Left Falsely Blames Right For House Fire, and Data Privacy Issues, with Rich Lowry, Charles C.W. Cooke, Erik Prince, and Joe Weil | Ep. 1166

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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.

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Attorney General Pam Bondi is testifying before the Senate as we speak, where she is blasting Democrats for opposing immigration enforcement in deep blue cities.

And Stephen Miller had an epic takedown of a CNN anchor.

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Plus, the latest on the saga of Jay Jones, the Democratic Virginia AG candidate with a penchant for sending violent texts.

Again, it's not really a violent, there's no such thing as a violent text.

Sending texts,

loving violence, sending texts, celebrating violence, wishing for it, praying for it, hoping for it about his political opponents.

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Guys, welcome to the show.

Great to see you.

Thanks for having us.

All right, so

I'm very interested in this South Carolina judge story.

Not one of the stories that we began with, but I'm sure you guys know what I'm talking about.

There's a South Carolina Circuit Court judge named Diane Goodstein, and this woman, like pretty much every judge in America, has recently ruled on a matter involving some Trump policy.

And she ruled against him.

It wasn't that big a deal, but she did rule against him.

She temporarily blocked the state's election commission from releasing its voter files to the DOJ.

The DOJ is looking for voter files because they're trying to comply with Trump's executive order to stop non-citizens from registering to vote.

Seems like it would make a lot of sense, right?

You've got to check the voter rolls, and we're already seeing some voter rolls get purged of illegals, which is good.

They have no right to vote.

No one can even argue opposite.

So, in any event, she didn't want to turn over the information, and she said, I'm going to temporarily block this.

That was later reversed by the South Carolina Supreme Court, the state Supreme Court there.

So, whatever.

To me, that's your bargain variety

legal dispute.

She She did rule against Trump, but whatever.

Then they said, okay, she's been getting death threats.

Now, I'm sorry, but death threats for any judge, sadly, in modern-day America, are commonplace.

I mean, I was a practicing lawyer for 10 years.

I know about this.

Lawyers get them too.

And by the way, not for nothing, but also journalists.

So it's not that I'm celebrating it or don't have empathy for somebody who receives it.

But I always ask the question, what kind of death threats?

I mean, if you just seriously go take a a look at any, probably any one of ours, but definitely my Twitter feed, and you see the comments that people post, you'll find a couple, some rape threats, some death threats, some assault threats.

It's crazy, but unfortunately, it's out there.

But then there's serious death threat.

Then there's an elevation of something that's an actual threat.

And people around public figures know the difference between the two.

So I always want to know, like, what kind of death threats?

Somebody online saying, I hope you burn, right?

That's not exactly what we're talking about, or like a credible threat.

All right, so all that is just to set up what happened here.

So, this woman says she was receiving some death threats.

And then on Saturday, her home caught on fire at 11:30 a.m.

Eastern Time.

She was not there.

She says she was walking on the beach.

You can see in the pictures here that her home is on the water in South Carolina.

She wasn't in the home, but her husband, who I think is 81, she's 69, was in the home.

He's fine.

Everyone is okay, relatively speaking.

The husband, who is in his low 80s, was in the house, along with, it's unclear to me, but they said three people suffered some sort of an injury.

It sounds like it was all related to jumping out of the house.

Thank God they got out, but like went out on a balcony and had to jump for it.

You can imagine if you're 81, those injuries would be, you know, rather profound.

And then it sounds like either their adult children were in the home or possibly their grandchildren, but no one's making too much out of the other injuries.

I'm not downplaying the story.

I'm just trying to, I spent some time this morning trying to figure out exactly what the injuries are.

And it sounds like the husband was the one with the most significant injuries, and we certainly hope he gets better quickly.

Let's see, they said,

stand by.

Arnie is his name, suffered multiple fractures to his hips, legs, and feet.

The judge's son.

was also hospitalized, though his condition remains unclear.

And that dad, the Arnie injuries, are the most severe.

He He was airlifted to the hospital.

So that's nothing to shake a stick at.

The husband seems really hurt, but thank God they weren't burned to death.

I mean, obviously, that or smoke inhalation are the most serious injuries when a fire breaks out.

Okay, so that's a tragedy.

It's awful, and everybody lives in fear of house fires.

However, the story is the lead of our show today because of what happened thereafter, which is a bunch of leftists led by Dan Goldman of Levi's Fortune.

He's a rich kid who decided to cosplay as a lawmaker, and he ran cover for Joe Biden for four years,

just was a mouthpiece for whatever Joe Biden said, did not exercise any independent judgment.

And he rushes to X, formerly Twitter, to post as follows.

Trump, Stephen Miller, and MAGA World have been doxing and threatening judges who rule against Trump, including Judge Goodstein.

Today, Today, someone committed arson on the judge's home, severely injuring her husband and son.

Will Trump speak out against the extreme right that did this?

I mean, there's a lot in there, guys.

First of all, how did he know it was arson?

And second of all, how did he know whatever happened was committed by the, quote, extreme right?

Talk about getting out ahead of your skis.

Stephen Miller promptly chastised him, calling him vile, deeply warped, and said that was a libelous madness that he posted.

And Dan Goldman doubled down.

Try answering my question.

If you're trying to combat political violence, why don't you condemn the political violence against a judge who ruled against you and your administration?

It's pretty simple.

Do you condemn all political violence or only that against your supporters?

All right.

He wasn't the only one.

I'll get to the others in a minute, but I'm just going to start with Goldman.

And then you had Monday afternoon and SLED, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, coming out, the chief, Mark Keel, saying there is no evidence to indicate this fire was intentionally set.

SLED agents have preliminarily found there is no evidence to support a pre-fire explosion.

So no evidence to support a pre-file explosion and none of arson.

Zero.

Has Dan Goldman taken down his tweets?

No.

Has he apologized for them?

No.

They're still sitting there misinforming whatever number follows Dan Goldman.

I didn't bother to look it up.

This is an elected U.S.

Congressman.

That's the state of America today, guys, where you're seeing figures on the right wing, prominent, very prominent figures from the Republican nominee in July of 24, Trump, to Charlie Kirk just last month, being actually assassinated or assassination attempts happening.

And as conservatives run around saying, we really, really, really need to talk about why this is happening and we really would like you to just put some sort of a cap on the incendiary talk about very prominent right-wing figures, especially right now when we're in danger of copycats.

We just

keep getting told it's both sides, both sides, both sides.

And now they rush to judgment because you could feel, Rich, the excitement on their part that they thought they finally had one.

They were thrilled.

Desperate.

They thought they finally had one.

Yeah, hungry for a counter example.

Look, two things.

One, that looked like it was a beautiful home, and that was a no-kidding fire, right?

This is not a kitchen fire.

People injured exiting the house looked like it burned to the ground, quite spectacular.

But I would just say, you know, we always have to be cautious about jumping to conclusions, no pun intended, obviously.

But 11.30 a.m., that's when you said the fire started.

It's very unlikely someone's going to go commit an act of fire, of arson at 11.30 a.m.

Daylight hours, middle of the morning with people in the home, right?

It doesn't make any sense.

And then there was no, there was no perpetrator or suspect.

So you're leaping to the conclusion that it's arson.

And then you're leaping on top of that conclusion that it was politically motivated.

arson and then you're leaping on top of that that it was mega politically motivated arson right?

And the only reason you do that is because you're feeling extremely defensive, because there have been these hideous acts of political violence that your own side has committed, and you want to engage in what about ism or both sidesm and use this terrible house fire as an example.

He should be humiliated, he should be embarrassed, he should take the post down and apologize to everyone he misled and apologize directly to Stephen Miller.

Of course, he'll never do it.

And Charlie, it's not just him, of course.

Among the others who pushed this lie was Nira Tandon.

She's like a bad penny.

She just keeps resurfacing in every administration, right?

We saw her.

She was Biden's director of domestic policy council.

This was Nira Tandon after his bad June, his bad, to put it mildly, June 2024 debate.

He's inquisitive, focused.

He remembers.

He's sharp.

That's the honesty level we're dealing with when we talk about Nira Tandon.

She was domestic policy advisor for Obama's 2008 campaign.

She was domestic policy advisor to Hillary.

This woman's just all over Democrat politics.

She's a very, very well-known figure on the left.

And Neera Tandon retweeted a tweet.

It remains up

that, let's see, reads as follows.

A few weeks ago, one of Trump's top DOJ officials publicly targeted this judge.

Today, that judge's home is on fire.

Neeratandon retweeted that.

By the way, they're talking about Harmeet Dillon.

This is how Harmeet Dillon, quote, targeted this judge.

After that ruling I mentioned, Harmeet Dillon, who's a perfectly reasonable person, I mean, good luck trying to paint her as an extremist, tweeted out, the Justice Department Office of Civil Rights will not stand for a state court judge's hasty nullification of our federal voting laws.

I will allow nothing to stand in the way of our mandate to maintain clean voter roles.

One citizen, one vote.

That's how Neera Tandon, according to the left, somehow incited an alleged arson that didn't take place.

And Nira Tandon's post remains up as well.

Then she also added, we need to get to the bottom of what happened here, but this happened hours after Stephen Miller attacked judges for insurrection.

I mean, the irresponsibility.

Yeah, there are two things about this that annoy me.

The first is I really do think that the institutional left has to decide whether or not it's acceptable to criticize judges.

I don't like the way that Trump sometimes talks about judges.

I don't like the way people around Trump sometimes talk about judges, but that is a consistent view that I have.

The left spent the last four years suggesting that the Supreme Court was corrupt.

and illegitimate and needed to be packed.

And now, every time the Trump administration so much as says that a lower court ruling is wrong, which is fine, then we're apparently living in the final days of the Republic.

So that's annoying.

The bigger problem here I think is that figures such as Nira Tandon live in this little bubble and as a result they receive information that is incorrect and they may never actually see the correction.

So it's not just that near atandon has a false impression of what is currently the problem.

And I use that word currently advisedly.

There is such a thing as right-wing violence.

We've seen some of it.

We saw January 6th, which was a pretty bad illustration of right-wing violence.

But in the last three or four years, leftist violence has been much worse than right-wing violence.

And in the last year, especially, the trend is pretty alarming.

But Nira Tandon doesn't know that.

Nira Tandon, like a lot of people who work in professional progressive politics, simply do not believe that people on their side are capable of committing violence or doing bad things because they're progressives and they're therefore on the side of the angels.

So she's primed to see this as violence.

The way she talks about it is, well, of course.

And then she jumps to this conclusion.

And she, and certainly those who follow her, may never know that this wasn't anything to do with politics from all that we know.

There are millions and millions of people out there right now who believe that the person who murdered Charlie Kirk was a right-wing griper.

They will believe that forever.

There is nothing that will convince them otherwise.

For the rest of their lives, that will form part of the political and ideological scaffolding that undergirds their views.

Neera Tandon is a perfect example of that sort of person.

