Chicago Mayor Rejects Crime Help, Trump vs. Fed Gov, and Taylor Swift Engaged, with The Fifth Column

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

Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.

Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.

Is it Tuesday?

It's Tuesday, right?

This week is so weird because, you know, Labor Day is coming.

It's Tuesday.

President Trump posted a letter he wrote to Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

We began our show about her yesterday on Truth Social last night announcing she's done.

She's toast.

Stick a fork in her.

He says he's removing her from her position following allegations against her of mortgage fraud.

She's at the Federal Reserve.

It's like, okay, they oversee mortgage rates.

She really does kind of need to be squeaky clean in this department.

But she is not going down without a fight.

Lisa Cook says, I'm black and I'm a woman, so F off.

No, she had her surrogate say that.

What she says is, I'm not resigning.

I'm going to continue carrying out my duties.

I got a term that takes me into the 2030s.

I'm not leaving.

Good luck, Lisa.

That's not going to end well for you.

And the Democratic Party has once again shown the world how out of touch they are.

The DNC summer meeting kicked off yesterday.

I'm going to give you.

Two guesses how it kicked off.

I'm going to give you two guesses at home.

Just think in your head, how would the Democrats right now trying to win back voters

who are mad over their woke excesses over the past five to ten years, what would you do if you were a Democrat in charge and you wanted to win those voters back?

Would you

say

like, let's make America great again?

I don't know.

Would you say something like the pledge?

I'm thinking something like, What could a Democrat swallow?

The pledge, maybe?

No, it was a land acknowledgement.

They're really sorry to the Native Americans for stealing their land, and they're going to do nothing about it, but they're sorry about it, so they're a better person than we are.

Lots to get to today with our pals from the fifth column.

Camille Foster, editor-at-large for Tangle News, Michael Moynihan, host of the Moynihan Report on Two Way, and Matt Welsh, editor-at-large for Reason.

Together, they are the hosts of the fifth column podcast.

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Guys, welcome back.

Thank you for having us.

Okay, the land acknowledgement.

It's really, it's an unbelievable thing when you actually sit there for it.

I think I told the audience this, but a couple years ago, I went to this Muckety Muck like conference where they want you to go and speak to the luminaries of today and tomorrow.

And first they paraded out General Michael Hayden as some sort of an expert on Trump.

Meanwhile, he's like one of his chief antagonists.

Okay, this is not objective analysis.

And then they had Ashley Judd get up there and God, she was a a hot mess.

I mean, a hot mess, but she began for like the first five minutes with a land acknowledgement.

This is like the liberal, the lefts, they love these things, but then they don't do anything.

They don't like make a donation, they don't give up the land, they don't like have someone like Elizabeth Warren, Chief Liesalot, come out and accept the apology.

That's it.

They're just like, we're bad people, we stole your land.

Anywho, so here was the DNC yesterday and its kickoff.

Lindy Somak, who is from the Saginaw-Ojibwe

Nation, and she's going to deliver our land acknowledgement today.

Lindy,

Lindy Somick, Nigerian cause, Amic Dodom,

Saginaw Chapua, Dojaba, Anishinaabe Kwe and Dow.

Good morning, DNC members, friends, and relatives.

Let's talk about the land for a second.

The DNC acknowledges and honors the Dakota Oyate, the Dakota people, who are the original stewards of the lands and waters of Minneapolis.

The Dakota cared for the lands, lakes, and the Wakatonka, the Great River, the Mississippi River, for thousands of years before colonization.

This land was not claimed or traded.

It's a part of a historical broken treaties and promises.

And in many ways, we still live in a system built to suppress Indigenous peoples' cultural and spiritual history.

Oh my God.

Guys,

Camille, you look moved.

I can feel, I feel like it touched you a little.

I mean, there's always something about those land acknowledgements that reminds me of just how out of touch Democrats have the capacity to be.

I mean, it's not just that this is kind of pretentious and frequently ahistorical.

It just really does expose the vanity of their political project to the extent they're talking about this stuff and not willing to abandon the land completely, just give it back.

There's a history of bloodshed and slavery and oppression and genocide.

Well, that's how you came to own this land.

What you should do something about it desperately.

yesterday.

It's like Bernie Madoff beginning a speech with like, I just want to acknowledge all the people who I hurt and whose money built this mansion from which I'm speaking to you.

Super sorry.

And anyway, could you pass me that margarita?

Thank you.

Jeeves, over there, bring it sad.

Anyways, super sorry, as I was saying.

What's the point?

I think the sad part is that as someone who really appreciates both history and property rights,

this could be a teaching moment.

It's always unidirectional.

It's always you find some elder from a local tribe who talks at the top.

And I like to hear from the elder from a local tribe.

I think that's cool.

It doesn't necessarily have to be the beginning of every political gathering.

But if you take any patch of land, including the patches that we're all in in our various places right now, there's a lot of weird ownership disputes.

So this

French owned it for a while.

And then there was like they went across the border and slit some throats of

Champlain or whatever.

Let's go for it.

You know, this land was seized by eminent domain as part of the urban renewal phrase of the 1960s and dispossessed a lot of people without a vote.

Let's do all of it, but they only do it in one way.

And it's right.

It is in a way to show maximum penance and minimum action.

You could be concerned with Native American lot in modern day America.

Of all the things that made me mad.

about the 1619 project is why are we ignoring the people on this continent right now who we screwed over pretty bad and left with pretty bad arrangements, generally speaking?

They got a claim and those people are patriotic as hell.

So we should be leaning in that direction and embracing all of that rather than just in a unidirectional way saying, I have the greatest morality by

crying at the right moment.

They can't help themselves, Moynihan.

I was going to start this response, Megan, with a bunch of gibberish that I would pretend was a language that

people spoke.

Let's do the Buddhist chant from

I Tina.

Nyam Yahoo Rengekyo.

Does anyone feel better?

Mecha Lekka hi, mecha hi niha.

Thank you great Pee Wee Herman.

I want to acknowledge Steve, who lived in this apartment before me, but I could pay more,

I believe, because I paid a little more rent for him and I have dispossessed him from this

Steve.

I'm sorry if you're listening.

No, this is Democrats have to realize a couple of things.

One, actually Republicans do this.

It doesn't work out well for them either.

Doing battle over history constantly is never a vote getter.

People get annoyed by it.

I get annoyed by it.

This constant idea that what you have, everything you have is ill-gotten gains.

I mean, Matt mentioned.

Two things, 69.

I was saying before that, Matt said, you know, not every political meeting should start this way.

Not every school board meeting, not every school assembly.

This stuff is everywhere.

And I cannot believe when we say kind of wokeness or whatever you want to call it is dead.

It's clearly not dead in the sense that they are not giving up in the universities and in local town councils and blue states, etc.

But this idea that history, they want to imbue you with this sense that everything you do, you owe a debt to somebody always, and you should always acknowledge it.

As Matt pointed out, you can do land acknowledgements as far back as the fossil record.

I mean, this is land swapping and fighting and warring and slitting people's throat is really across the board, right?

I mean, it's, it's very,

truly, so I'm wondering, Han,

why are they doing it?

Like, truly, why, how does today's DNC sit down, understanding the problems they have and the electoral beating they just took and say, let's do it, let's include it.

Cool.

Well, I think one of the reasons is, is that you have an age shift and the people who are the kind of, you know, middle-aged people, people in sort of my age cohort now, grew up with this thing.

And I certainly grew up with this, that this country has this original sin.

And to be a liberal, you have to acknowledge constantly the original sin of this country, which is both stealing land and the institution of slavery and racism.

And so to keep on this kind of religious,

you know,

It's kind of like a religious mantra.

You have to say it at the beginning of everything that you do to say, well, we are in our original state, a bad country and bad people.

In the rest of time, in perpetuity, we have to try to cleanse ourselves of that sin, which is burning down white supremacy, burning down the current structure of the government.

It's a destructive, almost revolutionary way of thinking.

Yeah, and you're

gesturing towards these impossible to conceive of, almost invisible enemies that can't be defeated.

It's so much easier than actually having to do something something about the things that are materially impacting the quality or lack thereof of people's lives.

So that's why you get all of this performance politics.

So it's exactly the same thing.

This is the same reason why Trump is having to try to rein in the Smithsonian.

It's doing the same thing.

The museums are doing, it's a series of museums.

They're doing the same thing.

Like basically every corner is a land acknowledgement.

We're terrible because they need us to believe we're terrible, that the United States is terrible.

That's why the flag is like a dirty symbol now and he's left his houses.

I've told a story before, but when I was at NBC, we were doing a story.

It was a charity story.

It was like we were surprising a widow whose husband had died suddenly with like a special gift.

And

NBC was like, don't have that flag in the background.

I mean, the flag was at her house.

It was like a patriotic widow.

They were like, no, don't, don't have the flag in the background.

An American flag.

Yes, an American flag.

It was on Long Island.

It was like, what's so controversial about the flag that NBC doesn't feel comfortable having it in the background of a widow's,

it was her flag at her house.

But that's, it's the same, it's all part of the same thing, which is we're terrible.

We're awful.

And there are original sins and then sins on top of those original sins beyond which we never can move.

And we're the better people because we recognize it.

And,

but to your point that you just made, Camilla, so right.

But our willingness to do something about it stops at the word because we're not actually going to take a look at South Chicago and do something to help those guys.

No, no.

We're not actually going to take a look at the Native American reservations and do something about what's happening there.

No, we're not touching that with a 10-foot pole.

When offered literally free policing in places like Chicago, We're just not going to even acknowledge that that's an offer.

No, we'd rather see the people die.

That actually happened this morning on MSNOW when Joe Scarborough had on the Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson, who's ridiculous, a ridiculous person whose approval rating, you have more toes than he has approval ratings

and numbers in his approval rating.

And here's, here, watch this.

Look at this.

Would you also like to get federal funding to help put 5,000 more cops on the street in Chicago?

Would that help drive down crime?

Well, look, policing by itself is not the full strategy.

No, I understand.

You've talked about the other things you want.

Would 5,000 more police officers on the street in Chicago be helpful to go along with all of those social programs?

