Carolla on Ellen, End of Woke Brands, Dems in Denial, and Paltrow's Bland Bio - MK Media Highlights

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

I'm Megan Kelly.

Welcome to this special episode today featuring some highlights from our MK Media stars on our MK Media Podcast Network shows this week, just in case you missed their highlights.

I got them for you.

Emily Jashinsky had Adam Carolla live on After Party this week, where they dug into Stephen Colbert and the truth about Ellen.

Link Lauren, he took a look at the way brands like Nike and yes, American Eagle have swung back from their woke moments back in 2020.

Thank God he did that on his show, Spot On.

Mark Halperin got into the state of the Democratic Party on Next Up and why their leaders are in denial right now.

And Maureen Callahan took on Gwyneth Paltrow's bland new biography on her show, The Nerve.

Enjoy, and we'll see you Monday.

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One reason actually people alienate half of their audience is because so many fewer people are watching in general that it's easier to sell ads to a loyal group of people rather than trying to bring in a giant piece of the pie because everyone has so many different choices.

Do you think that's what's going on here, or is there something else happening?

I, you know, I don't know what the dynamic is behind a lot of stuff.

Like, I can't tell if it's just a personal preference thing or it's an overt, you know, attempt to make money.

I personally have just always sort of said what I wanted to say, and I never really thought much about who was angry or who was listening or anything.

I mean, every comedian says that, but I think some probably don't.

I think Colbert

and any late night comedian,

and by the way,

news anchors used to be this way and Sunday show anchors used to be this way and and and reporters used to be this way.

They felt there was a kind of a thing in our society in general

where

you were a little bit stoic about things.

There's no Pedro Pascal talking about all his emotional difficulties he's having.

And was he not stoic?

Yeah, you want to call a guy pussy, right?

And throwing him off the ship.

Well, what I'm saying is, is

there isn't, I mean, I'm just sort of thinking this out in real time, time but it wasn't about late night and it wasn't about politics it was in general if I'm having issues at home or I'm issue with my children or whatever that's our business that's like our family business I'm not going to take to some

Twitter that didn't exist back then, but you know, write op-ed pieces and stuff talking about how much I hate my daughter or something or my son's transitioning or something.

You know, it was like, there was a decorum.

You know, it's like people used to dress to go on an airplane, you know, and so late night show hosts, news anchors, news reporters, doctors and lawyers weren't going to oblige and give you, let you know how they felt about everyone all the time.

You know, they, you know, if you, if you'd brought up a Trump-like character, you know, in the 60s, then Jack Parr would have said, well, not exactly my cup of tea, but I'm sure some people find him amusing or some, some, something snarky and a little underhanded, but they wouldn't go, fuck Trump and start screaming it over and over again into a camera lens, you know?

So it was like, there was a decorum.

And we didn't know what Johnny Carson thought politically because he didn't want us to, because he didn't believe

just like whatever marital issues he was having or...

or

situations at home, that wasn't our business.

He was there to entertain us and we weren't there to know everything about him.

And now we've gone into some realm where these people have to be more than talking heads who entertain us.

They have to be our friends and our, you know, co-sponsors.

And so they're going to start

talking about things that they never would have talked about that were personal.

You know,

Jay, I should say, David Letterman famously had his whole heart situation and a medical scare, and he got out there and you know you know came to tears and was talking about the surgeons that saved him and stuff and it was a moving moment but johnny carson wouldn't have done that because that wasn't for us you know and it wasn't comedy it was he was doing the comedy that was him that was his doctor so i think in general it's just a lot more sharing going on and i think If it's, you know, the ladies from the view or a late night show, I think we're going to know how they feel about politics nowadays.

There's no more of that.

And I don't know that people want to go back to those days where we had no idea.

You know, I mean, hell, a guy could be gay for 50 years and be on TV every day.

No one knew it.

That guy's a bachelor and he's 74 years old.

Well, we knew David Letterman wasn't gay.

Let's roll this clip of Johnny Carson.

He had a room.

Let's roll Johnny Carson.

This is F S5.

He was being interviewed actually by Mike Wallace.

And this sort of gets to, I think, the sentiment that used to drive the entire

late-night ecosystem.

So this is S5.

Do you get sensitive about the fact that people say he'll never take a serious controversy?

Well, I have an answer to that.

I said, now, tell me the last time that Jack Benny, Red Skelton,

Benny comedian, used his show to do serious issues.

That's not what I'm there for.

Can't they see that?

But you're neither they think that just because you have a tonight show that you must deal in serious issues.

That's a danger.

It's a real danger.

Once you start that,

you start to get that self-important feeling that what you say has great import.

And, you know, strangely enough, you could use that show as a forum.

You could sway people.

And I don't think you should as an entertainer.

Adam, there, it's almost eerie how accurately he describes what Stephen Colbert has become, at least from my perspective.

Yeah, I agree.

And, you know, I mean, sadly, there's a lot of,

look, I wrote a book

15 years ago called 50 Years Wallby Chicks, and it basically happened in 12 years.

So, I mean, there's lots of tape, lots of books, lots of KGB agents from the 80s explaining what they're going to do to the American mind.

And you go, but that's what we just did.

That was COVID, you know?

So

there's a lot of prescient stuff out there.

I

agree.

On the other hand,

it's your show and it's got your name on it.

And you should be able to say what you want.

And then once you say what you want, you should be prepared for any consequences that may arise from saying whatever you want.