And that is a very big problem that we struggle with in the modern era.

To your point, I was making this point yesterday.

In the mornings, I listen to a bunch of podcasts, including MPRs up first.

I do this so that you don't have to do do it.

I need to keep an eye on them.

I can't stand the podcast.

I don't recommend the podcast.

I don't like the personalities.

I hate the music.

The news is biased and almost like a thought bomb that goes off, where, like, you know, you're corrupting your mind.

But literally, every day, I get an example of left-wing bias that is so egregious, we talk about them a lot.

So, people know it's real.

They know it's real anyway, but seeing the examples is persuasive.

And

when the ICE shooter took aim at the Dallas ICE facility and wound up accidentally killing detainees instead of ICE agents, and the very first day that that story broke, you may remember, it came out that on the bullet casings, he had written anti-ICE.

You didn't really have to try hard to understand what was in his head.

It was all there black and white, but NPR decided to do a story, just like much of the mainstream media, saying,

motives are unclear.

We really don't know.

Okay, except it was literally written there on the bullet casing.

It's not like a gum wrapper near the scene, like on the bullet casing.

We may never know.

It's unclear.

So the next day, it comes out

this guy had written all sorts of notes

at his personal residence where they found it, attacking ICE agents as guilty of human trafficking,

saying

the people who are at that facility are nothing but folks showing up to collect a dirty paycheck.

Then there was a handwritten note recovered by investigators that read, hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror to think, is there a sniper with armor-piercing rounds on that roof?

I'm sorry, Charlie, but how much more clear can you get?

Hopefully, this will cause terror in the hearts of ICE agents.

Did NPR go back the second day and say, now we know, Nira, because it's Nira Tandon and her ilk who listened to NPR.

I'm the only right person who does it

Nira who actually we want to we want to amend our report yesterday.

It's now clear clear as can be it was anti-ice.

No, so to your point, they do they live in this bubble and they're controlled by media people who have absolutely no fealty to the truth

and

who can know what someone means by writing anti-ice on a bunch of bullets.

Maybe they work in a restaurant in Europe and they just don't have an ice machine.

They don't want an ice machine.

They like delivering that tepid room temperature water.

They're really, really convinced that that's the way.

I mean, look, it's so silly.

And we saw this again with the guy, I won't name him who murdered Charlie Kirk, where suddenly it became very nuanced, became very difficult to discern.

Meaning was

impossible to interrogate because this online world is ironic.

And it's just give me a break.

The double standard here is really irritating.

I am quite open

as I was earlier about right-wing violence where it exists.

There are examples of it, but that's not the problem we're facing as a country right now.

And it doesn't help anyone in the long run to pretend otherwise.

It's amazing, like the actual someone committed political violence.

It was arson.

Naming Stephen Miller.

I mean, this is aggressive stuff, even for your most ardent partisan.

This group, Progressive, this Progressive News Outlet, Democracy Now, you guys have all heard of them, they too got in on the bashing Harmeet Dillon train,

writing the following.

Let's see.

Judge Goodstein had received death threats recently after President Trump's Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dillon criticized the judge for temporarily blocking the state's election commission from releasing its voter files to the DOJ.

Again, based on that milquetoast tweet by Harmeet, Rich, the media too leaned into this.

Here's Nicole Wallace and former Obama DOJ official Mary McCord.

Listen to their take.

When we come back, what we're learning about the fire that destroyed the home of a South Carolina Circuit Court judge who faced criticism from Trump officials.

It comes amid a surge in hostility and threats against judges, as well as criticism directly from the Trump administration, including for Judge Goodsteins.

Mary, what questions do you have based on what we're hearing so far?

You know, this is the kind of, again, we've talked today already about crossing Rubicons, right?

And when you're starting to attack judges because of their rulings, we're in a very, very dangerous position in this country.

He needs to know the power of his voice and how people respond to that.

Oh, my God, Rich.

Yeah,

it's one thing to get something wrong.

We all get things wrong.

We all go prematurely sometimes, but they'll never go back, right?

Is she going to do another show?

Oh, I got this all wrong.

Sorry, I misled my viewers.

They never go back.

And to your point, like...

Goldman didn't delete the tweet.

He didn't even delete the tweet.

Even the most shameful people will just delete without apologizing.

Yeah.

And then, you know, to the point of people not knowing, I was struck about a year ago, Pete Buttigieg was on CNBC and was challenged by in the morning show and that one one host who's a Republican about, yeah, why did you undo all the Trump enforcement measures measures that were working under Biden?

And now you have a border crisis.

And Buttigieg said, no, we only undid child separations.

We only reversed child separations.

And I don't think he was lying.

I think he had legitimately no idea that starting on day one, Biden had unraveled all this Trump stuff because he never consumed any media that would have told him that.

So this guy is very glib and supposed to be well-informed and one of the brightest and best Democrats had no idea what the reality was on this key issue that helped decide the 2024 election.

And then just on the issue of violence, I mean, we have seen a low-level anti-Trump terror campaign in this country over the last year.

Now, I emphasize low-level, but I think the Tesla, the violence against Tesla dealerships and cars, it's acts of violence, illegal acts undertaken to advance a social or political agenda.

And that's certainly what we've seen with ICE.

The shooting was terrible, but there was an incident in Texas just a few weeks earlier that didn't get a lot of attention that involved a pro-trans anti-fascist cell in Texas undertaking an organized ambush of an ICE facility where they're graffitiing vehicles in the parking lot

in hopes to get ICE to come out, ICE officials to come out and get shot.

Now, none of them did.

A cop showed up and he got shot at.

But this is terroristic activity in the same way what we're seeing in Chicago, again, I've emphasized very low level, but it's kind of a low-level insurgency against federal law enforcement, where the vehicles are being chased by convoys of people, rocks are being thrown at the vehicles, vehicles are being rammed.

Everything is being undertaken to resist federal law enforcement, including acts of violence.

So this is shameful.

It's very real.

We should all be aware of it, but one side is wearing blinders and then is is hypersensitive to try to find any counterexamples.

Again, so they can say both sides are doing it.

What wasn't low-level, obviously, was the assassination of Charlie, the attempted assassination of Trump, the murder of Corey Comperator.

Or yesterday, I was mentioning the names of David Dutch and Jim Copenhaver,

57 and 74.

You guys probably don't know those names when I say them because no one does.

They're the other two people who were shot at the Butler rally.

They don't get,

they'd be national heroes.

They'd be everyday household names if that had been, oh, no, an Obama or a Kamala Harris or a Joe Biden rally.

But they're not because they were Trump supporters who got shot and they too were victims of political violence.

Again, not that part's not low level, but I take your point on like the Tesla dealerships and what's been happening on these attempted ICE harassment incidents that include violence.

One other thing on the messaging by the media, Charlie, Time magazine.

Hours before the fire at Goodstein's house, Trump's deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, accused this, accused U.S.

Judge Karen Immergut of legal insurrection for granting a restraining order that blocks Trump's deployment of the Oregon National Guard in Portland.

This has nothing to do with this judge whose house burned was in South Carolina.

They're calling up something Stephen Miller said about a judge in Oregon.

to try to blame, like creating an atmosphere against judges, which is insane.

People magazine, which people may not know this, People Magazine is 100% leftist.

They never get a story right that in a way that would flatter a right-winger.

They are of the left.

Trust me, I actually know a lot of the people who are there.

This is their headline.

South Carolina judge's home erupts in flames with family inside after she ruled against Trump and began receiving death threats.

Newsweek, Judge Diane Goodstein's home burns to the ground after ruling against Trump.

This is just irresponsible journalism.

You don't do that.

You do not do that.

House fires, one more point, can happen for all sorts of reasons.

When we saw Charlie get shot in the neck, it was a logical leap that this was an intentional act by someone who hated him.

And the odds were overwhelming that it was somebody who didn't share his politics.

That was a speculation that was supported by facts that was engaged in across the board.

And of course, it was true.

A house fire, it happens all over the place.

And this is not to make light of what happened to this judge's family, but I pulled this video just to show you.

This happened a couple of weeks ago and my staff and I, we all laughed at this.

I was sitting upstairs in my studio here.

I have an office up there.

You guys have been here.

And I'm just sitting there reading and my desk.

like underneath the lamp started smoking.

I'm going to show it to you because I took out my camera and filmed it.

Okay, so here you can see there's this glow.

Look, there's.

Oh my God.

Was it not the clock the last time?

Is it the desk that's on fire?

It's the light.

It's the sun.

Isn't it?

So what was happening there for the listening audience is I had this lamp that has a big glass bottom, a bulbous bottom, and the sunlight, much like you practice when you're a kid with a little prism, was coming through the bulbous glass and it was burning my desk.

I thought, previously, you heard me reference it, that I had a clock that was, that was catching fire.

I threw away that clock saying, oh my God, the battery's melted down.

I didn't realize even that.

And if you look at the desk, there are five hash marks in it from previous burns.

Whatever you do, don't get a toaster on your desk.

That'd be too hazardous.

We got rid of the lamp.

This is a silly way of making my point, Charlie, which is house fires can start through all sorts of unforeseen ways.

It's not like somebody being gunned down at a rally.

This was so irresponsible of all these media to jump immediately to after death threats, after comments by Trump, after comments by Stephen Miller about some other judge, after a benign tweet by Harmeet.

This is a cousin of this term that the left developed called stochastic terrorism, which in a sense is a clever way of being being able to blame Republicans if anyone out there does something crazy by linking it indirectly to something that someone has said.

The idea is that if someone says something inflammatory, because there are crazy people, you're statistically likely that a crazy person will hear the inflammatory comment, act on it, therefore it's terrorism.

It's complete nonsense.

It's partisan, it's one-sided, and it's been quietly dropped in the last year for obvious reasons.

Because if there's any such thing as stochastic terrorism, which there's not, then it would be obviously a big problem at the moment for the left.

What I think is particularly amazing about this, though, and especially the clip that you showed from MSNBC there, is that we just witnessed the trial and inadequate sentencing of a man who was going to kill Justice Kavanaugh and up to two other Supreme Court justices over the overturning of Roe v.

Wade.

That person got eight years, it seems in part

because he now says he's a she and the mother of he is now more on board with he being a she.

So on the one hand, we have an actual plot to kill actual justices to change the actual foundation of American law and that person being given a sentence that is 22 years under the 30-year guideline maximum.

And on the other hand, you have a house burning down, and this somehow being an indictment of general criticism of the judiciary.

This is preposterous as a double standard.

I don't want to blame the left for what happened in the case with Kavanaugh's would-be assassin, because I don't want to create a culture in which people feel unable to speak out loud.

But if you are going to make that case, as we just heard on MSNBC, you should not be focused on some absurdly attenuated link with a house fire that had nothing to do with it.

You should be utterly outraged by what happened in the sentencing of the man who was going to kill Justice Kavanaugh.

But they weren't.