Here's the best way I can put it, Joe: is that in the 90s when I was in high school, we had 3,000 more police officers and we had 900 people being murdered every single year in Chicago.

It's just not policing alone.

Of course, we want more detectives.

I know it's not policing alone.

alone do you believe that the streets of chicago would be safer if there were more uniformed police officers on the streets of chicago i believe the city of chicago and cities across america would be safer if we actually had you know affordable housing look okay that's not that's not the question i asked

Can I say

not going to do it?

Everybody wants in on that one.

Go ahead, Winhan.

Oh, my God.

I want to say four words that I've never said in my life and i hope to never say again good for joe scarver

i knew it same

no i mean this is a yes or no question yes i do and then explain contextually why you think it's not going to be the entire solution but yeah i think it would be great if the federal government would give us money because this is what mayors of big blue uh cities want more and more money they believe money can always solve the problem it's where do you spend that money what do you do with that money and to say that in the 90s

during the crack epidemic, I mean, the same thing is true of New York.

I mean, we had, what, 2,100 murders a year in this city in 1990, 91.

And, you know, effective policing now with technology, I mean, it's insane.

The difference is so significant.

And why not just say yes to that question?

Well, the answer is because he doesn't like the police.

And he does not.

Because his answer is no.

And he just doesn't want to say it.

No, he does not think the police are a solution to anything.

I suspect if you asked him a question on democracy now or an appropriately kind of left-wing thing, would you take if I gave you $50 million to get rid of entirely your police force?

He'd probably immediately say yes to that.

To the point that Damiel was making is that this is a thing where the culture battles are loom large because the solutions don't exist, right?

Because you would have to deal with something like, you know, what are we going to do about policing on the ground?

What are we going to do about policy and policy-oriented things to say affordable housing?

Number one, total, complete, and utter bullshit.

Number two, okay, do it.

What's the solution, buddy?

Let's find it.

Oh, you're going to have the state take over the city of Chicago and build affordable housing and become Caracas Venezuela?

Because you have a murder rate just like Caracas.

Maybe you should have a housing policy just like it, too.

Get out of here and pretend in some way that this is the thing that you need to do.

The problem in Chicago, by the way, is not being caused by a bunch of rabid homeless running around murdering everybody.

That murder rate in Chicago, which is about 550 people last year, is from the south side of Chicago, where it's gang-ridden and it's like the black gang and the Hispanic gang and you can't cross the line, the one street, because then you'll get killed by this gang or that.

I mean, I've been there.

I've met the moms.

I have seen what's happened to their sons and brothers and fathers.

Then the next generation grows up fatherless and they all have houses.

They all have a roof over their head.

They're actually getting shot on the front porch of their houses, but it's not about affordable housing, right?

There is no law and order.

There is none because Brandon Johnson doesn't want to send police in there, even if they're free.

I mean, Trump, frankly, saying, do you want me to send a bunch of National Guard troops in to help with this problem or other law enforcement is it's almost the same feeling I had when he wanted to create Gaziera or Maragaza, right?

Where it's like,

oh,

this is going to be a really tough one.

My God, you know, be careful.

That's a lot to take on.

But certainly, there should be the same response in both circumstances.

Those who are in the midst of this turmoil should say, please, God, yes.

Yes, I would like some help with law enforcement and order.

But no, Brandon Johnson would rather see everyone shoot each other.

He does not give a shit about the three-year-old girl who got shot in her parents' car this summer by some gangbanger.

He doesn't care.

I think that...

may have happened in Washington, D.C., but trust me, I could find 10 cases where it happened in Chicago.

So that's what's so annoying about their stupid land acknowledgments.

I await the DNC's tough talk about what's actually happening in our cities.

You know, Matt Welsh?

Part of the issue with Democrats in general, and this also applies to Gavin Newsom, who's out there trying to meme his way into the national political conversation, is that they don't have a lot of

governing success examples to point to.

And in fact, they have quite a staggering number of failures.

And, you know, including these failures, this, this, Brandon Johnson is probably the best example of this in the country where

you have sort of zombie 2020ism.

He still can't just bring himself to talk about policing without going into affordable housing.

And it's like, that's, we, you know, we remember 2020.

Everyone lost their minds.

Some of us, a lot less than some other ones, perhaps.

But we don't, we shouldn't be talking like that anymore.

But you still find that in places like Chicago, where last time I looked,

of the 50 members on the Chicago City Council, there were zero Republicans.

There are, I think, 46 Democrats, and then like four socialists.

The place has been absolutely dominated by Democrats and the left for a really, really long time.

And as such, is arguably the worst governed big city in the country.

Part of the reason why he answered the question that he did, besides the fact that he's awful, really, really awful.

He's just like literally a cutout for the teachers' union, which he used to work for,

is that even, you know, the free money to do a thing, he can't hint in that direction because his

overwhelming priority is to try to get not just the city, but the state, and if he could, the federal government to bail out the gaping holes in the teachers' union pensions.

That's right.

That's right.

All of Chicago's politics at the moment is wrapped around there.

The Democratic governor won't do it.

I will say this, though.

I understand the argument against having the National Guard and certainly the military come into a city.

I don't think the federal government should be doing that in places where it is not invited and where there is not a riot or a crisis on the ground.

No, the legal authority is very sketchy.

It's sketchy and it's a bad precedent.

And our federal government right now spends $7 trillion a year.

And 25 years ago, we spent $1.8 trillion a year, partly because we decided that the federal government and national politics must solve every issue, every local issue.

The framers of this genius governing structure, the greatest and longest surviving in the world in a constitutional republic, understood that the federal government shouldn't be in charge of fixing local government failure.

That is what we're threatening to do right now.

And it's a recipe for all kinds of conflict.

Yeah, no, you're not wrong.

You're not wrong.

I mean, we have our 50-state experiment, and it's kind of what makes us great, where we have a federal government and there are certain federal laws that we all have to abide by.

There's of course the U.S.

Constitution.

But what drew the original founding colonies into this union was so we get to be ourselves still, right?

Like we're, we're not going to have to abide by like some master king rules, right?

Like we can be different in Virginia than you guys are going to be up there in Connecticut.

Cool?

And everybody said, yeah, cool.

And the more Trump seizes control in state after state, whether it's the police power or cashless bail, you know, all things, I'm a very, very pro-law and order person.

So I'm on board with more cops, less crime, no more cashless bail that failed.

But forcing it by a president on states that have either ruled against it specifically with legislation

or, you know, against their will is a different story.

Like it kind of Fs up the 50-state experiment that is really at the bedrock of our foundational principles, Camille.

And I think it does contribute to the appearance that some of this is, in fact, performative.

I mean, you've got DC, which has had historically like lower crime in different periods, but had an explosion in crime during 2020.

It hasn't quite gone back down to pre-2020 levels.

So there is a reason for concern.

But at the same time, there's a bit of a kind of strange dynamic when National Guardsmen are coming from states that may in fact have higher crime rates to patrol the streets of DC.

And the deployments are only in the safest areas, the kind of tourist centers of D.C., not in the neighborhoods that have actually had the highest levels of violence, which is probably for the best because I don't necessarily want National Guardsmen deploying to Southeast and kind of shooting it out with young kids.

They're going to get that.

That would be a very, very bad look for 100,000 different reasons.

But the question becomes, like, how do we get to actually sustainable transformation of these communities that meaningfully lowers violence?

As you alluded to a moment ago, Megan, like part of the reason that it doesn't, it's odd to see people like Johnson talk about white supremacy as the actual danger in Chicago when Democrats have been in charge of every facet of Illinois politics for generations now.

At least it seems that way.

Those can't be the things that are to blame.

And the people who are dying on the South side, it's black on black crime, it's Hispanic on Hispanic crime, or Hispanic on black.

That area is not suffering from a white supremacy problem.

Yeah, yeah.

It's gang violence that no one gives two shits about.

And the racial exactly.

The gang violence is precisely it.

And oftentimes it's block by block.

It's neighborhood by neighborhood.

That's exactly right.

It is insane.

And one has to actually have empathy for the people who happen to live in these neighborhoods, who are not a party to the crime, which is most of the people who live in these neighborhoods, who effectively live in war zones.

So I think you're right to call into question kind of the morality and the judgment of the political leadership who are looking at the day-to-day suffering of their citizens, of the people who voted them into office

and not doing anything to affect them.

The question to Brandon Johnson was like, would you take free police help?

It wasn't like, do you want the military to move in?

Should we send it into the Armed Marines?

It was like, do you want free help on the law enforcement?

No.

Okay.

I mean, like, I truly, I went there.

I interviewed mom after mom after mom on the south side of Chicago in tears because think about it.

I mean, I have two young boys.

I have a young girl.

Like, they know that their children have zero shot.

They don't feel like they have any chance of getting out.

Every relative they've ever had is living there, by the way.

So they don't really want to leave their moms and their dads who are getting elderly and their aunts and whatever.

And they know that, like, they look at their little boy.

I look at my little boys and I think, oh, you know what?

They could be president one day.

They look at their little boys and they're like, please, God, let them live to 18.

Let them live to 18 years old.

And they have, they know that there's an overwhelming likelihood they're either going to get shot or they're going to get imprisoned before their 21st birthday.

And that there's a pipeline right into that gang system.

And they look at the little girls and just have to pray they don't get caught in the crossfire.

I mean, it's just, it's an incredibly effed up way of living.

And Brandon Johnson doesn't seem to care at all.

He's more interested in his progressive bona fides saying, oh no, like I'm against cops.

He's probably like Mom Donnie.

I want more social workers.

Like the social worker is going to go on to the south side of Chicago and put herself in between the drive-by guy and the porch and do an intervention so we can center blackness and have a more meaningful conversation, Moynihan.

Well, I mean, a couple of things about this.

First of all, you say it's black on black crime in Chicago.

Let's not forget Jussie Smollett, who that was, he was the victim of a Chicago racist attack and

informing me.

That too turned out to be black on black crime.

Correct.

It was Nigerian on American crime.

The thing that drives me crazy about this is you start this as a nice kind of bookend of it, is that Democrats talking about history.

