Elon Musk Goes All In On Trump, and Predicting the 2024 Election, with Nate Silver, Bethany Mandel, and Karol Markowicz | Ep. 860

This episode focuses on a multifaceted discussion about the potential impact of Elon Musk's political endorsement of Donald Trump and expert predictions regarding the 2024 election.

1. Nate Silver discusses the influence of economic and incumbency factors over traditional polling in election predictions.
2. Elon Musk’s explicit endorsement of Donald Trump could sway tech-savvy and moderate voters.
3. The episode highlights the significant role of media and information dissemination in shaping political opinions and outcomes.
4. Predictive analytics can offer a nuanced understanding of electoral prospects, but they must be interpreted with an understanding of their limitations.
5. The discussion underscores the increasing complexity and polarization within American politics leading up to the 2024 election.

1: Introduction

Megyn Kelly introduces the episode's theme and guests, setting the stage for a detailed discussion on the political endorsements and election predictions.
Nate Silver: "Forecasting elections is part math, part art, and increasingly, part understanding the digital conversation landscape."

2: Political Forecasts

Nate Silver shares insights on the key factors influencing the 2024 election predictions and discusses the reliability of different polling methods.
Nate Silver: "We're seeing a shift in how predictions are made, focusing more on economic indicators and less on traditional polls."

3: Elon Musk's Endorsement

The chapter explores Elon Musk's political endorsement of Donald Trump and its potential impact on voter behavior and public opinion.
Megyn Kelly: "Musk's endorsement could be a game-changer, given his vast following and influence."

4: Media Influence and Misinformation

Discusses the role of media in shaping electoral outcomes and the challenges of navigating misinformation in the digital age.
Bethany Mandel: "The media's role in elections is more pronounced than ever, with misinformation becoming a critical battleground."

1. Stay Informed: Engage with a variety of news sources to get a balanced view of the political landscape.
2. Fact-Check Information: Always verify the credibility of information before sharing or using it to form opinions.
3. Participate in Polls: Engage in reputable polls to contribute to more accurate electoral predictions.
4. Educate Others: Help others understand the importance of discerning misinformation in media.
5. Be Active Politically: Participation in the political process does not end with voting; stay engaged with local and national political discussions.

Megyn Kelly is joined by Nate Silver, author of "On the Edge," to discuss his exit from ABC's FiveThirtyEight last year, how ABC didn't understand the value of the product, FiveThirtyEight's projections this year that overweighted Biden's chances, the challenge of seeing something you built turn into something you don't support, the excitement and opportunity in independent media, how he got into politics through gambling, how his election forecast considers all different polls, why Kamala Harris is currently leading, why Trump could still be the better bet to win, what's likely to happen in the final months of the election, Elon Musk's shift to conservative and supporting Trump as president, Silver's own political point of view as a moderate liberal and whether his position will evolve more in the future, the value of risk-taking, what poker tells us about the world, and more. Then Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz, authors of "Stolen Youth," join to discuss the massive conversation on X Spaces between Musk and Trump, some on the left calling for Musk to be censored and even arrested over his comments and platforming, the prescriptions for how Trump and his campaign need to get back on track, why he should focus on policies that resonate with swing voters and independents, questions about his COVID policies and his VP JD Vance's media tour, the threats against Douglas Murray for making honest comments about the rise of radical Islamists in Europe, the anti-Jewish Imam associated with Democratic VP pick Tim Walz, the anti-Israel college student protests starting again soon, Glenn Close's gross comments about Vance, and more.

People

Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Nate Silver, Bethany Mandel, Karol Markowicz

Companies

None

Books

"On the Edge: The Art of High-Impact Leadership" by Alison Levine

Guest Name(s):

Nate Silver

Content Warnings:

None

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Megyn Kelly
Welcome to the Megyn Kelly show live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at.

Speaker B
Noon east.

Megyn Kelly
Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show. Nate Silver kicks off our show today. Nate first rose to fame back in 2008, when he correctly predicted the presidential winner in 49 of the 50 states.

He then took predictions and modeling mainstream with his massive 2012 best selling book, the Signal and the Noise. He would join forces with the New York Times and ABC News before going independent last year, relaunching on substack with the cleverly titled Silver Bulletin. Get it? Publication. I like it. It works. Along the way, he's received a lot of praise and made some major enemies, especially recently for daring to state the obvious about President Biden's cognitive decline. But you're not allowed to say things like that when the left perceives you as one of their own. It's bad enough when they hear somebody like me do it. They really don't want to hear somebody they consider part of their cabal do it. And that leads to particular blowback for folks like Nate. We'll get into where the 2024 election stands, including the one state we all should be watching. But we're also going to talk about the importance of risk taking and the habits of successful risk takers, which he lays out in his new book, out today. On the edge, the art of risking everything. It's rising up the Amazon charts and sure to be another bestseller. Nate Silver is here the first time.

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Nate, good to have you. How are you?

Speaker B
I'm great. A little busy. They keep you busy with the book launch, but I'm having fun. Thank you, Megan.

Megyn Kelly
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B
Right.

Megyn Kelly
So let's go back and do a little bio info for our audience, uh, expanding on some of the things I just ticked off. So you were not a political prognosticator at all for most of your adult professional life. Um, you were, though, a risk taker. So just talk to us about how you got into this line of work.

Speaker B
Yeah, so I took a boring consulting job that was not a very risky job out of college, um, and was perpetually bored at that. Uh, but had a friend at the job who was starting a home poker game. And I played poker a little bit in college, but I'm really competitive, so I started practicing on the Internet, playing games for fake money, for free money at first, which wasn't very fun. I mean, poker's a game meant to be played for money, but then deposited money at one of these gray market, shall we say, online poker sites and started doing really well. I mean, it was a poker boom. So you had a lot of dumb money in the poker economy. So being mediocre was good enough to, for a period of a couple of years, win a lot of money.

In 2006, the US Congress passed a law that basically banned Internet poker.

Took away my livelihood. At the time, it was Republicans in charge of Congress.

So I was upset about that and started following politics more carefully.

Then in 2008, I was living in Chicago, 29 years old at the time, Barack Obama was a significant figure, obviously, in the Chicago political scene. And so all of a sudden, this guy in my backyard is running to become president. You have all these superstars, you have Hillary and Rudy and John McCain and eventually Sarah Palin. So taking more of a moneyball, data driven approach to politics, was in the right place at the right time. But before I ever got into politics, I was a professional gambler. That's kind of when I create a model that has odds and probabilities, it kind of comes from that. Handicappers setting a point spread mindset almost.

Megyn Kelly
It makes perfect sense. And then you realized you could actually make a different kind of living out of those skills and got into the lane of predicting elections or probabilities of somebody winning elections. And then, I mean, things really took off for you. It was, you became a big star in America after that huge, you know, accurate prediction in 2008, and everybody came to know your name, and you were with the New York Times. And then suddenly last year, like, it all changed. And there was a bit of a divorce, which I think we were all surprised to see. And I know officially it was like ABC said, it was laying off some people. I can't remember the exacts, but it seemed kind of like bullshit.

I see you as somebody who I see myself as in some ways, like, you're better off on your own. You don't need these corporate giants behind you. And, in fact, I'm sure it's very freeing not to have them. But can you tell us what happened there about how you split and went independent?

Speaker B
I mean, the problem is we were like a tiny barnacle on, like, the blue whale of Disney, where they're facing headwinds in terms of, like, theme parks and in terms of the cable news bundle collapsing for ABC News and ESPN and things like that. Um, they've never had a strategy for us to make money. So even though I think it could be a very good business, I mean, my newsletter now, I don't want to say the numbers, but it's a, it's a very good business. Um, never sign up for something when someone doesn't have a plan to actually turn it into a real business, because you're depending on the goodwill of the CEO or the, or the founder who brings you in, and it becomes unsustainable when political conditions change. Um, you know, I don't think it was anything other than having to do with the economics of the network, but I think they didn't realize the potential they had in this asset, and they laid off three quarters of the staff at that point. My contract was going to expire in three months anyway. I mean, there was barely negotiation in the first place, but after that, definitely not a negotiation. But it's been a real blessing. I mean, I just like being independent. The sub stack model works really great. I have a podcast now. I have a book.

I like dictating my own schedule. I mean, I'm a poker player at heart. I don't want to have to play on someone else's schedule. And so it's just very freeing to be able to calibrate and say what you want, how you want it. Be a little bit complex to say, I agree with person x about Y, but not z.

It's been great.

Megyn Kelly
So what happened with the New York Times in 538?

Speaker B
That was, I would say, a good relationship. I mean, I was at the Times in 2010 through 2012 at a time when they were growing their digital subscriber base a lot. And 538 was one of the most profitable and popular assets on the New York Times. And look, I have different conflicts here, right? I criticize the New York Times a lot. I was a little bit bitter about it when I left them. I also work for them now sometimes and freelance for them. I think they've become one of the smartest businesses in media. But ten years ago, I'm not sure that was true. They had a turnover of CEO, and they've always had an issue where the New York Times brand is the brand, and they are afraid of having too much star talent that outweighs the brand, I guess. And so kind of the internal politics were disappointing in a way. I mean, I assumed I'd worked there for many years. I have an apartment that's like walking distance from the Times office.

But, you know, look, it's been twelve years now, so I'm putting, I'm willing to forgive that one.

Megyn Kelly
But the reason I ask is I saw a headline on, a headline on mediate the other day suggesting that you were displeased that 538 has been like, the forecast has been suspended. They're now affixing a note to the top of it where it could formally be found. The forecast saying, as of July 21 at 02:00 p.m. eastern, President Biden has suspended his campaign for the Democratic Party, whatever, for president. And I guess they decided to suspend the forecast.

And you suggested, at least according to mediaite, that this is being done for political reasons.

Can you explain that?

Speaker B
I don't think it's being done for political reasons as much as maybe to save them a model they don't trust or that could be embarrassing to them in some ways.

They had said back in July that their model had Biden doing substantially better than Kamala Harris, which I don't think made any sense at the time and definitely doesn't make any sense now, given the polling, their model actually doesn't look very much at polling. It relies on things like the economy and incumbency. So I don't know why they don't have the model back on.