MSNBC did not run a segment on that.

They didn't say it was a threat to the country.

They didn't call out Chuck Schumer for standing near the Supreme Court and saying that Kavanaugh and others would reap the whirlwind because they don't actually care.

That's right.

And you can sense it, Rich, as we've been waiting for them to have an appropriate, some have, not all have been awful in the wake of Charlie's death, but as we've been waiting for there to be universal condemnation of what happened to him, and we've been frustrated to see that's not the case, or even universal condemnation of what happened to the United Healthcare CEO after Luigi Mangioni allegedly, well, did shoot him.

He denies it, but we'll see.

But there wasn't.

You know,

the universal condemnation is only a thing on the right.

You know, that's why these two situations of like what happened to Charlie and what happened to that Minneapolis House speaker, that one in Minnesota, are not on point

because the right did universally condemn what happened to her.

There was one errant Mike Lee tweet, which he immediately took down after being shamed by right-wingers.

But the entire right-wing condemned that, and no one had been creating a cauldron for that House speaker prior to her assassination.

Some nutcase who said he was there on orders from Tim Waltz is the one who killed her.

But that's why it's just,

you know, these people have been waiting.

Instead of universal condemnation, some of them are like,

is it so bad that Charlie Kirk is gone?

I mean, is the world better without him?

He was a hateful person.

That's their narrative.

And they're just waiting, waiting, waiting until a right-winger commits an act of violence so they can say, see, see, both sides.

Now you condemn, you condemn.

It'll come back on us.

Yeah.

So at least we haven't seen what we saw with Mangioni, which is actually making him into a cult hero.

So we haven't seen that with Tyler Robinson.

We have seen the misdirection.

Like some people, oh, is it disturbed?

We'll never know.

It's

obvious what this was about and why he did it.

And some of these cases where a political figure, Gabby Giffords, famous one, is

harmed in a terrible attack, the perpetrator is just literally completely out of his mind.

that was a schizophrenic that attacked gabby giffords that was not the case with charlie kirk this was someone who's had his wits totally about him and set about uh murdering charlie kirk for political reasons to silence his voice and but we have seen a lot of people not wanting to take take that on and um uh sort of evade evade that truth and then also being harshly critical in a way of charlie's views in the immediate aftermath of this in a way that's inappropriate Now, obviously, not everyone needs to agree with Charlie Kirk.

A lot of people didn't agree with Charlie Kirk.

All that's fine.

But

there is some kind of

diplomacy when someone's actually been murdered in cold blood.

And we have seen

a lot of this.

The guy who was about to debate Charlie in a couple of weeks was horrified by it and obviously really moved by it and disturbed by it.

That's the appropriate reaction.

But they play this game and we've seen it with Jay Jones, the attorney general candidate down there in Virginia.

Yeah, so

there has been a lot of condemnation of that, but no one's said, oh, you got to step aside.

So they're trying to do just

enough to placate the view that this is hideously wrong,

what he said, and this is a worldview that's poisonous, has no place in our politics.

But they won't take the actual step, say, well, if it has no place in our politics, maybe has no place in that race because that would hurt too much and give up any chance of winning that.

He's running to be the top law enforcement official of the Commonwealth of Virginia, to be the top law enforcement.

He's not running to be the dog catcher where we don't really have to worry about whether he's going to catch the Republicans' dogs who are loose, too.

He's running to be the top law enforcement officer, and he's perfectly comfortable calling for the murder of Republican children.

I'm going to go to Jay Jones in one second, but you mentioned Van Jones, and I've been trying to get to this.

I have a very different view of Van Jones.

You can go check our feed to find out why but he i think he's been extremely cowardly around the charlie situation he he he was like oh i wouldn't have gone on his show i you know i wouldn't have platformed

i was thinking of that i don't know his name but there's a progressive influencer who i'd never heard of before that charlie was going to debate who immediately was like this is horrible hasan piker yeah yeah yeah i think that yeah Yeah, okay, because Van Jones, I think, has really been cowardly.

He really, truly, like, he got, he called Charlie a racist based on nothing.

Van had his facts wrong.

Charlie made a comment that there was a racial element, it appeared, in North Carolina with the slaying of Irina.

And Van hadn't done his homework and apparently hadn't heard that that man, who was black, killing a white woman, had said, I got that white girl.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's muttered it on video.

This is when I called, when I called Charlie Cook, when we first learned of the Kirk shooting, that Charlie, remember I mentioned this CNN segment.

I was just watching it from the night before when they all were condemning Charlie as a racist.

So if you were Van Jones and honorable, what would you do?

Especially after Charlie had been killed, you would say, I am so sorry.

I don't blame Van Jones for Charlie's murder, just to be clear.

And he didn't need to apologize for Charlie's murder, but for calling him a racist the two nights before that he was murdered, yeah, he should apologize for that with or without the murder, because it was a smear and it was wrong.

And it was based on erroneous facts.

So of course, every time as somebody who's in news, you have to come out and say, I was wrong.

I didn't know about what that black man had said and I apologize for Charlie for saying something about him that has no basis in fact he wouldn't instead he wanted credit for outing Charlie for doing a nice thing because Charlie had reached out to him and said hey let's have an honor let's have a good faith debate you know as men let's have an honorable debate and Van Jones didn't get back to him he likes to he wants us to believe that he didn't know about it until after Charlie died.

I don't believe that either.

I've got my reasons, but I don't trust Van Jones' word.

And now

he's continuing on this grift of trying to look like somebody who's like going to uphold Charlie's legacy.

He's going to be the good guy by saying a couple of nice things about Charlie after Charlie died.

Meanwhile, the story is he's a bad guy for smearing Charlie as a racist while he was alive and causing him strife within the last 48 hours of his life and then not owning up to his erroneous smear when it was clear to everybody that's what it was.

And so now he goes on with Bill Maher.

And Bill gives him the benefit of the the doubt and says, oh, you probably would have debated him, right?

Meanwhile, Van's already on the record as having said, I wouldn't have gone on his show and like built his platform.

And listen to how Van Jones compliments Charlie.

Take a listen here.

This is Friday night.

Would you have agreed to debate Charlie Kirk?

I bet you I know the answer, and I bet you the answer is yes.

Because that's the kind of guy you are.

Yeah, listen,

Charlie Kirk and I were not friends.

And we were in a big, big public fight the week that he died.

And

it turned out that the day before he died, he sent me a personal message wanting me to come on his show.

And he said, let's be gentlemen.

He said, let's disagree agreeably.

Let's disagree agreeably.

I'm going to carry those words with me because...

He was a words, not weapons guy.

I disagree with his words, but he's a words, not weapons guy.

And we're getting away from that now.

And I was very frustrated people in my party throwing rocks at the corpse before he could even be buried.

Blood still on the widow's shoes.

And people want to post every dumb thing he ever said.

He was a 31-year-old kid.

If you got me at 31 years old, I was on the left side of Pluto.

There is no telling what you would have me say.

So let's give some grace and some space, even to our leaves, and advertisers.

Okay.

He should have stopped after the words, widow's shoes, and we would have had no problem with what he said there, other than the ones I already outlined.

Instead, he had to go on to say people are posting every dumb thing he ever said.

This is a 31-year-old kid.

It's pejorative.

He's trying to put Charlie down.

He's trying to diminish him.

He's trying, this is classic Van Jones, trying to act like he's this person giving grace when what he's actually doing is insulting Charlie.

31 years old is not a kid.

All of our our founding fathers were younger than that when they drafted our documents, our founding documents, most of them.

And Charlie lived a life just like those founders.

Charlie was self-educated.

Charlie was a man of the world.

Charlie spent his life in flyover country trying to understand the issues that were affecting actual Americans.

Charlie was a far more articulate spokesperson for the causes he believed in than Van Jones could ever hope to be, ever.

They weren't errant, stupid tweets by a kid that the left was freaking out about.

They were thoughtful policy positions as a grown man that Charlie professed that most of us on the right wholeheartedly agreed with.

And there is no cause to diminish them or him.

It is truly part of an ongoing smear campaign, but Van Jones is more clever about it than Nicole Hanna-Jones.

To me, it's infuriating.

He was not some kid.

He did not need Van Jones to run cover for him on his tweets.

Van Jones, just stop talking about Charlie Charlie Kirk.

Just stop.

Unless you're going to say you apologize, I don't want to hear from you anymore.

And I'm pretty sure I speak for most of the right wing on that.

Just stop it.

Okay, sorry, but I had to get that out there.

It's been driving me nuts since I saw it on Friday night.

But let's go to Jay Jones because a different Jones, Jay Jones, who's running for Attorney General of Virginia.

And Charlie, I read at length from your piece on this show yesterday

about how you believe his text messages in your title reveal a disqualifying worldview.

I want to tell the audience before I toss it to you that we've now heard that there was more to the Jay Jones exchanges with this Republican Kerry Coyner,

who he had spoken to earlier before these texts.

And you see actually a reference in his texts to that conversation.

He says something like, I've told you before,

like, I'm only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.

And so, to their credit,

a local news organization called the Virginia Scope called up Carrie Coiner and said, what's that a reference to?

What was that conversation?

Good question.

And she told them.

She said that we had a pretty heated conversation about public policy and pain involving qualified immunity for cops.

He believed that they should not have qualified immunity.

And I said, I believe that people will get killed.

Police officers will get killed.

And he said, well, maybe if a few of them died, they would move on, not shooting people, not killing people.

And I said, that's insane.

But he firmly believed that if you removed qualified immunity, police officers would act differently.

And I firmly believed it would not result in good public policy and it would put police officers and the public lives at risk.

So then Jones told the Virginia Scope, I did not say this, which is really hard to believe given his other statements that he has to admit to, because we've seen the text messages where he calls for the then Republican Speaker of the House to have two bullets put in his brain, along with his children to die, young children to die in their mother's arms and that the parents should have to watch it and doubled down when the Republican he was texting to said, this is really offensive.

There's something wrong with you, called her up, said it again.

resumed the text thread, said it again.

So now this guy comes out, would love to see cops get shot too.

And so far, we cannot find a single Democrat politician who is calling for him to step down, Charlie.

Right.

The reason this is so alarming, as you imply, is that this seems to be the product of a considered

worldview.

People do get angry or upset or emotional and they send hyperbolic text messages or tweets.

Now, I will say that I don't send people text messages fantasizing about the murder of politicians or their children.

But I am, as a flawed person, willing to grant some latitude, less so perhaps for people who want to be an attorney general, but some latitude for those who make a mistake, providing that it is a mistake, providing that

it is acknowledged and reversed.

We have all had conversations with people in our lives who have said something awful, then been called on it, and then said, All right, all right, I got upset, or at least apologized for it.

But what we seem to be looking at here is somebody who has said this same thing in various fora.

By the time he gets in that text thread to saying, Yes, we've talked about this before, and then articulating the theory, which is people need to die so that my politics can prevail.