So I think that's the stage we're at.

I don't find it.

I don't feel like Colbert's been victimized.

And I don't feel like this is anything other than what shall be when you just do what you want to do i mean personally

i you know as long as stuff is funny

that's kind of that's the bar that it needs to clear for me sometimes stuff just turns into something else like activism or something

Yeah, let's let's let's put this Trump post up.

This is F1.

This was a truth social from last Tuesday.

He said the word is, and it's a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is next to go in the untalented late night sweepstakes, and shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone.

These are people with absolutely no talent who we paid millions of dollars for, in all cases, destroying what used to be great television.

It's really good to see them go, and I hope I played a major part in it.

Let's also then put up Kimmel's response.

This is F2.

He said, I'm hearing you're next responding to Trump, or maybe it's just another wonderful secret, alluding, of course, to that that Wall Street Journal report that Donald Trump said something about a wonderful secret in a Jeffrey Epstein birthday book, which is something that sounds like a mad lib.

But Adam, did you predict that Kimmel would become a chick this quickly?

Well, first off, can we leave poor Jimmy Fallon out of this?

That guy

just does impersonations, does a great Bruce Springsteen, plays acoustic guitar.

That's true.

I mean, I don't know how he got balled up in this whole mess.

i don't know that foul has ever done anything political um

jimmy is always been

feisty i guess would be the uh when we were taping the man show once

he literally almost punched i he almost punched a guy in like the front row kept telling him to shut up or something the guy like i don't know the guy was probably drunk or something and he i i was like i was like you're gonna have a it's gonna be a lawsuit um

i don't you were the the chick in that situation i was the chick in that i was the chick in that that situation um

jimmy hates trump trump hates jimmy um jimmy's pretty alpha e trump's pretty alpha e i i realize there's a lot of alpha on alpha battles going on you know us betas are just popping the popcorn and sitting back and and watching um letting the alpha

weird i like i like trump and i like jimmy Like I've known them both.

Obviously, I know Jimmy a lot, a lot better.

They're both exquisitely different, but there may be some of the same kind of alpha componentry somewhere lurking in both of them.

And

the thing about Jimmy is my daughter's working for him

right now.

I mean, not at the show.

She's on it, doing his alon.

But no, she's at the show.

And

he's treated me and my family and my kids especially like,

you know, precious gems his whole life.

He's always been generous with me.

He's always been good with me.

So I cannot summon any negative words about Jimmy Kimmel.

I don't agree with everything that comes out of his mouth, but I didn't agree with everything that came out of his mouth when we shared an office together.

for all those years but i've always loved jimmy and i've always felt indebted to jimmy and i like trump as well and uh there is

probably

some universe somewhere where those two avatars could have a beer and have a have a laugh but

not today

what a beautiful moment that would be

but is uh so okay trump is actually arguing something that a lot of his detractors or a lot of his supporters are not.

They're saying this had nothing to really do with Donald Trump.

It was just that Colbert wasn't very funny.

And here you have Trump saying, I hope I was the reason that Colbert started to fail.

I don't like when people hang the like not funny on people they disagree with.

You know what I mean?

Like I disagree with a lot of comedians.

And there are some who aren't funny, but like you can't go about Jimmy.

You can't go not funny.

You know what I mean?

And in a weird way, I think you hurt your case, you know, when you just start

people,

I've had it obviously done to me.

People do that thing where they go, this guy's an asshole and he's not funny.

It's like, well,

you know, Jimmy's been doing comedy for 30, you know, he's been getting paid to do comedy for 35 years.

He is funny.

He knows how to be funny.

You may not agree with

some of his jokes, but I don't like when people get, you know, wholesale-y, you know, the untalented Jimmy Fowler.

Like, Jimmy Fowler's a very talented guy.

And I get what Trump's doing.

You know, he's got to paint with

a broad brush.

But

in a weird way, I think you kind of hurt.

You know, I'll put it to you this way.

It's like when the AOC goes,

Elon Musk, that guy's an idiot, man.

He don't know anything, man.

It's like, okay, bitch, you seem stupid.

You seem really stupid now because, yes, he knows things.

I'd say it's fair to say he's not an idiot.

and by the way if he's idiot if if if if elon musk is an idiot that makes aoc fully retarded like the series

right i mean she's got to be almost vegetable medically she's like terry shivo

i mean right i mean if you're just doing

Well, we're not in good shape either if Elon Musk is an imbecile.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

On the grand scheme of things.

But

so I don't like when people do that just say you know the guy's smart he's done some good things I disagree with this latest thing he did or whatever that whatever that thing whatever your bitch is currently you know but uh I feel that way with comedians I hate when people go unfunny you know well it's the same standards like if if the resistance wine moms are laughing at something that Colbert said and the like MAGA voters are laughing at something that a kind of right-wing code comedian said it's funny because people are laughing It's sort of the same.

It meets the same very low bar.

Yeah.

Well, I don't, you know, I do think,

I do think Trump is responsible for a lot of

people's, I don't know, demise.

I'm not talking about Kimmel, but I'm just saying.

In general, he gets under their skin and then they get a sort of obsession with him and then they become preoccupied.

And

it's like in a movie,

it's like in a basketball movie where you say to your little player, you know, go bug their star center, just keep bugging it.

And eventually the guy snaps and punches him and gets thrown out of the game.

Like there's an element of that with Trump.

And the guy's laying on the ground.

