Was Air India Crash Deliberate, and Previewing Next Epstein Shoe to Drop, with Fifth Column and Aviation Experts | Ep. 1110

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

Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.

Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show.

I'm like a little jarred right now, given the story that we're opening with.

We have a huge show for you.

We've got the fifth column.

Love these guys, but we're going to start with a shocking report that just hit on what we know about Air India Flight 171,

which horrifically crashed soon after takeoff just a couple of weeks ago, about a month ago, June 12th, killing all but one of its 242 passengers and a reported 29 more on the ground.

Think of that.

So 241 passengers killed and a reported 29 more on the ground.

That Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which took off from India and was headed to London's Gatwick airport, seemed to run into problems almost immediately after takeoff.

Stunning footage of the crash emerged online.

Watch.

Terrific.

For the listening audience, you just see a plane, the huge white plane that looks like it might kind of be trying to land, but this happened on takeoff.

And then you just see the fireball.

Incredibly, somehow one person survived.

A 40-year-old British man, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh.

He just walked away.

It was an incredible tape.

You've probably seen it in the past five weeks.

Just walked out of the fireball with only minor injuries.

It's not clear in the moment that guy knew what had happened to him.

He later told local media, I was going to die.

But when I opened my eyes, I realized I was alive.

I pulled out the belt from under my seat and tried to escape.

And then I managed to do it.

I saw others and the air hostess in front of me who could not escape.

Air India said those on board included 169 Indian nationals, 53 British nationals, seven Portuguese, one Canadian.

The youngest victim believed to be just four years old.

And according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal, a black box recording indicates it was the captain who turned off switches that allow fuel to flow into the plane's engines right after the plane took flight.

The journal's reporting cites people familiar with the U.S.

officials' early assessment of the evidence in the crash.

According to the journal, the first officer asked the captain why he turned off the switches, allowing the fuel to flow, and then you can hear the first officer panic.

The captain apparently remains calm the entire time.

India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, or AAIB, first revealed the exchange last week without specifying which pilot made each comment.

That report says one pilot asked why the other turned off the switches and the other denied doing so.

But clearly, we now know that it was the second in command, but the one who was actually flying the plane, who said, why did you just turn off the fuel switches?

And then the captain calmly, this is obviously in a moment of dire situation for the plane, says he didn't do it.

The report says the switches were moved one second apart and turned back on after they had turned off the fuel about 10 seconds later, but it was too late.

The report also made no conclusions on whether the actions were deliberate, but it's easy to see why there are now reports hitting online from several aviation experts that there is no way this plane went down other than intentionally, that the captain of this plane deliberately brought down this flight.

According to the journal, these preliminary findings have led some U.S.

officials to believe that a criminal investigation must be opened.

The AAIB issued a statement to the journal Thursday evening stating, we urge both the public and the media to refrain from spreading premature narratives that risk undermining the integrity of the investigative process.

Well, too bad, because these folks have been notoriously secretive in other investigations and in this one.

And U.S.

officials think a criminal investigation should be opened up.

So we're not going to honor your request.

They added that at this stage, it's too early to reach any definite conclusions.

Okay, that's fine.

But you don't stop speculation

from a country that is not exactly known for its transparency on this kind of thing.

And when you're talking about hundreds of people who may have just been mass murdered.

Joining me now to react to all of this.

are Captain Steve Scheibener, Captain Steve on YouTube, Matthew Wiz Buckley, decorated U.S.

Naval Aviator and Top Gun graduate, and Patrick Smith, who's an airline pilot and air travel blogger at Ask the Pilot.

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Guys, thank you so much for being here.

Wow, this is really stunning.

This was a Wall Street Journal exclusive posting these new details, that it was the first officer questioning the captain's apparent actions.

He expressed surprise and then panic.

The captain remained calm and the names of those who were flying.

It was First Officer Officer Clive Kunder.

He was the pilot flying the plane, age 32.

The captain who remains calm and is under suspicion was Sumit Sabarwal, a decades-long veteran.

He is the one who flipped the switches, age 56.

Wiz, let me start with you as our top gun grad and pilot.

What do you make of this information?

Initially, Megan, it's an absolute horror.

It looks like a murder-suicide.

As you alluded to, 787s just don't simply rotate, get airborne, and then settle back down.

It looks like the captain, for whatever reason, wanted to check out that day.

And sadly, Megan, this isn't the first example of a pilot just wanting to take an aircraft down or take people with them.

Egypt Air 990 or the German wings mishap, I believe, in 2015.

Before I started flying for FedEx, there was a famous uh incident with a former flying tigers pilot who was going to jump in the jump seat and crash a plane into FedEx headquarters so he could get the insurance.

And, you know, he didn't want to look like a murder, so he wanted to crash the airplane.

So, Megan,

all indications are that the captain selected the cutoff position on the fuel switches.

about 10 seconds for that first officer who was flying the airplane to be a little confused and look around going, hey, what are we doing here?

And then to put them back on.

And sadly, one of the motors spooled up a little bit above idle and the other one was was just trying to come online, but it was too late.

Real quick, Megan, I know pilots' unions hate this, but we have like HD cameras on the other side of the moon.

If we had some HD cameras in the cockpit instead of just a voice recorder, we'd know for absolute 100% certainty what happened.

But for whatever reason, pilots' unions don't like a camera looking over their shoulder.

Maybe this will change that.

I mean, it's like being a cop.

You're in, you've got other people's lives potentially in your hands.

And unfortunately, you may have to sacrifice a bit of privacy because this is not the first time this has happened.

I mean, just researching for the show, we have seen pilot, you know, death by suicide, but while committing mass murder before.

I mean, that crash, that German air, that German pilot in 2015 was the most recent, but there were many prior to that.

Captain Steve, as you hear, as you look at the video of that plane, it was taking off and then, of course, comes back down.

It almost looks like a gentle come down, but obviously it wasn't and it wasn't supposed to be coming down.

And you hear these facts as reported by the journal what conclusions do you reach

well at first when you see that video it doesn't make any sense i've never seen anything like that an airplane that takes off it looks like it achieves flight fine and then seconds later maybe four or five seconds later you can see the nose kind of come over clearly the wings are losing lift and the airplane then begins to settle into the the buildings off the end of the runway and it does look like it's landing but it's not we clearly know that at this point the only only answer to that is it's a dual engine failure and what caused the dual engine failure.

And I think now with this Wall Street Journal confirmation, plus a preliminary report, which, you know, they parsed their words a little bit.

They said the fuel control switches transitioned from run to cutoff.

They don't transition.

Somebody has to place them there.

It's a three-step process.

You have to grasp the switch, pull it up because it's spring-loaded.

pull it down and let it go.

So that's only a human has to do that.

And there's no known procedure that I know of at 200 feet off the ground on rotate where you would grab those switches and put them to cutoff.

So either way, it was pilot error, whether it was intentional or unintentional.

I think now the Wall Street Journal has kind of concluded that it's intentional and that's no surprise.

And my understanding is, and maybe you can speak to this, Patrick, but my understanding is they put a little guard on the

control panel dashboard.

I'm not exactly sure what the right term is, but where they keep those fuel switches, there's like a little guard so that a pilot can't inadvertently like knock it with his hip or his hand while he's reaching for something.

So it really does look like, but by all accounts, here's a picture we got from the Daily Mail.

For the listening audience, it shows a little control panel, and you can see the tiny little fuel lovers, but to the right and to the left of them is like a little metal guard that stands up.

And my understanding is, Patrick, that's to prevent anything inadvertent from happening.

That's correct.

And

I think we need to start out by saying that there's a lot here that we just don't know.

The report that came out the other day was very preliminary.

We don't even have a CDR transcript yet.

You've mentioned a few times what we know, what we know.

Well, what about all the things we don't know?

And

as a result, I tend to be a little more reserved and conservative in my assessment of what happened.

What do you think happened?

I don't know.

We don't know.

Well, you say you're more reserved.

How are you more reserved?

What conclusion are you reaching?

I don't necessarily buy the murder-suicide scenario.

I'm not saying it didn't happen.

There's evidence leaning in that direction strongly.

But the dynamics of the crash don't quite make sense that way.

So let me get this straight.

You're going to shut the engines off at the moment of rotation and glide to a crash.

There are so many unknowns in a scenario like that.

There's no guarantee that the crash would be catastrophic, that everybody would be killed, that

the person who did it would be killed.

Just to the left of the impact area where the plane hit is a mostly open stretch without buildings or larger obstructions.

If the plane had just been a little more to that side,

the crash could have been at least partly survivable.

It just doesn't seem like the way somebody would go about doing something like that.

And you go back to Egypt there and German wings and MH370, which almost certainly was a murder-suicide.

It just, it feels different.

And there remains the distinct possibility, this is going to sound preposterous, that the Fuel control switches were shut off accidentally, inadvertently, in a moment of absurd absent-mindedness.

And while it sounds preposterous, that sort of thing has happened before.

For the listening audience, Patrick's speaking, and both of our other pilots are shaking their heads.

No.

But I like the disagreement.

I appreciate the different opinions because we don't know what happened.

Go ahead, Wiz.

I just couldn't disagree more, Megan.

If there was anything but what we've been talking about, they would go out of their way in this report to say it.

If there was a hiccup in the electrical systems, Megan, these jets.

You wouldn't know

you would not know any of that yet.

This is the same thing.

I absolutely would know that.

You absolutely know that because these jets are tattletales.

Okay, let me see.

They data link stuff.

No.

Those engines, they data link stuff directly to GE.

The flight control computers, they know just about everything at this point.

If there was any other straws they could be grasping at, they would throw that in the report right now.

They did not.

There was no electrical hiccups.

There was no contaminated fuel.

They put in this preliminary report, very preliminary stuff, obviously,

what they believe.

If there was any other thing on God's green earth, they probably

would have written that down.

Go ahead, Captain Steve.

You heard your thoughts.

I'll come back to you in a second, Patrick.

I'll come right back to you.

Let me get to Captain Steven.

Yeah, I agree that there's no way that those switches move from run to cutoff.

And that's what they said in the preliminary report that they were.

They were, they didn't say place, they said transition to cutoff.

Let's assume for a minute that there's some reason that there was an electronic glitch.

You would have to believe that it happened on both switches one second apart.

And if that were the case, they would be grounding every single Boeing airplane on the planet.

They all have those same switches.

There would be an investigation into what was wrong with those switches.

None of that has come out of this.

And so what's not being reported in the report is, or what's not taking place, is just as important as what you do read in the report.

I don't think Boeing or anybody else suspects that there's anything wrong with the 787 because there's not.

Correct, Matt.

I'll give you the floor one second.

One second, but I just want to say this.

We also have the other piece of evidence, which is the co-pilot, the one who was actually flying the plane, believed the captain did it.

100% believed he did it.

And then the captain denied it in some sort of calm manner, which was said to be his manner.

And then we'll get to the reports about his mental state, which vary.

Okay, go ahead, Patrick.

You wanted to defend your position.

Again, I'm not concluding anything.

I'm leaving open the possibility that this indeed was a murder-suicide.

And as I said, it is certainly trending that way, but it's not, we don't know for sure.

There's a lot we don't know.

And what of the possibility that he

simply shut them off by mistake?

It has happened before, and I'm sure my guests know that.

It sounds ridiculous, but it has happened.

And there also was mentioned in the report of a Boeing a service bulletin that was put out a few years back regarding fuel control switches that would not lock into position and could potentially slide back to the cutoff position on their own.

What of that?

To me, that kind of jumped out.

It's not likely, but it's also not likely that the captain shut the engines off and

crashed.

I don't find that unlikely at all.

I actually don't find that unlikely.

It's happened.

We are just pulling up these.

Well, so has the other scenario, but nobody wants to talk about that because it's not.

We're talking about it.

You're having your say, Patrick.

What are you complaining about?

Here's some examples.

You've got,

this is from the FAA.

They call them aircraft assisted pilot suicides, saying they're rare.

They include the November 2013 crash of Mozambique Airlines, a plane bound for Angola, which was eerily similar to the German Wings plane one.

That was German Wings Flight 9525.

That one was so eerie where that pilot died, taking 149 other people with him.

He was depressed and flew the plane right into the side of a mountain.

That was absolutely awful.

He was 27 years old.

We know he was determined to kill himself.

