The Nuzzi-RFK Drama, Attacking Tucker's Son to Smear Vance, and New Cancel Culture, with Emily Jashinsky | Ep. 1196

Transcript

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Speaker 17 Welcome Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Speaker 17 Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
It's a very busy Newsday. There's a lot happening right now.

Speaker 17 The House is expected to vote on the release of the Epstein files this afternoon. A move President Trump now says he supports.

Speaker 17 We'll talk about it.

Speaker 17 Plus, we have to get into the soap opera that literally everybody in the media and the political world is talking about, involving Olivia Newsy and her former fiancé, Ryan Lizza, who used to work for Politico, and RFKJ, and now another politician.

Speaker 17 You may know a lot of these figures. RFKJ, of course, has been on this show many times.
He's now our Health and Human Services Secretary. Olivia's been on this show, too, and is a friend.

Speaker 17 Ryan Lizza of Political, never on this show, but man, is he fighting back in this love triangle in which they allegedly find themselves with the reveal about another politician?

Speaker 17 I mean, what this has to do with your life, I know not. Literally nothing, but it's

Speaker 17 just one of the biggest stories that's out there right now. Literally everybody I know has sent it to me.
Like, everybody wants to know what we think, what you think.

Speaker 17 Does it mean anything in the larger scale of life? I don't know. I think...
Our guest today will have some thoughts.

Speaker 17 She is Emily Juszynski, and she is the host of After Party with Emily Joshinsky on the MK Media Podcast Network.

Speaker 17 She's also now the host of the Megan Kelly Wrap-Up Show that airs on SiriusXM Channel 111, the MK Channel. That's at 2 p.m.
right after the show.

Speaker 17 You can speak to her every weekday by calling 83344-Megan, 833-446-3496, starting at 2. Or you could get on the line a little early if you want to be one of the first ones.

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Speaker 17 Emily, welcome back. Great to have you.

Speaker 19 Thanks for having me, Megan. Good to be here.

Speaker 17 I know, it's as good a place to start as anywhere else, I guess, since everybody's talking about it. Now, most of the audience is like, who?

Speaker 17 So, Olivia Newsy

Speaker 17 is this rising star in the journalism field.

Speaker 17 She worked for New York Magazine. Prior to that, she worked, she went to Fordham, and then she worked for some far-left publication, didn't she? I can't remember which one.

Speaker 19 Yeah, she was on the Daily Beast. Okay.

Speaker 17 Yeah, Daily Beast. And she got got a job working for New York Magazine.
She's got, you know, sort of a flair with the pen and the storytelling, in my view. I enjoy reading her stuff.

Speaker 17 She was one of the few reporters to come out and report on what she saw around Joe Biden's mental infirmity prior to the election.

Speaker 17 It was late in the game, don't get me wrong, but it was prior to the election and prior to the debate, I should say. Right? Wasn't it? Was it prior to the debate? Was it right around? I think so.

Speaker 17 Right after the debate. Okay.
In any event, there weren't that many leftists who were willing to write about what they saw in Joe Biden. She was one of them.
But then

Speaker 17 it came out that

Speaker 17 she

Speaker 17 was having an alleged affair with Bobby Kennedy. Like a,

Speaker 17 I mean, they're calling it a digital affair, which sounds wrong.

Speaker 17 But what they mean by that is no in-person interludes, like phone sex, basically. Forgive me, audience.
And

Speaker 17 that

Speaker 17 basically her career wound up taking a massive hit because Kara Swisher,

Speaker 17 as the reports have it, went to the head of New York Magazine and said, Olivia, one of your reporters, is having an affair with RFKJ, whom she profiled, which is what makes it professionally very dicey.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 she got turfed from New York Magazine. They fired her.

Speaker 17 The story has... another wrinkle because she was engaged at the time to political writer Ryan Lizza

Speaker 17 and they'd been living together. And he did not go quietly into the night when all of this happened.

Speaker 17 She wound up filing for a restraining order against him in court, accusing him of taping her and, you know, stalker-esque behavior.

Speaker 17 He denied all of it and said, she's the only one who's done anything wrong here, not me. And she wound up withdrawing her motion for a restraining order.

Speaker 17 He points out without any proof of her allegations against him.

Speaker 17 So he feels, and to use his word, that he's been defamed by her without evidence and that people are still walking around with this idea that he somehow did anything wrong.

Speaker 17 Whereas he says, you know, I'm the victim. I got cheated on by, you know, my fiancé.
I thought I was going to marry.

Speaker 17 RFKJ came out at the time and said, I don't even know her. She just profiled me one time and apparently has developed a stalker-esque interest in me.
And I don't know what this is about.

Speaker 17 I did not ask Cheryl Hines about this when she came by my set to promote her book because it just felt very rude and untoward.

Speaker 17 And if this is true, how is it Cheryl's fault?

Speaker 17 You know, I don't, Maureen, my pal Maureen, you are a fellow star on the MK Media Network, Callahan, she would beg me right now to make the choice, the point that her reporting is that Cheryl and RFKJ got together when he was still married to his previous wife, Mary, I think her name was, who was having severe, you know, mental issues and she was basically being driven crazy, I think in part, according to Maureen, by some of Bobby's actions.

Speaker 17 And so Maureen is very unforgiving of Cheryl, too, because look, there is that old saying, you lose him how you get him. You lose him how you get him.
So it, and there's another report that Ryan Lizza

Speaker 17 was with somebody else when he got together with Olivia. So, once again, you lose him how you get him.
I don't know whether this is true. That's that is in the news today that he allegedly.

Speaker 17 People on Twitter are saying, You can't play the victim, you cheated with her on somebody else. Forgive me, Ryan Liz, I do not know whether that's true, but that's what the folks are saying.

Speaker 17 If you deny that, we'll report that too.

Speaker 17 So, this is a very tawdry mess. But Olivia has just gotten rehired by Vanity Fair to write for them,

Speaker 17 and she's also releasing what appears to be a a sort of memoir called American Kanto, C-A-N-T-O. She's moved to L.A.
She was in D.C.

Speaker 17 She's moved to LA

Speaker 17 and she was in New York for a time too.

Speaker 17 And this is, this book sort of juxtaposes between her life as a political reporter on the trail covering Trump, covering all, you know, these big presidential races, and her obvious

Speaker 17 allegations that she had an affair with Bobby Kennedy, which, by the way, I've I've got to just be honest, I buy entirely. I really have zero doubt it happened.

Speaker 17 For the record, I have to tell you he's denied it, but it's just ridiculous. It's so detailed.

Speaker 17 Like, she'd have to be a true lunatic to say all this because she would get sued so quickly for defamation. And if he were innocent, he would sue her.

Speaker 17 If you think of it, if you're Health and Human Services Secretary and you're a married man and somebody's coming out, reporter saying all these things with you, and not a word of this is true, you would absolutely sue her.

Speaker 17 But you wouldn't if it were true true and you knew she had your text messages and so on. I don't really care.
I got to be honest.

Speaker 17 Like, I think half the people we have in office right now have probably cheated on their spouses. And I just like, post me too, Emily.
I'm kind of like,

Speaker 17 it's their business. It's hard enough to find, you know,

Speaker 17 great politicians. It's not ideal.
It's not something I would choose, you know, like it's wonderful. But like, I don't know.
I've kind of given up on these fights.

Speaker 17 I used to be much more interested in them. And now I'm just kind of like, whatever.
Can we just find somebody who knows how to to govern? And I mean that for Democrats too. I don't think it's great.

Speaker 17 I certainly don't like when somebody holds themselves up as a paragon of virtue like Doug Mhoff and then we find out that they've got this kind of a history. Like, please spare me.
You're moralizing.

Speaker 17 Okay, but I'm getting, we'll get to the end on what Ryan Lizzie just did, which adds a brand new wrinkle to the story in one minute. But what does this say to you, this whole saga?

Speaker 17 Because it's like so many topics that we all and people that we all cover and know of and an industry that we cover and we know of and we're in intimately.

Speaker 17 And it just like, it's all anybody can discuss. So what are your thoughts on it, EJ?

Speaker 19 Well, this is obviously a sort of an amplified example of the kind of thing that happens behind closed doors and sometimes not even behind closed doors in Washington, D.C., in New York, Los Angeles, among very powerful, wealthy people.

Speaker 19 But I think everybody understood that this was a messy relationship. Certainly, everybody in DC seemed to understand that this was a messy relationship as it was happening.

Speaker 19 Ryan Lizza had kids, he's much older than Olivia, and it all just seemed like tornadic the way that they got together and carried out their relationship.

Speaker 19 But listen, like where I'm from, this would be, these would be people you wouldn't want to babysit your children.

Speaker 19 These would be people that you wouldn't want, you know, around your family or your kids because the behavior here is just grotesque and sad.

Speaker 19 And I think, you know, Olivia is talented enough to seem interesting and to sometimes mistake self-indulgence for talent.

Speaker 19 And she definitely has talent, but there's this, I think, permission structure.

Speaker 19 people who want to be great writers sometimes give themselves, which is if you are self-deprecating enough, that's license to also be very self-indulgent.

Speaker 19 And the writing in the Vanity Fair excerpt of the book that was released yesterday, it is so overwrought. And you could just tell that she wants to be great.

Speaker 19 And I think that's good that somebody wants to be great.

Speaker 19 She's certainly talented, but I also think young women, younger women, I think Olivia and I are roughly the same age, have been taught that this pain is in some way, and the suffering is some way art in and of itself, and is talent in and of itself.

Speaker 19 And I just hope she gets better. I hope Brian Liz's family gets better, but I also doubt that because the arc here seems to be going towards something even worse.

Speaker 19 And based on the allegations that Liza unfolded in the substack yesterday.

Speaker 17 I know. I mean, it's like, I don't know.
Very clearly,

Speaker 17 Olivia and Ryan Liza did not belong together. Seems very clear this was not a good match.

Speaker 17 And, you know, lots of people handle that bad situation badly rather than getting out of the relationship honorably. They make bad choices, which wind up hurting the other person.
And

Speaker 17 I'm always hesitant to really like completely go scorched earth, again, unless they hold themselves up as a paragon of virtue, because you never know what the other side is.

Speaker 17 You know, it's like, in my experience, generally somebody does not cheat unless the relationship has really gone bad. Now, that can be very, very wrong.

Speaker 17 Sometimes like really sweet spouses who are very loving and caring and supportive do get cheated on because the other person has got some issue. But, you know, how do we know on the outside?

Speaker 17 In any event, look, I'm not excusing it. I'm just saying this is, it's complicated to try to analyze these things from the outside.

Speaker 17 Okay, so she decides, I mean, it's very interesting because she never gave an interview about this alleged affair.

Speaker 17 You know, it was all articles about her, but it was very clear, especially on some of like the page six reporting, the New York Post reporting, that she was cooperating behind the scenes.

Speaker 17 You know, you can usually tell as the pictures get nicer of the person they're reporting on, you can usually deduce that there's some cooperation.

Speaker 17 So,

Speaker 17 in any event, event,

Speaker 17 weirdly, like her star has kind of risen as a result of it. She's, you know, like her name has been out there.
She's kind of painted as a femme fatale.

