Bizarre Group Chat Details, Media Compares Trump to Nixon, and MK Media Launch, with Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi | Ep. 1034

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Restrictions apply. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at New East.
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
We have a lot to get to today, but before we do,

I have some good and exciting news that I want to share with you. And it has to do with all of you getting a lot more content from some of our and your favorite guests of The Megyn Kelly Show.
The show has been growing like crazy. Thanks to all of you.
We are deeply grateful. And last month, As you may know, we added a new show to our podcast and YouTube feed.

It's called AM Update. And the response has been super strong, far exceeded all of our hopes and expectations.
If you're not consuming it, by the way, you can get it on our podcast feed or on our YouTube feed. And it's about a 15, 16 minute morning news update.
So you can kick off your day with what we think are the most important stories. And today, we are announcing the launch of MK Media, a podcast network of video and audio shows, which we are going to produce and help promote.
And we are starting with three out of the gate, which will launch in April and May. So you're not going to have to wait very long to consume them.
The first three are next up with Mark Halperin from the independent journalist and bestselling author Mark Halperin, The Nerve with Maureen Callahan from our pal Maureen, who is also a Daily Mail cultural columnist and a bestselling author, and spot on with Link Lauren from the great political commentator and influencer Link Lauren. I'm so excited about these three.
Aren't these a great three to launch with? They cover the gamut, right? It's like Link has got such a following amongst young sort of right-leaning people or independent-minded people who have just had it with the weird left. I hear from so many young people who are like, I love Link.
He's got such a following. Maureen, do I even need to say anything? I mean, we all love her.
She first started coming on and I loved reading Maureen, but I didn't know how she'd do in an interview, you know, when you have to do spoken word.

And you could see right from the get go, there was something special there. And the more she came on, the better she got.
And now, of course, she's just an A plus guest. And whenever we have her on, we get the most positive comments from all of you.
So she's going to be amazing. And I love the name of that show, The Nerve.
And Mark Halpern. I mean, can you name anybody you wanted to hear from more in the lead up to the last election than Mark? It's like when Mark would speak, you'd put down your pen and listen.
He was somebody who, you know, I always talk about how I'm doing my makeup or I'm cleaning my house or something while I'm listening to podcasts. Mark Halpern is a kind of commentator where you just stop the other thing and you just listen.
And sometimes you rewind it to hear it again. He's extremely well-connected, very well-researched, and just a very, very standup guy when it comes to his political journalism.
I mean, you can just take it to the bank. And so I'm thrilled that we're going to be getting into business with these three and helping promote their independent podcasts.
So thanks to all of you for helping make that possible for us to not just grow our show, but to help grow other shows. We're not done.
By the way, you're going to be able to find these shows on their, they'll have their own podcast feeds under those names and their own YouTube channels and their own social media accounts. And we're going to help them build all of those.
But that's not all we're doing. MK Media is going to continue to expand.
We're in talks with a bunch of folks and we will have more announcements to come soon. Some beyond just news and entertainment, by the way.
More on that as we launch these other programs. Look, what I'm basically looking to do is to help promote more sane, reasonable, and ideally entertaining people who have unique perspectives and the courage to say the truth, right? It's like, I'm extremely grateful for the platform that we have and, you know, the audience that we have.
But I also think it's important to, you know, the only thing I can think is the terrible Barack Obama phrase of spread the wealth around. But what I mean is just you want a lot of options, right? You want to hear somebody, for example, in Maureen, in the cultural lane, who devotes a whole show to that, just ripping on all the big stories of the day that we don't always get to on a show like this one.
That's maybe a little harder news focused. You know, we do a lot of culture, but it'll be great to have somebody singularly focused like that, that we can help promote Mark too.
He's almost all hard news. He doesn't really do a lot of the culture stuff.
Link, he does it all, but he's, he loves culture. He's a little younger and I think speaks to a different audience.
Anyway, it's just all coming together. And I love being in a place now, thanks to you guys, to help those folks get their voice heard by as many people as humanly possible.
Look at the monopoly the left has had on the news and the conversation for all of the country's modern history. It's only been the last couple of years that the right and the independent minded have developed this new lane.
So whatever I can do to help smart, honest, fact-based voices grow in that lane, I am committed to doing. So I'm going to.
Okay. So thank you.
Stay tuned. And let's get to the news and the drama over the Signal group chat.
Now you heard this story yesterday, right? The long and the short of it is a group of Trump's top security officials, Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, Mike Walls, National Security Advisor, and J.D. Vance, our vice president, and others were on a group text chain that I think involved 19 people in total.
And Mike Walls appears to have been the one, though not totally confirmed, who added, clearly accidentally, the Atlantic editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who's just, of all people to add, just the worst person. You know how many stories he's gotten wrong? Let me put it to you this way.
He thinks that Mark Milley is a patriot and wrote a whole article calling him the patriot for his promise to betray the sitting president of the United States and to tell the Chinese if we ever decided to plan some attack on them. That would be treason.
That would be punishable by death. It's not something that makes you a patriot unless you're Jeffrey Goldberg.
And that's how you see that. And that's how you see all stories involving Trump or any Republican.
So the fact that he got at it is a nightmare. There are some people saying Mike Walls is a neocon.
That's why he had Jeffrey Gold. Can I tell you, if you saw the people in my contacts, you could, you wouldn't know what to think.
You'd be so confused because in Mike Walls, this position as a, you know, guy who's been in, in politics forever or in Jeffrey Goldberg's, frankly, you have a lot of contacts. You meet people, you, they give you your, their contact, you put it in there.
You never know when you might need them or you might need to yell at them. In Mike Walls' case with Goldberg, I don't think you can draw any conclusions from the fact that he had him in the contacts.
We don't know who he was trying to add, but clearly he made a mistake. And now the left is treating this like we had a nuclear meltdown as a result of inappropriate group messaging on signal.
And I'll just start by saying this. If it were me, I think and I were the administration, I think I would have just said we made a mistake.
We'll look into how it happened and we'll let you know. Thank God.
Nothing bad came out of it. And it was, you know, on a, an encrypted channel, thank goodness, but sure we can shore up our communications and will, and that's it.
This is not Watergate. This is not the Pentagon papers.
People need to calm the F down. The mission they were discussing when we, we fought back against the Houthis, um, in Yemen, that, That was a huge success.
We took out a bunch of Houthi leadership. We threatened Iran.
It went off without a hitch. It's true it could have gone poorly if Mike Walls had CC'd like Iran.
I'm guessing like that's probably not a contact he just would have abbreviated on there. But in any event, it didn't go badly.
It didn't get leaked to anybody other than, yes, a guy who hates Republicans, but doesn't necessarily hate America because he did nothing to undermine the mission. So that's where it is.
It's really not that big a deal. It's not great.
Don't get me wrong. It's not great.
We don't have to treat this like everything about the report is wrong. It was like, whatever.
He clearly got added erroneously. Can we move on? Like, it's bad.
You should fix it. Tell us how you're going to fix the communications.
Off we go. All right.
Joining me now to discuss that and all the stories in the news, the hosts of the America This Week podcast, author and novelist, Walter Kern and Racket News Editor, Matt Taibbi. One in two adults have high blood pressure.
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How are you doing? Very good. How are you doing, Megan? Splendidly.
So what do you make of my take on SignalGate, Signal being the encrypted messaging app where they were having this

conversation and clearly had the eventually, oh shit moment of realizing somebody had added Jeffrey Goldberg to the message chain. Matt, I'll start with you.
I think I need to know a little bit more about how this story happened before I can accurately comment on it, because the notion that of all people in the world, the journalist who is probably most hostile to Donald Trump was added to this chat chain about an attack on Yemen. It's so incredibly improbable that the circumstances of it need to be understood fully before we can properly assess it, I think.
I mean, was it a genuine accident or what else happened here? It's just something about it doesn't smell entirely kosher to me. That's interesting.
There is some speculation online, just on X, you know, random folks posting. Is there any chance he was intentionally added as a means of getting a discussion, which didn't make anybody look bad? I think to the contrary, it made them all look very thoughtful and they're debating the pros and cons.
And, you know, is this something that we really want to take on? That's what JD was saying. Like Europe has 40% of its commerce going through these channels.
We have three, you know, should it really be our problem? And then some exchange about, well, yeah, but we're the only ones who can do it. So if we're going to push back at all, it should be us.
Whatever. The actual chatter did not make them look bad.
It was simply the fact that it was happening on Telegram and they added Jeffrey Goldberg. So Walter, some of the speculation online was, did they intentionally add him so that they could possibly telegraph to the Europeans, you know, where we actually stand on this and that they may need to pick up any slack that happens from this point forward? There's zero evidence to support any of that.
That's just, I'm just picking up on what Matt suggested there. Well, what I found curious is that if I were a somewhat hostile journalist and were added accidentally to a group chat that included the vice president, the secretary of defense and a national security advisor, I would lay low for a while and not blow my cover.
I would say, oh, wow, I just got an accidental pipeline into the very heart of the security state. Maybe I'm not going to come out the first time I get a little bit of news.
So it was interesting to me that Goldberg decided to sort of blow this once in a lifetime chance to surveil the inside of the lighthouse four-year scoop oh exactly i'd have been writing a book i'm waiting for the world war three war plan not the you know bombing of the houthis which you know isn't all that uh controversial but as you say it's a good point as you say i think it made Vance in particular look good. He can't be he can't be construed as a Trump toady after looking at this.
You know, he had some principled differences with Donald Trump. He said this conflicts with our messaging about Ukraine, with our general anti-war stance.
Also, as you mentioned,

it seems to favor the European interests over our own.