He's got a bloody nose and he looks at his coach and he smiles, you know, because that guy's going to the locker room.

There's an element of that with Trump.

Well, okay, so that's a great,

there's a great transition into the one and only Ellen DeGeneres.

And I want to ask you, Adam, if you stick around through this very quick break, all about Ellen's move over to the United Kingdom.

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Speaking of babies, let's bring Adam Carolla back in to weigh in on Ellen DeGeneres, who is now in the United Kingdom for some reason.

So let's go ahead and roll this clip of Ellen DeGeneres from last week, S7, talking about what she perceives as a grave injustice occurring under our noses here in the United States.

Our people in America and Republicans who are

quite likely to undo the right for gay people to get married.

I mean, that's back on the table as a debate, I think.

Absolutely.

The Baptist church in America is trying to reverse gay marriage.

They're trying to, at the very least, stop it from happening in the future and possibly reverse it.

And Portia and I are already looking into it.

And if they do that, we're going to get married here.

Honest to God, I didn't really love.

lines.

They love it.

How is she?

I thought they were married years ago.

She says she's also, this is F3.

She says she moved to the UK because of Trump, which reminds me of exactly what you were just saying, Adam, that something about Trump himself seems to have triggered the unraveling of very talented people.

Do you consider Ellen to be one such case?

Well, Ellen has always been a mean person.

And it's not, you know, she had her dust up with the press and these stories probably three years two or three years ago but i did her show um

and i i mean look i'll tell you truthfully sort of how it works when you do every show every show

has its own kind of personality, the show itself, not the on-air show, but the behind the scenes.

They all take on sort of the personality of their leader.

And it's sort of like when you go into a business and people are always all friendly, or they go into a business and everyone's sort of douchey, you know, and you're going like, what's going?

Why is everyone so mean and crappy in this business?

You know, it's the owners that way, you know.

And

so when you would go do Letterman,

I'll start here.

When you do Leno, Leno was fun and breezy and easy and people were nice and they were kind of laid back and they weren't looking over their shoulder at all and it was very kind of laid back and

kimmel's show is is laid back and nice and people are nice and uh lenerman's show people are scared or they were they were scared when i did it

two times i did they're sort of they're scared because dave is would scare them and ellen's show people were scared real scared and and i knew they were scared because it's like i was just sitting in the my dressing room and their like segment producer came in and he went, all right, so we've went over all the stuff we're going to talk about, you know, Christmas vacation or whatever it was.

And I go, yeah, yeah.

And he goes, you're not going to talk about meat or beef or anything like that.

Right.

And I go, no, I'm not.

I'm just going to talk about the stuff we talked about going on vacation or Christmas or the kids or, you know, their anecdotes, you know.

Okay.

All right.

Okay.

All right.

And he like came back like 20 minutes later, before, right before I went out, he's like, okay, but don't talk about beef or meat or any.

And I was like, you got two warnings?

Yeah, yeah.

And I was like, oh, this guy's scared to death.

This guy's scared.

And then, and then later on,

I talked to someone who signed an NDA, so I won't say his name, but he wrote for Ellen.

And I just went, how's Ellen?

And he said, worst person,

worst person.

And then we went, not worst person I've worked for.

Worst person I've ever met.

And by the way, I knew the guy did Rosie when Rosie was the 2D Chubb Club.

The worst and the meanest.

So I don't know, some kind of

some sort of mean off between Rosie in her prime and Ellen in her prime, you know, the two, the clash of the Titans.

Makes mud wrestling.

She's,

I like that, but

so

she's not a nice person at all,

which now everyone knows what I knew 15 years ago or whenever I learned it, but now that seems to be common knowledge, which I would expect, I was trying to explain to everyone how mean she was.

Not because she was mean to me, but because everyone was scared of her, which means she's mean.

She's not going to be mean to me.

I'm a guest on the show, right?

So I wouldn't know it from my exchanges.

I would know it with how her staff was cowering.

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After years and years of wokeness, someone's in an advertisement that doesn't look exactly like you.

Get over it.

And Nike, Nike is another brand like American Eagle.

They've decided to revert back to their core competencies.

They're now prioritizing tradition, conservative values, family by putting Scotty Scheffler in this new Nike ad.

where he's with his child.

It is a beautiful Nike ad, and it's in sharp contrast to their 2020 ad, Own the Floor, where they had plus size women.

So they're switching it up, right?

They tried one thing, right?

The last four years with Joe Biden in this post-November 5th world where President Trump won overwhelmingly, they're switching back now because it's popular to love your family, to be healthy, to be active, to get outdoors, to promote traditional conservative values.

That is what's popular now.

And so Nike and a lot of these big brands, because of the free market, because of capitalism, they are going back to what they knew years ago.

And And it's why you see this side by side of how the ads looked years ago and how they look now.

And of course, some people are going to choose to be offended, but there is no guarantee in life that every single brand is going to have someone that looks like you in an advertisement, okay?

If you want to get upset with Nike, that's fine, but you can also just go to buy the sneakers and the shorts and the athletic gear.

That's what you're supposed to be in the store for.

But there are also some other brands like Calvin Klein, right?

Calvin Klein.

Calvin Klein, which was all about hotness, right?

Calvin Klein, they did all these hot ads with Mark Wahlberg and Nick Jonas.

Everybody was doing these Calvin Klein ads, you know, in the 90s and the early 2000s.

It was a whole thing.

Calvin Klein decided to go woke and go broke.