Speaker 17 I don't know. There's like intrigue around her.
She's stunning, absolutely beautiful woman. And I think she's very talented.
People are mocking the writing because it's a little flowery.

Speaker 17 But I think it's very good. I've always enjoyed her pieces.
I appreciate some effort in making political coverage somewhat flowery as opposed to just a punch in the face.

Speaker 17 For lack of a better adjective, she probably wouldn't like flowery, but you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 17 She works at the rhetorical flair, and I'll take a little flair, you know?

Speaker 17 It's too much for our friend Charles C.W. Cook over at National Review, who's not a fan, but that's not a surprise to me.
He's, you know, he's English.

Speaker 17 So now she writes this book, and the excerpt is in Vanity Fair, and we've got some of it here.

Speaker 17 Okay, first of all, before we get to what's in here, let's go to the Emily Jashinsky dramatic reading from After Party.

Speaker 17 Last night, After Party with Emily Jashinsky airs live on YouTube Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 p.m. If you're missing it, you're missing the party.

Speaker 17 And then you can pick it up as a podcast or YouTube show so you can still check it out.

Speaker 17 But anyway, here's just a little clip of EJ giving her dramatic reading full with the black sunglasses that Olivia wears in her photo shoot on the Vanity Fair spread. Her watch.

Speaker 19 She's beeping. I do not like to think about it just as later.
I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny. I loved his brain.

Speaker 19 I hated the idea of an intruder therein.

Speaker 19 Others thought he was a madman. He was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad.

Speaker 19 I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could.

Speaker 19 Thanks for making me watch that.

Speaker 17 It wasn't that dramatic. It was, it was, you know, it was a rereading of what she said.

Speaker 17 Well, yeah.

Speaker 17 She,

Speaker 17 here's one of the opening paragraphs of the excerpt in Vanity Fair that dropped yesterday.

Speaker 17 I would take a bullet for you, the politician said. He always said that.
Please don't say that, I said. I always said that.
From his mouth, the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible.

Speaker 17 I did not like to think about it, about the armed man at his speech, or the armed man who broke into his home. And she goes on to set up this relationship in which

Speaker 17 she cared about him and vice versa. I loved the private ways that he was mad.
I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could.

Speaker 17 He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm that you just referenced, the brain worm. Baby, don't worry, he said.
It's not a worm.

Speaker 17 A doctor he trusted had reviewed the scans of his brain obtained by the New York Times. Bah, blah, blah, blah.
He told her he did not still have a brain worm or ever, as far as we know.

Speaker 17 Okay, it goes on. She does talk about what she loved about him, his blue eyes,

Speaker 17 her favorite body part of his, which she says was,

Speaker 17 guys, there shouldn't have been a long pause there.

Speaker 17 His nose, his nose, his nose. And her favorite of his,

Speaker 17 his favorite of hers, which was her lips.

Speaker 17 And then hold on,

Speaker 17 this is the part that

Speaker 17 everybody kind of wants to hear about.

Speaker 17 She writes, okay,

Speaker 17 she did not care about their 39-year-old, 39-year age difference.

Speaker 17 She said, okay, they both, they both, quote, moved through the world with amused detachment and deep sensitivity, contradictions that worked somehow in concert.

Speaker 17 She writes that despite being sober for decades, Kennedy told her he still uses psychedelics and even smoked DMT, a powerful drug on which people are known to have what feel like near-death experiences.

Speaker 17 She told him she liked uppers. I told him that I took Adderall.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 she writes that she said, I love you, only after he said it first. He called her Livy and wrote her poems.
He said he wanted her to have his baby.

Speaker 17 He promised to take a bullet for her in the part I just read.

Speaker 17 She, as the excerpt reads in

Speaker 17 the New York Times profile that just dropped, profiling her in the book, she loved him. She loved the politician, even though she was a political reporter.

Speaker 17 And he was then a presidential candidate she had written about. She loved his eyes, blue as the flame.
She loved that the sight of something as trivial as a rose could move him to tears.

Speaker 17 She loved his insatiable appetites and his particular complications and particular darkness.

Speaker 17 They write about a digital affair with Kennedy that revolved around texts and phone calls.

Speaker 17 The revelation derailed her career, leading to her fire at New York Magazine and a very public explosion of her relationship with Chris Saliza. Kennedy tried to brush it off, brush her off,

Speaker 17 sending her into self-imposed exile in Los Angeles. The book paints a picture of a nation and a personal life for her on fire.

Speaker 17 She describes the mutual infatuation that consumed her, even if it was never consummated. She's ambiguous in the book, but said in one of many interviews, we were not sleeping together.

Speaker 17 But American Kanto is far more than bearing witness to Trump world

Speaker 17 and about how she believes that warped her, just as it warped the country.

Speaker 17 Okay, that's basically the highlights before we get to

Speaker 17 Ryan Liz's response. But I don't know.

Speaker 17 Am I being too forgiving of this affair? I feel like it's a Kennedy. If you married, if I married a Kennedy, I would not be expecting fidelity.
I know that's, maybe that's wrong.

Speaker 17 Honestly, like, especially if when I got together with a Kennedy, he was cheating on his existing wife. Like, honestly, I, what do people think?

Speaker 17 I, I just, Like, if you're going to marry somebody who's cheated on other spouses and you're cheating with him when you fall in love and then you marry, like, what do you think is going to happen?

Speaker 17 You know, it's like some people have these deals.

Speaker 17 This is not my deal. This is not what I want, you know, for my relationship, my children's relationships.

Speaker 17 But some people do have these deals where it's either implicit or explicit that they're going to look the other way.

Speaker 19 And again, to the point that you were making, without knowing what's really happening, I mean, even the book refers to him as just the politician.

Speaker 19 And so it's very intimate, but also sort of detached in a way. And we don't have his side fully.
We don't have the full details. We never could.

Speaker 19 We can't go back and, you know, be in their social circles and know exactly what was going on behind the scenes.

Speaker 19 But I will say, I do think

Speaker 19 it's interesting that Olivia told the New York Times, she kind of demurred when asked whether she had the text messages, because

Speaker 19 RFKJ says this was basically unrequited, that she was sending him, as you mentioned, Megan, text messages,

Speaker 19 sexual types of text messages. It is hard for me to believe she would do that without it being requited,

Speaker 19 because what an insanely risky thing to do to a man who is as high-profile and powerful and married.

Speaker 19 But she also told the New York Times she seemed to say she wasn't going to be releasing any of these text messages.

Speaker 19 kind of said maybe she doesn't even have the text messages. And then Liz's story sounds a lot like R.F.
Kennedy Jr.'s story, which is that she was texting him all of the time.

Speaker 19 So again, I just don't know. I genuinely don't know what's true.
It's not hard for me to believe on the one hand given Kennedy's history even with his deceased wife. That was very public.

Speaker 19 So it's not out of the realm of possibility, certainly. One other thing I wanted to add though is also that as talented as I think Olivia is, she does moralize.
And she did a lot in Trump 1.0.

Speaker 19 And that's part of what bothers me about this story.

Speaker 19 I remember the time she held up her phone phone playing crying migrant children during a White House briefing in Trump 1.0, and the entire media hailed her as like this brave hero.

Speaker 19 I think as the administration went on, she kind of like learned to have more

Speaker 19 like detached amusement and a little bit of fun with it.

Speaker 19 But her and Ryan Lizza both are sort of like anti-right people who have held themselves up as responsible journalists and criticized a lot of people on the right for a long time.

Speaker 19 So I also do feel a bit irked by the revelations of their very, very, very messy and sordid personal lives.

Speaker 17 Fair enough.

Speaker 17 I will say she's always been very fair to me in her writing and her approach. She's never ostracized me, and I'm on the right.
Like, that's rare. That is very rare.

Speaker 17 So, I always liked her. I mean, she's definitely farther left than I am, but I don't really care.
To me, this is just like, obviously, she's got a thing for older men.

Speaker 17 Okay, so before we get to Ryan Lizza, it's a dark thing, too. It's a freaking dark thing because that pension led her first to Keith Oberman.

Speaker 17 Isn't that punishment enough for anything that happened thereafter? Isn't that

Speaker 19 the rest of your life?

Speaker 17 Yeah, she's paid her penance for whatever would come later. He's so disgusting.
It's amazing. Katie Tur and he as well lived together for years, who is

Speaker 17 many, Katie Tur,

Speaker 17 yeah, of MSNBC, who is is many years his junior they were together for many years and he continues to attack her now publicly is so angry about how that ended I guess she must have dumped him and now he was with Olivia for four years four years Emily the reporting is that he um well and this is this brings me to Ryan Lizza we knew I think that she was with Olbermann um I think did we Steve Cracker will let me know um Steve knows everything yeah there's been rumblings he said I thought I thought I knew that I wasn't surprised to learn she'd been, but I didn't remember that they lived together for four years.

Speaker 17 Four.

Speaker 17 So Ryan Lizza, I'll get to Keith Oberman and Ryan Lizza now. So Ryan Lizza,

Speaker 17 he's not exactly the jilted fiancé. He's more the cheated-on fiancée.
I think he jilts her. Or perhaps at that point it was just mutual.

Speaker 17 I mean, it's like, but he comes out with this extraordinary piece. Oh, wait.
All right. Just one second.
My team points out there is something else in her excerpt I need to read.

Speaker 17 okay, she writes the following: she writes, like all men, but more so, he was a hunter. Okay,

Speaker 17 in a literal sense, he used not a bullet but a bird. It was not about a chase.
Was that, I don't even actually totally understand that, like birds and bees? No.

Speaker 17 Um, it was about not about a chase, but about a puzzle of logic and skill that amounted to a test of his self-mastery.

Speaker 17 He was the mouse and the architect of his maze, the giver of his own pleasure and torment. He desired.
He desired desiring. He desired being desired.
He desired desire itself.

Speaker 17 I understood this just as I came to understand the range of his kinks and complexes and how they fit within what I thought I understood of his soul. All right.

Speaker 17 Can I say, I believe every word of that. I believe he desired.
I believe he desired desiring. I believe he desired being desired.
I believe he desired desire itself.

Speaker 17 That's not unusual for a man who's a serial cheater. Again, like, I don't know what's going on in his marriage with Cheryl, but like,

Speaker 17 just read Maureen's book, Ask Not.

Speaker 19 That

Speaker 17 many men who are unhappily married feel that, and the reason they don't act on it is because they're not monkeys and they have self-control and they took vows.

Speaker 17 And ostensibly, they, like Kennedy, may have a commitment to their faith, to Catholicism, to doing what is right, what is moral, and you know, what is honorable. I mean,

Speaker 17 this is why Bill Maher says he never got married, because he didn't want to give up passion

Speaker 17 and

Speaker 17 desire, which he was convinced would go away after a few years of marriage.

Speaker 17 And he and I have had many behind-the-scenes debates about this where I've urged him to accept from me that that is not something you have to give up when you get married.

Speaker 17 It's not the way it was in year one when you're first dating somebody, that's true, but that there can be like total hot passion passion and burning desire, even in my case, 20 years into the relationship.

Speaker 17 You know, and there are all sorts of ways of keeping that alive, which we can discuss in another show.

