Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show your home for open, honest and provocative conversations. OK, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly, welcome to the Megan Kelly Show today. Michael Knowles, he is one of the most popular podcasters out there. He is with Ben Shapiro's operation. He is what you might call a whippersnapper. I think he's only 30 years old. He went to Yale and somehow described himself as to the right of Attila the Hun.

How'd that go? All right. We're going to ask him. But he's written books. He's been very out there with this commentary. He's totally fearless and he's funny. So we're going to talk to him about all the latest in the craziness with the cancer culture.

You wouldn't believe, like just when you think it's dying down. It isn't. By the way, you can no longer have a Jeep Cherokee, otherwise you're a racist.

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First of all, do you go by Mike or Michael? I usually go by Michael, but yeah, it is only because my mother forbade me from having a nickname as a kid.

So it sort of stuck.

I was going to say your Christian name. I appreciate it. My, uh, my sort my my brother's son is named Joseph now, who just got married in his late 20s now.

But when he was born, my brother said, you know, I can foresee Joe, Joey, I think we got it covered. And when he was little, but they didn't foresee was that he would call himself Jojo, which somehow got turned into dojo.

And we all called him that. Your dojo. That is a superb nickname. That is a really, really good nickname.

You do have to think it through, right? You have one child. You have to think it through. Like what? What could they potentially be called?

I did, you know, when he was born, we really like the name Simon. And you know what's the nickname is Assai? I guess. So I like this idea of my son is like an old Yiddish man in a shtetl somewhere in Lithuania, you know.

And did you go with Simon? Absolutely.

Oh, yeah. We actually I've called him little SCIE, depending on how sort of much like an old man he looks at the time.

Our middle child, Yardley. I actually didn't think that through. I didn't think there'd be a nickname for Yardley. And what we all collar is yards which is great.

That's right. OK, what does that conjure up. But I like it right. I like the full name Yardley too. That's a very nice name.

You know what? I like it too.

And it's funny because she's she wants to know her name came from because your older brother Yates' got his name from Doug's dad. And so she's like, where'd you come from? And I don't know. But I've said before, I'm pretty sure because the name came to me and I'm like, how did how? And I'm pretty sure it came to be from the movie Christmas in Connecticut, which I watch every Christmas time. It's it's all like nineteen forty seven movie with Barbara Stanwyck.

And there is a very fat old bald man named Alexander Yardley, and I think she's his namesake.

That is great to have you told her. Have you.

Yes, she's a she'll she'll actually say you will say like I'm named after my grandpa and she'll say I was named after an old fat bald man from a movie in the movie.

That's really funny.

So I like sigh. OK, so let's talk about the latest news on Piers Morgan and Meghan Markle, because the saga goes on. I love it. I know people like a lot of people aren't that into like the royals per say. But this is just turned into the ultimate example of victimization culture. And now it's a free speech thing. Right, because Piers threw down, walked out and is basically thumb the middle finger at Good Morning Britain and ITV, though it's not clear whether they he was pushed or he jumped.

What are your thoughts?

Right. I absolutely feel for Piers Morgan. I never thought that I would say that, but I absolutely do. It seems to me that Meghan Markle is the most sophisticated biological weapon that America has ever produced. And it's very sad. I think it's revenge for the War of 1812. But in a way, she's kind of the voice of a generation, you know, the kind of generation that would rather play a Disney princess than be an actual princess.

She had to Google the national anthem of the country into whose royal family she was choosing to marry. You know, it doesn't get any more entitled than that. And, you know, I'm not one of these conservatives that believes, you know, last time I cared about the royals was seventeen seventy six. I think it's actually the English monarchy has served this wonderful purpose. Queen Elizabeth is one of the most important and admirable women on Earth. It's a representation of the nation itself.

And it's very fitting that now you have a member of the royal family and this American woman that I married attacking the nation because we as a civilization seem to sort of despise ourselves these days. So I'm not surprised that you'd say it.

You raise a good point. She Queen Elizabeth is she might be the living opposite of Meghan Markle.

She's all about duty service, country, stiff upper lip.

Don't explain anything, you know, just forge forward. And Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are somehow emblematic of this narcissistic. It's all about me and I'm always a victim and, you know, so feel sorry for me. And I don't like the service. I don't it's it's hard to smile on the on the Australian tour.

Right. Like, she's actually thinking we're going to feel sorry for her because while she was getting her silver royalty service back at the hotel room, she had to go out and dance and hold hands and smile.

Right. Right. It's it's a total it's not that she is averse to duty. So much is. She was oblivious. A duty she was oblivious to the idea that and I suppose this is true of a lot of people today, both in the States and in Britain, we have a culture that views politics primarily through rights. And there are different traditions of this. Conservatives have a certain view of rights and the left has another view of rights. But if you if you view politics primarily or exclusively as a matter of rights, then it's only a matter of time before it becomes a politics of entitlement.

The only way that a politics that recognizes rights works is if the politics also recognises duty, obligation, loyalty, affection for your family and ultimately for your country, because patriotism is merely an extension of filial piety from the affection that you feel for your own country. And it's it's really sad to watch this happen as Prince Philip was in the hospital fighting off his infection when the queen is, what, ninety four now? Ninety five has served her country admirably.

It seems to me that Meghan Markle bought the lie that a lot of people buy about something like the English monarchy, which is that it's all about prancing around in castles and riding horses and going on duck hunts or something. It's a very difficult life of duty. You know, you and I can wake up in the morning and do basically whatever we want to do. If we want to change jobs, we can do that. And if we want to go marry somebody, we can do that.

And when you are born into the royal family, you there are a lot of privileges that go with that, obviously, but there are a lot of restrictions. There's a lot of duty that is your place in life. And you serve a very important role as a symbol of the country. And I think they were absolutely shocked to learn that. Certainly she was shocked to learn this.

And he apparently didn't have been shocked how we knew from over here.

I mean, it was obvious to everyone, how could it not have been obvious to her, especially when she had access to someone the rest of us didn't know Prince I'm sure he told her.

And for her to now claim, like I had no idea what I was getting myself into is it's not believable. You know, instead, she she goes out there. And the thing that it's driving me insane is that look what's happened, Michael. We've got we've have we have two point six million people dead. We have record unemployment in Great Britain. We have 10 million people unemployed here in the United States. And we're supposed to care about what title her kid is going to get.

Well, I don't I don't care at all. I want her to shut up and go away.

Know, Meghan, I think you're being terribly unfair here because Meghan told us herself that she had nobody around her who could tell her anything about what it's like to be a royal nobody like, for instance, the prince that she was marrying and and really to complain about having to learn the national anthem or to complain about having to learn the hymns before your wedding into the family that runs the Church of England just represents a narcissism that that I do think is emblematic of the culture.

The only sort of benefit of the doubt on giving her is that she has been raised in a culture in the United States in particular, that is so focused on the self that she she, I don't think could really see past that the moment that she encountered the reality of duty of being a civil servant with a tiara on rather than some Hollywood starlet, which I think she thought was going to be the life of a royal. Then she she left, she ditched and she dragged her husband with her.

And so it was so sad to see them every so often in the interview, Harry would say, well, you know, darling, I think you have to stop it, Harry. I'm answering now, let alone me. Really?

Well, I mean, I and she definitely played the race card. That was very clear. And yes, it sounds like there was somebody who apparently said something racist within the royal family. We don't know because Oprah didn't probe more.

And I mean, I was saying earlier that I'm not sure we should just go with this because it's such a scurrilous allegation, like in a court of law, you'd have to back that up. That would not have been admissible the way it was elicited by Oprah. You'd have to have a foundation. Who said it, where? Who heard it, you know, and you'd have to get the details of it. I'm not sure we should accept it just because it was such a broad sweep.

I'm not sure we've got the evidence, but let's say we do. So what she's proven is that there is one person in her husband's family who is concerned about skin color and sounds like they may be a racist.

How does that lead you to pull up stakes from the entire monarchy to leave the country, to rest the prince away from his family, to go back to the United States, which, by the way, we were told is also a racist country? Right.

Look, people like Megan, OK, so somebody is kind of douchy over there in the royal family.

I get it, but. What she's really complaining about, what she really was upset about was the mean press, which to me is just so weak. I'm sorry, I know it. The press is nasty. I've been on the receiving end, of course.

Come on. Come on. And by the way, you think it was nasty? Then we'll wait to see what they're going to do to you now. Right now, you don't even have the semblance of police protection.

It's simply not credible. I mean, the allegation she's making about race are not credible. Her apparent inability to memorize a national anthem is not credible. She's an actress. Her job is actually to learn her lines. You know, none of none of these things, the understanding that the press is going to come and attack you. Right. She's she's been in the public eye for quite some time. So I don't really think that's credible. Also, don't you think if the royal family had a real problem with Meghan's race, which, by the way, no one would even know her race?

I mean, she she is what we call in Hollywood ethnically ambiguous. My mother, who I mentioned earlier, my mother had much darker skin than Meghan Markle. But if you can claim in any way some sort of victimhood that carries social currency. But don't you think that if the royal family had some problem with Meghan's race, that they would have mentioned this before Prince Charles walked her down the aisle? Don't you think they would have mentioned this before they welcomed her into the family?