If we're going to play games with conspiracy theories

and 4D chess, it's J.D. Vance, I think,

who comes out looking best

because it shows that he's both in the loop,

independent, thoughtful, and nobody's fool.

At the same time, he plays with the team.

All I know is that I'm Jeffrey Goldberg sitting there going, wow, I had a bug in the White House and now I don't. Also, I have never- Somebody online said, it should be a criminal act not to share the group text chains that Jeffrey Goldberg had internally, you know, when realizing that this was a real text chain he was on with the national security team.
Like, holy shit. And then, of course, even better would have been to see the reaction of the people.
I mean, who among us hasn't like CC'd somebody where you're like, oh, God, I didn't mean to do that.

But this is next level.

This one's not your average.

Oh, shit moment, Matt.

And of course, the Democrats who have completely fallen apart, who have zero support amongst their own party. We talked about yesterday some of the numbers on Team Blue.

They're just they're in worse shape now than they've been in 50 years since an opportunity to have a good news cycle. And they're right to capitalize.
I mean, if I were a Democrat looking to like change the narrative about what a mess my party is, sure, this will do for a couple of days. I'll I'll ride this one.
And so we saw this morning in front of Senate Intel was they called in the national security apparatus. This is a pre-scheduled thing on global threats.
And they decided to make the most of this, including Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who's a dem, versus Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe, head of the CIA. Watch.
Director Gabbard, did you participate in a group chat with Secretary of Defense and other Trump senior officials discussing the Yemen war plans? Senator, I don't want to get into it. If it's not classified, share the text now.
So you were the John Ratcliffe on that chat. I was.
Thank you. Thank you.
Can I provide some context, Senator, to that? Yes, but I've got a series of questions. But I think it's important because at the outset,

you made a couple of comments about signal messaging using encrypted apps so that we're clear. One of the first things that happened when I was confirmed as CIA director was signal was loaded onto my computer at the CIA, as it is for most CIA officers.
One of the things that I was briefed on very early, Senator, was by the CIA records management folks about the use of signal as a permissible work use. It is.
That is a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration. I've got a series of questions.
If you're making the statement, the signal is a secure channel. To be clear, in the signal message group, we're entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.
There was no classified material that was shared in that. So then if there was no classified material, share it with the committee.
This is strangely familiar, and I think my colleagues remember,

when you couldn't answer the question, is Edward Snowden a traitor? And I have serious doubts about your anyway. It's just like when she wouldn't say that Edward Snowden is a traitor.
This is just like that, Matt. So it's incredibly humorous to watch Mark Warner talking about breaches of security when his own Senate Select Committee on Intelligence suffered an extraordinary breach of security when the head of security for the committee was indicted for leaking material that led to the publication of the FISA warrant on Carter Page in 2017.
Remember the indictment involving James Wolfe? Now, that was a story where the circumstances were kind of mysterious because it was a story that seemed like certain people would have wanted to get out. But that really was classified information that was illegal to leak.
And it did end up in the press. And it was a major scandal, both journalistically and in the history of Congress.
So for him to talk about this situation where they're not exchanging classified material, they're not sitting in a skiff, and they're simply discussing an operation that may be sensitive but not classified. When he says, you know, I demand that you give us that material, there's no reason why Gabbard and Radcliffe can't just say no.
You know, we don't have to do anything. Right.
By the way, I think we're T minus like 72 hours before Jeffrey Goldberg releases it anyway, with maybe a couple of things redacted. But I I don't think he's going to stay in this like I I'm above it all and I won't release it.
He just I don't think he can help himself. Well, they can subpoena him and get it anyway.
So what's the problem here? Why does the Trump administration have to go first? This feels like a giant advertisement for Signal to me. We find out that the CIA, we find that the CIA uses it and trusts it.
Well, Peter Stroke, the head of counterintelligence over at the FBI, was, you know, talking to his mistress about how he was going to disrupt the Trump administration on regular text messaging apps.

At least they've scaled up a little here.

Yeah, good point. Here's some more Democrat anger.

It's genuine anger, I'm sure, like the kind they showed when Lloyd Austin went AWOL for days without telling anybody where he was.

Oh, no, wait, that never happened.

Here is Michael Bennett of Colorado sparring with, again, CIA Director Ratcliffe on who added Jeffrey Goldberg to the group.

Did Jeff Goldberg somehow, was it a, did he create a hoax that allowed him to become part of this signal thread?

Please answer the question.

Don't insult the intelligence of the American people.

Did he invite himself to the signal thread?

I don't know how he was invited.

You did not add it? Clearly it was. Finish your sentence, please.
Clearly he was added to the signal group. Your question is.
You don't know that the president's national security advisor invited him to join the signal thread? Everybody in America knows that. Does the CIA director not know that? I've seen conflicting reports about who added the reporter to the signal messaging group.
Walter, everybody in America knows exactly how this went down. Who added Jeffrey Goldberg? That's it.
Period. Michael Bennett has spoken.
Except we three. And we're pretty, pretty hip people who try to follow these things.
And yet we have no idea. What's strange about it is I've never accidentally added anyone to a signal chat.
That hasn't happened to me. I've never done a signal, but have you ever, never have have you never like misfired an email? I've like, I've misfired an email to like, you think it's going to be mom.
Yeah. But instead you send it to Maury.
I don't know. Just something like that where like the, the, the auto complete takes over and you go with it inadvertently.
Keep going. Well, I would have thought that anyone of the other 19 might have had veto power over this and noticed it.

That's what's strange. But don't you think, Walter, when Mike Walz sets up your your signal chat, you're like, I trust I don't I don't need to go pour over all 19.
Like, I trust Mike Walz. I have better tradecraft than Mike Walz.
I've learned from this story. Um, why should I here in Montana with my strange group of friends, which are similar to yours?

