Speaker 19 There was a reason you were given that case in front of your dad while he was there to remind you, right, of

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 What single 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?

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 28 We actually bonded with him and invited him to our house. And,

Speaker 19 you know, it just, 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 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?

Speaker 28 I'm sorry, I didn't hear the beginning of that.

Speaker 19 In the book, book, you write about how a person's worth is defined from learning from their mistakes.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 28 Well,

Speaker 28 we don't win by our victories. Sometimes we get consumed by them and we feel that we're

Speaker 28 we have this power that we really don't have.

Speaker 28 So, but understanding people's everyday problems.

Speaker 28 You know, I had the

Speaker 28 privilege of working with my dad on a milk truck

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 28 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, right?

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 28 And

Speaker 28 it was those experiences that formed my thought process.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 28 It did, as a matter of fact,

Speaker 28 sometimes that they challenged you.

Speaker 28 I actually had a woman come in, you know, and

Speaker 28 she challenged me. I can't afford to pay it.
I'm not paying it.

Speaker 28 So I said,

Speaker 28 you know, what do I do in this situation? So anyway, we worked it out.

Speaker 19 Did she come over to your house?

Speaker 25 No.

Speaker 28 No, she never got an invitation.

Speaker 19 Not everybody does. Listen, 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

Speaker 19 you've been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. So it must have been important to you to write down these stories and these thoughts.

Speaker 19 I hope you have big plans for the coming months involving your family and everyone who loves you.

Speaker 28 I thought that I would share my early life's experiences

Speaker 28 and would help other people who are in the same situation.

Speaker 28 My dad was one of 10, my mother was one of eight. With all my cousins and aunts and uncles,

Speaker 28 we were a very close-knit family.

Speaker 28 And when I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer,

Speaker 28 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 tried to

Speaker 28 conduct myself in a way that would reflect great credit upon my family and upon how we treat things.

Speaker 19 I'm sure they love you very much.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 check it out frank capriol thanks to all of you for joining us today we'll be back on monday have a great weekend

Speaker 19 thanks for listening to the megan kelly show no bs no agenda and no fear

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