He's already said it once by text message and then said it on the phone.

And then we learned that he also said the same thing about cops.

And what that tells me is this is his politics.

Now, that's not illegal in America.

You can have horrendous views, but you really should not be the top law enforcement official in the state of Virginia if that is your view.

And I draw this distinction in general, Megan.

I've talked about this on my own podcast with race.

You know, I have met people in my life who who had bigoted views.

The people who had never really thought it through, although I didn't like them or what they were saying, didn't particularly bother me.

People who maybe inherited bad views from their family or got angry about something or just were egged on by their friends.

And you say, I really don't think that's a nice way of looking at the world.

And they go, all right, all right, all right, all right.

That's one thing.

What is really alarming is when you meet the guy with the charts, when you meet the guy who's a zealot, when you meet the guy who's into race science, or the guy who has a long-standing and well-considered opinion on why Jews are bad.

Those people scare me because those people are not being carried away by the moment.

They are making a political play.

And look, Jay Jones, although he wasn't doing it publicly, was making a political play.

That is a political attitude.

And it's one that is frankly at odds with the way that America is set up, all of our presumptions.

We don't allow that.

You can hold those views, but you can't make them consistent with the American system of government or with the fundamental presumptions of the West.

You don't get to kill people because you don't like their politics.

You don't get to kill their children because you don't like their parents' politics.

You don't get to hurt people so that they will see or discover or learn that they were wrong all along.

This should be disqualifying without any qualifications.

This person should have dropped out.

Everyone should have told him to drop out.

It is more important than partisan control.

And again, the person that Jay Jones is running against, despite Abigail Spamberger's rhetoric, is actually not Donald Trump.

It's Jason Miares, who is a center-right, moderate, competent, current Attorney General in Virginia, who is clearly preferable from any political perspective than someone who wants to put bullets in the brain of his opponents.

Just another word on Jay Jones and why I don't believe his current denial that he didn't say that about wanting to see cops die.

A Richmond Times dispatch investigation published just last week on him found that in 2022, Jones was convicted in a reckless driving case after he was pulled over driving 116 miles per hour,

which was 46 miles per hour above the speed limit.

So that means the speed limit was 65.

Pretty sure that's 65, that's 116, and it's 65.

But here's the thing: I don't condone the speeding, nor have I ever driven over 100 miles an hour in my life.

But his punishment was a $1,500 fine and 1,000 hours of community service, 500 of which he spent working for his own political action committee.

So he's not an honest guy, Rich.

The only reason he admitted to saying he wanted to put two bullets in the head of the Republican House Gilbert speaker was because it was written.

And there was a fellow congresswoman there attesting that the texts were real, that he called her and doubled down, that he resumed the text chain and tripled down about wanting the man's children dead too.

So this guy, he's a reckless driver.

He's a liar.

He wants cops dead, Republicans dead, and Republican children dead.

And I'm sorry to make it all about Nira Tandon.

We played this yesterday, but here was Neera Tandon excusing it on Meet the Press.

And there's not one National Democrat calling for him to step aside.

Not one.

It's disgraceful.

I absolutely think people should criticize that 100%.

I think it was a private conversation he had, but still awful and disgusting.

We should condemn that, but then you should condemn when the president calls the Democratic Party the party of Satan.

Yeah, in all fairness.

Why don't we just say both of those things?

I think I've paid the price for standing for political violence on our side.

Mike Pence is the chief of staff.

Private, it's a private conversation, Rich, private.

And then I'll give you one more.

This woman, Melody Mel Cartwright, who is a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates, tweets out with Jay Jones' picture, I stand with Jay Jones.

Period.

End of statement.

And by the way, the only thing that's heartening is to go down and read the replies.

I'll give you a couple.

Behold the face of pure evil.

I wonder what she thinks about him saying the only cop is a good cop.

Is it only good cop is a dead cop?

And on and on it goes, like she's getting crushed in the comments because people are absolutely, they've had it with all of this.

Yeah.

So Jay Jones has no credibility to deny that he wanted anyone to die for political reasons, right?

Because we have it on the record.

And all you need to know about him besides what he said in those messages was his initial reaction when we broke the story was to say that we all regret text messages that we've sent, that it was a smear, that was an op-o-dump from Maoris, his opponent, and the National Review is a Trump-controlled publication.

Every part of that is wrong.

Most of us don't send text messages saying we hope people are going to die.

This wasn't a smear, it was true.

It wasn't a Maioris oppo dump, and National Review isn't a Trump-controlled organization, but he thought he could

get away with that.

He thought he could get away with that until it finally occurred to him, or someone told him, no, you got to go out and apologize.

And then he started to apologize and express regret.

Yeah, how about calling NR Trump controlled?

I said in AM update, that'll be news to Trump.

Exactly.

Yeah.

News to everyone.

Yeah.

Well, you guys did a great job.

Audrey Fahlberg broke the story and it set the internet on fire, although not everywhere.

The New York Times has yet to devote any time to it.

The New York Times is ignoring this story, which is outrageous.

It's part of a media pattern, but it's not the only one who have decided this is a non-story.

Of course, because it's a Democrat, if this had been a Republican, it would have been on the Times' front page.

It might not have been above the fold, but it absolutely would have been there, Rich.

Yeah, absolutely.

So

it's a complete double standard.

It's total hypocrisy.

And that's what we've been talking about the last 40 minutes, right?

They're desperate to have a mega arson.

So they make that.

the South Carolina fire into that.

And then here they have one of their own side expressing this poisonous worldview, and they want to ignore it.

No coverage whatsoever.

We'll be right back with Rich and Charlie.

Don't go away.

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Rich Lowry and Charles C.W.

Cook of National Review are back with me now.

Guys, there's an important case going up before the Supreme Court this morning.

It was argued beginning at 10 a.m.

And we have the audio because they release audio on the big cases.

What this case is about, we fronted it for our audience earlier this week, is alleged conversion therapy bans, which is just such a bastardization of what conversion therapy is.

That's not really what this case is about.

Conversion therapy is a thing that parents used to do to little gay kids in the 1950s, like, you're not gay, you're fine, you're straight, don't like boys, and send them into therapy where the therapist would be like, you're not gay, you like straight, you're straight, you like girls, girls, girls, and try to convince these boys that whatever.

Okay, so that's what conversion therapy is.

Colorado glomming onto a term that is pretty universally condemned.

I mean, some Christian circles still believe it can happen, and some people still believe it can happen, so with all due respect to them, but that term is basically loathed.

And glomming onto that fact, Colorado decided to ban the practice via legislation.

And it does cover the gay thing, but it's all about the trans thing.

And their law says that therapists are not allowed to

converse with their patients, children who say that they're gender confused in a way that would

push them back to their actual biological sex.

That

too would be considered conversion therapy as opposed to just therapy, where you're actually trying to search for,

is this real, this gender confusion, or are you just having home problems?

Are your parents getting a divorce?

Have you been bullied?

Are you a young girl going through puberty?

What could possibly be the cause of this other than actual gender dysphoria?

It's insane and it's really dangerous what they've done in Colorado, which is a lunatic state.

I mean, truly, like the legislation coming out of there on the trans issue is as far left as it gets.

So they pass this ban and a therapist files a lawsuit saying,

I can't do my job with this.

I'm not just going to affirm a child I don't actually think is trans because of a law that says I'm not allowed to discuss with him whether he really is or isn't or really is having gender confusion.

So these, this, the law, the underlying litigation all lined up

in favor of Colorado, in favor of letting the ban stand.

And then thankfully the high court took the case, which is good.

That's a good sign.

They didn't want to just let the lower court decision stand.

And they're hashing it out right now.

And we pulled a sound bite.

In this soundbite, we've got both Justice Alito, who of course is a conservative, and Justice Kagan, who definitely is not questioning Shannon Stevenson, the Colorado Solicitor General, top appellate

lawyer.

And you're going to hear some discussion in here about viewpoint discrimination, which is the position of those challenging the Colorado ban.

The therapist is saying,

this is basically a free speech case.

You're trying to tell me that I'm not allowed to say,

are you really trans, young man?

Or could it be something else?

You're trying to clip my speech because you don't want my viewpoint that maybe he's not trans.

making its way into my therapist's office.

So that's what they're talking about when you hear that term.

Let's play it.

In the first situation, an adolescent male comes to a licensed therapist

and says he's attracted to other males, but he feels uneasy and guilty about those feelings.

He wants to end or lessen them, and he asks for the therapist's help in doing so.

The other situation is

a similar adolescent male comes to a licensed therapist, says he's attracted to other males,

feels uneasy and guilty about those feelings, and he wants the therapist's help so he will feel comfortable as a gay young man.

It seems to me

your statute dictates opposite results in those two situations.

As I heard your examples, I think they would both be permissible because it didn't sound like in either case the goal was to actually change sexual orientation.

I guess I had the same kind of question that Justice Alito had.

I mean, if we assume, for example, and this is a big assumption on your part, but just assume that we're in normal free speech land rather than in this kind of doctor land.

And

if a doctor says, I know you identify as gay, and I'm going to help you accept that, and another doctor says, I know you identify as gay,

and I'm going to help you to change that.

And one of those is permissible and the other is not, that seems like viewpoint discrimination.

I don't disagree with that, Justice Kagan, and that's why medical treatment has to be treated differently.

Because anytime you exclude one harmful practice, you are by definition saying these things are allowed because they are not harmful, and these things are excluded because they are harmful.

That's the driving force behind regulating the particular practice.

All right.

And that top lawyer for Colorado's argument, which is, I agree this is viewpoint discrimination, but we're allowed to do it in the medical community, is exactly what we heard on NPR this morning from Nina Totenberg, who's their Supreme Court reporter, who is an absolute bully, nasty person.

I was there for years covering the high court when she was there because she's 200 years old.

And trust me, this is not a nice person.

But listen to her summary of this case this morning to the NPR listeners.

I guess when advocates of conversion therapy hear that their treatments are discredited, they just don't believe the medical associations.

They note that the American Psychiatric Association actually listed homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1973.

Attorney General Wiser says that medical science evolves over time, and there were times when we didn't know that smoking cigarettes, for instance, that they caused cancer.

But now we do know that, and it's wrong, he says, for a doctor to tell people to smoke cigarettes three packs a day and tell them don't worry about the health effects.

He says that would be substandard care, just like conversion practices are substandard care.

Can you believe that, Charlie?

That's Nina Totenberg trying to say a therapist, just actually doing a full-throated explanation with a child on why they might be feeling gender dysphoric or gender confusion is akin to forcing cigarettes on them or saying cigarettes are healthy, you should smoke those.

So, as you suggest, the problem here is with the analogy.

There are are so many bases being stolen here.

This is not a free speech case in the sense that we would usually think of free speech in America, where effectively anything goes.

The question posed by Sotomayor did draw the right distinction.

Structurally, we do, of course, impose certain rules on medicine because we regulate medicine.