I mean, let's talk about history a little bit.

I mean, as Camille pointed out, so many of these cities have, or Matt pointed out, have, you know, city councils that are 100% Democratic, Democratic mayors for long stretches.

Well, you know, New York City had a very similar thing.

And when it had Republicans, it had Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay, who were essentially Democrats.

And then they decided after David Dinkins to give a try to someone named Rudy Giuliani, obviously a very different Rudy Giuliani than what we see today.

But that worked.

Was it just that?

No.

To Brendan Johnson's point, well, is it just policing?

No.

But if you look at history, what does it tell you that smart policing, and this is, by the way, one of the reasons beyond the Constitution that I object to the National Guard being is that there is if you talk to cops, and I just was doing this, they are like, no, no, we have very specific things and intelligence and we have people in the communities and we do this stuff in a real nit.

We just need more more funding and more of us and i would highly highly highly recommend to listeners and viewers the new book from peter moscos uh peter was a baltimore city cop and is now a professor at john jay uh college here in in new york city and he it's basically an oral history called back from the brink about how new york through policing brought new york city back to a normal place uh from a place that was like honestly like south american central american levels of violence and as he says it's not entirely policing, but there was a lot of it was.

And if they want to look back in history, don't go so far back as say land acknowledgement.

That does nothing for anyone.

Go back to New York City in the 90s, talk to Peter Moscow and say, okay, we don't want to flood the zone with, you know, 30,000 cops, but what can we do with more cops and smarter policing to get violence levels down in this?

Talk to Bill Breton.

Bill Breton is alive and well.

And we'll walk you through exactly how he did it as the police.

Star of Peter Moscow's book.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's amazing.

I'm blessed to be able to call him and his wife, Ricky, my friends.

But he's done it in a couple of cities.

And it's a whole broken windows thing.

It's very famous.

But like

Bill Bretton's written whole books where you can read exactly how he and his team cleaned up New York.

They just, they don't want to.

They think it's the...

ACAB thing, right?

All cops are bastards and F the police, defund the police.

They like to say now they're not for that anymore in the Democratic Party.

They're totally for that.

Imam Dani, a couple years ago, he was saying that.

Now he's like, oh, well, not exactly.

No, now he just wants the social workers on the domestic violence calls.

Sure, sure.

Like any woman getting the shit kicked out of her by her, you know, twice her size husband, what she really wants is a social worker to ring the bell and have a chat with him about white supremacy and implicit bias.

You know, like it's ridiculous.

That's Mom Dani's view.

That's Brandon Johnson's view.

And these, I like, I want to say that these cities deserve what they get because they keep voting these morons into office, but it's hard to look at those moms in South Chicago and say that.

It's hard to look at a mom who's getting abused in Queens and say that.

I just, they feel powerless.

They don't even feel like their vote counts and their lives are not spent even on election day standing and waiting online.

You know, they're probably working three jobs just trying to keep food on the table.

Back to Scarborough, though.

I will make you eat those words, Michael Moynihan.

No sooner than five minutes after you.

I say that, never say it again.

You know, you're not going to say it here.

So here he was yesterday going after Mike Johnson, Speaker Mike Johnson, hammering red states as the most violent ones.

How, like, let's keep the big picture perspective.

It's really red states that are the violent ones.

This is from yesterday.

And if you want to look per capita, they need to do no more than look to Mike Johnson's home state, the Speaker of the House, and look at violence per capita.

You have a much higher chance of dying in Monroe, Louisiana than you do Chicago, Illinois.

You could look Little Rock, Arkansas.

You could look at Monroe, Louisiana, you could look at Shreveport, Louisiana, you could look at New Orleans, Louisiana, you could look at Memphis, Tennessee, you could look one Nashville, Tennessee.

You can look at one red state after another, Bessemer, Alabama, and you will see violent crime rates much, much,

much higher per capita than Chicago, Illinois, San Francisco.

Send those troops to Shreveport, Louisiana.

Send them to Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee.

Send them to Red States where they need them.

Okay.

So,

first of all, Stephen L.

Miller on X pointing out that the current mayor of Monroe, Louisiana is an Independent who has served for five years.

The previous mayor is a Democrat named Jamie Mayo.

He literally served for 20 years.

Democrat-run city.

He mentions Nashville, Tennessee, Democrat-run city.

He mentions Little Rock, Arkansas, Democrat-run city.

Jackson, Mississippi, Democrat.

Birmingham, Democrat.

St.

Louis, Democrat.

Memphis, Tennessee.

Democrat, New Orleans, Democrat.

Baltimore, Democrat.

Detroit, Democrat.

Atlanta, Democrat.

All of these big cities that he wants to hold up.

It's like, look at these.

These are Democrat-run in red states with red governors.

That doesn't mean that the governor can step into any city and clean it up.

This is one of the reasons why governors of New York have historically had difficult relationships with the mayors of New York City, because very often they have very diametrically opposed views on what to do in running a city as big and dynamic as New York.

So he kind of misses the big picture.

Moynihan, do you care to take that one?

Well, yeah, I mean, governors can't and shouldn't in ways, and I don't think presidents should either.

And, you know, if Joe Scarborough thinks we should be sending the military to other places, just not the places where his viewers live, I think he's really...

No, he's trying to make it sound like this is a Republican problem, not a Democrat problem.

And it's not.

It is not a Republican problem.

It's a soft on crime Democrat mayor and governor problem.

I think, so I think that's the right way of framing it in the sense that even if, and it is often the case, you can have a case in which you have a Republican-run city that has out-of-control crime.

I mean, sometimes it's very, very hard to get a handle on these things and you have to, you know, bring all the people in.

The thing is, wanting to bring all the people in, wanting to solve these problems, thinking about policing, because it is an essential component.

If you don't have a robust police force that is actually tackling gang violence and tackling crime, then you have, I mean, there's not a lot that, you know, a Republican governor or a Republican mayor of a state can do about a city that has 95% fatherlessness in certain neighborhoods.

But you can do things to be creative on crime.

The problem is the juxtaposition between that and Brandon Johnson the next day saying, I don't even want it.

I won't even answer the question about a city that has been so overwhelmed.

And you mentioned, Megan, a little girl being killed.

I remember talking on the fifth column about a little girl who was killed in Chicago sitting in the parking lot of McDonald's.

She was shot.

This stuff happens all the time in these places.

It doesn't matter who takes over Illinois and the governorship or if, you know, every member of Congress becomes a Republican.

It's still Brandon Johnson's city.

And he's still the one saying, no, we don't want any cops.

That's what's been so frustrating to me.

That's what's been so frustrating.

So I've talked about this before on the show, but you know, for example,

Tucker is constantly talking about the shitty state of American cities right now, and I agree with him 100%.

But I see this as a Democrat-run city problem.

I see this as a Democrat problem.

I really do.

I think if these cities would elect more Giulianis or Bloomberg, who was also very good when it came to law and order,

they would do better.

They would have a turnaround.

Somebody who knows how to manage sanitation and waste management, that would be great if we could find that in New York City again.

Trust me, I lived in the upper west side for 14 years.

What the hell happened to the waste management?

Used to go, it makes a difference.

It's not so different from the broken windows theory, you know, where it's like clean up the broken windows, even though nobody's like using that building because it's like order, like go after the guy for public urination because it's about law and order and sending a message and then like starting small and then going big.

Same thing on sanitation.

You walk down the street and every

corner's got a garbage that is overflowing.

You've got got rats coming to eat it's like where is the damn budget for the sanitation and mayor de Blasio's wife was getting hundreds of thousands to be some videographer for the city we all knew that was bullshit what a lie that was they were patting their own pockets and we had rats eating on the nice parts of new york and that it's just ridiculous okay so that's that's a long thing of saying this is a democrat problem.

And the one great thing about Trump, so I was totally with him on taking over DC.

I think it's fine.

He has the right to do it under law.

But sending troops into other cities, like LA was a different story because he was sending them to protect the ICE agents.

But just picking a random American city that's got a crime problem and sending in National Guard or other troops, I don't see the legal basis for it.

And it's not okay because of our 50-state experiment and federalism.

And there are important principles behind these bans, these laws, these boundaries that we have.

But.

It is a very interesting experiment on whether we're just going to talk about fascist Trump and his overreach, or we're going to get to the underlying problem that has gotten his attention.

You know, I think

it's not far afield from what he's doing with the flag

executive order.

We can get into the details of that too.

But I think in both cases, what Trump really wants to do is call attention to the underlying problem.

Thoughts on it?

I don't really think that flag burning is an underlying problem that ranks anywhere to be.

It's a lack of patriotism.

He's trying to get to the lack of patriotism, the America hatred that consumes the left.

I will repeat my mantra, which is that anyone worried about lack of patriotism, go take a drive.

Just drive.

Just drive for a day in any direction.

And

why don't you drive through the NYU campus, drive through the Yale campus, drive through Stanford?

Let's do that and see what the patriotism looks like.

There is more than one way to drive,

Megan Kelly.

Now, no one's saying the entire country is not patriotic.

It's the left.

It's the academy.

It's the K through 12 indoctrinators who have hold on our students.

It's the people who run the Smithsonian, the people who used to run the Kennedy Center, the people at NBC.

What are you talking about?

Like, there is a massive problem with lack of patriotism and love of the country.

It's all on the left.

I think that we are trying to do what we always do with politics, which is to organize our hatreds, right?

We are organizing our hatreds of the left, who deserve it in some cases.

I don't like to hate because I'm a hippie.

We are organizing our hatred against the right because they're overreaching and doing other things that I don't like.

But again, I don't like to hate because I'm a hippie.

But I would suggest that the people who are invested in either as a consumerist or practitioner of politics, we are trying to like organize ourselves being really mad at fellow Americans.

And I gotta say, someone who's been driving around a lot for the last like four or five months, I ain't seen it.

I go to Cooperstown, New York.

Is that a Republican city?

No.

Is it filled with American flags and awesomeness in the Baseball Hall of Fame?

God damn right.

It's not exactly San Fran.