Speaker 17 But like

Speaker 17 she's describing something that is probably real. I get that people think this is kind of cheesy, but it's probably real.
And she's still young. I mean, you're young too.
I don't know. Like,

Speaker 17 am I being again too generous to a friend in saying like she may have been swept away by this desire from a Kennedy presidential candidate in a way in particular a younger woman might fall for like this he desire desire is unique or real or something new and exciting that's like literally every man No, I don't think I mean it's it's entirely believable that she would have been about 30 years old at this time Maybe even a little younger than that and the power imbalance I mean we talked about that throughout me too But the power imbalance in a situation where you have this like swaggering historic figure in Bobby Kennedy.

Speaker 19 And I'm not saying Olivia fell prey to any like predatory situation.

Speaker 17 I'm just saying there's something

Speaker 17 to say that either.

Speaker 19 No, not at all.

Speaker 19 There's just something that, you know, there's something romantic and seductive from her perspective, clearly in the writing about being approached by somebody that famous and powerful and mythical who wants her.

Speaker 19 So yeah, I mean, I think... Kennedy is probably very aware of the effect that he has on women just by virtue of being a Kennedy.
I I think every Kennedy is very aware of that.

Speaker 19 And Olivia is clearly, through this writing, you can see taken in by the mythology of all of it.

Speaker 19 And you could probably put any random like 27-year-old in her shoes and you would get the same result.

Speaker 17 There's, I think, a 39-year age difference between them. I mean, like, it's something massive.

Speaker 17 It is, clearly it's a thing where she likes the older man a lot because truly, like, I'm 20 years younger than RFKJ.

Speaker 17 And I mean, there's zero, I'd be like, of course he's married and I'm married, but like I, oh, I wouldn't date somebody 20 years older than me at all.

Speaker 17 By the way, just a word for dating somebody your own age. I just want to put that on the record.
Something wonderful about dating somebody your own age is that you age together.

Speaker 17 Like you cross, you know, new barriers together, new, new big birthdays together. But you, they also know all of your

Speaker 17 references. I've said this before, but I really mean it.

Speaker 17 Like if I make some stupid joke about 80s music or even like songs of the 70s or sitcoms or, you know, what happened in the 90s, my husband knows all of them.

Speaker 17 We both crack up. You know, we grew up in the same movies.
Not long ago, we were talking about something and about somebody who had jumped some crazy

Speaker 17 amount of distance. And I said to Doug, God did a Peter Pan right off this bridge.
And he knew immediately what that was. And the audience, do you know what I'm talking about?

Speaker 17 Is anyone getting the movie?

Speaker 17 You can write to me if you know what it was. It's Megan at megankelly.com.
The point is that there's real joy in having those shared references.

Speaker 17 We laugh 10 times a day based on one of these things. I just think it would be very different.
But there are especially a lot of young women who like older men. And I don't know if it's a daddy issue.

Speaker 17 That's probably something for a psychiatrist, not for me. But

Speaker 17 Olivia definitely, this is her type, because that brings me to Chris.

Speaker 17 Wait a minute. Not Chris.
Ryan Liza. Chris Lizza is disgusting.
And not Ryan Lizza and definitely not somebody who Olivia would date.

Speaker 17 Well, so,

Speaker 17 well, I mean, I know.

Speaker 19 Hard to say.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I don't know. He's too gross.
She would never. But, okay.

Speaker 17 So Ryan Lizza decides upon the excerpt of this thing being published in Vanity Fair to finally, really speak out about this, which he really hasn't so far.

Speaker 17 I mean, Olivia did give a couple of minor interviews just to sort of salvage her reputation when this was all happening to to her, but she did, she hadn't done the big in-depth thing like she just did with the New York Times and the excerpt of Vanity Fair.

Speaker 17 So now Ryan Lizza has had about enough of this

Speaker 17 and he decides on, he left Politico during this whole scandal and he decides on his new, it's not Substack, it's a publication I hadn't actually yet heard of. What's it called, Steve?

Speaker 19 Telos.

Speaker 17 Oh. It is his Substack, but he just calls it Telos News.
What does that mean, Telos? Is that a Spanish reference? I don't even know what that is. What is Telos? T-E-L-O-L-L.

Speaker 17 It's Latin? Oh, I went to public school.

Speaker 17 I don't understand that.

Speaker 19 I can't tell you what it means.

Speaker 17 Okay.

Speaker 17 Well, in any event, I'll ask my kids. They're at private school.
They know Latin, or at least a few words. I learned a few in law, but not enough.
Okay,

Speaker 17 so he is like,

Speaker 17 okay, bitches, it's time for me to pick up my pen because I'm a writer too.

Speaker 17 And here's what happens.

Speaker 17 The New York Post is writing this up.

Speaker 17 They say,

Speaker 17 Lizza,

Speaker 17 well, I mean, I read his piece. So actually, we don't need to.

Speaker 17 I have it here. Standby.
We don't need to rely on the New York Post, though they did do a good write-up of it. Where is it? I have so many papers.

Speaker 17 They left it in the other room. My God.

Speaker 19 I like how they went to the overhead camera so we can see all of your papers.

Speaker 17 Like, there's so many, like, there's so many affairs to keep track of. I don't have it all.

Speaker 17 Okay, in any event, I guess I left it back in my other room, but I do have the write-up on it and my team's write-up on it.

Speaker 18 Okay.

Speaker 17 He writes about how early on in their relationship, he helped her out of a jam with Keith Oberman,

Speaker 17 whom she had dated.

Speaker 17 The way he words it in his piece is a little weird. It almost makes it sound like she cheated on him with Keith Olbermann, but that's not it.

Speaker 17 She dated Keith Olberman when she was very young, like 20, 21,

Speaker 17 and like new to New York, and lived with Keith Olberman, or at least he paid for her studio apartment. And

Speaker 17 points out like he spent, lavished thousands of dollars upon her. Keith Oberman's now gleefully confirming all of this, saying, Oh, I was making tons of money at the time.
We were together four years.

Speaker 17 That's four birthdays, four Christmases, four anniversaries. What was I supposed to get her? Like a

Speaker 17 plastic, a Kmart gift card you know like okay you're super important Keith Olbermann but I'm not gonna lie him actually being Olivia Newsy's boyfriend for four years does make him slightly cooler than I thought he was

Speaker 17 so

Speaker 17 he's out there he's enjoying every second of this and uh

Speaker 17 Ryan Lizzer writes about how she came to him Olivia did and is like please help me you know clean up this mess that I made with Keith Oberman. And he did.

Speaker 17 I'm not exactly sure how they needed to do it, but she needed to get away from him. She didn't like Keith Oberman when all was said and done.
What a shock.

Speaker 17 And he helped her clean up that mess. Do we still have Emily? Do we lose her?

Speaker 17 Uh-oh. We lost Emily.
Oh my God. Who was it? Is it Keith Olberman? He's interfere.
This is the part where it just gets good for Keith Olbermann.

Speaker 17 All right, we're going to get her back on, but she knows the story, so I'm going to continue reading for the listening audience.

Speaker 17 Okay.

Speaker 17 And then

Speaker 17 Ryan Lizza writes as follows: that there was a period in their relationship where he uncovered a secret love letter on Hotel Stationery after she returned from covering what he thought was just the presidential race in 2020.

Speaker 17 She was on the road. He thought she was just doing like presidential politics coverage.
And he finds a secret love letter she began to pen but did not yet complete on Hotel Stationery.

Speaker 17 And it was not addressed to Ryan. It was addressed to someone named Mark.

Speaker 17 It went on to like

Speaker 17 have some kind of corny lines, like, If I swallowed every drop of water from the tower above your house, I would still thirst for you.

Speaker 17 She had written in this note dated March 5th, 2020, according to Lizza.

Speaker 17 Their home, he noted,

Speaker 17 had no water tower. Oh, God, this is so

Speaker 17 sad. Why do we know this? Why are we knowing any of this?

Speaker 17 He wrote that another page named the recipient of the letter as Mark, which is not his name, which he said confirmed what he feared, an alleged physical relationship with someone other than himself.

Speaker 17 By early

Speaker 17 2020, he, Ryan, and Olivia had signed a contract to write a book on the presidential race, he says.

Speaker 17 But Nuzi was busy spending more and more time on the road, including in South Carolina, which he believed was for reporting.

Speaker 17 Instead, Liza now claims that she, quote, secretly followed this particular man on the campaign trail to pursue him, allegedly sending him explicit photos and messages while telling Ryan Lizza that she was, quote, dealing with the crisis concerning her sick mother.

Speaker 17 He says she admitted to to him that the relationship with this man intensified, ultimately leading to a sexual encounter at his home the night she went dark and stopped answering messages from Liza.

Speaker 17 And he finishes his piece,

Speaker 17 stand by,

Speaker 17 by

Speaker 17 phoning his agent and delivering the news. Quote, we have a big problem, he recalled telling the agent, quote, Olivia is sleeping with Mark Sanford.

Speaker 17 Mark Sanford was a presidential candidate back in 2020 who made news because he was caught cheating on his wife with a different woman, which became the big story.

Speaker 17 Remember, he went like hiking with her on like some Argentinian trail or something. I can't remember the details, but it was like, it was all over the news.

Speaker 17 And he had been considered a frontrunner, and then it just killed his chances back in 2020. People weren't responding to this kind of news the way Trump did.

Speaker 17 You know, it was was like, fake news, screw everyone. And then people looking the other way, like pretending not to believe it.

Speaker 17 It really did mess up his campaign. And now it turns out, according to Ryan Lizza, that Olivia too was having an affair with Mark Sanford.

Speaker 17 And at a time, he alleges she has not yet responded to this, so we'll find out whether she denies this.

Speaker 17 At a time when she was covering him. And indeed, if you look back, she did profile Mark Sanford.
There are pictures of it.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 Ryan Lizza says at this time, she was either in the midst of or beginning an affair with him and went on to continue covering him.

Speaker 17 And she was sleeping with her subject, which is a very clear journalistic, no, no, that is not okay by

Speaker 17 anyone's measure.

Speaker 17 He asks, how could we write a book about the presidential campaign if Olivia had a sexual relationship with one of the candidates? And

Speaker 17 they didn't write that book, though I think by 2024, when they broke up over the alleged Kennedy affair, they had once again decided to write a book together.

Speaker 17 Like they patched things up after Sanford stayed together and once again had decided to write a book together, which once again had to be shelved because again,

Speaker 17 She was covering RFKJ and allegedly fell in love with him. Well, she says she fell in love with him and began this via text affair.
She claims.

Speaker 17 Again, RFKJ is suggesting, though not that explicitly, that she's some sort of a psycho-stalker who like developed a fixation on him after one profile of him. Okay, that's where things are now, Emily.

Speaker 17 She's back with us. So, how do the Ryan Lizza revelations about Olbermann, Sanford, and this allegedly being a pattern change things?

Speaker 17 Because I will tell you, there's now a push by Twitter, by X, for her to lose

Speaker 17 the gig she's now got at Vanity Fair.

Speaker 17 They want her to be punished for all of this. That's really what they want, more than she already has been.
She already lost her job at New York Magazine.

Speaker 19 Well, I think that's dumb. I mean, she's an essayist.
I think her title with Vanity Fair is West Coast Correspondent, something like that. And

Speaker 19 she's an essayist. If she's not covering like the daily TikTok of Capitol Hill and campaigns and politics as someone who's like breaking news,

Speaker 19 then she's just going to sort of cover politics from a literary perspective, which I'm assuming is what the gig is going to look like.