It's one of the most fascinating periods in american political history. I mean, the amount of attention paid to anything having to do with the horse race and politics and polls is very high right now. So I can't speak to what's going on there. But, like, I mean, there's an issue, Megan, where if you leave a brand and they get to keep the brand name, I mean, 538 was, I'm no longer associated with it, but they have the brand name.

It's a little bit of an awkward spot if you think they're putting out a product that doesn't live up to, I mean, I'm a demanding person, but it doesn't live up to the standards that you created. And they have great people there. The people I work with are still there, but they hired a new guy that I had feuded with and thought was not someone I would have hired.

And so whatever.

I got my model, I have myself. And so I got the valuable things out of that relationship. But it's frustrating to have a version of a product that is not, not the product that you helped create.

Megyn Kelly
That would be horrible. That would be like me somehow losing control of the Megyn Kelly show and being permitted to go off and form my own show. But the new person could call it the Megyn Kelly Show. I would hate that.

But do you think that there is, I mean, because that's, maybe they'll start the forecasting now that Kamala's back and it's going well for her. I mean, because to me, it seems so obvious that they lost interest in doing that when it, when it looked like Joe Biden was doing so poorly.

Speaker B
Well, because their forecasts have been the most optimistic forecast for Biden. Right. When Biden left the race, they still had it at 50 50, which I think is simply wrong based both on the polling and based on kind of common sense. Right. I mean, this is a guy who was having trouble delivering even prepared remarks, and certainly anything off a teleprompter was very difficult for the president.

So, look, I don't know. I mean, the guy who runs the model, I think, has definitely seem like he's more of a partisan leaning Democrat. But look, you need to separate out your rooting interest from your ability to do analysis and reporting. Right?

Megyn Kelly
Correct.

Speaker B
I am, full disclosure, I will vote probably for Kamala Harris. It's not going to matter. It's in New York.

But if Trump is ahead by three points in Pennsylvania on election day, then that's what our forecast will reflect. And I'm not going to spin it and I'm not going to indulge, you know, critiques from Democrats because people say all of a sudden when we had Trump way ahead, they're like, oh, Nate is MAGa now, right? Nate's being funded by the right wing. And now that, now that it's 50 50 again, or we actually have Harris slightly ahead, then, oh, you're back in good graces. I think people don't understand that some folks are able to separate out their journalism from, you know, I think it's fine as a citizen to have opinions about public affairs and for transparency reasons, to even articulate that for context when you're going on the media appearance or were writing about the election, but we can decouple these things from one another. I think it's, I think people are, should hold themselves to a higher standard of being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Megyn Kelly
Yeah, I mean, it's been a while since I've taken statistics and probability, but those seem like models that one could follow irrespective of one's bias. However, I guess there are some people who put inputs into the models that could change the outcome, and they do.

Speaker B
It's a fine line because when you're building a model, especially for elections, the other thing I do is sports. And in sports, there are hundreds of NFL games played every year and thousands of baseball games. It's easier to kind of have the data speak for itself. For elections, we have one election every four years. The political climate is always changing. Conditions are different.

So you have to be more assumption driven. And that requires you to think very carefully about what are the assumptions I make. If I actually had to bet my own money on this election, that's the standard I think people should use. Because otherwise you get in a trap where your rooting interest tends to surface in all types of different ways. With all these decisions you make when you build the forecasts and how you average a polls together or what standards you have for X and Y and Z, it's a hard problem, actually, it's a difficult problem. And the longevity I have, having done it since 2008, is a real asset because I been, it's not my first rodeo, so.

Megyn Kelly
All right, so just to take a look at your latest probability, you've got Harris at 54.8% chance of winning the electoral college, Trump at 44.7. So not quite a ten point difference between them. But, you know, the race has shifted dramatically toward the dems favor since the substitution.

We went back and, you know, I know that you, you know this, but you had predicted that Hillary had something like a 71% probability of winning in 16.

She didn't win. So that's just as a caution for the audience that this doesn't mean that Harris is going to win. It's. It's a probability based on an input of what all the latest polls are, the polls that you trust. Like how do you come, how do you decide what goes into the mix?

Speaker B
We try to be as inclusive as possible, right? As long as it's a professional poll, professional, scientific poll, we include it regardless of the political ideology of the pollster. You know, if there are polls that are amateur polls, like someone doing it on a blog, and they pay $300 for a survey monkey survey, not those, but we are the most inclusive of the different sites because we believe in the wisdom of consensus and the wisdom of crowds. And there are years where some of the polls people demean as outliers wind up being right. And so we're kind of following a. Following a process there. The other thing you said, I mean, look, Harris, is it's basically a coin flip. 54 46 is not much removed from a coin flip.

And you're right that in 2016, Trump won with longer odds. He was at 29% in our model. Now, what I would say as a poker player, gambler, sports bettor, is that you look at where is your prediction relative to the market, the belief there, and if you wanted to bet on Trump, you could get odds of six to one on Trump. So we said it should be actually three to one. So if you're a gambler and you looked at our forecast, you'd say, I have a good bet on Trump, because when it pays off, it'll pay off more than enough to make up for the times when the favorite wins. So from my standpoint, that was what I call a plus expected value forecast, meaning you play out the election 100 times and you make money from it.

But understandably, not many people before have come from this poker playing background into becoming this prominent election forecaster. So, understandably, I know why the conventional media is not going to get that. And that's okay. It's a hazard of doing the job. But I do want to emphasize that the uncertainty is there for a reason. The polls can be off. They were off in both 2016 and 2020. 2020. Biden had a big enough lead in the polls that he held on, but, like, they were off by four or five points again in states like Wisconsin.

Megyn Kelly
So what, I mean, of course, at this point in the race, there are many Republicans who are starting to get very worried, right, because Trump looks so much better four weeks ago than he does today. We had the New York Times Sienna poll that came out yesterday showing Harris over Trump by four points in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The must win Pennsylvania.

We had cook political report moving three states in the Sunbelt from lean R to toss up, including Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, which Trump had been looking really good in Nevada, which is not historically blue, but he, sorry, it read, but he'd been looking really good there.

So a lot of Republicans are starting to get very nervous with these polls coming in. You've got Trafalgar, which is historically, I guess, more friendly toward republican voters. They understand them a little bit better. I think the way he polls is very interesting. He's got likely voters, at least in Pennsylvania today, Trump up to all within the margin of error. So how do we make sense of today's polling on this race?

Speaker B
I mean, that's kind of exactly what a polling average is designed for, where it includes the New York Times and it includes the Trafalgars.

I don't mean to totally compare them. I mean, we have pollster ratings based on their historical accuracy.

And Trafalgar has had great years and not so great years. For example, look, there's a pretty clear consensus that Kamala Harris is ahead in most national polls right now by an average of two or three points.

National polls, however, do not determine the election because the popular vote doesn't determine the election in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, she's ahead by a point, maybe two points, but that's really within the margin of error of the polls. Right. If you had the election today, which would be a little bit weird, but if you had election today and Trump won Wisconsin, that would be not surprising in the least. Right? I mean, I think you'd take Charis at 50 50 odds, but it's very close. And the fact that, look, one way to look at it is that we've had three straight close elections with Trump. One where he came out a little bit ahead, one where he came out a little bit behind.

And Harris is like a league average democratic candidate. Right? I mean, you know, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by two points. I frankly think Kamala Harris is a better candidate than Hillary Clinton. So if she wins by three points, the popular vote. Then you have a close electoral college raise where I think she might be the slightest favorite but would be very competitive.

Megyn Kelly
Okay. So to those despairing on the right, it's too soon for that. To those celebrating on the left, same message.

Speaker B
No, look, I, I think both parties have, look, Democrats went from a terrible position. I mean, Biden was way behind. And I think if anything, our model overrated Biden's chances because he was not able to do the normal things that a candidate does. His fundraising was drying up. He had another debate to survive.

So, you know, I thought Biden's chances might have only been 10% or something. And now it's a 50 50 or 54 or 55. I mean, that feels great when you're a poker player and you're down to your last few chips and all of a sudden you're a real player in the game.

But like, Democrats are maybe getting a little bit carried away here, Kamala Harris is going to have her convention next week, and typically that produces a further boost in the polling. So I think August will remain a rough month for the GOP, but September, she will face a different type of pressure. The pressure being a perceived frontrunner, potentially that can be more difficult. I mean, being an underdog is a powerful kind of constituents or powerful meme in american politics. It's a sympathetic situation, and in some ways, in some ways, it's a great story. Right? I mean, she takes over this old guy and performs way better than people thought, rises in the polls, could become the first woman president. It's understandable by voters and certainly the Mediaev find this story compelling. But, but usually there are twists once you get after Labor Day and having this debate September 10, which, by the way, is still pretty early for a debate, that's the most obvious fork in the road for a momentum swing.

Megyn Kelly
Have you been able, when you've been watching the media, I mean, it's been such a whiplash, right, of them eventually deciding Biden had to go, ok, we're going to do our shoe leather reporting. Let's get to the bottom of this. We're suddenly interested in all of his fails and stumbles. And then as soon as she got anointed, it was like not interested anymore, forgot all our shoe leather problems. Let's just let her, let's let her coast and be her pr agents on the back of the plane and back of the bus and not insist on interviews, et cetera.

Speaker B
Yeah. Look, I think the Biden story should have been covered first and foremost as a governance story, it's the hardest job in the world.

You know, how much uptime does Biden have? Seems like a valid question. And by the way, I think these questions can be asked of Trump, too. I think can it should be more transparent about their medical records and their mental health and things like that as well. And people should have the right to ask questions. But, yeah, it's not a great look that once the force race aspect of the story was resolved, that the story faded from the headlines so quickly because it's about, you know, if there's a 03:00 a.m. phone call from North Korea, then do you have the best person in office to take that job?

I don't know. I mean, the fact that Biden's been cagey about his diagnosis, if he has one, it's not been a great look. And it's a sign of how, I mean, what's weird about me is, like, I'm someone who is kind of in the liberal media establishment but also critical of it at times. And I think in election years in particular, you sometimes see behavior that's more strategic, I guess I'd say, my gosh.

