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Hey, everybody. Tim Mo from the Bulwark here during family movie night. I got into a Twitter feud with Megyn Kelly last night, which is something that I need to reflect on internally for sure. And I know that, you know, maybe for some people, like, hearing about the details of a Twitter feud is kind of like, you know, hearing about somebody's fantasy football team's loss. You know, it's sort of like, okay, buddy, this mattered to you really more than to the rest of us. In this case, it's a little bit of an exception. Not because I think you care about the blow by blow of my feud with Megyn Kelly, but because the arguments that she is making are extremely alarming and they're psychotic. They're also alarming, and they speak to a larger trend of what we're seeing right now on the right that is chilling and I think presages some really scary stuff ahead. In addition to that, it also demonstrates the hollowness of their ideology, and Megan demonstrates the hollowness of her ideology in a way that is much more overt than we're used to seeing. And so I think that it's worth breaking it down for everybody. It started with this. And if you saw the video we did last night in the breaking news on the Tom Homan bribery scandal last night, I'd start with Megan's reaction to that. Tom Homan was caught on tape accepting a $50,000 cash bribe in a kava bag. That was a new piece of information since we taped the last video. So it was like somebody went to kava, got themselves a bowl, presumably ate the bowl, and then put $50,000 of cash in a bag and then handed it to Tom Homan as a bribe. That this was an FBI agent posing as a. As a business person. They've got some leads to Tom was doing corrupt dealings, and that is what led to this situation. So having an extremely high ranking official, the deportations are in this administration on tape accepting bribes is something that you would think would unite everybody. You would think that he wouldn't be going to work Monday morning. Regardless of your ideology is you don't want to live in a kleptocracy. You don't want to live in a country where people in charge of, especially in charge of law and order type positions, people who are making determinations about how we treat people who are here either illegally or have other issues with their legal status. The idea that that person would act so brazenly illegally, you think would be unacceptable in any situation. Not in this administration of mob Bosses. So Megyn Kelly's reaction to that story that Tom Homan had taken the bribe was, we do not care. Don't bother. Real Tom Homan, he's a national treasurer. So I guess some points for just honesty. She doesn't care. We can live in a banana republic. We can live in a kleptocracy. High ranking officials in the Trump administration can line their pockets. Corruption doesn't matter. All that matters is this unending battle between MAGA and anti maga. Right? That's all that matters to Megyn Kelly. She doesn't care if they cheat. She doesn't care if they break the law. She doesn't care if they cheat on their wives. She doesn't care if they have allegations of sexual assault and harassment. She doesn't care about any of that. She doesn't care. As long as you're wearing the MAGA hat, Megyn Kelly thinks you can act with impunity, and she's just extremely blunt about that. My colleague Sam Stein posted that it does raise an interesting question. If there is a limiting principle to that, is there, like, anything that someone in the Trump administration could do that Megyn Kelly would object to? And I think the answer is basically no, as long as it advanced their mission, right? If somebody in the maga, you know, somebody in the administration did something to embarrass maga, that. That could upset her. But as long as they are out there advancing Trump's cult political prospects, Megyn Kelly will be okay with it. So I guess points for bluntness. I replied to that with a rhetorical question. As Kamala might say, you don't care that government officials are taking cash bribes? What? What? Really? Like, we can't even agree on that. As I said, I thought that was a rhetorical question that would just sort of float into the air, float into the ether of our Internet discourse. But Megyn Kelly took that one sentence rhetorical question very seriously, and she spent I don't know what appears to be the better part of a couple hours crafting a reply to it that was like Canterbury Tales in length. I'm not going to be able to read all of it because we have limited bandwidth on this YouTube page and the upload time would take so long if I read everything that Megyn Kelly wrote in response to my rhetorical question, but I'm going to read some of the key passages. It starts like this also, by the way, it's so long that people were confused why I was replying to her as if she was talking to me because you have to scroll so far to get the fact that this is a quote tweet on top of my tweet. So like I said, I said you don't care that government officials are taking cash bribes. What? She replies with a quote tweet thusly, we don't trust you. We don't trust the work of your president's doj. We don't trust the work of your president's FBI. You indicted our presidential candidate four times with made up BS charges trying to put him in jail for life. You changed laws so he could be civilly sued by a woman who didn't even remember what year her alleged rape by him was. You led an AG who ran for office promising to get Trump try to bankrupt him on a claim so specious even the New York Appellate Court scoffed at it and had to reverse the damage award. Quick aside here. Seems like the system worked there in that case, but we'll just leave that. Let's put a pin in that. Then she goes on, One of yours killed Charlie. And then you laughed at our pain, protested our vigils and said Charlie was to blame. And in hell you lied about the killer's motives and said he was MAGA when you knew he wasn't. You put us all in danger by not admitting the truth and then not relenting on the lies you tell about us. You