I imagine, Megan, you know, from all over the place, take more care with who I allow to see the more sensitive parts of my communications. The truth is, we actually don't know.
And the more I think about this and the more I look at it, that the Democrats were ready to pounce on it suggests, I don't know. And the more I think about this and the more I look at it, that the Democrats were ready to pounce on it suggests, I don't know, that there might be more to it than we are.
Interesting. You guys are you're going to the dark place.
Go ahead, Matt. Yeah.
And again, not to speak about Michael Bennett specifically, but for members of the U.S. Senate to talk about an inadvertent leak as if it were this dire, life-threatening matter of national security, when throughout the entire first presidency of Donald Trump, there were epidemic, illegal leaks of classified intelligence from everything involving the signals intelligence about Michael Flynn talking to the Russian ambassador, to the alleged contact between Donald Trump and members of Russian intelligence, to the, you know, figures connected to Trump or known and suspected Russian agents, to the Alexander Downer stuff.
I mean, I did a story about this once and made a list, and I had like 14 or 15 different illegal leaks that came out. All reporters knew what was going on during that time.
There were tons and tons of material that were being discussed in skiffs, and what would happen would be like some kind of aid from Congress would call you and would essentially confirm the details of a classified story and then would put you on the phone with somebody else who would be the second person to confirm the story. This was going on constantly.
It drove most of the major Russiagate stories during the Trump period. Isn't that now Natasha Bertrand made her name? Right.
Yeah. I mean, this is what journalism was for years and years and years and politics, for that matter.
Right. And none of that stuff was ever investigated or punished, even though it went on in the open.
So I'm a little bit amazed that this not not illegal situation is being investigated so vehemently. What did they do? They discussed war plans, which went off without a hitch while inadvertently ceasing a reporter.
No one's claiming this is a good thing. However, it's like can the same people who could barely muster any outrage, I mean, truly, not barely, who really, in many cases, didn't muster outrage at all for the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, for Abbey Gate, for, you know, actual military debacles that have happened in the recent past, that they said nothing.
Like, they weren't outraged. But now they want us to believe that they're really horrified that one reporter got a heads up on an action against the Houthis.
I don't buy it, Walter. One thing that's interesting is that this is an actual war plan that everyone agreed with, except maybe J.D.
Vance. I mean, Jeffrey Goldberg, it's not like they put Alex Jones on the chat.
Jeffrey Goldberg, I'm sure, agrees with. Yeah, agree.
Yeah. And that would have been interesting.
But bombing the Houthis is not something that I think Jeffrey Goldberg disagrees with. I don't even think that the Senate committee disagrees with it.
It's interesting that this is a policy that really there was unanimity on, except in the case of Vance. And when this first broke, it was an anti-Vance story.
That was how it was being spun. You know, Vance and Trump are at odds.
That didn't survive the, you know, first news cycle, but it was how they first headlined this thing. Avery, meanwhile, all Vance said was, I'm not sure the president is aware of how inconsistent this move is with his stated goals, you know, which is make the Europeans start paying their fair share.
He wasn't saying the president is wrong to do this. He's saying, is he aware of, for example, the 40 percent that Europe uses these channels versus the three percent that we do? He wasn't like, Trump's an idiot.
Trump's wrong. He was like, I don't know that the president knows this stuff.
They're having lunch today, pre-scheduled, but Vance and Trump, but the White House is making clear there's absolutely no daylight between these two. And I will say this.
I'd love to talk to you guys about the messaging now because my own take on it is Trump, as usual, is hitting just the right tone in hand. Like he's like, Wall's a good guy.
Made a mistake. He'll learn.
You know, like it's fine. He's he seems to totally have Mike Wall's back.
That was said directly to a couple of reporters this morning. Peter Doocy was one of them.
And who was the other one, Steve? Who got it was an NBC reporter. Oh, Garrett.
Hey. Yeah, in the gaggle.
Do we have that on cam? Trump's tone? We do, I think. Right.
No, we don't have that. Oh, because it wasn't on cam.
But yesterday he came out. He's like, I'm just learning about this for the first time today.
I think he's nailed it where he's like, yeah, you know, it's a mistake. The operation went off perfectly.
And Mike Walls is a good guy. I would say I think Pete Hegseth, who I really care about, but I think he's a little too defensive.
He's probably feeling a little like, whoa, he's like, they're not war plans. I didn't text war plans.
This it's coming down to like a debate over semantics. Do we do we care? Like, personally, I don't really care if he texted him like a blueprint with like, and then the F-16 is going to come in here.
And then if they do this, we'll do that. I mean, imagine that's what an actual war plan looks like, but I have no idea.
Or if it's just, we're going to overwhelm them with the following air power. We've also got an aircraft carrier in there, you know, like the general things that you would be telling the Tulsi's of the world and the JDs of the world to generally let them know how large or small this thing is going to be.
So what do you make of the the tone and the tenor of the messaging from those who are on defense today? I think the administration comes out looking not so bad. I mean, the the security leak is obviously not great.
I mean, and it's

going to invite criticisms that these people are inexperienced. I don't know what they're doing,

right? They're already saying that in droves. But as to the actual discussions, it's not like you

had a bunch of people saying, wait, where's Yemen again? Is that next to Panama? I mean,

they seem to know what they were doing. And as to remember, Gary Johnson, what is Aleppo? What is an MSNBC running for president? That would be that.
Or what does Israel want us to do? Can somebody call them up? Right. Right.
We didn't see evidence of that. See, I think Trump's management style.
Or Putin. Well, yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Can somebody call Putin and find out whether he's behind this? One time I almost burnt down a gas station I worked in.
It created smoke and a terrible smell. I cleaned it up as best I could.
The next day the boss came in and instead of punishing me, he looked around, sniffed the air and said, I feel like something went on here to carry on. It was the greatest act of discipline I've ever received because to withhold punishment sometimes is to show true dominance.
And I think that's what Trump has done here. The ability to give grace in this situation is also in its shadow form, the ability to get rid of you.
And I think everybody is going to shape up from now on. Also, I have to say that just just quickly, I think it makes Vance look good.
It shows that he is willing to stand up for what he thinks and give his opinion. And that's what we want a vice president to do.
If there is any disagreement or if he is challenging the idea, isn't that what we want from these people? We want them to discuss it. I'm not really sure I understand what the controversy is apart from the security leak.
If the Democrats could design a security leak, it would be to Jeffrey Goldberg. Why are they acting like they're unhappy with this thing? Right.
They're not. It's just because of their numbers.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's 100 percent because of their numbers. I will say this.
Doug Brunt, my husband, was not that long ago pulled over by a cop on his way home from dropping the kids off at school. And the cop said, do you know what you did? And Doug said, yep, I did a little bit of a rolling stop at that stop sign.
The cop was like, thank you. Thank you for admitting it and let him go to your point, Walter.
I pardon you. He showed benevolence and it was the ultimate power move in Doug's defense.
It's a very safe very safe intersection. Most people come to a rolling stop, but Doug Brunt doesn't anymore because now you only get one pass out of that problem for free.
In any event, this will, I think, be blown over in probably another day or two at the most. It is interesting, though, that they are already using Signal.
You heard Ratcliffe saying that in his testimony that we got to the CIA and found out that they're using a signal all over these government devices. It was used by the Biden administration.
We've confirmed that too. They said, oh, but you know, rarely.
Well, I don't know whether that's true or not. Right.
It's like maybe they didn't make the stupid mistake of copying in a reporter from Fox News. But look, if this is something that they don't want to have happen, it should be stricken from all administrations, not just the Republican ones.
All right, let's keep going because there's a lot to get through today. The matter of whether Trump was allowed to deport all these alleged Trenda Aragua gang members on three flights, only two of which are at issue.
Here's I can understand one flight's not at issue because nobody on it was being deported under the Alien Enemies Act. Two flights are at issue because the people on board were all being deported, at least in part due to Trump's invocation of that act and his powers under it, which say if you're at war or you're suffering an invasion or some sort of incursion, the president can declare that.
Well, Congress has to declare war, but the president can declare the other two and then classify people as parts of it, you know, sort of enemy actors, and then they can be deported without due process. That's what's so appealing to the Trump administration about the Alien Enemies Act.
You can boot them really kind of no questions asked, get out. I've actually just been looking into this.
Maybe immigration lawyers have this on the, at the ready, but here's the story under the, um, uh, okay. Under the regular immigration law where we have expedited deportation, expedited removal, you can kick somebody out if you catch them at the border.
That was true for a long time under Trump or under Obama or under Biden. These agents who catch somebody sneaking across the border, they don't have to let them have a whole hearing.
Just get out. I caught you.
Go back home. Kick them out.
They're entitled to nothing. No due process, nothing.
And it's under this expedited removal power. And it usually applies to about 100 miles around the southern border.
Well, Trump, as he did in Trump 1.0, has expanded it by executive order to reach pretty much all of the United States to where our border agents like Tom Homan, if they find you and they, I don't know what the standard is, probable cause most likely, to believe that you're a Venezuelan gang member can remove you, no questions asked. The downside of using just that expedited removal power, which is being challenged legally, is that if the person says, I'm seeking asylum, I'm seeking asylum, you have to give them the asylum hearing.
It slows the whole thing down. These illegals take advantage of that.
They're not really seeking asylum. They came through four different other countries where they could have gotten asylum.
They just want to be here. Anyway, that's why Trump decided to invoke this alien enemies act, which does not allow the asylum escape hatch.
And what's happening right now in courts is there's a debate about whether these people deported by Trump under their Alien Enemies Act are entitled to any level of due process before we declare them Venezuelan gang members. No one's talking about striking down the Alien Enemies Act,

which has already been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court has held

there's no right to judicial review of most of the president's decisions under that act.

