← The Megyn Kelly Show
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
01:41:28
Megyn Kelly is joined by The Daily Wire's Andrew Klavan, author of "The Kingdom of Cain," to discuss ridiculous elites at the Met Gala, the focus on “black male fashion” this year, out-of-touch celebs like Anna Wintour trying to play the woke game to avoid cultural and social backlash, how American culture is shifting away from leftist drift, how our society is breaking and why “ideology is death to art,” the increase in sexually explicit content in our culture, the false narratives from Trump’s Meet the Press interview on NBC and his "I don't know" comment, the truth about how Trump said he'd follow what the Supreme Court rules, the media spin about immigration and refusal to ever give the Trump administration a win, the shocking new audio of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wife describing his abuse towards her, the left and legacy media ignoring the story and continuing to make Abrego Garcia their poster child in their fight with Trump, and more. Then Jason Riley, author of "The Affirmati...
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- [00:00]
Megyn Kelly
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Like it just happens to fall right after we do our big astronaut special. Well, if you missed it, you should check it out on YouTube where it's blowing up. It's in our feed right now. In any event, here we are on our way toward our historic flight. And by the way, looking it up on the nationalday calendar.com, it says that National Astronaut Day on May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan Bartlett. Oh, I lost it just as I'm trying to click on it. Shepard. It's about Alan Shepard first became the first American in space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule. That was literally the flight to which Gayle King compared her vanity. Look, here we are astronauts with our in depth training getting ready for our historic flight that we also took. So it's Maureen and Sarah, I salute you too, because we also sacrificed for our country. And to all those of you who wrote in appreciating our sacrifice and our trailblazing people wrote in about how they never realized that because they drive their kids to school every morning, they too should be in the Indy 500. See, you get it. You get it. I salute you as well for your sacrifices and your expertise. Okay, moving on to other news. President Trump making news yesterday, sparring with Meet the Press host Kristen Welker. While Jen Psaki gets very offended when asked if she was part of the Biden cognitive decline cover up. She never saw anything, anything like we all saw. I See? Nothing at the June debate. It wasn't until then. Sure, Jen. Plus, the Met Gala is tonight and it's apparently going to be the most politically charged one in years and the most pandering. We've got the perfect guest to discuss it all, Andrew Clavin, host of the Daily Wire's Andrew Clavin show and author of the new book the Kingdom of Finding God in the Literature of Darkness. It's out tomorrow. That's one of the many reasons he's the perfect person to start with. The Met Gala on It's all about finding God in the midst of evil and today's declining culture. This July, there is a global summit of BRICS nations in Rio de Janeiro. The bloc of emerging superpowers including China, Russia, India and Iran are meeting with the goal of displacing the US dollar as the global currency. They're calling this the Rio Reset. As BRICS nations push forward with their plans, some worry global demand for US dollars will decrease, bringing down the value of the dollars in your savings. While this transition won't happen overnight, the real reset could mark a pivotal moment. So learn if diversifying your savings into gold is right for you, Birch Gold Group can help you move your hard earned savings into a tax sheltered IRA in precious metals. Claim your free info kit on gold by texting MK to the number 989898 with an A plus rating. With a Better Business Bureau and tens of thousands of happy customers, let Birch Gold arm you with a free no obligation info kit on owning gold before July and the rio reset. Text MK to 989-898 today. Andrew, I'm not kidding, like it's actually quite perfect that you've written a book on finding God in the midst of evil. As we watch this Met Gala take place and the reason they've decided to go hyper pandering, it's the all black Met Gala. It's not only blacks who are going, but it's a pandering to black dandyism and the culture of black fashion. Starting back with certain slaves all the way up to modern day. They Anna Wintour. Wintour. So white and her partner who's like organizing this whole thing with her, also a white guy decided that they realized they would take a hit if they just tried to plan this. So they brought in. It feels very much like black tokenism to me. Like a focus group of black fashion elites allegedly and also just well known black people like Angel Reese of the WNBA to like give them the imprint of approval and some of These folks had, like, meetings at the Apollo Theater. The New York Times wants us to know they went to the Apollo Theater to plan tonight's Met Gala, you know, historic theater in Harlem, as they try to pay homage to black fashion. Because I will submit to you and then you take it. They have been embarrassed by the year after year after year press coverage of how disgustingly excessive and over the top this showing of wealth is where the plates go for over $70,000 a ticket. And you've got morons literally like the Kardashians and Diddy inside the Met Gala. I witnessed with my own eyes dry humping in the bathrooms, smoking in the Met Gala bathrooms with cigarettes. Another very famous pair from Wall street snorting coke, which my husband Doug saw with his own eyes in the men's room and making a mockery of. This place was just supposed to house some of our greatest works of art. So now they've decided to try to get over this reputation of Anna Wintour being America's biggest snob and this thing being the most over the top, elitist, evil event by pandering to blacks. What do you make of it?
- [06:44]
Andrew Klavan
Well, first of all, I do want to say, Meghan, first, thanks for having me on. But also I do want to say that you have picked the person who may care about the Met Gala. Least in America. I think there may be people who can't maybe who can't see, possibly who care about it less.
- [06:57]
Megyn Kelly
But this is why you're perfect for it.
- [07:00]
Andrew Klavan
Is why I'm perfect for it. I know. And I thought it was kind of hilarious that they were going to highlight black fashion. I'm not even sure what black fashion is, to be honest with you. I would have liked it if they have highlighted white fashion. It would have been at least a little different. It's really fascinating to watch a failed elite who has now been rejected by the American public in the last election, basically declared irrelevant, fighting very hard to remain at the top by doing the same things they've been doing for the last 30 years. It's so out of date, it's so old fashioned and it's so untoward. For this absolute display of pure privilege and wealth to condescend to recognize that some people who wear clothing happen to be black. And when you talk about the Met, it is a world class museum. It was one of the greatest museums in the world. And to have these people parading through and displaying as really a fashion accessory, they're caring for minorities, they're caring for the poor, they're Caring for whatever they're pretending to be caring about, when instead they could just be showing off the fact that they have enough money to be beautiful. And I think most of us would like to see that. Most of us like to see beautiful people being beautiful. Why we have to see beautiful people being virtuous just escapes me entirely. I think it really is fascinating that the people who just were rebuked by the American public in a very big way are clinging to what they've been doing all this time. There's absolutely no taking stock, absolutely no looking in the mirror, no thinking, maybe we did overdo it. Maybe we've gone down a wrong path. Maybe we are wrong. They can't do any of that because their entire power structure is built on. Exactly. Displays of virtue. And I think that it's. It's kind. I would find it sad if I didn't find it so hilarious to watch them kind of slowly, slowly swirling down the drain. I think they're going exactly where they're. They should go. And I think it's going to continue because, I mean, people are sick of it. You know, I. I've always wanted to write an article that I've never gotten around to called Netflix Made me a bigot by sequestering Black. Black work on like, a Black Lives Matter for like a year.
- [09:17]
Megyn Kelly
For like a year. Every time you turn on Netflix, all you'd get is like, black directors, black actors, black film. It's like, oh, my God, like, what happened?
- [09:25]
Andrew Klavan
And I would sit there and go, I'm not gonna watch this. I'm not gonna click on this and encourage them. And then I noticed, of course, that some of my favorite actors, you know, Denzel Washington, was shuttled into that place. It is like when you go to a bookstore and try to find a copy of an American classic, Invisible man, written by a black guy. And it's in black literature. It is the most alienating, divisive, bigoted thing you could possibly do. And they do it again and again and again. And it just shows that they don't know any of the people who are being excluded by it. The actual black people who are being excluded by it. And your description, your description of what's going on in the men's and lefties room, which I had no idea.
- [10:04]
Megyn Kelly
I witnessed it.
- [10:06]
Andrew Klavan
It sounds more interesting than the show itself.
- [10:08]
Megyn Kelly
I'm sorry, but it's like. But the disgusting debauchery truly of, like, you're in. Have some respect. You absolute cultural low. You got in here because Anna Wintour thought Somebody might click to see your half naked body on her red carpet, but have some respect for the actual great works of art that are in this place. You don't understand true beauty and true culture. Like, they only understand it through their Kardashian lens. It's absolutely disgusting. Here's the thing, here's what they're saying about tonight's gala, okay? They're calling it Superfine Tailoring Black Style, which the museum says is a cultural and historical examination of black style over 300 years through the concept of dandyism. The Met show tonight for the first time is entirely devoted to designers of color. As the New York Times puts it, focuses on the way black men have used fashion as a tool of self actualization, revolution and subversion throughout American history and the black diaspora. According to the Mets website, the exhibition is sponsored by Louis Vuitton, Instagram and some others, including Conde Nast. Anna Wintour's owner, the owner of Vogue, not her owner, the owner of her magazine. The New York Times says the show the culmination of five years of work by Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute's curator in charge to diversify the department's holdings. He's white, by the way. So is Anna. That's why they had to have their first ever host committee since 2019 at least, including many black people like Simone Biles, Spike Lee, Tanya Lewis Lee, Janelle Monet, Angel Reese, as I mentioned, and Usher. And then the co chairs of the gala are Asep, Rocky, Formula one driver, Lewis Hamilton and Pharrell Williams. The honorary chair is of course LeBron James, who we all look to as a fashion icon. This is to your point about like, not like taking some of our, you know, great authors and putting them into the black author section. I was at an event one time and the interviewer, she didn't mean to do me any disrespect, but she was talking about my success in the cable news world. And she said, you were one of the highest paid women in all of journalism. And I said, you don't have to say woman. And it was true. I wasn't trying to toot my own horn on my salary, but it diminished it. You know, it was like when I was at, you know, the peak of cable. No, there were actually maybe two people in the industry making more than me and they were men. But it's. The point is simply don't separate me out based on my lady parts. It diminishes me. And my whole goal is to get to the top, period. Not just top of the people who have vaginas. That is not what I want. And I'm going to guess that the. My black counterparts in fashion would really not like to have that same asterisk behind their designs or be patted on the head like a pet by Anna Wintour.