Did they did they just learn their biology a couple of months ago? Did they just. Oh, my gosh. They might have a child. Well, goodness. Here's the other thing.

So let's say somebody had this thought in their head like concern about how dark the child's skin was going to be. Right. Not good. Not good. But what what actually matters in life is not whether somebody might somewhere harbor a racist thought, a sexist thought, a trans phobic thought, but whether they act on those thoughts. Right.

And as far as I can see, the royal family's behavior had nothing to do with race. They embraced Megan, they embraced Archie. They did not withhold a Prince title for that kid because his mother is multiracial, is biracial. Not at all. All the facts that have come out say the kid never had any entitlement to become a prince. That was known for one hundred years, long before Prince Harry met Meghan. They knew his kids would not be princes until his dad took the throne.

Then it would be up to him and his wife about whether to bestow that title or accept the title bestowed by the king.

So there's nothing she's got nothing to prove that anyone behaved in a racist way. There was one racist comment, allegedly, so I was like from that.

And her mean press coverage, we've spun into this narrative of like now you get the head of BLM, one of the founders of BLM, calling for a boycott of the royal family.

Right. I don't I don't know exactly how that boycott is going to work, but this is so emblematic of our culture. And there's actually a joke going around right now that the left was so angry about George W. Bush's foreign policy of bombing the Middle East. And then they were so happy when Obama and Biden decided to bomb the Middle East because it was a woman manning the drones. You know, it was it was a person of color dropping the bombs and the bombs had a rainbow flag and the BLM sign on it.

What at what has happened increasingly is that we have shifted away our focus from actions to words. And this comes with the shift wrought by call it political correctness, call it brokenness, call it whatever you like. The shift from old moral codes to new speech codes, the undermining of old standards of behavior with this new sort of lexicon that we all have to adhere to. Jen Psaki, my favorite current White House press secretary, we get such a kick out of Misaki.

She was just confronted with this this problem that Joe Biden is facing on the southern border where the the numbers are far worse. The children are being separated from their parents. They're being put in cages. It's it's an identical policy to everything that the left ever accused Trump of doing. And they said, do you have a messaging problem? And she said, no, the past administration had a moral problem. Well, what's the moral problem? That the two policies are almost identical, but it's the the intentions, the deep seated beliefs, the actions might be the same, but something something there is different.

That's right.

Well, I mean and I want to get into the immigration thing with you in a bit. But before we before we leave the the royals, I wanted to talk about the Piers Morgan piece of it, because the other thing that the left does is everything boils down to one's lived experience and they don't care about facts like them.

Like hard facts that put the lie to someone's claim are now dismissed out of hand is just contrary to one's lived experience. And it's very frustrating to argue with somebody like that. Right, because it's like, how are you supposed to make any progress if that's some sort of trump card they can always throw out on you and Piers Morgan?

I watched that segment which preceded his walk off the set. And he was angry, he was talking to their weatherman, that good morning, Britain's weatherman, who forgive me, I think he's mixed race. I know he's a person of color and that the weatherman was trying to make a similar point in response to Piers Point about the kid was never entitled to be a prince. And she she misled us. And we've got that clip. I don't think most people have heard this.

This is a lot of people are playing why he walked off or showing Piers his walk off. But here's what preceded it.

Listen, Megan just got it wrong or she hasn't been prevented from being a prince because of his skin color. And that's been believed by Americans on national television there. And that is damaging.

But again, to know what is their lived experience. And no, it's not true that that is their lived experience. And again, this is this is where the confusion comes in. How do you sometimes identify covert racism is actually quite hard because it's not that on not one. It's not true.

It's so frustrating. What what are you talking about? Covert racism. He was never entitled to the title Black, White, Purple. He wasn't going to get it. It's not her lived experience. It's her imagination.

Megan, those are just your deeply ingrained implicit biases. Don't you know the King George, the Fifth understood in the early 20th century that someday down the line there would be this boy who was in the line and he was one eighth black and this was all just to promote white supremacy or some some other such evil. This problem is widespread. I mean, you see it everywhere from the Smithsonian Institution describing the phrase objective reality or objective truth is white supremacy.

You see it to this dismissal of facts here in in the royal family. It comes from an undermining of our faculties of reason. And will it actually it does tie into this issue of political correctness because political correctness asserts that by changing words, you can change reality, that words which are symbols that we use to communicate with one another, they actually have no tie it. They have no relation to some objective reality outside of themselves. So we can just construct any sort of reality that we want to quote Hamlet when he's feigning madness.

It's all just words, words, words. And so you see this expressed in a lot of cockamamie left theories during the 1960s and 70s in the academy. But what this redounds to is you cannot tell me that my suffering is not real.

The suffering of the individual, the claim to grievance is the only thing that I can know. I feel, therefore, I am. And you can present all the facts in the world. We're simply not speaking the same language. And this is why, by the way, if you want to have civilised politics, you need to be able to agree on the meaning of words and the things that words refer to. That's how we persuade one another in a republic when you can no longer do that, when you cannot communicate, then you have lost your mode of politics.

When you lose speech, you lose that mode of politics and politics merely becomes a bunch of interest groups grunting at one another, which is sadly what politics in the West would appear to have decayed too well.

So so after this 14 minute exchange, you can sense Piers's frustration. And I must tell you, I felt it, too. I just I'm sure our audience listening right now is feeling it, too. It isn't. First of all, what does that even mean? It's her lived experience. She she made it up. And therefore, we're supposed to say it's true that it makes no sense. So then, Piers, ultimately this is so then Alex Berrisford is the guy's name, which is very close to Alex Berenson.

They should not be confused.

Alex Perrysburg is the weather man for Good Morning Britain, who I am told by my team, has publicly said that he had when his mother was white. I think his father was black.

So he was still poking Piers and he was suggesting that this entire criticism by peers boils down to the fact that Piers doesn't like Megan because as Piers has told everybody, Megan ghosted him years ago.

She sort of, in his view, used him to work her way up the ladder in Great Britain and getting contacts that were well known and then ghosted him as soon as she met Harry. And I was Alex attack on Piers right before he walked off the set. And then he called Piers and he listen.

And I understand that you don't like Megamall. You've made it so clear a number of times on this program, a number of times. And I understand that you've got a personal relationship with Malcolm. You had one and she cut you off. She's entitled to cut you off if she wants to. Has she said anything about you? She cut you off? I don't think she has. But yet you continue to trash her. OK, I'm done with it.

No, no, no, that's all right. Now, I don't know what that's pretty good. Track record. Maybe not mine. I'm sorry. This is absolutely diabolical behavior. You I'm sorry, but Piers spouts off on a regular basis and we all have to sit there and listen. Six thirty to seven a. Yesterday was incredibly hard to watch, was it? I don't know. So he's diabolical because he didn't want to sit there and have a conversation that was not being conducted in good faith and with guardrails that would adhere to fact, whatever the facts were.

And by the way, Meghan Markle may not have criticized Piers publicly for, you know, over the course of, you know, after she posted him.

But we now know that she was the one who called the station herself to complain about his statement that he didn't believe her because with respect to her claim that she was suicidal, she purportedly said she was very concerned about others with mental health issues, hearing that kind of thing. Now, by the way, at no point did Megan claim that she is currently having those feelings. She was recounting a feeling she claims she had a couple of years ago. And, Piers, a couple of years later was saying, I'm not sure I believe anything she says.

I actually don't believe anything she says, which is a view he's entitled to have. So now we know she personally had a hand in what became this huge kerfuffle leading ultimately to his departure, but diabolical that was they were not willing to have the combo.

I was so glad that Piers walked off that set. And I think some American conservatives might be a little confused by it because, you know, we love to talk about the free marketplace of ideas. And, you know, the only answer to bad speech is more speech. And we've got to stay in the fight and debate these things. You are not in any way obligated to engage in a debate in bad faith when when you say that this person talking to Piers was not acting in good faith, that is the key here.

They were not debating ideas. They were not there was no persuasion that was going to go on here. This was a character assassination, a petty personal attack on Piers Morgan. And I loved his expression. He just said, sorry, mate, you can trash me, but not on my own show. And I think conservatives have a lot to learn about that. You know, we we seem always to give in to the left on the guardrails of the conversation.

We always seem to give the left their premises and we debate according to their premises. And Piers said, no, thank you. You know, it's it's it's a losing battle. It's a trap. And he tried he tried for 14 minutes.

It wasn't like he just said, ah, you're not somebody I can talk to because you're not dealing. In fact, you listen to it back and forth and it got personal on the show and he kind of had it. And clearly, I mean, I said this before, but clearly he had had something with his own team behind the scenes prior to going out there on the set.

I could tell I mean, just from having been a TV anchor, I could read it on the look on his face. Clearly before he went out there, somebody ticked him off. And who knows what they said. I'm sure they were chastising him over his remarks. And Piers is Piers, you don't want Piers.