But what's being discussed and argued both at the district court level with this Judge

Boesberg and yesterday at the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, a three-judge panel,

one judge, an Obama appointee, one a George H.W. Bush appointee, and one a Trump appointee, is do these people get any sort of due process before we label them Venezuela gang members and then put them on these planes? And if they do get some, what does it look like? Do they just file what's known as a habeas petition where they get to say, whoa, whoa, I'm not even from Venezuela.
And if so, shouldn't that have been filed in where they were being held, which is down in Texas, as opposed to in Washington, D.C., where almost all the district court judges are lefties. And clearly the ACLU, which commenced this action, was looking for a leftist judge.
And they got one. Yes, Boesburg was originally appointed to the bench years ago for a D.C.
court judge by a Republican Bush, George W. But he is there's no question the guy's gone left.
What happened to Justice Souter happened to Boesburg. He may have originally been liked by a Republican judge, but there's a reason it was Barack Obama who elevated him to the federal district court judge.
You just take a look at his rulings, take a look at his wife, take a look at who runs an abortion clinic, his daughter who appears to work for a group that helps illegals and gang members who are in this country illegally. Okay.
So anyway, he sided, not surprising with the ACLU, and now it's up on appeal to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. And they hashed it out yesterday about whether Trump has obligations to these people before he puts them on these planes.
Anyway, that's where it stands now. The D.C.
Circuit will make its ruling soon. Your take on all of this, because my my first conclusion on it is politically, this is a no lose situation for Donald Trump.
Walter? I agree.

First of all, who wants to be in charge of deciding that this Trenda Agua member should be allowed to stay and then answering for it when he kills somebody? Is this a power that they really want, or is it just a way to frustrate Trump? Because it's a power that I would not take on myself. It's pretty risky.
Number two, alien combatants. Well, we know they're aliens.
Are they combatants? It is true that we live in a period of irregular warfare. We have drug cartels that are obviously incredibly powerful and well-funded in the United States, which originate outside the country.
It's their contention that somehow the Venezuelan government had something to do with infiltrating these characters into the U.S. That would qualify, I think, in the 21st century as a combatant.
We take people who aren't in uniform and we smuggle them into other countries hoping that they'll do things for us. They may claim that they're seeking asylum or not.
So, so far Trump has taken this all on himself. And now this judge is saying, well, we want to, I want to be responsible for it, but does he really do that? Is there a judiciary that really wants to sometimes allow these people to stay

such that they commit further crimes? So in that sense, you're right. It is a political win win.
Be careful what you wish for in terms of this judge and whoever he might represent. It could be a hand grenade.
You know, to your point, Walter, Jose Ibera, who is the guy who killed Lakin Riley, he was let loose back out on the community in New York after committing two other crimes, flown on the taxpayer's dime down to Georgia. This is a Venezuelan gang member of Tren de Aragua.
And that's where he killed Laken Riley, who's, you know, the face and name of the very first bill that Trump signed into law, cracking down on illegals. Imagine if you're the judge, you know, if, if, if another Jose Abera is on one of those two planes that he literally tried to call back into us airspace after they'd already left.
And now he's very angry that they didn't turn the planes around. Imagine that, you know, you're responsible for bringing one of these guys back and another 22 year old gets killed.
That's why I say politically, Matt, whatever happens with the D.C. Circuit, this is well worth the fight in many ways for Trump.
Well, I'd I'd push back a little bit on that. You know, I think maybe the specific case, that's true.
But in a larger sense, I think the Democrats so completely destroyed their reputation as defenders of civil liberties in the last 10 to 15 years. We're talking we're asking right now whether or not these Venezuelan, you know, alleged Venezuelan gang members have due process rights.
And remember, Barack Obama assassinated an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, without any due process based on a memo they essentially wrote to themselves saying that the due process didn't have to involve the defendant. And, you know, going on.
That would be the lowest level of due process one gets. That would be the very lowest.
It's a process. It just doesn't involve you.
Right. So that's kind of sad.
But Matt, Matt, this guy, this this Bozberg was head of the FISA courts, if I understand correctly, which is a form of due process that the defendants don't even know is going on yes exactly that that's that's the class jesus however yeah um but you know but then from there you know they want to they they did so much in the area of of undercutting their traditional defense of say the first amendment First Amendment, right? And the Sixth Amendment, they handed those issues to Donald Trump. And J.D.
Vance said it was the biggest difference between the Trump administration and Kamala Harris was their attitude towards, for instance, free speech. Now, this isn't a speech issue, but it is kind of a civil liberties issue.
It doesn't pertain to an American citizen. But we've seen in recent years how a lot of these sort of civil liberties problems start on the periphery and work toward the middle.
And we end up talking about, you know, the rights of Americans being violated. And so I do worry about that a little bit.
I do think, you know, Trump especially has to be careful to preserve the high ground on civil liberties issues just because. There's definitely some screening going on because, first of all, there's a way Tom Homan found these people.
You know, they didn't just like there's a reason Walter, Matt and Megan were not targeted by Tom Homan. He is doing his homework to figure out who is here, who's here illegally.
And they represented to the court and forgive me, I don't know whether it's all or most of those who are on these planes had already had hearings. They'd already had hearings determining that they needed to be deported.
So it's either all or most of these folks already had way more due process than they would be entitled to had they been caught at the border pursuant to expedited removal under any president. So there's that.
But here's the thing that Americans can't get past. Tom Holman put it best.
And I think this is what we're all wrestling with. Joe Biden opened the border and millions of very bad hombres crossed the southern border are in the United States right now and will kill, rape and hurt our children, ourselves, our neighbors.
And we don't care. I mean, I'm really at the

point like, get out, get out. I don't really give a shit about your due process.
What due process did the rest of us have? Or as Tom Homan put it here in 27, listen. What we've heard from lawyers representing some of these people is that they deny that they're members of this gang, or either Trendy de Aragua or MS-13,

do they get a chance to prove that before you take them out of the country and put them into a notorious prison in a country that they're not even from? I mean, do they have any due process at all? Look, due process. What was Lincoln Riley's due process? What was Lincoln Riley's due process? That's very powerful, Matt.
No, I get it. Absolutely.
And I get that people are frustrated. It's just something to keep an eye on.
And I remember, you know, the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, which is, you know, not not the most storied act in our history. You know, there was frustration among conservatives when the Democrats started pulling out laws like the Logan Act to go after Donald Trump.
Sometimes when you see presidents using ancient or exotic laws to execute policies in in situations, you know, it can be a bit of a red flag.

That's all.

I think that's as far as I just think it's a sign of our desperation. And it's our desperation as a country to solve this problem that was not of Trump's creation.
He he's been that's this thing he ran on from the moment he came down the escalator, Walter, like the immigrants, Mexico, they're not sending their best. and he's trying to use an extraordinary law that is on the books and has been upheld by the U.S.

Supreme Court to help him in what I believe Trump genuinely believes is an invasion. I believe Trump has a sincere belief in that.
I went back and forth with about about Andy McCarthy's legal position. And I love Andy, rarely disagree with him, but I do hear last week when

the national review guys were on about how, look, this is, this is a law. It is on the books.
It's

been adjudicated. And the court has said there's no judicial review of it.
If a president makes a

mistake, that's too bad. There are certain things that are not for the courts to second guess

the U S president on. And Andy was making the point on his own podcast this week.
Well,

we didn't this, he still had to provide due process George W. Bush in the war on terror when we were dealing with enemy combatants.
Well, no one invoked the Alien Enemies Act. Nobody was citing this.
Like, I'm sorry, George W. didn't think of it.
And Trump did. But we're in a whole new world now.
Go ahead, Walter. Theodore Roosevelt, I mean, excuse me, Franklin Roosevelt imprisoned many, many thousands of Japanese Americans merely on the basis of being of Japanese heritage.
They put them in concentration camps in places like Wyoming. I don't know if that was under the authority of this Alien Combatants Act.
But, you know, when people perceive themselves to be at war in some fashion, things change. Tom Homans is American's bouncer.
OK, he has a very common sense approach that I think appeals to the electorate. There are bad guys.
My job as a big, tough dude is to get them the hell out of here so that you guys can enjoy yourselves and be safe. So far, that's an understanding, a political understanding with the American people that the American people seem fine with and in fact supported in the election of Trump.
That the judiciary is volunteering to get in the middle of this may not be the smartest thing it's ever done because they're not only bringing scrutiny on themselves politically and on their families and their various potential conflicts of interest, they're starting to create a debate in America about whether the judiciary should have the powers that it does. Many of those powers are actually backed by Congress, it turns out, in a practical way.
And they're going to become unpopular with their congressional sponsors very soon. It's a very good point because, look, we are on really thin ice if ultimately Judge Boesberg, because this will eventually go back down to him, does issue some attempted mandate that those people be pulled out of that El Salvadorian prison and returned to America.
There is no way the Trump administration is going to do that. And I think at some level, while Judge Boesberg may not be fully thinking of this yet, Matt, the Supreme Court will be because Justice Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts, knows better than anybody.
There's no police power behind the courts. They we we abide by their rulings out of a sense of duty, neighborliness, order, nationality, patriotism and acceptance of a system where there is a separation of powers.
But if there's too egregious an overreach, and I don't

support flouting the Supreme Court mandates in their laws for the record, but I'm just saying

Chief Justice Roberts knows better than anybody that if they issue an order as specific and as

extraordinary as that to the sitting commander in chief, it could destroy the court's power.