- [13:15]
Andrew Klavan
Yeah, the first. The first female to do something is in fact an insult in its. In its way. But yes, kind of the point. Every movement. Every movement in America gets taken over by the left. This is one of the things I blame the right for, that we have no cultural. We have no culture. We're not nimble in the culture like the left is. So, you know, feminism raised some really interesting issues, really important issues, but now it's just leftism in a skirt. You know, the idea that people shouldn't be racist, great idea. But now even that is simply racism, you know, is simply socialism with a black face. Everything they do simply becomes leftism in disguise. And so the division is actually the point. The idea that your identity, you know, you have to. You have to congratulate them on this. Because the left, who could say. Who could have predicted that the left would be able to make the love between men and women problematical? I mean, more problematical than it just naturally is? I mean, we all. Obviously, sex and romance are places where we all have problems, but they've actually made it unappealing. People have stopped having babies. People don't get married in time to have babies. People have to, you know, write these long things before they can just say, I would like a guy in my life, or I would like a girl in my life. Life, you know, to. To be different than me and to have a. Build a family with and all that. They've made all of that problematical. And as a result, the human race is actually dying out. So congratulations to the left. But all of this stuff is the point. All of this stuff is the point. The point is never, you know, hey, let's be colorblind so that we all treat each other equally. I think we'd all sign on to that. The point is not like, you know, let judge people on their abilities and their talents and not on their sex or their race or anything. All we'd all sign on to that. But it's always. It always turns into the most divisive possible thing. So you start out saying, you know, can we tolerate gay people? Absolutely. Let's tolerate gay people. It ends up saying, you know, we have to teach your children home. We have to show your children homosexual porn. It's always pushed to the Absolute level of social dissolution. Because I think the social dissolution is the point. In museums all around the West, Meghan, all around the west, there are attacks on the very Western culture that made those museums possible. This is happening everywhere. You can walk into almost any museum and you will see something about white privilege or, you know, Western colonialism instead of, look at this beauty this culture has produced. So the culture throughout the west has been polluted by this stuff. And it's one thing to attack it, which I love doing, and I think we should attack it endlessly. But I also think people of traditional beliefs, people of Christian religious beliefs, people of patriotic beliefs also have to start making culture. You know, we have to start making something that looks beautiful so that people say, oh, I get it. This is actually better than what these people. Better than a banana taped to the wall.
- [16:09]
Megyn Kelly
So let me, let me give you another twist on this. You're the perfect person to be discussing this with. I mean, truly like that. The whole notion of your book the Kingdom of Cain meant to find God in the midst of evil is what we kind of try to do every day on this show and on yours too. I've heard you. And we are surrounded by truly evil events. And I do believe. I know, I don't mean to sound too dramatic, but I think the Met Gala is one of them. I really do. I think the excesses of people like Sanchez and Bezos are among them. I feel like it's. It crosses over to genuinely evil in a world where people are hurting, where people are struggling, where people have real concerns to be bragging about traveling with not just your super yacht, but its sister which just boards your helicopter. And by the way, it's not just them. There's an article about Mark Zuckerberg today talking about how he went over to the fjords in Norway and they have anti helicopter rules there because there's these majestic mountains, you know, with. Inside of which are these skinny, beautiful, cold fjords which are melted glaciers from years ago. And you're not allowed to have a helicopter there to preserve the beauty. And they don't want them landing and they don't want to turn this into LaGuardia Airport. And so what did he do? He brought his yacht and its little sister where it has a helipad. And Bezos has the same thing, has the same. I've seen it. I haven't been on it, but I've seen it where you'd. You can get around the anti helicopter rule like, because they don't want you landing on one of the mountain, the mountains by having it land on the sister yacht. And then he goes hela skiing in the peaks of the fjords. So it's him, it's this, it's supposed to be like some hundred million dollar wedding between Bezos and Sanchez in June in Italy. Some over the top situation where I mean the amounts of money that are going to be flushed down the toilet so these two vain empty vessels can see themselves in People magazine is stomach turning. And the Met Gala. Okay, so Anna Wintour and her excesses and her obsession with fashion and over the top, you know, parties like this where she's surrounded only by the right names is part of the problem. So she to get the COVID does something about black people to get the extra cover. She has the advisory committee of black people. And then there's this quote in the Times. One of the advisors, Ms. Karifa Johnson in, in talking about what she hopes to see tonight and what she doesn't want to see. Put it more dryly, quote, I just really don't want to see any floor length durags or pimp canes. She said Now I wasn't sure what the durag, it's spelled D U R A G was because in my head that connotes the thing that, you know, some people wear on their heads. And indeed that's what it is. That is, it's a durag. Like, like it almost looks like a bathing cap with like a tie at the back, almost like a pirate's cap. And some people of color wear them. And she's saying you better not go like pimp with it where it's, you know, it goes all the way down to the floor. You have a pimp cane. So fuck you if you want to go that way with black fashion. And to me, Andrew, like we have Jason Riley coming on second hour and he, he wrote the book please stop helping us. And he's got a follow up out today about affirmative action saying, you know, black people and their ascent in the country was going very well. It was an astronomic curve upward prior to the Great Society in terms of everything. Socioeconomic measures, education, religious attendance, intact families. It wasn't until the government, meaning the left in particular Lyndon Johnson got involved that things really started to spiral downward. So you don't want to see the do rags and the pimp canes. But I guarantee this woman's a leftist who helped create more of a culture in some sections of the black community that embraced that kind of fashion that she's now embarrassed about. Whereas the if if the left had left the community alone, they probably have total equal parity on all these measures that they like to now raise as signs that Republicanism has failed and America has failed.
- [20:19]
Andrew Klavan
Right. Well, this is what you know, and Jason is a great, really knows this topic well, it's absolutely true. You left out, when you were talking about the excesses of wealth, you left out the interview that Michelle Obama just gave where she was complaining that when she was in the White House, she had to pay for food. And. And I thought, like, it's unbelievable. This is indicative. You know, it's funny. America is a country where people don't care if you get rich. They like it if you get rich. You know, I lived in Britain for a long time where if you get rich, they cut you down immediately. If you're a success, they cut you down. That's not true in America. In America, we congratulate people for their success. Nobody cares that Jeff Bezos is a billionaire. All we ask is that you behave with a little bit of elegance and a little bit of compassion for people who aren't billionaires. And that seems to be too much for them to do. This is exactly what we're looking at, Meghan. We are looking at the alienation of the upper classes from the rest of us. They don't care if our factories close. They don't care if our towns die. They don't care if globalism has destroyed not just the manufacturing base, but the soul of the country. They don't care that people are dying by deaths of despair at such numbers that our life expectancy has gone down. They don't care that babies aren't being produced. They've got theirs. And, you know, it is interesting, in a country as generous as ours, where we're like, you know, good for you, Jeff Bezos. Amazon, a great idea. And nobody loves Amazon more than I do. Just treat people with a little bit of respect and look around yourself and make sure that other people aren't being crushed beneath your heels. And I think it's funny, recently, with the rise of Donald Trump, guys like Bezos seem to have caught on a little bit, which I think is a great thing. Zuckerberg seemed to catch on a little bit, but somehow I know he's only pretty.
- [22:01]
Megyn Kelly
He literally two weeks ago shot his fiance and Gayle King into space and then lectured everybody. Have you been with it cost a million dollars a seat? No, no one has been. And no one's going to be gone.
- [22:13]
Andrew Klavan
Saving up. I'm saving up. I know, I know.
- [22:17]
Megyn Kelly
Lost touch.
- [22:18]
Andrew Klavan
It is. It is amazing how out of touch they are. But. But it's also amazing. What's also amazing is the fact that they are actually being exiled at this moment as we speak. They are being. The. The elites are clinging to power. They're not clinging to money. They've got plenty of money, but they're clinging to power because the social power, the. Is gone. When was the last time you went to a movie that really mattered? When was the last time you saw anything on TV that you actually cared about? Their cultural sensibility has gotten so far away from what people want, what people care about. You know, the Met gal look, the Met Gala. People would watch the Met Gala if pretty people showed up in pretty clothes, kept their mouths shut, and displayed themselves. I think that's something people like to watch watch. You know, we all like to watch.
- [23:03]
Megyn Kelly
It on those terms.
- [23:04]
Andrew Klavan
Yes, we all like to see pretty actresses and handsome actors dress up and show up for their awards and all this stuff. But when they show up for their. And they shake their fingers at us and tell us we're voting for the wrong people, not understanding that maybe, you know, the price of eggs has hobbled other people in a way that they don't understand. That's when you start to lose touch. That's when you start to lose touch and you start to lose your cultural power. This is the moment. What's frustrating for me is this is the moment when people who have insight into what is going on culturally might be creating things instead of just attacking what the left is doing. I think this is the time when, you know, it'd be nice to have somebody buy a studio that. That would actually produce good quality material for the rest of the country. You know, they're making movies that, you know, they're making movies that only, like six or seven people go to see, and then they give them oscars. It's like 60 minutes, you know, being nominated for an Emmy for butchering an interview, you know, so that it looked anti Trump. It looked like, you know, Trump's opponent was doing better than she was. And now they're nominated for an Emmy for that dishonesty. It's like the New York Times winning Pulitzer Prizes for covering a Russian collusion story that literally did not exist. That was not a real story. And so they're basically celebrating themselves and elevating themselves and parading themselves, but they're parading themselves to fewer and fewer people, and many, many more people are catching onto the fact that, you know, maybe winning a Pulitzer isn't that important if you're giving it to people for lying. You know, maybe winning an Emmy isn't that important if you're giving it to people for butchering the news. So. So it is a moment. It's a moment of incredible self blindness. You know, it's like they think we don't see them, or they think that somehow they can hold on for another generation. And I don't think they can. But this is the moment when people have to start creating things on the right, whatever you want to call the right, conservatives, you know, liberals, I think, are on the right at this point. Whatever that mindset is that says our traditions matter, our freedom matters, our that nobody has all the answers, that nobody should be so self certain that they understand things, so self certain that they're willing to silence and censor other people, that Marco Rubio won't have to go into the State Department and clear out their censorship bureau. You know, I mean, that's the kind of thing that I think we got to get rid of, and we have to do it by making a culture that works. I'm thrilled. You know, I noticed in that New York Times article about the Met Gala, they said they cited the fact, in their words, that Donald Trump had seized power at the Kennedy Center. Well, I'm thrilled for Donald Trump to kick those people out of the Kennedy Center. The Kennedy center is a national theater and should not be displaying drag queens for kids. That's not what they're there for. They're there to display the best artistic work that this country can produce. But I want to see them start to produce great artistic work at the Kennedy Center. I don't want to see them die. I'm not looking for revenge. I'm looking for reform. This is the moment. This is one of the most exciting moments of my lifetime, culturally and politically, because this shift is happening, and I hope we take advantage of it. I think it's a beautiful thing. That thing that you're seeing at the Met gala, it looks like Rome just before it collapsed.