And so what the people who want Colorado's law to stand will say is, well, if your doctor told you to stick a knife through your calf, is that free speech?

Well, no.

Or if your doctor told you to go smoke cigarettes and it's good for you, is that free speech?

Well, no, we do regulate medicine and there are some questions that are now beyond doubt.

The idea that this is one of them is so preposterous that it it defies belief.

This should be laughed out of court.

If anything, the rules should run in the other direction, or at least they should acknowledge that up until about 10 years ago, this was considered absolute lunacy.

So for a state to go from all of human history to you are not allowed to question this as a doctor is ridiculous.

And yes, there is a free speech element there because when a matter, medical or not, is a ongoing question of public debate, is an ongoing question of medical inquiry.

And just as a sidebar, I don't trust a lot of the medical organizations that will

so no, I mean, like on NPR, of course, they started listing all of these institutions.

They have lost their credibility and for good reason because they will just produce false evidence in response to social pressure.

But forget that for a moment.

This is an ongoing matter of legal dispute, political dispute, medical dispute, philosophical dispute.

You cannot intervene, as Colorado has said, and put your finger on the scale in the direction of the innovation and expect not to be challenged on it.

It is such a dishonest comparison.

Yes, so well said.

Charlie, NR's Ed Whelan, just posted this.

Sure seems like there could be nine to zero agreement that strict scrutiny applies, which would be good.

That means we're going to apply the most strict scrutiny against this law and to see whether it's basically the law will likely fall.

It's almost impossible to pass that standard.

The court might divide on whether it should go ahead and apply strict scrutiny itself, thus striking down the law, or remand for the lower courts to do so.

He writes, I'd expect the majority to apply the strict scrutiny.

Colorado effort to defeat standing seems to have failed.

So it sounds like it's been so far a very bad day for Colorado to the point where Ed thinks we could be getting a 9-0 ruling on this.

If we did, that would just be so beautiful.

We almost never get them.

And for them to send a message like that on an issue like this would be actually quite bold.

Yes, when you have Alito and was it Kagan that you paid the clip from making exactly the same point for the same reason, that's not a very good sign when you're the lawyer on the other side.

And the idea that everyone in the medical profession, including therapist, just has to accept gender dysphoria as, oh, that's the way you are.

And I can't talk to you about it is insane.

And as we all know, gender dysphoria is associated with other forms of trauma, with other disorders, autism, childhood abuse, all that.

And that's not going to come up.

We're just supposed to accept the dysphoria.

I remember a couple of years ago, Megan, talking to a friend, there was a story about Megan Fox, you know, the very successful and attractive actress having some form, the story didn't stipulate what it was, some form of body dysphoria, right?

Clearly, totally irrational, right?

But when she goes to talk to a therapist, the therapist is supposed to say, oh yeah, you're ugly or you're too skinny or whatever it is, just because she has this irrational belief about her own body.

It is insane and should never stand.

And all these therapists not allowed to exercise their expertise in how to flesh out an issue and see what is really bothering someone.

As we've heard so many times,

there can't be a Christian therapist in Colorado anymore if this law stands.

Exactly right.

Go ahead, Charlie.

Just to add another stolen base here, and of course, Colorado knows this and the activists know this, which is why they're pushing this.

There is a big difference here.

So I am a pro-gay conservative.

I always have been.

I think people are born that way.

I was born straight.

Some of my friends were born gay.

If you say to a therapist or a doctor or your parents, you know, I think I'm gay, and then you subsequently decide that you're not,

what have you really lost?

But if you say now, well, actually, I was born in the wrong body, that unlocks the next step, which is

the immediate movement into very often physical and irreversible so-called gender-affirming care.

It's not something that you can say, I was wrong about that, or it was a phase in the same way as you could with most other of the controversial gender and sexuality questions.

And they know that.

So the stakes here are much, much higher.

That's another reason why you shouldn't shut down this speech, because we know what happens next, Megan.

The 12-year-old who gets gets affirmed in their conception of themselves, the next day they get affirmed in their hormones or in surgery.

And then they end up at 18 years old saying, God, I actually was just a tomboy, but now I have had my private parts cut off.

That's why Abigail Schreier named her book, Irreversible Damage.

That's what comes next.

And by the way, that's another reason why schools should not be asking people their pronouns, children or college students, because for some people, they've never said it out loud.

They might be secretly wrestling with whether they're a she or a he.

And the first act of actually writing down and choosing the opposite pronouns begins the social transition.

And once it's begun, it's extremely hard to undo it, which is why we shouldn't be allowing this.

Some teacher in a classroom should not have that sort of a power over your child, especially a minor child, which is the hill I will die on.

I've said that to my own school.

So it's just outrageous.

I think this is

a good sign, Rich, that the Supreme Court's going to go the right way.

And let's hope so, because there's another trans case going up involving athletics and whether boys should be allowed to play in girls' sports.

So if the Supreme Court sends a nice strong message here, I think I'll sleep a little better at night.

Okay, I want to keep going.

I know Rich has got to leave in seven minutes.

Charles stays with us for a bit longer.

There is a big story today

per Just the News and John Solomon, which is about Jack Smith and his investigation of the January 6th

riot at the Capitol.

And what has just been revealed by Dan Bongino and Cash Patella at the FBI is actually quite shocking, I have to say, even for Jack Smith and the Biden DOJ.

And it is that the FBI and Jack Smith collected the private phone records of eight, I've also heard 10, Republican senators and one GOP House member as part of his investigation of the J6 riot.

So he went, according to Senator Chuck Grassley, to the private phone companies and subpoenaed the private phone records of U.S.

senators, all Republicans, to see who they were talking to, when they were talking to them.

the duration of the call, and the general location data of the call.

He couldn't hear the contents of the calls themselves.

It wasn't a wiretap, but got all that information for some 10 Republican lawmakers from the dates of January 4th through January 7th, 2021.

The lawmakers included Lindsey Graham, Bill Haggerty, Josh Hawley, Dan Sullivan, Tommy Tuberville, Ron Johnson,

Cynthia Lumis, Marsha Blackburn, and GOP Representative Mike Kelly.

It was all conducted via a grand jury subpoena that Jack Smith got and then served on the phone companies

through his cellular analysis survey team.

He then looked at the information and Chuck Grassley's office revealed that the FBI found

this

piece of the investigation in what was called a prohibited access file in response to Grassley's oversight requests.

Grassley must have gotten wind that there might be such a thing.

So the FBI started digging and digging to see if they could find it.

It was hidden in a prohibited access file that is meant to limit the ability of FBI agents to access certain documents, but they got in there.

A former executive assistant director of the FBI tells Just the News, Chris Ray would have had to be involved in approving this rule.

There is no way this would have happened without the head of the FBI signing off on it.

And now you really do have things going to the next level when you look at the Jack Smith investigation subpoenaing secretly Republican members of Congress and their private cell phone messages.

Your thoughts on it, Rich?

Yeah, well, that should be a real red line.

And I always thought Jack Smith was a fanatic.

I hated January 6th.

I think it was terrible.

It was a blight on the country.

I don't think it was a crime or Donald Trump committed crimes on that day.

Obviously, the writers committed crimes, but this was an effort because the impeachment failed to have a do-over and try to go after Trump

criminally.

And it was obviously all done with a political timetable.

He wanted to get after this and the classified documents case on an expedited expedited expedited timetable that was ridiculous compared to the usual timetable in these cases, just with an eye to the November elections last year.

That was wrong.

I think Smith just lost his mind over this matter.

I can understand how that might happen.

It was a terrible thing.

But if

this is true and correct, it'd be another sign of that.

Cash Patel said, under our watch, the FBI will never again be turned against the American people.

Dan Bongino said, under our leadership, the FBI will never again be used as a political weapon against the American people.

It's a disgrace that I have to stand on Capitol Hill and reveal this, that the FBI was once weaponized to track the private communications of U.S.

lawmakers for political purposes.

That era is over.

There are Republicans who are very angry over this, Charles, including Josh Hawley, who is one of the senators targeted.

I mean, this has got, this just whiffs of serious separations of powers issues here because you've got Jack Smith, who worked in the executive branch under the Attorney General, without notice to sitting U.S.

senators and House members, getting their private phone communications right around the time when the election was being certified.

I mean, right around, like, what if, I know we all, we all feel the same about January 6th, that it was terrible.

And we've never, the three of us have never run excuses for January 6th.

However, there was the certification of an election that was about to happen, and there would have been conversations about it.

And are there any legitimate objections, just like we saw Democrats raise in every earlier election won by a Republican?

And to have the FBI spying on those Republican senators and any communications they had, what, with lawyers?

Did they want to find out if they spoke to lawyers off campus who specialize in election law?

And then that person became the focus of their crosshairs.

Is there another secret FBI file where they then zeroed in on those guys?

Like,

we've crossed here a bridge I don't think we've crossed before.

Chuck Grassley is saying this is almost as bad as Watergate.

Well, it's just so unlike the FBI to behave like a fourth branch of government, start tracking the phone conversations and records of people it dislikes.

I mean, is there any point in the history of the FBI which he hasn't done this?

If Cash Patel stops it, it'll be the first time

in

its history.

This is classic Hoover-style conduct.

This is where it gets so annoying for those of us who are staunch critics of January 6th, and in my case, who didn't vote for President Trump over January 6th, because despite my repeated and sincere condemnations of January 6th, I don't think that gave the government carte blanche to do

anything it wanted.

And I also don't think that it is an all-purpose excuse to oppose anything right of center.

Unfortunately, there are too many people within our politics who have adopted that approach.

And one of them was Jack Smith, who

really,

I think, responded in a way that made January 6th worse in a sense.

Because what you had at January 6

was a thankfully unsuccessful and never going to be successful repudiation of American constitutional norms.

And what you have had in response to January 6th, sometimes from Jack Smith, is a repudiation of American constitutional norms.

And you do not fix violations of constitutional norms by adding more violations of constitutional norms on top.

Now, this wasn't Jack Smith necessarily, but we saw another one, for example, with the attempt to disqualify Donald Trump from the 2024 election in certain states because of January 6th.

I see all of these things of a piece.

I think you had a terrible and embarrassing incident that should be long in the memory, and those who were responsible for it should be vilified.

I also see a response from certain parts of the government that we should be extremely uncomfortable with as small L liberal, classical liberal Americans.

And this is a good part of that.

I mean, I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that Jack Smith gets his own subpoena and gets dragged in front of the Congress.

I mean, Hugh Hewitt, who I really respect and who's a smart lawyer, posted the following, put an ideological zealot outside the law, arm him with an unlimited budget and as many prosecutors as he desires, two grand juries and a compliant FBI, and this is what you get, an American baria, which was he was part of Stalin's secret police.

The congressional investigation should begin today.

A select committee in the Senate full of the brightest lawyers in the Senate GOP should be stood up by Leader John Thune with usual powers and allotment to the usual numbers of minority senators.