Speaker 19 Then if she's writing in first-person new journalism style, by all means,

Speaker 19 we should be begging her to continue writing at this point because she's giving so much.

Speaker 19 But Lizza, I found just

Speaker 19 his revelation, which he also wrote in this overwrought prose where he's talking about tinkering in the garden and tending to his bamboo and cleaning up.

Speaker 17 He's really upset about the bamboo in the garden. You try to pull it out, pull it out, pull it out, and it keeps regrowing.

Speaker 19 I mean, you know, these are the types of people who just like love

Speaker 19 making like, I don't know.

Speaker 19 These are the types of people that think very highly of themselves.

Speaker 19 And Lizza is the type of person here who thinks he is coming across in a way that repairs his reputation, but actually, it is so profoundly unmasculine to treat.

Speaker 19 No, I mean, to treat a woman that you were with this way, to talk about how you didn't really want to get engaged to her, you just wanted to live with her and test her out,

Speaker 19 and then to say, Well, you know, Olivia started this, I was going to be quiet about all of it, we agreed to be quiet about all of it, and then to go spill all of these details, and to be the one who nobody would have known about Mark Sanford if he hadn't written about it.

Speaker 19 Like, to be the man and to be the person who has to tattletale on this younger woman that you were in a relationship with despite having children and a family, you were living with her and to blame her.

Speaker 19 I mean, it just doesn't make him come across better. It makes him come across like a narcissist and immature.
And there's something like deeply unmasculine about it.

Speaker 19 So I thought the sub-sec was helpful to that effect in giving us some insight into how he conducts himself.

Speaker 17 Not to mention, all of the men on X that I have read today are like, dude, this is not something you want to admit about yourself.

Speaker 17 That she had this affair, that you stayed with her, that she had yet another affair. You know, like, this isn't, this, it's not, it's not great.
I understand that point.

Speaker 17 But like in his defense, I'll defend him.

Speaker 17 I think he's feeling extremely angry and betrayed because he did forgive her clearly that first time. And I'm sure it was painful to read the excerpt.

Speaker 17 He read it with a very different eye, I'm sure, than you and I did, and did not appreciate, you know, they're talking about her having RFKJ's baby and what she loved about him, his eyes and his nose, and how he said he'd take a bullet for her and how his desire.

Speaker 17 I mean, can you imagine if you were her fiancé, the anger that would be surging through your veins in reading that?

Speaker 17 Now, he says he's with another person now and that this new gal is great and he loves doing the sub stack and that's all good for Ryan. But I'm sure his anger led him to just say, fuck it.
It's on.

Speaker 17 Like, I'm going to drop the bomb that I've been withholding, which is because this really, it does change things.

Speaker 17 I mean, honestly, it does change things to find out if it's, it's a pattern, if it's true, that like this is the second presidential candidate that she's covered and slept with at the same time.

Speaker 17 Like, I'm not saying it's great to do it once

Speaker 17 for the record, but I've never slept with the source. I just want to make sure I'm not making excuses for her because this is something like, trust me, I've never slept with the source.

Speaker 17 But it's one thing, like affairs of the heart, people are unhappily married, but like a pattern, you know, and especially with like the older man thing.

Speaker 17 And it's like, I see the point people are raising, which is like, how could you employ her as a politics reporter at this point?

Speaker 17 She is, as you point out, West Coast editor for Vanity Fair, which seems fine. And I don't think for one second she should lose that position.

Speaker 19 Yeah, I agree with that. And I mean, I just,

Speaker 19 the, the sad part of this is Olivia did lose her father pretty young.

Speaker 19 And, you know, her also claim to fame was parlaying a gig on the Anthony Wiener campaign, an internship on the Anthony Wiener campaign into

Speaker 19 a big, yeah, into a big essay. And so it just seems like she's been through a perfect storm of like,

Speaker 19 personal and political and professional pain and weirdness.

Speaker 19 And I get that sort of the poetry that she's trying to come across, that she's trying to make come across in the book, even calling it American Canto, this idea that her personal story has been woven with this really crazy decade, interwoven with this really crazy decade plus in American politics in a somewhat interesting and instructive way.

Speaker 19 But also, I mean, it's definitely,

Speaker 19 there's clearly something that personally is creating a pattern.

Speaker 19 And that's, I hope that she gets help for that because it's replicated itself a number of times now in a way that's brought, it has hurt other kids. I'm sure Liz's kids have been really hurt by this.

Speaker 19 I'm sure Lizz has been really hurt by this. And nobody deserves that.

Speaker 17 It sounds like he hurt them. And then they got more hurt.
I don't know. I think even Liza is 10 years older than she is.
There's Oberman, who's like decades older. Liz is at least 10 years older.

Speaker 17 RFKG is almost 40 years older.

Speaker 17 Sanford's a lot older, too. Like,

Speaker 17 I don't know. Somebody, I think it was Charles C.W.

Speaker 17 Cook tweeted out or somebody tweeted out a picture, a headline of like Olivia Nuzzy in the White House with Trump and like three other figures, and he just wrote, uh-oh.

Speaker 17 Which was funny. But look,

Speaker 17 what I would want, and look, she doesn't need my advice, but

Speaker 17 Olivia has tons of raw talent and she's got a very bright future. This is a dark chapter, but she she's going to be around as a political writer for a very long time.

Speaker 17 And I would love for her and all young writers coming up and young reporters coming up to realize that the best and really only way to make your name in this industry is through your talent.

Speaker 17 I mean, it's just, it's the best and really only way to rise up and sustain a career in this industry. And, you know, the more distractions like this, part of it is life.

Speaker 17 People aren't, they're not perfect. They make mistakes.
Sometimes those mistakes, if you're a public figure, make news.

Speaker 17 And sometimes when the news is about you and it's so loud, you feel like you have to say something. I think that's kind of the position she was in here.

Speaker 17 But it's not something you want to dine out on at all. It's something you want to move on from quickly.

Speaker 17 And, you know, with any sort of PR crisis like this one, it's probably just best to own it, own it all, own it early and move on. Because it's not a fake news controversy.
It's a real controversy.

Speaker 17 You know, she admits this happened. So it's like, okay.

Speaker 17 I mean, I will just say like when involved in fake news controversies, I have learned at the ripe old age I am, don't give them any oxygen because that's exactly what your detractors want.

Speaker 17 They want nothing more than for you to spin your own wheels on their bullshit nonsense about you. It took me 55 years as of today, but I finally figured that one out, EJ.

Speaker 17 So hopefully the young gals coming up behind me and guys for that matter can learn that too sooner.

Speaker 19 It's your birthday, Megan?

Speaker 17 It's my birthday.

Speaker 19 Happy birthday. This story couldn't have come at a better time.

Speaker 17 Thank you so much.

Speaker 17 Well, look, I guess at my ripe old age, what I wish for all these people is healing, actual love, wellness, and bright careers that come from the tip of their pens instead of any other tip.

Speaker 17 Any other tip? Oh my God.

Speaker 19 That was beautiful. I mean, like.

Speaker 19 What, like 30% of romantic comedies, comedies at least, the protagonist is a female journalist, like how to lose a guy in 10 days. Like, you go down the line.

Speaker 19 And so I think there's an archetype that, especially like millennial women and probably Gen X too saw in movies and in television where there's this troubled journalist who creates great art and writing out of personal struggles and it's all interwoven.

Speaker 19 And so I think it's very easy for people to get caught up in the romance of all of that. So I hope that this has been a colossal lesson for Olivia Nuzzy too.

Speaker 17 Yeah, honestly, I think you're right about that.

Speaker 17 She actually is getting dragged right now on X because she in 2015 tweeted out a screen grab from some film or movie or a TV show that had a reporter sleeping with a source.

Speaker 17 And she captioned it to the effect of, why does Hollywood think female reporters all sleep with their sources? Oh, no. I know.

Speaker 17 Like, oh, well, that did not age well.

Speaker 17 Maybe it gave an idea. I don't know.
But, like, here's the other problem. Like I said, up top, she's stunning.
So she'll have a lot of options.

Speaker 17 You know, like that, but look, having come up through this industry, you know, I've been in news now, I don't know, I got in 2004, 2003, so over 20 years.

Speaker 17 You will have opportunities. You will.
It's a dirty, sleazy, sometimes sexy business. And you put in long hours.
There are lots of hotel rooms.

Speaker 17 There is an imbalance of power where very rich, powerful men will definitely desire the younger ingenue reporter. And you really have to know what your moral compass is going into it.

Speaker 17 You know, you have to understand who you are, what you will and will not do before any of that starts.

Speaker 17 Because, you know, once you head down that path, sort of trying to inadvertently blow up your life professionally, like in the industry that you've chosen to be in and you want to make a name for yourself in, it is hard to recover.

Speaker 17 It's going to take a long time. You can, you can do it though.
Like, I think she will come out of this because she is talented.

Speaker 17 If she sucked and she didn't have any writing talent and reporting chops, which she does, she wouldn't. But she does have those gifts.
So I think the money's on her.

Speaker 17 I don't think this is going to hurt Kennedy at all. I don't know what's going to happen between Kennedy and his beautiful wife, Cheryl.
It's probably not great.

Speaker 17 The details make it tough to deny.

Speaker 17 But like I said at the top, who the hell knows what's in somebody's marriage compact and what they're willing to overlook in the name of, I don't know what, you know, I don't know, calmness, peace, and serenity in one's life.

Speaker 17 There are some women I know who choose to look the other way when they know their spouses are cheating because they just have kids. What are they just,

Speaker 17 they kind of feel like men or dogs? You know, that some people have that in their heads. I hope that's not your future, Emily.
I'm damn sure it's not mine.

Speaker 19 I'm pretty sure it's not mine either.

Speaker 17 All right, lady, we're going to take a quick break and we're going to come back with some actual news as opposed to just news about the news reporters.

Speaker 17 And that will end today's edition of Days of Your Lives.

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Speaker 16 All right, let's go. Isn't it great to be together? It's so great to see you.

Speaker 17 You're not alone. It's only the liberal media and the haters who want you to think that.
We're in the majority right now. We're from Chicago.
We foam in just for this.

Speaker 17 I was like, we have to go. And then, after what happened to Charlie, I'm like, we definitely have to go.
Don't miss your last chance to be part of the Megan Kelly Live Tour.

Speaker 20 It's a very important time in our country, Megan.

Speaker 7 Stand firmly. Do not waver on the truth.

Speaker 17 Next stops: Bakersfield, Anaheim, and the Grand Finale in Glendale, Arizona, featuring special guest Erica Kirk.

Speaker 17 I really genuinely feel like it's more important right now than ever, you know, for all the reasons. And it took courage for all of you to come.

Speaker 11 The biggest thing we can do is be unafraid.

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Speaker 17 Emily Jashinski is back with me now. She is the host of After Party with Emily Jashinski.
Go subscribe now, wherever you get your podcasts, and on YouTube at AfterPartyEmily.com.

Speaker 17 I love that.

Speaker 17 She's also the host of the Megan Kelly Wrap-Up Show on SiriusXM channel 111. That's the MK channel on Sirius.
And she hops over there to talk to you live right after this show ends.