- [26:12]
Megyn Kelly
Yes, 100%, that's exactly right. It feels like end of days kind of stuff. And just two points. The Times points out that given the crackdown on DEI by the Trump administration and all of corporate America and many colleges even. I mean, even colleges now. We'll get into this with Jason later. But even University of Michigan got rid of its DEI program, which was. It was the worst. The worst. So it's not just the ones Trump is threatening. You know, it's many others are like, let's let's get rid of this has been a nightmare. So this looks like the resistance now. Anna Wintour. Anna Wintour and her $70,000 plate gala is the resistance now because they're leaning into the ridiculous hyper focus on race in the midst of the country's pushback on this nonsense. And then they also point out that in the past, further complications in the fact that she's hosting this are the fact that in the past, she faced her own allegations of creating a racially insensitive workplace at Vogue. And also, despite the many DEI initiatives after 2020, the fashion world has seemingly failed to make good on those promises. Of the more than 15 appointments at the top of major brands this year, not a single one was a designer of color. Which is totally fine to point out, because live by the sword, die by the sword. Maybe they couldn't find black designers who, for whatever reason, rose to the top. Maybe next year they will. Maybe there weren't enough Asians either. I have no idea. Maybe it used to be a meritocracy, and only now are they getting obsessed, obsessed with race. But the point is, if you're gonna live by that sword, and Anna Wintour does now, then you're gonna die by it, too. And this is her trying to stop herself from dying by it by being like, but I. I did a thing promoting black fashion. Look at me. I'm a good person. I had Simone Biles. Okay, secondly, to your point about when was the last time you saw just, like, a pure movie that was like, just about American values, made you feel good? It happened to be last night. Now, not coincidentally, it was from a film that was made 15 years ago. But let me tell you what happened. We didn't get to watch the Kentucky Derby on Saturday. We were all, all over the place, my family. And so we. I, I knew who won because I am in the news, right? So I, I saw who won. But I asked the family, has anybody seen. Nobody had. Had seen it. So I said, all right, close your eyes. We're gonna watch the Kentucky Derby on Sunday night. I'll cue it up on YouTube. And that's what we did. We watched some local pre show from Kentucky for half an hour, and then we played the race, which was two minutes. And we, we wear our little. I have a little Kentucky Derby box. And we put. And we put on fun hats and, like, little scarves and ascot scarf, tight type things for the guys, my sons. It was fun. Anyway, we watched it, and as you know, sovereignty triumphed over journalism. And there's a lot to say there too. But what got us in the horse watching mood. So we put on that great film from 2010 from Disney, Secretariat, starring Diane Lane. It was great. And John Malkovich as the, as the horse's trainer. It was so good. It was made by the same producers, the same producing team that made the movie Miracle on Ice and that did Invincible, which is a great film with Mark Wahlberg. You know, they, Disney used to know how to make films that were great for the whole family, that had wholesome lessons that, that made you feel good about the country and the possibilities here. By the way, I later learned that Secretariat was the only non human included on ESPN's roster of the 100 greatest athletes of the 20th century. So. Or maybe it was top 50. I think it might have been top 50. And Secretariat was the only horse or even just non human listed on that because he was just so what an incredibly talented horse. The greatest racehorse to ever live. And anyway, it's one of those things, not unlike Miracle with Kurt Russell where they take you back to the miracle on ice 1980 and the US hockey team and just make you feel good about the country and something extraordinary that happened here. But, but look, what a difference. You don't have to go. Go back before 2025, go to 2020 in 10 years. Disney collapsed on its mission, its understanding of what America wanted and it's become evil. Yes, I will use that word too for them. They've crossed over into trying to trans our children was so recently Andrew, that they were still part of the good guys.
- [30:42]
Andrew Klavan
Yeah, I. Well, one of the things about intellectual dishonesty is that it goes along and it goes along and then it falls off the table. This is true. And it's true of corporate life as well. And I think that in the last five years we have seen the arts in America die. And that's not to say that no one has produced any good work. It's to say that as I said before, there's very few movies that we all get together and watch and talk about. Very few television shows that really catch fire. And all the ones that do have all been about bad people. They've all been about anti heroes when they do work because they no longer know how to make stories about men and women who are decent people and are looking for love and looking for the things that ordinary people are looking for. You know, all my life I have loved stories. My life has been about writing stories. I have read every novel on earth of any quality whatsoever. I have seen Every movie in the world. And I never cared who the people were in the story. I was happy to see a story. I'm an American. Americans look like all kinds of things. I was happy to see a story about Italians. I was happy to see a story about Irish people, Jews, black people. It never, ever mattered to me whatsoever. I never even thought about the fact that that's what I was watching. I thought I was watching stories of good and evil, stories of hope and triumph, stories of failure and despair. All the things we want to tell stories about. Suddenly I'm being told, and this is something that's happened. I mean, I've had numerous people, friends in Hollywood, who have basically lost their jobs or have left the business altogether because a white man can no longer get hired. It's very hard for white men to start a career publishing novels right now because everybody has to have a. Not just be black, but has to have a name that sounds black or at least sounds colored in some way. And this is deeply offensive because after years of reading books like To Kill a Mockingbird, where we learn that bigotry was wrong, we're suddenly being told, no, no, that was just the wrong bigotry. Once you get the bigotry right, once you're hating the right people, then the hatred is great. Then the hatred is absolutely terrific. And they. They've turned the values on their heads. And I always tell people like, the devil doesn't care who gets hated as long as the hating gets done. And so what you have is an art form, storytelling, that has been completely emptied of any viable content. Just in the same way that painting has basically become empty. The only place where you can see visual art that really matters is in video games. And even those are under attack by the Woke ideologues. Ideology is death to art. You know, the other day, and this is kind of on. On what's happening now, I watched that film Conclave, which is about a, you know, getting a new pope. Well, yeah, you said absolutely right. But it starts out with the good guy in it, you know, played by Ralph Fiennes, making a speech saying certainty is. Is a danger. I completely agree. I think that certainty is one of the big dangers we have. We should all be a little humble, a little bit uncertain about, we believe, a little willing to listen to other people. The rest of the movie is all. All filled with religious certainty about everything but religion. It's filled with religious certainty about what the church should do about gays, what it should do about marriage, what it should do about all the about women is filled with absolutely intense religious certainty about everything except religion. That is where I think the left and the arts, which the left control in this country and in the west in general, that is where they have come a cropper. They have become so certain, They've become so religious in the bad sense of that term, and they've lost all humility, and they don't know how to tell a story anymore. And it's like, listen, I'm not looking to go backwards. I want to see new stuff. I want to see 3D stuff. I want to see all the new kinds of things. But certain things stay the same. Human nature stays the same. Human values stay the same. Beauty stays the same. And I think that those are the things that have been absolutely rejected, because they've rejected all the values of the west, and those are some of the central values of the West. It's been a really dispiriting time for people like me who love the arts. I mean, I have always loved, as the poet John Keats said, I have loved the principle of beauty in all things. And it's a very dispiriting time to watch for five years where you can't see anything but a lecture on how all of the things that you have found beautiful and good and true, including God and country and family, all of those things were really just terrible, terribly, terribly oppressive to some people who have been invented to be oppressed. And I think that it's incredible how empty the stories that we've seen have been. And so when you say you went back to secretary, and as you said, that movie, which was a good movie, that movie is not that long ago. And even now, you see small little flickers of remembrance, of things that matter. I saw a movie by Steven Soderbergh called Black Bag, which was very clever and glamorous and sophisticated, but it was about marriage. It was about the holiness and sacredness of marriage. It's built into this spy story. And you think, like, yeah, people can still do this, but they have to be brave enough to do it. And they have. In Hollywood now, you have to fight the unions who watch every story to be about some neglected person or neglected.
- [35:48]
Megyn Kelly
Or you wind up like the movie Reagan, where you can't get nominated for Best Picture because you didn't have enough lgbtqs on your production set or people of color or indigenous, whatever, I mean, to go down the list. But you have to have these quotas filled in order to even qualify for the big awards in Hollywood. So it's just the whole thing is such a farce. It's, it's, it makes no sense. The you, you mentioned something at the top about how it's like hard to find a nice movie about a male, female relationship. Now you just like a beautiful, you know, heterosexual falling in love coming of age story. And I want to add to that because not only is it hard to find that, but like pornographic stuff is ubiquitous now. You know, teens, like they say the average 12 year old has already seen triple X porn on one of his devices by the time he's 12. And then you think about, and this is no offense, but I saw this headline to my pals over at the Trigonometry podcast and I like these guys, but I saw online a lot of the women who I follow, who are strong women, were very angry with them because, and saying I'm, I'm unfollowing the show because they're interviewing that woman from only fans who had sex with a hundred guys in a day, in 24 hours and you know, put it online. And then she's just, just all about these crazy, very depressing antics that she does sexually. And I see like, I'm not about de platforming and I still like those guys at Trigonometry, but that is definitely not an interview I would do. I would not want to highlight this woman's role in our society. I think it's something we should be feeling really sad and depressed about, not not giving greater, you know, prominence to or light to. But can you speak to that? Because that's all part of it. Speaking of evil.