In one ruling, it could completely destroy the Supreme Court. Yeah, I mean, possession is nine-tenths of the law, right? And I mean, it reminds me of an old story about Joseph Stalin, who apparently he was criticized by the Pope for something.
And he essentially said, well, screw the Pope. How many divisions

does he have? And that comes into play here. That came into play.
There was a famous case involving Abraham Lincoln in the beginning of the Civil War, where it also came into play. The courts in these kinds of showdowns tend not to have the upper hand.
And that might play out that way. And they know it.
So it's like, OK, it's one thing, you know, to say those you now have in custody have to be provided the following screening, this bare minimum of so-called due process. But the odds of them getting back those people in El Salvador are very thin, slim.
And by the way, Trump did return a guy from Nicaragua and a woman who had erroneously both been put on those flights when they had meant only to get these Venezuelan gang members. So it's not like there's been no screening or no double checking of what Homan is doing.
They're making sure it's just how much scrutiny are they entitled to. There's a couple of additional points on this that I do want to get to.
I do have to take a quick break, so I'm going to do this commercial, and then we'll come back. We've got to talk about what John Harwood, formerly of CNN, tweeted out about this, among other things.
Stand by. Walter and Matt, stay with me.
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So we are talking about what Tom Homan said, what Trump is doing, and whether this is a political winner for him, irrespective of what happens at the courts. This would help.
This would help Tom. I mean, Trump.
As John Harwood, former White House correspondent for CNN, worked for The New York Times, NBC, and so on. Okay, tweets out the following.
Tom Homan is like an early 20th century Southern sheriff who would send a mob to find a black kid who had allegedly looked the wrong way at a white woman. The mob would bring back a kid who kind of sort of fit the description and the Homan character would say, string him up with an exclamation point.

That is where he went with Tom Homan asking, where was Lake and Riley's due process? Walter thoughts on that. Well, I'm an actual novelist on Lake Harwood.
So I'll give my competing image of Tom Homan. And he's like a bouncer in a very big nightclub and finds some guys who've been harassing women in the women's bathroom and kicks them out the back door.

And when they want to come back in the front door, doesn't allow it.

That is just a pure cheap shot on Harwood's part to act as though this is racist, that it harks back to the Southern past and so on. It doesn't apply in any respect.
It's a bad image, a bad metaphor, and it's prejudicial on its face. He can say it, but it doesn't mean much.
But this is how this is a window into how a lot of these leftists view the issue of deportations and of closing the border, Matt. I mean, it's ridiculous.
First of all, how many times are these people going to invoke Jim Crow? You know, it's everything is either Jim Crow or Hitler, basically. Since Trump arrived on the political scene.
The other thing I'll say is, you know, I was a foreigner for 12 years. I lived in the former Soviet Union.
I lived in a number of different countries, principally Russia, but also Uzbekistan, Mongolia, some other places. And you never have a sense that you have rights to a place as a foreigner.
You always think of yourself as a guest. You always want to be on your best behavior.
And you always want to respect the culture to try to learn the language, do all those things. And the idea that you can be thrown out of the country at any moment is present in your mind at all times.
I was thrown out of Uzbekistan and they had every right to do that. What'd you do? I was there on the wrong kind of visa.
And yeah, I was actually playing for the Uzbek baseball team at the time. And they threw me out after practice.
But look, the idea that all these people, you know, as much as a civil libertarian as I am, the idea that foreigners or the people who are here illegally have the same rights as Americans, this isn't true. They may have, by law, they may have the same speech rights once they get here, but the notion that the president doesn't have the ability to throw these people out of the country doesn't hold up, I don't think.
It's absurd. And here's the interesting thing about this.
Americans are actually really kind and nurturing and welcoming, and they're caretakers. I think they have a natural tendency to be caretakers.
And so that whole, give us your tired, your poor, and all that, that works on the Statue of Liberty. It worked on us for hundreds of years and it worked on us all the way up to about four years ago when Joe Biden took it to a place no one had ever taken it to before and just opened the borders.
I mean, it was just absolutely dangerous what he did. It was absolutely, it's, it was treasonous.
That's how it feels truly. I don't throw that term around loosely, but the jeopardy that he put us all in and the lives that have been cost from that decision.
There's just no question he should be held accountable in any event. And so the American public have had it.
They've had it with this debate. The Democrats have lost it.
It's one of the reasons why their party is in the toilet right now on its approval ratings. So the American public is behind Trump on this issue above all others.
Well, this and the trans issue, they're really behind Trump. And this is why I asked my team to pull this clip.
Now, hold on, I'm going to set this up. I saw a really interesting tweet thread, whatever, post thread on X a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago.
And the, forgive me, I don't remember who started it, but the guy was saying, post here pictures or clips of people who are portrayed as villains in movies who you now no longer think are, right?

With like just the dramatic changes

that have happened in our country

over the past 10 to 20 plus years.

Who do you now see who is depicted so poorly in film

as not a villain who you were told was?

And this was one that I was like,

oh my God, this is so true.

It's not directly related to immigration, but you'll get it. It's this guy.
You want answers? I think I'm entitled. You want answers.
I want the truth. You can't handle the truth.
Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's going to do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom.
And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties.
You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.
That's right. And I don't really care if you have to give a few code reds to do it, Tom Homan, Colonel Jessup.
I mean, I kind of think, Walter, we're all Colonel Jessup now, or at least in the mood for Colonel Jessup. Listen, I grew up with Dirty Harry and Charles Bronson movies.
We haven't even gotten close to that level yet. In the early and mid-70s, after the chaos of the 60s and the early 70s, we had a series of heroes.
Buford Pusser, the Southern Sheriff, speaking of Southern Sheriffs, walking tall, who went around with a baseball bat, getting rid of all the scumbag in his small town. We had a decade of vigilante movies where people practically stood up and cheered.
And in one of those Dirty Harry's movies, it's interesting. There was a villain who ends up kidnapping schoolchildren who is let off earlier in the movie by a judge on a technicality,

even though they have him, and then does even worse things. So America's in that mood.
And cultural cycles, you know, as Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream of culture. And I think in a lot of cases, that's true.
In terms of cultural cycles, we're in a Tom Homan cycle, not a Tom Cruise upright Boy Scout cycle.

No. of cultural cycles, we're in a Tom Homan cycle, not a, you know, Tom Cruise upright Boy Scout cycle.
No, Lieutenant Weinberg, your time is up. We are we are over the soft leadership stuffed into a military outfit without ever having done a three mile run.
We need the Jessops of the world right now, Matt. And, you know, I don't know what's going to happen with the trend of Aragua gang deportations.
I certainly hope the Trump administration wins this. But let's just say they get their hands slapped by some court.
It doesn't matter. It's all worth it.
We're setting up the protocols, like how far can Trump push it to get rid of these people that Joe Biden let in?

And it's the same thing as like the signal gate that we kick the show off with. For the Democrats who said nothing about the floodgates being opened, I have almost no tolerance for their objections in how we now get rid of these people.
You know, you've lost your moral standing to complain about any of it. You caused this entire problem, which Trump is now trying to fix and the country wants desperately to fix.

Yeah. And just to go to go back to you're absolutely right.
And to go back to the John Harwood thing, the reason that comparison is so obscene is because, you know, the young black men who were rounded up during the Jim Crow period, they were citizens.

They had rights that were ignored and abused during that time.

They should have shared full equal rights because they were Americans just like us.

It's an apples to oranges thing to compare these two situations, to claim that these suspected gang members are like abused American citizens just isn't true.

And you're right.