You shouldn't have to, Piers, that he was his quintessential self that day.

And now he's basically I don't know, he seems like he might be kind of enjoying thumbing his finger at everybody because he is a free speech advocate. He wrote a whole book about this. Right. And here is what he told the the press who hounded him on the street yesterday.

I believe in freedom of speech. I believe in the right to be allowed to have an opinion. If people want to believe Malcolm, Malcolm, that's entirely their right. I don't believe almost anything that comes out of her mouth. And I think the damage she's done to the British monarchy and to the queen at a time when Prince Philip is lying in hospital is enormous and frankly contemptible. So if I have to fall on my sword for expressing an honestly held opinion about Meghan Markle, I'm not diatribe of bilge that she came out with an interview.

So although the work crowd would have thought, they think that they've cancelled me, I think they'll be rather disappointed when I reemerge. Hmm.

Good for him. I love it. Right. It's like and when this kind of thing happens, I feel like everyone needs to speak up. He needs to say, no, I won't be canceled. Right. And I'm not sorry because he wasn't sorry.

And the rest of us I mean, I tweeted in his in his favor a couple of times the other day, this whole week.

And I went on a bunch of British television to defend him because we've been talking on this podcast, Michael, about how it's not enough when the mob comes for somebody to just not join the mob. If that's the best you can do, then we'll take it. It's better than joining the mob. Right. But what we really need is people who are able to fight back against the mob to stand up for the one being mobbed. And you don't have to agree with him about whatever he said.

You just have to stand up for the principle of free speech and against mob rule. Yes.

This is I think the way that we persuade people to do that is by showing the reality of what we call the cancel culture, because a lot of the time, I think the reason people don't speak up is that they feel that they can hold on to their old privileges, the privileges that the sort of dominant liberal order gave to them. You saw this great example over the past week with one of the. Musicians in the band Mumford and Sons, he complimented it because he was so sad, he complimented Andy knows book detailing how awful Antifa is and has gotten brain bleeds from Antifa.

He has seen it really firsthand, did excellent reporting. And he said, oh, I liked the book, and now they're trying to cancel him for it. And what did the musician do? He issued an apology. And it was it was just it was the worst thing he could have done, not even as a matter of truth and justice, but even for himself, he's getting this bad advice where people are going into his ear and saying, don't worry, just lay low, apologize to the mob, give appease them a little bit and then they'll forgive you.

And you can go back to your old popularity. And that just won't happen. There is no forgiveness in this culture. Roger. So Roger Scruton, speaking of wonderful Englishman, the late, late Roger Scruton, said that in order for us to have civilization, we need confession and we need forgiveness. You need to be able to say, whoops, I did something wrong and you sacrifice your pride. And then the rest of society has to be able to say, OK, I forgive you and you sacrifice your resentment and then you can get along together and have a country that would appear to be on its way out.

America used to be the land of second chances. I don't even know if we're the land of first chances anymore as these radical ideologies are advancing. And so in that in that world, any kind of weakness, any any sort of apology to the mob, it's not only going to set you back, but it's certainly going to set back the cause of the traditions that we all cherish and will maintain. Let me ask you about that.

So you're the banjo player and Mumford and Sons, hugely successful, right? This is sort of I guess they describe Mumford and Sons is more folksy.

I don't I didn't realize that that was the the area that, you know, kind of like a pop genre for them.

But they're awesome.

And it's a great gig. They're succeeding. There's a huge band. So they come to you and they they say we can't really this isn't going to work with our lefty folk people for you to be an Andy, no fan.

And you kind of got to like you got to fall on the sword if you have any chance of staying with us. I mean, most people it's hard to be a musician.

It's hard to find, you know, to hit success.

Most people would do it would would do what he's trying to. I get what he's trying to do. I feel bad for him, but I get what he's trying to do, don't you?

I totally get what he's trying to do. The thing he doesn't understand is he's already out of the band. The thing that he doesn't understand is he's already lost whatever he had. And so the choice is not do I stand firm and lose my gig or do I capitulate and degrade myself and then get my gig back? I think that choice is over. The only question is, do I lose my gig and keep my dignity or do I lose my gig and grovel to the people who are going to destroy my career?

Oh, my God. So that's very interesting thought. First of all, I'm going to need to sit with that. I really am. I, of course, thinking about my own personal history, but I wish we had known each other that this is true.

I think of of a lot of people that because this kind of culture came on us so fast that the old the old way of thinking was, you know, apologize, sort of it's OK. It'll work out. I just think in the last number of years that has really changed. That rug has been pulled out from under our feet. And that's a pretty, pretty negative social change.

No, my friend Melissa Francis says she goes, OK, you killed apologising.

I mean, your incident was kind of one of these moments where you looked at it and you said what I thought, nothing about this makes sense. The the alleged issue, I call it the controversy itself doesn't make sense. But then the even the reaction to the apology that the culture had had snapped, something in the culture had snapped. And look at the the effects that it's had now into the future.

Yeah, I've said before, I really felt that the whole thing, like people were gaslighting me, you know, I know what I said is factually true. And yet there's nobody out there, almost nobody defending me. By the way, Piers Morgan was one of them who openly did defend me. Ben Shapiro, your colleague, is another one, but very few. And so I was really like, I'm being gasless. So I guess I did step on some huge landmine that was very culturally blind of me, you know, like that sort of.

And I'd been so beaten down by my year and a half at NBC.

At that point, I was like, that was just a little palp of my formal real self. Up next, I am going to play you a sound bite that you will not believe. Stay tuned. It's from Chris Harrison, the host now sort of turf host of The Bachelor. I mean, just flogging himself on Good Morning America with Michael Strahan.

It was shocking. It was a shocking exchange. If you haven't heard it, you will stay tuned.

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You know, you'll be shocked to hear that I'm not a nightly bachelor viewer, but I have heard about this. This is a real it's become an international incident from some tabloid TV show.

It's it's so cringe. So let's just get people up to speed.

My understanding of it is somebody, a woman on the show.

Yeah. It came out that in twenty eighteen.

Not that long ago, I guess she was in college. She went to something called like a plantation party, totally inappropriate. It's like twenty eighteen. It's probably not a good idea. And it came out and she was deeply apologetic. She was embarrassed. Right.

And Chris Harrison, who hosted The Bachelor, was asked about it in an interview and he basically said, yeah, plantation themed frat party in college. And he basically said, well, cancel culture. You know, was it wrong then or is it just wrong in twenty, twenty one?

And he was trying to make the point of, like, you know, we sort of always have this perfect 20/20 hindsight and are we beating up on her too much?

Right. So that was his knee jerk reaction. Well, you he actually said we should have Grace, right?

Well, if that Grace was so he was removed from The Bachelor. I don't he's not officially fired yet. As far as I know. He's been taking a break and is not on the bachelor show. He's hosted for, like, I don't know, 45 years.

It's been forever since the Hoover Institution. Right. Right.

So it's already kind of like the whole thing is making me feel uncomfortable. And I like Chris Harrison.

Hey, when did he become controversial? And then he went on Good Morning America with Michael Strahan last week. And I was like every muscle in my body was clenched watching it.

It was so uncomfortable. He looked like a hostage. I was like, blink twice if you can hear us.

Chris, are you OK? Are they giving you food and water?

So just listen, because we have a clip. Listen to this. A lot of people and I'm wondering why would you defend Rachel Kirkconnell?

I am an imperfect man. I made a mistake and I own that. I believe that mistake doesn't reflect who I am or what I stand for. I am committed to the progress, not just for myself, also for the franchise.

You said, quote, Is it not a good look in twenty eighteen or is it not a good look in twenty twenty one. Because there the big difference. So, so what is the to you. What is the difference or is there one. There is not antebellum parties are not ok. Past, present, future. Knowing what that represents is unacceptable. I am saddened and shocked at how insensitive I was in that interview with Rachel Lenzi and I didn't speak from my heart.

And that is to say, I stand against all forms of racism and I am deeply sorry. I'm sorry to Rachel Lindsey and I'm sorry to the black community. So you are the right person to lead this franchise into the future, you feel? I plan to be back and I want to be back. This interview is not the finish line. There is much more work to be done and I am excited to be a part of that change. A lot more work to be done.

Chris, I cannot agree with you more on that.

I think he hear the apology, his apology, but it felt like it got nothing more than a surface response on any of this. And obviously, he the man wanted to clearly stay on the show, but only time will tell if there is any meaning behind his words.

Megan, do you remember do you remember at the end of Breaking Bad? Spoiler alert. But, you know, she has been out for a while. So great endeavor. I mean, truly magnificent TV. And at the very end, Walter White, this sort of villainous guy, is his brother in law. Cop brother in law is about to be killed by the drug dealer. And Walter is pleading for his life, is saying, no, just do this, Hank.

Don't know, just say this. So you'll do this. And Hank looks at him. He says, Walter, you're the smartest guy I know. And yet you don't realize that this guy decided to kill me ten minutes ago. You don't realize that this is all for naught. You know, listening to that interview, what what he first said when he defended this girl and said, you know, look, I have some race and two different times whatever, that that was a defensible man.