No charades like the J6 jammed down by Speaker Pelosi.

It's difficult to overstate what Smith did here in terms of attacks on the Constitution's separation of powers.

I hope Leader Thune calls a select committee together and gets them to working immediately.

Former Director Ray and former A.G.

Garland have much to explain.

Our Javer should be the last witness.

This is so huge.

Meaning Javer, like the guy Lynn is, the investigator who is kind of the villain.

Anyway.

I agree with him.

I don't think this is, I think this is the beginning of a massive story that's going to go on and on.

And I'll bet you he did more.

If Jack Smith was willing to cross that line, I'll bet you there will be other lines that he crossed and then put it in a secret FBI file.

Thanks to Chris Ray, he's going to have his hands full too when we see that select committee probably come through.

Rich, I know you got to run.

Thank you so much for being here, as always.

Awesome.

All right, Charles, I have something super fun for you to discuss now.

And I'm sad for Rich that he won't get to weigh in on it, but you're going to be really honored.

Michelle Obama, as you know, has got a podcast, and she's using it.

She's putting it to good use.

I mean, she's really working through a lot of her feelings about the United States, about her husband, about her children.

P.S., the answer on all three of those is she can't stand them.

She hated motherhood.

She can't stand her marriage.

And she's not too keen on the United States of America.

And there's another thing she's not too keen on, and that is

being so famous.

Listen to this, SAT 33.

I wanted to ask you guys earlier, like,

what makes you feel alive?

What makes you feel like you're present?

In the life I live, which is so abnormal now, it's really, it's like being outside.

You know, I mean, we've, I say this a lot.

Something that comes with fame that people don't,

that

they don't appreciate, they're not cautious of is the loss of anonymity.

Yeah.

Like, it's hard for Barack and I to just be in the world unobserved.

And as a couple, so much of your interaction just happens because you two are experiencing the world together, sitting in a park and watching life go by, you know, stopping at a cafe and getting a cup of coffee, and then the conversation turns to the conversation next to you, right?

We're always the conversation next to the people we're sitting.

Oh my gosh, Charles.

So

no one held a gun to her head and made her run for the White House and become first lady twice, though you wouldn't know that to hear her talk.

And on top of that, you know, like Laura Bush, she kind of went off into the sunset and never bothered anybody again.

Barbara Bush certainly did that.

Hillary Clinton didn't.

But Michelle Obama decided to launch a podcast where she talks about herself incessantly.

That there's the woman she had on who was questioning her was a relationship therapist talking all about Michelle's relationship with Barack.

Again, P.S., spoiler, she can't stand him.

She looks at him across the dinner table and wants to smack him because she cannot stand the way he chews.

The contempt is oozing out of her whenever she speaks of her husband.

Answering questions like, what makes you feel alive?

Like you're present.

I mean, it was like listening to an episode of the Charles C.W.

Cook podcast.

This is, I hear you do this all the time.

And so she goes out there.

She wants people subscribing.

She does a huge promotional tour.

Come listen to my podcast.

And then she's got the nerve to go out there and cry about how famous she is.

And people are always talking about her, Charles.

Yeah, and just as a 30,000 beat

point,

she

doesn't really have a big problem there in that description.

I mean, unless there's something else going on, that is a good problem to have.

To be very rich and very famous does not solve all of your issues, but it is generally quite a good thing to be.

I mean, I remember when I was much younger hearing a movie star, I forget who it was, complain that people would come up to him at dinner and ask for autographs or whatever.

And my view was: look, that's kind of what goes along with all of the money and fame and adoration that you get.

There are certain times where people can be, I'm sure you experienced this, but people can be a little bit inappropriate, or they come up when you're with your kids and they wish you wouldn't, or whatever.

I'm sure.

I'm not a movie star, but

it is generally a good problem to have is the first thing.

She just seems wildly ungrateful that she has lived this extraordinary American life that most people would never get to experience.

But the thing that I find most annoying about this is she says that she's saying this on a podcast that she chose to produce.

She was not handcuffed and put in front of that camera.

She was not zip-tied to the table and told to speak into that microphone.

It is actually possible to disappear, even if you've been president.

Ronald Reagan flew back from Washington, D.C.

to California and lived on his ranch.

And he made public appearances when he wanted to, but people didn't go find him.

George W.

Bush lives on a ranch in Crawford, Texas.

He is in public if he wishes to be.

It's not mandatory.

This is an absolutely enormous country.

There are so many corners of it where you can live, if not anonymously.

You can live on a bunch of land with Secret Service protection and no one will ever bother you.

So what she's really saying is that she is no longer able to interact with the world in the way that she wishes to be since her husband was president for eight years and she was first lady.

Well, then don't run for president.

That's obvious.

We know that.

I have some sympathy, I guess, at one level for someone like Dwight Eisenhower or Harry Truman, who, you know, they lived after their presidencies.

And it was an interesting move for them because some of them didn't have much money.

And so they'd gone from being commander of

the Allied forces and then president to sort of, well, do I have enough money for groceries?

And they would live on a farm or whatever.

And they didn't quite know what their role was as a former president.

But this is a very well-trodden path now.

They knew what they were getting into.

They knew what it would be like afterwards.

They loved every minute of it.

Just give me a break.

Yes.

And by the way, who made her pose on the cover of Vogue three times?

Was that the terrible American public?

Like, no, she wanted the stardom.

She wanted the fawning attention.

She wanted everything that she's gotten.

And now she wants us to feel sorry for her because she got it.

Now, and by the way, you're not the subject of everybody's conversation.

With two seconds, they'd say, is that Michelle Obama?

Yeah.

Oh, and then they'd move on.

You're not that interesting, Michelle.

Don't flatter yourself.

So that was something I needed to discuss with you.

And then last but not least, can we talk about Zach Bryan?

Because this is actually a very big star whose a lot of people, especially including on the right, adore.

His music's really popular.

But Zach Bryan has come out with a new album.

And in it, he's previewing a song that condemns ICE.

He goes after ICE, and he seems to be going after the current state of America.

We have a bit of that here in this soundbite from the song.

all alone.

The bar stop bumping the rock, stop rolling the middle.

Fingers rising, and it won't stop showing.

Got some bad news:

the fading of a red, white, and blue.

So, this is he's posting a snippet of his song that's about to drop on the new album.

And you heard, just for the listening audience, in case you didn't quite get it, I heard the cops come, cocky mother effers, ain't they?

And ice is gonna come, bust down your door, try to build a house, no one builds no more.

But I got a telephone, kids are all scared and all alone.

And then he goes on to say, got some bad news, the fading of the red, white, and blue.

This is the same guy who,

let's see, he reportedly condemned officers as out of control and as a bunch of middle-aged white dudes arresting people.

When another country singer condemned Bud Light after they partnered with Dylan Mulvaney, this trans activist, he declared in a now deleted tweet, I just think insulting transgender people is completely wrong because we live in a country where we can all just be who we want to be.

It's a great day to be alive, I thought, and on and on.

He's gotten pulled over a couple times by the cops.

Well, one, in which he was like, I'm a famous singer.

I'm a famous singer.

I don't have to give you my address.

And so on.

And you tell me whether this is going to have any sort of backlash for him, Charles, because you've got actual country music star John Rich

tweeting out, let's see, who's ready for the Zach Bryan Dixie Chicks tour?

Probably a huge Bud Light sponsorship for this one.

And also adding,

he said that this is actually pretty commonplace.

That he said Nashville is full of guys like this.

A lot of pushback from people on the right, suggesting he just lost most of his audience.

What an idiot.

Your thoughts?

Well, I'm more offended by the fact that rhythm guitar was so out of tune on what sounds like a finished record than by the lyrics.

I really think they ought to have done better than that.

But seriously, look, he's a free American.

He can speak his mind.

I'm not a fan, so I don't particularly care.

But what I do think, which is what I always think in these situations, is why do it?

Not because he's saying things I don't agree with, but because there's so much to talk about in music.

And politics is inevitably a downgrade.

There is almost no piece of music that has ever been written that was improved by bringing day-to-day politics in.

Maybe timeless.

But the things that are happening right now, that's so right now.

Those those could be tweets i mean that is the the resistance piece du jour that he's put in there and it just annoys people and those that it thrills forget about it in three weeks so why do it again i don't want to silence him that's what he really wants to do from the bottom of his heart that is his lookout it's not my prerogative but

it's it's an odd temptation that artists have to get political in the most boring and inconsequential of ways when they could instead be talking about things that are timeless or interesting.

So I find that almost embarrassing rather than upsetting.

So good.

You're a bore.

Zach Brian, you're boring.

That's good.

That's cutting.

Well done, Charles.

Great to talk to you.

Thank you so much for being here.

Everybody, check out Charlie's, especially his latest piece, It's So Good on nr.com.

I mentioned it earlier on Jay Jones and everything at NR, which is how I spend my morning, just pressing play on the audio recording on every NR article.

Talk to you soon, Charles.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

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Have you ever looked up something and suddenly it seems like ads for that product are following you everywhere you go on your phone?

Or you've spoken about something and an ad for it shows up on your phone?

Are you worried about your data getting collected and sold to some company in America or some foreign country?

Well, my next guests are the co-founder of Your Solution, the co-founder and CEO of a really exciting tech company called Unplugged.

They're working to solve this problem for all of us.

Unplugged designs and manufactures the privacy-focused up phone, UP, Up Phone, a smartphone that functions just like other companies' smartphones, but without any of the privacy risks.

That's thanks to firewalls and other features.

The Up Phone users can browse, they can shop, they can call, they can text, they can take pictures, they can post on social media, whatever they want to do, without being tracked and without having their data harvested and then sold to third parties.

How about your children?

Did you know this is happening to them too?

Here with me now, unplugged co-founder Eric Prince, who was previously CEO of Blackwater, and unplugged CEO Joe Weill.

Guys, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having us, Megan.

It's a great idea.

I worry about this all the time because that does happen to me.

I'm sure it happens to everybody with the ads listening to you and definitely watching what you do online.

I'll never forgive it for coming back to me with an advertisement for elderly Pilates.

They misread the situation.

That's all I'm going to say.

But it could be a far more serious problem than that.

Eric, you started

the phone company and then brought Joe in because he was a genius at Apple.

We're going to get into that.

But why did you think this was necessary given all your years in security?

You know, after the 2020 election, seeing big tech canceling certain voices, throwing people off platforms, and we actually had a team together doing an unlock.

And I said, We're never going to make big tech better by complaining about it, only if we can actually compete.

And so we went out to build an independent phone platform that allows you to be in the world but not of the world and have all your data collected and harvested and exported.

And we managed to make it to market.

We've sold 13,000 some devices in our beta test.

And now we're out on the mass market.

And

we wanted the phone to be comfortable and usable

so that people are,

it's easy to switch.

And I think we've accomplished that.