Speaker 17 Call now at 83344-Megan, 833-44-Megan, 833-446-3496. If you want to get on the line first,

Speaker 17 you can just put it on hold on speaker so that you're at the top of the line, and Emily will get to you within the hour.

Speaker 17 And before we get back to Emily, oh, this is just in my prompter, we have a breaking news video. Oh boy,

Speaker 19 from one astronaut to another, happy birthday, Megan Kelly. What?

Speaker 17 No!

Speaker 17 Have you been?

Speaker 17 Okay, that's clearly AI, and I appreciate that. I have been.
Actually, I've been. Yes.
I, just like Gail, have been. Except I didn't have to

Speaker 17 ruin my career in order to get those accolades and then shame everybody for not seeing me as a heroine. Okay, let's do some hard news.

Speaker 17 Yesterday on this program, we had Glenn Greenwald, and we were talking about the news that Tucker broke on Friday, that Miranda Devine matched and then advanced on Monday about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the Trump shooter, the guy who shot Trump at Butler, Pennsylvania, killed Corey Camparatori, and shot two others.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 they reported that Crooks had a very large online footprint, that he had been getting increasingly violent in his rhetoric for the two years prior to Butler, Pennsylvania, that he had been firmly on the right for half of that time, and then almost like a switch flipped, went over to the left and started to sound more like an MSNBC host.

Speaker 17 And then beyond that with his violent, violent rhetoric and calls for hurting people and his hatred of Donald Trump.

Speaker 17 And then Miranda advanced the story by reporting that he also was part of the furry culture, trans furry culture, that he was using pronouns,

Speaker 17 they, them.

Speaker 17 like non-binary stuff and was into furries, just like we've seen with the Charlie Kirk accused shooter, with the Assention Minneapolis school shooting, and so many others, the one in Nashville,

Speaker 17 Tennessee.

Speaker 17 I mean, we would be here for a long time, like more than 10 now. We've seen either a trans ideology, a non-binary, or a furry ideology pop up.

Speaker 17 And we speculated on the show that maybe Miranda got her sourcing from the FBI, which wanted to like maybe change the conversation from what Tucker dropped.

Speaker 17 She clarified with me on Twitter yesterday, on X yesterday, that's wrong. And she outed it how she got the story pretty openly, saying, I got it from the same source Tucker got it from.

Speaker 17 So the same person apparently went to Miranda and Tucker. And they both gleaned various facts from the reporting and came up with these stories.
And Miranda was clear to point out publicly on Twitter.

Speaker 17 The reason it rankled her is because she wrote, all I've ever gotten from the FBI, including under Trump, is gaslighting and stonewalling and occasional irate phone calls.

Speaker 17 So it definitely was not the FBI who gave her the story. She said the leadership of the FBI has been nothing but hostile.

Speaker 17 So I wanted to clarify that and then also add a third reporter who got this same leak from the same source, independent journalist Brianna Morello,

Speaker 17 who advanced the story by reporting that this shooter had, quote, multiple deviant art accounts that she says are potentially associated with Thomas Crookes.

Speaker 17 One such account prominently displays they, them pronouns.

Speaker 17 A secondary account under the username the PIC Microwave has since been deleted, but its contents remain viewable.

Speaker 17 The account contained eight original artworks created by the user, all of which were overtly violent and depicted individuals being shot, beaten, or covered in blood.

Speaker 17 There's one example with like a cartoon figure with a yellow face and a blue shirt holding a rifle and two people clearly dead and shot on the ground. We're showing it for the watching audience.

Speaker 17 right in front of them. She also reports Crooks allegedly opened a PayPal account under

Speaker 17 the alias Rod Swanson. Important note: that name Swanson may have been inspired by former FBI senior agent Rod Swanson.

Speaker 17 The former FBI employee was the chief of investigations for the state of Nevada during the 2017 Vegas mass shooting. He also had a Gab account under the name Epic Microwave.

Speaker 17 And there he posted a series of pro-lockdown, anti-Trump messages. This dovetails the Tucker reporting.

Speaker 17 More and more, there are questions about what the FBI knew and what they didn't know,

Speaker 17 whether

Speaker 17 this stuff was offered to them

Speaker 17 and whether they took it, were interested in it, and did anything about it, right? This reporter, this person who went to Tucker, Miranda, and Brianna, like, did that person go to the FBI as well?

Speaker 17 Did they review the files? Did they think this was interesting? And why aren't they briefing us on this at all, given that Crooks is dead and the investigation appears to be over?

Speaker 19 This is unfathomable. I mean, the fact that none of this information has been made public, that the FBI has not once come out and said there's also evidence, substantial evidence, by the way, from

Speaker 19 Crooks' posting history of him flipping to the left and then posting openly pretty violent musings.

Speaker 19 That is the fact that we have had nothing on that until a source went to Tucker Carlson and then to Miranda, then to Brianna with this information, according to Tucker,

Speaker 19 which was gleaned by using private detective tools. So at the minimum of what the FBI would have access to, there are two possible explanations.
Neither of them is good.

Speaker 19 One is that the FBI didn't know any of this, which I don't buy. In fact, I think it's likely they probably had some of these posts come on their radar before the shooting itself.

Speaker 19 The second explanation is just that they've been keeping it from the public for some reason. They claim active investigation, that makes pretty much no sense whatsoever.

Speaker 19 But they have been very quiet about what appears to have obviously been known behind the scenes.

Speaker 19 I mean, I don't buy the first explanation, the first possible explanation that this was not on their radar.

Speaker 19 And I don't particularly understand why they would have any good reason for the second explanation, which is that they've just been sitting on this information about potential they, them, pronoun use, not potential, I mean, pretty obvious, linked to the phone number, linked to the email.

Speaker 19 It's outrageous.

Speaker 17 Furry culture.

Speaker 19 Yes, and if I'm the family of Cori Comperator and I see the back and forth with the, quote, Willie Tepez figure that you talked with Glenn about yesterday, someone who is linked to what has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization, a European Antifa group, I'm absolutely furious because it seems insane that the FBI either missed this or has been keeping it quiet.

Speaker 19 That is just either way, it is unfathomable and infuriating.

Speaker 17 And why does, according to Tucker's reporting, Thomas Crook's online profile end virtually as soon as he starts corresponding with this William Teppis?

Speaker 17 I mean, if you were going to speculate about it, you might guess they moved the communications to a different forum that's not traceable and not retrievable.

Speaker 17 You know, maybe they took it over to Telegram or they took it over, over, I don't know, even to WhatsApp or someplace other than a place that's easy to retrieve because it does, he was posting quite a bit prior to that.

Speaker 17 So it doesn't track that he just suddenly went silent.

Speaker 19 We're talking 700 plus YouTube comments over the course of a couple of years.

Speaker 19 That is not a limited social media profile, which is what, or a limited digital footprint, which is what the FBI said initially it was.

Speaker 19 And when the FBI initially made comments, they basically said Crooks had anti-immigrant and an anti-Semitic, which clearly he had actually serious anti-Semitic posts.

Speaker 19 And that's what they were public with.

Speaker 19 So when the FBI publicly said that, are we to believe they only saw the first half of his digital footprint and not the more recent stuff by the time he committed the shooting?

Speaker 19 That was... completely left-wing anti-Trump.
I mean, that's also unfathomable.

Speaker 19 And I went back and looked at the report, the congressional report that was released last December, December 2024, by the task force on this attempted assassination.

Speaker 19 And they reported something similar to what Miranda, as a journalist, experienced, which was just insufficient cooperation from the FBI. It is in that report.

Speaker 19 So this has been going on for more than a year now, where even congressional Republicans are frustrated with the FBI.

Speaker 19 A journalist like Miranda, who is very good on this topic, is frustrated with the FBI. So what are they being so cagey about?

Speaker 19 None of the possibilities right now seem to reflect well on the FBI.

Speaker 17 I want to give them the benefit of the doubt because I haven't spoken to them and they've always been very good to me. And so I, you know, they, they're the ones.
They, they helped us out.

Speaker 17 They broke the news of the rest of the manifesto of the Nashville shooter. We broke that.
You know, Stephen Crowder had gotten his hands on it originally and did amazing reporting early on.

Speaker 17 And then we got the rest of the story. And the FBI was not shy.
This Trump's FBI, Cash and Dan, not shy about calling out the trans ideology of that shooter.

Speaker 17 They weren't shy about it in the Minneapolis shooting. So like, I don't get why this would have been ostensibly a secret in the case of the Butler shooter.

Speaker 17 You know, maybe it's that they weren't able to actually verify it.

Speaker 17 You know, like neither Tucker nor Miranda nor Brianna are saying like definitively, we could swear to it in a court of law, it's 100% Thomas Crooks and his social media. But it seems clear that it is.

Speaker 17 Like they've gotten us one stop short of that.

Speaker 17 So maybe that's the FBI's hang-up. Like they're the FBI and they can't say it publicly unless they have it.
Like they've got it nailed. I don't know.

Speaker 17 But the whole thing, there should just be an openness.

Speaker 17 Like ideally, Cash will give an interview or Dan will give an interview where they just answer the questions about this and say, we did know or we didn't know and this is why we can't run with that.

Speaker 17 You know, they have a different standard for reporting. than those of us in the podcast world do.
And that I understand too. So put a pin in it.
More to come as we get it.

Speaker 19 And of course, this was the Biden FBI. So that, I mean, it's possible that they're still like raking through the muck of the Biden FBI and trying to get to the bottom of what happened themselves.

Speaker 19 I guess so.

Speaker 17 Just, it's hard to believe there's a bigger case to look through at the FBI than the Butler shooter, the guy who tried to take out Trump. Like, Trump's now president.

Speaker 17 There's more reason than ever to figure out who did it. And if there's somebody else behind it, we need to know that ASAP.

Speaker 17 Trump's not like less controversial today than he was in July of 2024 and certainly not less less powerful. So I don't know.

Speaker 17 I don't know. Okay, let me keep going because there's other news to get to.
We talked also with Glenn yesterday about how J.D. Vance is now getting attacked.

Speaker 17 Of course, he's going to be even worse than Trump. Trump, you know, was he really a racist? But J.D.
Vance is definitely a racist. He's an anti-Semite.

Speaker 17 He's associated with Tucker Carlson, who everybody knows is an anti-Semite and a Nazi. Mark Levin told me so.

Speaker 17 And they're trying to like wrap that around J.D. Vance now because they're they're friends and he hasn't condemned Tucker.

Speaker 17 You're a long time waiting. He's never going to condemn Tucker.
I hate to disappoint Tucker's critics. Mark my words, JD Vance will never condemn him because he's not a dick.

Speaker 17 He is going to stick by his friend. And I don't think J.D.
Vance thinks that Tucker is an anti-Semite or believes any of the things that people are saying about him.

Speaker 17 And he's not going to say something he doesn't believe. Okay.

Speaker 17 But he is standing up, like he's actively standing up for

Speaker 17 Tucker's son, Buckley Carlson. Now, there are two Buckley Carlsons.
Tucker has a brother named Buckley, who I think is two years younger than he is. And then Tucker named his son Buckley.