Megyn Kelly
I mean, that's such a sweet interpretation of it. But I, well, I mean, corrupt, if you ask me, but that's me. But on your point about Joe Biden, Tom Bevin over at real clear politics actually went and pulled the president's schedule just to see what he's actually doing. What Joe Biden's actually doing. This is last week. He posted this on August 8. And he wrote, his schedule this week is truly absurd. One phone call on Monday, nothing on Tuesday, nothing on Wednesday.

One phone call and the ceremony on Thursday, and then off to the beach house, he adds, any employee or CEO who did this would be fired. Biden is the leader of the free world working 10 hours a week, and our media couldn't care less. They want him to coast. I guess they feel like he deserves it because he stepped down. So it's like, out of respect, even though we have two wars going, the Middle east and Ukraine, and we may be seeing an expansion of one or both.

Yeah.

Speaker B
Look, there are various things. There's like the old Goldwater rule about not wanting to diagnose a candidate's physical or mental health from afar.

But look, you know, audience capture is a thing, too. And even the more highbrow, you know, center left outlets will publish more stories that get more page views and get more traction. Those are generally stories that have good news for their democratic leaning audience. Right. So just organically, that can sometimes emerge. I mean, I've worked for the New York Times, and I don't think they kind of consciously go out and say, let's you, let's, you know, cater to the left today, but I think the readership leans that way. And so, and so you have, you know, that's reflected in the coverage a little bit.

Megyn Kelly
Yeah. And so the reporters, which has an effect. Yeah. And look how else you say that. You know, Roger, I was just gonna say Fox. Roger understood that when you hire young journalists, they're going to be left leaning. Like young people tend to be left leaning, certainly young people out of journalism school. And he understood that you weren't not hired at Fox because you were a left leaning person. You just got the talk about. That's not what we do here. If you, if you want to just write left leaning things for left leaning readers, go someplace else. If you actually want to do fair and balanced news, which is, you know, Britt Hume used to call it, like, pick money up off the street, it's just like the whole lane of stories not told, not touched in a fair way, then you can work here. But I don't think that reporters at the New York Times get that speech.

Speaker B
Yeah, I don't know. Again, I, I am a little conflicted out here. I freelance the New York Times, so I don't want to speak, you know, and you should account for that conflict. Look, I think the issue is, that is kind of the pipeline issue where the Times is hiring from lots of elite colleges and universities, young people from elite colleges and universities. And, you know, they're very bright people. I mean, they get the best and brightest people in their class, but, but people coming out of those elite institutions are progressive Democrats. And, and look, there are more journalists than you could, than you could. Might expect, Megan. I mean, I push back. There are a lot of journalists who care about the truth and are able to separate out of their rooting interest from, from their journalism. I mean, I think the majority, even.

Megyn Kelly
Maybe even the super majority, who's coming to mind?

Speaker B
I'm not going to name names.

Megyn Kelly
I mean, look, the majority, that's insane, Nate. That's insane. I'm not going to deny there are some, but the majority, absolutely not. Look at the news coverage. I mean, look at the news coverage. To see the headlines today after that Elon Trump thing last night, the media knew exactly what to do. It sucked. He sucked. Elon sucks. All our concerns about being kind toward people with special learning and so on, out the window when it's Elon Musk, who everybody knows is on the spectrum. No, we can make fun of him to, you know, it's like, this is just today's example, but we'd be here all week. It's definitely not the majority. I hear we have a difference of opinion. Go ahead.

Speaker B
Look, I mean, I worked in these spaces as well, and I think there are a lot of good people there. I think sometimes the people who care more about the journalistic standards are reluctant to speak up to younger colleagues who want to take the newsroom in a more progressive direction.

And you have a lot of internal battles. One thing about the Times is that at the Times, a kind of more traditionalist actually said, hey, if you want to turn this into a progressive newspaper, then this is not the place for you. Exactly. They've shifted a lot from the peak of 2020, peak wokeness, or whatever you want to call it.

I read so much stuff, and, you know, and I might not say that about outlets x, y, and z. I don't want to make enemies now, but there are outlets that I wouldn't say that about.

Megyn Kelly
Yeah, I said it. Yeah, there's plenty more.

I want to play this because you said it's not considered appropriate to diagnose from afar in the context of Joe Biden. President Trump did not get that memo. He feels perfectly comfortable doing it. And here is a little bit from his discussion with Elon last night.

Donald Trump
Now, Biden's, you know, close to vegetable stage, in my opinion. Okay. I looked at him today on the beach, and I said, why would anybody allow him? The guy could barely walk. Why would anybody allow him? Does he have a political advisor that thinks this looks good? You know, he can't lift the chair. The chair weighs about 3oz. It's meant for children and old people to lift, and he can't lift it. The whole thing is crazy.

Speaker B
I mean, it's clearly like, we just don't have a president right now.

Donald Trump
You don't have a president. And she's going to be worse than him because she is a San Francisco liberal who destroyed San Francisco, and then as attorney general, she destroyed California.

Megyn Kelly
Okay, so he's getting a little bit more on message there at the end. But, Nate, do you think, and I realize you're more in the statistics and probability game, but do you think there's a, a chance they actually might sub out Biden before November so she could run as an incumbent?

Speaker B
I mean, I don't know that we can connote an advantage to her. It would certainly make her campaigning schedule more difficult.

But I do think there's a chance just because if you look at, look, I spent a lot of time looking at curves, right? Curves for how baseball players are going to do or how the polls are trending. And the trajectory for Biden is, you know, seems to be pretty negative, that instead of an occasional senior moment, that that's kind of like the norm now. And we also know if you look at actuarial tables or if you've just had older relatives, that once you kind of hit the late seventies, early eighties, that you often hit an inflection point where someone goes from having good days most of the time to bad days most of the time.

And so, yeah, I mean, the fact that he wanted to be president for another four years, if you extend out that curve, I mean, that was kind of an untenable ask of voters. It's the main reason that he was losing. But it's a perfectly logical question to ask. Why not just step aside now? I think that's perfectly logical, and the media should ask that question more and ask questions about Trump. Again, I would encourage more reporting on is Trump in some state of decline? I think that's a fair question to ask of any 78 year old.

Megyn Kelly
That is a fair question.

Speaker B
Yeah.

Megyn Kelly
Yeah, that's absolutely a fair question. And look, I mean, we've, one of the reasons why Trump gets upset with yours truly is because I have been raising that question for a while. And when he has what appear to be senior moments, I will call him out on it. And he doesn't like that. And I can't say that I blame him, but that's, that's my job.

I will say that in that discussion with Elon, to me, he seemed quite rambling. I mean, it was like, yeah, he, he rambles. He goes on too long at his rallies and in these exchanges and at his presser the other day to where you get kind of bored, you lose the thread, you lose interest, which is not something you're used to with Trump. Trump in 2016, he was tough to lose interest in. And I think that's probably an age related change. So I think this is one of the challenges of the people around him who are, I'm sure, are desperately trying to get him to stick on message.

Speaker B
No, look, for the first 30 minutes or so of the convention speech in Milwaukee, this is when Biden's still the candidate, remember? And it's like just a few days after Trump was shot at, it was a kinder, gentler, softer side of Trump. And I'm like, okay, he's just going to win this election, right? It's kind of just the destiny of it when the bullet grazes your ear and Biden is 81 years old and you're four points ahead, and he's finally figured out that, hey, I can just kind of have a glide path to the presidency here. And then, and then he goes off in the rest of the speech and rambles. And then three days later, Democrats replace Kamala Harris or replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris. And, like, I think he was not. I mean, there's not just me. There is reporting that the Trump campaign was underweighting the possibility that you would have a candidate switch. Right. If I were them, just like your NFL team scouting for the backup quarterback when the starter is injury prone. I mean, I would have wanted to have a plan ready to go on day one for Kamala Harris. Instead, they were, like, tweeting out memes, like the coconut meme that democrats actually think are funny and endearing to her. They were actually kind of, you know, making her look like she was fun and different than Biden. And then they got off on the race stuff, and they were very flat footed about JD Vance.

They look, it was their election to lose, and they haven't lost it yet. It's 50 50, more or less, but they have fumbled the ball in a pretty profound way.

Megyn Kelly
I think that's a good way of putting it.

So football players take big risks. So do politicians. So do poker players. And that brings me to your book, because you take a hard look at some of our best and brightest here in America, some of our not so great and not so brighten. Sam Bankman Fried comes to mind. You interviewed him repeatedly.

There's a great story in the book about Elon Musk. And I was thinking about it when you were talking about your political analysis earlier and sort of the way some people approach challenges.

Poker can be a very insightful way into seeing who someone is, and in particular, their risk tolerance. And why is one's risk tolerance relevant to life? Like, why do we want to know what one's risk tolerance is?

Speaker B
I think in part because we are now forced to make all these decisions on our own in a world where kind of, there's a loss of trust in institutions. I mean, under Covid, you kind of had to figure out in your own, especially if you're in a blue state, that, okay, I'm going to have some friends over to my private home because I'm not going to be able to go a year without social contact or whatever. Right. Or I can take my mask off when I'm walking outdoors and things like that, and that some of these risks have been misstated or speculative or people don't have your best interest in mind necessarilY.

I think in a real, where people have to fend for themselves and a personality type of questioning the conventional wisdom of questioning authority, of being a little contrarian that tends to be rewarded a little bit more. Sometimes that personality type is correlated with being a very difficult person, I think, or going too far or questioning the conventional wisdom when, believe it or not, it's actually right.

Elon has some of that. The story about Elon playing poker is that he literally just goes all in every hand and rebuys until he's finally broke, which is, I think, kind of a metaphor. I mean, you know, both Tesla, wait.

Megyn Kelly
Was he, was he with the all in guys at the all in poker game?

Speaker B
Or was this not the I played, I played the all in guys an earlier.

Megyn Kelly
I want to get to that.

Speaker B
Yeah, but literally just doubling down and going all in every hand. And that's how he ran his companies. I mean, both tests.

Megyn Kelly
But then he won. Wasn't the story in the book that he kept doing that he kept losing all in again losing. He'd get more chips, lose. And he kept doing it until he won. And then he was like, I'm done.

Speaker B
No, you will. You will not. He eventually, I don't know if he ran out of money or he won a small pot and then gave up, but that's, that's not a winning poker strategy.

Megyn Kelly
Okay. Okay, good. So don't try that at home.

Speaker B
I dont recommend the Elon kamikaze poker strategy.