- [37:41]
Andrew Klavan
Well, I think it's really interesting to me that the Biden administration, which targeted Catholics who wanted to go to the Latin Mass for investigation, feel that it's against the First Amendment to silence porn. Porn is toxic. It's poison. I don't actually want to outlaw it. I mean, I'd like to outlaw it. I'm not sure I can see a way to outlaw it without destroying people's freedoms and giving the government too much power. But it's a toxic. It's toxic. And it's toxic for a really simple reason. It strips one of the most important interior things we do, which is making love to one another of everything but the body outlines that come together. And so it empties out the experience. Boys who get addicted to porn never develop sexually. They can't have sex in real life. They can't relate to actual women. And this is part of, and you and I have talked about this before, Megan, but it's probably to me, one of the most important subjects there is. This is part of a genuine attempt to erase the category of female from the human experience. This idea that a guy puts on a dress and suddenly he's a girl. It's deeply offensive. Not because I care what that guy does with his life. It's because I care that the society recognizes that being a woman is a very particular experience and includes as the center of that experience motherhood, which is another thing has been that has been denigrated to the point where women apologize when they say, oh, I'm just a mom, I'm just a mom. Like, you're the center of the creative world. You're the thing that artists imitate. You're the thing that everybody builds the world to protect. And yet you're not just a mom. You're the center of the world. That is actually what you are. And this is part of the reason that people don't have babies. They've tried every single thing to get women to have babies. Let's give them $5,000, let's give them maternity leave, let's give them all these, you can't do it. Because they're denigrated, because they're attacked. And porn is kind of the absolute expression of that denigration. Being a woman in the act of sex is different than being a man in the act of sex. I shouldn't have to say that, but I think I do. It is an entirely different experience. Look, a guy having sex with 100 women in a day would also be disgusting and also be immoral. But it's not quite the same thing as the self immolation of a woman doing that. Basically erasing the whole purpose of herself and her body and her soul, I would argue, by this absolutely demonic display. And I love the guys at trigonometry too, and I understand why they did it, but still, I think that really what you should have on, if you want to talk about that subject, what you should have one is a priest. You know, you should have like an exorcist or something like that, because that is a symbol of a truly broken society. Broken at its core. And you know, this is a thing where Elon Musk and I are actually on the same page. It is the death of humanity. People stop having babies. You know, it's not just. I don't think humanity will die out because people start having babies, but the places where people have stopped are the places where civilization is at its peak, where modernity is at its furthest limit. And I Think that that. That says something about modernity and it says something about the society we've become. There is a very, very strong argument to be made, and this is actually one of the arguments of my book. There's a very strong argument to be made, that our society in increasingly losing its faith. And I'm not even going to define that faith. Just saying the faith in God that basically underpinned our society has gone insane. That our society is a society of illness where people can no longer see the spiritual realities that are right in front of their faces. We know that it was disgusting for that woman to sleep with 100 people. But it's very hard to put into words without becoming spiritual, without speaking spiritually. It's very hard to say what is wrong about it. You know, it's her choice. Why shouldn't she do it? We don't understand why that's disgusting anymore. We know for a fact that it's disgusting for a man in a dress to go into a girl's locker room in an undress there. But we can't quite say why, because we haven't got the spiritual diction to speak about it anymore. We actually don't know who we are anymore. We think, you know, the guys who think they're smart, who think they're cynical and tough and see into the heart of things, talk as materialists. But materialism is completely unsupportable. When I say materialists, I mean people who think that we're nothing but stuff, that there's nothing to us, there's no soul stuff in us. It's just all physicality. That's an indefensible position. It's a position that can't be argued. It's an unscientific position. It's not a position that anybody who knows anything about the deeper levels of reality would support. And yet that, I think, is the default position of intellectuals and artists in our country and in the West. And I think it's driven us insane. I think that there's a certain kind of insanity. I compare it to that. It's called the man in the Gorilla suit test. There was a famous test done, I think, in the 90s, where they gave people a picture of people passing around a basketball. And they said, count how many times a guy in a white shirt passes the basketball. And people did that. And they missed the fact that a guy in a gorilla suit walked through the scene. They just didn't see it because they weren't looking for it. And I feel the same way about God I feel that we have been trained to look at ourselves as things. We talk about morality as if it were a fictional. Smart people say this stuff. They say, oh, morality is just a fiction that we share. There's no such thing as absolute good. And I challenge them to find a planet or a universe in the multiverse where killing a child with an axe is good. Where killing a child with an axe, even if everybody says it's good, it doesn't become good. There are such things as truth, as goodness and as beauty, and we've lost that plot. Even the people on the right who know it's there don't have the language to speak about it anymore. And I don't want anybody to adopt my religion. I'm not preaching to anybody. But just the fact that there is something beyond sheer being that underpins all of life, that is, you know, call it the logos, call it the Tao, call it whatever you want to call it, that there is something there. When you forget that you're not dealing with reality anymore and you start to become insane. And I feel our entire society, the showing porn to children, the endless watching of porn until you can't make love to a real woman anymore, women selling their bodies on OnlyFans and not understanding why that's a problem, all of that, those are symptoms of mental illness. And I think that that mental illness permeates our society. I think it defines our society rather than being a problem in our society.
- [44:23]
Megyn Kelly
I'll tell you, on Friday night, we were thrilled to go to our. We have three kids. They're 15, 14 and 11. And the oldest two were confirmed in the Catholic Church. Our eldest was a year behind just because we were asleep at the switch. It was a Covid thing, whatever, it was fine. It worked out great because they got to go through it together, my older two, and they both got confirmed on Friday night. And I was surprised at how moved I was by the ceremony. I did not expect tears or to really, like, they've been working so hard. Our. Our church in particular does require a lot of, as they call them, the conformandi. And these kids did a lot over the past two years to earn this right. And it was totally moving. The bishop was there, they had their white gowns on, these young girls in the church with, like, their hair back in a little white ribbon. I mean, it just spoke to something higher and better and purer than what you get. I almost likened it to, like, you know, when you're in a freezing cold church with air conditioning, then you walk outside on An August day and you get hit in the face by the 90 degree weather. It's almost like that to go from that kind of a ceremony where you feel connected with God and hopeful about your children's future and their relationship with him and like the set of moral blueprint that you get from a relationship with God. And then you come back into the news world and you see like the girl who's going on the trigonometry. Again, this is not to bash those guys. I love them, but I just. This woman's choices are really deeply problematic for me and I just, I feel sorry for her. I feel like someone needs to save her. I don't think she should be promoted. I think she should be like somehow saved. And I think we need to be saved, you know, we need to be saved. Stephen A. Smith was asking me what happened, like, why did wokeism rise? Why is it here? And I said what I believe, which I think you believe too. The. We pushed religion out of the public square and we had nothing left. And these people need something, you know, people. It's no accident that most people on the right are not woke and most people on the right are religious. And most people on the left are the ones who make up all the woke. And they've pushed God not just out of the public square, but out of their lives entirely. They need more. They need more experiences like I had on Friday night, and they need less time online watching only fans.
- [46:38]
Andrew Klavan
Yes, indeed. And you know, it's not a question, it's not just a question of what they need. It's a question of living in the real world. I think this is the important thing to me is like even people on the right, they sort of go to church on Sunday and then they kind of forget when they're in their business mode, they say, well, I have to cut this corner and cut that corner. But, you know, if God exists, and I think it's almost a certainty at this point that he does, just scientifically, he's the center, the core of reality. Reality is an expression of his nature. And so if you're living outside of that reality, it's not going to work out well for you. It's like saying there's no gravity because you can't see it. It's just not going to work out well for you. And I think that living in reality is the only way to grow. It's the only way to grow straight and strong. It's the only way to know yourself. And putting yourself into a relationship with God is the only way to continue to grow. I mean, look, at some point, all of us are growing, but at some point, you stop. If you're not challenging yourself against the ideal of who you were supposed to be, you stop growing when you say, oh, well, this is who I am. I'm done. But as long as you keep saying, you know, I was made to be something more than this. The thing that you're talking about, about your kid's confirmation also happens at weddings. When you go to a religious wedding and you suddenly think, you know what? This is a big deal. This is not like no fault divorce. There is no such thing as no fault divorce. This is two people joining themselves together in sight of God. You know, and that's making a statement about what it means when a man and woman come together. And look, this is not about legalism. It's not about the law. It's simply about the attitude that you bring to life. Nobody makes more jokes about life than I do. I think I spent more time making jokes about life. But life itself is not a joke. You know, life is a serious business. You have one shot on this plane at what you're doing. And you're given so much. It's a privilege to be alive, and you're given so much beauty to connect to so much rationality, so much such a deep design that. To laugh that off and to say, oh, well, it's just marriage and if we don't like it, we'll get out of it, or to say, you know, it's just sex and if we just do it and, you know, who cares how many people, different people we do it with, is to miss what life is. It is to literally miss the reality of life. And I think it's that. I think it's not like necessarily a need or that society goes better, although all those things are true. It's that to live outside of reality is the definition of mental illness. You know, to say that you're something, you're not to act as if you're something or not. You know, I mean, how would it be if you invited me on the show and I showed up in a Napoleon costume and said, you know, I took some time out from conquering Europe, you know, you'd say, oh, this guy has gone nuts, right? Because I'm no longer talking about reality. That's the way I feel when people tell me that, you know, life is just material and there's no such thing as God.
- [49:23]
Megyn Kelly
And, you know, the thing is too, I was reminded, as I often am at church, and church related events. It's not just the relationship with God, it's also this sort of scaffolding of the relationship that you develop with the people who are in your church. In this case, the people who were also being confirmed, the families who also had kids being confirmed and the, the sponsors, the people who, who step in to, to support your children in this journey. I mean our two sponsors are absolutely lovely people who like pulled our kids aside privately and said, you know, like whatever you need, if you need somebody to talk to you, if you need a ride home, if you need anything, like we've got you. Like all of this comes into their lives because of this overall structure, the relationship with God, the church, the week after week relationship and you know, seeing the people, all of that is so valuable and helps fill somebody up, a child in particular with great ingredients as opposed to the darkness of some of these other things. Just some of the themes that Andrew touches on in his new book. Okay. It's called the Kingdom of Cain. Finding God in the Literature of Darkness. It's out tomorrow. We'll be right back with more on that and the news. Don't go away. Let's be real. Our modern world can be toxic. From ultra processed foods to environmental chemicals, our bodies are under attack every single day. And one of the biggest casualties, our digestion. Millions of people suffer with indigestion, bloating and upset stomach. But here's the good news. We don't have to just accept this. Our ancestors had the answer all along. Bitter bitter herbs and plants have been used for centuries to stimulate digestion, support detox and keep the gut thriving. That's why just thrive. Digestive bitters can be a game changer with a powerful blend of ancient time tested bitter herbs. Just one dose before meals wakes up your digestive system, helping you absorb nutrients. Better break down food and say goodbye to bloating and sluggish digestion. Ditch modern toxins and get back to what our bodies were designed for. Reclaim your gut health with just Thrive Digestive bitters. Available now@justthrivehealth.com use code Megan to save 20% off your first order. That's justthrivehealth.com promo code Megan.
- [51:37]
Sean Spicer
Hi everyone. This is former White House press secretary Sean Spicer. We all know that Americans are still recovering from the record inflation of the past four years. Now some in Congress want to make cuts to Medicaid, a program that provides critical health care to 72 million struggling Americans, including veterans, people with disabilities, kids and your friends and neighbors. 40% of American births are actually covered by Medicaid. And Medicaid covers health care costs for a third of children with cancer. Working families rely on this program. It has 77% support. Nearly 9 in 10Americans oppose Medicaid cuts. Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to protect Medicaid. As president, he's still promising to love and cherish Medicaid. Did you know that 12 million Medicaid families live in rural communities? Many of these people voted for Donald Trump and they didn't vote for this. If Congress cuts Medicaid, a lot of rural hospitals could close and a lot of rural families will be hurt. No matter how you look at it, cutting Medicaid just doesn't make sense. Stand with President Trump and tell Congress not to cut Medicaid.