Speaker 17 And that son is working for J.D. Vance in the comms shop.
And because he's Tucker's son, he's now getting all this pressure on him. He's getting...
labeled like a bigot. It's crazy.

Speaker 17 The attacks on Buckley Carlson, which are totally unjustified and they've just decided to pick on him and pretend he's got positions that he doesn't have and demand that like someone speak out about it.

Speaker 17 It's like, what, what? So I'll give you an example.

Speaker 17 There is someone who calls herself a journalist who goes by Sloan Rackmuth and she has decided to, according to JD Vance, he posted this, obsessively attack a staffer.

Speaker 17 In his 20s in JD's office, he's talking about Buckley Carlson because JD goes on, she does not like the views of his father.

Speaker 17 JD goes on to to write, every time I see a public attack on Buckley, it's a complete lie. And yes, I notice every person with an agenda who unfairly attacks a good guy who does a great job for me.

Speaker 17 Then this podcast host, Daniel Mayle, responds with, Mr. Vice President, Sloane Rackmuth asked if Buckley Carlson, your employee, shares the same affinity for bigotry that his father does.

Speaker 17 How should we interpret your answer?

Speaker 17 This woman, Sloane Rackmuth, has been really going after Buckley Carlson as if he's the sitting vice president. It's very untoward and nasty.
And

Speaker 17 JD goes on. This Sloan describes herself as a defender of Judeo-Christian values.
Is it a Judeo-Christian value to lie about someone you don't know? Not in any church I ever spent time in.

Speaker 17 And then goes on to post this.

Speaker 17 I have an extraordinary tolerance for disagreements and criticisms from the various people in our coalition, but I'm a very loyal person, and I have zero tolerance for scumbags attacking my staff.

Speaker 17 And yes, everyone who I've seen attack Buckley with lies is a scumbag. So good for him.
He's amazing. Like taking on these like online smear campaigns, you could argue it's beneath the dignity.

Speaker 17 I don't think so at all. I think it restores the dignity of the vice president's office.
He's a young vice president.

Speaker 17 He knows that online does matter in some circles and it can drive narratives about people.

Speaker 17 And this is a totally innocent young man who's done done nothing other than be born to someone the left hates.

Speaker 17 So, good for the vice president for saying, you keep coming at me, you're going to hear from me.

Speaker 19 And by the way, Buckley Carlson, he used to work for Jim Banks. He is being confused for his uncle, who has some fiery social media posts.

Speaker 19 But if you consider yourself a journalist, as the Sloan Rackmuth and others do, they immediately, it appeared a lot of people, immediately conflated or confused his uncle for him, which is a very easy thing not to do.

Speaker 19 It just takes a little bit of googling before you post and a little bit of verification before you post if you say you're acting in a journalistic capacity.

Speaker 17 And nobody here in the- By the way, Emily, by the way, also because if you look up Buckley Carlson, the brother, his ex-bio is like loving father, husband, you know, the brother.

Speaker 17 Like clearly, Buckley Carlson the younger is all but a kid. He's in his young 20s.
He just got out of college.

Speaker 17 Like he almost certainly would not have the description that the older Buckley Carlson has. It wouldn't take much to figure out there are two people by that name.

Speaker 19 Right. And Buckley, the younger Buckley, worked for Jim Banks for a while.
He's been in D.C. And nobody in conservative circles in D.C.
has a bad word to say about Buckley Carlson.

Speaker 19 Everybody likes Buckley Carlson, who works for J.D. In fact, that's how you end up working for the vice president, is that people think you're a good guy, and they slat you into that role.

Speaker 19 So it's just... completely ridiculous.

Speaker 19 And I think part of the reason Vice President Vance has stepped into the mix here is that he recognizes what this is actually about and is nipping it in the bud because he recognizes that for years to come, as you said, Megan, there's going to be a guilt by association drumbeat of attacks on Vice President Vance because of his relationship with Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 19 And that's what this is actually about at the end of the day.

Speaker 17 So then we get

Speaker 17 Dave Rubin. responding to J.D.
Vance with a post that reads, Mr. VP, I submit this respectfully.
You're totally right. Nobody should be judged for their parents' words or actions.

Speaker 17 But, and I think you know this, the very people relentlessly attacking Jews now have Indians next up on the docket. And that includes your wife, even if she eventually converts to Christianity.

Speaker 17 So, yes, Tucker can interview whoever he wants. His brother can post garbage memes all day, and his son, who may be just fine, can work for the vice president.

Speaker 17 But I think people are asking you to stand up when you see something evil.

Speaker 17 While I know you are trying to hold an increasingly fractured coalition together, you were elected to be a leader, not follow the whims of the trolls.

Speaker 17 And since they eventually will turn on your own family, at some point you might want to get ahead of it.

Speaker 17 Those are my two cents, and I'll continue to defend all the good things you and President Trump are doing, something that this crew of people never do. What do you make of that one?

Speaker 19 Unfortunate. I mean, really unfortunate.

Speaker 19 It's just...

Speaker 19 The vice president has relationships with people, as every single person in the conservative movement does right now, by the way, who disagree with them on the issue that Dave Rubin appears to be talking about right now, which is the question of Israel.

Speaker 19 And there are some people who believe criticism of Israel from Tucker Carlson's guests, and some people will say Tucker Carlson himself have flirted with open anti-Semitism.

Speaker 19 And then there are people who disagree with that. And

Speaker 19 I obviously disagree with a lot of the over-inflation of that label because I think we learned over the last 10 years that when you inflate labels like racist and bigotry, when people are having good faith disagreements, you end up cheapening the word itself, which is rightfully stigmatized in the United States of America.

Speaker 19 We have like fought, people have died to make bigotry something that is deeply stigmatized in the United States. And so I think people are allowed to disagree about that, of course.

Speaker 19 But people find themselves right now in these really fraught personal relationships that they're working out on their own behind the scenes.

Speaker 19 And it's obviously obviously much more complicated when you're the vice president or when you're a public figure. But Dave Rubin knows that.
Dave Rubin absolutely knows that.

Speaker 19 And I just think too often it becomes virtue signaling along the lines of the same thing that we saw over the last 10 years from the left.

Speaker 19 And I do feel like this post from Dave was a kind of verging on public virtue signal. And that is the stuff that's going to needlessly tear people apart.

Speaker 17 Yeah, there's definitely a faction of the conservative right, that's the more neoconnie fashion, the more pro-Israel faction, that is turning into BLM 2020.

Speaker 17 I mean, it's very alienating and it's very not conservative, and it's not going to serve anybody well. Not the right, not them.

Speaker 17 It's a pointless exercise because most conservatives will recoil when faced with the choices of like, say it, say it my way,

Speaker 17 rather than get on board. That is just not for us.
It's just like, that's not how we've operated. It's not like in our DNA.

Speaker 17 So, yeah, I agree with you on that wholeheartedly. The other thing is, I don't understand what he's talking about.
Like, what?

Speaker 17 What do you mean? What you not to follow the whims of the trolls? Like, what does he mean? I think people are asking you to stand up when you see something evil. What is the evil thing?

Speaker 17 Is Tucker evil? Because I don't think J.D. Vance believes that, and he's not required to.
You're talking about Fuentes. Here's something that's bothering me.

Speaker 17 I mentioned it yesterday and I didn't get to it. If he's implying that J.D.
Vance hasn't said anything about Fuentes, he's wrong. Just as the New York Times,

Speaker 17 Jamal Bowie, was wrong yesterday when he said that J.D. Vance refuses to condemn Nick Fuentes.
He has condemned him. He doesn't spend all day, every day condemning Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 17 This guy is a podcaster,

Speaker 17 but he has done it. I remembered him doing it, and I actually asked my team to pull the clip.
And here's at least one of them. I think he's done it repeatedly.
Watch.

Speaker 21 In your own movement, that's what I want to ask ask about, because one of the supremacists who was saying things like this about your family.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 21 Nick Fuentes, an avowed anti-Semite,

Speaker 21 went after your wife. He had previously dined at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump.

Speaker 21 Does this have any room in your movement, in the MAGA movement?

Speaker 22 Of course it doesn't have any room in the MAGA movement. And of course...

Speaker 17 You disavow him and miss.

Speaker 22 And of course, Donald Trump has criticized this person. Look, I think the guy's a total loser.
Certainly, I disavow him.

Speaker 22 But if you ask me what I care more about, is it a person attacking me personally or is it government policy that discriminates based on race?

Speaker 14 That's what I really worry about.

Speaker 17 Disavow, total loser. That was as recently as August of 2024.
What more is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to, as the vice president, like monitor daily the podcast, do a podcast in rebuttal?

Speaker 17 You know,

Speaker 17 it's really, let's face it, about his friendship with Tucker. That's what it's about.

Speaker 19 That's 100% what it's about.

Speaker 19 And it's not, and even beyond that, it's about his willingness to engage with people like Tucker Carlson who are pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable, conservative, Republican Party foreign policy, and to ask really deep questions about that.

Speaker 19 And listen, I actually completely understand, as someone who's been fairly critical of our relationship with Israel throughout the last couple of years, completely understand why the Jewish community in the United States of America is frightened by the growth of Fuentes' platform.

Speaker 19 I understand that. We are within the generation of people who lost family members in the Holocaust.

Speaker 19 There are living Holocaust survivors right now to this day, and they are very, very understandably sensitive, especially as the algorithm picks up on Fuentes' world and all of that and starts churning it out and pushing it in your feed and amplifying it.

Speaker 19 So, completely understand the sensitivities, but it just in the same way that the right asked the left, people on the left, who, by the way, there are living survivors of Jim Crow,

Speaker 19 and there are people who are reasonably sensitive about racism in the United States, just as the right asked people on that side of this to be,

Speaker 19 to act in good faith and to be judicious. As there were criticisms along the lines J.D.

Speaker 19 Vance just made about policies made in the name of affirmative action that were fully racist and ideas coming out of people like Ibram X. Kendi that were fully racist and Robin DiAngelo.

Speaker 19 Just as the right was critical of the definition inflation over the last 10 years there, we should be demanding the exact same thing of our own side because it only makes situations worse when you impugn people's motives by accusing them of being engaged in actual bigotry rather than good faith criticism.

Speaker 19 And if you genuinely believe that J.D.

Speaker 19 Vance falls into that category, because Tucker Carlson did an interview you thought that was too soft with Nick Fuentes, despite the fact that in the middle of it, he did go in this back and forth with Fuentes about how blood guilt is not Christian.

Speaker 19 Now, I would have done the interview differently, but that part, I probably wouldn't have done the interview at all, actually, to be honest, but that part was actually pretty powerful where he's debating Fuentes on ascribing blood guilt to people because of who they are.

Speaker 19 And that's not getting attached to J.D. Vance.
I mean, it's just all so, it's all so ridiculous and really unfortunate.

Speaker 19 And you'd think that we would have enough distance from the woke movement of the last decade to see,

Speaker 19 to recognize some of that when it crops up on the right.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 17 I mean, I feel like Tucker Tucker answered this when I interviewed him. You know, I said, what do you say to the critics who say you should have gone tougher on Fuentes?

Speaker 17 And he said, do your own interview. I'll give you a cell phone number.
Like, go ahead and do it. I'm me.
I'm Tucker. I do the interviews the way I see fit.
That's a totally acceptable answer.