That's an upstanding man who's actually standing up for somebody and standing up against a mob. The guy who went on that TV show is despicable. I mean, that makes a shell of a man, a shell of a man, the only way they can really beat you. In this sort of cancel culture, like they can take your job, they can take your money, they can take your reputation, but the only way they can really beat you is when they get you to degrade yourself.

And sadly, they succeed at doing that a whole lot.

It was like I had so many feelings and I watched it like obviously every line was scripted, you know, you could just tell.

And he went on to say that he's, of course, now working with a diversity trainer.

I mean, like only a certain male gesture comes to mind. Do you know the male doctor? And it's a matter of fact, I do.

Well, if I don't believe him and even though I thought it was not graceful of Michael Strahan not to let them off the hook a little bit, I can't say I disagreed with Hans assessment. I didn't see sassier. I think he was right about that.

Of course, it was insincere. You know, you're initially in this moment where you disagree with the guy. You say, well, I have a different view on antebellum parties for I disagree with him, OK, but now it's not just that you have a disagreement with this guy and you think that he's a bad fellow and has bad motives. You also know he's a liar. He is actually given you a reason to criticize him. I don't think the previous criticisms were legitimate at all, but he has now given you a legitimate reason to criticize him.

And so the mob wins.

Right. And I would be shocked if he actually does return to the Bachelor franchise.

To your point about the end of Breaking Bad.

You know, the thing is, you look at things like this and you think, OK, I mean, I don't think many people are going to support an antebellum party. And twenty eighteen wasn't that long ago, but it was before this crazy, insane WOAK revolution.

We're having, you know, sort of the beginning because, I mean, I left NBC October of twenty eighteen. I feel like that was that was one of the first things to happen in the crazy revolution. Right.

But but the same people who are trying to tell us that Chris Harrison is suddenly a raging racist, a bad man who has to lose his show over know could be more graceful.

I don't know if the standard was the same that are trying to tell us that the Jeep Cherokee is offensive and has to lose its name.

That's happening.

And Jeep, I think, is going to do it well, of course, because you see in the name of anti-racism and anti white supremacy, we need to erase any vestige of any culture that is non-white. I mean, first of all, you know, on the point of this part of it, you're not allowed to have a party about the South, you know, the big skirts or anything, but you're allowed to have a toga party. And last I checked, there was a whole lot of oppression and slavery in ancient Rome.

Perhaps someday you won't be able to have a toga party. Perhaps these these cultural mores, these standards are changing so rapidly because they're not really about any just standard. They're really just about the imposition of the rule itself, the fact that these cultural radicals can get you to acquiesce to and do their bidding. That's, you know, I think sort of the the first thing that we need to come to grapple with.

Well, I don't know anything about, like a plantation party doesn't sound like a good idea to me, I have to say. And I know. Right.

Like, I'm pretty loose about, like, not slapping people on the hands on non P.C. stuff. That seems rather obvious. But I also think she was a dumb ass college student and an apology should be enough. Right. She's this girl shouldn't have her life ruined. And Chris Harrison was trying to throw her a bone and accept the apology. He shouldn't have his life ruined. He's been critical to that whole franchise. And now it's like you you're done, right?

Well, and just, you know, just think about all the things that you have done in your own life.

You say, gosh, well, that wasn't so great. I messed up there all I did something wrong to this person. And think about how you have been forgiven for those things and how you would like to be forgiven. And of course, it would be nice to extend that grace to other people, but we are caught up in this particular ideology. It's a truly this is sort of the essence of progressivism whereby the past is always bad and the present is always a crisis and the future is always going to be wonderful.

And so if you defend in any way anything in the past, which means if you don't go along with the progressive political agenda, then they'll find some reason to go after you, some reason to cancel you. And unfortunately, people who do not. I think people who spend all their time in politics kind of understand that. And they're better equipped to deal with with this mania because maybe some people have seen it coming. But for most people who don't spend that much time, you know, browsing political philosophy in the News World all day long, this will be a surprise to them.

And I mean that that is what has created the cancer culture.

Mm hmm. And I, I, I want to follow up on that one second, but I do want to just round out so people know. A UCLA law professor, Berkeley law professor and Berkeley doctoral candidate wrote an open piece. Same. Jeep has signaled that it's open to granting the Cherokee Nation's request to change the name of the SUV, and then they point out that non Indians have for years co-opted Indian culture and identity, for example, the game of cowboys and Indians being played ad nauseum by children forever as one example.

And then they go on that. The other the other point they make, brace yourself. Guess what else is racist?

The Eskimo Pie, they ask, are they taking the Eskimo pies? You can kiss your ass goodbye if you like. It first came out in nineteen twenty one. They say the cheery icon of an Alaska native child wearing traditional cold weather clothing has traveled around the globe. This happy go lucky imagery has circulated more broadly than knowledge of Alaska's complex colonial history, ignoring the sovereignty of the indigenous peoples of Alaska. You racist, you put down that pie right now, I.

I would like to state for the record, I am not now, nor have I ever eaten an Eskimo pie. I do not want to be marred by the allegation of racism. You know what's so ironic about this, though? Not not that the left and the people pushing this particular care about the irony is you race Cherokee, what are you going to replace it with some sort of generic English name so that you have a race Cherokee Cherokee from the culture even consider the more famous example of the cancellation of Aunt Jemima.

We just aren't. Drama is allegedly racist. Aunt Jemima is a character is a black character that was played by a black woman, which most people know. But what a lot of people don't know is that Shamima was a character created by a black comedian, a black comedian in the late 19th century named Billy Cassagnes, who was part of the minstrel theatrical tradition, which is now obviously very politically incorrect. But you have a black writer creating a black character for a black actress.

And in the name of racial justice, some white marketing executive at a corporation is going to cancel all of that. Isn't there something perverse about that logic? 100 percent.

And by the way, my team is telling me that actually they're they're getting rid of the name Eskimo Pie.

That's what's the net. What's the new name of trying to look at this pie?

What is it, Eddie? Oh, Eddie's or Eddie's pie. That's there it is. Say, let's. Oh, yeah, Eddie's right. But that's the ice cream brand.

I think it's eighties. You would have hoped that at least rename it Intuit Pie, but no, absolutely not. It's easy. They just replace it with a sort of generic American term. And there goes there go the Eskimos. Now it's gone.

And the thing is this when I was going to say is, all right, so this girl on The Bachelor, she's done Chris Harrison, I guess he's done.

But remember, we just had a story in the news this week or last week about the incoming editor in chief at Teen Vogue, Alexey McCalman, and this girl. She sent out some dumb ass college tweets that were anti Asian. She was making fun of Asian eyes. I mean, they were definitely racist tweets. And she like there was there was an uprising.

Twenty people at Teen Vogue wrote like, screw her. You know, she shouldn't be here. But Vogue stood by her. Right. She's young, she's black. She's I think she's twenty eight years old, young woman. So this wasn't that long ago, right, that she was in college, let's remember.

And she's OK. She's going to she's going to keep her job.

She worked for Axios before this, but Anna Wintour and all the others are going to stand by her.

Chris Harrison, white guy.

So much of course because it is really not about a stand. There is no universal standard that's being applied here. It's it's not. As Adrien Formule, the Harvard law professor, says, it's not hypocrisy. It's hierarchy. There is a new sort of hierarchical caste system being imposed upon American politics, which is really dreadful sort of thing and antithetical to the culture that we all want. But it's very effective. And I think I think conservatives are actually sort of missing the point here.

When we dismiss these things, we laugh about it. We point out the hypocrisy. We giggle at the absurdity, pissy welcomeness, cancel culture. Yeah, it's absurd. Oh, my gosh. It's crazy. It's also a cogent political strategy that has been ruthlessly effective for decades at this point. And it appears to be accelerating everything we do to try to stop, it seems, if anything, to help this process advance. Mm hmm.

Well, I mean, another example was Joy Reid, who's constantly making racist and inappropriate remarks, anti-gay remarks, you name it. She she came out last week and called Tim Scott Senator Tim Scott.

She said he he's only there at this Republican event to, quote, show a patina of diversity. Petina of is so offensive. And Tim Scott responded by saying to your point, Michael, and I quote, We need to take these comments seriously. WOAK super. Pharmacy is as bad as white supremacy, end quote, and this is not the first time she's called him a token. She's like, that's just fine, I guess, because Joy Reid has black skin.

She also, by the way, called Justice Thomas. Uncle Clarence. Right.

Obviously another name for Uncle Tom, just fine because of her skin color. And I think that leaves most people sitting back saying, what the hell are the rules?

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you know, this brings up such an important point, because the rules now are that the logic doesn't matter in the arguments you make don't matter. It just matters what the person who makes those arguments looks like. So Joy, Reid gets to say certain things, but, you know, I don't get to say other things. What whatever this gets to the left's understanding of free speech, which I think was articulated very well by Herbert Marcuse, father of the new left infamous essay in the nineteen sixties called Repressive Tolerance.