Okay, and then there's,

let's see, there's a bunch.

Egypt Airlines, you guys mentioned Flight 990 off Nantucket in 1999, killing all 27, 217 people on board, caused by deliberate action, according to the NTSB.

In that case, a relief pilot, Gamil al-Battudi, waited for the captain to leave the cockpit, then disengage the autopilot.

As the plane descended, he could be heard saying in Arabic, I rely on God over and over.

And there are more.

I mean, you could keep going.

Hey, Megan, real quick, with the Egypt air.

Yeah, with the Egypt air mishap.

So the captain actually came back from the head or whatever he was doing and saw this going on.

He jumped in.

pulled back on the control yoke and he's fighting with the FO, the first officer at the time.

And the Boeing at the time, the captain would override the first officer's control inputs.

Guess what he did to take the airplane down after that?

He reached over and shut the fuel to the engines off.

So

another instance of that.

But let's be clear, Megan.

Whether it's the India Board, the NTSB,

history has shown us that we want to have preliminary reports.

Why?

Does the flying public want to wait 12 to 18 months to find out why an airliner crashed?

No.

So they want to compile as much facts as they can, as quickly as they can, as Captain Steve alluded to.

If there was something going on in these brand new 787 airliners where just magically the fuel switches go to cutoff, they would be freaking the hell out right now.

They're not.

I'll support Patrick a little bit and say, of course, there's all sorts of slim to none possibilities going on here, but all the evidence is pointing in this direction.

And, you know, Megan, it sounds like we're going to talk about mental health stuff here in a little bit.

But yeah, let me tell you what the reporting is on that.

Okay, the Daily Telegraph is reporting the following: that Captain Mohan Rangang Rangang Nathan,

a leading aviation safety expert in India, has revealed that, quote, several Air India pilots had allegedly confirmed that this experienced pilot had suffered from poor mental health.

The captain we're talking about here, Sumit Subarwal, the one, he's now dead, age 56, who we are speculating may have brought down this plane.

So this other captain is saying that he's spoken with several Air India pilots who allegedly confirmed to him that this pilot had suffered from poor mental health.

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, he claimed, quote, he had taken time off from flying in the last three to four years.

He had taken medical leave for that.

This captain is understood to have taken bereavement leave after the death of his mother.

Again, this is from the Daily Telegraph, though it's believed by this man doing the reporting, a different captain, Rung Ganathan, that he'd been medically cleared by Air India prior to the fatal crash.

The Telegraph said that while Air India declined to comment, an official working with their parent company, Tata Group, told the publication that Captain Sabarwal, the guy at issue, had not taken any medical leave, with the preliminary report failing to obtain any significant findings.

They added that within the last two years, both pilots on board the flight had passed the Class 1 medical exam, which makes an evaluation of their psychophysical capabilities.

Unfortunately, some of those other pilots in the cases that we just went over also passed their exams and were not identified as having mental problems, but they clearly did.

Your thoughts on that, guys?

Well, Megan, we just went out with a video about mental and emotional health, and I interviewed Dr.

Charlie Carreri, who's really the pioneer in this field.

He's the guy responsible for, at least at American Delta United and Southwest, their programs that are in place.

where pilots can go self-report without any fear of incrimination or losing their jobs, which is hugely important because there's a big stigma with mental health.

And I think that's the direction that all this is going is to sit and talk about what's the mental health issues with pilots.

And it's a very stressful job and you have to balance on the road with at home.

And those two things don't always go together very well for people that travel all the time.

And then there's the stress and the responsibility that goes with the job.

So I think there's never a bad time to have that conversation about mental health.

Certainly now this is kind of a springboard into having that conversation.

And it's certainly one that I think is important to have.

Hey, Megan, a

quick update with the German wings.

They actually knew.

A lot of his doctors knew, but apparently the German medical system, it's, to steal a phrase, it's verboten.

Those two systems weren't allowed to talk.

In Germany, apparently, you could say, I'm absolutely nuts and suicidal.

I'm going to crash an airliner.

The doctors were forbidden.

from telling whatever the German FDA is about any of this.

Oh yeah, trust me.

After that, I think they've hopefully made some changes in the German system.

But at the time, all the doctors after it came out, they had to shrug their shoulders and say

by law not to do that.

Yep.

That thing was so disturbing.

And it was very clear in that case that it was a murder-suicide.

Like my husband and I have, you know, as one does in gallows humor, made jokes about it.

There's, I'm down here at the Jersey Shore for the summer, and we always take our kids to this amusement park at least once a summer.

And there's one of those rides, the Scrambler at this amusement park.

And there's something crazy about this particular Scrambler.

It goes to like a gear that you've never seen before, where you really feel like you're going to be flung right off the coast of New Jersey into the ocean.

And one time, like one of the first times I ever wrote it, I looked at my husband and our kids, and I tried to get a look at the guy operating it.

And I said to my husband, Doug, I'm like, he's like the German pilot.

This is it.

You're like, he's, it's fun.

It's gallows humor.

But like, there are, there are people who are extremely sick.

And that's what's so disturbing about this is it's one thing if you're sick and you commit suicide, but if that's what happened here, we're talking about a mass serial killer.

Same thing with MH370.

Like

you're beyond suicidal.

You're one of the worst homicidal maniacs in world history.

We're talking about hundreds, hundreds of murders in an instant, which to your point, Patrick, is why we should be cautious before completely throwing this captain under the bus.

And And by the way, as Steve alluded to, airlines regulators,

the pilots' unions, at least in the US,

we've come a long way.

There's a lot of, I guess you could call it proactivity now towards self-reporting and being open and upfront about mental health issues to keep

trouble from being driven underground where it could cause some sort of accident or

something awful.

That being said, I mean, there are people with mental health issues in every line of work, from

surgeons, police officers, airline pilots, whomever.

It's very important to emphasize here, very important, that having a mental health issue, having even depression,

does not turn you into a psychopathic mass murderer.

For that to happen, there has to be something else going on.

Yes.

What it is, I don't know.

How is that diagnosed?

How is that discovered?

How do we know who those outliers are?

What do you do?

Like when you get on board the plane, when you guys fly commercially, you know, my friend, I've mentioned this before, my friend, she's always giving the pilots boxes of chocolates.

Like, yeah, L, that's not going to save you.

Okay, but she does.

What do you guys do when you get on board the plane?

Do you look at the pilot?

Like, this is something that's going to be running through the minds of people.

I realize it's a, it's like the chance of getting hit by lightning.

It's extremely remote, but like it's going to be through us nervous flyers through our heads the next time we get on board a plane.

Captain Steve, what do you think?

Well, Megan, we've talked a lot about this on my channel.

I'm coming up to my retirement date in three months.

And I'm, you know, just because I turned 65, it's, I'm done.

And it's kind of a one-size-fits-all position.

But I tell people, look, when you get on an airplane and you can look up into the cockpit, you don't care what gender the person is.

You don't care what color their skin is.

What you're looking for is a little bit of gray hair and if you see gray hair that reassures you if you see somebody up there that looks like it's one of your teenage daughter's dates

it's it's not caused for your teenage daughter

you know again you know and i was young at one point i get it but i also wasn't the captain At that point, over the years, I've aged.

And I think it's a little bit of gray hair is reassuring, especially in a position where you're sitting in the back and you're trusting somebody basically with your life.

Yeah.

Well, those older one here is the one who is allegedly culpable, and the younger one who is 32, the co-pilot was 32, who was flying the plane, first officer, and the guy, you know, being possibly accused is 56.

Go ahead, Patrick.

You're going to say something.

I would somewhat disagree with that.

I understand that it's reassuring to people, but it's also not necessarily meaningful.

You know, there are a lot of younger,

fully qualified, excellent airline pilots out there.

So

the extrapolation you made, maybe without meaning to, is that younger pilots aren't as safe as older pilots.

And I just, I just can't, I can't accept that.

Well, it didn't.

I'm not saying that.

They're equally qualified.

What they lack is the experience and the judgment.

And that's what you pay for with the captain on an airliner: somebody that's been around the block a couple of times that can say, at certain times, slow down.

That's

the experience.

You can only give our audience a little bit about you, Captain Steve, because I neglected to do that.

But you joined the Navy after college graduation.

You were commissioned and trained as a pilot back in 83, 84, commercial pilot for 40 years.

And you were initially scheduled to fly American Airline Flight 11 on September 11th, 2001, the first plane that hit the World Trade Center.

My God, I didn't know that.

That is really chilling.

I was initially scheduled to be the first officer on that flight.

And due to kind of an extraordinary circumstance, I was bumped from the flight the night before.

And there's a documentary called In My Seat that's available on YouTube that tells my story.

But I travel now all around the world talking about living on borrowed time.

So that was my near-death experience.

But yeah, it kind of gives you chills on the back of your neck thinking about

how close it was to being

basically the pilot on the first airplane that flew into the First World Trade Center.

Yeah, speaking of the money.

Hey, Megan,

I want to drop anchor a little bit

on the mental health stuff, not to freak the flying public out even more.

Pilots are either gods and we're flawless

or we're not, which clearly we're not.

Megan, if you go to your FAA doc or as Steve will know, you know, in the Navy flying fighters, we had a flight surgeon.

Of course, the flight surgeon would say, hey, if anything's wrong with you, you make sure you come and tell me.

That was the last person.

on this planet we would tell anything was wrong to.

Why?

Because then we're grounded and we're not flying and we're not doing the one thing that's probably making us happy.

So if you tell your FAA doctor in your annual physical or every six months or whatever it is, like, hey, I'm not feeling too good.

I'm a little depressed.

Guess what's going to happen?

You're going to get immediately grounded, most likely, and you're put over in this filing cabinet.

And it's an absolute nightmare.

Megan, this is one of the reasons I started the No Fallen Heroes Foundation four years ago is because of aviation mental health.

We have got to hide anything that's wrong with us.

You're going to to lose your job or potentially your license.

It is a perverse system right now where pilots are forced to either self-medicate, drink, hide what's wrong with them, or lose their job.

Until the FAA steps up and says, hey, we're going to have a no-kidding serious conversation about this.

Pilots and mental health

is the elephant in the room that nobody's really talking about.

That is really terrifying and makes perfect sense.

What you're saying is that my friend needs to board the aircraft with like a pot of coffee and maybe a breathalyzer.

Well, you know, Megan, real quick, you know, Sully and Miracle on the Hudson, everything like that, obviously a great aviator and did some good stuff.

It's funny in the movie because they're like, oh, hey, they kept doing the count.

Like, hey, we saved this many.

I got to be honest with you, Megan.

Maybe I'm just speaking for me.

If both engines flamed out and I'm Sully, guess who I care about in that moment?

Me.

All interest is self-interest.

The fact that I saved 150 people sitting behind me is gravy.

But remember, unless you're a suicidal captain, as potentially in this case, if something goes wrong with the airplane, I'm caring about me right now and my beautiful bride, my kids.

Oh, and everybody else too, if they do a documentary about it.

Well, we have to find out.

I don't know whether he had a family or what.

Obviously, there's one report suggested he had a mother who died recently.

There was an interesting report about this captain.

from a long time ago.

This is in the Wall Street Journal.

They said that he started his flying career in the early 1990s.

He attended the Indira Gandhi Academy.

It's a prestigious flight school run in India.

That a friend of his, who overlapped with him for one year in

flight school, said he stood out among their classmates, very polite, never cursed, never drank alcohol, spoke softly, so softly that sometimes they had...

difficulty hearing him, had to ask him to speak louder.

Unlike other students, messy quarters, Sabarwal kept a Spartan room filled with the bare minimum.

If you opened his cupboard, said the friend, there were two formal shirts, two t-shirts, two pairs of shoes, one slippers and one bag so it wouldn't be unusual i think to find a pilot who's meticulous um then figuring out where if at all he turned homicidal uh is a different question altogether can i ask you something whiz

on patrick's point of like if you wanted to bring down the plane this doesn't really seem like the way you would do it like the

You know, it is strange to like, it's all on cam, you know, as opposed to the MH370 guy who it's never been confirmed we can't because the plane disappeared that that was a murder suicide but i agree that that's overwhelmingly likely what what happened um he he got the the plane out over the indian ocean which is huge and vast and you you know you're guaranteed to kill everybody to have almost no evidence of it like why if you were going to do this would you do it so soon after takeoff and in an area where there's a field right there where maybe it could be recovered by the co-pilot or something could happen.