When youre in business, though, and youre a venture capitalist, youre looking for founders that have an extremely high risk tolerance, that are willing to go all in on a contrarian idea for 10, 12, 15 years because it might be worth 1000 x year investment, and you can only lose one time your investment.

Elon has done that twice with Tesla and SpaceX, which in Silicon Valley understandably gives you kind of godlike status there financially. The bet on Twitter seems like it probably won't be great, however, as a bet in terms of cultural influence, as much as he might get made fun of by the establishment media. I mean, Twitter, I think, is part of what has caused a vibe shift away from left progressivism toward a more conservative direction.

I mean, I think Elon's not a central, he's actually a full bodied conservative now. He endorsed Trump.

But lots of prominent journalists, center left journalists, are still on the platform. It's still the best forum for many topics like sports, which I follow. It was fun to follow during the Olympics. So I think, look, even the Twitter bet, I think, can't be totally dismissed. And the same journalists who would say, oh, this is such a disaster, Twitter are still on Twitter and still using Twitter to, like, drive engagement to their platforms.

Megyn Kelly
They are. They all said they were leaving and they went over to that Mark Zuckerberg thing and then we never heard about that thing again. And they were all back on Twitter. I see them all the time.

Speaker B
I mean, politics doesn't really work without conflict, and journalism doesn't really work without conflict. And so having threads or an alternative where only the left was there or blue sky or whatever, it's just people, I don't know what metaphors I'm allowed to use in the show. It's just people patting themselves on the back, I guess, is how I put it. It's not very, it's not very interesting. Yeah, a circle jerk was a term I was going to use.

Megyn Kelly
Yeah, I got it.

Speaking of Elon's political views, he did speak to that in the interview with Trump last night. Here's a bit of it, six.

Speaker B
If you look at my record, it's. I've actually been, I'm not like, they try to paint me as, like, a far right guy, which is absurd because I like making electric vehicles and, you know, solar and batteries, helping them with the environment. I supported Obama. I stood in line for 6 hours to shake Obama's hand when, when he was running for president. I call myself, you know, historically a moderate Democrat. Democrat. And. But now I feel like we're really at a critical juncture for the country. So this is to people out there who are in the moderate camp to say, I think you should support Donald Trump for president.

Megyn Kelly
All right, Nate, I have a, I have a crazy prediction for you. I think in four years that's going to be you. I can see your eyes starting to open. I've been watching your evolution on x, and I see, I see you. You are going from somebody who is committed on the left, New York Times guy, to more heterodox. You challenged a lot of the COVID lockdowns and the madness. You see the lunacy on some of these, you know, media stories. That's my prediction. In four years, you're going to be sounding just like that.

Speaker B
I, I would be surprised because I think, in part, we've seen a, some acknowledgement on the left that they need to course correct a little bit. We have seen a decline in wokeness in the past four years, in my opinion. We have seen colleges like Harvard bring back standardized tests and more requirements for attending school there. We've seen outlets like the New York Times, I think, understand that they want to have a broad audience, probably not conservatives, not Trump fans, but broad from left to center right. So I've seen some, you know, some course corrections, I think, and because what I want is, like, I don't think that, like, questioning authority or being skeptical of the accumulation of power, I don't think that should be right coded or conservative coded. Right. Maybe it should be left coded. I don't know. But, like, you know, the fact that, like, oh, you know, questioning the experts is now seen as being something which is very right wing. I mean, that used to be a value I associated with skepticism, a value associated with liberalism.

And I can get to, if you want to get into political theory about, you know, I call myself, I'm a liberal, but I'm not on the left.

And I hope that for a long period of time in american politics, there's been a coalition between liberalism, which is an enlightenment political tradition, and the left that might be breaking down to some degrees. But I don't find, like, you know, Elon's political turn very appealing. For example, he's also tweeting out things that are misinformation. And he's gotten, like, red pilled in a lot of ways. And I think I'm truly independent. And like I said, I'm a Kamala Harris voter this year. There are Republicans apart from Trump that I would undoubtedly find more appealing.

But I know it's a cliche.

I feel like I have stood in place and other people have abandoned their values a little bit. I think my faith in institutions has gone down a little bit with the COVID things and some of things happening in higher education and so forth. I mean, there have been a lot of scandals in the capital, church, for example. There are good reasons why people have become less trusting of institutions and authority, and I'm sympathetic to those. There are certainly more people in my world that have the permission structure to vote for Trump has opened up in my kind of poker playing, risk taking world that's opened up. But I am not with the program myself, and I don't think I will be in four years.

Megyn Kelly
I mean, I've seen this happen to a lot of people. I'm just saying it's my prediction, it's my statistics and probability, which, again, I haven't taken since 10th grade. So take us with a big grain of salt. But I see you on an evolutionary path that I've seen many times, and I do think you're right. The ground underneath your feet shifts. I mean, I really don't see myself as feeling any different about my issues than I felt when I was at Fox News. And people used to say, oh, she's a centrist, she's a moderate. Now they say I'm somebody on the far right. Somebody even says, alt right. I I don't even know what that is anymore. But, you know, if being against children cutting off healthy body parts without their parents permission, it makes you all right, then, okay, whatever. You can call me what you want.

You know, some of us have got our core issues. Let me just ask you. Can I just ask you, and I want to talk more about the book, but can you explain to me as a Democrat how you could vote for, for Kamala Harris when we've got the open border?

And, I mean, these are my two biggest issues. Not in this order. They got the open border and you've got the child transition problem. I mean, you've got, literally, you've got kids cutting off healthy body parts and being sterilized by regimes in states that just think it's fine even without parental permission, schools hiding it from parents, life altering, life changing. I realize it's a small segment of the population, but to me, it's just like, these are children. How could, how can we support any party that will facilitate this? Not, not a judgment on you, just want it explained.

Speaker B
I mean, I'm not a Democrat. I'm actually registered Republican. I registered as Republican in 2016 to vote against Trump in the GOP primary in New York because I live in a very blue district. So your vote has a lot more leverage if you're a Republican in my district.

I have no opinion on those other topics. I'm not a Democrat. And I think Trump has some paths that are more obvious. I mean, I think inflation and immigration, I think people in the media overrated on both sides. The culture war stuff a little bit.

I know it gets people riled up.

But if I were Trump, I'd talk about immigration and Harris's left wing record in California. I'm running in 2020 and not go for the culture war stuff as much.

Megyn Kelly
Okay. But that doesn't answer.

I'm trying to figure out how a relatively moderate, reasonable, smarteen, likable guy can pull the lever for somebody who's going to facilitate more of this. You know, is it. Is it just that it's not a priority? It's not, like, on your list of things that make you pull the lever for one person or the other. It's.

Speaker B
It doesn't affect. It doesn't affect me in any way. And I think, you know, I kind of lean a little bit libertarian, and I understand that you have issues when it comes to children, but, like, it's just not. It's not something. It's something where there is more heat than light. It's not an issue that, you know, I have trans friends, and I think it's a complicated issue. I think lots of movements go too far in different directions, but it's not my issue. I mean, you know, for me, the disqualifying issue for Trump is January 6.

I just think it's fundamentally disqualifying.

You know, in the same ways I thought that Biden's age was also disqualifying, was planning to vote libertarian or some other third party.

You know, you could argue that Trump's age is also disqualifying. I would like to see a constitutional amendment where you can't be inaugurated when you're past the age of 75.

So to me, it's a matter of. To me, it's a matter of January 6 disqualifying, 86 year old present disqualifying. Now, I have someone who's qualified, and I'm certainly not on the far left. I'm very much in the center. But, like, if you eliminate one choice, then you have one other choice, and that's the choice I'll make as an irrelevant voter in New York.

Megyn Kelly
I know. Well, I've been an irrelevant voter in New York my whole life. So I understand, though now I'm an irrelevant voter in Connecticut. I'm. I'm not. I'm not trying to put my value system on you. It's just those things are so important to me. I hit my head against my desk, not understanding why people don't see it as I do. And then I remind myself, not everybody sees things as you do. Um, just for the record, though, it's not about trans people. It's about the children. Um, okay, let's talk more about the book, because explain to me what it means to be a Riverian. I want to get the pronunciation right because I've only heard. Yeah, I've only seen it written as opposed to hearing you speak it.

Speaker B
Yeah. Riveria means a resident of the river, which are these people who combine being very analytical, quantitative with being really risk taking and competitive. So that's the canonical example of a poker player.

They are really good with math. They're also good with reading people in some particular way, at least, but they really want to win. I mean, poker players are insanely competitive. And it's also the mindset when I talk to venture capitalists and founders in Silicon Valley, it's a similar mindset when you talk to people in the crypto boom. Similar mindset. Or obviously things like sports betting, for example, it's a personality type that is very high variance, meaning very high upside. So maybe you are the richest person in the world, or maybe you're Sam Bankman Fried, who's the antihero of the book, and shows what happens when these values are taken too far. But for better or worse, it's my world. It's a guided tour of my world. And the hope is that I can kind of let you see people through their own eyes, through fair and balanced. That's a cliche, reporting where I talk to 200 people for this book.

I believe, as an author of the principle of show not tell. Right. I'm not going to beat you over the head with something. I'm just going to give you good reporting people, in their own words, a lot of fun context, and anecdotes. I'm not trying to weight the dice too much, and I think it does a really good job with that.

Megyn Kelly
Again, the book is called on the. The art of risking everything.

Is it true you yourself won some $750,000 in the year that you were writing this book, playing poker in the three years?

Speaker B
And that's gross profit, not net, right? That means how much money you, if you don't count all the losses, right. You win 750k. But no, I was in the top 300 in the global poker index rankings worldwide for a period of time, which is pretty cool to be doing it in my spare time. Um, you know, there's a lot of luck involved in the short run in poker. But no, I love the game, and I like it because it is both a strategy math game and a people game. I mean, at the end of the day, um, if you can. If you can look at somebody and, you know, I used to think this was overrated, the physical reads or the vibes thing. But, like, when you get thousands of hours of training, of looking at people when they're playing a poker hand, and, you know, is their heart beating in their neck? What are their hands doing?

Their eyes. The eyes. People know how to lie through their eyes, but they forget about the rest of their body, their posture and things like that.