- [52:42]
Megyn Kelly
President Trump gave an interview to Kristen Welker of Meet the Press. It aired yesterday. On Sunday, before I play you the actual clip of Trump, I'm going to play you a sound bite of your favorite news program, the View, discussing, discussing the clip I love. See how I love. Okay, watch. When you say you don't know, you.
- [53:06]
Kristen Welker
Have to check then you shouldn't be.
- [53:09]
Gayle King
President if you don't know the job.
- [53:10]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah. Why are you doing this? And don't, don't act like we're the idiots here. You know the job and yes, you know you are violating your oath of office by doing it. Or am I crazy? Yes, the answer, yes, you're crazy. Sorry, I should have set it up better, but Trump is. They're pulling a part of the interview in which he said, she said, you have to follow the Constitution, don't you? And he said, I don't know. And so that's her being like, oh, you know, you know. And what they're not playing is the full context and follow up of the exchange, which we will do for you. Now watch, your secretary of state says everyone who's here, citizens and non citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree, Mr.
- [53:57]
Andrew Klavan
I don't know.
- [53:58]
Gayle King
I'm not, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know.
- [54:01]
Megyn Kelly
Well, the Fifth Amendment, I don't know.
- [54:03]
Gayle King
It seems, it seems, it might say that, but if you're talking about that, then we'd have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials. We have thousands of people that are some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on earth, some of the worst, most dangerous people on earth. And I was elected to get them the hell out of here. And the courts are holding me from doing it.
- [54:25]
Megyn Kelly
But even Given those numbers that you're talking about, don't you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States?
- [54:32]
Gayle King
I don't know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said. What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation.
- [54:50]
Megyn Kelly
So he's making clear we will follow what the Supreme Court says. But the I don't know comes in the context of him saying, I'm not exactly sure. He's saying, I'm not sure what level of due process the Fifth Amendment would provide in this circumstance. There's no question. If it were an American citizen, it would be the utmost. Or if you're. If it were an illegal who was arrested on a criminal charge inside the United States, facing the loss of liberty within the United States, being faced with a penitentiary. But there is a real question about what level of, quote, due process they get before being deported. And there's no question, none whatsoever. Under expedited removal, which allows the president to get rid of them certainly along the southern border. And if they haven't been here for more than two years, and Trump has tried to expand it beyond just immediately at the southern border, they get no due process. They get none. They get turned away and ejected immediately. The only way they stop that is if they claim asylum. Now, some people will do that, but many won't. And those people are not entitled to due process. So he is right to wiggle on these sweeping demands that he just say all of these illegals get, quote, due process. It's actually a lot more complicated than that. And he's 100% right to defer to his lawyers while saying, I will follow what the Supreme Court tells me. But, you know, the view isn't going to tell you that, Andrew. And neither are the left wing pundits and press who are running with Trump's not sure whether he has to follow the Constitution as the headline out of that interview.
- [56:24]
Andrew Klavan
That's utter nonsense. They're also asking the wrong question. If 11 million people come into the country illegally and unchecked, so we have no idea who they are and nobody says anything about the rule of law, then the fact that the rule of law is being broken to the level at invasion levels, and then suddenly he has to try each one of them, which is not in the Constitution, as you say, they have a certain amount of due process, but it's much more limited than the due process you and I would get in similar circumstances. He's supposed to not be able to have to deport them one by one. That's basically making. Turning the Constitution into a suicide pact. And I think this is the thing that they, that actually should be the question. Why are they here? Why were they let in? Why didn't the press make a big fuss? I mean, you had to watch, you really had to watch Fox News to find out that this was going on during the Biden administration. If you were watching television, there was no way to know that these people were pouring in up to 180,000 in a single month, where last month I think we had three. And we were told by the president that he couldn't stop it. He didn't have the power to stop it. We were told by the head of Homeland Security that it was fine, the border was secure. We were lied to again and again and again. And, you know, it's really interesting to me that the press has been making a big fuss over whether or not they knew that Joe Biden had dementia. I mean, everybody knew except for the media. But, but they're saying, oh, well, maybe we didn't cover that well, but they lied about everything. They lied about everything by not asking. They lied about everything by trusting the officials and Democrats and politicians, and they're still lying. And the thing is this, everything they do is about the destruction of the country. I mean, I don't understand. Well, I sort of do understand why it is that the Democrat Party, one of our two major parties, is supporting the rights of murderers and rapists over the rights of the people who are being murdered and raped.
- [58:12]
Megyn Kelly
You know, let me play another sound on that same front, because they got into the question of the border. And, you know, Trump's basically saying to her, isn't it wonderful to say the border secure? And she's obsessing now about, can your emergency declaration that justified closing it remain in place now that it's secure? Can it, can it, can it watch? Border crossings are at their lowest level ever recorded. Is the border, is the border now secure?
- [58:38]
Gayle King
Yeah, it's really secure.
- [58:40]
Megyn Kelly
It's absolutely.
- [58:40]
Gayle King
Isn't that good that when you say that, isn't it a beautiful thing when you say it's the most secure it's ever been in the history of our country? Isn't that a nice statement?
- [58:49]
Megyn Kelly
Well, I'm curious to know what it means. You declared a national emergency on the southern border. Will you lift that emergency?
- [58:58]
Gayle King
Well, the biggest emergency is the courts aren't allowing us to take.
- [59:01]
Megyn Kelly
Really, we're going to talk about that, but talk to me first about this.
- [59:04]
Gayle King
That's to be the emergency.
- [59:05]
Megyn Kelly
Talk to me first about this. That's such a leftist right. First of all, she won't say yes. Why? Why can't you say yes? It's like if you said, isn't it a good thing that the, the nationwide number of abortions is down? Like, if you were to say that, she would never say yes to that. Like, whether you're pro choice or not, isn't it better that we're killing fewer babies? Like, you can't say that. There's certain things that should be not controversial. The. The secure border is one of them. But she won't. And where does she pivot to? Okay, maybe she's being objective. She doesn't want to offer her opinion. Fine, so where does she pivot to? Like, maybe. How are you going to keep it that way, sir? No. When are we lifting the emergency declaration so it could become unsecure again?
- [59:47]
Andrew Klavan
Well, this is the way they cover Republicans in general. Of course, with Trump, everything is amped up to the highest level. But it's like the guy has been actually had a very successful first hundred days. It's almost been. Been a giddy success, especially at the border. That's the major. But everything he does is looked at from a negative point of view. I mean, even if you read the Wall Street Journal, it's hilarious. They say, well, prices haven't risen, but they might. They might rise, stocks are going up, but they might go down. You know, you never. It's like, it's like being visited. It's like having the news reported by the ghost of Christmas yet to Come. You know, you're not seeing the things that will be, you're seeing the things that might be. And everything he does is a mistake. And the fact is, his record is really good. I mean, I understand that he doesn't talk like other politicians. I don't think he thinks like other politicians. I think he thinks more artistically, in a way. He sees things. He sees a gestalt instead of looking at one problem and this problem and that problem. But he's been quite successful. You know, the only time I think he ever made a really, really serious mistake was when he listened to experts on Covid. That was his biggest. That was the biggest error of his first term. And so the fact that he's not listening to experts now is. Is to me, kind of thrilling. You know, this thing. Everything he does, everything he does is covered as if it's a disaster and as if It's a problem. And what I think is happening again, I think this is a failed elite that is basically being thrown, quietly dragged out of power, as they deserve, as they well deserve, after their failure during COVID which was one of the biggest failures of a leadership class since World War I. As they're being evicted, they're holding on, and they only have one strategy, which is to demonize Donald Trump and hope he does something wrong. When they can say, see, see, we were right all along. And I assume what the point is to keep their base intact, to keep this radical base intact, and then eventually find some Potemkin candidate who stands up and looks like he's a normal person, but will actually be controlled by the deep state. And what Trump is trying to do is he's trying to debilitate the deep state. He's trying to gut it. He's trying to. To take away its props in its bureaucracies and its agencies that have absolutely no responsibility. He is trying to get rid of the invasion of people who came into this country with absolutely illegally, while the President is responsible for keeping that border closed. And he's trying to change the very nature of a country that has been going downhill for the last several years. And I think when we look over at Europe, I mean, this. This was, to me, my favorite moment of the second Trump administration so far was J.D. vance's Munich speech, where he asked the question, if in Britain, they're arresting people for praying silently in their own homes because their home is too close to an abortion clinic, how are they like us anymore? And so the left wants all of us to be in that situation. That is where they're headed. That is where they want to go. Europe is a dead culture. And I think the one thing we have to do is like the end of the movie E.T. we have to sort of separate and sort of say, no, we're a living culture. We want to keep the values and the principles that made us the greatest country that's ever existed on Earth. We want to keep them in place, and that's what they're fighting against. That's the battle that Trump is in. And I have to tell you, I don't think everything Trump does is right. I don't think everything he says is right. But I'm on his side because I think he is defending a Western culture that has given us everything we have. And it's been. I think it's been the greatest culture that Earth has produced. And so. So, you know, I think that it's fine it would be fine for a reporter to pick on something he does wrong, but they pick on everything he does as if it's wrong. And I think that that's everything they.
- [63:24]
Megyn Kelly
Highlight is in line with their narrative, which is we do need open borders and more immigrants are good, whether they're legal or illegal. And the fact that virtually no American knows Rachel Marin's name, but virtually all now know Abrego Garcia. This Kilmar Abrego Garcia who's an illegal is ridiculous. Rachel Marin didn't get a visit, her parents, her grieving family, from Chris Van Hollen, the sitting senator from Maryland. He's the one who did go over to visit Kilmar abrego Garcia, an Ms. 13 accused gang member who trumps ice, arrested and shipped over out to El Salvador. And he's El Salvadoran. The news on him every day, it gets worse. And by the way, the Democrats have now been told, reportedly by leadership, stop going there, that that's not a good look for us to be sitting having margaritas with this guy, because not only is it very clear that he is Ms. 13, why is he hanging out with two Ms. 13 gang members on a street corner? They don't hang around with others. They only hang around with other gang members. Jesse waters on the 5 the other day was doing a very funny thing about how, like, it's like finding a bunch of Italians in, like, a corner gambling establishment in the back room. And one is called the Don, and he's with, you know, two other guys. And one of the other guys is like, I don't have no idea. I don't know. I'm not connected to the mob. No, it's like that. They only hang out with fellow, fellow maid men. Like, the odds of this being a civilian and not a gang member are extremely slim. Anyway, so now we learn over the past week that this Abrego Garcia, remember, his wife, looked at us all and went on Good Morning America and tried to claim that he's a very loving husband. Not only did we first learn about the first restraining order, then we learned about the second restraining order. And we now have the audio of Jennifer Vasquez Sura pleading with a judge for temporary protection from her husband in 2020 and actually describing some of his behavior in the first person. Listen here.