Megan, that airliner was gliding like a set of car keys at that point.

That's exactly when you'd want to do it.

It was enough time where they, like Captain Steve said, just got airborne and immediately the engine shut off and it's going to settle right back down.

Any higher altitude, unless he knocks out the first officer, the FO is going to have time to put those switches back.

There's a horrific 10-second delay.

God bless the first officer for, whoa, what are you doing?

Remember, Megan, in the West, we got rid of the imperial captain years ago.

Like you can't question the captain and they're a god on the flight deck.

We don't do that in the West.

In some of these other countries, Asian and Indian, the captain is still kind of revered as a god.

So you can tell in that 10 seconds, maybe, that the FO is like, what are you doing?

Why did you do that?

And then the guy just kind of sitting there as the plane's descending into that neighborhood.

The FO puts the switches back on.

Maybe if he had done it a little bit quicker, he could have gotten some thrust.

So we're never going to be able to know until we all transition and meet this guy again why he did this.

It's just, you know, I don't think he's going to be in the same place you and I are.

And it's interesting because some people online are like, well, he

replied with, oh, I didn't.

Hey, man, if you're about to commit murder or suicide, telling the truth probably isn't high on your list of things to do in that moment.

So clearly.

And he knew there'd be a black box recorder.

He knew it was being recorded, correct?

Go ahead, Steve.

And Megan, you're asking why with a rational mind, we're trying to make sense out of something that's completely irrational now when he stepped over that line none of us is really ever going to know but what we do know is that what he did was completely psychotic and it doesn't make any sense but i agree that if that that's the if you're going to do what he did that's the perfect place to do it 200 feet off the ground there's no recovery from that And that airplane is going to crash.

And most likely everybody's going to die.

I think he was just thinking about himself in that moment clearly.

And, but the rational mind tries to make sense of the irrational and it doesn't, it doesn't work.

It doesn't.

I'll get your last word, Patrick.

Go ahead.

So why glide onto the roof of the building?

Why not simply push the nose down and crash into the ground at that point?

Why the glide?

I'm not saying it didn't happen that way, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

And meanwhile here,

I want to point out, I think we're...

the whole conversation is veering in a little bit of a sensationalist direction.

And I don't want people to have this idea that when you get onto a commercial flight, you should start psychoanalyzing your pilots

in the hierarchy.

I think you should.

My point was the idea that your pilot is going to crash the plane is like so out there among the possibilities and things you should be

thinking about.

Hey, Megan, real quick, after 9-11, there's a famous story of a U.S.

air captain in Philadelphia.

I love the Jersey Shore reference.

I was born and raised in Margate, so nice job there.

But this guy was in Philly and he went through TSA.

Do you remember when they were stealing, you know, tweezers and fingernail clippers?

Well, they took his fingernail clippers and he looked at the TSA agent or whatever and said, go ahead and take that.

I have these.

And he held his hands up.

He's like, I don't need my nail clippers to take the plane down.

I have these.

Guess what happened?

They threw that guy in jail and it took the union like a couple days to get him out and fight like two or three years to get his job back.

So he said, I have these.

I don't need a fingernail clipper.

So I know I said that Patrick was going to have the last word, but I know because he raised some interesting points there.

No, no, no, because he raised some interesting points.

Like, I'd love to hear you respond, Captain Steve, on why wouldn't he just put it in a nosedive and take it down?

That's actually a good question.

Well, again, we're trying to make rational sense out of something that's completely irrational.

Maybe he's fantasized about turning the fuel control switches to cutoff.

They were placed one second apart from each other, which is consistent with the way we turn them on and turn them off.

It's a one-handed operation, one, two, it goes like that.

So he probably was fantasizing over that on some level, thinking about just watching the airplane descend.

The reports are that, I guess apparently he was very calm in this.

He was the only one on that airplane, apparently, that knew what was coming next.

If I was the first officer, I would absolutely be in a panic.

about it.

You're transitioning from flying out normally to what just happened.

The fact that the first officer had the presence of mind to reach down and put them back to the running position is semi-incredible in my mind.

Good on him for doing that.

He

almost saved the day, but not quite because of where it was done.

It was done so low that there was really no recovering from it.

Megan, with the German wings, remember what the German wings guy did, locked the cockpit, captain's beat, and trying to break down the door.

He put the autopilot in a gentle descent and flew into the Alps.

So why didn't

I answer a question, Patrick's question with a a question?

Why didn't that guy just roll the plane inverted and fly it straight into the ground?

He put it into a gentle descent, like Captain Steve just said.

Maybe he had some sort of weird fetish about, I'm just going to watch this thing slowly fly into the side of a mountain.

So, again, you can't question crazy.

Can I ask this one other question?

What about the survivor?

Do you think he could be important?

You know, like there's a survivor.

Right.

Unlike the market.

He was seated right in front of the wing spar, which is the heaviest, strongest part of the airplane.

It's a steel girder, basically right behind where he was.

And that probably took most of the impact.

The fact that he said one of the initial reports was that he heard a loud bang and the lights flickered.

That would be consistent with the Ram Air Turbine deployment.

Eyewitnesses in that situation are not.

necessarily reliable, but with all the other information we have, that his account fits with the deployment of the rats.

So he's one part of this that seems to be accurate accurate with the whole transition of what took place in those basically 60 seconds.

Megan, if you

having observed a pilot in his sort of mental state, are very slim.

I think go ahead, Wiz.

Well, if he was in our fighter squadron, his call sign would be Highlander.

You have Galois humor, so do we.

So you got to cut that guy's head off to kill him, clearly.

So his new call sign's Highlander.

It's true.

When you're in a dangerous business, you're actually in one.

I just report on many.

And so you have to go to that.

Otherwise, you're just, you're crying every day guys thank you um patrick we gave you a hard time but you kept the discussion interesting with your different that's my job okay thanks to all of you

all the best wow what a story my god it's so disturbing i totally accept that the odds of this happening to you are incredibly small and it is not something that you need to worry about at all but then you think about what whiz was saying about the mental health screening and how it's not set up to encourage honesty and transparency from our pilots.

And you think, well, there is an action point here that we need to really think about.

Thankfully, we've got Sean Duffy running transportation.

So maybe this is something that we can actually, you know, message we can get to him.

This did not happen in America.

This happened in India.

But, you know, there, before the grace of God,

God rest those souls.

All right, we'll be right back with our friends from the fifth column.

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Joining me today for the rest of the show to react to all of today's headlines are our pals from the fifth column, Camille Foster, editor-at-large of Tangle News and Matt Welsh of Reason Magazine.

Moynihan is scrambling scrambling to make it.

That'll be the drama that takes us through the next hour.

Will he or won't he?

But in the meantime, you can find all of their work at wethefifth.com.

Okay, and you can subscribe there too.

Guys, great to see you.

It's a pleasure.

I want to start with.

Do we have the Mark Halperin site, you guys, my team?

Okay.

Oh, all right.

Samba, I have it in front of me.

So I went on with my pal Mark Halperin on his next up show this morning.

We taped it before I taped my show.

We're doing this live.

And

Halperin is everywhere.

He does that show and he does Two-Way and he's like, you know, whatever.

And apparently on his Two-Way show today, and even in our interview, he raised this with me and I knew what he was talking about.

But I want to tell you what happened.

On Two-Way, he said the following: Everyone I know believes a major newspaper, one of the top three newspapers in the country, is about to publish a piece about President Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Everyone I know knows that, and people in the White House know that too.

When that story drops, if it drops today, and some people think it might, it could drive the day.

Then he asks the following questions to Dan Turntine and Sean Spicer.

Either answer them or say, in fact, we don't know.

How did Trump and Jeffrey Epstein meet?

I don't know, they say.

Did Trump ever go to Jeffrey Epstein's townhouse?

Yes.

It's not a townhouse, it's a mansion.

How many times?

I believe many.

What occasions?

One-on-one parties?

What did he go for?

I don't know.

Okay.

He's just asking these questions.

It's fine.

These guys don't know.

I think I know the answers to a lot of these, and I answered them on Halperin's show.

So if you want to hear my answers, you can tune in to Next Up.

Not that I'm some expert on Epstein.

I've just been neck deep in all these reports over the past couple of weeks for obvious reasons.

But I can tell you, I don't know why we're afraid to say it's the Wall Street Journal.

Maybe that will turn out to be untrue, but I've been told by multiple sources that the journal is working on a piece on Trump and Epstein.

And guys, there's no question in my mind that

There's going to be a lot there because they knew each other for 15 years.

They were actually close friends for 15 years prior to Epstein's troubles.

And I'm sure they did spend a lot of time together.

But what does that tell us?

He spent a lot of time with a lot of luminaries and they weren't all pedophiles, right?

It's like a lot of them, some of them were women.

It was the Dalai Lama was over at Epstein's house.

Michael Wolfe just told Vicki Ward that a couple of days ago and we could go on.

So what it's not.

It doesn't make Trump look bad or it doesn't incriminate him in any way that he was friends with the guy.

He's already admitted that.

The question is, are you going to produce evidence that Trump took advantage of an underaged girl?

Now, if they're there, then we're talking a scandal.

But honestly, if somebody's got that proof, we would have seen it by now.

Would we not?

Yeah.

The Biden administration had access to all of these files, at least the Biden Justice Department did, whether or not the president or any of his people looked at it.

The possibility that this information, this damning, incriminating information that would have devastated Donald Trump's future prospects for a politician or perhaps even brought him under criminal suspicion, the likelihood that that would not have already come out years ago is unbelievably low.

I just can't imagine it.

We've seen leaks of absolutely everything else.

We've seen legal trials that have been completely prosecuted on much thinner, thinner, thinner, less sensational grounds.

We've seen

rape.

So that doesn't seem to be what's hidden here or obscured anyways.

Eugene carroll accused him of rape which was a completely bullshit allegation um i don't believe one word that e gene carroll said but trump is on camera with the you know you can grab him by the p-word and they let you get away with it when you're a celebrity so it's like the fact that trump might have had a handsy

40s and 50s or even earlier than that, I don't know, is not going to come as a huge shock, Matt, but it's, if there were proof that he had a thing for underaged girls, you don't think we'd know that by now?

I think we would know that.

I think the potential political damage of this story, and let's keep in mind, the Wall Street Journal was not alone, but they were ahead of the pack mostly in writing about the Biden-White House Operation Bubble Wrap cover-up for months and years.

They did.

Wait, is that a real term?

Or are you just saying that?

Because I love that.

No, no, that was the term.

That was the term among both the journal and the New York Times reporting about the

Joe Biden.

That's awesome.

Talked about it on this show.

They use Operation Bubble Rap to describe the Dr.

Jill Biden kind of initiative.

And maybe we'll even talk about that later on in the episode.

Who knows?

But so, anyways, Wall Street Journal does good reporting, period.

But right now,

I think the fact of the matter about the politics of this is that Trump is facing a political challenge, the likes of which he hasn't really seen in a good while, which is that some people in his base are like, I don't know, dude.

I don't like how you're handling this, or I don't like how your administration is handling this.

And at a time when there's a lot of people who are more of the independent bent among people in media, the conservative media, podcasts, and Substack, who are dissatisfied with the level of disclosure so far in Epstein-related information from the Justice Department, having the story drop to remind you of what we already know on the record is that he does have a relationship, as does a lot of people, including several people that all three of us know have like been to Epstein's island and or have had interactions with him, scientists and people like that.

But the timing of that information at a time when there's these struggles between Pam Bondi and Dan Bongino and when there are people who haven't gone full Charlie Kirk in that they haven't gotten a call from the president and said, okay, I'll stop talking about it.

People are still talking about it on the right.

Well, Charlie is too.

He did.

He had that one day of like, I'm not doing it.

And then the next two days, his shows have been heavily on Charlie, which is not something that I say every single day.

But Trump just went out and called those people on the right and within MAGA who are talking about it still.

He called them a bunch of losers.

He said he's lost.

Bad people who are weaklings.

Weaklings and that they're working for the fake news and that this is all like a fake news plot or a liberal democratic plot that you fell for.

It's a hoax and et cetera.

It's going to be really interesting against that backdrop to see what those people do.