San Fran, which is now run by a mayor who's doing, Camille would know more about this than I do, but San Fran is been turning around slightly over the last couple of years, beginning with the bouncing of the school board.

No, I agree because they went so far left, electing Chesa Boudin, who you guys and I have talked about before.

But like, let's not pretend you're, I don't understand because

you know better.

You know what my problem is.

You've seen the Gallup polls with the decrease in patriotism and how the left's loathing for the country is rising.

The problem is results, not people's hearts.

I am not going to be able to fix people's hearts.

I wish that I could, but also I don't wish that I could.

I don't want that.

What I want is for places to be governed better, beginning with the place that I live in.

One of the problems that we have in modern politics, you mentioned de Blasio, and you mentioned like rats and things running well.

De Blasio, the first time around, who was the non-entity who wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for Anthony Wiener not being able to handle himself or maybe handling himself a bit too much.

He was public advocate.

That was his job.

He came on my show.

I was like, what the hell is that?

No one's ever even heard of you or that.

You have no chance.

And then he won.

But who did he run against?

He ran against a really capable New York City guy named Joe Loda, who had run the MTA well.

He'd worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations, like being by all accounts, a very good and dedicated public servant.

And he lost by 50 percentage points because Democrats living in new york were thinking to themselves how embarrassing is it that in our biggest city the most important city in the country we've been run by republicans and independents for 20 years that's embarrassing we want to express our sense of national politics by voting for a sand dinista uh who we don't know don't care and if he throws out a first pitch at a mets game we're going to bow him because he sucks but we're still going to vote for him as opposed to a competent person when you fixate constantly about national politics and the people that you hate who you think their hearts are bad, then that fixation is going to prevent you from seeing what's around you.

And what's around you is you're being misgoverned, especially so in big cities, but not only.

And that sort of harnessing of that sense of national-focused hatreds is blocking you from

actually finding a solution that all of us here want to see.

Well, yes.

I mean, that last point I agree with, but I would say that Trump is not a hippie and definitely not going to share a roach clip with you, with you, Matt Welch.

But

he does have goals.

Like, he's not dumb.

And in the same way, he set up the Democrats to boo the little boy with cancer at the State of the Union, right?

Like, he's got these

to boo

no murders in D.C., right?

Like, he's very good at finding these causes that make the Democrats look terrible and dumb.

And I do think the flag burning in a way is one.

Not only might they burn the flag in response to it, which is a fine thing to do.

I don't, I'm totally against it, but it's absolutely constitutional and should not be, no one should mess with it.

I'm sorry, but it's very, it's one of the things that makes America great is that you can do that here without getting arrested.

Not that I would, not that I want to see it.

In any event, I think that he's trying to call attention to, not necessarily that they're now going to burn flags, but that that's what they do, and that they're now going to defend it in a way that's going to be like, yeah, I'm going to burn it and fuck America and this, that, and like calls attention to something bad about them that irritates the vast majority of Americans and puts them in the awkward spot of having to be like, are pedophiles so bad?

You know, like,

over and over, he puts them in this terrible place and they take the bait, Camille.

It's been almost a decade of Donald Trump being at the center of American politics.

And it is the case that Democrats continue to fall for exactly the same ploy with respect to what you just described.

Donald Trump does things, they are framed in a particular way that to the extent you're actually disagreeing with him, you do seem a little bit like a lunatic.

Like

you're opposed to federal dollars for policing.

You're opposed to trying to do something to kind of promote American pride.

It's possible that you could talk about things in a more sophisticated way, my friends on the political left, that you could say, for example, that, well, policing is, of course, we want more police.

We need more police on the streets.

We need policing to be well-funded.

But also

a national level solution to this problem probably won't work.

Like we should maybe think about some of the more practical things that we could do.

Closure rates, clearance rates for cases in Chicago have always been historically low.

And it's one of the things that is a commonality across the most crime impacted regions of this country.

Police departments that just don't work well.

It's not just that they're underfunded in many instances.

It's not just that they don't have enough police officers.

The police officers who are there aren't necessarily doing a great job.

Like you actually need better engagement with the local community in order to work on that.

You need better staffing in those departments with respect to the leadership.

And you also need political officials who are interested in doing more than just making these kind of preposterous statements about national politics and posturing with respect to Donald Trump.

If you are the political leadership of St.

Louis, you should not give two shits what's happening in Washington, D.C.

It has absolutely no impact on the quality of the lives of the people in your community.

The stuff that matters to them is closer to the ground, and that's what you should be talking about.

And you can defend those reasonable policies and talk about policies in a substantive way without getting completely captured by the national political hysteria.

And yes, I think Matt is right.

Like our desire to perhaps foment this kind of contempt of the other, which is great for politicians, but is oftentimes really, really bad for the citizens who they're supposed to be serving.

Okay, so what Camille is calling for is a more sophisticated, substantive messaging coming from our Democrat politicians, all politicians, that is not necessarily about personal destruction or insults of the other side.

You should have a little chat with Tim Waltz.

Here's SOT 3.

Oh, my God.

The privilege of my lifetime was stand beside someone we know was the most qualified and would have been a fantastic president in a President Harris.

And look.

We wouldn't wake up every day to a bunch of shit on TV and a bunch of nonsense.

We would wake up to an adult with compassion compassion and dignity and vision and leadership doing the work, not a man-child crying about whatever's wrong with him.

May his fat ankles find something today.

Petty as hell.

What does it mean?

What?

Wait, what?

I want Gavin Newsom and Tim Waltz to start writing checks to Donald Trump for stealing bits that he

being so much shit and fat ankles.

Do you think 20 years ago, uh, Tim Waltz would have been talking about his fat ankles?

I don't know.

But he didn't even stick the landing.

Fat ankles find something today.

I don't know what that is.

Trump petty.

It doesn't matter what you think.

You have to work to understand it.

Is it a good burn?

Terrible burn.

Also, I don't know how big that audience was, but it's pretty tepid applause applause for the most qualified woman in the history of the Republic, Connie Harris.

He's like, man, I guess, is he kidding me?

It's like Brad Ankles joke, which was not going to land either.

But it is, it's an amazing thing to watch people like this and watch Democrats who are desperately trying to be.

you know, Donald Trump cover bands.

I used to mention this all the time about Republicans doing, all of a sudden doing their impressions of Donald Trump and doing, being really bad at it.

And I'd see it on Fox and I'd see it all over the place and just be like, oh, come on, guys.

That's, he's singular in that sense.

Don't try to be it.

But to the point of,

you know, patriotism, which ties into this, because they have no idea what to do now, Democrats, particularly because, and the patriotism thing.

In America, it used to be the flag waving was both sides of the aisle.

They don't feel that they can say anything generous about the police or about America.

And you look at those numbers, Megan, which you cited, the Gallup poll, which was, I think in June, which didn't surprise me in any way.

And the reason is because I am the generation that grew up in this time in which everything,

what is the land acknowledgement, other than to say we live in a kind of a crappy country that did something crappy to become what it is today.

And then you look at, you know, illegals who are being deported or being detained by ICE, saying, as they're being shuffled away in front of a bank of TV cameras, saying that this is a corrupt government.

But yes, you want to stay here, don't you?

Isn't that the entire government?

You want to stay.

See how you do in El Salvador.

Not going to.

I mean, you want to stay.

There is a reason that people wash up onto the shores of the United States and not the other way around.

People aren't washing up on the shores of Cuba or Venezuela.

The Venezuelans are coming here.

The Cubans are coming here.

But we can't accept that.

And we're so far down that road that I think we had a bit of an argument about this on the fifth, about the Smithsonian stuff, but it is so ingrained in us now that if we see something positive or some positive spin on the U.S.

in a museum or something, we kind of bristle, like, oh, that's, or it just seems out of place.

Like, that seems a bit weird, particularly when you realize that the 1619 project wins every award, that the biggest movie of the 90s was JFK, which, by the way, is an extended attack on this country and saying it's so bad that we even killed our best president.

I mean, it is just in the groundwater of everything we do.

Howard Zinn books are always on high school curricula.

It's the most popular history book, and it's absolute horseshit.

And I've written about this a million times.

It's just bad history, but it's the right history because it's directionally the right history.

And I think that if Democrats wanted to do something radical, they could, you know, kind of embrace, because I think, you know, to Matt's point, there are people that are in little Democratic enclaves that aren't hippie, you know, park slope food co-op, Hamas supporting weirdos.

They're people that are just like, oh, we voted Democrat our whole life.

And, you know, we kind of like this country.

And it's pretty great.

And we don't want to see it go down the tubes.

But it right now is not that much.

They're not political.

A lot of those people are not political people.

They may vote Democrat, but they're not political.

Just a small observation.

I was watching Goodwill Hunting recently.

We actually watched it with our kids.

And

I noticed, you know, how the Matt Damon character is this Savant who's working as a janitor on his work release from his many criminal problems, but he's smarter than everybody at MIT.

And And he kind of goes off on Robin Williams, the therapist, in one scene about like, you read all these books, you read all the wrong books.

And he says, you know, why don't you try reading a real book like Howard Zinn?

And he starts talking about his history books.

I'm like, I never even really caught it when I was younger because I wasn't raised like that and I wasn't thinking about those things.

But it's amazing how many institutions the left has captured, how many of their references dominate the day.

Like, that's the definitive book that you should read if you want to know about America.

And that's still all over private schools in New York City.

That's the one Howard Zinn is their God, and he will teach you to love America right quick.

He will, I mean, hate America right quick

with every passing page.

There's much more to discuss.

I have 50 seconds before break.

I do want to show you Kilmar Abrego Garcia in that moment you pointed out as he was being arrested by ICE, saying this is a corrupt government, SOT 25.

So, you'll have to trust me that that's what he said in Spanish.

Then, why are you fighting so hard to stay here?

Get out.

Because, as near as we can tell, you came here illegally, you were deported, you put up a bullshit asylum claim, they let you stay, and then you beat your wife repeatedly, according to her.

And then you tried to traffic a bunch of people into the country.

You appear to have joined the gang, and then when we tried to say, Get out, get out of our corrupt country, you held on with your bloody fingertips saying, Let me stay, let me stay, let me stay.