cried endless tears for Jimmy Kimmel but none for Charlie. That's all. Megan. Again, we're about 40% way through this tweet here. I had two replies to that. The first one was about this pronoun usage. Megan is somebody who's very obsessed with pronoun usage. She doesn't like it when people have to put their pronouns in their bio or clarify what their pronouns are. It's a big issue for her on her podcast. She seems to really struggle with pronoun usage herself. She keeps saying this. We don't trust you. Who's the we? Does everybody not trust me? Does everybody not trust Carol Leonig from the Washington Post, who's been a great reporter who broke this story? We don't trust the work of your president's doj. Some context clues. I guess she's saying there that Biden was my president and not hers? I don't know who the we is there. It continues to go on. You did this, you did that. You changed laws so you could be civilly sued. I didn't do any of these things. I didn't do any of that. Like you is a personal pronoun and I didn't do any of the things that you're upset about. So we can go through the merits of all of these things and whether you are right to be upset about them. I think in some of these cases, I think it's crazy, for example, that Megyn Kelly would smear the work of good people who work in law enforcement, who protect this country, who work at the FBI, who worked at the Department of Justice, who went out and got bad guys, who went out and got sex traffickers, who went out and got predators, that went after children. All of that type of work happened during the Biden administration, during the first Trump administration, during the Bush administration, during the Obama administration. There are good people working for all of those administrations in, in law enforcement. And I don't think they deserve to be smeared and have their work smeared by Megyn Kelly because she has Biden derangement syndrome. Like, I don't. That's just me. Just like, I'm not going to smear the people that were investigating the Charlie Kirk assassination in Utah. A lot of people out there that just rank and file folks worked for people of both parties or law enforcement doing the best they can. And if you provide me evidence of any individual person acting wrong in any of those administrations, like, okay, not everybody's perfect, but just to paint with a broad brush that everyone that worked at the FBI and DOJ under, under Joe Biden as some corrupt person, that, that is an enemy of Megyn Kelly and her, her fans, I think is truly grotesque. And, and like, frankly, Megyn Kelly and the type, those types would get really upset at the acab, that sense that all cops are bad. These get this from the far left. That's, that's a phrase in the. That's what she's saying. She's doing ACAB to the FBI under Biden, all cops are bad. And I don't agree with that ideology at all. So on these pronouns, you see what she's doing here. I'm into this more in a little bit because I think it's important. What she's trying to do is really turn the entire country into a game of shirts for skins. But we're. Violence is in play, right? Like any act of violence, any wrongdoing against any MAGA person is the responsibility of any non MAGA person. And I reject that altogether. And I reject this little pronoun game gameplay that she uses here. I think that she should speak in I sentences and then use singular sentences rather than in trying to create some broader responsibility around actions. That she was offended by. And this is particularly acute when it comes to Charlie. I want to read what you wrote again. One of yours killed Charlie and then you laughed at our pain. I didn't do that. And people, I think, who are genuine about their sadness over Charlie's assassination, I don't think would do this, would. Would try to poison the dialogue in our country like this in his name. Because one of mine didn't kill Charlie. Unless you are talking about a human or a man, because he was one of those. A deranged young man killed Charlie and it's his responsibility. And I didn't laugh at their pain. The opposite, actually. I didn't protest their vigils. I didn't say Charlie's to blame. And I don't even know if I believe in hell, so I don't. I didn't say he was in hell. I didn't lie about the killer's motives. The opposite, actually. I've been trying to do my best to make sure that everybody gets the best possible information about the killer's motives. And. And I've rejected some of the conspiracy theories being pushed both on the right and the left about, you know, why the bullet went through his neck and what the text messages. And I think the killer's motives are pretty clear. That he had a trans roommate. He was upset by Charlie's hate. He also had easy access to firearms, was taught how to use high powered firearms. As a young person, he spent a lot of time in this VR headset. And the carvings and the bullets are related to, like, the games that he was playing online and. And the. And the conversations he was having in Discord. So I think this, all this is pretty straightforward. If this was an episode of Law and Order svu, I think it'd be boring. It's like, it's like, okay, well, the killer admitted it in three places. And the. The ammunition carvings match what he's doing in private. It's like open and shut case is a 10 minute episode of SVU. So I did not do that. I don't think other people should participate in the conspiracy theories around this either. She said, you put all of us in danger by not admitting the truth and then not relenting on the lies you tell. About us. Again, like, there's nothing. There's no specific. It's just smearing. This is just like she's broad based. Smearing everyone in order to incite. Right. That's what Megyn Kelly's doing. Right? It's like if there's one person anywhere in the world that did any of these things, then Tim is responsible for it. Then all Democrats are responsible for it then than anyone that voted for Kamala Harris, even if they're not a Democrat voted for, is responsible for it. That's where she has landed. It's extremely gross and