You have just been insulted by the president.

I don't know, Megan, if you know this, but sometimes Donald Trump insults people in the media.

On the right.

It's a day ending in why.

So

I will say for the record, my advice to all those people who are on the right is

just keep doing your thing.

Like you can't.

You can't run a show that way, a journalistic outfit.

You really can't run that way.

President Trump will get mad at any journalist who is doing their job.

And I don't forget the fake news.

They got their own issues.

But I mean, honest reporters who actually like Trump and are fair to Trump.

And you just, you know, it's part of being a journalist.

You are disliked more than you're liked.

And that's just the way it goes if you're doing your job right.

Yeah, I mean,

it seems to me, though, without having seen the Wall Street Journal reporting or the reporting from whomever is going to be publishing this story, there's no possibility that we would be talking about this or that this story would be coming out if there was not this profound mishandling of the disclosures related to the Epstein investigation.

Like everything about this has gone badly for the administration.

The messaging around it has been absolutely terrible.

Someone should absolutely lose their job about over it.

Whether or not it happens this week or a couple of weeks from now is the only question, I suppose, that actually ought to be seriously entertained.

But they mishandled this.

Like one doesn't have to believe any sort of conspiracy theories to look at the situation, to raise raise an eyebrow and say, what on earth is going on over there?

Who is responsible for

actually talking to the public?

When I think about like, okay, I don't know what they have.

Is it a picture of Trump with like a young girl?

Like it's not going to be with some, you know, really young girl, but let's say like a 17-year-old girl.

If that had come out, if they have that and that comes out

on any other day, it'd be like, all right, whatever.

You know, everybody knows that Trump was a bit of a playboy when he was younger.

You know, he's had multiple wives.

He was a man about town when he was younger.

And it wouldn't have been a total yawn, but it would have been mostly a yawn.

Certainly, his supporters would not have given two figs about that.

But now would be a terrible time for that to drop because of the way this is all snowballed into like, why is he so adamant about not releasing another document.

And then if they drop this story with that kind of thing now,

it could potentially hurt him because now even his own supporters have been insulted for actually caring about child issues, including potentially sexual abuse.

And then you see that and you think, oh, how much is there in this lane?

And why does that explain?

I'll give you the last thought on that.

Whoever wants to take it in the 30 seconds we have before a break.

Just to say that Trump has over the last 10 years successfully used insult comedy to kind of bring his base into line and into check, most famously, in my point of view, with the House Freedom Freedom Caucus, which started off as an antagonist and then he whipped them into line by the end of 2017.

Can he do that with his base

of people who are independent in media?

We are going to find out.

Yeah, we're in the process of finding out.

Okay, be right back with the fifth column.

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Back with me now, two of the three, Camille Foster and Matt Welsh of the fifth column.

I mean, Moyenahan's not here, so I think we can just say the two best.

the best two I've made.

We can say that anytime.

He's very busy trying to get his name scrubbed off certain flight logs.

I didn't really understand the exact thing, but hopefully he'll be finished.

You never know.

He's a bomb, Vivant.

I mean, who knows where he's been?

Yes.

My team did send me this

just for what it's worth.

Okay.

Michael Wolf, like

he, he's like, to me, he's like a Gabe Sherman type, where like 50% of what he writes is explosive and spot on and jaw-dropping, and the other other fifth is totally made up.

That's my own impression.

But he gets all these very, very famous billionaire-type people to let him follow them around like a fly-on-the-wall, you know, like the Murdochs and many others.

And then they all regret doing it.

Trump.

Anyway, he dropped a book not long ago called Too Famous, like T-O-O, and he wrote this in the book.

The FBI did not list in its findings of the Epstein residence search a set of pictures that Epstein sometimes removed from the safe to show friends.

A dozen or so snapshots from shortly before their quarrel in 2004 of Donald Trump at Epstein's Palm Beach home, posing with a variety of young women in various stages of undress.

Some topless, sitting on his lap, touching his hair, laughing, and pointing at a suggestive stain on the front of the future president's pants.

Now,

that's Michael Wolf.

Yeah.

So I have no idea whether any of that is true.

But again,

you know, this has been out there.

And if this is now somebody's going to produce this photo, my first question will be, where'd you get it?

What other photos of Jeffrey Epstein's do you have?

And why haven't they been made public before now?

That would be the kind of thing Trump wouldn't want hitting, but that doesn't prove he molested anybody.

And let's not forget.

that one of Epstein's lawyers, not Dershowitz, the other guy whose name is escaping me right now, but he is on the record as saying there's nothing.

Jeffrey Epstein had nothing on Donald Trump.

I asked him.

I specifically asked Epstein whether he had anything on Trump, and the answer was no.

So

that's why I'm not on Donald Trump, correct?

Yes.

But it's one thing to show like the president, you know, the current president, but then, you know, he owned a beauty pageant and he was just like a rich guy.

It's sort of frolicking about with young girls.

And I don't, I mean, the stain is just, that's so nasty.

If they're all making fun of of it and having fun with it on camera, the odds are it's an absolute nothing burger.

And just like, you know, these are people letting off some steam, having fun, not thinking he's going to be the future president.

I can see why Trump would be like, yeah, that's not ideal.

I'm not going to be putting that out, or I don't want to invite somebody to put that out.

But again, it sounds like that's not in the government's possession, that that's in somebody who knew Epstein's possession because it was not seized.

That's Michael Wolfe's point, not seized.

So this is some private individual.

Could it be Michael Wolfe?

I have no idea.

Who's been holding on to it for however long.

Michael Wolf dropped tapes of Epstein right before the presidential election.

They just didn't get any attention because we were focused on saving the world and he couldn't stop Trump's reelection with his last 11th hour hit piece on Trump.

And it had to do with Epstein.

In any event, that's where things stand.

Any thoughts on that, on the picture, on the details?

Wolf, it's a 50-50.

It's a 75-25.

I'm not sure in what direction I would go.

Probably 25-75

with his veracity.

He's just been historically kind of loose and sloppy, but he also does have access.

So it's always buyer, beware.

I would caution that if there is a photo, anything like what you describe, that's trouble for Trump.

There's such a difference between visuals and non-visuals.

And this is going to sound like a strange comparison, but I'm going to make it anyways with the Abu Ghraib photos, right?

The prison that the U.S.

military ran in Iraq and abused prisoners, and it was bad.

When those first photos came out, it was awful.

America had a reckoning, a long

conversation.

Then candidate Barack Obama said, when I'm president, we're going to release the rest of them.

And then when he became president, he changed his mind.

Partly because, and their stated reason was not that Barack Obama was in the photos, but like, this is going to make life difficult.

The Abu Ghraib photos changed or impacted American foreign policy.

And uh it absolutely cut into trust for the government and the military and a bunch of other things besides um it makes things uncomfortable so it's just the visuals of seeing this there can be totally documented center how would you recommend he handle it matt like at this point if if you know he were taking your advice on what to do right now what would it be

My advice is not for the health of the political prospects of any sitting politician.

My advice is I want to see everything as long as it doesn't abuse the individual rights of some of the people people in the images.

And it certainly would not abuse Donald Trump's individual rights to have that released in any shape or form.

I want to see all those photos.

I want to see the rest of the Albuquerque photos too.

Not that I relish looking at them.

I want the maximum transparency.

And let's just remember that, again, regardless of what one thinks about,

you know, the Epstein files being a skeleton key towards everything.

And I don't at all think that.

One can look at the real reporting from people like Julie Brown, heroic reporting at the Miami Herald that basically reopened the case in 2019 because of them working hard to uncover previously covered up files.

Not even covered up, just unreleased files.

We should be in favor of transparency.

And one reason that Pam Bondi is rightly in the crosshairs, in my opinion, right now, is that she could have said in February, she could have said, I'm in favor of transparency.

And we're going to see and do the serious work to try to release as many files as possible.

And we'll go over which names need to be redacted and and which don't.

And that's difficult work.

And we're going to do this also in light of Jelene Maxwell has an open appeals process going and we don't want to jeopardize that.

That's not what she did.

She invited influencers to the White House and gave them Trapper Keep

fan service, not transparency.

And then when those fans and they read phase one, they were phase one.

Like there were more pieces going on.

They did.

They did.

So there's two things that I want to say, one of which I'm actually a little nervous to say, and I kind of don't want to say it, but I may say it anyway.

But the first thing.

do it the first thing is uh perhaps a disagreement with you matt i i i love transparency secrecy is for losers this is what makes you guys the top two just fyi this is what makes you the top two keep going thank you thank you the secrecy is for losers etc etc that said

There is a reality here.

Like libertarians are both concerned about transparency and checking government power, but also checking government's ability to abuse that power.

And in a high-profile investigation like this, what we all know is that if your name is published, even in a totally innocent way, because of your own personal affiliation with Epstein, which might not have been criminal in any sort of nature whatsoever, to have it publicized in a sloppy way or at all, even in this particular climate, is tantamount to accusing you of something really, really nefarious.

So I appreciate the restraint on the part of judges who have been involved in this case.

And now, even with respect to federal disclosures, that's at least a worthwhile consideration.

Now, that's a bit of a nuanced point.

It just kind of brings two things into tension.

Now, the other thing that I want to say that I'm a little reluctant to say, but I can't be the first person to think this is, why the hell haven't we seen some AI generated video of Donald Trump with Epstein or even AI-generated photo of it?

It would be so easy to do, especially when you have this things like this out.

You would expect it to spread like wildfire.

It is, it is just odd to me that something like that hasn't happened yet.

I don't necessarily want it to.

In In fact, I don't want it to.

But it is.

You know, Adam Schiff is in his basement right now creating it.

He's personally stitching it together.

I'm sure it's going to hit soon.

I don't know if he has the technical prowess, but I believe he has the motive for sure.

Here's the tweet I was referring to.

It's the lawyer, David Schoen, S-C-H-O-E-N, who did later, he represented Trump.

I think maybe it was at the first impeachment trial.

Earlier, I guess I should say.

He said,

second impeachment trial.

He said, this is a tweet.

I was hired to lead jeffrey epstein's defense as his criminal lawyer nine days before he died he sought my advice for months before that i can say authoritatively unequivocally and definitively that he had no information to hurt president trump i specifically asked him exclaim exclamation point

so that's you know as close as we're going to get to hearing from epstein himself that he didn't have any real compromat on Trump.

And if there's a picture, okay, fine.

It'll keep tongues wagging.

But look, the reason why I really think

I don't know how long this goes on, you know, if there's a drip, drip, drip in the journal or whoever else.

And like, the problem for Trump is now the left wing is suddenly interested in Epstein.

You know, like these absolute Cretans who had absolutely nothing, not a care for who might have been hurt behind the scenes by, you know, some pedophile ring or just freaks who hung out with Epstein.

Now, suddenly, they're everyone's savior.

Like, oh, I'm on it.

I'm on it.

In fact, there was an extraordinary exchange on Morning Joe where Jamie Raskin, a villain, went on.

To his credit, Scarborough asked him something along these lines.

Look what happened.

Congressman could have gotten that from 21 to 25 when Democrats controlled the DOJ.

It was a crisis then.

It's a crisis now.

Why didn't Democrats call for it from 21 to 25?

Uh-huh.

So, I mean, you'd have to go back and look specifically at particular prosecutorial decisions

and what was taking place in terms of the other cases.

So I don't know.

We could try to reconstruct that record.

But the point is, is that Donald Trump is the one who has led the crusade to say that

Epstein, who was his very close friend, and there's all kinds of pictures of them.

See, he has no answer.

Donald Trump did not lead the crusade.

Trump, sir, it gets definitely, we're into the Epstein thing.

Trump himself has always been very measured.

Yeah, family.

I'm Don Jr.

Yes.

I mean, that's true.

But how about Jamie Raskin?

I don't know.

There may have been issues going on.

But Trump.

But Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.

Here's why Trump screwed up.

But that's Trump's problem now is because forget Jamie Raskin.

No one gives a shit what he's thinking or doing.

But now suddenly you're going to have the New York Times like, oh, well, it's a chance to hurt him.

Great.

And I don't know whether that's going to help or hurt Trump because it's going to generate a lot of...

additional coverage of it.

But as soon as the Times and The Guardian and the Washington Post are on the story and CNN's doing it wall to wall, that's when all of us on the right are going to start defending Trump because we can't stand those people and it's just too cynical.