So, okay, I'm not feeling the sympathy.

Stand by because there's more to discuss.

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Here with me for the full show today, Camille Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welsh.

Together, they are the hosts of the Fifth Column podcast.

Go subscribe now at wethefth.com.

All right, guys, so we started the show yesterday on Lisa Cook, who is one of the board of governors.

She's a governor on the board of governors overseeing the Federal Reserve.

And that gives you a 14-year term, I think it is, when you get appointed.

Yeah, 14-year term.

She was appointed under Joe Biden, and so she's officially supposed to be on there through the 2030s.

And

she just got fired by President Trump, and she says, Hell no, I won't go.

She is refusing to leave the post.

And President Trump fired her because he says she's been credibly accused of committing mortgage fraud, which is a problem for really anybody, but certainly for someone in her position.

And her case has been referred to the Department of Justice by this guy, Bill Pulte, who oversees the mortgaging industry.

Trump posted to Truth Social, on Monday, he posted to Truth Social the letter that he sent to Lisa Cook that reads, Pursuant to my authority under Article II of the Constitution and the Federal Reserve Act, you are hereby removed from your position on the Board of Governors, effective immediately.

The Federal Reserve Act provides that you may be removed at my discretion for cause.

Trump noted that the DOJ's inquiry into whether she lied on mortgage applications amounted to sufficient cause to remove her.

In light of your deceitful and potentially criminal conduct in a financial matter, they cannot and I do not have such confidence in your integrity.

Her term set to expire by its terms in January 2038.

So

she gave a statement to Politico as follows.

President Trump reported to fire me for cause when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so.

I will not resign.

I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022.

Her lawyer,

Cook's attorney, Abby Lowell, again, he's the ubiquitous when it comes to Democrat candidates and causes.

President Trump has taken a social media to once again fire by tweet, and once again, his reflex to bully is flawed, and his demands lack any proper process, basis, or legal authority.

We will take whatever actions are needed to prevent his attempted illegal action.

We believe that he's now filing a lawsuit to stop this attempted firing.

What the media wants you to know about Lisa Cook is black woman, black woman, black woman, black woman, first and only black woman on the board of governors, which somehow is supposed to mean that you cannot be fired.

I guess I have superior abilities to avoid getting fired.

So does Camille.

You two guys are effed

because we have superpowers.

Mine are from below the waist and Camille's are all over him.

And these give you the ability to never, never get fired, even if you've committed a criminal fraud, as she's now being accused of.

She denies it.

Chris Ruffo, always there with something in his back pocket, adds this to the conversation from April of 2024 when she was nominated.

She's also apparently a plagiarist.

He went back and looked at her academic work.

He says it contains plagiarism according to her former university's policy.

He went through, says her publication history is quite thin, has serious methodological errors, largely focuses on race activism rather than rigorous quantitative econ.

And he has all the examples.

And as far as we can tell, Lisa Cook really doesn't have all those stellar credentials when it comes to economics either.

Yesterday, we pointed out how her biggest accomplishment when it comes to like her academic write-ups appears to have been she wrote something about how

when lynching was happening to blacks in the United States, it led to fewer patents being filed by those who were lynched.

Now, I'm sorry, but

this doesn't seem like such an aha moment that we would lead to like some deep thought dissertation, but I guess Lisa Cook got credit for it.

So what we're learning now is that the two properties she bought, because she's accused of doing kind of what Adam Schiff and Letitia James are accused of doing, having two residences and declaring them both as your primary residence so you can get a lower mortgage, which would be fraud if you did that.

And she declared both her Ann Arbor, Michigan property and her Atlanta, Georgia property her primary, her principal residence.

And apparently she did it within two weeks.

This I didn't know yesterday.

She bought each or got the mortgage for each within two weeks of one another.

So there was no mistake that she's not going to be able to argue it was an error.

She knew that she was buying two properties at once, and she knew that only one could be a principal residence.

And that, I would suggest, makes it look even more intentional than we knew and less and less like a mistake.

And so, what do you think should happen here?

Do you think Trump should stand by his effort to remove her?

Should the DOJ prosecute her?

If it does indeed have this documentation that Bill Pultey says exists?

And what do you think is really going on here?

Anyone?

Do we have to defer to Camille?

Go ahead.

No, that's leaked, not legally, but it's usually a good idea, just in general, not on this particular matter.

Look, you have an allegation.

You don't have any sort of criminal charge that's been filed.

An allegation on its face is perhaps not enough to to justify a reasonable cause for dismissal here.

But one can suspect that the likelihood of a charge happening in this particular case, given the interest of the president and given the fact that the Justice Department seems to have an interest in prosecuting cases like this, it could very well happen, in which case, then the dismissal actually happens and the dispute and questions about whether or not the president has the authority to do this goes away.

But there are still some lingering concerns, and I'll come to that in a moment.

But I will say that the defense of this particular woman has not been particularly glorious.

The profile that the New York Times wrote up over the weekend really does have, and it's almost like, it feels like comedy.

She's draped in one of those like Kinte cloth sashes, and

it's like emblazoned in the headline is first black woman.

And I just, these facts don't matter to me whatsoever.

I am actually interested in if a federal official, or at least to hear an appointee at the Federal Reserve, is engaged in some sort of financial fraud, even a rather small-ish thing that lots of Americans, I imagine, have been guilty of, which is somewhat lying on mortgage or loan applications, which interestingly has a weird parallel to a legal drama that Donald Trump himself found himself caught up in,

which

I was personally quite skeptical.

And in fact, I think we probably talked about it on this show a couple of times.

Like, I thought that was dubious.

I thought prosecuting him for any of that stuff seemed completely outlandish, especially because there was no one who lost any money.

He repaid the loans, et cetera, et cetera.

And in this particular case, I think that these cases, even the Letitia James stuff, like none of it rises to the level of being particularly concerning to me.

So I think that the lesson here perhaps ought to have been we should tread lightly to the extent that we're engaging in prosecutions or even investigations that could have serious political ramifications for even for people that we dislike.

I think the unfortunate thing for the president and the administration more broadly is that in a couple of these cases, including the John Bolton stuff earlier this week,

they're so determined to spike the football.

Even if all of these investigations are above board and there are legitimate grounds for getting rid of these people or prosecuting them, the thing that you would expect is kind of decorum.

That is an ongoing investigation.

We're not going to comment on it.

Instead, even if, again, I'm going to take them at their word in these legitimate cases, they make it hard to defend it publicly because they're so determined to spike the football, to call these people stupid, to to put up kind of insulting tweets about how, yeah, you know, no one is above the law.

I see what you're doing there.

I love it.

I'm like, spike it, spike it, do it.

With the four years we got from Tish James, no one's above the law as she was rapidly pursuing Trump.

No, she cannot afford that.

She was wrong then.

She was wrong then.

She was, but they will not learn unless they are forced to suffer.

And so I'm 100% behind it.

If Lisa Cook did not fill out primary residence, primary residence on two mortgage applications within two weeks, she would not have this problem.

I'm sorry, but like she brought it upon herself.

I'm sick of like,

I don't do this.

I really don't.

Like you say a lot of people might have this problem.

I don't have this problem.

I actually have always been very Pollyanna-ish when it comes to this kind of thing.

You don't commit fraud.

You know, character is what you do behind closed doors.

You could get away with it.

You can't get away with it.

It's irrelevant.

You don't do it because it's wrong and it's against the law.

And if she did it on her, she deserves what she gets.

I have zero sympathy for her.

And then the nerve to do it, allegedly, and then

like take this job.

And they're saying in the reporting now that she may have lied about it when she interviewed for this job, where she's going to be a mortgage rate assessor, decider, enforcer.

No.

Absolutely not.

You, you may not have this sort of a blemish on your record, which is criminal, and hold that job.

I say, fire her ass, take it to court.

And actually, this should be the least of her legal problems.

She should be defending against Pam Bondi for most of the time.

I want to be clear.

I'm not acknowledging that I haven't engaged in any sort of mortgage fraud, to my knowledge.

I've always been on my mortgage loan application.

I'm just saying, in general, I don't like the specter of these kinds of things being politicized.

I think we're better off as a country when people can indifferently perhaps just look at these prosecutions and say, you know what?

I have some trust and confidence that people are going to pursue these cases in an above-board, legitimate manner.

That's what I want to do.

But my own view is the only way back to that norm is to stop, to make them suffer.

They must have skin in the game.

We cannot take the high road and get out of this.

We tried that.

We didn't prosecute Hillary Clinton, though it's looking more and more every day like we should have.

Trump tried to go high road in 1.0.

They ruined his first term.

And then they tried to lock him up for four years and bankrupt him.

And now they must suffer.

They must suffer, or we're just going to go through this again, but only with Republicans.

So I think really you have to take the nose and rub it in the crap in order for these people to learn that it's a really unfortunate, unpleasant process.

Don't do this.

Don't do this again.

And not to find somebody who didn't commit a crime and go after them.

That would be very, very wrong.

But if I kick, if Bill Pultey kicks the tires on your car and he finds mortgage fraud rolling away, you're going to be in a lot of trouble.

Sorry.

I'm not in the box your way towards peace camp.

When I associate myself with the comments of the economic historian Philip Magnus,

a pretty good follow on Twitter, who said, I opposed, although I didn't, but I just because I didn't know her, I opposed her appointment to begin with because she's mediocre and bad.

And I oppose Trump being the one to fire her because I don't want the president to have that much authority over the Federal Reserve Board.

It's better to have a

quasi-independence or fully independent Federal Reserve if we are going to have a Federal Reserve than it is to have something that's being impacted by the president.

I think there's a problem that Democrats have here and the media by extension because it's a lot of the same sort of initiatives.

And again, I'm saying this is someone who thinks that Trump shouldn't do this and that, you know, as Harvey Silverglade has pointed out in a book of the same name, the average American commits three felonies a day because there's so many things that have been

classified as a felony.

If you want to find me doing a crime, and I don't even smoke pot, Megan Kelly, you could probably find me doing a crime.