And the thesis is you can't tolerate intolerance and therefore you got to shut up all the conservatives and you need to encourage speech from leftists. And we've you know, we've dismissed this on the right for many decades and said, oh, it's perverse, it's awful. There is a sort of logic to it. The logic is that all free speech regimes have some standards. There are some things you can say. Some things are off limits. That's always been true in America.

It's always been true everywhere else. And what the joy Reids of the world are saying is, yeah, we support racial tolerance. But Clarence Thomas, laboring under a false consciousness is actually setting that back. And so we can be as vicious to him as we want. Tim Scott, same thing. We can be absolutely vicious. And according to our understanding of speech, that is totally coherent. I think that if conservatives don't recognize the the logic that the left is using here on speech, if we just keep uttering platitudes about free marketplace of ideas or whatever, I don't think we're ever going to stop it because because their perception of of free speech is actually, I think, a little bit cleaner.

And their strategy is obviously much more effective.

And they they don't they have such a blind spot as to how regular Americans feel and live. And of course, the Silent Middle is too afraid to speak up. But I was thinking about it just this week when it's so it's Women's History Month now. Right now, the war in March is Women's History Month. And there is this woman. God, she annoys me.

Her name is Jill Filipovic or Filho. Yes.

I don't write with an F and she went after Rush Limbaugh after he died. She was one of the people who wrote an article. She went after Ben Shapiro. She wanted Ben's article about his remembrance of Rush to be all about Rush's alleged sexism. That's how she wanted Ben anyway. So she was in a Rush Limbaugh fan. OK, she doesn't have to be, but she's the gender. She covers gender for The New York Times. And literally, she she spent time tweeting on March 10th.

OK, here's the tweet. And now I'm really going to get myself yelled at. But I think the issue of example setting for a kid is a totally fair one. What example are you setting when Dad works for pay and Mom does the care work at home? Lots of reasons not to want to set that example for a child.

Oh, my God. Right. So I tweeted out two things on this, which I'll read. This is idiotic, disgustingly judgmental. Stay at home moms are setting a great example just as moms working outside the home are as long as they're loving and engaged. This sanctimonious guilt trip is sexist bullshit, whether from a man or a woman. Ladies, do not listen to this moron. And my follow up was also any woman trying to pit stay at home moms against moms working outside the home has no business calling herself a feminist or covering gender for The New York Times.

Hey, Jill, you called Rush Limbaugh a woman hater.

Look in the mirror.

She she loves women so long as they're their living, their lives exactly as Jill would like them to.

Yes, but this has a long history among feminists. When I saw her tweets about this topic, I thought, wait a second. You're telling me that now if you want to stay home and raise your family, then it is wrong for you to do that. And your husband has every right to make you go to work. Doesn't quite sound like women's liberation to me. It seems like there's a bit of a bait and switch, but it goes all the way back to those second wave feminist debates between Betty Friedan, the American feminist, and Simone de Beauvoir, who very famous French feminist and the strumpet of Jean-Paul Sartre.

And they were disagreeing over whether or not women could stay home and raise kids if they want to pursue what is the strumpet of Zailckas.

So that was a very vicious, awful philosopher in the twentieth century named Jean-Paul Sartre. And the irony of feminism, I guess this is one of the examples of the irony of feminism, is that Simone de Beauvoir, most famous feminist in the world, was basically the jilted common law wife of this philanderer. Derelict, named sergeant, but but somehow this was presented as very empowering, and it actually she she explains this in an interview with Freedom Free and says, well, look, if some women want to work, that's good.

You know, and if someone would want to stay home, that's good, too. And Simone de Beauvoir says, no, we cannot give women the option to stay home with their family because, sure, a handful of women really want to go out and work. They're going to go to work. But most women, if given that choice, are going to stay home and raise their kids. And that is not liberating. If we want to liberate women, we have to force liberation upon them.

And I think when you understand that fact, which which goes far beyond feminism, goes to basically the whole left program today, when you understand that they believe in their heart of hearts that they need to force liberation on you seems like a contradiction in terms. All of this kind of highfalutin talk starts to make a little bit more sense. Mm.

It's infuriating. I hate when they try to pit moms against each other as though some one version is better or one is a bad example for children.

Screw you, Jill.

Now, meanwhile, you should read Barry Weiss, as everybody knows, because you're Sicilian and she's got her own substract now, which everybody should subscribe to. And she actually put this one out on City Journal because I think she needed some just make sure she had all her ducks in a row and her reporting and backups and all that.

But she had this crazy good incendiary piece about schools that hit this week. And one of the schools she talked about is here in New York, Grace Church. It's very, Tony, very sought after.

And they are getting rid of their banning the use of the terms, mom and dad and boy and girl, to the point where if you read a book about, like, I don't know, a little boy blue, you know, you're not allowed to say the word boy you have they say you have to substitute the name.

And I don't know what Little Boy Blue's name. It's like you got to be like this is a this is a story about little blue.

And you can't say mom and dad, you have to say caregivers or generic parents and you can't say nanny or babysitter either. It's like it goes on. So we've gotten to the point now where you're just not even allowed to say boy and girl in these classrooms.

Michael, I just think. Are we getting to the breaking point?

Well, this it does show you, I think, why the right and part of the left has gotten so focused on this transgender issue, because the transgender problem, gender dysphoria as a psychological matter, affects very, very small number of people. It is it seems to be spreading is a social contagion. But in terms of the psychological issue, it's very rare. And so why are we spending all our time talking about how we can't say, boy, we can't say girl, the boys got to go to the girl's room, the boys got to be able to compete on the girls track team.

The reason we're focusing on that is because it gets to the fundamental distinction in human nature. There is you know, it's funny that we talk about racism so much. There's really very little distinction between the races. But there is a distinction between men and women that men and women traditionally understood are complementary to one another. You know, they go together. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. But somehow we go together. There's never going to be a war between the sexes because everybody's sleeping with the enemy.

Is is the old adage goes. So you if you can obliterate that fundamental distinction, then you really do have control over a society, then you really can remake society, as has been the plan of leftists going back even further than Marx. Whittaker Chambers, the ex communist, ended up being one of the guys to convert Ronald Reagan to be a conservative. He said Marxism, communism. It's not a new ideology. It's actually the second oldest faith.

It's the alternative faith of mankind that began in the garden when when the serpent told Eve Ye shall be as gods. And by the way, it hasn't a relation to our free speech debate. And I think it shows the constraints of free speech, inevitable constraints. You're going to have to limit certain things, because if we believe as a society that boys are boys and they cannot become girls, then we are going to refer to boys as he. We're going to use that language.

It's going to affect the way we perceive the world and how we talk to one another. If you believe the new fashionable idea that actually there's no such thing as sex and boys can be girls, girls can be boys or whatever, then you're going to refer to boys and dresses as she you're going to communicate different ways. You're going to perceive the world differently. If our country can't agree on the most basic things, then we cannot have a country.

And I think it's why the left has spent so much energy on this issue. And I think it's why people on the right who kind of see what's what's going on or spending time fighting back against it as well.

Well, I don't know why it has to cross over to intolerance toward. Pre-existing beliefs, language and, you know, science, I like I, I actually am not somebody who doesn't accept. Right.

If somebody says if somebody's born in a designated male at birth and they're they're their boy, and then they say, I want to live my life as a girl and I feel that I am a girl, I will respect that.

I will absolutely use their pronouns of choice. You know, my own belief is that there are two sexes saying I'm a science person. I believe that there are two biological sexes, male and female, and then there are people who just feel like they're not in the right body. They identify more with the other sex and that's fine by me.

But stay out of my lane. Don't fucking tell me we can't have women anymore. I'm sorry, but I like that's bullshit. And don't tell me we can't have boys and girls and don't tell me if I want to use those turn's terms.

It's because I'm trans phobic and and honestly, I know I know I have trans trans people in my family. I know trans people. And I want no one who is in favor of this bullshit. It's like right there, activist lobby. Well, that's or even just self flagellating, super woak liberals are driving us to make these decisions that I don't know who wants this.

No, of course, it's always going to be some white marketing executive cancelling Aunt Jemima. Right. This is not some cry from the oppressed masses. Whenever they would come up that they would want to rename the Redskins, they would always there would always be public polls of Native Americans and they never cared. None of them care at all about the Redskins. It was only woak white liberals. And it's the same thing here with the transgender question. And actually, you don't just need to take my word for it.

You can look at the way that the left has used these identity groups. So, yeah, I don't I don't think that people confused about their sex are particularly militant, at least not not in my experience, not the ones that I know. But for decades, we were told in defense of homosexual rights leading up to the redefinition of marriage, we were told actually a pretty simple argument. People are born with innate sexual desires and innate sex and you can't change that and you're born this way.

And so a compassionate society is going to accommodate that and tolerate that ultimately, even to the point of redefining marriage. I, I totally understand that argument. And that argument ultimately was successful. And then the very same lobbies undercut that argument with the gender question because they came out and they said, actually, there is no such thing as sex and not only a sexual orientation mutable, but actually sex itself is mutable. And you just need to have some cosmetic surgeries and then you can be the other sex and nothing is fluid and nothing is fixed at all.