And I mean, without, go ahead, Matt.

Just the, you know, in general, always those legacy media institutions have so much less oomph and power and influence than they used to.

So that's always worth keeping in mind.

I think what will drive some of this, these headlines, what we're already seeing, which is that Democrats in Congress are going to say, oh, we're going to need to have some hearings on this in August.

And the thing is, you know, maybe we should have hearings hearings on this if it means that we need to figure out the behavior, particularly of the Department of Justice way back in 2007, the first time around.

Like, why did these decisions get made and what were the contours of it or whatever, that there might need to be those.

Why did Alex Acosta?

cut such a sweetheart deal.

And by the way, I had Vicki Ward on the show two days ago, the reporter who wrote for Vanity Fair for all those years and then wrote that piece in the Daily Beast in 2019 saying, I spoke with a member of Trump transition team.

That person said they weren't worried about Alex Acosta getting confirmed because he told them the reason I gave Epstein the sweetheart deal is because he belongs to intelligence.

This is above my pay grade.

And basically I needed to make it go away.

So she stands by that 100%.

She go back and look at the clip.

It's on our YouTube feed right now.

She was like, I have absolutely no doubt about my reporting.

I stand by it 100%.

The person was in the room with Acosta and heard him say it.

And I have never gone back even once Intilla on my reporting.

So she's, you know, she stands by her reasons on why Acosta did what he did.

And you're right.

If we're actually going to have a special counsel, I don't think we're going to have congressional hearings because Dems would have to control the House.

Now they might in 2026, but right now they don't.

So they can't have hearings.

I don't think we will have hearings, but if we were going to, we definitely have to keep 2007, 2008 in the mix.

What was George W.

Bush's, you know, in the last year, his attorney general doing?

Why did Alberto Gonzalez or his top team sign off on this?

Because Alex Acosta said Maine Justice vetted everything and approved everything I did.

And we know what that means.

Now later, he told the Office of Professional Responsibility, reportedly, we've never seen the actual Q ⁇ A, that

he was not told to drop it because of any intelligence link.

So anyway, that's just yet another something that they'd have to look into.

All right, I want to shift gears now.

This is not an important thing.

Actually, before I get to this, but this is my second, this is my, after the plane crash, this is my second favorite story.

But before I get to it, I just want to say this.

It does occur to me, this is a self-inflicted wound because of Pam Bondi.

I don't think there's any question.

I don't know why she thought it would be a great idea to drop this two-page memo in the dark of night in the middle of the summer during a slow news time when people have nothing to chew on but that, right?

For Sunday night.

What?

For Monday, for Monday.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like if you want to bury a story, you bury a story during a busy news time, not during a slow news time.

Somebody, when Elon and Trump were fighting on Twitter and we were all

refreshing our ex,

you know, like people addicted to crack, you know, know, like every two seconds, like refresh, refresh.

Somebody tweeted out, like, by the way, if you have any bad news you want to drop, now would probably be the time to do it.

No one cares.

She did the opposite.

But I want to say this, as we're talking about all this, today, National Review had the headline that I'll read it to you.

Exclusive, Trump administration to cut off federal funding to hospitals that provide gender transition services to minors.

Yes, right on.

They are in the process right now in the Senate of approving $9 billion worth of Doge cuts.

It's not the full gamut, but it's a very nice start.

That's $9 billion we're going to have in the pocket that we didn't.

Today, one of the other great news stories we'll get to is we appear to be about to defund officially NPR and PBS.

to the tune of a billion dollars who should not be getting one more penny of taxpayer money.

In June, thanks to Trump's tariffs, that's according to NBC, which hates Trump, we had a surplus for the first time in forever in the month of June.

Again, thanks to the tariffs, we were not deficit spending in June.

We were spending in the black, like people who have a budget and are going to live up to it and actually have savings to put away.

It doesn't sound like the United States.

He just this week signed the HALT Fentanyl Act, cracking down on fentanyl and the people who deal it, which is a scourge across America, really devastating to working class communities and middle-class communities too across the country.

So he's just racked up a ton of wins, a ton of wins, and things for which he should be celebrated.

So I understand Trump's frustration at having to talk about this Cretan Jeffrey Epstein.

Again, for that, he needs to blame Pam Bondi.

He doesn't seem like he wants to do that.

Anybody want to comment on the Trump Ws before we move on to my second favorite story of the day?

Just as the libertarian jerk hole here on the corner, nine billion is a good idea.

You might be slipping out of the number, number one position.

Yeah, whatever.

I've been on the show before.

I know where I belong.

And it ain't number one.

But $9 billion

operates the federal government for one half of a day.

It is much less than the $500 billion rescissions package that Rand Paul was looking for.

Obviously, much less than the initial claims of Doge.

I like $9 billion.

It's better than zero.

But it's only $9 billion better than zero.

And I'm glad for the PBS NPR thing, which you alluded to, and some other things besides.

But I want more government cutting, period.

And I would co-sign and just say

trimming politically, politically divisive things that the federal government is funding.

I mean, probably appropriate.

The federal government shouldn't be throwing tons and tons of money at things that most Americans aren't particularly interested in.

That doesn't make a lot of sense.

But we can talk about it.

Okay.

No, I want to talk about what happened at the Cold Play concert.

I'm sorry, but it's everywhere.

It's all anybody's talking about.

And we just got some news on it.

So in an extraordinary chain of events, there was a Cold Play concert.

And where was the Cold Play concert?

I was at Gillette Stadium, home to the NFL's New England Patriots in Foxborough, Massachusetts.

And here is what happened.

They had like the kiss cam kind of thing that goes around.

And I guess we should play it.

Do we have the video?

That zeroed in on this one couple.

And I'll describe it for the listening audience, though.

I imagine 99% of the audience has seen this clip already because it's gone totally viral.

Let's watch it.

Yeah.

Oh, look at these two.

All right.

Come on.

You're okay?

Oh, what?

Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy.

At the beginning of the clip, it's got the man behind the woman like holding her with his arms around her and she's swaying in his arms.

These are two obvious lovers or in some sort of romantic relationship.

It's not how I hold the head of our HR.

Non-existent.

We don't have that person.

But anyway, it turns out the man is,

hold on.

His name is, he's an astronomer.

He's a CEO of a company called Astronomer.

Yeah, Andy Byron, I think is his name.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Andy Byron.

And his HR director, who it that's who he's holding in there.

And I'll give you her name too in a second.

I got it all in here.

I just, it's spread out across my packet.

Stand by.

This is, if it's my favorite story, I should have been more prepared.

Oh, it's in the update.

Is it in the update?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry, guys.

Bear with me.

So much paper and so little time.

Okay.

His name, yeah, is Andy Byron, B-Y-R-O-N.

And he's the CEO of a company called Astronomer, and that is his chief people officer.

Is that what we're calling HR now?

That is so weird.

Chief People Officer, Kristen Cabot, C-A-B-O-T.

The problem here is that Andy Byron is married to someone other than Kristen Cabot,

who, again, the irony of her being head of HR.

And he has two children.

And it appears that they were caught in what appears to be an affair.

And here's the latest reporting.

Okay.

That

Byron and his wife, both 50, live in Northboro, which I think is by Foxborough, Massachusetts.

And per Mrs.

SpaceX on X, who is heavily covering and tracking the story, his wife has now deactivated her account.

The wife later dropped her married name on her Facebook account to the delight of Mrs.

SpaceX, who wrote, what a class act.

Go, Megan, get that divorce lawyer and get the money.

Okay, so this is all speculation because none of this has been confirmed by the relevant players.

But what we do know for sure is that this is the guy that is his head of HR.

They were caught in an obvious embrace.

And as soon as that cam went on them and they saw their image up in the thing, it was the worst cover-up ever.

She turned her back to the camera and he just like squat, he looked totally humiliated and embarrassed.

It's like, hello, everybody knows to just act like you didn't do anything wrong.

You got to keep the, keep holding and then make it into like a dance.

That's all it was.

It was a dance.

It wasn't an embrace.

Do something other than turn and cower in humiliation, Camille.

He did so many things wrong.

I mean, the very first thing is, and look, I've never cheated on my wife.

I'm not cheating on my wife.

I love you, baby.

It's her birthday.

I'm happy birthday.

Great.

But if I did it, to borrow the phrase from O.J.

Simpson, I sure as hell am not going to take my side chick to a stadium.

with 65,000 strangers and just kind of march through the crowd and go up to our box and then be helding her in a warm embrace at a cold play concert.

I think that the actual star of this story, though, is Chris Martin, who decides, given an opportunity here, to let these people off the hook and just let the camera move along, to suggest explicitly that these people are either having an affair.

I mean, seriously?

You just throw the fans under the bus who paid their hard-earned money for these tickets?

Maybe probably for a very expensive box.

He's an accelerationist, Camille.

He's just trying to get them faster to where they were maybe going all along.

Maybe he didn't believe it.

It feels like the same.

The only reason he would say that is if he didn't believe it, you know, if he just thought they were camera shy and he's giving them a hard time.

But as it turns out, he may have been correct.

We don't have confirmation of that.

Take it with a grain of salt.

There could be some other innocent explanation.

As much as we all trust Mrs.

SpaceX and her reporting, we really don't have this confirmed, but it's everywhere.

It's everywhere.

And honestly, it's just alarming because every woman woman sees that and has like a shudder go down her spine that like your marriage could go up in an instant based on really bad judgment.

People do this, they have affairs, you know, marriages fall apart, normally not in such a public way

where you've got Chris Martin involved.

Here, we've got the right

clip now.

Let's watch it.

Yeah.

Oh, look at this.

All right.

Come on.

You're okay.

Oh, what?

Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy.

Oh, she's talking to her friend.

That's her friend.

She whips her back to the camera.

Yeah.

And

he actually bends down to get out of the camera.

He's like squatting to get out of

the sight.

Honestly, they should have listened to me.

Look, he's really hugging her.

It's tight.

Yeah, you just lean in.

You have to lean in at that point.

Right?

Like, you really do.

You got to like kiss her on the top of her head and be like, She's so cute, my head of HR.

She's been through a lot.

Somebody just died.

That's why I'm holding her like that.

I don't know.

I'm not sure what you do, but I don't think this is it.

It is a pity Moynihan isn't here because he would have great advice.

You just wouldn't.

He wouldn't be turning and shying away.

I think

he has a certain transparency in the way he looks his life.

Megan, I'm just alarmed a little bit by the level of specificity in your suggestions for how to avoid engaged with your side piece.

You know what?

It's because I'm an actress now.

I don't know if you caught my premiere in With Love, Megan,

my Megan Markle parody, but I'm an actress.

I did see.

Yeah.

And let me explain to you how it works in the improv world since you clearly don't know.

It's just everything's a yes.

You don't say no.

It's like, yes, I'm on camera.

Yes.

I'm hugging.

Yes.

It's no problem.

Yes.

It's never like, no, no, I wasn't doing it.

It's you threw something at me and we're going to go with it.

Okay.

Try to blow it up, Welsh.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's great advice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is this is the problem.

When you haven't been the way I have to outer space, you don't know things.

See, I probably, this guy and I will probably get along.

He's an astronomer.

I'm an astronaut.

We should probably connect.

He should give me the exclusive.

Are you auditioning for something here?

Teams very loving.

Definitely not.

I feel about my spouse the way Camille feels about his.

Okay.

It's not related, but it kind of is.

Forgive me because we're taking a usually we do harder news and then softer news, but I'm taking a Dane.

I'm taking a different route.

scotty

schiffler

you know me in the sports do i have it wrong the golf chef scheffler the the golf champion i'm not a golf guy i don't know look at this i got nothing here i got i i'm talking to two like intellectuals i i and monihan would not help here either

sport no he doesn't he doesn't know golf either but basketball football i'm your guy yeah Okay, all right.

Well, golf is a sport too.

And it is.

This guy, Scotty Scheffler, is very popular and very successful in his accomplishments.

I'm going to tell you all the stuff that he's done in one second.

He's number one in the world, just in case you didn't know that, which I didn't.

He's 29, three-time major champion, has won the Masters twice and the PGA championship this year.

He's looking to inch closer to the career grand slam at the open this week at Royal Portrush.

16-time PGA tour winner, and he's been the number one ranked golfer for over 100 weeks.