- [65:23]
Jennifer Vasquez Sura
Came to fill out a protective order. I think it was in December. But I didn't show up to the court because his family, like, washed my brain telling me that his dad was sick and not to do it. I called 911 from a disconnected phone. Now, they took a long time to get to the house. It was probably like, 20, 30 minutes. So I saw a neighbor walking his dog, and I opened the door, and I was like, help. And then when he heard me, like, he grabbed me from my hair, and then he slapped me. And then the neighbor, like, he didn't know what to do. He didn't know what to read, react. I have pictures of the evidence, like, all the bruises, because it's not even on Wednesday. He hit me, like, around, like, three in the morning. He would just wake up and, like, hit me. And then last Saturday, for my daughter's birthday party, before I went to my daughter's birthday party, he slapped me three times. And then last week, I did call the police. My sister called the police because he hit me in front of my sister.
- [66:18]
Megyn Kelly
And then she wound up standing down on her request for a protective order, as virtually all domestic abuse victims do, because they're scared. And they get generally threatened by their abuser that they will not pursue that through or the abuse will continue. Don't know exactly what happened in her case. That's speculation on my part. And then there was this Andrew. He got pulled over with a bunch of others back in 2022, and it was pretty clear that they were trafficking people across the southern border. It was like some car that had been weirdly enlarged without the normal sort of interior, and nobody wanted to produce an id and the person who was at the driver's seat had all sorts of questionable information that he was giving to cops. It looked like he had a questionable pass when it comes to alleged crimes and possible trafficking before. And here's some audio obtained by Fox news of that 2022 traffic stop. You can hear the police saying, and you'll hear it here. He's hauling these people for money. Listen, how many rolls have you got in here? Four.
- [67:24]
Kristen Welker
Where? Four seats. Four rows of seats?
- [67:27]
Andrew Klavan
Yeah.
- [67:27]
Megyn Kelly
Three.
- [67:27]
Andrew Klavan
Three seats?
- [67:30]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah.
- [67:32]
Sean Spicer
Did y'all put an extra one in?
- [67:34]
Megyn Kelly
Huh? Did y'all put another one in? No.
- [67:37]
Kristen Welker
They come like this. The. The truck. I've never.
- [67:42]
Megyn Kelly
I've never seen one with that many seats in it. You know what you got, right? You know what you got here, right?
- [67:48]
Kristen Welker
No. He's hauling these people for money is what he's doing.
- [67:55]
Megyn Kelly
Just to clarify, the driver was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the owner of the car is the person who had the criminal past, and it had been modified so they could get more people into it. And so, I mean, it's just. This is their poster Boy, they don't care. It took leadership to tell them, stop, stop doing photo ops with this person. But this is so on brand for them.
- [68:17]
Andrew Klavan
Yeah, well, that, that's the interesting thing. I mean, I, I said on my show, ladies, find a man who looks at you the way Democrats look at gangsters. Because I think that this is, this is the brand, and it's, it's a problem for them. You know, you have to ask yourself, what's the Democrat Party's business model? Right. Every party, political party, theoretically wants to win. These are questions on which the American people are. 80, 20, 80% of the people want these people out of the country. And they're defending, not just them, they're crying over these obviously bad hats and not crying over their victims and kind of silencing their victims and shoving them under the carpet. And so you have to ask yourself, what is the business model? And I think the answer is that the business model is global. It's not American, it's global. It's the idea that they are the global elites, that the borders are going to be erased. We're just not going to defend the borders. So it doesn't matter where you are. And ultimately, we're going to have the sort of one big beautiful government instead of the one big beautiful bill. We're going to have a one big beautiful government. And it's all going to be these people. You know, it's going to be the Met Gala in government. That's what it's going to be. It's going to be those people are going to run the world. And the problem that they have is we kind of like our country. You know, I think most of us still love this country and still want it to be a country and understand that it's not the same country as Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia may be a country that Saudi Arabians love. Good for them. You know, they should live and be well. But still, this is our country. It comes from a long tradition that goes back to ancient Greece. And we want to keep those traditions and keep those ideas alive. And so what they're doing is, when I say they're using the Constitution as a suicide pact, what I mean by that is they're trying to trip us up on our own laws in order to paralyze a president who is trying to secure our country and trying to make our country a hub of manufacturing, trying to make it take away China's power to erase us by closing off our supply lines. All of those things are what he's doing. And it's just amazing to listen to the press try and justify this stuff. Isn't a child going to have one less doll if you stop China from ruling the world? And we're supposed to all cry and say, oh, please, let China rule the world. We don't want a child to have one less doll. This is the entire thing that the press is doing is basically trying to erase the things we love. Fake faith, family and flag. You know, those are the things they're trying to erase and those are the things that Trump is trying to restore. And they even have words for it. Like they'll call us a Christian nationalist. And I'll scratch my chin and think, well, I'm a Christian and I love my country. I guess I'm, I guess I'm a Christian. Sounds good, you know? Yeah, you made it sound, you made it sound like a bad thing, but I was kind of happy that way.
- [70:53]
Megyn Kelly
Here is Ilhan Omar speaking of people who don't love our country. When she was caught up with by a Daily Caller reporter asked about her support for this. This guy.
- [71:07]
Kristen Welker
Congresswoman Omar, I'm Miles Morrell with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
- [71:10]
Megyn Kelly
Do you think more of your Democratic colleagues should be traveling to El Salvador to advocate on behalf of Abedigo Garcia? I think you should off.
- [71:17]
Kristen Welker
Yeah, I'm sorry, what? Congressman, who should you.
- [71:21]
Megyn Kelly
Why me?
- [71:23]
Jennifer Vasquez Sura
I'm not taking any questions right now.
- [71:25]
Megyn Kelly
But here you go.
- [71:26]
Kristen Welker
Yeah, thanks.
- [71:29]
Megyn Kelly
Classy. It's nice. I mean, I'm a big fan of the F bomb, but I, I host a podcast. I'm not a sitting member of Congress, like, actually trying to represent constituents. And there was absolutely nothing wrong with the question. He wasn't rude. He didn't get in her face. That's a totally normal question that's being debated right now on virtually every news channel. But she can't handle it and she's trying to look like a tough guy. This is the Democrats new approach. They're going to swear more because they think that's Trump's magic. Magic. Do not get it.
- [71:56]
Andrew Klavan
Yeah, they keep saying they got caught in the decency trap. I must have missed that phase of the Democrat Party. When they got caught in the decency.
- [72:03]
Megyn Kelly
Trap, was it when they had an abortion truck outside of the dnc?
- [72:07]
Andrew Klavan
Yeah, the abortion truck. When they had the censorship bureau when. If you said that they were wrong about something, your social media disappeared. When you said that they're the man.
- [72:18]
Megyn Kelly
Showing his quick boobs on the White House lawn, was that their decency trap?
- [72:21]
Andrew Klavan
That was the, that was the decentry trap. Yeah. And that's now. But now they're going to get tough. They're going to get tough. And you know, the thing is, I also love when they talk about messaging. You know, it's our messaging. You know, is there a way, is there a way to talk about letting gangsters come into the country and defending them at the, at the expense of victims that can be messaged better? Like, I don't know what that, you know, what, do you put it to music? I don't know what the message is. You just keep saying due process, due process.
- [72:46]
Megyn Kelly
And try, you know, you try to sort of sound like, I don't know, Michael Douglas in the American President, you know, like I'm an ACLU card carrying member and like this is all about rights and being an American. Without any acknowledgment of how they came into the country, the massive numbers, what it's done, what it's doing right now to American communities, American citizens. There has to be some proportionality given the, given the admission. Right. The way they came in should be the way they go out. With almost no due process and in some cases no due process. And we're fine with that. I asked Tulsi last week when I sat with her, what goes into deporting these people, Figuring out who's gonna be deported, who's gonna be put on the planes to El Salvador. It's very in depth. It is not. He's brown and has a tattoo. It's DEA agents who are very steeped in who's connected to these MS.13 and Trenda Aragua gangs and FBI folios on all these guys. They know who's in the country and they certainly know the ones who are criminals and running gangs. That's why they started there. The left wants you to believe it's just all gay hairdressers who we targeted.
- [73:50]
Andrew Klavan
And why is that not the question though? This is what really bothers me. You know, Thomas Jefferson said that upholding the law is a duty of every citizen, but it's not the highest duty. The highest duty is survival. And obviously the country doesn't survive without borders. It obviously doesn't survive if we let in terrorists and gangsters and all these people. So why is the question not how do we get rid of these people? Why isn't that the question? Why isn't, you know, President Trump, what are you doing to get rid of these people?
- [74:16]
Megyn Kelly
So he could answer that, why isn't it happening faster?
- [74:19]
Andrew Klavan
You know, and when they talk about, oh, he's gonna make. Take away Harvard's tax exemption. My question is, you know, you can debate whether Trump has the right to do that, but my question is, how are we gonna get Harvard to stop raising an elite class that hates America? How are we gonna get Harvard to start raising an elite class that's steeped in the culture of the west and the things that we believe in and love? You know, why is this, this absolutely premier university, churning out this garbage? You know, it's like they. They have to first admit that their people are beating up on Jews. But where are they learning this? Where are they learning to hate Jews? They're learning it in the classroom. They didn't come in that way. They didn't come in hating Western culture. You know, people. People who start out as, like, I was an English major, they come in loving books, you know, and they come out hating those books and hating the authors and hating the traditions that made them. That books made those books. Why is. Why isn't anybody in the press asking those questions? How do we get them to stop? How do we get the New York Times to report the news? How do we get Harvard to educate our children? How do we get ICE to get rid of these people in the country? And the reason is they're all the same people. They're all the same people. They're all the same leftists who do not love this country, who think that the country needs to be fundamentally transformed. That's not what I think. I think the country needs to be restored and reformed, but that's a different thing. In some ways, it needs to go backward to a sense of sacredness about the traditions that made us who we are. They are sacred. The things that made the Constitution what it is are sacred. The Constitution itself can be changed, but the ideas that it rests on, those will never change. And I think the thing is, if you're using that Constitution to get rid of those ideas, which is what I think the left is doing, then the Constitution is being misunderstood. And I think that we have to be stronger. I think we're doing pretty well right now, to be honest with you. I think we have to be very outspoken in just saying, wait, wait. What we're trying to preserve is a country of liberty, is a country of religion, a country of faith and flag and family. And if they don't like that, let's have that argument. I'm happy to have that argument.