So talking to some of the best poker players in the world in the book, as well as being proficient on the math side of things, certainly I've gotten to a point where I'm pretty competitive and poker is unique in that I'm terrible at basketball, so I wouldn't be allowed to anyway. But I couldn't go and play a Stephen Steph Curry and LeBron James at a pickup game of basketball. Right. In poker, you can register and pay your $10,000, go to the cashier's window, main event, wheelchairs of poker, they'll give you a ticket and you can sit down at the table and the best poker players in the world might be there battling against you. So it's a very lowercase d democratic enterprise, and it's kind of my safe space is my joke.

Megyn Kelly
What's the game? What's your game of choice?

Speaker B
I mostly play Texas hold'em. That's the, that's the most popular game. It's a two card game where you get two cards face down, so you have no information about what someone has apart from their betting patterns.

Megyn Kelly
Now would your methods work against, say, my children? I mean, I have a 14, a 13 and an eleven year old. They love to play poker.

Would it, would they work against a child? Right. Who's, they probably wouldn't be bluffing a whole lot of the time, but they're reading their emotions is such a different game.

Speaker B
Kids are pretty good at deception, I think. Actually, I have a friend who wrote a book about, like, you know, if you apply game theory to parenting, because sometimes when you have kids, I don't have kids myself, but like, you know, if you have kids in your, in your extended family, you're doing a little bit of negotiating with them sometimes, right? I'll offer you x if you're behaving and otherwise we'll do y. And here's the, here's a carrot and here's a stick. I think your kids might be pretty good at poker. Bacon.

Megyn Kelly
I read parts of the book and I think I saw you citing, forgive me, I can't remember his first name. Nash, from a beautiful mind from Princeton who came up with game theory or the whole, you know, it's all detailed beautifully in the movie played by Russell Crow. But is his theory actually important to your poker playing abilities and your assessment of your competitors?

Speaker B
Yeah. So game theory is basically about what are the conditions that emerge in a highly competitive world. If I'm trying to apply my best strategy and you're trying to apply yours, then what's a prediction for where we end up? And this is the whole basis for poker. The reason why you need bluffing in poker is because you need an incentive for your opponent to pay you off when you claim to have a strong hand.

That comes straight out of game theory. And game theory is kind of one of the foundational concepts of the book. But I like it because, like I said, it gives people credit for being intelligent. Sometimes I think politicians and political parties assume that they're the only smart party in the room and the other party is stagnant and stuck in the mud. And most recently, that assumption hurt Trump by being very flat footed when the ticket was changed and underestimating Democrats desire to win the election, even if it meant.

And to be clear, people say, oh, Joe Biden kind of nobly stepped aside. I mean, that's stretching it a lot, right? Every ounce of pressure was put on him by Nancy Pelosi and others, which I think was the correct strategic move, but there was a lot of pressure applied. And by the way, in 2020, Biden got a lot of help from the party. Jim Clyburn endorsing him all, you know, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg dropping out and endorsing him and really boosting him very quickly after South Carolina and after Super Tuesday. So if the party wants you in, the party wants you out. And the Democratic Party, for better and worse, is a stronger capital p party than republican party. The Democratic Party gets what it wants. It might not always want the right things, but, but, you know, it's, it's been smarter about, about candidate choice, I think.

Megyn Kelly
Oh, I think the Republicans are jealous of that. I don't think you're wrong about that at all. I think a lot of republican voters who are much more individualists in these moments are more like, damn, why can't we behave more like them? That you get out of line, you get the stick, you get back in line, then they have an election and they win. But I think team Trump should be listening to this, especially as they go a little closer to that September 10 debate and lower expectations for her, which is not smart. Go back and look at her debate against Mike Pence. She was good. She was strong. I just watched it on Friday.

They should be reading your book. Everyone should be.

It's called on the Edge, the art of risking everything. Great stories in there about so many colorful characters. Nate, thanks for being here. All the best to you, of course.

Speaker B
Thank you, Megan.

Megyn Kelly
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Megyn Kelly
Fresh off his massive x conversation with former President Donald Trump, there are calls from abroad to censor and potentially arrest Elon Musk. Because, you know, hate speech over in Europe is illegal.

You can't say offensive things or you might get arrested.

And God forbid you platform Donald Trump and he insults some. This is so ridiculous. Elon responded perfectly. I'll tell you exactly what happened. And college students are returning to campuses this month, and there's a new plan for how they will show their anti Israel support for the Palestinians cutting class. Yes, they're going to be doing massive, like sick outs, I guess, which seems like an improvement on Tentafada, but we'll see.

Commentators and co authors of the fantastic book stolen Youth, Bethany Mendel and Carol Markowitz join me now to discuss all these and more headlines. Bethany, Carol, welcome back.

Bethany Mandel
Hi, Megan. So nice to be on with you again.

Karol Markowicz
Thanks for having us.

Megyn Kelly
Likewise. Okay, so I love that Elon so upset the people over in the UK and Europe writ large that the EU is actually warning him, this is ahead, ahead of the Trump conversation, saying, you better watch it tonight that you can't have any incitements to violence or hate speech or racism.

And if you do, you could potentially be arrested. You're having that exact plan and arrest argued for in the paper today, suggesting, really, that's the only thing that will make Elon listen to these international, in particular, european constrictions on speech. And Elon's response to this was to fuck off. I'll get the exact quote. It was better than that. I think it was, to be precise, go fuck your face. That was.

Karol Markowicz
Is it something about us that we just, like, let loose?

Bethany Mandel
I love when Megan curses with us.

Megyn Kelly
I know.

Karol Markowicz
Every time.

Megyn Kelly
I'm just trying to be accurate in my reporting of the story. Bethany, so how did you think it went last night? And what do you make of the advance leftist freak out about the platforming of hate?

Bethany Mandel
Zachary, he's one of the candidates running for president. Do people really think that he shouldn't be platformed? What country are we living in? And, you know, I love Elon using the f words. I love him using it creatively. That's all terrific. But, you know, I would say that we fought a war not to care what Europe. Thanks. And so here we are. We shouldn't worry about their insane anti free speech laws because we live in America. Elon is now an american.

This is not our problem anymore that you guys can't, you know, deal with the fact that people will say things that you disagree with. We're a little bit past that. I listened to the whole thing on X. I thought it was really excellent. I'm actually, I don't love listening to stuff like that. I'm not like every interview politically, I listen to that. I don't. And I really enjoyed that. It was casual, it was smart. I heard things that I never heard before from Donald Trump. I thought it was excellent. Well done. Lots of listeners. I mean, they're saying they had a billion listeners, ultimately impressive and amazing.

Megyn Kelly
I feel the need to correct the record on that. They say there were a billion views. We don't know what that means. I think a view is counted even if you scroll right past it. I mean, there's no way there were a billion views of that, actual watches of that last night, because if there were, it would be the lead story in every newspaper and publication worldwide. Like, that's just not, that's not, but I'm sure there were tons of eyeballs. It's just this is an ex marketing device that they use to try to boost whatever big thing they're getting behind.

That's just for the record.

So, Bethany, by the way, it was in the Guardian, and it was an ex Twitter boss who said he has a way of grabbing Elon's attention if he keeps stirring unrest. He doesn't like some of his posts on what's happening in London. Get an arrest warrant. And same thing, talking about how it was clear from my eight years at the platform that there's something lost in translation between british interpretations of free speech and those parroted by a us libertarian interpretation of the concept. Correct, sir. Correct. There is, there is something lost in translation. It's called the US Constitution. And that's what we follow over here. We don't follow your definitions of a hate speech. Thank God. As Carol points out, whole war was fought to get rid of those shackles.

Karol Markowicz
Yeah, no, thank God. I mean, what was really interesting to me was that all of these folks who were, you know, preemptively up in arms about anything that could be said, none of them have listened to Elon Musk's talk. They've never listened to Donald Trump talk. They have this caricature in their minds of what these folks sound like that has no basis in reality. And I was really disturbed watching a lot of these individuals who like Dei is their entire personality. They're always talking about inclusivity. And as soon as they actually heard Elon Musk speak, they said, oh, this is rambling. He sounds like an idiot. He's on the spectrum. He talks about being on the spectrum. And all of their sweet talk about inclusivity went out the window the second an actually autistic individual got onto a platform in which he could speak freely. I thought it was really disturbing and really instructive about how, how committed they actually are to inclusivity.

They're not.

Megyn Kelly
But don't forget Bethany Joy. This is the joy party. It's having such a good time.

Bethany Mandel
I just want to add also that a Washington Post reporter also tried to shut down this conversation. He asked Corinne, you know, the spokeswoman at the, at the White House.

Megyn Kelly
Oh, we have this. Hold on, Carol. Let me play it. Let me play it. And then you react on the back end. So, yes, for the audience, this is a Washington post reporter at the White House press briefing asking Karine Jean Pierre one of the dumbest questions we've ever heard. Here it is.

Speaker B
Elon Musk is slated to interview Donald Trump tonight on x. I don't know if the president is going to tune in. Feel free to say if he is or not.

But I think that misinformation on Twitter is not just a campaign issue, it's an America issue.

What role does the White House or the president have in sort of stopping that or stopping the spread of that or sort of intervening in that? Some of that was about campaign misinformation. But, you know, it's a wider thing, right? Yeah.

Megyn Kelly
No, and you've heard us talk about this many times from here about the responsibilities that social media platforms have when.

Speaker B
It comes to misinformation.

Megyn Kelly
Disinformation.

That person asking the question is an idiot, Carol, an absolute idiot. I can't believe that he considers himself a member of the press and it works for the Washington Post. Go ahead.

Bethany Mandel
It's crazy. I mean, I think that we used to have at least some faith that these people weren't full on lackeys the way they are. But the last, like, two months have really opened some eyes. I don't just say people who are, like, political, like the three of us were really involved. I hear from people all the time that how can I believe anything that this media is telling me? Because Joe Biden was hidden from view. We were told he was totally fine. He's not totally fine. Then they just swap him out. I think all of that has really broken trust with kind of more Normie people who maybe don't follow things quite as closely as we do. And then hearing this kind of question in the White House, to say, how can we shut down speech that we don't like is just unbelievable. It's un american. It's unacceptable.