They've lost all standing to complain about this like they have on speech issues. Okay.
Yeah, go ahead. I have one last point, Megan.
One of the reasons that Americans in general are so exercised about this issue is that they see it in the streets at home and around them. In other words, an insulated federal judge is one thing.
But when you're, you know, driving down the street and you see indigent people or what look like troublemakers, or if you go to the gym and you undress and the guy next to you has a tattoo of, you know, bloody death on his back, or if you come across these gang members in any setting, you're going to be scared. You're going to be frightened.
It's an existential issue for everyday Americans, especially working class Americans who mix in the kind of places that these people hang out. So they have a completely different perspective on this.
And of course, the media wants us to believe that there are all these sweet asylum seeking good people who just want a better life in America. And that's baloney.
I mean, yes, there's some portion and we do have asylum processes that would allow those folks if they enter through a port of entry to claim asylum. But it's been so abused that right now everything's paused right now.
It's just, you know, we got to stop the bleeding before we can decide whether anybody else gets to come in. It's like the sign held up by Homer Simpson, go home.
The country's full. That's how that's the mood right now.
Mood, as the kids say. Okay.
We've got to talk about the media because there's been, it's not just John Harwood with his, with his sins. Do you guys to The Daily, The New York Times podcast? It's called The Daily and it's on.
But I do. I do it for you, Matt.
I do it before you don't have to. Same thing with The View and Meghan Markle's dumb Netflix special.
I'm a giver like that, guys. So The Daily today.
You did what? just, just as like a horror movie exercise, but anyway, we're going to have to do a part two on that with Matt Taibbi Maureen bad news. You're out Matt Taibbi's in.
Um, okay. So today they had on, and I really liked Jim Rutenberg.
I have to say, he's a good guy, but he's a lefty

and everything he writes or says comes from that perspective. So that's just the way it is.
He used to be the Times critic, like media critic. And he's profiled me a couple of times.
That's how I got to know him. Anyway, I think he's a sweet guy, but this is his worldview, right? He comes on to talk to the host.
I think it was Michael Barbaro today. And yeah, it was.
And they were talking about the state of the media under Trump and how horrifying it is. They're horrified about how Trump has seems to have like taken over media.
I'm just going to give you a few samples of this. There's so much to choose from.
I guess I'll start. What do you think, Steve? Sot 10.
You guys pick your fave because we have a bunch that we love. Watch.
The echoes to that moment, to that period in time are so loud in these early days of the new Trump administration.

Strikingly so.

He's going after the press in ways that are very similar to the ways Nixon did, but he's going farther than Nixon did already in just the first couple months. At the same time, he's completely able to make an end run around the press, around its journalistic narratives to this huge new media sphere that will present the world only on the terms that Trump wants it presented on.
And that is something that Nixon could have only dreamed of. What what would it be? That's ridiculous.
No, but what would it be like, Walter? Can you like,

if only like the Democrats have to look at Trump and think, gee, what would life be like if we had outlets to just said what we want them to that were just like reliably in our corner and doing our bidding. The New York Times is asking this question as though they haven't been doing this for the Democrats since, well, at least the past 50, 40 years.
The New York Times has a hotline to the State Department, and it's probably got a hotline to the CIA. It's got a hotline to every position of power.
It has taken dictation for decades and decades. But the premise here is so flawed.
The idea that everybody is waiting for orders from Trump on independent media. The great thing about independent media now is that it's growing up from the grassroots and Trump is coming down from the presidency and they're meeting and they're not meeting seamlessly.
There's a lot of arguments. I mean, if conservatives, right wingers, libertarians have as many ways to argue with each other and disagree with each other as the left does, but they also have something that the left doesn't have right now, which is authenticity.
And they're trying to claim that this is a top down phenomenon when it is absolutely the opposite. Yeah.
That's so true. Think about what happened just the other week.
We showed the clip where it was like Black History Day and Trump had the CEO of Pfizer, among others at the White House. And Trump was like, hey, the CEO of Pfizer.
And, you know, this is the ardent Trump faithful at the White House where they were like, boom, boom to Trump. It is bottom up.
They love Trump, but he doesn't control them. They have their own strong feelings on the right about him, his policies, who they're going to applaud, who they're going to boo.
But before I get you to weigh in, Matt, I got to get in some of this other sound because it's all so delicious. There's more of the same point being made in a discussion about X.
Listen here. If you open up X, what used to be Twitter, under Elon Musk and now in the era of Donald Trump, you experience something very different than what you did a couple of years ago.
Whether it's Elon Musk himself coming on to praise President Trump or a bunch of conservative accounts I had never followed suddenly are very prominent on my feet. But very much it now feels like a daily megaphone for Trump and the entire MAGA movement.
That that's a big deal for Trump because it's, as you know, these are Trumpian narratives that take over the platform and support whatever he's saying that day. Suddenly, one of the most important, widely used social media platforms in the country, if not the world, is being managed for the president.
But it's its own media sphere. And it's emerged in this entirely new way.
And that's this world of male-dominated media. Okay, Matt, that, well, X was completely controlled by leftists since its iteration, since it was first born till two years ago, right? Facebook, same.
Zuckerberg's had a new sort of revelation that he's, I guess, more right-leaning than we knew. But Facebook has been completely left-leaning, at least in its core politics.
Go down the list, all the social media, right? Like, where's the discussion on how threads and blue sky are just democratic echo chambers now? You know, like, not to mention outside of social media, actual media, which other than this one digital lane is entirely controlled by leftists. So Megan, this is my favorite question that you've ever asked me.
Jim Rutenberg the irony of this is astounding Jim Rutenberg in

August My favorite question that you've ever asked me, Jim Rutenberg, the irony of this is astounding. Jim Rutenberg in August of 2016 wrote an extraordinarily influential article called Trump is testing the norms of objectivity in journalism.
And the entire argument of the piece was that Trump was such an extreme threat that journalists had to change the way they did business. We no longer had to be just true.
We had to be true to quote history's judgment, right? So it was a clarion call for the entire mainstream media to change it's they did this, they did that. We don't really care.
You sort it out attitude to let's become activists. Let's tell you which is the right thing and who is the villain and who isn't.
And let's become a narrative driven in your face politicized media, which has lost all credibility with audiences. Now, when he says that Trump can go circumvent journalistic narratives and go directly to the people, he's absolutely right.
But that is a market contest, a free market contest of believability where the mainstream media is losing because it's screwed up so many stories in pursuit of trying to preserve these politicized narratives. They've made so many horrific factual errors and gone over the deep end so many times that people trust the Joe Rogans and Megyn Kellys of the world far more than they do the Jim Rutenbergs of the world.
Jim Rutenberg created this situation that he's lamenting. It's extremely ironic.
Hashtag part of the problem. I'll give you one more.
Stop 14. Again, back to Nixon.
So to go back to Nixon for just a moment, what he wanted by your account most was to somehow get around journalists like Walter Cronkite, who he was so frustrated with, and so frustrated that he couldn't get around. With Trump, that dynamic has been kind of inverted, right? Trump doesn't have to go around the mainstream media.
This new Trumposphere in the media is already working with him and for him. And in that sense, Trump doesn't even need the mainstream media.
Walter, that's called the internet. That's called the internet.
Okay. But do you tell me, has there been a modern president who's made himself more accessible to the mainstream media than this one.
He has them in every day and lets them do a gaggle or holds a presser. He takes questions from all of them.
He gets annoyed at one or the other, like the AP and says, all right, you no longer be in pool. He takes questions from all of them.
When he ran, he went on Theo Vaughn. He did Joe Rogan.
He did Sean Ryan. He's not talking to those guys now.
They're not breaking news on Trump. He's talking only right now to these mainstream.
And they're still mad that the others exist. First of all, the reason that they can't adapt on the left is that they have an orthodox religion, which won't allow them to get over certain catechisms.
Nixon, Jim Crow, etc. These have nothing to do with life in America 2025 right now.
They're mourning a monopoly. They're mourning a period when there were three networks and basically three newspapers.
Now, they can't get over the fact that they've lost power, that the Internet goes from side to side, not top down, that it is indeed a net and that it's decentralized. The attempt in the last few years before Trump was elected and Elon took over Twitter was to make the internet and

social media resemble that old monopoly. They wanted to sit on top of it and use these academic

misinformation organizations and State Department-sponsored disinformation organizations

to curate it in a way that was really a losing battle in the modern age. Because the internet now

is like water. It can flow around you.
And it's not just Trump who can get his message out. It's

Thank you. And it's not just Trump who can get his message out.
It's all kinds of what characters that they would consider fringe. We've entered a new age and the New York times can't believe it's not still 1974.
And then invoking Nixon can't scare everybody from, you know, speaking up. But if you either get with it, people and Jim Rutenberg, or you're going to be left behind and you have been.
It's crazy because they talk about like they're so obsessed, of course, with Watergate. And, you know, I grew up, I watched all the president's men.
It was one of the reasons I wanted to become a journalist, not because they took down a Republican, but because that was spoon fed to all of us for decades as like the ultimate example of journalism at its core, like risk it all. You're in danger.
You're onto a great story. Everything around you is being threatened, but you stay on it like a dog with a bone.
And then ultimately you take down a president. It was a crazy story.
Only in retrospect, you look back and you're like, oh, that was the media doing what it does, like trying to take down a Republican. Only this one they can't get to, Matt.
But the same thing that makes them like, he texted war plans to Jeffrey Goldberg. And Trump is the devil who won't speak to any mainstream media sources,

even though he does it literally every day.

His oxygen is speaking to any and all reporters, but they won't see it.