Also, I believe they put a bunch of like non-binary women with beards and men in dresses.

Calvin Klein, I don't know what was happening in those marketing meetings.

We'll put it up on the screen, but they decided to go woke and go broke as well.

Now, can we just have some hot people?

Okay, is it too much to ask that we have some hot people in ads?

Maybe it will drive some traffic to the website.

Maybe it'll drive traffic to the stores because I don't want to see like some overweight, non-binary man, woman with a beard, like a freaking circus clown selling me underwear.

You know what I'm saying?

I don't need a circus clown selling me underwear.

And Calvin Klein, they've now gone back to putting some hot people in ads.

Okay, they have this new ad with Lily Collins.

She looks gorgeous.

She looks stunning.

If you look at Bad Bunny, if you look at these other people in the Calvin Klein ads, they have clearly done an about face, a 180.

They've left the non-binary Chewbacca trolls behind, and now they're prioritizing hotness.

And what confuses me also when it comes to these brands that went so woke and so broke, non-binary people are like 0.00000, whatever percent of the population.

But Calvin Klein, because of DEI, ESG, whatever, a lot of these big brands thought, we need to jump on this bandwagon.

This is what we need to do.

Sort of like Bud Light with Dylan Mulvaney.

Let's stray from everything we've known and everything that's worked for years and try this ridiculous tomfoolery, buffoonery, and clownery.

Guess what?

It didn't work.

It didn't work.

So now you've got Sidney Sweeney, you've got American Eagle.

People are in an uproar.

But also, this is something money can't buy because you'd have to spend a lot of money to get people talking about your brand.

Now they're all talking about your brand.

Now, last night, I was talking to my producer, and this reminded us of the Victoria Secret Fashion Show.

Now, as a gay man, a 100%

gay man here in 2025, I will tell you with unequivocal certainty, I would make it appointment viewing to sit down and watch the Victoria Secret fashion show.

Okay, I love the entertainment.

I love the pageantry.

I love the music.

They always had like Taylor Swift performing or they had Maroon 5 or whoever the hell was performing at the Victoria Secret Fashion Show.

And I love to see the superhuman size 00007 foot tall Amazonian models trapes down the runway.

and ridiculous clownery outfits.

Okay, that is why I like the Victoria Secret Fashion Show.

And it's probably probably why a ton of you also tuned in to the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.

Well, a few years ago, they tried to cancel the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show because Ed Razick, one of the developers of Victoria's Secret, one of the producers of the iconic fashion show, made a comment about, oh, trans women aren't the fantasy.

Trans people aren't the fantasy, right?

He should be allowed to have his opinion.

Well, he got canceled.

He got so freaking canceled by the woke mob.

In fact, they didn't even do a Victoria's Secret fashion show for years.

They did not do one for years.

Well, they came back recently with a Victoria Secret fashion show and they said, you know what?

Get those skinny bitches in here, get those size quadruple zeros in here, put the wings on, get the freaking music going, and strut down the runway and make sure there's film in those cameras.

And we all loved it, okay?

Nobody out there thinks they should look like Bella Hadid all the time, okay?

Unless you are insecure, unless you're insecure and you're not living in reality, you know that these are alien, superhuman people who have personal trainers, personal chefs, plastic plastic surgeons, aestheticians.

Okay.

Us as civilians, we're not supposed to look like superhuman models, but some folks still get offended by seeing skinny models on television.

And that's sort of the dichotomy I'm trying to paint for you here in this episode right now.

There are brands that are allowed to put skinny, tall, supermodels in advertisements.

Does that look like 99% of the country?

No.

Does it look like 99% of my group of friends and family who are of all different shapes and sizes and backgrounds?

Absolutely not.

But if you choose to be offended, that is because you are insecure and you have thin skin.

We shouldn't be so offended all the time that brands choose to give us some skinny models.

You know what?

If American Eagle decides we're going to put Sidney Sweeney, a skinny little hot blonde chick on January in Hollywood in an advertisement, and you choose to be offended, that's on you.

You're allowing that to erode your happiness and eat away at you, okay?

Not everyone is going to look like you all the time.

I walk into rooms, I walk into meetings, and sometimes I'm the only gay person in there.

But you know what?

I don't make being gay my entire personality.

And so for these folks at home, these liberals on the internet, they feel so upset when they see Sidney Sweeney or so upset when they see the Victoria's Secret fashion show and these skinny models because they're so insecure.

They need such outside affirmation all of the time.

They need to see someone who looks exactly like them, which is tough because some of y'all look like trolls and you look like Chewbacca, okay?

It's tough.

Some of these like LGBTQIA R2D2 non-binary folks sitting around on TikTok with the pride flags in the background, as we just showed you, they choose to be offended, but someone isn't always gonna look like you in every single TV show.

And they've ruined plenty of good TV shows, which we'll get to later in the episode, because they feel like they have to check every single box and every single quota.

If you choose to be offended by Victoria's Secret, that's on you.

If you choose to be offended by American Eagle, that's on you.

And you should go look in the mirror and get comfortable with who you are and your own skin.

That is how I live.

And that's the advice I give to so many people, especially young people growing up who message me, who leave comments.

And this is the advice I give to parents who are raising young kids and raising young adults going out into the world.

Be comfortable with who you are.

It might take a journey, it might take years, but figure out who the hell you are.

So when you go out into the real world, you're strong, you're secure, you know who you are, and you can't be offended by every little thing.