So it's crazy.

Like, I don't think you can get any more accomplished in the world of golf.

And he just gave a press conference.

I saw this on X, and it's rare that I sit and I watch like the whole four-minute clip of somebody I don't know at all.

I

was fascinated by what he said.

I'm going to play you part of it, and you'll see why I was.

It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for like a few minutes.

It only lasts a few minutes, that kind of euphoric feeling.

It's like,

okay, now what are we going to eat for dinner?

You know, life goes on.

I love the challenge.

I love being able to play this game for a living.

It's, it's one of the greatest joys of my life, but does it fill the deepest, you know, wants and desires of my heart?

Absolutely not.

You know, that's why I talk about families being my priority because it really is.

You know, I'm blessed to be able to come out here and play golf, but if my golf ever started affecting my home life or it ever affected the relationship I have with my wife or with my son, you know, that's going to be the last day that I play out here for a living.

You know, this is not the be-all, end-all.

This is not the most important thing in my life.

And that's why I wrestle with why is this so important to me?

Because, you know, I would much rather be a great father than I would be a great golfer.

He went again,

right?

And he was talking about how, you know, you work all day.

You're out here on the course all day, the links, whatever, and you're practicing, practicing, practicing.

You get up early in the morning.

My wife always says thank you to me when I go because she knows I'm really putting it all out there for the family.

And then you win and you're like, yay.

He really talked about how

winning's great, but it's really not that great.

Like you make such sacrifice, you put so much effort into getting the win.

When you get it, there is that moment of euphoria, but then it's quickly over.

He's like, so I won.

I can't remember which tournament, but, you know, one of them.

And he's like, and everybody's like, yeah.

And you're hugging.

And then that night, you know,

we went out and like watched a movie.

Like we went out to dinner.

You know, it's like, and then you're right back.

The questions that come your way immediately are, what are you going to do for the next one?

Like, what can you do the next one?

Like, what's going to happen the next one?

I could totally understand what he's saying.

I'm not an athlete, but it reminded me a little bit of back when I practiced law.

And you would kill yourself getting ready for this big trial.

You know, it's like the Super Bowl of law.

And I mean, night and day with no sleep and like years that way.

And then you'd try the case.

And yes, you would win.

I lost one, but we got it reversed on appeal.

Any event.

So it was all net net.

It was all wins.

And you'd, you'd be so thrilled at having the W.

And you would go out and celebrate that night.

And then the next day, it's just done.

It's done.

But the pain of losing was so acute and would weigh on you for weeks.

You know, like, oh, it so far outweighed the joy of winning.

And I've never heard a professional athlete just be so honest about it and just get like really real about how

that high is a bit of a false god.

And what's real is sitting in your living room.

Yeah.

I mean, and you mentioned his age.

And I don't remember how old you said he was.

It sounds so sub 30.

He's fortunate to have figured it out so early.

I don't know that most people do.

I mean, I think we are

people of privilege.

We live, you know, pretty, pretty, pretty extraordinary lives in many respects.

We get to talk to really prominent people in all kinds of public contexts, occasionally come in for controversy.

But we've been able to do a lot of stuff.

Before I had kids, my wife and I visited every continent, including Antarctica, and done all kinds of cool crap.

But what I've come to realize, and I think the knowledge I have that other people don't, having already done a lot of the bucket list stuff that I could have imagined before we had kids, is the most important thing I do every day is like wake up and try to be a great husband and try to be a great father.

And that doesn't mean I don't care about other things, but I've put those things into the right context.

I think my daughter and my son really helped crystallize what my priorities are, like my marriage and my own kind of personal happiness and my ability to be present in any given moment.

And we used to have one of those posters in the office that said something like, you know, it's not the destination, it's the journey.

And I hated it for years.

I was like, I want to win.

But I have come around to completely understanding it.

Like it is, it is those quiet moments.

The best moments of my life are those quiet moments where, or not so quiet moments, where everyone is in the bed together for 15 or 20 minutes.

And to be able to recognize it in that moment is an extraordinary privilege.

And we don't do it enough.

We're consumed with politics.

We're consumed with career advancement or the next thing that we want to do.

And we forget that the moment you achieve the great thing you've been thinking about, you're immediately thinking about, okay, what's next?

What other thing am I striving for?

Just things, however things are in your life right now, it could be so much worse.

And it may be.

Eventually the void, the void is screaming out for all of us.

But we have this moment to be present, to be grateful.

And I love that.

I mean, it's such a great sentiment.

I don't really watch golf, but I'm an instant fan of his.

Yeah, same.

Cause you look at those kids.

Like I think about my kids when they were babes in their cribs and they smell so good and they're so happy to see you in the morning to go in and get them.

You've already won.

This is this is daily winning.

The W is is staring you in the face.

It's not to say you shouldn't have any professional ambition.

It's just when you have that satisfaction, that true, like true, real love and joy, it's like everything else is kind of gravy.

I'm not even sure if you can get the high from winning on the golf course or whatever.

Now, in my case, in the ratings or whatever God you're chasing, once you know what really matters, right?

It's like that fulfillment is up here.

Maybe you can bump up a degree or two, but I don't know.

Even people who don't have kids, Matt, I think can recognize the disappointment of chasing something that's kind of false, whether it's an Oscar in Hollywood or a trophy in sports, you know, not to undermine the whole process and the discipline and, you know, being great at something, but like the win isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be.

First of all, I need to take credit.

I was badgering Camille Foster to have kids for a very long time.

That's true.

Ronaldist of the film podcast.

It's true.

I love how kids don't have any idea what you do for a living.

Not what you do, Megan.

In particular, my 17-year-old knows exactly what you do.

I love her.

Dad, you aren't Megan Kelly.

I've seen her on TikTok.

You're like, that's why I put up with this abuse.

Basically.

But there was an interesting interview.

We just had the baseball all-star game, which was really terrific this week in Atlanta, in Atlanta, where it had been banned by idiots a couple of years ago.

But there was an interview with Francisco Lindor, the great Mets shortstop, that was kind of similar.

Reported just like, you know, what is your motivation to go out there every day?

Just a little 30-second clip.

I recommend looking at it.

And he's like,

kind of giving Alan Iverson almost, you know, like motivation?

But like, no, it's not about motivation.

It's about work ethic.

Motivation is like, you know, is temporary.

It lasts for a while.

It's on your shoulder, makes you think to do a thing.

But to do the grind every single day to pursue a consistent level of excellence to be the best at what you do,

that takes a lot of discipline

and it takes work ethic and kind of long-term thinking.

And that way you're much more at peace, actually, about whether you win and where you lose.

Did you put in your best effort?

Great.

And then, if hopefully, if you have some kid lits around who don't even know that you play baseball or host a podcast or do whatever, it's incredibly rewarding.

You feel like you've done your best.

And if you're fortunate enough, like all of us are in this conversation, to know that that work, that attempt to strive for a consistent excellence um and the work ethic that goes into it can contribute to you being able to to provide some stability and and uh comfort for your kids to pursue the things that they want to do um it is so satisfying it's as satisfying as like growing a garden and eating your food like oh man there's just something elemental about that and it's not necessarily chasing uh immediate spike of highs it's about a long-term i'm grinding i'm working and i'm putting in long hours but I'm doing it for this reason.

And that reason is the true source of the happiness.

Yeah.

It's a good reminder, you know, not to get too drawn into, it could be anything in your life.

Even for like my work, my, my stay-at-home moms who watch or listen to the show, you're on social media, you make a post, you check it over and over to see how many likes you've gotten.

The same false God, you know, as like

thinking winning the PGA tour is going to be the thing that fulfills you or winning the Oscar, you know, for whatever movie is going to be the thing.

It's exactly the same thing.

You know, we all get sucked into it.

And it's a team.

What a great gift he gave us.

A great reminder that whether it's this huge goal that everybody in the world, well, most of us have watched and know about, or it's something in your private life that you've prioritized, like getting a raise or getting a new job title or getting a social media like or whatever, getting the right invitation to the right, you know, cocktail parties.

They're all false.

They're not going to do the thing for you that you're looking for.

Really, look inside your living room.

That's where the answer is.

Guys, stand by.

More coming up when we come back.

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We just had the one-year anniversary, one-year mark since Butler, Pennsylvania, which was, you know, just a sea change moment in American politics in a way.

I mean, Trump was on his way toward winning the election, but that moment and the way he handled it just galvanized support behind him, even amongst disaffected Republicans who were sort of eh about him after that moment.

Didn't feel that way.

Now, if you were a member of the press and a normal person, you could at least begrudgingly say, wow, he really handled that like a champ.

You know, gosh.

If you were a lunatic member of the press, you speculated on MSNBC about how he faked it, how it was all, the whole thing was fake, totally disrespectful to Corey Comperator and his widow.

They've never explained that piece of their bizarre theory nor apologized to her for saying such a thing.

And if you were a member of the press, you might, who is a lunatic, have made it all about you,

your trauma.

And I don't mean that you were almost shot, which is something Selena Zito can say.

By the way, thank you, Megan Kelly show viewers.

Her book debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, which I'm sure did not want to put her there.

So God bless all of you for buying her book, Butler.

She was there with the president on that day.

So if you're a real loon, here's where you go with it.

This is CBS's Seth McFarlane, who appeared on Chuck Todd's cast.

Sorry, sorry, Scott, Scott McFarlane.

Seth is a different guy.

Scott McFarlane, who appeared on the Chuck Todd cast,

which has the same number of viewers as people who are in this screen right here.

And

here's what he said about Butler.

For those of us who were there,

it wasn't an immediate or even a long-term reflection on Secret Service.

For those of us there, it was such a horror because you saw

an emerging America.

And it wasn't the shooting, Chuck.

This was, I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours.

I got put on trauma leave, not because, I think, of the shooting, but because you could, you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people.

They were coming for us.

If he didn't jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us.

I know.

Many of us on press row, as we talked about this on our text chains for weeks after, were quite confident we'd be dead if he didn't get back up.

There was a subset, not everybody, there's dozens of people in the crowd who started comforting us, saying, you did this.

This is your fault.

You caused this.

You killed him.

And they're going to beat us with their hands.

I mean, they were going to kill us.

And

respectfully, the Secret Service had bigger issues in protecting us.

When he jumped up triumphantly, it saved us.

But that's the thing.

I can't eliminate from my mind's eye the look in their faces.

That's what America is right now.

It's not rational.

It's an irrational thought to think the media shot somebody from atop a building.

But the lack of rationality is what connects January 6th to this.

Oh, God.

What?

Wow.

He's the CBS's J6 reporter, by the way.

Do you believe that lunacy?

I can't.

I'm just trying to, I'm out here with like with diagrams against bulletin board just trying to,

well, what the

theory exactly

here.

Yeah, that the mob was going to kill them, that was going to kill the media, the totally peaceful mob that didn't even stampede out of the joint before Trump jumped up.

That was there.

You read Selena's book, lovingly, happily celebrating him.

And then to their enormous credit, stayed calm even after the bullets were flying.

And then, yes, when Trump stood up and heroically did that, felt inspired.

But

who is ever talking about the mob turning on the media?

This is the first I've heard anything like that.

And it's totally inconsistent with the actual tone and tenor of MAGA rallies.

That guy, I'm just going to say it, is fucking making that up the same way AOC wants us to believe she was almost raped on J6 when she wasn't even there.

He's imagining, he's imagining thing, making media the center of the story and also transposing his personal grief at an electoral outcome with

the reality in front of him.

I mean, he's mad that people responded.

I mean, Trump stood up there.

I didn't vote for Trump, as we know.

He got up, blood coming out of his ear, and said, fight, fight, fight.

You can't, I think it's really, really difficult to look at that and say, wow,

that's scary, the way he acted there or that response there.

No, it was awesome.

He got up.

The shooting was horrifying.

And we could have had the only fair thing to say to Scott McFarland.

about his scenario planning here.

And it's something that we talk about constantly into the column podcast.

America has a problem with political violence.

That assassination attempt was very much part of it.

Killed a man.

And it's terrible.

And it's an unresolved problem with political violence on the right and on the left in different ways.

And we don't talk about it honestly.

All of that is true.

If Trump would have died that day, I shudder to think what would have happened in America.

We all dodged a bullet.