And you said, well, wait a second, you just gave me the exact opposite argument and now you're giving me this new one. But both of them are designed to obliterate the old understanding that we had the old standards on these things. And I think that this is a feature of WOAK leftism. I don't think it's a bug. I think it's a feature. I think George Orwell talks about this in nineteen eighty four, which these days has been skyrocketing up the bestseller charts on Amazon.

I think it tells you a little bit about our culture book written. Seventy years later, it's back up at the top. What Orwell says in eighty four is the totalitarian, tyrannical regime rules through newspeak, which is a sort of political correctness. It rules through surveillance, but most of all, it rules through doublethink and doublethink is his word for the regime forcing you to hold mutually contradictory ideas in your head. At the same time, the born this way argument and the there's no such thing as sex argument.

You if you if the regime can force you to hold both of those ideas at the same time, in Orwell's words, you lose your capacity and willingness to reason. And getting back to your excellent point earlier on, when we can't reason, then all we have is our lived experience and our grunts and our interests and politics collapsed.

In a second. I've been asked Michael about his new book that he's got coming out.

Unlike his old book, we're really hoping that there'll be something in there, as is it is April 2017 book was called Reasons to Vote for Democrats A Comprehensive Guide and had a table of contents, an extensive bibliography, and it had two hundred and sixty six empty pages. It's sold like some crazy amount like it initially I think it was sixty thousand copies. So it's up above that now, but we'll get into it in one second.

I want to bring you before we get to the add a feature we have here in the Megyn Kelly Show. Notice from the archives. We thought this one would be timely because it's about Piers Morgan. This is where we direct you to a show from our library that we think you should check out again. And Piers was one of our early guests. This is actually episode sixteen. We're talking about talking about a friend of the show, Piers, who has been in the news quite a bit this week.

As you've already heard, he walked off as UK morning show. Good Morning Britain, where I've been a guest many times and I enjoy the show. And he never came back. Here is Piers on our show on October twenty eight.

We're at this place now where I think one of the. Showed on college campuses, the vast majority what want a constitutional amendment to ban hate speech, they want it to be not covered by the First Amendment, which is so absurd because, of course, the the First Amendment is necessary not to protect speech you like, but speech you do not like. No one's trying to shut down speech everyone loves.

Well, that's the whole point is, is that I regularly I follow lots of people on Twitter whose opinions I don't agree with precisely. So I hear something outside of my own kind of echo chamber and I urge everybody else to do the same. When you only follow people on social media that agree with you, you start to develop is very tribal entrenched view of things which doesn't allow for any nuance or any movement. But it gets really insidious when you're in universities and colleges around America.

We have the same problem in this country when they decide that even someone like Bill Moore is unacceptable and has to be no platformed because he's held a shining light to mockery and all things around it. When that starts happening, you really think, well, I know who you are going to allow to speak. And what kind of education are kids going to be getting in these universities? What are they going to be taught if they find everything offensive, if they're triggered by everything and they can't even have a speaker like Bilbo's a liberal, come and talk to them, let alone a bona fide conservative.

I don't know where this takes education, takes students and it takes democracy, but I do know it's taking it, as I say in the book, into a dangerous place where rotavirus has been appalling. But it will be historically, pandemics tend to blow out in about two years. And then where are we left as a society? Because if we don't wake up, which is the title of my book, we don't wake up to this problem. I think the attack on free speech over time after all this will end up being far more dangerous than any.

He called it. He's living it and we need to stop it. I've got a feeling Piers is not going to be silent for long, and that is a very good thing.

And this has been from the archives.

Back to our interview after this legacy box is perfectly named because it takes part of your legacy, part of your life, puts it in a box, and then it returns it to you in perfect, newly usable form.

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We did it. I sent it to my old tapes. I did some aerobics tapes. It did some legal tapes, did some early Fox News tapes, just some fun stuff that I had on tape back in the Dark Ages. And it was fun to see it again. And I've been forever since I looked at it.

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Go to legacy box dot com slash MGK to get an incredible fifty percent off your first order by today to take advantage of this exclusive offer and then send that box on when you're ready. Go to legacy box dotcom MK for fifty percent off while supplies last. In a world in which the messaging, the public messaging is all about how you've been victimized and it's all about your identity and not about using your brain and how you think about the world, it's just, you know, you were born a victim if you have certain skin color, certain, you know, lady parts or what have you.

Yeah, it's just as such a self-defeating message. And like that, it explains why people are depressed and they you know, the people who are pushing for these WOAK identity politics, they have nothing to replace it with. They have once they get rid of what they have critical race theory down our throats and they're making everybody say there's no more gender. I don't know what kind of world we live in other than do you feel sorry for me as I do?

Right. Right. I mean, there was a great Babylon B headline about Meghan Markle, which said, oh, my God, it was it was so great. And Meghan Markle inspires millions of girls around the world to show them that no matter how rich and beautiful and famous you are, you still can be oppressed because that obviously has social currency.

That the way that you know that that victimhood now carries social currency is that you have so many people pretending to be races other than white. The Rachel Dolezal example, there have been plenty of these cases, professors at NYU, people who are pretending to be a non-white race. Well, if there was such a thing as white privilege as the left is currently describing it, certainly people would be going in the other direction. Linda Sarsour, who is a radical leftist woman, she famously said that she began to sort of lean into her Islamic identity because she didn't want to just be a boring white woman in New York any longer.

There was a big push that she was actually quite supportive of during the Obama administration to create a new racial group, MENA, Middle East and North Africa. Traditionally speaking, people from those areas when race mattered were classified as white in the United States. The push to create a new racial category to declassify people as white would seem to me pretty clear that the privileges and the the social advantage are very much in the other direction and there and they are justified by claims of victimhood.

So people want to they want to embrace an identity that will be traditionally oppressed.

But if you are actually in a group that's been, you know, historically marginalized, like Latinas, Latinos and you vote troub, then you lose your person of color, then you are multiracial, white.

Yes, that's right. You're a white Hispanic. It's so complex.

And by the way, to your point, Abigail Schreier was on the show, you know, who wrote irreversible damage, which every living human being should read.

And then she was saying it's no longer cool to be a lesbian. We're like, we're losing lesbians to the trans thing because it's not cool enough. People are looking for an identity that, you know, is kind of sexy and they're like a lesbian yarn with gays.

It's like they're boring or interesting. Right.

Right. No, it is. And and you see this reflected in in social scientific surveys, which I'm sure is what Abigail was referring to. What's funny is that our culture is so prideful, we're so arrogant and we're so stupid. We are so ignorant even of our recent past and certainly of our our ancient past. There is no new idea under the sun. And what has come up, these new crazy gender theories or whatever. This is just the re-emergence of an ancient Eris.

I mean, very specifically, the transgender thing is the re-emergence of a heresy called Gnosticism Gnostic dualism. This idea that my true self has nothing to do with my physical body. I might look like a guy. And I got an Adam's apple in a deep voice. But actually, deep down, I'm something else. And the flip side of this heresy is another crazy idea that is being pushed these days, which is materialism. The idea that I am only my body, you know, our loves, our hopes, our dreams, our affections, they're all just illusions.

It's our brain pistons firing all wacky to to dilute us. And therefore, we don't need to worry about a moral order. And if it feels good, do it is kind of the prevailing moral idea. So those two versions of of humanity, those two ideas about us are currently being advanced at the same time, even though they're polar opposites and they obviously miss the truth of the situation, which is Abigael might say, is the truth of the complexity of sexuality or the complexity of our nature, which is we are soul and body.

We are spirit and physical. And those things are together and they're inseparable on Earth. And gosh, isn't this a complex world that we live in? It would seem that that answer, the only non simplistic answer, is the only one that people are no longer willing to engage with.

I know it's like that tolerance isn't enough. It has to be total of. Abandonment of the world order, we knew, you know, that you can't be a woman anymore. Women aren't the ones with breasts or who menstruate, and you can't you can't even say, oh, gosh, what was the one that somebody was telling me?

You can't even say like that. It's the woman who gives birth. I don't know. It went on like every day there's a new rule. And I just feel like, no, I don't accept. I disagree. I will protect my ability to say I'm a woman and I don't really give a damn if it offends you. But this whole conversation is reminding me we cut this clip because what we saw the other day, our whole team was laughing.

But this kind of nails it. It's this.

He's a comedian, Ryan, long as he's playing like modern therapist, talking to this distraught young woman about life in today's day and age.

Listen, a lot of therapists will tell you how to get your life together and what you can do differently, but they rarely ever focus on what the world could do differently. That is your family's fault, that society's fault. Whoever you are, there's things working against you. It's my job to find those things and help you base your entire identity around. And I've been feeling pretty lonely lately. Have you tried posting online about what you can do differently?

I was dating this one guy, but then I, the best friend in his bathroom at his birthday party.