- [76:22]
Megyn Kelly
I love that Faith, family, and flag. That works perfectly for me. I want everybody to buy Andrew's book. It's called the Kingdom of Cain. Finding God in the Literature of Darkness. Very clever as everything he writes is. It's a pleasure to see you, Andrew. Thanks for being here.
- [76:37]
Andrew Klavan
Thanks a lot, Megan. It's good to see you.
- [76:39]
Megyn Kelly
All right, coming up next, Jason Riley. He's so good. It's hard to get Jason Riley. He doesn't do a lot of interviews. You don't see him everywhere. He's totally brilliant. And he's got a new book on the affirmative action fraud that's been perpetrated on us all. And in particular, has that has harmed the black community. Jason tells it like few can. Next. More and more Americans are making their health and fitness a priority again. And studies show that strength training does more to burn fat than cardio alone. Plus, as we age, it's critical to maintain muscle mass and bone density. Jacked Up Fitness is dedicated to helping individuals achieve their health and fitness goals with innovative, high quality home gym systems. Their commercial grade Jacked Up Power Rack Pro is the ultimate all in one home gym system that lets you get a full body workout right in your own spare room or garage. Basically, everything you used to do at the gym, you can now do at home. And if you are new to strength training, their Get Jacked up program has full body video workouts led by celebrity fitness trainers. You simply press, play and follow along. No more excuses. Go to getjackedup.com to sign up for this free program and when you're ready to purchase your own Power Rack Pro, use promo code MK to save 10% at checkout. That's getjackedup.com the human body is incredible, capable of repair and growth that amazes scientists even in 2025. But as the years pass, natural healing and building processes slow down. While this is normal, there is a way to support your body. A collagen supplement from Ancient Nutrition can help you look and feel your best. For centuries, people have searched for a mythical Fountain of Youth. Spoiler alert. It does not exist. However, collagen is a proven way to promote youthful health and appearance. And that's why I want to tell you about Ancient Nutrition's Multi Collagen Advanced Lean. Ancient Nutrition combines ancient wisdom with modern science to create high quality supplements. It's delicious and easy to incorporate into daily routines. You can mix it into your coffee, your Matcha, or your smoothies. Right now, enjoy. 25% off. Your first order@ancientnutrition.com Megan that's ancientnutrition.com Megan for 25% off support your body and feel your best with ancient nutrition.
- [79:06]
Sean Spicer
Hi, everyone. This is former White House press secretary Sean Spicer. We all know that Americans are still recovering from the record inflation of the past four years. Now, some in Congress want to make cuts to Medicaid, a program that provides critical health care to 72 million struggling Americans, including veterans, people with disabilities, kids, and your friends and neighbors. 40% of American births are actually covered by Medicaid. And Medicaid covers health care costs for a third of children with cancer. Working families rely on this program. It has 77% support. Nearly 9 in 10Americans oppose Medicaid coverage cuts. Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to protect Medicaid. As president, he's still promising to love and cherish Medicaid. Did you know that 12 million Medicaid families live in rural communities? Many of these people voted for Donald Trump and they didn't vote for this. If Congress cuts Medicaid, a lot of rural hospitals could close and a lot of rural families will be hurt. No matter how you look at it, cutting Medicaid just doesn't make sense. Stand with President Trump and tell Congress not to cut Medicaid.
- [80:08]
Megyn Kelly
I'm Megyn Kelly, host of the Megyn Kelly show on Sirius xm. It's your home for open, honest and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal and cultural figures. Today, you can catch the Megyn Kelly show on Triumph, a SiriusXM channel featuring lots of hosts you may know and probably love. Great people like Dr. Laura. I'm Beck, Nancy Grace, Dave Ramsey and Yoruba. Yours truly, Megyn Kelly. You can stream the Megyn Kelly show on SiriusXM at home or anywhere you are. No car required. I do it all the time. I love the SiriusXM app. It has ad free music coverage of every major sport, comedy talk, podcast and more. Subscribe now. Get your first three months for free.
- [80:53]
Andrew Klavan
Go to SiriusXM.com MKShow to subscribe and get three months free. That's SiriusXM.com MKShow and get three months free.
- [81:05]
Megyn Kelly
Offer details apply. President Trump and his administration have tackled countering DEI from day one of his second term. He means it, trying to eradicate the policies that show special treatment and ignore merit. Many proponents of DEI argue related programs such as affirmative action are necessary to help minority groups get ahead. And they are now working to undermine the Supreme Court ruling that says you can no longer do it in the college admissions setting. But my next guest is here to tell us why the people pushing for affirmative action are completely wrong to do so. Jason Riley is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His new book, the Affirmative Action Myth why Blacks Don't Need Racial Preferences to Succeed, is out tomorrow and highlights how black achievement was on the rise before racial preference policies, which actually had the opposite effect of the one that was intended. Jason, great to see you again. So this is a great follow up. I know you've had other books too, to Please Stop Helping Us, which was your earlier book about how the government just, oh, so desperately wants to, quote, help the black community. And every time they try to, they set blacks back generationally. And this book seems to dovetail perfectly with your earlier book as well as with a film that we profiled on this show five years ago from Shelby and Eli Steele, what Killed Michael Brown, which takes a look at Ferguson, Missouri, and talks about how blacks were moving up the socioeconomic scale in terms of neighborhoods and families and communities and earnings. And then came Lyndon Johnson's Grand Great Society, which was meant to, quote, help and completely undermined all of that progress. So give us the basic thesis of your book.
- [82:58]
Kristen Welker
Well, you. You laid it out pretty well. And it's good to see you again, Megan. What prompted me to write this book was all the chatter around the supreme court decision in 2023, Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard. And there was a lot of anticipation that the court would rule the way it eventually did, that racial preferences violated the fourteenth amendment equal protection clause and were unconstitutional. But the talk in the media, particularly among the left wing elites, black and white, was that this would be a devastating blow to the black middle class, that these policies that the Supreme Court was about to strike down had created the black middle class and that without special treatment, without racial favoritism, the black middle class would be decimated. And I said, wait a minute, that is not what the historical record shows. There was a black middle class well before affirmative action policies took effect in the 1970s, and in fact, that black middle class was growing at a significantly faster rate than it grew during the era of affirmative action. So that's why I wrote the book, to take on some of these false narratives out there that want to credit government programs and expanded welfare state, racial preferences and so forth with black uplift, when in fact, that is not what drove black uplift in this country historically.
- [84:26]
Megyn Kelly
What, what does affirmative action do at the college level to the black students and those around them?
- [84:34]
Kristen Welker
Well, it's what it does to any student, Megan, that is admitted without the credentials of the surrounding students at the same institution. That's the issue here, as I've said before, if you admitted to Harvard left handed redheads with SAT scores that were 300 points below those of the average Harvard student, you would see left handed redheads pooling at the bottom of the class. You'd see them dropping out at higher rates. You'd see them switching from harder majors to easier majors. That's just the way it works. The most important credential for a student going to any institution is that they have to match the academic preparation of the surrounding kids at that school. And when there's a gap, that is what, that's when you run into trouble. And affirmative action mismatches kids with schools. And we often speak of it in racial terms. But the same could be true of children of alumni. The same could be true of student athletes, the children of donors, and so forth. Anytime there's a mismatch of the child in the institution, you're going to see those kids pooling at the bottom of the class. And we have a ton of evidence showing this. One of my favorite studies that point this out is one done by an economist at Duke University who interviewed freshmen at Duke and asked them what they wanted to major in. And the students that were black. Black, black men in particular were asked whether they wanted to major in the STEM fields or in, I should say, the natural sciences and economics. And what happened was about 75% or so of black freshmen males at Duke said they wanted to major in the in natural sciences or economics, but only about 35% ended up with a degree in those fields. So you have had a 35 point attrition rate among white males. It was 4 points, the attrition rate. And what the economists showed was that what produced this result, what accounted for this disparity entirely was whether the student had been admitted to the school with the same credentials as other kids at Duke. In other words, Duke admits some black kids that do meet the standards of other kids kids and some black kids who don't. And that attrition rate could be explained entirely by which black student we were talking about. Those blacks that had been admitted to Duke with the same credentials as everyone else at Duke ended up with a degree in that major. Those who didn't switched out of the major. And so that shows you the mismatch effect of affirmative action.
- [87:10]
Megyn Kelly
And I remember from it was either one of our earlier discussions, or maybe it was Heather McDonald, your colleague at the Manhattan Institute. But one of you guys was telling me, unfortunately, what happens with a lot of the folks who then do Not. They're not able to compete in the sciences. And they. They were on their way to getting an economics degree, but instead they. They couldn't make it this. So they wind up majoring in, like, African American studies or women's studies, which are degrees with which you can do absolutely nothing.
- [87:40]
Kristen Welker
Right. But it also shows is again, how counterproductive the policy is when, for instance, California banned racial admissions back in the mid-90s. And by the way, a number of states, nine or 10 states, even prior to the Supreme Court's decision, had already done this in big states. Texas, Florida, California. So we have some idea of what's going to happen in the absence of these policies. And what happened in California is that, yes, for a period immediately after the ban went into effect, the most selective schools in the California system, Berkeley and ucla, saw a reduction in black and Hispanic enrollment. But the University of California system overall saw an increase in enrollment because kids were going to schools where they were better matched. More importantly, what California saw was a sharp increase in the graduation rates of black and Hispanic students throughout the system, including in those more difficult STEM fields, computer science, engineering, physics and so forth. Much, much higher gpa, Much, much higher graduation rates because kids were being better matched with schools. And one of the. And so my point is that a policy that was put in place to help increase the ranks of the black middle class, at the end of the day, was resulting in fewer black doctors and black lawyers and black engineers than we would have had in the absence of the policy. And I think one of the real tragedies here, Megan, is that when you look at these black kids who are admitted to some of these selective schools with lower standards, what you find is that they have higher standards than the average college student in this country. They're just lower than they are for students at those more selective schools. So these kids would be hitting it out of the park academically at a less selective institution. I mean, if they're going to Michigan State instead of Michigan, if they're going to North Carolina instead of unc. Exactly. You're going to have them graduating with the degrees they want. These are not. It's not that these kids are unqualified for college. It's just they have been put into a situation where they're in over their head academically, where the pace that's. That classes are taught at is much faster than they're used to. So you're turning really smart kids into artificial failures in the name of helping them. And so I, you know, good, rich admittance to Affirmative action is what I say.