And now with Joe being a true product guy,

really taking us to new heights.

So, Joe, you're at Apple.

And before we get to the phone, I understand you were there and you thought it used to be a great company.

And then speaking of Trump, things started to change in the era of Donald Trump.

Definitely.

When I first got to Apple, no one ever talked about politics, and that was really appealing because I'm here in the Bay Area.

It was nice to feel like I wasn't at a politicized environment at work.

But after the 2016 election, that started changing.

People started making comments and meetings, and it became kind of normal to criticize Trump and then conservatives.

And it really started ballooning.

After a few years, it went from a non-political environment to like a full-on, you know, in the summer of the George Floyd Revolution, you know, struggle sessions and intense political talk at work about,

you know, COVID not being from a lab, saying things like that is racist, a lot of the pro-transgender sort of re-education happening at work.

So yeah, as these things escalated and became more politicized and started representing a more and more niche kind of, you know, Berkeley Bay Area attitude, I really felt like, man, can I keep contributing to a company that like wouldn't hire my son for one of my sons?

You know, that was very clear.

I was supporting a company that was building a future that didn't favor my kids.

And then I saw Eric on a podcast about a year and a half ago and reached out and we started talking.

And here we are.

Wow.

So, Eric, can you outline for us some of the risks that we're all facing every day when we just carry around our iPhones or our Android phones?

Megan, the entire industry really exploded after 9-11 when the U.S.

government was rightly trying to find more people that fit the profile of the 19 hijackers.

And they went to the advertising industry to start looking for certain characteristics.

And then when the iPhone came out around 2009, the software development kits, the app development kits, everything was built around surveillance capitalism, all about the ability to collect your habits, where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse, to collect that information off your cell phone and to sell it to advertisers.

So this entire multi-trillion dollar industry, the reason that Google and Apple are multi-trillion dollar companies is they are surveillance platforms.

Google pays $32, $33 billion a year just to have their browser on

an iPhone to enable the collection of all that data.

And so this is not even Big Brother doing it.

This is big tech doing it.

And you consent to it.

When you buy a new iphone or a new android phone with google mobile services on it and you scroll through that big user agreement at the beginning that nobody ever reads you're consenting to have all your stuff collected analyzed and exported and so the phone works with all the apps sitting on the phone to do things as radical as turn on the microphone to listen to your conversations while you're while the phone is sitting on your nightstand

in your bedroom talking to your spouse.

Oh, Oh, yeah.

Surely that's rare.

That's got to be rare, no?

100%.

I wish it was rare.

It is not.

I would, you know, this came, this is a big topic.

People ask me all the time, like thousands of times people have said, like, Joe, do the phones really listen?

And I can tell you this, the sad thing is I don't think they have to.

I think it's worse.

I think it's worse than the mics being turned on.

So whether or not an application is turning on a microphone, it's certainly plausible in some scenarios.

But the fact is, all the apps on your phone are spewing information constantly to advertising databases that are able to learn everything about you and the people in your life.

So for example, what, like how?

Yeah.

Sure, sure.

So you don't realize like when you have a phone and you put an app on it and it says ask app not to track, what's actually happening in the background is that app is opening sessions with third-party data harvesters to transmit the most important thing is your location.

Because when you have everyone's locations, you have like a three-dimensional topographical map of the relationships in our country, right?

So you know who sleeps with who, who goes to work with who, who goes to the gym with someone else, right?

Who goes to church, who goes to a mosque, who goes to a gun store.

All of that is discernible from location information that's streaming from our apps, even if you turn location off and ask app not to track.

Apps have ways of doing this.

Yeah, it's called fingerprinting.

So applications use many signals from your Wi-Fi, your cell signal to identify your location.

That's being deposited from the app through the SDK, the data harvester, into a data broker, which then turns you into a cohort.

So an advertiser can say, show this ad to a 30-something woman in Connecticut who loves Pilates, right?

And then they'll nail that cohort.

They'll nail that cohort, right?

So what's happening is you start with relationships and location.

And then you go on, okay, someone did a web search and they didn't do it on private.

So now we have information about pilates in that search from a group of friends and now you're seeing ads and i think the big thing we don't realize too is that the amount of ads we're seeing has catapulted in just the last 10 years because roughly at the peak of tv we were seeing like two to three thousand ads a day it's estimated we're seeing 10 12 000 or more ads per day now as we've gone from three hours of tv a day on screen time on tv to seven nine ten hours a day on smartphones okay so let me ask a dumb question let me ask who cares right the young kids would be like who cares we're growing up in the information age they know everything about us i think i think there's a big risk here so okay the average average kid in america by the time they reach the age of 13 has had 72 million data points collected on them

every bit of their preferences every bit of their human interaction so imagine now in an era of ai you effectively have an algorithm digitally grooming them

and this is really dangerous all this information being out there megan i would say there's like layers of problems here the first is just let's not discount creepy ads or dystopian you know my mom for example she went to get a screening i'm from new york she went to sloan kettering to get a cancer screening for an insurance thing and just because she brought her iphone with her and it knew she was there For a month, she was seeing ads on the meta platforms about products to help with the after effects of chemotherapy.

And she thought that like they had discovered she had cancer.

Yeah.

Luckily, thank God she didn't have cancer.

But and some people keep that kind of thing secret, especially from an employer.

I mean, I remember back in the 80s when people were getting HIV diagnoses and it was like the scourge.

You would never have wanted that to come out.

But who knows what people are hiding?

Could be an STD, whatever.

You don't want your employer knowing.

Totally.

And all this information is in databases where you can buy it.

This is the big thing I think people don't realize.

The cell phone information, everything coming from these apps is meeting a legal designation called third-party doctrine.

It's not considered normal data that has Fourth Amendment protections.

So the government can buy this.

That's, I think, the next risk after creepy ads.

Correct.

So follow me here.

Okay.

The government can buy this data to say, hey, who's going to churches or mosques?

Who's going to gun

conventions?

Who's going to anti-abortion rallies?

All of this is discoverable and is frequently purchased by the government.

So we work with operators and various agencies who use this data today to find.

okay I think I lost

I think I lost Joe but I'll go back hopefully I still have Eric do you can can you hear me Eric I'm here I got you

okay good so just pick it up where he left off so does the up phone block all of that

sure that Joe show your phone the uh the upphone

blocks at the roof

those apps from collecting and exporting that data so that you're you don't have an advertising ID.

Your phone, Megan, has an advertising ID, which is like a 32-digit alphanumeric code, which follows you around and makes your device unique and makes it possible for the apps sitting on your phone to export all of that stuff, which can be bought by anybody with a credit card at $1,000.

It's shocking what can be ascertained from that data.

Yes, the big risk to look at third-party data.

Let's see what it looks like.

Does it look like a normal phone or is it like...

So here's my normal phone.

Here's my up phone.

It runs just like an iPhone.

We have like our own encrypted cloud storage product.

You can see here.

That's my son.

Let me move over here.

When I flash over here.

He's flashing through his pictures.

Whoa.

Whoa.

Dash.

No, just kidding.

Just kidding.

Okay.

You see that number there?

What's that number say?

3550.

Oh, yeah.

3550.

3550.

Okay.

What is the number of times today that my phone has blocked the apps on the phone from opening sessions with third-party data harvesters?

You're saying this would even happen on airplane mode on these other regular phones?

Yeah, what I'm saying is that the apps on your phone, many of them, are constantly trying to get money by selling things like your location or who's around you or what you're doing in the app.

So they're reaching out to do this.

Our phone blocks this on the device.

So that means my phone's not contributing to this third-party database of advertising information that's purchasable by anyone.

Can you guys stick over a couple of minutes after?

We have to say goodbye to Sirius XM audience because we got to hand over the baton to Dr.

Laura.

But can you stay around for a little bit extra for podcasts and YouTube?

Gladly, thanks.

Okay, good, because this is crazy.

I actually really do want to know more about this.

This sounds right up my alley.

I have to tell you, I mean, now with like the deep state, people genuinely worry about the deep state, what it knows, you know, who it could target, irrespective of who is sitting in the White House.

There is a group of people we believe are working against the interests of, let's say, Republicans, President Trump, conservatives.

And I don't want them having all my information.

I don't want them knowing where I am, even if I have location services off.

And by the way, this explains why every website now is asking you if they could turn on your location, right?

Have you gotten that?

Like every website's like, can I know exactly where you are?

No, why?

Let's talk about the...

the risks to us because I was saying, I worry, I do, I'm not going to lie, I worry about the government spying on my phone and spying on me and knowing exactly where I am.

I don't trust them.

Now, I don't care who's president.

I don't trust the government to have all that data about me.

Is that crazy paranoia type stuff?

Or is that something that's a real worry?

It's a real worry, and I share your concern completely, regardless of who's in power.

I think a lot of us have seen in the last 10 years that the closeness of the DOJ and the tech companies is a really big concern, and none of us should be comfortable with this.

So yeah, the idea that there's all this data out there about us, which can be leveraged in the event of a crisis, or if there's a change of government and policy, suddenly maybe something about us, we're in a group that's not popular.

I think we should be concerned about this, especially, Megan, because of this technical legal issue.

The information coming off of our phones is not Fourth Amendment protected.

So like if the government wants to wiretap you, there are Fourth Amendment issues there.

but they don't need to wiretap you.

This is what I think people need to understand.

People are worried about the back door.

Oh, what if, what if there's like some, the government sneaks in and monitors my phone?

The front door is open.

The information from our phones allows us to be profiled and put into groups in ways that are very, very dangerous for us.

So, but what you're saying is if the government, let's say I only had an up phone and I didn't have an iPhone or an Android, then the government would try to get it from like you guys and it wouldn't be there for the giving.

Like they try to get it directly from this phone, but they just couldn't do it.

Correct.

So we have no unencrypted customer data at all.

So like we have a photo and video storage service similar to iCloud, but unlike Apple, ours is encrypted from us.

So if the government says, hey, Joe, give me Megan's photos because she has an up phone, I don't have the photos.

There's nothing for me to give in the case of photos.

Wow.

Yes.

Megan, we've already gotten law letters of

federal agencies coming to us saying we need access to this device.

Yes.

And we say, we have nothing to give you because we don't have the keys.

And they said they've used every means at the U.S.

government's disposal, the DEA,

the DOJ, the Secret Service, and beyond, and they couldn't get it.

So, look, we take digital privacy very seriously.

We take the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment.

That's why this phone exists, is to protect individual data sovereignty.

The

news just today is full of a story of Jack Smith working while he was at the DOJ as a special prosecutor,

working with the phone companies to subpoena all this data of Republican senators and lawmakers.

Now, that's a different way of getting after it.

That did require a grand jury to say, yes, you can have this data.

But I mean, the point is simply that government will work against you if you piss them off enough.

That was just Republican senators who did nothing.

Who did nothing.

It was just Republicans around J6th.

It's not like, oh, we saw you organizing J6th.