No, he's Nixon.

He's got to control them all or he won't give us access.

It's so funny to see their own bias just completely

blind them to what's actually happening in front of them.

Thank you. them all or he won't give us access.
It's so funny to see their own bias just completely blind them to what's actually happening in front of them. Not only the bias, though, Megan, it's also just the wimpiness, the whining that, oh, my God, the president can get around the journalistic narratives and get around the mainstream media.
You know how the press gets power by being good at what it does. When you get a good story, when you break news, when you're a great investigative reporter like Cy Hirsch, people listen to you.
It's like EF Hutton, you know, when you have good information, people listen. When you suck at your job, like the people at The New York Times mostly have for quite a long time now, you lose audience.
And presidents like Donald Trump can get around you and you don't have the same influence that you have. You had in elections previously.
I mean, as a campaign reporter, I've been doing this for, I guess, since 2004. I covered five straight presidential elections.
And the press continually lost influence as people discovered that there were more sources out there on the Internet that they trusted more because they got tired of hearing the same old canned stuff from reporters who were too friendly with politicians in both parties, but particularly, you know, with with Democrats, I would say. And the fact that they get frozen out, it's their own fault.
It's their own fault for not working and for and for not thinking about the audience first and not their political sponsors. I got another one.
I follow up with you on that, Matt. Another piece of the broadcast today, their show was about how he's doing this, right? Going around, around the mainstream to these alternate sources.
But secondly, he's got, he's cracking down on the mainstream and they cite the ABC news settlement for $15 million with him, which was required because their lead political anchor repeatedly said Donald Trump had been found liable for rape, which is defamatory and false. By any measure, as a lawyer and a journalist, I can tell you we'd all be in deep shit if we said that and and it's not true about somebody.
Then they cite CBS, because Trump filed this lawsuit against them for their editing of the Kamala Harris thing, which I already said on the show I thought was a bullshit case. But he's trying to rattle their cage a bit, and he filed it in Texas where they have more favorable laws on consumer fraud, etc., whatever.
He wound up getting that transcript produced, and 60 Minutes was somewhat embarrassed. It wasn't like the worst switcheroo of answering I've ever seen in my life, but they were somewhat embarrassed by, it was clear they did run cover for Kamala, tried to make her look a little better than she did.
But the way they talked about it, Matt, it was like, Rutenberg was like, and this is 60 minutes. So he sued them and they're caving.
CBS is caving. And you're talking about like one of the most respected broadcasts in America.
And they're still, they're still so hard charging and tough at 60. You know, he did, in no way was he recognizing what the rest of us see.
It was just 60 is a shadow of its former self. It's a joke today versus when it had murderers row with Wallace and Bradley and the rest of them.
They just they don't they genuinely don't see it. It's unbelievable.
You know, my my father, who was a reporter, used to tell me that that you can learn you don't need to go to journalism school that you could learn it the the basics of the job in two hours but in those two hours probably the first thing that they tell you when you start working in journalism is that the one thing that you cannot do is accuse somebody in print of a crime that they have not been committed for.

That will get you sued 100 times out of 100.

And the ABC News case, you know, I understand the argument that you can construe that verdict, I guess, if you take a creative interpretation of it as rape.

But it's not going to hold. He wasn't convicted of rape and it wasn't a criminal case either.
The most you can say is sexual assault in that case. And he repeatedly said rape and he clearly knew what he was doing.
So that that's why they settled in the 60 Minutes case. They settled because they did something embarrassing and they didn't want to get it out.

They're trying to merge. They're trying to have a merger and they need government approval.
Right. Exactly.
And to your point about 60 Minutes falling from its great heights, Walter and I talked not that long ago about the 60 Minutes story about speech in Germany, where they did this extraordinary segment

sort of breathlessly showing how wonderful it was to live in a country where six armed cops burst into your door to arrest you for doing memes. And they don't see that.
For insulting somebody. Yeah.
Yeah. Literally for an insult.
So, to mention the old the laptop can't be verified.

It can't be verified. Leslie Stahl, not to mention what Scott Pelley did with Moms for Liberty when they came on.
There's there is no pornography being put in K through 12 education library books. There is, Scott.
There is. It was just there's so many examples.
60 is a joke to most of the country now, except these far lefties who still see it as, you know, the God of TV news. It's, it's just kind of fun, frankly, to see like how out of touch some on the left are Walter, because it's like the whole world has moved past them.
And they're still, I said this once before, it was like, we are all enjoying the fruits of our light bulb while they are trying to figure out what oil to put in the lantern. Megan, they're on a nostalgia trip.
Right now on Broadway, George Clooney is playing Murrow, okay? And good night and good luck. CBS can't get over its glory days.

New York Times can't get over its glory days, but they all go back to the 70s. It's like when my father insisted on playing music from 1955 when he was a high school football player.

He just had to revisit it obsessively.

And going back to Nixon and other moments when they had the power that they lack now, it's not our fault that there's no Walter Cronkite. It's theirs.
If they had someone as talented and trusted and charismatic and, frankly, objective-seeming as Cronkite, bring him forth. I don't see it.
By the way, I, too, am obsessed with the music that was on the radio during my high

school and college years. We recently went to a basketball game and I came out singing one of the

songs. I love this song.
And I admit to you, I never paused to ask myself, what does this actually

mean? Until my kids were like, mom, do you know what that means? And that song was OPP. Abigail Finan doesn't know either.
You down with OPP? Yeah, you know me. And let's just say in the second verse, he says something like the lady to the ladies.
OPP means something different. The first letter is the same, but the last is something different.
Then he says something like, um, I can't, he won't say it, but he says something like it's other people's. He says, I won't say it, but it rhymes with the leanest, the meanest.
Then I got it. Remember how these people in New York used to wear those OPP hats everywhere? That whole year, everyone was wearing fur OPP hats.
I mean, the skull caps, they were amazing. Don't know what I've been promoting all these years, Matt Taibbi.
Stand by. We'll figure that out in the break and be right back.
More with Walter and Matt coming up. Think of the last movie that made you think, that changed you, nevermind possibly inspired you.
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Speaking of leftist hypocrisy and cluelessness, Jasmine Crockett is a rising star amongst the far left progressives in this country. She's a representative from Houston, Texas,

of all places, which makes no sense because she seems to be far too left for Houston, but apparently not because they elected her. It must be like, you know, Orange County in California being like the one outlier in an otherwise uniformly state, like all red with the one blue, all blue with the one red.
Um, okay. So Jasmine Crockett got up at a Los Angeles dinner this past Saturday and, um, it was hosted by, this is perfect.
The human rights campaign. These are the people who run around harassing every business to make sure that they're being pro LGBTQ and pro DEI and pro-DEI and not doing anything that a human rights campaign

finds offensive in any way, shape, or form,

unless if you are in a wheelchair

and are the governor of Texas,

in which case it is fine for Jasmine Crockett

to do this to you.

Watch.

Because we in these hot-ass Texas streets, honey.

Y'all know we got governor hot Wheels down there. Come on now.
And the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot ass mess, honey. I got to check my woke rule book, Walter, but I'm not sure that I don't think that's allowed.
I do not think you refer to the guy who's in a wheelchair as the governor of your state as governor Hot Wheels. Some of her defenders online are like, we all call him that down here.
And as far as I can tell, it's only nasty leftists who do. I'm not sure that gives you a pass.
If she'd spoken in English, I would have understood her better. So I almost didn't miss.
I almost didn't catch the insult. One thing the Democrats specialize in is accents.
Okay. They adapt them to the audience and sometimes they go really far out there and she's at, she's at the bleeding edge of street talk.
Okay. There's going to be a point at which I don't understand at all.
And they're speaking in code to their own supporters. And frankly, that's where they're getting every time they tried to micro target and bend over backwards for some specialty audience with what are otherwise supposed to be national figures.
You say she's a rising star, but she can't rise that far because a lot of people here in Montana can't decode her speech. Um, so it's, it, it, it is, uh, condescending.
It is thespian. It's pure acting what they're doing.
They're trying to be edgy. They're trying to get headlines and clicks for these otherwise, you know, ridiculous, uh, insults, but she got on the Megyn Kelly show and being a rising star in the Democratic Party means getting increasing amounts of attention for increasingly absurd statements.
It's just like when you're on the campaign trail, right? We're going to win. We know you don't talk like that.
We hear you every day. The sitting vice president, why are you talking like that? Right.
Or give whatever the accent was in front of the crowd, you know? Um, but it's funny. You should raise this point.
It's, it's like, we knew you were coming Walter, because we, I'm, Oh, we got this from Ian Hayworth. He's a commentator online, clever.
And he put together a montage of Jasmine Crockett sounding like, I don't know, I guess her normal self versus her new accent, which she brings out when she's in front of the crowds or she wants to rip on governor hot wheels and his wheelchair. Take a listen to 17B.
My mind, I'm thinking, I just got to Austin and I had to be five people to get here. I don't know about this.
Y'all don't know what white privilege looks like, but I'm going to show you a little bit of something. It's a huge responsibility.
You know, the congressional seat is over four times as large as my house seat. I'm trying to get clarification.
Look at calm down. Calm down.
No, no, no, no. Because this is what y'all do.