- [90:09]
Megyn Kelly
Well, and the other piece of it is they've, they've ruined what used to be these like really coveted, exciting, sexy degrees like Harvard or Yale or Columbia. Because now for the black and brown and whatever other minority students who graduate from there in 2025America, everybody's like, I mean, that's just the reality. We're like, we know how they got in. I mean, that's the truth.
- [90:36]
Kristen Welker
Exactly.
- [90:36]
Megyn Kelly
Whereas those, those kids of color who made it in there based on their own merit are getting dragged down with that same eye roll. Unfairly.
- [90:45]
Kristen Welker
Yeah, exactly. You, you have not only turned a lot of kids into artificial failures, the, the ones that, who are successful on their own merit, their success is somehow tainted by these policies. No one wants to be. And what self respecting person wants to be the token on campus or in the workplace? And that is what affirmative action has done. It's also reinforces stereotypes. And the justices got into this in the majority opinion. If you go to an elite school and you're surrounded by minority kids who clearly don't belong there and are struggling in class and so forth, you leave college with a certain view of the intellectual capabilities of minority. That's what these programs are doing. They're reinforcing that stereotype by setting up these kids to fail. And it's a real shame. And the point I'm making in the book is that in the era prior to affirmative action, this is not what was happening. Kids were attending black kids were attending schools where they met the credentials and they were graduating and they were closing the gap. Megan, with white college graduates, the rate at which blacks were entering school and graduating from college was getting closer and closer to the white rate. And what we know from the data is that around 1970, that convergence stalled. The rate of college completion among blacks is the same today as it was in 1970. That's the legacy of affirmative action.
- [92:16]
Megyn Kelly
Because what did it do as a practical matter? I mean, explain why did it stall? Because what the left will tell you is because this is a racist country and the stain of Jim Crow could never be erased and the stain of slavery could never be erased. So they kind of got as far as they could get. And everything else is going to have to come, frankly from whitey, you know, opening up doors and creating opportunities to.
- [92:35]
Kristen Welker
Talk a lot about. Yeah, well, the narrative is to talk a lot about the legacy of slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow, not to talk about the legacy of affirmative action or the legacy of the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson and That's what happened in the 1970s and the late 1960s is we had these expansions of government programs and I think they interfered with black development that had been ongoing and ongoing again at a much faster pace than before. I mean, when you look, I'll give you an example with employment in the late 1960s, something like 80% of the least educated blacks had a job. By the early 1990s, it was down to fewer than half of the least educated blacks had a job. There again is affirmative action in practice. One of the other things that happened during this period, Megan, and it's why affirmative action was so ineffective. I believe one of the reasons is the deterioration of the black family. There was not only this convergence going on in terms of educational achievement, there was also a convergence going on in terms of black black earnings is a percentage of white earnings. Blacks again in the pre affirmative action were closing the gap. Gaps were narrowing in economic advancement. So the median income of blacks was getting closer to the median income of household income of whites. But what you saw between the late 60s and the early 90s in particular was a deterioration in when black couple headed households, married blacks heading the household. And you saw an explosion of single black parenting. And so that economic advancements simply could not keep up among blacks because obviously married couples make more money than single couple than someone who's single and running a household. And so because you saw this proliferation of solo parenting in the black community, that economic convergence, that narrowing of the black white gap in earnest started moving in the opposite direction. And affirmative action could not make up for it. And the Great Society programs and the war on poverty efforts could not make up for it. Even a black president and Obama could not make up for it. As I often said back at the time is that we learn once again that a black man in the White House is not as important as a black man in the home. Even you can tell economically that is not something that lends itself to political intervention. This is something culturally going on among black Americas. And you see the legacy of single parent families. And again, that's another point that I get into in the book.
- [95:23]
Megyn Kelly
Well, you touched on another point which is very dicey. It's full of plutonium, this point. But you write if black youth in more recent decades have adopted an oppositional mindset, it has been with the approval of many intellectual elites who to excuse and justify behavior that previous generations once discouraged and condemned. So can you speak to what it used to be like versus I know what you're saying now. It's like these white leftist elites who will bend over backwards to be like, don't punish the black students. No, black students can get suspended. Stop saying two plus two equals four just because it does. You know, if a black student says it's five, it's five. That's your white supremacy speaking. But what was it like before?
- [96:09]
Kristen Welker
Well, what you saw was an attempt for blacks. And this again is what you saw in the first half, first two thirds of the 20th century. What you saw was an attempt among blacks to assimilate to middle class values. And this was the focus of the black leadership. Behave yourself, pull up your pants, finish school, take care of your children. These were priorities. How you present yourself matters. And that was the belief of the black leadership. Martin Luther King believed that. Thurgood Marshall believed that how you present yourself to whites, yes, there's racism. Yes, we have to fight for equal rights. But there are also things that we have to be responsible to for ourselves. The things we can't continue blaming whites for indefinitely. And they were very specific about that. It was very common among the black leadership. You just, just don't hear that sort of talk today. It's derided as respectability politics. And people say, well, it didn't work because there's still racial disparities in this country. And my point is that it didn't not work because of the track record of advance that I just laid out when it came to incomes and educational attainment. Oh, yes, it was working quite well. We just stopped practicing. And that is the problem. It's not that it doesn't work. It's that we stop practicing it. And by the way, it was extremely successful. It was the type of mindset that produced Brown versus Board of Education, and it's produced the Civil Rights act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965. That generation of black leadership had solid, solid accomplishments. And they were very much focused on respectability, politics, and the behavior of black people.
- [97:59]
Megyn Kelly
I want to ask you about what's happening with the Met Gala tonight, because we started the show by talking about how it's like about the black diaspora. And these two white people, Anna Wintour and her chief costume designer, a white man, have decided to make tonight's Met Gala all about black designers, even though very few black designers are really at the top of the fashion world. But this is her trying to look like she. She's a woman who's relatable and she cares about the black community. But meanwhile, it's not gonna happen at Vogue. But she's gonna feature them at the Met Gala. And so one of the people who they had to bring on, like a black committee that they pointed out in the New York Times, has a meeting at the Apollo Theater. Jason. So they're legit. They're at the Apollo Theater with their meetings to say, like, what the theme should be and who should be invited. And there's a quote from one saying, you know, we really wanna make sure that people continue to, to. To, you know, perpetuate our vision of black dandyism. That's. That's the idea of, like this sort of colorful dress that was favored by some, but not. She does not want to see a full length do rag. That's a quote, a full length do rag by anybody or quote, quote, a pimp cane. Now, this, to me is so ironic is this is a black person saying this about what she doesn't want to see from black people showing up to celebrate. Celebrate black culture. Meanwhile, you. You make a pretty strong case that it is the left that set a portion of the black community down the lane of prizing the black whatever, do rag, the pimp cane and so on, as opposed to folding into the middle class and there being almost no distinction between them and their white counterparts.
- [99:42]
Kristen Welker
Yeah, and I think where I see this most prominently is in the sort of hip hop pop culture where you have people, you know, the guy sitting in prison now, Sean Combs, you know, made a living trafficking. And the worst stereotypes about black people, materialism, drugs, violence, misogyny people, Jay Z, Snoop, all these guys, Dr. Dre. And they were just, just elevated by our cultural elites. That's all they did was traffic in negative stereotypes about black people and became multimillionaires in the process in putting out products, gutter lyrics that most decent black people, most black people, in fact, want to shield their kids from. My parents didn't want me listening. In fact, if I got caught listening to stuff like that, I'd get in trouble. And that was very typical of a lot. But there are a lot of white elites that celebrated it, celebrate. Oh, this is just. They're authentic black people. The black kids that are raising their hand in class, that are studying, that are studious, that speak standard English, oh, they're acting white. They're. They're not. They're not authentic. You know, Snoop is authentic. He's keeping it real. And you hear this, you hear this even today, coming up, the types of black people that the left wants to celebrate and elevate are those types. And they put them out there as standard bearers for black. I'll take you the most obvious example. George Floyd. George Floyd was presented as your typical black person in America. What they go through every day. George Floyd. George Floyd. Maggie Lincoln was high on drugs, a lifelong criminal who died resisting arrest. He is not your typical black person in America.
- [101:44]
Megyn Kelly
It's such an insult.
- [101:45]
Kristen Welker
And yet we are putting up statues of George Floyd and taking down statues of Abraham Lincoln. It's, it's, it's crazy. It's absolutely crazy.
- [101:55]
Megyn Kelly
So on the affirmative action front, are we expecting these colleges to comply? Because I remember right after the ruling, I think it was Cornell, if memory serves. And you know, you went to, I think you went to college in Buffalo, and I'm from Syracuse. We had that discussion. So not, not too far from our neck of the woods, switched over to. Okay, we won't ask what your race is on your application, but we will ask for your. Your essay to get into college should be submitted via video. You read it.
- [102:26]
Kristen Welker
No, you're right. That's what they're going to do. No, they're not going to comply. They're not going to comply willingly. And that's why I'm glad that the person who. Edward Bloom, the head of Students for Fair Admission, which won that Harvard lawsuit, is staying on the case. He's going to continue to follow up with threats to sue again if he finds them trying to evade what the Supreme Court ruled. And I think that is very, very necessary. These schools are very committed, committed to this diversity, equity, and inclusion. And I think they are going to try and stay the course and wait out the Trump administration's pushback. So, no, I don't think this is over at all. I think they have their work cut out.
- [103:05]
Megyn Kelly
Well, I certainly hope they stay on the case because it's so pernicious. And you've been one of the greatest truth tellers on it all. By the Affirmative Action Myth by Jason Riley. It's out tomorrow. The affirmative action Myth. You will not be sorry you did. He speaks like these very, very complex issues. He boils them down into very digestible bits. That's one of the things I love about Jason, is that he puts, like, sophisticated economic concepts in ways that even I could argue them, which I appreciate. And look, this is a battle that's going to be ongoing, especially because of Trump and his DEI efforts. Great to see you again, Jason.
- [103:39]
Kristen Welker
Thank you, Megan.
- [103:41]
Megyn Kelly
The affirmative action Myth. That's exactly what it is out tomorrow. Thanks for listening to the Megyn Kelly Show. No bs, no agenda, and no fear.