Corey Compatoro sadly did not.

But the country dodged a bullet.

But we still have that problem in front of us.

So that part of it is true.

That's the only part of it that's semi-true.

But it's not what the, what are you doing?

That's not the story from that day.

Yeah.

And he didn't even seem to get there.

Yeah.

He didn't even

to that conclusion.

Like

grappling with the reality.

And honestly, on the fifth column, there are many things that we've talked about regularly.

The surging, not the surging, but the persistent growing problem of political violence that we've had in this country, which became really prominent and undeniable in the summer of 2020, which certainly played a part on January 6th, which has risen up in so many other occasions.

And honestly, when President Trump was elected, that assassination attempt at the baseball field during that congressional baseball game, we've seen so many instances of this.

We should be trying to connect it, not in a way that directs blame at either of these political parties, but in a way that acknowledges this is a reality in our politics and we need to do something about it.

And doing something about it means sober, honest,

thoughtful engagement with one another, talking honestly about ways that we can kind of ratchet down the temperature of our political exchanges and debates.

We don't do that, honestly.

For the most part, we're looking for who to blame in various circumstances as opposed to, and this is interesting because it has a parallel to the very first segment on your show today, Megan, but like the kind of NTSB style investigation of what happened with this particular plane crash, what went wrong, how can we avert it and make certain it doesn't happen again.

I'd love to see us have a serious bipartisan investigation and inquiry into what happened during the summer of 2020, into what happened with COVID and why we didn't do a better job with messaging there, into what happened with January 6th.

But we won't have a sober, honest, not at all politicized investigation into these things because our politics is utterly broken.

And our politicians, generally speaking, are not really in the business of actually trying to get to the bottom of things nearly as much as they are assailing their political enemies.

And quite frankly, you just saw an example of a journalist who is similarly in the world

about the nature of things.

And I think actually

this is what I think of Trump supporters.

They're deranged, googly-eyed madmen who want to kill members of the media like me and would in a New York minute.

That I, my life was the one you should have been worried about the day of Butler as a member of the media.

I was almost killed.

I could see it in their eyes.

Trust me.

Now CBS sends that guy out to go do reporting on January 6th, on, you know, ongoing, on Trump, on anything involving Trump supporters.

And they're supposed to watch CBS and watch this guy come on camera and think, I can trust him.

He's fair.

He gets me.

He's made the effort to get my side of the country.

Bullshit.

That guy should actually be fired.

He should be fired.

Obviously, he's not well.

Yeah,

that is not the way.

There's a new book out about

the COVID disastrous response.

And one of the, and the others are not in front of you, is two Princeton sociologists, actually, who describe themselves as leftist-centered.

And it's an absolutely harsh indictment on what we're supposed to be the truth-seeking institutions in this country, in science,

in government, and in the media, in academia.

And everyone really, really failed during COVID.

And as a result,

really like helped erode and shred trust and

impinge on civil liberties and such like.

We see this kind of example here.

The journalism industry, as it has been collapsing through things that may or may not be related to this,

has been covering itself in this type of kind of openly partisan.

What's the worst thing he said there besides all the words?

It's that me and all the other reporters were text messaging each other with the same kind of sentiment.

Then you're all crazy.

I hope that's not true, honestly, because that.

show tug, they're like, yes, yes.

This is like the main face of NBC's political coverage for many years.

Like, yes, right on, yes.

I'm no, no pause at all.

Like, gee, do you think you might want to pause before condemning the entire group that was there that themselves had been traumatized by this?

No, not a thought because he was like right on.

By the way, we don't have time for it, but Francis Collins, he was on late night on Colbert just last night.

Maybe we do have time.

Let's play it really quickly.

We're going to play it.

Top 35.

Stephen, we have other deficits that politics aren't going to solve.

Maybe they're making it worse.

There's a truth deficit.

We're in a place now.

Yeah, where

seems to be no real penalty for saying something that's demonstrably false.

It just

irony.

We have a trust deficit

where because people don't know if they can be sure somebody's telling the truth, why should I trust that person?

So we stop trusting each other most of the time.

And that's dangerous also also for our future.

Oh, geez.

Wow.

No introspection.

Francis Collins.

You guys, you have to stay for two more minutes and we just have to talk about that.

But don't go away.

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Okay, guys, so Francis Collins, who ran the NIH and the COVID response above Fauci, says we're at a truth deficit.

And this is really unfortunate and lamentable.

This is the man.

who decided to try to ruin people like Dr.

Jay Bhattacharya, who's now running NIH and in the Francis Collins seat, because he said maybe we should do focus protection and just focus on the people who are really vulnerable and ask them to, you know, lock down and not the entire society.

That might make more sense than having totally fine, perfectly healthy children and young people run around masked or not run around at all or arrest them while surfing or out in a public park, not near anyone.

And so he decided he had to be labeled fringe and ruined.

This is one of our best scientists in America at Stanford.

Now that guy wants to turn around, that's the least of his sins, by the way, and lecture us on how it's really sad we have a truth deficit in this country and something ought to be done about it.

Thoughts on that?

Let's evaluate the truth-seekingness of the following quote, the science-ness of the following quote.

When the Great Barrington Declaration came out in the summer or late or early fall of 2020, that Jay Bhattachari and others signed, basically saying we won't focus protection.

His words, Francis Collins' words, we need a quick and devastating takedown

of these fringe epidemiologists.

Okay.

Quick and devastating takedown.

That is

some clown talk, bro, to paraphrase Bryce Harper.

What are you doing?

There's no truth.

There's no science.

That's a political hatchet job.

And what effect did it have?

Jay Bhattachari was censured by 100 faculty members at Stanford, censured.

The amount of chilling effect, there was a great piece by John Tierney in the City Journal a couple of years ago, talking about all these different places where peer review was happening in epidemiology science that was related to COVID after this intervention by Francis Cole.

It had a huge chilling effect on scientific discourse.

And meanwhile, then the Biden administration did all kinds of jawboning against social media companies to have them suppress people, just like go ahead and kick them off your platform of people.

Not just Joe Rogan from Spotify was their attempt that they talked about on a daily basis, but people like Rand Paul from YouTube.

Successful.

They kicked him off for a while.

Amazing mass kind of censorship, jawboning event.

He was in the middle of this.

I don't want to hear a single damn word coming out of his mouth about truth and freedom and science and anything like that, unless the first one is, I'm sorry, I screwed up.

He's not sorry.

He's totally screwed up.

And Stephen Colbert, who is doing dance routines with giant syringes about the vaccine, is also not the place to have that conversation.

No, and lets him totally get away with it, Camille.

Yeah, I mean, well, he's not a journalist, so I don't expect him to do much better.

And he came there for a PR opportunity, but it would have been much better to have him do a little bit of introspection during our moment of most profound need.

Our public health infrastructure completely failed us.

Like just in terms of messaging and communicating with people people in an honest and transparent way, communicating both our certainty and our uncertainty, really profound uncertainty at various moments.

Like that's what they should have been doing.

They failed.

profoundly.

We don't even have to get into debates about vaccine efficacy or anything else.

I think the quote that Matt just cited and the many, many, many instances of people getting way out over their skis, openly misleading the American public about the use of masks or necessity of masks in certain instances, only to reverse themselves later.

All of that has not only had consequence it didn't only had consequences during the pandemic it has contributed to this circumstance we find ourselves in where people don't know who to trust they only trust people who kind of openly agree with them they're they're upset with the bureaucracy they're upset with the institutions broadly like there is an absolute need for us to go back think carefully about what happened there um and it isn't too late to do it like we can still do it at this point but it is definitely the case that a lot of these people just need to by the way he didn't get a pardon

He didn't get a pardon.

Fauci got a pardon, but he was on all those emails too when those two decided to stifle any discussion about whether this thing originated in a lab.

Remember that explosive story where it was like, I mean, now we all know it could not talk.

It definitely started in a lab, but you couldn't talk about it.

And those two got those ridiculous epidemiologists together who had all privately, we found out things to the House that the Republican-led House that investigated it and got the emails.

Privately, they were like, this doesn't look like anything in nature that we've ever seen before.

Kind of looks like we grew it in a lab.

And then those two went in there and browbeat them.

And then within literally like hours, they all did a 180 saying, it's natural.

It's natural.

Came from a penguin or something like that.

Definitely, definitely, definitely not in a lab.

And the nerve.

So, okay, you're going to be a dishonest, disgusting broker on a pandemic that took a lot of lives.

That's okay.

That's your decision.

You'll have to live with that and face up to it when you meet your maker.

But then to have the nerve to go on a truth tour, trying to lecture the rest of us.

I actually want to hear it one more time.

Now, having had that discussion, let's play SOT 35 one more time.

Stephen, we have other deficits that politics aren't going to solve.

Maybe they're making it worse.

There's a truth deficit.

We're in a place now.

Yeah, where

seems to be no real penalty for saying something that's demonstrably false.

It just...

Oh, my no, it's not.

We have a trust deficit where because people don't know if they can be sure somebody's telling the truth, why should I trust that person?

So we stop trusting each other most of the time.

And that's dangerous also for our future.

It's very meta.

You know, like what he's saying applies 100% to him.

And you're watching it thinking, I agree with every word.

It's just you're the one who created the trust deficit.

You're the one who said the untruths for which there was no accountability.

Just as a reminder, in those emails,

he gives the order in the emails writing that it's important to settle the matter, to quote, put down this very destructive conspiracy about COVID starting in a lab, lest the experts do, quote, great potential harm to science and international harmony.

What?

A counter conspiracy.

He's never been held accountable.

A counter conspiracy.

I do

using the word settle.

Yeah.

I'm going to pre-settle the science in the name of

it.

Why was it so important to have it settled when you could see the debate was raging within the top experts of the world saying, okay, could it be natural?

Might be, but geez, we don't think so.

He wouldn't let it play out.

He wanted a conclusion because he knew we funded it.

That's the reason he knew that we were funding gain of function research in that COVID lab.

He knew that we were paying EcoHealth Alliance to partner with the bat lady to do it.

And he didn't want it to come out that he and Anthony Fauci were likely behind the entire pandemic.

That's what was going on there.

And now he's given red carpet rollout on Stephen Colbert and not asked about any of that shit.

It's infuriating.

Now, wait, now I've taken, I've abused you.

I've kept you seven minutes over.

Do you have another few minutes?

Because there is one other thing I wanted to get to.

Yeah, we got, we got time for you, Megan.

Okay.

Okay.

God bless you because there's nobody else I'd rather do this with.

I've been waiting all week to do this with you guys.

Did you catch the piece in the New York Times entitled, Is it Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right Wing Family?

Fan.

Fantastic.

It is.

It's so good.

I can't wait to talk about it.

And if you haven't read it, Camille, fear not.

I have it here and I'm going to bring you.

the highlights.

Thank you.

Now, the man's name is David Litt, L-I-T-T.

However, the term does not apply with respect to his piece, as the kids would say.

That's slang, but cool.

Okay, I'm just going to give you a little from the top.

Published July 13th.

Not too long ago, I felt a civic duty to be rude to my wife's younger brother.

I met Matt Kapler, names him, in 2012, and it was immediately clear we had nothing in common.

He lifted weights to death metal.

I jogged to Sondheim.

I was one of President Barack Obama's, who does that?

I was one of President Barack Obama's speechwriters and had an Ivy League degree.

He was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician's license.

Can you imagine?

It's basically like, what a rube, unlike me.

My early memories of Matt are hazy.

I was mostly trying to impress his parents.

Still, we got along chatting amiably on holidays and family events.

Then the pandemic hit.

and our preferences began to feel more like, more, feel like more than differences in taste.

We were on opposite sides of a cultural civil war.

The deepest divide was vaccination.

I wasn't shocked when Matt didn't get the COVID shot, but I was baffled.

Turning down a vaccine during a pandemic seemed like a rejection of science and self-preservation.

It felt like he was tearing up, he was tearing up the social contract that until that point I'd imagined we shared.

Had Matt been a friend rather than a family member, I probably would have cut off contact completely.

As it was, on the rare and always outdoor occasions when we saw each other, I spoke in disapproving snippets.

Then he quotes, work's been good.

I guess that's Matt saying work's been good and David with the, hmm, my disapproving snippet of you, Matt.

My frostiness.

wasn't personal.