You can't be knocked off your rocker, okay, because a brand puts some skinny model who doesn't look like you in an advertisement.

You can't be knocked off your rocker because someone makes a negative comment about the way you look, maybe on your social media, because that's the way the world is.

Do the work to figure out who you are and to be confident and secure and you are, who you are, so you can go out into the world and get shit done.

Okay, that's what I did.

I knew growing up, I am not going to be a six foot tall supermodel, but communication is my skill and it's what I was put on this earth to do.

So go to the drawing board and figure out what you were supposed to do in this world.

And it might not be being a supermodel because for 99.9% of us,

that is not the career path laid in front of us.

We aren't all going to be Bella Hadid, Gigi Hadid, and Kendall Jenner.

That's okay, but you have to make the choice not to be offended constantly.

And it's interesting to see these brands go from woke back to what was working for them before for decades.

But I think there are four things at least that are objectively in the interest of the United States.

One would be immigration, controlling the border.

Trump has clearly in this area, in all four of the areas I'm going to list, he's clearly done some things that people rightly say are overstep,

that these policies have some downsides.

But controlling the border is something that's in the national interest, something a majority of the Americans want.

Trump has created a spectacle, but he's also shifted the paradigm on what it takes to close the border and how effective it can be.

Number two, tariffs, okay?

Trump has changed the paradigm there, too.

Lots of these countries now are doing what the United States wants.

The coverage this week of the deal with the EU, favorable to the United States, favorable to Trump.

Even news organizations that don't normally say positive things about Trump have said this is in the United States interest.

Trump got a good deal out of this.

And again,

the goal is clear.

He wants to re-engineer global trade by leveraging the U.S.

market and other American advantages without hurting the American or global economy.

Right now, that appears on track.

It's early.

These deals are not fleshed out yet.

But I'll say again, this is another area of a Trump achievement in the national interest.

Other presidents didn't do it, just like closing the border.

And Democrats just pretend it's just a total failure.

Same with number three, controlling the size of the workforce.

Trump has turbocharged the capacity of a White House to control the size of the bureaucracy.

He already has eliminated a lot of positions.

He plans to eliminate more.

This concept that we've had for decades that

the federal government is just going to keep growing.

He's figured out a way to change that.

Again, popular, not in every respect, overreach in some areas, but this is another area that Democrats are simply criticizing.

Finally, as I mentioned before, NATO, where Trump has ensured the terms and conditions apply now to be a member.

He's changed the relationship from one where the European countries were free-riding and freeloading to one now that's more transactional.

It's a post-globalist arrangement in which the alliance can live on, but on terms that are far more favorable to the United States.

Now, again, I say again, in each case, there are objectively downsides to what Trump has done.

But I'll say also in each case that overall, these directionally are positive and popular.

And no other recent president has had the

requisite desire or drive to change the status quo in such a fundamental way.

In this country, the Democrats simply accentuate the downsides of these achievements.

They find and highlight the weak links, and there are weak links, rather than grappling with what's actually happening that I think think is more important that the trends in this country in terms of public opinion have fueled trump's rise and capacity to get stuff done trump has understood where public opinion was on these issues and others and the democratic party has been and largely remains clueless okay this is to me fundamental if you're thinking about the connection between what trump has done and what's happened with the democratic party and it's not just in the united states trump has read the mood of where things are and these issues issues and others, and the Democrats have failed.

The American left has failed on these and other issues.

So if you look at Europe and the other industrialized democracies in the West, you see the same conditions that have grown over decades that have caused rebellion against the parties on the left, out of control mass migration, out of control crime, the dominant

influence of wokeness and all sorts of cultural institutions.

The LGBTQ changes that many have seen as overreached, particularly in the area of trans.

Censorship, over-regulation, cancellation, neo-socialism, all these things exist in other countries.

Kim Strossel has written about what's happened to the United States in the Wall Street Journal.

Very good focus that most Democrats haven't even thought about.

Open borders, unrestrained spending, supports for teachers' unions when they're acting antithetical to the interests of our kids.

An obsessive focus on climate change,

bashing the police, being against Israel, the dominance of identity politics.

All of this has caused Democrats in this country to lose support from demographic groups, independent of Donald Trump, although Trump has taken advantage of that.

Imagine if the Democrats, if the Republicans, rather, were losing support from interest groups that had long been a bedrock of their electoral success.

Imagine if the reverse were happening, how much the media would cover it.

This is a massive story.

Democrats losing support from voters of color, from younger voters, massive.

Now, Trump is singular.

All these other industrialized democracies, they have the same issues.

But what's different is they haven't found their version of Trump.

There have been kind of poor man's versions of Trump, but they haven't succeeded.

They haven't had Trump's skill.

They haven't had Trump's level of aggressiveness tough enough and determined enough to take on the old order.

So what's happened to these other countries with their left parties, their equivalents of the Democratic Party, is they're weaker than they were before, but they're not crushed.

They haven't declined as precipitously in most cases the way the Democratic Party has, who is now as low as they've been in poll after poll.

I'm thinking about this stuff, and I talk to some Democrats who are, but very few prominent Democrats, whether you're talking about people in elective office, you're talking about activists or writers or people in think tanks, they're not even vaguely grappling with this problem in public.

Why?

Because they fear that the activist left will push them out of the party or cancel them.

And because most of them lack the creativity and self-awareness that's required to say, how did this happen?