And I certainly don't smoke mortgages for crying out loud.

People are crazy owning property.

But the problem is that Democrats in their sort of spaces, in their administrative state, in their kind of just sort of soft neoliberal sort of governance of things,

they are constantly appointing people who aren't great.

I mean, I don't like RFK.

I know you do, Megan.

We won't argue about that right now.

but

everyone's up in arms about RFK being appointed as head of HHS.

Tell me how much greater Javier Becerra was.

An absolute, total political hack with zero relevant experience appointed by a president in 2021 when, I don't know, was there something going on with health, public health in 2021 that is of concern?

And he was nominated in part because he was from California,

but also because he's Latino and COVID, you know, obviously affects our Latino American communities, blah, blah, blah.

It didn't make any sense at the time, and it did not excite anything like the same level of outrage.

It's just sort of understood that we'll have mediocre people like, I don't know, Kamala Harris, the vice president, you know, and Karen Bass was on that short list,

a career mediocrity

who had never been in any election where she didn't win 80 to 20

was on the shortlist of being there.

So there's this sense of like, yes, Donald Trump is assertively trying to break norms and create more power for himself to do as he pleases in the presidency.

He does that literally every single day.

He's signed more executive orders in his presidency than any president.

in history with the exception of FDR in his first term.

This is, for those of us who are opposed to an overly vigorous executive branch, very alarming.

I don't like it.

And

he's trying to do this in such a way to expand his power.

He clearly has been jawboning Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve all his second term, trying to get rates lowered because that's going to juice the stock market and make the bad effects of tariffs seem probably less bad.

It's kind of obvious what he's trying to do.

I don't have any faith that he is

approaching or that his Department of Justice is approaching this in a fair manner.

I don't.

I don't have faith in any politician turns out and let alone him while he's dunking the football.

Dunking the football.

Spiking.

Spiking.

Spiking the basketball, dunking the football, and eating the baseball.

Okay.

Using bench breathing.

Well, I'll tell you something.

They tried to go after Donald Trump for writing payment for legal services in payments to his lawyer around this Jeremy Daniels thing.

If that is a 34-felony indictment and conviction,

actually saying two residences at the same time are your primary residence is fine by me that that is a crime it actually is a crime unlike the shit that they were pulling against trump her what she did if she did this it actually is mortgage fraud so it's okay maybe we wouldn't have prosecuted it in you know 10 years ago but it is a new day

thanks to the democrats and now they must suffer to learn and she's as much a part of all of it as anybody she's been such a hyper critic she's been on board board with Trump and the white supremacy and all the like she was fine with everything that happened to him.

So suck it, Lisa Cook.

You're fucking fired.

Deal with it.

She's fired.

And by the way, he does have the authority.

He has the authority to fire her for cause.

The statute does not define cause.

You've been accused credibly.

And by the way, Bill Pulte of the mortgage organization is saying he has great cause to fire her.

Alleged felonies when it comes to mortgage fraud when you're sitting on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors is 100% cause.

You actually don't need to be convicted.

It'd be nice if he let her have a trial and be convicted before you, but he doesn't have to.

She's calling the organization into disrepute.

There have been multiple news stories about whether she committed mortgage fraud.

She can be fired right now, and that's what's going to happen.

And that's what a court is eventually going to hold.

Maybe not the district court, depending on the judge they pull.

But I have no sympathy for her.

Zero.

And I, and she's not the only one.

I don't have sympathy for any of these people.

If they committed crimes, and we'll see what happened with John Bolton.

I don't know what happened with John Bolton.

If he did something, I'd like to see the evidence.

But if he actually crossed the line legally, then him too.

I don't care.

If you committed a crime, you opened this Pandora's box.

The Trump critics, mania-ridden Democrats must suffer.

Okay, that's it.

Go ahead, Camille.

I just want to ask, what happens if the next election cycle, Democrats sweep into power?

I mean, again,

stranger things have happened.

I'll just put it that way.

And they aren't thinking to themselves, you know, we got it so bad the last time.

They're thinking, we are really going to stick it to them this time.

It seems to me that the most likely outcome is not they learn their lesson.

It's that the lesson that they learn is that we need to be about retribution twice as much as we were before.

And I just think that there was a lot of things.

And we're on the course that we have to, that we must play out before this stops.

I mean, I practiced law for 10 years.

I love law and order.

I love the law.

I actually think it's the one thing still binding us together.

Like the honest judges out there who are still interpreting the law and upholding it, no matter where the chips fall politically, are like a really important piece of what's holding us together still, 250 years after we were formed.

But in this particular instance, and I would never advocate charging somebody who didn't do anything, but if somebody actually violated the law and it's a crime that we normally wouldn't prosecute because it's just too small ball for us, we're just in a new era.

And so the Republicans are doing the right thing right now.

And if what is required to get us back to normal, which was, let's say, 10 years ago, is more pain and suffering on both sides, then so be it.

Then that, that, I'm sorry, but it's what the country has to go through.

We can't, we are going to die.

We are, the country will end if we become,

if lawfair is just a new tool that's in the political arsenal of whatever power, whatever party is in power.

Lawfair.

How do you know this isn't a law fair itself, Megan?

No, I don't know.

But my point is, I'm fine with it if it is.

If she committed a felony and we normally wouldn't prosecute it, but the reason we're really prosecuting it is because we're done

not, we're done with the exercise of discretion that would have been in their favor, then that's fine by me.

I mean, we didn't prosecute Hillary Clinton.

We did not go after her.

We did not lock her up.

We tried to take the high road.

They didn't accept the olive branch.

They tried to ruin Trump personally, Trump professionally, Trump's presidency, and many around him.

You know, they're the ones who locked up Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress, Peter Navarro for contempt of Congress.

We didn't try to lock up Merrick Garland when he committed it.

It's time.

I'm fucking done taking the high road.

They have to suffer.

They have to have real skin in the game before they will

accept reality, which is this move by them, repeated, repeated move by them, is ruining our our foundational basis.

So until they know that on a visceral level, like the kind you get when you're looking between bars, they're not going to behave differently.

So that's, I mean, in a nutshell, where I am on it.

Okay.

Low road Megan.

Yeah.

No, I mean, look, I, you know, you know us dumb libertarians and our obsession with the Constitution.

I mean, I'm

obviously.

There's nothing unconstitutional about it.

You violate the law, you can be put in jail.

If there's a basis for the prosecution.

I mean, if I was fired from my job and they didn't allow me to respond to the charges, I'd probably file a lawsuit for wrongful termination.

But

what we would say at the beginning of the Bush, at the middle of the Bush administration, libertarians were quite loud about this,

is that executive power and the growth of executive power is going to turn on us

essentially and eventually.

And And in 2008, that's what happened.

Barack Obama became a.

I don't like executive power either.

I don't like a very strong, large president.

I don't like it.

So I cede that point.

Keep going.

The problem is, is that when you respond to the

expansion of executive power under George W.

Bush with the massive expansion under Barack Obama, and then you see where it's gone.

It keeps on going, keeps on going.

And my concern with this is that we become Latin American.

american in if you look at any latin american country particularly you know argentina is a great example with economic policy of firing people that you know just you know if we keep doing this forever where does it stop does it ever stop number one and number two is that do i want to live in a world and i don't know about the john bolton stuff as you just said megan it's unclear what this is but had john bolton written a hagiography of donald trump would the fbi have been at his house last week no chance I mean, is that this is a question we have to ask ourselves.

And, you know, it is a question that cannot be answered.

But if this woman, I would prefer, by the way, when you point out, I have no idea about her qualifications, but I believe you.

Camille has looked into this.

If that is the case, I want to get to the point where we stop hiring people.

And there are ways of doing this, illegal ways, because it is against federal law to be hiring people on the basis of, for instance, the color of their skin and to quote Camille, the shape of their genitalia.

That

shape and shape.

Shape and shape.

Shape and shape.

Right.

And I agree with that.

But I do worry about this cycle of law fair.

And it's like, well, you use it against us.

And just to be totally clear to listeners and viewers who have not been paying attention, they should have.

When we've been on the show for many years now and we were full-throated in our denunciations of this shit against Donald Trump, I worry that because it crossed a Rubicon.

Yeah, I worry with that there's no way of going back if we keep going on this, and that it's just lawfare, political lawfare forever.

I get it.

I totally hear you.

It's a valid point.

Like, it doesn't sound like a crazy rebuttal to me at all.

I just maintain, just based on my life experience, the only way they will learn is if they feel pain personally.

Like, they must be made to feel personal pain.

Their

heroes, for example, the ones who perpetrated Russia Gate and those those around them, must be put through this same meat grinder, or it will continue in perpetuity.

They have to feel like, to quote Edward the Longshanks, that could be my head in a basket, or they'll just keep doing it.

They'll just keep doing it.

So I know, I hear you.

I mean, we're at an impasse, but

I think Trump sees it as I do.

And I think we're going to be spending the next three years talking about the legal cases that have been brought against people like John Brennan, Jim Comey, potentially John Bolton.

Didn't have that one on my bingo card, but okay, I'm open-minded to what he may or may not have done.

Let's see.

Going after somebody for whom you have no colorable basis, something that seems clearly made up, I will speak out against.

But so far, I have not seen that.

And I don't know what John Bolton did or didn't do.

You know, the reporting yesterday was that the CIA called something to the attention of the FBI about something he had disclosed overseas.

No idea.

So we'll just hold our, keep our powder dry until we know more about that one.

Okay, I do want to get this sound bite in because we've spent a lot over the first hour and 20 minutes talking about the left's obsession with identity politics and why are they still doing this and this is not a winning strategy.

And you won't be surprised at all to learn that Tiffany Cross, who was

probably the biggest racist after Joy Reed, or she might have been ahead of Joy Reed, depending on the day, over on MSNBC, she got fired from MSNBC, allegedly because she was like like committing shenanigans with the company like reimbursements.

I don't know, but she denied all that.

I think it was because she was a racist hack who had no ratings.

But that's what gets you invited onto Abby Phillips' panel.