If he can't take you at your worst, he doesn't deserve you at your best and society to change his views on the women at their worst. I now understand the world needs to change the way it looks at hot messes. I think I've been smoking too much. You've actually been smoking the perfect amount. Am I correct in saying you use it to self medicate? Ninety three percent of New Yorkers go to therapy. So whether you're born in the wrong place with the wrong parents, the wrong amount of motivation or the wrong gender, you want energy to be focused on who's to blame for that happens rather than integrating what you can do about it.

I love it. He he totally hits the nail on the head. It reminds me of this this observation that struck me a few months ago. We always hear about institutional racism and institutional oppression. So then I started thinking about the institutions we've got, you know, big tech, the government, the universities, Hollywood, a high education, low education. All this these institutions, the left controls every single one of them. So if there is institutional racism, don't you think that the people who are making that claim, maybe they should look at themselves?

I mean, all of us more broadly, if society is really the problem, you know, the system, if that's really the problem and it explains everything that's ever gone wrong in my life, what is society? Last I checked, society is just all of us. Right. And at some point, don't you have to look in at yourself and say, gosh, maybe I am not only a victim, but I am an active person? You know, one of the most bigoted aspects of this whole WOAK racialist idea is the idea that only white men, straight white men are there, the only fully human people, because they're the only people with will and intellect and any agency at all.

This is their theory. Right. And if you if you in any way deviate from that identity group, then you don't really have a will. You don't really have ability. You don't really have any agency. That is the worst possible thing that you can tell a kid. It's the worst possible thing that you can tell anybody who you hope to develop into a flourishing human being.

And it's truly white supremacy, that white supremacy that could be right out of the mouth of David Duke. Right. Right.

Which is what? Scared. No, no, you're right. They don't look at their own institutions. It's all they think all the racism is at Fox News and NASCAR and WWE. And those are the those are the institutions we need to focus on. And now conservative media online, I don't know.

I think that people are starting to get to their breaking point because they've really like when you start telling you, you know, schools, you cannot refer to mom and dad.

I just think people are going to be pushed to the brink. And when you look at the larger situation in the country right now, you know, I think Biden has gone so much more woke than we thought he would.

So it's like we went from Trump who fought this nonsense to Biden, who we were told is going to be this sort of milquetoast moderate who's leaning way into this stuff at a time when he's pushing for amnesty. Right. For the 11, 12 million illegal or people who are in the country illegally right now and undocumented, where people are swarming across our southern border.

And he's doing very little about it. Right. The press is giving him a complete pass. Unemployment is still 10 million people still unemployed. Right. So it's like a covid lockdown's remain in place, easing a little. But as we get people vaccinated, we're still being told masks possibly through twenty, twenty two. I just think. How much are you trying to try people? Like what how much should we be expecting of the American people to take?

Well, you know, we were promised a return to normal and the first thing he does is a nuke women's sports and obliterate the border. Tell us we have to lock ourselves up. Or two years, but that would be the new normal I mean, this is this is something that really worries me when you hear people in public health or people who are politicians talk about the new normal. We all laugh about that. We say we're not going to wear the masks forever.

We're not going to social distance. What what an Orwellian phrase. If ever there was one forever. But but we sort of are right. The way that you get norms is when you just do certain things for a long enough period of time, then that becomes normal. And I had a fear that this would happen with Biden because Joe Biden and I don't mean this to sound as insulting as it will Joe Biden is nobody. Joe Biden, I don't think he's had an original thought in his entire life.

That's why he had to drop out in eighty eight because he was plagiarizing everybody else's thoughts and lying about his record. It's true. I think he is a glad handing politician who kisses babies and smiles for photos. And what he is in office is an empty suit and an avatar for the political winds. He wakes up in the morning, Alex's index finger, he puts it high in the air, figures out which way the wind is blowing, and then he just goes in that direction.

And unfortunately now, because the left, I don't think that he is speaking for the majority of Americans, I don't think the majority of Americans want a nuke women's sports and open up our borders. And every poll shows that I'm right about that. But what what is really blowing in his in that direction is the institutional power now in the country. And this is something I actually detail it a bit in my upcoming book, Speechless. The way that the left has attained influence in this country is very subtle.

It's through what a communist theorist Antonio Gramsci called a war of position rather than a war of maneuver. It's not just, you know, they advance and they retreat and they advance. They take positions of power in all of the institutions and then they exercise that power. So the reason I think that no one's really worried about Joe Biden's obvious cognitive decline right now is because nobody thinks that every day he's making all the most important decisions. He is an avatar for this political establishment, this system that could operate without him or with him or with him.

Some of the time it's operating in a way, on its own.

You mentioned your you're having a book come out. Is this one actually going to have worse?

Well, you know, Meghan, I decided after my best selling blank magnum opus reasons to vote for Democrats, I thought it would be a curious challenge to write a book with words. And furthermore, I thought it would be funny if for my second book, I wrote a book that is actually about words. So the title of that book is Speechless. I just turned in my final draft to the editor. It is in a way providential, I guess that the book happens to be about exactly what is going on right now, how we got here through this political correctness regime, which a lot of people date back to the eighties.

I think it actually goes back further to the 20s and why conservatives have been so feckless at opposing it. It seems like anything we do, political correctness advances. And I think it's because it lays a trap for conservatives where we either go along with their crazy new standards or we abandon standards entirely. Either way, PC wins. And I will tell you, though, Meghan, I will tell you, writing a book with words I had, I admit this fully all humility.

It's much harder than writing a book without words. I'm glad I did it. It was edifying, but it's it's tricky.

It's so much trickier.

So I do think the reason people like Republicans and others, the left to which I think is largely with us, that they go they went along with it for so long, is no one wants to be called a racist or a sexist or a homophobe or transphobia.

They don't for too long. Back to the discussion we had at the top. We have all been assuming that our critics are operating in good faith.

Right. And I think the big reveal over the past couple of years now that they've reached too far is they're not.

They're not. And just because they throw these terrible names and labels at you doesn't mean it's true.

Even if they have a critical mass on their side saying the same, they've got their army. But the silent middle. The silent majority. Yeah, there are army. And you just have to keep reminding yourself of that.

Right. And this I think this you know, I don't want to be called racist. Thing is a big issue here. I'm not so worried about being called racist anymore because I know that I'm not racist. Racism is an offence against human dignity. That's why it's wrong. So that's why I'm not going to do it done. I don't care what these people, these crazy people call me, but it's a it's a real fear. It's the worst thing that you can possibly be called in the country right now.

And so what what happens is there's only two responses that you can have to PC if you're in any way not a leftist. The one is you. Go along with it, right, you just say, OK, I'll start using the new words and doing whatever you want me to do, and then the second way is to say, OK, look, I don't want to go along with your new words, but I am not going to make any substantive claims myself.

You do whatever you want, live and let live and you get rid of all the standards. But the problem here is the whole point of PC is to get rid of the old standards. This is an example that really jumped out to me about this was some months ago when drag queen story hour was in the news. I guess this was before covid drag queen story. Our is this event where we're transvestites will come in and twerk, sexually dance in some cases for toddlers.

And some conservatives said, you know, this is a bad idea. And there were other writers who I think we're a little bit squishier who came out and they said, no, actually it's a blessing of liberty. And at the heart of this is a kind of radical skepticism. It's this trap of PC that we've been talking about, which is the argument here was that if you say that we shouldn't have drag queen story hour, then the left might say that we shouldn't be able to go to church on Sunday, you know, because they're just they're both sort of similar things.

First of all, they're already telling us we can't go to church on Sunday. We've been dealing with church closures from the state for a lot of the covid pandemic. But also, are you telling me that we really do not have the moral conscience, the the act of judgement to be able to say drag queen story, our not so good going to church? Probably pretty good. Are we really not able to distinguish between right and wrong and true and false and good and bad?

Because if we're not able to do that, then the left has already won the WOAK. People have already won. We've already been defeated. And like Hank lying there on the ground and Breaking Bad, we just don't know it yet. But it's already happened. Yeah.

And I mean, how do we lie down so easily to it? You know, I tweeted out this little picture a week ago that summed it up, saying, how do we get to the point where W.

S P word is Song of the year, but we have to cancel Dr Seuss as too offensive or to be seen like what the hell has happened to our country?

Talk about double standards.

It makes sense to me, Meghan. It actually makes sense to me in that I mean, you even think just on the music front, they always want to cancel that that Christmas song. You know, baby, it's cold outside. They say that is sexualise, very transgressive. But to Omeje to me too much. But but WSP word that that's perfectly wonderful. The reason for this, of course, is because those things have a purpose. You know what the left is has wielded very effectively now for at least 50 years is sex is licentiousness.

Right? If you arouse people's sexual appetites and you get them always so ready and raring to go, then they're going to be less in command of their higher faculties that the founding fathers knew this. This is why there were huge prohibitions against obscenity for most of our nation's history. Theoretically, it's still on the books. And I also understand why eBay is going to ban Dr Seuss certain Dr Seuss books, but they won't ban Mein Kampf. I understand why Amazon will ban Ryan Anderson's humorously titled but actually scholarly book When Harry became Sally.