How far back has this been going on?

Some of these trends go well before Donald Trump's rise.

When the few Democrats do tepidly and timidly put their toe in the water and say,

what have we done wrong?

They do it in a way that doesn't really give voice to a full analysis of what's happened and what needs to happen next because they're afraid, as I said, of being canceled by the left.

They're afraid of being out of step with the activist wing of the party.

So near at hand,

a liberal, advisor to Hillary Clinton, advisor to Joe Biden, one of the smartest people in the Democratic Party, in my experience, very knowledgeable.

She wrote Not Bed Peace in the Wall Street Journal, not in the Washington Post, not in the New York Times, but in the journal, conservative editorial page.

And she admitted that the Biden administration that she was part of, a big part of it, in advising on domestic policy, screwed up on the Mexican border.

And she called for comprehensive immigration reform.

She rightly in her piece put in sharp relief all the unpopular elements of Donald, of

President Trump's immigration policies, because some of the things Donald Trump has done are unpopular on the border.

But she also felt compelled to call for a path to citizenship for some of the people in this country illegally.

That is known by many Americans as amnesty.

And she criticized other elements of what Donald Trump has done to try to stay on the good side of her liberal wing of her party.

If the Democrats can't figure out how to lead with being tough

in 2028,

whoever the Republicans nominate, whether it's Vance or somebody else, they'll make mincemeat of the Democrats.

In Trump world, they laugh at how, even now, even after Donald Trump's victory in 2024 was clearly fueled in large part by immigration.

They laugh at how much the Democrats still don't have a clue on immigration and a range of other issues.

Then you think about New York City and the nomination by the Democrats of Mr.

Mandani to be their mayoral candidate.

The reaction to that, again, reveals how clueless far too many Democrats are about what his election would mean for their brand.

Republicans are salivating at the notion of having Donald Trump be able to run against Mandami and campaign against him if he's the mayor of New York City.

Now, there are people in Trump's orbit who don't want him to win because they think he'd ruin the city.

And some of them have pretty big investments in New York.

So there's cross-pressure there.

But on the left, they continue to not grapple with what it would mean to elect someone with Mondami's background and stated positions on the economy and law enforcement, a range of other issues.

There was an op-ed piece of the New York Times by a woman named Tressie McMillan Cotton.

She argued that the opposition to Mondami is based pretty much solely on his racial heritage rather than, say, the fact that he's a socialist.

Okay.

New York Post story this week talked about how so many prominent people in the party, in the Republican Party, planned to make Mondami the face of the Democrats.

And then you have people like Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, the leading Democrats in Congress, both from New York City, Kathy Hochl, the mayor of New York, the governor of New York.

They know how dangerous this is politically for the party.

They're really worried about it.

But except for the fact that none of them, none of those three have publicly endorsed Mondami yet, they're frozen in amber because the base does not want to see them be outspoken against the nominee.

And they're worried that he may win.

But they're not doing anything, at least overtly, to stop his march to victory.

Who can solve this for the Democrats?

Who can speak out thoughtfully?

I don't think that the current Democratic Party chair, Ken Martin, or the past party leaders, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden,

These folks are not well positioned to try to stop Donald Trump on his march to achieving more or to do the other task that needs to be done in parallel, rebuild their party's brand, to try to come up with policies and ideas and messengers that could really make a difference.

Okay.

Trump's going to continue to have success and failures.

The Democrats may do very well in the midterms.

They may well.

But in each case where Trump may have failure, I don't think it has much to do with the Democrats having a capacity to affirmatively and assertively meet the moment, to rethink why voters are so down on their brand, to change their image on the economy, on social issues.

Because based on all the available evidence, the Democrats actually, right now, are on worse shape than the polling suggests, because the polling is a snapshot of where we are.

They're running out of time.

Again,

because of the nature of the midterms, because we don't know where the economy will be, we don't know what's going to happen with the Epstein story.

It's possible that the Democrats will have a good 2026.

But the Democrats I talk to are far less worried about 2026 in the midterms because this history suggests that even weak the party could still do well enough to take back the house what they're worried about is 2028 what they're worried about is the capacity of the party to redefine itself and to win back voters that'll need to win the white house particularly because they are a party right now without strong candidates the democratic brand on its own right now

It appears to be on the wrong side of both the polling and of the history.

And that's a big problem.

It's a big problem to be on the wrong side of polling and of history.

You think back to where did this start to go wrong?

As I said, some of these trends have been around forever.

But what's to me, in talking to the smartest Democrats I know, what to me is their biggest concern is not the history, but the future.

How can they fix this when so many of the dynamics on social issues, teachers' unions, the economy,

immigration,

government spending, relationship with NATO, on so many of these issues, there's no reflection about where things went wrong.

And it's very hard for Democrats to criticize Donald Trump and praise him, because if you give him any praise, think about in the first term with the Abraham Accords, ask any Democrat privately,

what do you think of the Abraham Accords?

Privately, they'll say fantastic.

Ask them what they think about shutting down the border.

Most of them will say, great, huge accomplishment.

But in our polarized red, blue America now, it's very hard for either party to praise.

And

you take heat from the base if you praise Donald Trump, and they're worried about what Donald Trump would do with that praise.

But a realistic appraisal

shows that Democrats are not getting on the right side of these issues.

We're on the wrong side of public opinion, the wrong side of history.

These other industrialized democracies, their liberal parties, have survived because they haven't faced Trump.