And she went on and had some

pearls of wisdom to offer about Stephen Miller, deputy assistant to the president, who's been behind a lot of these executive.

executive orders, who is brilliant, who is very much behind the immigration policy, who was very much involved in writing the executive order on the gender madness, which was wonderful, and is one of the left's favorite villains.

And

here she is talking about him in SOT 9.

Anytime that we play something from Stephen Miller, it would be journalistic integrity to point out that he is a white supremacist and he is the brainchild behind this policy.

That's not my opinion.

That's actual fact.

And for him to purport lies from the Oval Office as a white supremacist, I don't know, it should be pointed out.

That's first.

Washington's Wall Street Journal is all reporting.

Oh, the Wall Street Journal reported that he's,

it's a fact.

He's a Wall Street Journal.

Arthur Idala, who goes on there.

She's an idiot, and that's actual defamation.

If I were Stephen Miller, I actually would file a lawsuit against her.

If I were Trump, I would file a lawsuit against AOC for saying over and over that he's a rapist.

Like they're stating it.

She actually says, it's not opinion, it's a matter of fact.

That's a problem, CNN.

Like, that is where the CNN producer should have gotten an Abby Phillips ear to say, you actually have to take that back.

We're going to get our asses sued.

Stephen Miller should sue her.

And it's just ridiculous.

They continue to do this to Stephen Miller because of the immigration policies.

And it's like, okay, they're very popular.

Deportation is less popular right now than it was.

But closing down the border, even Rahm Emmanuel told me he wouldn't change a thing about what Trump has done at the southern border.

But you've got your hangers on who can't let go.

What do you make of Tiffany Cross?

Full disclosure, I've been on Abby Phillips' show a couple of times.

I like Abby.

She's nice.

I was even on once with Tiffany Cross, who I mean, the best thing about Tiffany Cross is that she is relentlessly consistent.

This is always the argument that she deploys in precisely this sort of way.

And it's interesting that her target in this case is Stephen Miller, because Stephen Miller is actually pretty notorious for using a similar sort of argumentation tactic where you attribute to people the worst imaginable motives.

Oh, you disagree with my policy position?

Why are you siding with murderers?

Why do you love murder?

So there's a sense in which this is just kind of what you expect, like the kind of ridiculous,

hyperbolic political theater that you're going to get.

And it's not at all surprising that that is what Tiffany Cross engages in on that particular panel.

No, it is not an objective fact.

I am not aware of the Wall Street Journal publishing that.

And I do not think it is a winning strategy for progressives or Democrats broadly or the left or anyone who opposes Donald Trump to simply go on making the most extreme, absurd claims about the other side, about the nefarious motives of the people that they're arguing against.

You could make practical, well-structured arguments against these people.

You could advocate for even better policy, but they don't do that.

And they refuse to do it for so long, which is why they may be in the political wilderness for a long time.

But it's also, again, just hard to predict how these things will work out.

So, you know, I've said a little bit in defense of Abby Phillips, who I think at least tries to have on a diverse array of characters and try to represent the broader before she goes on other podcast and then bash and then bashes the conservatives.

Yeah,

that's what she's been doing.

I think Abby tries to be middle of the road.

I also think that there is, in general, just a tilt towards the left amongst most elite journalists.

You're so sweet.

Camille, you are a sweet guy.

You're just as sweet and hippie-ish as your friend Matt, Darren.

She's a massive hippie.

I'm on.

She is a dishonest broker.

She's a far-left person who's trying to masquerade as an impartial arbiter.

And you don't have to look very far to see it.

And especially, like, look at that interview she gave to Kara Swisher, where she shat all over Scott Jennings and Jillian Michaels and

basically called her

a loser who's got these insane ideals.

And if she wants to come out and make herself a national embarrassment, that's Jillian's prerogative.

It's like, oh, nice way of treating your guests.

Okay, she didn't rip on you, Camille.

So we'll change for the next episode.

I wouldn't rip on Jillian in that way either.

I saw the thing that she was getting castigated for recently, and it's completely unreasonable and unfair.

Jillian was right.

Yes, completely agree, as she usually is.

I've got to take a break, and I have another subject I want to get to, but

this doesn't fit in anywhere, so I just have to play it and get your reaction.

Kamala Harris is going on a book tour.

She wants you to get really excited about it.

And here's her latest promo promo on TikTok, SOT 8.

Okay, I almost forgot these.

It makes swing room.

She's packing.

Actually, I think I have everything I need.

On tour this fall.

What on earth was that?

She's in her sweatpants.

Oh, my God.

She's one of us.

And don't you do this.

Isn't that how you pack?

This is so, it's so funny.

Lord.

Are you excited for her tour?

Are you guys going to be going?

Oh, I might go.

I might go.

It could be comedy gold.

I mean, that's

Millennium Krabbits.

Yeah, hell yeah.

Yeah, I like the score.

I feel like it ain't over till it's over.

What is what is that about?

What is the subject?

Right, what does it mean?

Good, good, good observation.

What does that mean?

Like, it is over.

You realize you didn't win, Stacey Abrams.

Um,

I want to like offer a challenge to like a viewer who will go to all of the Kamala Harris Harris book signings and events in her one

and I will give like five bucks a pop for any new idea she expresses from the first one.

So we'll get like the list of things she says at the first one.

And if she says anything new, any sort of new idea at all, I'll give the viewer $5.

That's kind of, I want to come up with some sort of a challenge because this woman has no new ideas.

There will be nothing of substance said.

It's going to be the worst waste of money to go see this person and buy this book.

But I think she's going to do it because I don't know, guys.

I think she thinks it ain't over, Camille.

I think she actually thinks she does have a shot in 2028.

Am I wrong?

Megan, to say that this woman has no new ideas is one word too long.

I don't think she's ever had a single idea, period.

So

very generous of you.

You're like Camille with Abby Phillips.

Just be too nice.

No, in fairness, she thought it was a good idea to arrest the parents of truant kids in high school.

That's right.

That's right.

Or you with Joe Scarborough.

Yeah, we're all just feeling a little warm and fuzzy today.

Matt thinks everybody's patriotic.

You love Joe Scarborough.

You think Abby Phillips is some moderate down the middle.

I don't know what's going on today.

We have to take a break.

Let's get ourselves together, some deep breathing, fellas, and we'll be right back with the fifth column guys who stay with me.

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So,

this just in Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey are officially engaged.

She just posted it on her Instagram with the following

message.

Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.

And a picture of him apparently down on one knee and her caressing him, looking lovingly at him.

Here's another picture where he's standing and they're holding one another.

And then there is a shot of the ring, which I can't see very clearly here, but I'm sure it's very nice.

They can afford whatever ring they want.

I'm not a Taylor Swift fan for many reasons.

I mean, I respect the Empire she's built.

I do.

Yeah, I do.

I respect the Empire she's built.

I respect that she stood up for herself and she's got some modicum of talent.

However, she went political, and like anybody who does that in the arts, they risk alienating half the country, and she's done that.

She's done that very effectively.

So I'm really not her fan.

However,

as an American billionaire, right, which she's got to be at this point, who's like not even 40,

I think it's great she finally found love.

I really do.

I am rooting for them.

I think it's not a coincidence that the person she ultimately decided to settle down with is a real man, is like

a bootball player, you know, tough guy who doesn't really take a lot of shit from people.

Like, yeah, that's generally attractive to most women who don't want, you know, someone wearing like in a scooter with a man bun.

That's really not as hot.

And so I think it's no accident.

This gal from the South who started out singing country songs found him attractive and he was the one who ultimately won her heart.

And I think it's obvious the reasons why he would be attracted to Taylor Swift.

So I am rooting for them.

Again, not her fan politically, but I don't care.

Like I hope they have a wonderful, happy life together.

I hope they make a bunch of beautiful children.

And I hope she stays out of politics.

I really genuinely hope that the last year was an example to her of how much easier and better her life will be if she just stays in her lane and lets people enjoy the music or not instead of trying to tell us what she thinks about lgbtq policies thoughts on it

um love wins

i'm

up on this real man thing

I have no man button.

I would probably crash a scooter, which I guess is kind of not not manish because I couldn't ride a motorcycle either.

But I just want to say, Megan, in my defense, that those of us who don't read very manly, you know, sometimes are beneath the surface, our own Travis Kelseys.

So I just wanted to say that.

I agree with that.

Losing a lot of bars.

You're not effete.

You're not effeminate.

He's not like.

No.

Not at all.

You're not feminine.

I mean, to make a manish, but he's not a real man like me and Travis Kelsey.

I mean,

that's true.

I want to tell you, though, I've had a lot of women ask me whether you are single and available.

So I like whatever you're putting down, they're picking up.

Megan, why are you

on the air?

That's pointing to himself, like with a questioning face.

Pictures, are you kidding me?

Just certain people, maybe I'm with somebody, who knows, but maybe I'd break up with them if you showed me.

that it was someone spectacular, right?

I feel like you would, I had Charlie Kirk on recently.

We were were talking about this viral clip of his where he talked about how he would never, when courting a woman, and he used that word courting, which I like,

split the bill on the first date, how it would be so humiliating to do such a thing.

And he said something like,

the honor you sacrifice is not worth the money you save in doing such a thing.

And these young guns who are interviewing him were just flabbergasted by, they're like, what do you mean?

You don't even know if it's going to work out.

You're not sure if you're into her.

And he schooled them.

I feel like you would absolutely pay for the first date, Monday.

You're a Gen Xer.

I would pay for the first, for the 50th.

The chances that that date is going to be, shall we say, successful, get a lot smaller.

You know, people are like, oh, yeah,

let's not go back to your house.

No, I'm just saying that I always pay for the bill, Megan, Charlie Kirk, and I probably disagree on a lot, but I think he's right about that.

And congratulations.

I'll bet you that's how Travis Kelsey helped in part get Taylor Swift.

I bet he understood she could pay every bill of theirs from here to eternity, but he probably, I'm going to bet, insisted that he be the one to pay.

And let's face it, he's doing okay, too.

Pay the bill.

She's always going to pay for the jet.

So just keep that on.

Absolutely correct.

And let's not sleep on the fact that

this engagement happens after what happens.