Speaker 17 Like, if you don't like his brand of interviewing, you don't have to click on his face. Tough shit, right? Like, he's not required to do his interviews exactly the way you require.

Speaker 17 Clearly, he has a very large fan base that loves the way he does his interviews. Like, if you don't like it, that's fine.
You don't have to.

Speaker 17 But he doesn't have to change his interviewing style to appease his critics who, you know, want him to ask exactly the following thing in exactly the following way.

Speaker 17 Of course, he's not going to do that. And they're like, oh, but he was tough on Ted Cruz.

Speaker 17 He was tough on Ted Cruz because he called Tucker an anti-Semite within the first four minutes of the interview. That has a way of sending you into

Speaker 17 a more offensive posture against your guest. I would have done the same.

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Speaker 17 Dasha Nekrasova, who is one half of the Red Scare podcast, which is she's awesome. She's been on this program many, many times.
The two of them are amazing.

Speaker 17 Just got canceled. For the listening audience, Dasha is the half of Red Scare, that is the actress.

Speaker 17 She's been starring on the, or she did star on the show Succession, which is about, you know, loosely based on the Murdochs. And she played a PR agent who kind of was dating Greg, the ne'er-do-well.

Speaker 17 nephew of the the powerful family patriarch. In any event, she's great.
She's very talented. She's been in other shows as well.

Speaker 17 These two were also reportedly the characters that the two daughters in the original white lotus were based on. There's one daughter,

Speaker 17 it's Connie Britton's character, and she and her friend go on a trip with their mom, Connie Britton. And they're based on Dasha and Anna.

Speaker 17 And it's so amazing because one of those characters was played by Sidney Sweeney. So it's like everything's connected.
In any event, she's fascinating, very interesting.

Speaker 17 She's from Belarus and Anna, her partner in crime on Red Scare, is from Moscow. They both came over to the United States when they were kids, but they have a healthy appreciation for authoritarian

Speaker 17 countries and crackdowns on free speech and how important it is to say like the most outlandish things and just test the limits of that First Amendment. Like, great.

Speaker 17 It's wonderful to be in a place where we can have these very provocative conversations. Well, some fucker who goes, his name is Brown.
Is that his full name?

Speaker 17 I'm reading the Hollywood Reporter piece by Seth Abramovich, which is very good. The guy's name seems to be Brown.
He's 36. He was once an actor.

Speaker 17 Didn't have a lot of success, but did have a role in 2012's hit comedy Project X. Never saw it.

Speaker 17 Finding himself disillusioned, writes Abramovich, with the acting world, he transitioned to producing, most recently, with the comedy horror, Fuck My Son, with an exclamation point, real nice.

Speaker 17 The title of which drew titters ahead of its premiere, Jonathan Brown.

Speaker 17 This guy, it turns out, has for

Speaker 17 years,

Speaker 17 years now, been trying to get Dasha canceled. He is emailing relentlessly the agency that represents her in Hollywood.

Speaker 17 He's been tracking her for years, keeping the agency updated on who she's having on Red Scare, why they're too controversial for polite company, what she did or did not do during the interview.

Speaker 17 Keep in mind, these two were originally Bernie Bro supporters, right? They kind of migrated rightward when the woke left exploded, but they were fine with Hollywood when they were Bernie supporters.

Speaker 17 Now they come under the microscope because they're not woke. He

Speaker 17 continued to email them, to post on Instagram about her, to list their alleged crimes. Meanwhile, it wasn't them saying anything.
It was their guests, and he didn't like...

Speaker 17 that their guests said certain things that were controversial, and they were.

Speaker 17 Went on to list all they had on Alex Jones. I cannot sit by in silence anymore.
I ask you to do the right thing, condemn this hate. This cannot be what our industry is about.

Speaker 17 Steve Bannon,

Speaker 17 he was outraged. Steve Bannon was on the show and on and on and on.
And then like expanded out the people he was targeting, including this movie.

Speaker 17 producer who had just cast Dasha in his movie, writing, be careful. She just did a podcast with Nick Fuentes.
This is in October. Didn't make any news.

Speaker 17 There was no scandal the way there's been with Tucker. Bad idea to be associated with anyone who is openly pro-Hitler.
Okay, so what? She's now pro-Hitler because she had Nick Fuentes on.

Speaker 17 And the producer responds, oh, wow. The other producer, this is a quote, is Jewish and is friends with her.
I don't know her. When news broke that her talent agency, Gersh, dropped.

Speaker 17 Dasha at this guy, Jonathan Brown's nonstop insistence and harassment, Brown texted the producer again. I hope you find an excellent actress to replace her.
Yes, responds the producer.

Speaker 17 She is being replaced right now. So her agency and the movie have dumped her.
She so far has declined to comment on it other than she retweeted this article I saw and said something like,

Speaker 17 you know, something like, can a girl just do a podcast? Something to that effect. This is insane.

Speaker 17 So she's been blacklisted now in Hollywood and with the talent agents because she has a podcast which she invites controversial figures and they too Emily do not like the way she interviews those people.

Speaker 19 It's an entertainment podcast. It's not even like a political news podcast.
They talk about culture and they talk about politics and foreign policy sometimes, but it's entertainment.

Speaker 19 They don't purport to be journalists. They don't purport to be like deep moral actors.
They're literally just when they remember to turn the microphone on having conversations

Speaker 19 about like news of the day and pop culture. And I actually feel like I learned a lot about Nick Fuentes from the interview that they did with him

Speaker 19 because, you know, it was, it was a soft interview.

Speaker 19 I like it was a they're, she's an actress, she's an artist.

Speaker 19 They're on an entertainment podcast and they were doing like a human interest piece with Fuentes where they're just talking about him, talking to him about why he does this, why he does that.

Speaker 19 And they, I think, had his guard down more than he has in other interviews. So I actually thought it was a pretty compelling conversation.
Same thing with Steve Bannon. Now, again,

Speaker 19 you and and I are journalists. We act in journalistic capacities.
We're not saying that we would do podcasts like Red Scare does podcasts, but they are literally artists.

Speaker 19 They are not, what's the, Camille Pollya had a great line during Me Too, where she said the idea of an artist as a moral actor is, quote, a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism.

Speaker 17 That should go up on our first segment. That's how we should have started this show right before we got into the affair chapter.

Speaker 19 It's right, but it's like this idea that people who...

Speaker 17 Can you say it again? Can you say it one more time?

Speaker 19 The idea that an, I'm paraphrasing the first part, but the idea that an artist has to be a moral actor is, quote, a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism.

Speaker 19 I think she wrote that in the Hollywood Reporter in the middle of the Me Too movement.

Speaker 19 I've never forgotten it because it so well describes how the left has tried to shift our expectations of what we see from actors in popular culture.

Speaker 19 It's one thing to hold a politician to that standard, it's one thing to hold a journalist to that standard, but it gets even more ridiculous when you're holding an actress/slash podcaster to that standard.

Speaker 19 And by the way, one quick point on that: there are people who listen to Nick Fuentes who are not actual bigots. And that is one of the interesting things about Dasha, who does listen.

Speaker 19 She's a Catholic convert who does listen to Fuentes and references Fuentes.

Speaker 19 You can actually learn a bit about the appeal that Fuentes has with some younger, non-bigoted people, which again, I don't listen to Fuentes. I'm not listening to America First.

Speaker 19 It's just not happening. But there are people who do, and they are worth understanding because they're looking for criticism.

Speaker 19 My theory is they're looking of some criticism of the MAGA movement from the right. And one of the only places they find it is in Fuentes.

Speaker 17 That's

Speaker 17 such a good point. Like, it is more important right now to figure out why is he so popular than to just try to cancel anybody who is trying to figure it out, right?

Speaker 17 Like, why don't we stop and consider the mission that they're on? Like, why is he so popular? Why?

Speaker 17 And I know, of course, our Jewish friends are like, he hates Jews. Like, that's all we need to know.

Speaker 17 But it's not all we need to know because, like, there is a growing number of disaffected young men in particular in America who are really deeply unhappy and have been told they're to blame for all of society's ills.

Speaker 17 And his message is resonating with them. He talks about more than Jews and blacks and women on his show.
When he talks about those groups, it's not great.

Speaker 17 It's not great for any one of those three categories. I can attest to that.
But it's not all he talks about. And so some of his stuff is compelling and it's very interesting and he says it very well.

Speaker 17 He's a persuasive arguer. So I understand the perceived threat with him, but what we need to figure out is why, what is it about him?

Speaker 17 And I think from that standpoint, these interviews do have real value because maybe there really is a need that needs to be filled by somebody for whom the price of admission is not so high, right?

Speaker 17 Like you don't have to get through all of that bile in order to hear somebody say these other things.

Speaker 17 And I don't know, like, I'm sick and tired, though, of like the New York Times saying he's the new Charlie, like he's filling the void Charlie left. That's all bullshit.
Like, no, he's not.

Speaker 17 Those two couldn't stand each other. Charlie was noble and beautiful and faith-based and a God-loving Christian.
Nick Fuentes is not noble and he's not beautiful. He's angry.
And I understand.

Speaker 17 And I actually,

Speaker 17 like, I I forgive him his anger. Clearly, he's had like some bad things happen to him.
And I get all that. I hope as he matures, he understands that

Speaker 17 it's not the right move to blame it on whole groups of people or condemn whole groups because you've been treated wrong, whether it's by a woman or a person of color or a Jewish person, whatever it is he's doing.

Speaker 17 Because he does have the shot, if he were able to somehow reform those other things, of being like a hugely consequential figure.

Speaker 17 And I don't know. He doesn't seem to have any interest for now in doing anything on those other fronts.

Speaker 17 He seems to really revel in alienating those groups and saying the most hateful things possible about them. So in any event, okay.
So that's enough about him.

Speaker 17 One question for you. There was

Speaker 17 Rod Drer. Is it Drer? I never know how to pronounce it.

Speaker 17 I really like him. But

Speaker 17 he's been suggesting that there's as many as 30 to 40%

Speaker 17 of GOP, Capitol Hill, and White House staffers who are Groupers, who are Nick Fuentes followers. Now, that's not not the same thing as the New York Times saying it.

Speaker 17 The New York Times would say that just to try to like demonize a whole group. Rod doesn't have those motivations.
So I know you've been doing some reporting on this. What have you found?

Speaker 19 Yeah, no, I heard that figure. I read Rod every day.
I really, really appreciate Rod. And he reported that a D.C.

Speaker 19 insider told him as many to 30 to 40% of Gen Z staffers, Republican staffers in Washington, D.C., were groipers. And then he said he talked to about 10 Zoomers, Gen Z people when he was in D.C.

Speaker 19 recently who all confirmed that number to him.

Speaker 19 And I mean, I'd been here for a long time, been involved in the conservative movement, youth movement for a long time, deal with tons of students, have done like literally more than 100 coffees probably in the last five years alone with students.

Speaker 19 And so I went to sources, I went to seven sources, people everywhere from the White House to Capitol Hill.

Speaker 19 all with the exception of one, I would say populist aligned, nobody older than youngish, millennial.

Speaker 19 And everyone was like, that number is crazy, which confirmed my suspicion that that number was way too high. One person, an administration source, said it's not even double digits.