And I'll say again, if you think Trump is a bad political athlete, you're making a mistake.

Trump has lots of unpopular policy positions, but he knows how to mitigate them better than the Democrats know how to mitigate theirs.

And he fights to get on the right side of issues when he's on the wrong side.

Democrats, for instance, are counting on being on the right side of Medicaid and Medicaid spending and people on healthcare.

Trump's not going to sit back passively and be on the wrong side of that.

He'll do whatever he can as much as he needs to change.

The Democrats have not shown the same level of awareness, the same level of nimbleness.

And so I say, again, this question, how did the Democrats go wrong?

And there's plenty of other things we could list.

We've talked about some of them here.

Trying to block Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination in 2016 and 2020, trying to keep Bobby Kennedy off the ballot.

law affair against Trump.

There's a whole range of things that are kind of episodic that Democrats did in part because of Trump derangement syndrome, in part because they were too wedded to the establishment of their party.

It's a long list, but the core of the list is being on the right side of the issues that matter to the American people.

I still rarely find any Democrats who can speak with passion about how they got on the wrong side of the issue of trans athletes and girls and women's sports.

Rarely.

They continue to drift back towards the ideological base of the party.

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

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The Gwyneth biography, which has been everywhere for about the past week, it's coming out today.

Troublemaker,

troublemakers everywhere.

Just save your money.

Okay, I'll tell you what's in it and what's not in it, and we can talk about it.

I read it over the weekend, and it was kind of a slog.

It was kind of a slog.

And, you know, that's a lot to say for somebody who most people either love her or hate her, but there's no in-between.

So she's a polarizing figure who has been in the culture for about 30 years.

She's in her 50s now.

She got famous when she was in her early 20s.

I mean,

we've been living with Gwyneth Paltrow for a long time.

And if the best you can come up with is the headlines.

Okay, so there were a few takeaways we got last week.

One of the most Gwyneth anecdotes ever, she had to, she complained allegedly to a friend that she had to tell Brad Pitt the difference between beluga caviar and Ossetra caviar, which I had to look up.

I didn't know the difference either.

I didn't know there was an Ossetra caviar.

And she told

the

cosmetics scion, Aaron Lauder, that Brad Pitt is dumber than a sack of shit.

And listen, I think Brad Pitt's got that coming.

He's had it coming for a while now.

He's getting it.

And there are also hints in this biography that Brad, even though he was a much bigger star when they got together was threatened a bit by gwyneth's what was clearly a meteoric rise and that wouldn't surprise me now gwyneth also according to this book gwyneth the biography i mean you would think it was like a queen of england it's not that it's a short life she's only 50.

okay

according to this book

She told the late makeup artist Kevin Aquan that she loved it when Ben Affleck teabagged her.

I understand that there may be troublemakers among you who do not know what trouble, sorry, you know what trouble is, what teabagging is.

And I'm going to pause here and pay homage to the great John Waters, whose movies like saved me as a kid.

Like I like,

I would go rent them and just like die.

I just laughed till tears were coming down my face.

Now he is credited with introducing the phrase teabagging into the lexicon.

It was a movie he did called Pecker, I think.

So this is, this is, I'm gonna warn you, it's graphic.

Children are around.

You don't wanna listen to this aloud.

But it's very funny.

So here is John explaining this sex act to a writer at Boing Boing in a piece that was published April 17th, 2009, John Waters.

And I quote, teabagging, it sounds so dainty, doesn't it?

It sounds like you took your tea bag out of your fine china and you just put it daintily on the saucer out of your sight.

Tea bagging, John tells us, is,

quote, by my definition, the act of dragging your testicles across your partner's forehead.

In the UK, it is dipping your testicles into your partner's mouth.

I didn't invent the term or the act, but I did introduce it in my movie Pecker.

Teabagging was also a popular dance step that male go-go boys did to their customers for tips at the Atlantis, a now-defunct bar in Baltimore.

Hope this helps.

John Waters always helps in the culture.

He always helps.

Now,

the good part.

It's all good, but this is great.

Ben Affleck is scandalized by this.

He has been leveled by this.

He is utterly furious and he is contemplating reportedly a lawsuit.

An Affleck source told Radar Online last week that, quote, this isn't going away quietly.

Ben is livid and he is ready to fight back.

Now, I am sorry, but just like Brad Pitt, I'm not sorry, actually.

This is Ben's karma.

I bet Jennifer Garner was livid when rumors circulated that Ben was having an affair with Blake Lively on the set of the town.

Go look at those paparazzi pics of those two, the body language.

Or when he was accused of sleeping with the nanny, which he has always denied, but I mean, come on.

She walked away with a drop-top lexi.

She was going on social media, posting images and video of herself to Katy Perry's Girl on Fire.

Or I'm sure, I'm sure during his infamous Oscar speech, which we all just revisited an episode or so ago, in which he said that their marriage was work, or when he told Howard Stern that he drank himself into oblivion because he, I'm, I'm, I'm like, this is a,

what do you call it?

I'm not quoting directly.

He felt trapped in their marriage.

I mean, I think Ben can take this one, okay?

I think he can field it elegantly and just accept it as payback.

And we will come back to him later as promised in the show when we get to j-lo's latest onstage i i mean i would call them sex floits but that almost sounds like

it's darker than that it's actually darker than that now okay back to the gyneth book

there is otherwise really nothing in this book okay the last half of the book is about goop and who cares

Do you really want to read about how she got the idea or how she came to,

you know, do series A rounds of funding or how

she interacts with her employees or her managerial style.