Travis Kelsey shows up to camp in the best shape of his life.

It's like, he did the year one problem that a lot of dudes do, which is like, wow, I'm in this happy relationship.

I'm going to get fat.

That's interesting.

And it wasn't right.

I don't think he could put a ring on it unless he like sealed that up.

And he shouldn't.

Pretty good.

Well, some ladies like the heftier bare bodies, you know?

They like the

bare body is a, I think it's a gay term.

So I probably shouldn't use it here.

But you know what I mean?

They like a little bit more meat on the bone.

Do you believe that, Megan?

Do you believe that?

I know some women who like their men a little heftier.

I think they feel maybe more secure with them.

I'm not sure.

I'm not one of them.

Doug is, Doug is perfect.

Are these

the same women who are asking about me?

It's fine.

It's all right.

No, no, I'm sorry.

You could put on a few and woo them along.

I don't know, just to say anything more.

Look,

one thing about this couple that makes me feel a little uncomfortable, I'm not going to lie, is like, why are we so obsessed with celebrity?

Like, we're obsessed.

Can I tell you this post that they just, she just put this up like two seconds ago?

It's already got,

well, last I looked 36 minutes ago.

It's got 4.3 million likes.

4.3 million likes in like a couple of minutes.

These two,

they're being treated like they're royalty, like they're American royalty.

And God, I mean, when she gets pregnant, it's going to be ridiculous, the coverage.

So like, why?

What, what is it?

Why?

She's one of our last pop stars.

We really don't have that as a category anymore.

I guess I suppose Beyonce might be like that, but we don't really have any, like, everyone knows who this person is.

They've created a reality that everyone has to deal with because pop culture is so fragmented and she with the Eris tour and other things.

She's just like ubiquitous, certainly to those of us who have teenage offspring, preferably daughters.

I asked my daughter, I'm like, are you into Taylor Swift?

And she was like, no.

She's like, she's fine.

And actually, my daughter goes, I respect what she built, but no, I'm not into her.

I'm like, right on.

My girlfriend.

No, no.

I don't know.

She's not like a, she doesn't obsess over music.

And honestly, can I tell you when my kids play their music for me now?

I don't, I've never heard of any of them.

I have no idea who these people are, right?

Do you guys have that?

I'm like, back in my day, there was a melody, but I have no clue what they're listening to.

Now, we, we had this conversation on the podcast the other day when we're in the car, Matt and I, particularly with teenage daughters.

When I'm in the car, I now put on music to try to please my daughter.

And like, maybe she'll like this.

It's like embarrassing.

what channel do you hit

when you put on serious xm other than channel 111 uh to listen to yours truly and dr laura um what channel do you hit well first of all did i tell you the time that my daughter said why does megan hate taylor so much yes i very did talk

long story and she just like honestly she softened her message today yeah you know she follows you on instagram and she's like why she'll know some clip that you saw or something but no i mean i would love to um uh shout out out Sirius to give them a plug, but I don't know.

I think, don't they, is there a, like, a Dylan channel?

I, like, I'm like 40.

Dylan, yeah.

See, I like, I like pop rocks.

I like 80s.

I like 90s.

I like the your aughts channels.

I like those like down in that rain, in that region there.

I like the TikTok channel.

They've got stuff that the younger people like.

I don't know.

The Taylor Swift music, it's fine.

Like, let's not pretend she's one of the great artists or songwriters of all time.

She's fine.

It's like kind of bubblegum, you know, it speaks to a certain population.

There's a reason that most of her fans are tweens.

And that's fine.

There's a place for that in our society.

I just, I think she was treated like she was more important than that particular role.

And she started to believe that she was more important than that kind of role.

Like, like, her endorsement would be critical to the Kamala Harris team.

And then she did, that's, that's when I turned on her.

When she, first she made some nonsense about, like, like supporting the Palestinians right after Israel got attacked.

It was like, okay, could you give them a beat to like figure out how many of their people have been taken hostage before you do a fundraiser for the other side?

And then she endorsed Kamala Harris because she chose Tim Walz and his crazy LGBTQ stance.

He's the most radical governor in the country on that.

So that's when I turned on her.

And then, you know, Trump has got his own reasons.

We have to explain that to Tim Woyninghan Jr.

She she's probably with me on this if she thinks it threatened.

Isn't Taylor She was bad a conservative?

it was like outed as liking wrong things on Facebook or something, which shows you how fancy she is that people are paying attention to what her dad likes on Facebook.

I think she's from Tennessee, right?

She's so she's from the South.

So it shouldn't come as a big surprise that he's probably a little bit more right-leaning.

In any event, the whole celebrity obsession is just a lot.

And I'm like, get over it.

You know, it's like we do this thing in America where we just,

we build these people up like they're infallible, like they're gods, like they're some sort of some, not the same humans we are, and then they always disappoint us.

You know, look at Tom Brady and Giselle.

That was another Hollywood royalty kind of couple, you know, or it was like

NFL player just like Travis Kelsey and supermodel, not a singer, but a supermodel.

It fell apart.

By the way, I do think there's a lot to be gleaned from who she wound up with after Tom.

This is my own opinion: her jiu-jitsu instructor, Giselle, according to my sources, and in my opinion, wanted a normal life.

She wanted a husband who would stay with her and raise their family and be like with her at night in their home.

She's Brazilian.

She's a more traditional woman.

And he wanted to be on the red carpet and flitting about the world and going to the Lauren Sanchez wedding.

And she didn't want that, notwithstanding the fact that she's this totally glamorous model.

And I have been told by somebody who knows them both, this was at the root of their problems.

He wanted the big life, and she didn't.

So, in any event, we'll see.

These things can be fraught.

Two huge, huge careers, you know, where both is used to being the dominant player.

How long do we give it?

Do we end in a cynical note?

Is that too dark?

How long?

I'm still smarting from my Kim and Kanye prediction.

I promised that their marriage would endure despite what critics said.

I was rooting for them.

It was the Camelot of our times.

I'm just a huge Kanye stand.

I'm still smarting, honestly.

The whole thing is very different.

I guess you didn't see the Hitler stuff coming.

I did not see that coming.

So

I'm reluctant to offer any prognostication for fear that it will backfire in the worst imaginable way possible.

I feel like that should have been disclosed earlier in the episode, but okay,

everything needs to be funneled through that.

I don't do the prognostication anymore.

This is, I just want more microphone.

I'll give you the prediction.

I mean, first of all, Giselle, if you want somebody that just like stays home with you at night, I mean, going

my Uber app is like, I think I had a low rating.

No one's picking me up.

So I'm going to say, that's the first thing.

Second thing is,

is this is a mean thing to say, I think it's a mean thing to say, but I saw them on a podcast together.

I guess it was, I guess it was Travis Kelsey's podcast where she's announcing some new.

And

he's a bit of a mimbo.

And so

it's sounding like that to me.

He's not, he's not like.

No, he's a mimbo.

A mimbo is a male bimbo.

A mimbo.

Oh.

He had a bit of a mimbo vibe.

And she seems a lot smarter than him.

So that might be staying power, or she might realize, ah, the football player is maybe not.

I don't think it can last because of that.

Wow.

Yeah, I'd never just been so engulfed in the curiosity of who you were.

Oh, that's

all.

The best things about that last statement is you didn't even know what the word engulfed meant before, like you met Taylor.

Like, this is, you have broadened your horizon so far.

It's we're the perfect, I'm telling you, it's so she makes me so much better.

Thank you for saying that, thank you for saying that.

But it's like you see you on the stage and you see how crazy you can get an entire stadium going, and then

I get you in a room, and it's like I've known you forever.

It's like it was just the easiest conversation I ever had, and it was just so much fun that that it just

knocked my socks off, from what they say.

Knocked your socks off.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I felt like it was a lot of fun.

He blew me away.

I had never experienced something so mesmerizing on stage and then so real and so beautiful in person.

Here's where it usually goes south.

Like, let's be honest.

Travis Kelsey is very famous and very successful in the NFL.

He's not Tom Brady level because there's only one person who's Tom Brady level, and that's Tom Brady.

But it can happen with with these big sports guys, NFL or elsewhere, that after they leave the big sport, you know, they're never going to be as successful as they were when they were, what is he, a tight end?

It's very hard to achieve that level of success again.

And then a lot of these guys, we've seen the cycle, they get down on themselves, they have a suffering, they suffer a crisis of confidence.

You know, they act out in some circumstances.

Like, it's not that he's not going to be fine.

Obviously, he's marrying one of the richest women in the world.

I'm just saying, like, the post-glory phase of life comes quickly for professional athletes.

And that can be a tough pill to swallow, especially for men.

I think that's true, Megan, but also in his particular case,

he's going to be a broadcaster.

He's got the gift of gab, despite or because of his mimbo-esque qualities.

That's the word that the podcast that he does with his brother is pretty.

Pretty popular, and he's just sort of like a funny-winning personality.

And he's

not not impressed.

I'm not impressed.

But then again, I don't understand anything about anything these days because I was served up a class.

This also should have been disclosed at the top of the show.

Yeah, yeah.

I shouldn't.

I literally should not be on the show.

That was just typing this on a screen to me.

But I saw a clip of this

talk to a girl.

And I'm like, wait, people watch this?

Haley Welch.

Yes.

Not anymore.

Do you know her name?

No.

She shares my last name, Megan.

This is something

you need to disclose.

I was, by the way, just I was appalled trying to watch that.

I was like, okay, she was in a viral clip.

Now she has a, like a podcast where she makes like millions of dollars.

I mean, good for her.

She was working in a factory before.

So it's awesome in a great American story, but I do not understand it.

So we also got to the crypto scams.

Yeah, the crypto scams are working in her favor as well.

Yeah, I read about that to her disadvantage.

I don't know.

Are people still listening to that show?

I hope the Taylor Swift marriage lasts longer than the Huck Tua's podcast career does.

Fingers crossed.

And, you know, best wishes.

I'll leave it at that.

Guys, a pleasure.

As always, find all their work at wethefif.com.

Love those guys.

We're back tomorrow.

I'll see you then.

Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.

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