It was strategic.

Being unfriendly to people who turned down the vaccine felt like the right thing to do.

How else could we motivate them to mend their ways?

This is not a parody.

This is real.

He's actually writing this in the first person.

I wasn't the only one thinking this.

A 2021 essay for USA Today declared it's time to start shunning the vaccine hesitant.

An LA Times piece went further, arguing that to create teachable moments, it may be necessary to mock some anti-vaxxers' deaths, which he brings up again here as like, these were my teachers.

Shunning as a form of accountability goes back millenniums.

And then he goes back on

Hester Prynn and the Scarlet Letter and what that was meant to do.

That was before social media, blah, blah, blah, blah.

What people used to do, he says, few people who lost friends over the vaccine changed their minds.

They just got new friends.

Those exiled from one version of society were quickly welcomed by another, an alternate universe full of grievance peddlers and conspiracy theorists who thrived on stories of victimized conservatives.

So he goes on about how he really wrestled with this and he really kind of tried to shun poor Matt.

But then

they decided to start surfing together.

Matt, like a typical right-winger, didn't write him off, didn't take it too personally, continued talking to him, was nice to him, and actually volunteered.

to help him learn how to surf.

And he says, okay, I wish I could have learned the lesson that ostracism doesn't help, doesn't work.

I wish I could have learned this through self-reflection and study.

What actually happened is that I started surfing.

After moving to the Jersey Shore, oh, great.

In 2022, I signed up for lessons.

Despite my advanced age of 35 and lack of natural talent, I got hooked.

Matt was the only other surfer I knew.

I put my principled unfriendliness aside.

Listen to the guy cloaking himself in glory for being a dick all the way through Matt, not abandoning him and continuing to help him.

From the moment we began paddling out together, I could tell my cold shoulder strategy had backfired.

I'd spent the peak of the pandemic in a cultural bubble, and he had done the same.

Driving to a break or changing into our wetsuits, he'd often express opinions about the merits of vigilantism or the health benefits of Mexican stem cell injections that I found slightly unhinged.

Where is this coming from?

I wondered.

The answer was nearly always: Joe Rogan.

I assumed our surf buddy experiment would either fail spectatorly or would bring Matt over to my side.

Neither of those things occurred, however.

Instead, the connections we found were tiny and unrelated to politics.

And then he goes on to talk about common ground they found on non-political matters.

And

he forgave Matt for being a crazy Joe Rogan fan and started to rethink his decision to completely ostracize Matt from his life.

And

he decided that this was a better path.

That shunning, he writes, plays into the hands of demagogues, making it easier for them to divide us and even in some cases, to incite violence.

So he hasn't learned anything about his worldviews other than when you have the hateful, awful people on the other side, the shunning isn't the most effective way of getting them to change their worldview because they you drive them into the arms of the true lunatics.

That's what he learned on the surfboard with Matt.

There's so much in here.

I'll start with you, Matt Welsh.

Since you're a Matt and you read the piece, your thoughts on it.

There are so many aspects of that that make me want to

both punch the window that I'm looking through right now and also just laugh myself to death because the lack of self-awareness is so fantastic.

But there are public policy aspects of this that are worth thinking about.

End of 2021, we were just talking about when Francis Collins was in office.

The president of the United States was calling this the pandemic of the unvaccinated.

That sense of absolutely divisive and accusatory.

You don't like, you're not doing what we want you to do.

And so therefore your death is your fault.

That was widespread in mainstream media and mainstream democratic discourse and in democratic governance during the Biden administration.

And it is, and it was sick.

Joe Biden accused Ron DeSantis and all these governors who were not doing exactly what he wanted to do in terms of like schools and other aspects.

He was accusing them of playing with kids' lives.

Remember, I wrote about all this stuff in real time.

Like, you're accusing a governor of a state during a pandemic of being more interested in politics than his own children in his family, because DeSantis has a bunch of kids, and his children in the state living or dying.

That is so warped.

I mean, it's a terrible thing to, a terrible place to be as a human being.

Like, maybe I shouldn't ostracize people.

Like my principled unfriendliness.

Like, dude, you've got, you, you need to touch a lot of grass.

Yeah.

Yes.

And maybe even some weed while you're touching grass.

It's like go somewhere, smoke out a lot.

Touch it and smoke it.

And figure out why you've become a monster because you kind of have, just as an interpersonal way of going through things.

But also, these theater kids held power.

He still has the power to get.

Matt isn't out there writing in the New York Times op-ed page to think about reconsidering.

And let's be honest, this wouldn't have been published if Kamala Harris would have won, because he wouldn't be going through the same levels of introspection.

Same reason Gavin Newsom wouldn't be going on bro podcasts now if Kamala Harris would have won.

Now, suddenly, the New York Times is like, oh, maybe we should, I don't know, profile Andrew Schultz or something.

Like

there's a palpable difference.

Like maybe we can't just pretend like half of the country is irredeemable bigots that we should just sort of shun their way into modifying their behavior.

It's a whole I guess CBS's McFarlane didn't get the memo.

No, did they?

I mean, the Times was still going after Schultz in that piece as well, where they were profiling him.

Look, I wholeheartedly agree with everything that you all have said about this situation.

I mean, especially like the notion of casting you just deliberately being an asshole to everyone in this self-serving way is just so obnoxious.

It's nearly beyond belief, except we've all lived this.

We've watched this happen.

We know people who have done this themselves.

And I will say, you know, for my part, I've had weird politics.

It is always the case long before COVID that we would be in circumstances where people would meet me, discover something that I think, like, I don't know, the Department of Education should be completely shuttered and think, what a monster monster you are.

I can't even talk to you.

And I think for people like us, we've long had this, given that experience, you have to be pretty generous to people, even when you have a severe disagreement.

And looking for those areas of common ground and trying to persuade people on the basis of the things that we have in common, as opposed to trying to castigate everyone who is imagined to be somewhat different from you or diverges from accepted opinion on something and attributing the worst possible motives to them.

Like that is just a monstrous way to live.

I do have real concerns, though, that this has been a hallmark of the left, that they've been uniquely censorious in many instances, that they've been, interestingly, because many of them aren't believers, they've been weirdly puritanical and

kind of

prone to condemnations.

But some people on the right have adopted some of these same approaches to politics and to kind of social interactions in victory.

And I'm someone someone who in that summer of 2021, I remember, and we were talking around that time, Megan, and some periods after as well, I got published two pieces within the space of a couple of months and found myself at the center of like a hate storm.

Like the first was in June where I was skeptical of the critical race theory bans, not critical race theory itself.

I have nothing but contempt for those ideas, but I didn't think the bans were a good idea.

And I said so in a public place and a lot of conservatives got openly and secretly angry with me.

and a couple of weeks later i remember that debate i was down here at the shore when we had it yeah yeah and and a couple of weeks later i published this story about amy cooper the central park karen quote unquote

and people on the left were not press impressed with it and it was the same exact thing in the other direction and there was never really an interest in maybe we should have a conversation perhaps camille is an honest broker and the fact that he manages to piss off people on both sides has something to do with the fact that he's just trying to get at the truth we don't seem to have an appetite for that.

And my Joe Rogan bro, who surfs, who's still cool enough with you to take to invite you out to surf, despite the fact that you've been strategically and deliberately an asshole to him systematically for years,

he deserves a medal.

And you desperately, desperately, desperately need to touch grass, as has already been said, and think carefully about the kind of person you want to be.

Just be better, motherfucker.

Come on.

Because you know, yeah, be better, motherfucker.

You know, like he's putting all those things, those, those things in there to to win him plaudits from the left-wingers, he assumes correctly are reading the Times, right?

Like, I was a complete douche to him.

Let me reassure you.

At every turn, I've treated him like absolute shit.

Let me reenact the dialogue.

How's is work going okay?

Hmm.

Like, oh my.

I mean, I think we've also determined that David is a gay man.

No, he's not because he's, I think it's a sister-in-law, but he's certainly acting a little on the edge um

anyway he's doing it because he wants snaps right he wants snaps from the times readers that's why he's

and what does he think is going to get him snaps

being a complete asshole to someone he loves someone who's in his family someone who's been nothing but nice to him and and none of that matters all that matters is he didn't get the covet jab people he watches joe rogan so we have to hate him i mean truly even his on-paper indictment of the guy doesn't go beyond that like Like,

where is Matt's terrible sin?

You didn't even say that, like, he listens to Tucker Carlson.

Like, Joe Rogan,

he's kind of middle of the road.

Like, what do you mean?

Anyway, I just think it's such an amazing window, right, into how the left is.

And is anybody surprised that this was a speechwriter for Obama?

God, just zero.

I would just add there's a cautionary tale for everybody.

You know, we're talking on a podcast that talks about politics, the people who are going to be higher than normal

sense of involvement or consumer interest in politics.

You don't have to bring your politics into everything.

You don't have to bring it into your baseball or your golf.

You certainly don't have to bring it to your family, especially in ways where you're naming them out loud.

It's the New York Times.

You don't have to.

Like, the world is a big and beautiful place.

Anytime I go anywhere in America, which I do as often as possible because America is awesome,

you know, the first conversations that you have with people aren't about politics.

You know, I spent the 4th of July on the 13th deck of a cruise ship in Boston, moored with a bunch of senior retirees standing up and putting their hand over their heart as the military anthems of each branch of the military were played as we're watching it on a big screen.

What's wrong with you?

Am I going to turn to the lady next to me and say, I don't know, man, did you vote for someone I didn't like?

That's right.

You look like a Trumper.

That's actually not how normal humans live.

You can't go in in any direction in america and no one really is having those conversations except when you've over politicized everything and too much of your brain space on a daily basis is taken up by politics don't do it you don't have to don't judge people that way uh we're all awesome uh in our way even our theater kids are awesome they just need to maybe have a little bit less power

I have like dear friends, like truly very, very close friends who are die-hard liberals and also woke, not just liberals.

I mean, I don't have a lot of friends who are woke, but I have a couple of girlfriends who are woke.

And people ask me, like, how have you maintained those friendships through like the last five years in particular?

And we, not all of them have survived.

I told the audience months ago that a friend did break up with me not too long ago over politics.

But for the most part, my dearest friends are still intact.

And the reason is, with some, we sometimes discuss politics, but we do it totally respectfully.

I am completely open to their worldview.

and there's so many things on the republican side that you can criticize i'm happy to give them all their main points which are never unreasonable you know they're not like nutcases and they give me mine too about the democrats so if we go there we go go only 10 into the politics and usually there's plenty to criticize on both sides and i'm delighted to give it up about the right and they're usually fine giving it up about the left but the vast majority of our time together we talk about our lives you know like who's running around all day thinking about trump or politics Like, we do it for our jobs, sure, and that's fun.

Like, when I'm with my friends, we talk about our lives, we talk about our kids, we talk about something funny that happened with other friends, or a dinner we went to, or a party we went to, or what's going on with your mom, how's your mom doing?

Where did you guys vacation?

What was it like?

There's so much you can discuss that doesn't come anywhere near the political sphere.

And there's so much within politics that you can discuss that's like fair game and isn't going to upset anybody.

It's just these people who are so hard partisan, like you, David Litt,

are the ones who ruin it for everyone, for families and friend groups.

He's the one who should be kicked out.

He's the Hester of the group.

Hester Prynn, right?

Was that her last name?

Yeah, Prynn from the Scarlet Letter.

You're Hester.

You get the Scarlet Letter, not sweet Matt.

Matt, I hope I see you here on the Jersey Shore.

And I hope you come up to me and you tell me, it's me, Matt.

And I will give you a hug and we can talk about your jerk relative.

Guys, thanks for doing overtime.

It's always a pleasure.

And all the best to Moynihan.

Hope whatever he's going through resolves quickly.

Yeah.

Amen.

We'll work on him.

Anti-bird back.

Here we go.

Thanks, Megan.

See you soon.

All righty.

Awesome.

What another great show.

I love those guys.

What a day.

Thank you all for tuning in.

Please tune in tomorrow, too.

We're going to have Maureen Callahan, the one and only.

She and I have a lot to go through, including the sit-down of Michelle Obama's.

Remember Megan O.

Michelle O has an update to her podcast that stars Barack O, and we both have a lot of thoughts.

Tune in then.

Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show: No BS, No Agenda, and No Fear.

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