Speaker 19 So, what's important about that is there are some, and Fuentes has made a concerted effort to infiltrate institutions. He says that's what his movement is trying to do.
So, yes, it's true.

Speaker 19 Like, there actually are some, particularly young men, who fall into that category. But I think that's why it's so, so, so important for people who are commenting on this to always show their work.

Speaker 19 To tell us how you got from point A to point B, how you said this person is actually an anti-Semitic, an anti-Semite. Tell me exactly what they said, why that is anti-Semitic, and

Speaker 19 how you got. to that point.

Speaker 19 And the same thing should be done when you're making claims about who is what, because otherwise Fuentes wins.

Speaker 19 If everyone is like, yeah, 30 to 40% of staffers are Groipers, and I don't begrudge Rod for saying that. He had people, he's a journalist, he had people telling him that.

Speaker 19 I just question that those sources are in touch with the actual kind of youth orbit in DC. Because again, like I know people have said, why would someone go tell a journalist if they're a Groiper?

Speaker 19 But that's not how this reporting was done.

Speaker 19 I was talking to people who would definitely know, younger people who would definitely know, and who I know and trust through good sources, populist sources, and even they were like, no.

Speaker 19 So there is some number of people, and that's why we have to be extremely careful about it.

Speaker 17 I also think that if there are people who are tuning into him because they do have negative feelings about those groups, right?

Speaker 17 Like, if it's not his other messaging, if it is the messaging about Jews or blacks or Hispanics or Indians or women,

Speaker 17 that's important to know too.

Speaker 19 Yes.

Speaker 17 And the answer to that is not

Speaker 17 to call Tucker or anybody platforming Nick Frontis or talking about Net, like an anti-Semite or a woman hater or a

Speaker 17 bigot.

Speaker 17 The answer is to provide more information to those people

Speaker 17 and

Speaker 17 to try to rescue the conversation, in other words. Like, I don't think creating him as like this boogeyman who can never be platformed or discussed in polite society will help.

Speaker 17 I think it will only make people more interested in him. And look, as somebody who definitely does not want to see bigotry, misogyny, anti-Semitism grow,

Speaker 17 I think we have to be careful about not behaving so badly that it just gets used against us as like, God, you really are awful.

Speaker 17 Like these female shrews are trying to shut them down and tell me I'm a bad person for listening, you know, or because that's what they're doing. They're saying like, oh, Jews, didn't I tell you?

Speaker 17 You know, and like it's getting used against them because they're trying to silence conversation. So like, I don't even play into it.

Speaker 17 You know, just like you can calmly and effectively say, let me tell you all the things that Nick Fuentes has said. This is who you're backing.
This is who he actually is.

Speaker 17 I think that's very effective, as opposed to like trying to shame people, call names, de-platform or whatever, delegitimize.

Speaker 17 Just, you don't have to look far to find out what Nick Fuentes has actually said about all those groups I listed. It's a long list.
He doesn't, it's not just Jews.

Speaker 17 He hates a lot of groups, or at least has hate in his heart for a lot of those groups. He's not shy about espousing it.
In any event, it's just, that's a question of tactics.

Speaker 17 Okay, I have one thing I got to ask you about because I know you've got to go because you've got to prepare for the wrap-up show, but I got to ask you one thing.

Speaker 17 You being a young person and having your finger on the pulse on Capitol Hill of where young men in particular stand right now.

Speaker 17 Bill Ackman, he of the 400-paragraph tweet, has weighed in on the plight of young men in America today. And he has followed, he has posted the following on X a couple days ago.

Speaker 17 I hear from many young men that they find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting. In other words, the online culture has destroyed the ability to spontaneously meet strangers.

Speaker 17 As such, I thought I would share a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone that I found compelling. I would ask,

Speaker 17 may I meet you?

Speaker 17 Before engaging further in a conversation.

Speaker 17 I almost never got a no. It inevitably enabled the opportunity for a further conversation.
I met a lot of really interesting people this way.

Speaker 17 I think the combination of proper grammar and politeness was the key to its effectiveness. You might give it a try.
And then he goes on to say:

Speaker 17 I failed to mention that this works much more effectively when you are, and I thought he was going to say, rich?

Speaker 17 I'm sure that it's something to do with your success. No, when you are moving in motion on subways, elevators, escalators, et cetera.
So your thoughts,

Speaker 17 I don't know why, but your thoughts on Bill Ackman's love-life advice to men your age.

Speaker 19 I love when Bill Ackman gives unsolicited advice every time. And it's usually unsolicited, but that is the best type of advice from Bill Ackman is unsolicited.

Speaker 19 The idea of going up to somebody and saying, may I meet you with like a $50,000 Rolex on your watch? Definitely going to work every single time.

Speaker 19 And that is my impression as to why Bill Ackman thinks that this line is so useful.

Speaker 19 The proper grammar part, like, what is he talking about?

Speaker 19 Nobody wants this, Bill Ackman. Who told Bill Ackman that this? I think it was probably because he was walking around like with a Rolex on and like Gucci loafers.

Speaker 19 And people were like, you may indeed meet me.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Do you want to

Speaker 17 help me with my investments? Because I also would like

Speaker 17 a Rolex. I would like to know billionaires.

Speaker 17 Yeah. No, I, look, I appreciate the thought of like polite.
politely being the one to reach out, right? Like that I'm in support of.

Speaker 17 And also of a man being the first to sort of knock on the door or be the like initiator. I think we do need to get back to that.

Speaker 17 I think it's in a man's nature to be the pursuer, you know, to be the lion. And women need to remember that.
That's good for men and it's good for women.

Speaker 17 Like the men like to pursue and the women like to be pursued and we should get back to that. That's great.
It's a good dynamic. It doesn't have to be that way, but it's good.

Speaker 17 But I'm not sure, may I meet you is the way I would say something like,

Speaker 17 you know,

Speaker 17 wow, you're stunning. Who are you?

Speaker 17 That might get a woman's attention, like a compliment or a joke, something even self-deprecating, something to make a woman, making a woman laugh is like a beeline to most women's hearts.

Speaker 17 May I meet you would probably project to me this person's going to be bad in bed.

Speaker 17 It's just,

Speaker 17 that might be where I, in my head,

Speaker 17 went with me.

Speaker 19 You just earned yourself like a 4,000-word Bill Ackman post on X about why he is actually very good in bed. And it will be, you could expect it to be highly technical,

Speaker 19 but i'm sure that that is forthcoming at this point by the way meet people in your social circles i mean it's like can't recommend that enough like the the idea of like going up to a random person at a bar is what people do when they're trying to like sleep with someone not have a relationship with them but meeting people in your social circles is a great way so that you can avoid doing the may i meet you line anyway you can actually just have some built-in trust uh that this person knows that person and that person and you you have some social fabric that already ties you together.

Speaker 19 Just a tip, just a tip.

Speaker 17 Yes, but I do appreciate him trying. I have to say, there really is a crisis with young men, and people are not meeting each other.
They're not getting married anymore. They don't believe in marriage.

Speaker 17 Young women don't believe in marriage, according to the latest polls. And so, like, more guys actually should think of the young men and say, for whatever it's worth, this is how I did it.

Speaker 17 And like, there will be other nerdy types like Bill Ackman for whom that is a nice line, and it will work with their personality. You know, it's so whatever, take it for whatever it's worth.

Speaker 17 And, you know, Bill Ackman married this completely stunning, brilliant woman who I went to MIT. So it all landed pretty well for Bill Ackman.
So who are we to judge? Emily, a pleasure.

Speaker 17 We will see you on the after show. Thanks for doing it.

Speaker 19 Thanks for having me. 83344 Megan.
Everyone call in.

Speaker 17 M-E-G-Y-N, because many years ago today, my mother Linda was giving birth to me. She had given no thought to how to spell my name.
And when I was born, she said she figured O-B-G-Y-N?

Speaker 17 M-E-G-Y-N. That is why you have to call 833-44-M-E-G-Y-N to reach Emily.

Speaker 19 I love the after-show.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I talked to her this morning. As she always does on my birthday, she told me a story about how she went in there to give birth to me.
I was the third child.

Speaker 17 So the doctor said, oh, you're going to give birth right away. You know, like you go to the fast lane because you're on three of three.

Speaker 17 And there were two other gals who who were in there about to give birth to their first babies. And they had to go into like the waiting area because they thought that was going to take forever.

Speaker 17 And my mom went in there on November 17th, early in the morning. And it was more than 24 hours later that I came out.
So they were wrong. Then as now, I was a late arrival.

Speaker 17 And I've been kind of behaving that way ever since. Emily, thank you, madam.
I don't want to make you late, so I'll let you go.

Speaker 19 Thanks, Megan. Good to see you.

Speaker 17 Happy birthday. Me too.
All right. Yeah.
Okay, we'll keep it rolling here because, as you know, Emily's coming up, but we've got a little more news to do before we toss it to her.

Speaker 17 Okay.

Speaker 17 What?

Speaker 17 Steve's talking to me. We only have 30 seconds left in the show.

Speaker 17 Well, we didn't give Emily a lot of time to go prepare for her show. I mean,

Speaker 17 in our defense, she knows everything that was on the show because she was actually part of it today.

Speaker 17 Wait, I really wanted to get to that

Speaker 17 sat of

Speaker 17 on

Speaker 17 Bill Maher,

Speaker 17 Scott Galloway. Let's play it.
Where is it? SAT 10.

Speaker 20 The second worst thing to happen to young people is remote work. One in three relationships begin at work.

Speaker 20 This is where you find friends, mentors, and mates, and especially young men, need the guardrails of a workplace.

Speaker 20 But in my view, the worst thing that's happened to young people is the anti-alcohol movement. I've had Huberman on, who I'm a big fan of, and Anteon.

Speaker 20 And my point is that the risks to your 25-year-old liver are risk-are are dwarfed by the risk of social isolation.

Speaker 20 In some, think of all the amazing relationships you've had in your life and be honest.

Speaker 3 Did alcohol play a role?

Speaker 20 In some, get out, drink more, and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off.

Speaker 16 Yes!

Speaker 17 I love that. I totally agree with him.

Speaker 17 It's not that you need to totally booze it up, but alcohol has been so demonized, and it really can be a social lubricant, especially at a young age.

Speaker 17 The New York Times did a very long podcast on this two summers ago, and it was actually very illuminating.

Speaker 17 Like, we've gotten to be such teetotalers that we're like taking the fun out of everything. You can't have any processed food ever.
No candy, no sugar.

Speaker 17 You can't have a drink or you're going to drop dead and also wind up arrested. It's like these young men are having a tough time meeting women.

Speaker 17 Thanks to COVID and other things, they're not doing a very good job of socializing in a way that leads to love and romance. And by the way, they're not having sex either.
That's also been demonized.

Speaker 17 It's like, if they need to have a couple of drinks, no one's talking about getting like fall down, blackout, drunk, but if they need to have some drinks, have a good time, they're in caught, like, stop guilting them.

Speaker 17 Stop guilting them non-stop about what they eat. Stop guilting them non-stop about what they drink and how they live.
They're all entitled to a little fun.

Speaker 17 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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The Nuzzi-RFK Drama, Attacking Tucker's Son to Smear Vance, and New Cancel Culture, with Emily Jashinsky | Ep. 1196

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