Megyn Kelly
It's a learner, one of the best known, most famous, richest men in the world, somebody who's created I don't know how many thousands, hundreds of thousands of american jobs. Elon Musk wants to have a public conversation with the man who was president and is running to be president again. And the question at the White House by the a member of the White House press corps is, what are you going to do to stop it? What are you, Karine, Jean Pierre, going to do to stop it and rein in the misinformation in this press conference, in this conversation that I wasn't invited to? I mean, he could listen, but that I'm not allowed to participate. See, I am the gatekeeper. That's what he's saying. I get to decide what the parameters are, and I feel really uncomfortable when people are going outside of my controlled circles, like, to x with Elon and having a free flowing conversation. Bethany, he's literally. You can see he's uncomfortable with it.

Karol Markowicz
Yeah, no, it's completely authoritarian. And what's been interesting, having Elon take over X was seeing, you know, we thought we had free speech in this country. And then watching the Twitter files come out and seeing, wow, they absolutely silenced people who were against all the COVID restrictions.

They actively worked with the government in order to make sure that people could not speak freely. But I'm thinking back to remember the tips line that Obama had during Obamacare. They've always footsied with this authoritarian stuff where, you know, report, don't, don't, don't be afraid to report misinformation. And we are the determiner of what misinformation is.

We saw that really, really balloon during COVID One of the disturbing things that I heard again and again, doctors, when we were researching stolen youth, was that they said that the medical associations were making it possible for them to lose their licenses if they spoke misinformation about COVID And then that definition of misinformation then spread to misinformation about reproductive rights. And you could not give misinformation about reproductive rights if you were an OB GYN. So all of this stuff, all of this authoritarian leanings, it has been going on for ten years, but really, really hit the gas during COVID It's.

Megyn Kelly
I mean, the conversation was fascinating. I said before on the show, to me, Trump was too rambly. He's just got to write tight. Trump, right? Tight. Keep it tight. It's too long. You can't follow. And I'm in the business, you know, so it's like regular civilians are like, I only have a limited amount of time for this. I got to put my kids to bed. I got to get ready for work. You got to write tight anyway.

But there were some fascinating exchanges. Here was one in which Trump was trying to make the case against Kamala.

Speaker B
Obviously, what's happening sort of overnight is they're rewriting history and making Kamala sound like a moderate when in fact, she is far left. Like far, far left.

Donald Trump
Worse than Bernie Sanders. She is considered more liberal by far, than Bernie Sanders. She's a radical left lunatic. And if she's going to be our president very quickly, you're not going to have a country anymore. And she'll go back to all the things that she believes in. She believes in defunding the police. She believes in no, fracking zero.

Now all of a sudden, she's saying, no, I will. I really want to see fracking the day that if they got in, the day she got in, she'll end fracking.

Megyn Kelly
Ok, now here's this is my lead up to the next topic.

So that was good. That was actually solid by Trump. Not rambling up and down on a point, hit her on a few different things. Good, good, good. But too often what we get is the rallies where they're these long, rambling, you know, 90 minutes rhetorical journeys.

They don't get anywhere near the pickup that they once got. You know, the channels aren't just putting them on tv like they did in 16 because he was a ratings machine. That's either not working anymore or they've just finally realized that that's actually not appropriate. I said it in 16 and I'll say it again, you shouldn't just take one side's rallies and put them on television. That's not, that's not okay for journalists. But anyway, he's not getting the pickup he wants. And the polls are not looking anywhere near as strong for Trump as they were. Shows a very tight race. The latest New York Times Sienna poll shows it's her race by four points in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. That's not good.

Enter Peter Navarro. Peter Navarro, I mean, a Trump loyalist. He went to jail because he was held in contempt of Congress for not giving up Trump state secrets. You know, his conversations with Trump around j six and he's out of jail. He's sitting in for another man who's in jail for the same alleged crime. That's Steve Bannon hosting war room.

And Peter Navarro, who's, I mean, he loves Trump, obviously had the following to say about Trump, the polls and messaging. I think it's very interesting.

Speaker B
Listen, the problem you have with giant figures like Donald Trump is that people may tend to tell him what he wants to hear rather than what he needs to hear. But clearly, the last three weeks have been difficult.

There was a decision made to debate Biden prior to him being crowned the nominee. And I'm sure there were good and bad pro and con reasons for that. But you can at least say in hindsight that that was a catastrophic error. It's not just less than 90 days to the election, it's less than half that to early voting. The question is, what is the strategy going to be? Roughly half of a Trump rally speech now is usually scripted. Red meat for the Trump base rally formula is simply not sufficiently focused on the very stark policy differences. Policy differences between him and Kamala Harris when Trump attacks Harris personally rather than on policy, Harris support among swing voters rises.

Megyn Kelly
What do you make of it? Does he have a good point, Carol, start with you.

Bethany Mandel
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, look, I think that anybody who wants Donald Trump to win would tell him, run on the issues, your support will rise. If you remind people that just before, you know, Covid, their lives were going great, economy was going great, the country was going in a good direction, no wars, et cetera. He has an argument to make, but he keeps falling back into this childish name calling, nickname giving thing that resonates with his base. But the base is already there. They're already coming to vote for him. He doesn't need that. He needs a swing voter who's saying, wow, I'm actually thinking about voting for Donald Trump. But then he keeps pushing them away. I think that it's absolutely correct that he can win those voters on the issues, but he keeps playing these games. I just don't know. And the funny thing is, you know, the Trump campaign keeps saying that Kamala's not talking to the press. And, like, they keep pointing this out.

Trump should maybe talk to the press just a little bit less. Like, a little bit less press a little bit more, you know, talking to union workers in Michigan and trying to get their vote, a little less talking to the New York Times.

Megyn Kelly
Well, here was Peter Navarro's prescription, Bethany, which is equally interesting. He says, first idea. The former president immediately begins entering into an interactive jumbotron policy dialogue with Harris. Once Kamala's words are played, then Trump offers his side. And most importantly, he says, Trump offers a set of concrete solutions. That's one. Two, before each rally, Trump should hold a press conference with different officials on different issues. Example, Rick Grinnell on foreign policy. And they get into specifically what happened during Biden, Harris, and what Trump would do differently were he to be placed in the Oval Office again. Third, insert his own remarks with american citizens harmed by the Biden Harris administration policies. Like in Pennsylvania, you'd have fracking workers who have lost their jobs. Like, put that in the middle of the rallies. That could get some pickup. Fourth, rallies must start on time and only last 55 minutes. Less is more. This is back to my right. Tight right type. What do you, I mean, Bethany, that's so simple.

Do we have a person in Donald Trump who is capable of taking this advice?

Karol Markowicz
So during the debate, we saw a disciplined Donald Trump that we had never seen before, that Donald Trump was killing it.

We have not really seen that discipline since the assassination attempt, unless I think, I think he's rattled. Someone can't shoot at your head and shoot you through the air and not get rattled. So I think there is definitely that component of it. I was really frustrated. And I actually, she wrote a column for Newsweek, and it came out today about JD Vance, because I think a lot of these criticisms can be made of the vice presidential candidate as well. He went on all the Sunday shows and he talked about how Kanal Harris, you know, all of his woman comments were indicative of the fact that Kamal Harris is anti family, which I think she is, and I think the Democratic Party is. But the fact is he sat there and said his prescription was a $5,000 child's tax credit. And, you know, as a mother of six, like, more than all for that. But he, he skipped the vote. There was a vote for an increased child tax credit a week and a half ago, and he skipped the vote. And so I'm sitting there thinking, you, you, you had the opportunity to do that as a legislator right now. Just like when people say to Kamala Harris, like all these lofty goals, you're in office right now, you could be doing these things. I say the same to JD Vance. And he gave another example of it was the child tax credits. And then Covid, and he sat there talking about all of the excesses that happened in blue states, and nobody talked about that more than the three of us. But all of those policies about masks were written by the CDC under the Trump White House.

I have, as a journalist, tried to figure out who wrote those policies. Why did they differ from the who? Because the who said that kids should be wearing masks, much older when they're more developmentally ready to do that.

I have never gotten an answer about why the CDC under President Trump differed so drastically from the WHO.

Megyn Kelly
And so when I hear control to Fauci and all of his, you know, band of brothers and sisters there who are so zealous. But wait, I do want to say something about the child tax credit because I will confess to you, I've paid almost no attention to that debate. But JD Vance raised it when he was on my show, and he keeps raising it. So I actually did start looking into it. The reason he didn't show up, I'm sure this piece is speculation. He didn't show up for the vote. It was defeated by the Republican Senate, by the Republicans in the Senate.

And the reason the Republicans came out against that child tax credit as proposed, and you still have a child tax credit, but they were going to revise and change it a bit, was because they said you've changed it from a tax rebate that you would get upon paying taxes to just a gift. It's no longer under the Democrats new plan linked to income.

It's like it's not going to be a write off under the new proposal. It's just going to be a gift which looks like welfare, which Republicans oppose. And there was a long piece in National Review by Marco Rubio a couple of months ago that really laid out a strong case for why that wasn't a good bill. They like, he likes the child tax credit and Republicans like, they're the ones who raised it from 1000 to 2000 and back in 17. But they were saying this is a bad proposal because it changes it into sheer welfare.

Karol Markowicz
Yeah, I mean, I think it was frustrating that he didn't show up and that there wasn't a conversation. And so they ceded the ground on this whole conversation to Democrats. They made it look really bad because they blocked it and there was no viable alternative offered on the floor. He just didn't show up and recognizing he is running for vice president. But it's not a good look when you're sitting there saying my solution is x and you don't show up to the vote and you don't have anything to say. Nor has he said anything publicly that I've seen. And I wrote a column about it.

Megyn Kelly
I got to hear more from JD and why I didn't show up. But it wouldn't have mattered. It went down by, I think, four or five votes. So his vote would not have made the difference. And I have to say personally, I'm against that. I am against that kind of wealth. Like, it should be tied to income. That's bullshit. We shouldn't just be handing out, with all due respect to you and your six kids shouldn't just get a check because you have six kids. It should be tied to income, which is what the Republicans did. It was originally tried to tied to income tax, sheer income tax. Then they added in your Social Security tax payments that it could work against, which was good, good for parents. And then the Democrats are like, let's forget all of that. Just give, like. And that just seems like a vote getting welfare mechanism that generally Republicans would not support and didn't hear.