dangerous. Her tweet goes on a long way if you want to keep reading it. She has a lot of other concerns. But it ends like this. So, no, we don't care what you say about Tom Homan. We do not trust you. We only care about defeating you. Again, like defeating who? Defeating what? What are you trying to defeat? Like the Democratic Party. Okay. I mean, I'm technically still registered Republican. I voted for Nikki Haley. I mean, I'm extremely anti Trump and I'm extremely anti their attempts to undermine our liberal democratic system of government. But this idea that we don't care what you say about Tom Homan, this is on video. It's not about what anybody says about Tom Homan. It's. It's people that serve the country in law enforcement have tape of him accepting a bribe. So this is not a he said, she said situation. There's a tape. We saw he did it. I. I don't know what that would. Trust has nothing to do with it, I guess. Unless you don't trust your own lying eyes. What she's trying to do is undermine trust. Say that anybody you know that is not part of MAGA that did not vote for Donald Trump can't be trusted in any way. And so then you can never trust anything except for Donald Trump himself. Right? Like that. This is the ethos of a cult. I replied to her twice, once mentioning the pronoun usage that I just laid out, and then once, one more time, laying out the situation with Charlie. Here's. Here's my second reply that she ends up replying to one more thing. Charlie's assassin is accountable for his actions. I'm accountable for mine. You're accountable for yours. That's how things work in a liberal democracy. And that's how Christians know God judges us. My show focused on the tragedy of Charlie's killing was deep sadness, not glee. I did not laugh or lie. His death struck me deeply. It was hard to get out of bed, to be honest. It scared people in my family. I began my show by decrying anyone that participated in the behavior you object to in the wake of his death. I reject your slander of your fellow Americans. I abhor this attempt to accelerate us into a civil war where half the country are made responsible for the actions of one sick kid. One day, I hope you, Megan, will reflect on the ways you have used your friend's assassination to further poison the country for his kids and ours. So that said, I mean, again, that was pretty blunt, but also honest. I was trying to share my actual feelings about this. Try to take this away from this imaginary online Twitter war and replace it with, no, Megan, I'm a human. You've met. You know me. I'm sharing you what my real feelings were and what my actual behavior was. I didn't expect you watched every show of mine after Charlie Kirk's death. But if you want to know what I actually said and if you want to engage on our disagreements, let's do that rather than do this thing where you paint everybody as the worst example of the counter side. George W. Bush once said after a funeral that too often we judge other groups by their worst example and ours by our best intentions. And that's what. That's what Megyn Kelly's trying to do here. She's trying to take the worst example of some person on the left she could find and condemn everybody with it rather than actually engaging with the person that she's talking to. Right? Because that's inconvenient. That's hard. And so instead of doing that, instead of like, engaging with me on the merits, instead of responding to my actual actions, what she does is play another pronoun game. Okay? She plays another pronoun game. She replies with, she ignores all the parts about how I behaved and then says he thinks we. We are the ones responsible for pushing this country toward a civil war. The absolute gall. I just want to end with this. I don't think that. I don't say that. I don't think we. I don't know who we is. Megyn Kelly and all of our listeners. I don't think everybody is. And that group is responsible for pushing the country into civil war. I think there are specific people that are. I think that fellow MAGA podcaster Tim Pool will put this up on the screen, has tweeted about civil war dozens of times. I think that's concerning. I think he's partially responsible. I think that Megyn Kelly is, by her behavior, by her actions, by acting like that. This is a all or nothing war between MAGA and anti maga, between the pro democracy side and the pro Trump side, and that nobody on the anti Trump side can be trusted. That all of them must be treated as an enemy combatant, that all of them must carry the baggage of the worst actor in the entire country that voted against Donald Trump and that they must be defeated at all costs. That is the view of fascism. That is not the view of liberal democracy. That is not a Christian view. That's not a view of really, of any organized religion where. Where you. Where you judge and condemn people just because they disagreed with you in various politics. I think that her behavior is extremely scary and insightful. And I think that we almost call it out. We almost call it out. They're all doing that. They. When I say they, I mean these MAGA podcasters, influencers. You see this trick all the time. Karl Rove actually just shouted this out in the Wall Street Journal recently. He says that they killed Charlie. They did this, they did that. No, Tyler Robinson killed Charlie. I covered that story and did so to the best of my ability in a way that was truthful, in a way that was true to my feelings about it, in a way that educated the audience. Megyn Kelly used his assassination to try to further divide and incite us to spread lies and smear people. And. And I think rather than trying to condemn half of the country based on the behavior of any person, Tyler Robinson should be judged harshly for his behavior. And I think hopefully he'll suffer the consequences of it. I want to be judged for mine, and I think Megyn Kelly needs to be judged for hers. And in my view, her behavior has been absolutely appalling. All right, everybody, subscribe to the feed. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to all this. We'll be talking to you soon.