But they won't ban Mein Kampf because Hitler and Mein Kampf do not pose any threat to the left's agenda. No serious person looks to Hitler for wisdom know other than a handful of skinheads or something. Actually, the left benefits by keeping Mein Kampf in circulation, if only to make it more forceful when when the left calls all their opponents literally Hitler and Nazis, whereas Dr. Seuss really is influencing impressionable young minds. And so if he in any way contradicts that, the orthodoxies of the day, you've got to get rid of that guy because the left is always trying to get a hold on that the common sense.

This is why they care so much about education. You know, they can't answer Ryan Anderson's book about transgenderism, so they have to ban that. That's not hypocrisy. It's actually a pretty clever strategy in my mind.

It's such crap. You know, it's like I grew up reading all those Cinderella's Sleeping Beauty damsel in distress must be rescued by the prince. Old women are witches and hags. I get it. Like I. I read all that. It worked out fine for me.

I didn't see myself as a damsel in distress ever like that.

Get that shit is not like those character traits are not formed by stupid children's books. I mean as much as you can put like I mean you remember when I was at NBC, Savannah Guthrie wrote along with Noah Oppenheim's wife, a book called Princesses Wear Pants. And I put her on because, you know, she was a colleague. Yeah. I'm thinking to myself, like, this is so stupid because, like, they might or they might. Frilly dresses, and there's nothing wrong with that, you can wear the frilly dress and the little Mary jeans and have your hair done up into big girls, and you can still be an ass kicker.

And I think, like, this is the problem that Jill Filipovic has or whatever her name is, that some people just have an image of of empowerment, looking only one way.

And if it's not reflected in your children's books, if Dr. Seuss has something that might be mildly offensive to some, we have to get rid of it. Otherwise, the damage, it'll be a mess. I know I stole the last word on it, but I've got to ask you, because I.

I know we have a limited time, but just listening to you and all your amazing, like, smart references, I know you went to Yale and I didn't know that prior to studying up for this interview, but how did you get so smart?

That is very kind. It's all just a performance, you know. I just know it is just you know, I really appreciate that. I actually have a serious answer to it, too, which is because we're in this culture where people are the curriculum are being totally destroyed. You know, good books are being taken out and replaced with total nonsense. And we're always being told, you can't say this, you can't think this. I find that if you just read a book every now and again, if you just turn off the mainstream media, I mean, I'm sure you can speak to this, you know, just the same.

But you will learn much more about certain things, because there is, as Ronald Reagan famously said, the problem with our our opponents is not that either they don't know anything. It's not that they're ignorant. It's that they know so many things that aren't so. So, for instance, you have the 60 19 project comes out and says America was founded to protect slavery. You don't need to be a member of Mensa. You don't need to get a perfect SAT score to find out that that's just total nonsense.

That's just not true, really. You just need to read like two articles or a book and you will know that's crazy, that the current fashion to get rid of Christopher Columbus say he was this awful worst person in the world. If you just, like, read up a little bit on the guy, you'll find out that isn't true. I think that the dominant left wing narratives that we're being told they're forceful because they've got the weight of propaganda behind them.

You know, they've got institutional power. New York Times spent millions of dollars promoting the 60 19 project, but the arguments themselves are pretty shallow. They're really they they're they're made of paper. And if you if you just poke at them a little bit, you know, if you investigate a little bit, I think that just about anybody will be able to to reeducate ourselves and realize that a lot of what we're being told just isn't true. Now, where did you grow up?

I grew up in New York. I grew up in a very liberal county, Westchester County, in a very liberal state, New York, with very liberal friends, and went to a very liberal school, then moved to L.A., very liberal city. I have no idea how I ended up to the satellite to hunt. How did this happen? I don't know that scientists will wonder for years.

Are your parents conservative? No.

My mother was sort of, you know, a centrist. I guess she she wanted to vote for Clinton in ninety six. And Meg and I kid you not. I was six years old and I was a political junkie, though, and all I knew from watching that I don't know how this was the case. My grandfather used to teach me it's a grand old flag and things like that. So maybe I learned it from him. But I in ninety six I pleaded with my mother.

I said, please vote for Bob Dole. I think it was I was the only guy in the country who was really enthusiastic about Dole and all except for Bob Dole himself.

That bill is going to vote for Bob Dole. Exactly.

And but all I knew is Dole was a war hero and Clinton was a draft dodger. That's all I knew about the whole race. And I begged and I begged. And she got such a kick out of it that she actually let me go into the voting booth with her back when we had physical voting booths. She let me pull the lever for Bob Dole. So I guess I'm actually confessing to election fraud right now. Unan. Right. But that was my first vote for Bob Dole when I was six years old and that she was kind of a moderate Republican if that she liked some Democrats.

My father kind of a moderate Republican, but he's voted for Democrats to. So I don't know. I you know, I'm I'm slightly to the right of Genghis Khan. So how that happened, I don't know. I do think that left wing places such as Yale or, you know, living in New York City or Los Angeles, they kind of either bring you along with the dominant view or they force you to really think about what you believe.

So, you know, you if you go into that and you got the ideological bullets flying every day, you're going to discard some of your beliefs. You're going to change some of your beliefs and others you're going to dig more deeply into. You're going to investigate more. And in a way, I actually think conservatives have an advantage in these in these left wing institutions because they have to know what they think. They have to be able to explain it.

Whereas did you own it?

You own it. Like, were you open? Yeah, I was open.

I came out much harder. Has to come out that way, you know. Then it gets better. It gets better, does it. I don't. Well, that's the only question. I don't know about that. But but I did. I came out and I actually became much, much more conservative. You know, I was sort of that fashionable fiscal conservative, social liberal, as people would say. And then I became much more so, you know, some people say conservatives want to return to the nineteen fifties.

I think over time it's become more like the thirteen fifties. You know, you really you really dig into these things. And at the time friends the shockingly I did. I don't I don't know how. I think part of the reason was because, you know, I was involved. I did a lot of activities. I was in the theater, I was a student government. I take a bunch of classes, political things. And it was during the age of Obama.

So people were less on edge. You know, whenever whenever the left is in power, they tend to be a little bit nicer. I've found only a little bit. But the other reason is because people knew, right? If you know somebody, especially if you get to know them a little bit before you know their politics, then the caricature that's in your mind that's been implanted there by the media and the educational systems of the evil, awful conservative, it just doesn't click right.

Because, you know, you've got this real thing in front of you. You say, no, I, I like this guy. I like Michael. So, you know, I don't know how that's going to work. And they come up with all sorts of explanations. One thing I have found, though, is I had lots and lots of friends. I had a great time. I got invited to lots and lots of parties in college and and all these liberal places.

But out of sight is out of mind. And I found the only people that I've known from all those places who've really sort of turned on me, say all sorts of things because of my political views. They're the ones that I don't I just don't see anymore. And so it's it's much easier to retreat to this awful caricature that you're told by the media. I think, you know, if we had more more interactions with with the left, I think that would really crack some of that propaganda.

Yeah.

I mean, I've said before that I think one of the ways to fight racism is to expose people of different races to other people of other races who are also like that sort of imbeds a positive you in your head.

And the same is true with conservatives and liberals. Try to surround yourself.

They don't have to agree with them. But just if they're likeable, if they're kind, if they're good people, it can it can be a step. You know, I just had Andrew Schultz on the program saying that we should dance.

What we need is to dance, which is like lean into something that's kind of fun and like less political and not. It is divisive and not so serious, you know, I mean, Chesterton had this great line, he said the angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. You know, we don't need it doesn't always have to be this tedious, sort of everything's a grand political statement. This happened in the 70s. You know, the the radicals did say the personal is the political.

So all of our personal interactions had to be opened up to public scrutiny. But can't you just sort of let it go for a little bit? You know, in the long run, we're all dead. We're here together. We're all broken and sent one have, I guess, getting back to our earliest conversation, can't one have it just a little bit of grace and hopefully get along with our our countrymen? I hope so.

Now, I think we can end this by doing a big favor to Meghan Markle, who is back in the United States, and Prince Harry, for that matter, and spare them. You know, I'm not going to sing the national anthem because that's too big.

But, you know, I also love Grandal Flag, so I think let's sing it.

Let's do it gladly. You're singing a grand old flag is flying flag and forever.

Well, I think the door is a little tricky.

So don't forget to subscribe to the show because on Monday we're going to have Victor Davis Hanson cannot wait to talk to him. We are going to put him today, but we tape with Michael Knowles same day. And he was so fiery about these current events, including the royals, that we were like, he's got to go on Friday because I don't I don't have it in me to ask Victor Davis Hanson about the royals. There are limits to what I can do.

And these news cycles have timeliness the issue. So we need to enjoy Michael. And then we'll get to sort of the godfather of commentary, Victor Davis Hanson, the one the only the lightener, the illuminator on Monday. So excited, been trying since we launched to get Victor. I'm not I don't feel the need to ask him why he said no for so long. But the point is he said yes eventually. And you'll get to hear him on Monday.

In the meantime, have a great weekend.

Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No bias, no agenda and no fear. The Megan Kelly Show is a devil may care media production in collaboration with Red Ventures.