And I was just starting to get into the rhythm of doing constituent services.

They send them to Texas.

They send them to Florida.

Every deplorable state that we can think about, they usually coming out of y'all's think tank. There was someone that talked to me and said, in fact, a former ambassador in the Clinton administration.

Someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody's bleach blonde, bad built, butch body. OK, Matt, that was three years ago.
The ones of her just sounding like a normal person talking three years. Not like that was 20 years.
But then she moved to Mississippi for all that time. That was three years ago.
She sounded like a totally normal person. It's only now she's got her accent and she's going to kick everybody's ass.
It's such an affectation. So this is funny.
Jasmine Crockett sits on the Judiciary Committee and about a month was about a month ago, Walter. Yes.
Yes. We saw this.
Yeah. And the hearings, the full committee hearings are quite long.
You know, you can be there for over four hours. So and they let the most junior members ask questions last.
so I had to sit for quite a long time uh and then at the very end Jasmine Crockett who I'd never

heard before suddenly started screaming at me and Michael Schellenberger. And when you're a witness in Congress, you have to pay attention to what everybody says because you never know when you're going to be asked an actual question and maybe even allowed to speak.
But I could not understand what she was saying. She was moving from one thing to another and she was doing all that code switching stuff with the y'alls and y'all eyeing on this and everything.
And then I went home to look her up and I found her talking like that online. I was like, what is that all about? And there was not even a pretense of addressing any of the issues that we were there to talk about, like digital censorship.
It was just these people somehow represent the other side. She probably had no idea that, you know, I was a lifetime Democrat or had been most most of the time.
And it's just that's what she does. She puts out this video of her acting in a certain way, and that's how she fundraises.

We actually did a bit of a deep dive on her after my old colleague from Fox News, Todd Starnes, posted something on X not long ago, Walter.

He posted the following.

Jasmine Crockett wants you to think she's from the hood, that she grew up on the streets.

The exact opposite is true.

She attended an exclusive day school where tuition is nearly $35,000 a year. She also attended Rhodes College, a private school where tuition is nearly $55,000 a year.
She's cosplaying a gangsta. So we looked up her background.
She was born in St. Louis.
She's 43. Her dad was a Baptist pastor and a teacher.
Her mother worked in a post office. She graduated from Mary Institute and St.
Louis Country Day School, one of the most expensive private schools in the city. Indeed, the current tuition, $35,000 a year.
Got her bachelor's from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, private liberal arts school, current tuition, $55,000. Then she moved to Texas and went to law school.
Looks like she started at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law, finished at the University of Houston Law Center. But while she was at Rhodes College in Memphis, the Tennessee Star reported this past May, almost a year ago now, that she and other black students, she claimed in a 2020 interview, were victims of multiple hate crimes in 2002 when she was a college student, that she said, in my junior year, I became the victim of a series of hate crimes, a series of them.
Myself, along with a handful of other black students, this is her claiming this in 2020 about her 2002 college experience. My school didn't know what to do.
They brought in the Cochran law firm and the lawyer that helped me became my instant shero. They go on to say in 2021, she provided additional details of the alleged hate crimes to ABC7, with the outlet reporting that she recalled needing an advocate when someone left racist hate mail in her campus mailbox and when her black friends had their cars keyed on campus.
The Tennessee Star contacted Rhodes College to seek details about the alleged hate crimes and whether police reports were filed and whether the Cochran law firm was actually retained. The college did not respond.
An additional inquiry by the star to the Cochran firm similarly did not receive an immediate response. The stars sought confirmation from the firm about whether they even represented the college and the female attorney identified as the shero and didn't get any response.
And then before we went on the air today, we called, we followed up with the star just to see if they ever got anything back. And here's what they got from Crockett's office.
They told the star, the racist mail was assembled using letters cut out of magazines and newspapers, but they say Crockett's office did not respond to an inquiry by the star that sought to determine whether the letters still exist and are in her possession. Pressed for details about the incidents, her spokesperson told the star they consisted of racist slurs and hate mail that were put in her and 17 other student campus mailboxes, but the paper reports that Crockett's office did not reply to the star's inquiry seeking to determine whether Crockett and the other students ever filed a police report.
Okay. I mean, I'm sorry, but this woman, I think Todd Starnes had it right.
She's cosplaying something other than what she is. They're all cosplaying.
I was at a Senate hearing recently, and I looked at the left side of the horseshoe. It was the RFK Jr.
confirmation hearing. And there was Bernie playing the socialist, and there was Elizabeth Warren playing the puritanical scold.
It was like a boy band or a band that had been assembled by a casting agent. They have a person who represents each part of their demographic or their constituency, and they play the role to the hilt.
But the biggest difference these days between Democrats and Republicans is this. On the Republican side, people claim that they should have power because of what they've done.
I'm Elon Musk. I shoot rockets into space.
I administer Twitter. I'm Donald Trump.
I built skyscrapers and developed real estate around the world. On the Democratic side, it's what was done to you that's important.
This is what happened to me when I was young, when I was in college, I was a victim. Now, I just think in America, claiming that victimization is an accomplishment is a period that's over.
She's still at it, but I don't think it flies. She's another AOC who was Sandy Cortez for her entire upbringing in Yorktown Heights, which is part of Westchester, Matt, not Alexandria Ocasio Cortez woman with a Puerto Rican history.
She does have a Puerto Rican parent and the others, the white person from Westchester, I think. Now she's, you know, AOC as she wants us to lean into with the person of of color she is and the rough upbringing she had in the Bronx, which is not Yorktown Heights.
Trust me. Lifelong resident of New York State and dated a guy for five years from Yorktown Heights to stop.
In any event, now Jasmine Crockett's out there. She wants to be the lead attacker of Elon uh, Elon Musk of governor Abbott of Ted Cruz.
Here's her latest on Elon, I guess, as she celebrates her birthday, which was March 19th on March 29th. It's my birthday.
And all I want to see happen on my birthday is for Elon to be taken down. Yes.
Listen, I have learned as I serve on the Doge Oversight Committee that there is only one language that the people that are in charge understand right now. And that language is money.
She sounded normal there a little bit, Matt. I guess the accent comes and goes.
Yeah, it seems like this is a person for whom there is more than one language. And it's apparently not just money.
But yeah, I think Walter's exactly right. And your comparison to AOC is apt.
It's so strange. You know, Ocasio-Cortez, before she became,

before she ran for Congress for the first time, there was a Bernie-backed group called Brand New Congress, whose mission was to replace the entire Congress. Alexa, stop.
To replace the entire Congress with populist candidates.

And they chose to support AOC because when... to replace the entire Congress with populist candidates.

And they chose to support AOC because when the people from this group met with her, they felt like she was a, quote, normal person and wouldn't come off as an activist who would rub voters the wrong way.

And so the irony is that she gets into Congress and immediately adopts a completely different personality. I think that does happen at times, you know, people, once they get a taste of politics and they, especially when they get a taste of social media attention, you just never know what's going to happen to them.
And the incentives in, particularly in the Democratic Party politics are all wrong they, they just incentivize people to behave in ways that they never would in real life. You know, Walter, I used to have a best friend who she would, she'd have a few drinks back in the college days and she was start speaking with a Southern accent.
It was, it was organic. It wasn't, it wasn't an affectation just kind of started coming out.
It was her drunk personality. I don't think Jasmine Crockett has such an excuse.
I like she's trying to send some sort of a message. She thinks like being street is going to make her seem tough or get her some sort of cred with some sort of a group, but really just makes her look dumb, especially when you have the old tape of her.
It's it's middle class and upper middle class people pretending to be poor and and nobody wants their children to grow up and be poor uh she's playing a role and when she's relaxed she stops playing it as we just saw in fact when she's drunk she sounds like a kid who went to private school yeah that's right that's worst. The worst.
You guys, it's been a fruitful and

enjoyable two hours, and I thank you both profusely for coming on. Great to see you both.

Thank you.

Went too fast. And we are back tomorrow with Jordan Peterson.
He's only been on one other time.

Looking forward to that.

Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.