Okay, so let's keep going. Because, because I just had on Nate Silver. He sounded the alarm the other way. Like, don't panic, Carol, was what he was saying. He's like, yes, she's got what I think it was a 56% probability of winning right now to Trump's.

She's 46. He's 46. He's 54. You know what I'm trying to say? 54, 46. Kamala, don't panic, though, because it's early and because she's still in the honeymoon period, which is going to go into this convention. But then things will settle down. Now the other side of the ledger is, as Peter Navarro was saying, early voting begins in weeks and this media seems determined to just run cover for her and all of her leftist marxist policies, not to mention waltzes walls, is until we get past the point of docking banking real votes.

Bethany Mandel
Yeah, well, I would say that like Nate Silver, I play poker. So when it's 53, 47 and I, I have the 53, I don't feel great about it. I don't feel great about it until the hands over. So I don't think anybody should be resting on any laurels on either side right now. I think there was a moment in the Trump campaign where they thought they were unstoppable and then obviously they swapped out Joe Biden for Kamala Harris, injected a new enthusiasm into the race for the Dems. Anything could happen. And look, they're going into their convention. The Democrats are going to have their convention. I'm sure they're going to get a bump out of it unless the Hamasniks take it over and really make it the disaster that it might become.

And the Trump campaign has to be ready for this. They can't just say we are comfortable with where we are. I think neither side could really say that. But I think for a long time the Trump campaign just was on a trajectory where they didn't think anything could stop them. So I don't think anybody should be comfortable right now. I don't think either side should be resting.

I'm them. I'm in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, over and over and over again.

Megyn Kelly
Don't forget to listen to Peter Navarro.

Bethany Mandel
North Carolina should listen to Peter Navarro.

Megyn Kelly
I do think this anti Israel thing could be interesting with these protesters. I don't, I think we will have protesters at the DNC. Do you guys think that they stave that off just by picking walls?

Karol Markowicz
No, absolutely not. What I think is interesting is at the RNC, there was a hostage family there that the crowd let a cheer bring them home. That, and they were, they were family, the parents of an american hostage. And that's what happened at the RNC. I think, though, if they, if a hostage family goes to the DNC, they need security. Not only are they not going to be cheering, bring them home, but the DNC need to make sure that family members of hostages being held in Gaza. Americans need to have security. That really is indicative of a real rot within the Democratic Party.

Megyn Kelly
You think they will have a family member of a hostage?

Karol Markowicz
I mean, they should, but who knows?

Megyn Kelly
I don't think so.

I think there will be protests in Chicago because, look, they already protested her on the trail post picking walls. So they're going to be there.

They didn't put that story to bed. And I do think it's interesting, though, Carol, that this plan by these young democratic socialists of America, those are the ones who are literally in the streets of New York celebrating on ten, seven, literally celebrating the death of all the Jews. Yay. This is before any retaliatory campaign. That's the group. So now they're getting their act back together because campuses are opening back up. And this new thing that I said in the intro is like a sick out of kind. And they're predicting, and I'm quoting here from a piece that was in the free press, no one can ignore large swaths of empty classrooms. No one can just turn around and plug their ears when the university can no longer call itself a university.

I'm not sure they're not there. I think I just keep going on teaching my class and ignoring.

Bethany Mandel
I mean, first of all, I wish I had come up with a cause that I could strike out for in college and not get penalized. I think that that's really where I went wrong in my college career. But that's really the thing. These colleges already have rules about attending classes or about how many classes you need to get to or about the work you need to get done. And yet they're overlooking these rules for these protesters. So at some point, the protesters are not wrong. The colleges are responsible here. Are they going to hold these students accountable for not showing up to class for days and weeks at a time, or aren't they? And I think that this is the problem in so many facets of our society. I think that we don't enforce rules that already exist. We don't enforce laws that already exist. I was in Singapore this summer not saying we should cane anybody. But, you know, everybody comes back from Singapore saying, oh, it's so clean, it's so nice, it's so law abiding. They have largely the same laws about littering and everything else that we do. They just enforce those laws. So the colleges need to understand that we're going to be looking at them and saying, are you going to enforce the rules? Or do these protesters get a pass for not going to class for weeks at a time?

Megyn Kelly
Yeah, Bethany, because I don't, that won't have the visual effect that the tentifada did, which I think she'll be very grateful for. Go ahead.

Karol Markowicz
Yeah, no, Rutgers University at the orientation, and I went to Rutgers and it's a garbage school and no one should go there. But it's for this reason.

They. They had protests at orientation and parents were like, what's going on? Like, they don't enforce policies at the end of the day. They need the visual, they need something. But so much of what all of these protests were was performative and it was about status and it was about, you know, you're in with the right line of thinking.

They don't actually believe what they were saying. And if they did, they would be in the streets protesting for Bangladesh right now. They don't actually care about any of this stuff. And that's what's most disturbing to me.

Megyn Kelly
That this is what Douglas Murray has been saying and he's in trouble over in the UK. They're trying to cancel him yet again. I mean, truly, there's no more courageous, effective truth teller in the world than Douglas Murray. He's my number one. I listen to him with bated breath. I try not to breathe, I try not to let my stomach growl. I just listen like I have to take every word of this in. Everything he says is so spot on. And one of the things he was saying was that if this really were about their heartstrings being pulled for the poor Palestinians, we would see protests everywhere. We'd see protests in yemenite, we'd see protests in China, where they're undertaking a genocide against muslim Uighurs. None of it that Lebanon. Yeah, over and over. It's about Jews, and they'll find a different reason to tell us that we need to hate the Jews, and the Jews are bad, depending on the news cycle. But he has seen through that and he's also been very critical of the UK immigration policy. And so now his haters are trying to blame what's happening in the UK streets on him. We can get into that in more detail.

Bethany Mandel
Yeah. I think that what they're doing to Douglas Murray is indicative of how afraid they are of his arguments. His book that came out, I think it's several years ago now, he's getting in trouble for a book that predicted the problems that Britain was going to go through. And so him being kind of a fortune teller of where things were going to go, which I think was obvious to a lot of right thinking people, has gotten him into trouble. Going back to our first conversation on the show where, you know, they don't have the kind of free speech protections that we do. So a book written several years ago inciting violence today is something that potentially makes sense to, you know, the British left, and that's terrifying. And look, Douglas Murray is ours now. They can't have him anymore. I think we should make him american as quick as possible.

Karol Markowicz
Maybe that's Donald Trump, the first thing he should do.

Megyn Kelly
He should. That's exactly right. He, he was making the point, and we're going to get into this a little bit in more detail later this week. But he was making the point in an interview a few years back and promoting the book that he's sick and tired of these protesters coming to the UK or to America only to tell us how much they hate our guts and how shitty our countries are and how they want us to, I guess, obey Sharia law. They do actually say that in some of these protests. And he, in the perfectly indignant Douglas Murray tone, took on that, among other points. I'll just play you a little. Here's saad 18.

Speaker A
I don't want them to live here. I don't want them here.

They came under false pretenses.

Many of them came illegally and continue to come illegally, and we don't want them here.

And I'm perfectly willing to say that because it needs to be said.

If I hated Australia, hated the australian people, hated australian history, hated the australian way of life, broke into the country illegally and spent my time trying to undermine Australia, why should I be in Australia?

Speaker B
Why?

Speaker A
What would I have brought the country? What benefit? What moral benefit? What financial benefit? What social benefit is? You'd have brought no benefit.

So why just hope that those people are not in large enough numbers and keep your fingers crossed and put it off for another day?

I think we have to start saying very clearly, if you don't like it here, go.

And if you don't like it here and you intend to make it worse, we will make you go.

Megyn Kelly
Yes. Yes.

Bethany Mandel
So insane. Yeah.

Megyn Kelly
Yep.

Karol Markowicz
I mean, the same with all these campus protesters here on, on visas.

Megyn Kelly
Yes.

Karol Markowicz
That's.

Megyn Kelly
So Douglas Murray is a threat because he's such an effective truth teller and he just keeps saying more truths which bother, you know, the leftists, but he's putting his thumb on exactly the right problem because it's not just a UK problem, it's absolutely a problem here. That's the guy we need making our case over on the right for the reason why we can't have four more years of Kamala Harris. We need those points being made. Bethany, you know, it's like, this is my frustration with Trump. You know, I just, when I hear him do the rambling wind up and it's fine. Like, Peter Navarro is right, the red meat for the base is entertaining, but he's there with him. Him, they're with him. You need those kinds of arguments being made about how, what a terrible position we've all been put in because of our open border and how now things are going to get more explosive. We just saw a woman get, get raped at gunpoint this week in New York in front of her spouse or fiance. We're going to have more just like it if we continue these open border policies. And her statements now that she's some sort of a border hog talk are not to be believed.

Karol Markowicz
Yeah. Yeah. I thought that one of the best portions of the space last night with Elon Musk was when Trump talked about October 7 and he said, you know, that can happen here. And I think that that's, that's a lot of why Americans are not paying attention to the fact that Americans are being held in Gaza, because we think that we're somehow immune. We're not immune. We have people coming over the border who are threats to national security, who want to commit another ten, seven here. September 11 was history for a lot of people, but there are a lot of voters who remember that day and they'll never forget it. And we need to put back, put, put on our go back machine and remember those moments, remember that feeling, because we can have that here.

And if we continue these open border policies, we're absolutely going to see a replay of October 7 year.

Megyn Kelly
You know, not only has she been pretty squishy on Israel and this whole conflict, but she chooses Tim Walsh. And in the news this week is the fact that he's, he's apparently pretty tight with this guy in Minnesota. Hold on. I want to make sure I get his name correct.

Imam Assad Zaman.

He is a quote of Hitler promoting Imam, according to the DC examiner, a master teacher, according to Tim Walls.

And he offered Tim Walls lessons over some period of time. Tim Walz admits they, quote, spent time together in which he was giving Tim wall some sort of lessons. And this is a guy who is apparently a big fan of Adolf Hitler.