Like, do you want to see the P ⁇ Ls, the profit and loss sheets?

It's so dry.

This book is so dry, and it's clear that nobody in Gwyneth's circle talked to the author.

Nobody.

The only passage, by the way, that's relevant for our purposes at the nerve, it goes to one Amy Griffin,

who I think, I think her claims are specious at best

those claims that are in the tell we addressed again in a recent episode but I'm going to read the passage in this otherwise snooze of a book

about

well okay so this graph first goes to Derek Blasberg who

she does clock accurately in here.

And he is the guy who last summer, Gwyneth was reportedly spreading the word that Derek had been a guest at her house in Amogansett and had fled in the middle of the night after

literally shitting the bed.

And he left a mess for the maids to clean up and didn't leave a note or apparently even send a text giving a heads up.

Fled like a thief in the night.

down Montauk Highway.

Okay, when I first met him, meaning Derek, I was a little dubious, Gwyneth admitted.

I was like, Are you a professional friend of celebrities?

Yes, that's my side.

Anyway, Gwyneth, the author then goes on to say,

Gwyneth's circle around this time also included Amy Griffin, wife of billionaire hedge fund founder John Griffin, whose firm G9

also invested in goop.

At first, Gwyneth told friends Griffin was one of her, quote, disciples, and quote, wants to be me.

I hope Amy Griffin is listening.

So good.

You know it's true.

But then she moved closer to Griffin and distanced from others.

Well, you know, Amy is a big, a big investor in goop.

So, you know, that's how that works.

Okay.

I also want to give you guys just a little peek behind the curtain as to how most of this stuff works, especially when it comes to unauthorized celebrity biographies.

So

the author will have a meeting with sales and marketing about six months before the publication.

And

they will say to the author, what are the headlines?

What's the stuff that nobody knew before?

And that's the stuff we're going to try to plant as a first serial in like a meaning like a serial edition in like a people magazine.

We're going to try to get you booked on.

CBS Sunday morning or The View or The Today, you know, one of the very, like, there are very few mainstream media outlets left you can go to.

So, to get in is like, is really hard.

And so, usually, what happens is,

unless you are bringing something really weighty to your subject matter, it's going to be the flashy stuff that gets the headlines and

the first serial in People Magazine, which I believe was like three or four pages, like with art.

And that's it.

And they stripped this book for those parts.

There's nothing else in this book.

Nothing.

it just makes me angry because it's such a money grab, you know?

It's like, anyway, so Gwyneth,

just the other day, this started going viral.

You know, her ex-husband is Chris Martin of Cold Play, who has found himself in the news cycle over the astronomer couple who are having an affair and have since been fired, let go, resigned, whatever.

And so

I bet Astronomer went to her and they came up with this.

Take a look.

Thank you for your interest in Astronomer.

Hi, I'm Gwyneth Paltrow.

I've been hired on a very temporary basis to speak on behalf of the 300-plus employees at Astronomer.

Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days and they wanted me to answer the most common ones.

Yes, Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow.

So if you're listening, the question in that little typing

sound accompanying that was a graphic that said Q, colon, underneath,

OMG, period, what the actual F?

Very cute, very clever.

And then

we get, so that's likable, Gwyneth.

And see, this is where I really think a better author, a smarter one, frankly, would have been able to bring some sort of cultural criticism to bear here.

Because you have a Gwyneth who can be completely likable and funny in something like that, and like winking and nodding, and we're all in on the joke.

And then you get the totally insufferable Gwyneth, who last week was doing an Ask Me Anything for her podcast.

And

she's asked,

What do you think your husband most loves about her?

And this is what buckle in.

Buckle in.

This is a little bit of a lengthy segment, but we got to run it at length for the full effect.

This is what we get.

Do you want to see what Brad's heading?

Oh.

I honestly don't have a favorite, he said.

I truly love

her too.

Your physical beauty, the way your body moves through space, the way you disappear a little when you're working, the way your hands add something to a pan,

your love of dirty jokes and well-plastered walls.

How much you know about art, that you feel so comfortable naked and hate fake people.

When you're needy, when you're angry on the road.

I love when you chug water by the bedside at night.

I like the things you choose to worry about and how you handle problems.

I love your morning routine and when you act like I've been demanding you to get out of the bath when I haven't said a word about it.

I love the skin on the back of your knees and the arch of your feet and when you smile at me in bed after you've put in your retainers i love how hard you try and how often you succeed

keep going if you like

i think that segment was like 28 seconds.

That's a long segment, maybe longer, maybe closer to a minute.

First of all, this guy clearly knows how to keep the peace at home.

Okay.

What do you like about me?

He submits a laundry list that includes things like well-plastered walls and like moving, her body moving through space.

You forgot time on that continuum, Brad.

It's Brad Falchuk, her husband.

I mean, a person with a little more self-awareness and a little less narcissism would have stopped less than halfway through that text and said, this is a lot and I'm not going to subject you guys to it.

Okay.

None of us want to be subjected to that.

That is a provocative personality, though.

Okay.

You got to give her that.

And in this book, what we get is the equivalent.

It's the equivalent of a book report.

Gwyneth said this, then she did that, then somebody else said this and did that.

I don't want a summary.

I want something I can sink my teeth into.

So save your money.

Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.

No BS, no agenda, and no fear.