Even if they had seen that, it would have been problematic.

But I mean, Joe, this is not a figment of our imagination.

No, it's happening all the time.

So I think, again, I think we don't realize how big this problem is and how frequently it's happening.

And what you're describing is not just the phone data, but the cell carrier data.

which is what was discussed here in this recent case, which is another separate, terrible issue.

This is separate from the phone, but this is just basically, if you've got a phone, its location is permanently being tracked by all the cell carriers and that information is available going back permanently.

So are your call records and any SMS messages you send.

Even the content of the SMS messages are saved by the phone company.

So this is something else we've been working on.

We're actually really excited to announce that.

Is that true?

The phone companies, they have all your texts like on record?

Yes, SMS messages.

So this is why we're focusing on solving this problem as well.

We just created a new product with a mobile network called Pond.

So it's a data-only sim for your phone.

So you can make calls on Signal or other apps like that, but it doesn't make phone calls because those phone calls would be kept by the phone company.

So this is a data-only sim.

And unlike normal cell products where your location of your phone is being kept forever, Pond deletes your location information every 24 hours.

So there's just a 24-hour buffer of where your phone has been.

But if the government goes to them and says, hey, where was Joe's phone?

They just don't know.

So the way to think about this, these risks, it's like a diamond with many surfaces.

And what we're trying to do is basically create increased protection on each surface of the diamond.

There are many ways that we can be vulnerable to government surveillance and tracking.

And we're talking about ways to improve your chances in each of these areas.

Now, Eric, what if you wanted to track your kid?

You know, like, I know there's Life 360 and there's all the different apps where you can have your kid turn on his location services or join the app and then you as the parent can find him.

Is that something you can do on the up phone or is that no that's contrary to the entire purpose of the up phone

uh i will defer to joe on that question but i what i will say is you know we have we actually have a kill switch on this device which separates physically separates air gaps the battery from the electronic so that off actually means off your phone you can't turn off now we also have a what do you mean i can't turn it off even when i totally power it down when you power it down it's still pinging towers it's still pinging wi-fi building that digital breadcrumb trail of wherever you've been, that advertising ID following you around 100%.

So this phone also has a, just in case feature, if someone says, Megan, give me your phone, I'm here to inspect it.

You say, sure, officer, you can unlock it with a certain code, and it's an instant hard wipe.

You have another feature.

Hey, are we worried at all that this is going to get in the hands of like true criminals and terrorists who are going to use this?

It sounds like

it could be used for nefarious purposes, too.

Certainly, we don't want to support

bad guys, but I think our founders addressed this issue, right?

Like our legal system is designed to protect innocents.

And they said at the time, like, whoa, bad guys are going to take advantage of this.

And they said, you know what?

To have the, the society is at much greater risk if citizens aren't protected from the government than if citizens can get away with things on an individual basis.

So our perspective is we support law enforcement completely all the way because law enforcement protects our constitutional rights.

And we've designed our product to protect constitutional rights.

So yeah, this, this, the way to think about these risks, Megan, is like a, it's like a pyramid.

You know, Eric is a unique person who's probably at the top of the pyramid.

There are probably many people who are trying to get into his phone and find his location.

And for someone like him, having an actual off switch for the battery is really important because he needs to go into situations where the phone can't emit any electricity at all, right?

I've had the scenario in meetings with important people where, you know, I have my phone and I turn it off, like entirely off.

And yet you do wonder who's in there.

Is there a government in there?

I mean, I've met with Vladimir Putin.

I've prepared for meetings with Vladimir Putin, with Prime Minister Modi of India, like with President Trump.

And I always think before these things, like

you'd be stupid if you were China or someone else not to try to go in.

I'm probably an easy access point, right?

Probably easier than Putin or Trump.

If you could get into my phone and turn on a microphone, that'd be really convenient.

So, I mean, this, I would love to have battery off and no one can even potentially be listening through anything that's on me.

We can even do things, simple things like shut the microphone off, shut the camera off, the GPS, the Wi-Fi, the touch-to-pay, all those features hard off at the root level that you know off means off.

Yes.

Well, the other thing is, you know, I always worry about airplane mode because you see these studies every once in a while about like, if your kid's walking walking around with that phone in his front pocket and he's 13 years old and he's got another, I don't know, you know, 80 years of walking around with that thing, it can reduce sperm count.

It can potentially cause problems that we haven't, I don't know whether this is true, but you see the warnings all the time.

You see an article about it.

But if you truly have the ability to just turn it off when you're not using it, actually off,

that seems much better.

It's great to be able to physically turn it off.

And like, we're not motivated for customers to use the phone, right?

Every other phone provider is motivated financially for people to use the phone more we have no financial interest in usage so we want you to turn it off when you want to turn it off we also have this feature which i love i think you would really like this too which is it shows me the time since my last unlock oh so that is good i love this and i'll tell you why this is so great because I have a problem.

I'm a busy guy.

I use my phone way too much.

I have six kids.

I have a beautiful family.

My wife is the best.

And I sit down at dinner and I look at my phone to see, you know, do I have an email?

You know, how's that deal going with Verizon?

Whatever, right?

This is a problem for me.

I love having a phone that encourages me not to pick it up.

So with this feature, I put my phone in the pocket.

Same thing at church, right?

I go to church and I'm like, I don't want to look at the phone.

But because of this, I know I'm like building up time.

We call the feature time away.

Instead of screen time, which is about your phone, we call it time away.

It's about you.

So here I get to go to dinner with my family and know like when I pick this phone up, it's going to say it's been like 90 minutes since I opened it and I'm going to feel so great about that.

And it really helps me and my family in my day-to-day life, right?

Like I think your point is pardon me.

But if you can still use everything on this phone that you could use elsewhere, like can I still use Google or can I still use, you know, X?

If I want to have a TikTok.

Yes, we have all the, we have 10,000 native apps and we also have access to all the apps that are in a Google Play Store.

They're just going to behave a little differently because they're not giving you the super customized experience.

So if you're not going to be,

let me clarify this issue a little bit.

So what we do is like, I have YouTube on this app, on this phone, and I sign into it and I stream your show, and it's just like normal YouTube, right?

I happen to, I sign in with Google.

I'm fine with this.

But my phone doesn't have Google mobile services.

So what we're balancing is allowing people to have normal consumer experiences with their phone without having this crazy data leakage.

So to answer your question, yes, all the normal apps work and I use them just like every day.

So I use YouTube.

I even use Google Maps.

I turn on location when I want to use Google Maps.

It's a great map product.

And, you know, I'm fine with my location being known by Google for that drive that I'm having to take.

And then I turn it off.

So all of the normal stuff, the day-to-day stuff, is just like an ordinary phone.

The change is I'm actually using less data because my apps are not streaming all of this unnecessary information about me to third-party apps.

Lasts a lot longer.

Correct.

Yes.

so you'll notice this we actually have done recent tests i don't know if this is wild we had a cyber security firm compare this issue between an iphone and iphone and they watched it just took one hour a phone with 33 apps the same apps all the apps you use like spotify pinterest whatever and they just watch the network traffic and the iphone made 3100 calls in that one hour that our phone did not make our phone did not call any data harvesters the iphone even when ask app not to track was was selected made 3,100 calls to known data harvesters.

And get this, Megan.

In those 3,100 calls, it transacted 210,000 packets of data in one hour.

That's 60 packets of data.

Yeah, that's 60 packets of data per second on a phone with just 33 apps.

What's it telling them?

I mean, you're just sitting here, you're not doing anything.

What is it telling them that

amount of data in an hour?

You know, when you have like a kid and they start, they go from like toddler and they start getting a little more independent and they want to see that you're there all the time you know i i have you know dad dad yeah hey i'm here buddy i'm here the apps are like that they're like ravenous for transmitting your location they're basically just constantly phoning home going i'm here i'm here i'm here i'm here i'm here because your real-time location you got to think about it in detail one of the most valuable signals is you know the simple feature that determines whether your phone is in profile or landscape to like read an article how you're holding the phone?

That's a very important signal that every app has access to.

And that can tell a data harvester, is this person moving?

Are they

stationary?

Are they laying down?

Are they running?

All of this is very valuable when you're building a profile.

So the apps are just completely dedicated to transmitting this information to data harvesters at this insane rate.

I mean, that's over 60 times per second that this test showed.

that these packets were moving, which is just wild.

Eric, this was meant to be, given your security background and Joe's background at Apple and his growing unhappiness with working for that company, this seems like a match made in heaven.

I mean, do you even have an iPhone now?

Do you have a second phone that's connected to all of this stuff or no?

No, I've pretty much shifted digital life fully to unplugged.

And is it working okay?

You said it's in beta.

Does that mean people can't buy it yet?

Or what?

What's where is that?

You can buy them today at unplugged.com.

You can.

Okay.

So, and we're also

planning, Megan.

Is it a plan?

Like then you'd get an ATT or you know, whatever Verizon phone service?

So we're on ATT and T-Mobile and all the MVNOs.

We're working with Verizon right now, but we're with those two major networks.

So if you're not, if you're on Verizon, you can move your number to ATT or T-Mobile.

And it just works like any normal phone.

We ship them.

We have a great U.S.-based customer service support team to help you set up your phone and transfer your data from your iPhone to the upphone.

It's really easy.

It takes about a half an hour.

They're great, by the way.

Everyone loves them.

I get a million emails a day about this.

So yeah, it's super easy.

Unplug.com.

we're also in best buy um which is a great partner for us as well that's good and we're just also also delivering to canada and to the uk now and soon to maintain europe

well they they definitely need it because their governments are way nosier than ours and i mean that's saying something but the uk has absolutely no respect respect for anybody's privacy neither does canada all right so now you i you guys actually are advertising on the megan kelly show but that is not why we did this segment i know eric a little bit and i think this is a great idea i've actually been worrying about this in my own life for for a bunch of reasons lately.

So I love this.

It's like necessity is the mother of all invention.

So here you go with the product we've been waiting for.

It's called the upphone unplugged.com.

You guys, thank you.

Thanks for coming up with us, Eric.

And thanks for joining the team, Joe.

Thanks, Megan.

Thanks for having us, Megan.

Thank you.

All the best.

See you soon.

God bless.

Very cool.

Wow.

I mean, have you ever worried about it?

I'm sure you have, right?

How have you not?

Like, who the hell knows?

And every day you hear another story like that one about Jack Smith.

I mean, it just seems like,

do we trust our FBI?

I mean, I trust Cash and I trust Dan, but it's like, who else is in there?

How about the CIA?

My God, nobody trusts them, nor should you.

Anyway,

I haven't looked at phone security the same since I started hearing about this.

And I read the packet about like the bedroom.

That's not good.

That's not okay.

Anyway, check it out.

Unplugged.com, the up phone.

Thank you all so much for being with us today.

We are back tomorrow with Link Lauren and more.

Don't miss that.

Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.

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