And Walls has appeared with him several times. He's a local muslim leader in Minnesota. He has justified Hamas terrorist violence, reading here from a Breitbart piece which is quoting the Washington examiner. And this pro Hitler thing is because he shared a film on social media that is some 6 hours long and just kind of reimagines HiTlEr as just, I guess, in the way Tim Walz reimagines socialism as something that's just neighborhood totally. It reimagines Hitler is just something who's like some guy who's kind of avuncular, you know? I don't know, Carol, but every day we get a new piece of info that doesn't suggest is going to be a very particularly friendly administration toward our friends in Israel.

Bethany Mandel
Well, that's, I feel like absolutely right. And Trump hit the Israel point several times last night in a bunch of different ways. I mean, as you said, he mentioned he tied it to the border. He talked about the fact that if he was president, you know, he doesn't think October 7 would have happened, et cetera. It's on his mind in a way that I think that with democratic ticket, it's on their mind as like how much can we minimize this so that we don't get in trouble talking about it? And this is the kind of thing with the Tim walls and the, and this imam, these are the people that they're openly courting. And you can't deny that those are the people who are going to be disrupting the convention. I think that that's exactly where they're afraid to go and they're afraid to talk about this topic. So they end up, you know, having, having these crazies in the party, in the tent, interrupting them and screaming at them. Now, of course, the media has been papering over these interruptions and, oh, Kamala, isn't she so, you know, just so cool in the way that she shuts them down. But I'm going to have a hard time seeing her shut down a lot of them, and that's going to be a much tougher thing for the media to cover up. So I think that we're in a situation where I, a lot of the policies that they're pushing are specifically tied to not having these conversations.

Megyn Kelly
Here's Tim walls speaking about this imam. Bethany, he's on camera 15.

Speaker B
I would like to first of all say thank you to imam.

Speaker A
I am a teacher, so when I.

Speaker B
See a master teacher, I know it. And over the time we've been together.

Speaker A
One of the things, one of the.

Speaker B
Things I've had the privilege of is.

Speaker A
Seeing the things in life through the.

Speaker B
Eye of a master teacher to try and get the understanding.

Megyn Kelly
So he's a big fan of this guy who, for the record, this imam, after a one party leader in Minnesota posted on ten seven that he was beyond heartbroken to see what happened in Israel and that he knew some of the people who, and they were brutally killed or kidnapped. Kidnapped. This guy responded that the, the person expressing the sympathy and his group cannot be joined at the hip to apartheid Israel and still hope to count the muslim vote. That was in response to a ten seven post that was expressing sadness for what had happened. This is exactly the kind of thing that used to be able to ruin an entire campaign. But when you have all of the media running cover for you, it's fine. He won't even be asked about it. That, that's, yeah, that's the overwhelming likelihood here.

Karol Markowicz
So it's funny because Gabe Kaminsky at the Washington examiner uncovered this stuff within, like, I don't know, a week and a half since he was named the vice presidential nominee. So my question is, was he vetted?

If he was and this was found and they decided to run with him anyway? That's terrifying.

My suspicion is they thought that they were going to go with Josh Shapiro until there was such a insurrection within the democratic party that, God forbid they choose someone with the last name Shapiro, that they pivoted at the last minute to waltz and they didn't do their research.

The fact that they didn't choose Shapiro when the reality is a lot of his policies and public statements about Israel mirrored that of waltz is because he's jewish. There is a real fundamental problem within the Democratic Party, and we've heard Canalis say about these protesters. I understand the emotion. I understand they're coming from.

It's wildly inappropriate for an american president to be saying that when one of our closest allies is facing an existential war for its survival that can come to our shores tomorrow.

Megyn Kelly
Yeah. Not to mention the people she felt such sympathy for are tearing down posters of american hostages, like, not to mention, and is Israel hostages, including babies? And it's. Oh, I understand your anger really? Well, not in that context, no. All right. Stand by. Quick break. Back with more. Bethany and Carol, stay with me. I'm Megyn Kelly, host of the Megyn Kelly show on SiriusXM. 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 Doctor Laura, Glenn Beck, Nancy Grace, Dave Ramsey and 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.

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Megyn Kelly
So it appears that no good deed goes unpunished. Because even though JD Vance wrote this best selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, that was made into a film by Ron Howard that cast Glenn Close in the iconic role of JD's mammoth, Glenn Close is not grateful for any of those opportunities because, by the way, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a Screen Actors Guild award, because today she's out there taking shots at JD Vance because Hollywood leftists are going to do their leftist thing. She posted on her instagram on Monday a photo of herself and her cat. You know where this is going? The message was, Eve would have left a bleeding mouse head in the bed of anyone who criticized any kind of lady with a cat.

Now, of course, the media is loving it. Carol, you've got Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, Deadline, New York magazine, all out there with headlines along the lines of New York mags, which was Glenn Close and her cat. Bite back at JD Vance. To me, this is just so gross. You, you got all those awards because he told his family story and you played someone who is so important to him. And by the way, the whole point of his stories about her were to show you the importance of the most powerful female in his life, the woman who shaped him more than any other, to whom the whole book is an homage. But you can't see through that. You've got to essentially attack him as being a misogynist because of the cat comment. It's absurd.

Bethany Mandel
Zachary. It's sort of funny. Well, first of all, I would say that the Glenn closes of the world have to tell their team that they're still. They're still part of the squad. You know, I know I did the movie where I played Meemaw or whatever, and I know that that makes me possibly align with JD Vance somehow, but I want you to know that I would never, and here's my cat, and I will speak out against this man. It's a way of keeping them in line. Right? I think that's how Hollywood police is each other.

But, of course, there's no waiting for the media to be fair. And I think that they love covering this kind of thing. Celine Dion asked them not to play, you know, one of her songs at their rallies, and it was just all over. They just enjoyed so much covering these meaningless squabbles.

They can't cover what Kamala is saying. She's not really saying anything. So this is what they do instead.

Megyn Kelly
I just. I think it's just so nasty, honestly. Like, I had this Bethany, I've told a story before, but, like, charlize Theron and her friends basically cribbed my entire book for that movie bombshell. And she played yours truly. And then on her press tour, she just went on out and it kept dumping on me. It was like, first of all, you stole my book. You stole my very intimate story.

And I. You didn't pay me anything now that it was for sale. And then you, like. And you took all this time to play this story. You took absolutely no time to actually get to know what me. And then you decided to just spend your whole press tour dumping on me. Like, what the. Hollywood is disgusting. Just take your fucking award and slink away.

Karol Markowicz
Yeah, I mean, it makes them look bad at the end of the day. It's not. It doesn't. It doesn't impact my impression of JD Vance seeing Glenn close do that. I look at that and I think that's trashy. And that's a trashy move on all of their parts, on Glenn. Closest part, all of them. And all of this stuff is what makes people want to vote for Trump, because this, like, elitist, holier than thou, like, bullshit that they do makes me hate them and makes me want to see them lose. And so this is the stuff that radicalizes me. But in the other direction.

Megyn Kelly
Yes. I just feel, like, have the class to say, I'm going to sit this one out. You know, of course she's voting democrat. Nobody thought otherwise. But just, you know what? I'm sure she met him. There's zero chance she didn't meet him when she did that movie. Just have the class to sit this particular one. Not every fight requires you to participate. But you're right, Carol in Hollywood, she's got to shore up her bona fides. Like she's probably getting some incoming. Like, how could you play his grandmother? Right? And so she's got a telegraph I'm.

Bethany Mandel
With, needs to make a spectacle of it. That's, you know, that's how communism works.

Megyn Kelly
Well, we're not going to get the media to change anytime soon, that's for sure. I'll leave you with this soundbite from Michael Steele, who used to run the RNC, but he's a Republican like Nicole Wallace is a Republican. And both ladies are shaking their heads no immediately.

And now he's running cover for the fact that we're not hearing from Kamala Harris and according to her own statement, won't any time until perhaps September. Listen to him.

Speaker B
What has struck me since Donald Trump's.

Speaker A
Press conference is sort of the sort of highbrow nature of the press coming at Kamala Harris saying, well, she, in my view, whining that she hasn't, she doesn't talk to, she hasn't done a.

Speaker B
Sit down with us.

Speaker A
She hasn't done interviews with us.

Speaker B
And I watched that press conference.

Speaker A
And I said, well, when you start actually asking real questions of Donald Trump.

Speaker B
And pressing him, then that sort of creates a space of balance.

Speaker A
But right now, is there a real.

Speaker B
Need for her to sort of, you know, get the imprimatur of the press.

Speaker A
On her campaign and her efforts when she's having a very good conversation seemingly with the american people without them, a.

Megyn Kelly
Conversation with american conversation.

Bethany Mandel
Where is she having a conversation with the american people? It just, it's unbelievable to me that they could say stuff like that with a straight face, like what a sellout he used to be, you know, sort of a moderate Republican who would say occasionally smart things, and now he's become this sycophant on the left who will say anything. The media loves Kamala Harris. They're not going to give her tough questions. They're going to give her the easiest possible questions that she could answer with no problem. I would love to see her do a conversation like Trump did with Elon Musk. With Elon Musk, you know, anybody of her choice. It doesn't have to be Elon, she could pick somebody on the left that will. She could pick Michael Steele and they could have a conversation. I'd love to see her get into a long range conversation for over an hour talking about all kinds of things. Let's see that happen.

Megyn Kelly
We'll take what we can get, but it'd be better with adversarial media so we could actually learn something. Trump faces them all the time. Bethany, I'll give you a little word.

Karol Markowicz
I mean, if you watched JD Vance going into the line of fire, I mean, I didn't love everything he said on all the Sunday shows, but he actually took the time to spend in a sit down conversation with all three of those, of those networks. We will never see that from Kamala. And I'm hopeful that once the honeymoon wears off and people actually hear what she says, she is not a very strong candidate. And once people see that, I'm hoping that, you know, her numbers will go down. But she, I think she realizes that Biden made a mistake in letting himself be participating in the debate, and she's not going to let herself make the same mistake.

Megyn Kelly
Ladies, a pleasure. Thanks for being here tomorrow.

Bethany Mandel
You're so much prettier and smarter than Charlize Theron. I just want to add that 100%.

Megyn Kelly
I don't know about that, but thank you. I'll take smarter.

Bethany Mandel
Oh, yeah.

Megyn Kelly
Thank you. We're back tomorrow with the fifth call.

Thanks for listening to the Megyn Kelly show. No b's? No.

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