The Key Midterm Issue, and Vance vs. Cruz, with Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cooke, Plus James Woods on His New Album and Our Culture | Ep. 1413

Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every week day at Kneast. Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly, welcome to The Megan Kelly Show and happy Wednesday. We've got a great show for you today, legendary actor, musician, and all-around badass James Woods. We'll be here just a bit later, but we begin with politics. We are now less than a month away from election day. Time is running short, and President Trump is back on the campaign trail heading to San Antonio today to campaign for Embattled Republican Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton. The president's going to all red states, which is somewhat disturbing if you are a Republican because he shouldn't really be needed in Texas or Nebraska or some of these other states that he's having to go to, but such is the state of the GOP. Paxton continues to trail in the public polls in a state that Trump won by nearly 14 points just two years ago. Texas's Republican governor, Greg Abbott, is too busy. He says to see President Trump, he's in a tight-reo election race of his own. So he says he will not be at the campaign rally. He has a quote scheduling conflict. Obviously he doesn't think it will behoove him to appear in Texas with President Trump. This is the problem for, I mean, it's not really Trump's immediate problem. It's really the problem of the GOP, but once the House and/or the Senate go dem, it's going to be Trump's problem, which is why he's chosen to campaign hard for them in the last few weeks. And last night, there was a Senate debate. If you'd like to sit and look at this pen for the next two hours, you'd probably be more entertained than if you watch this debate in Maine between Democrat Troy Jackson and Republican incumbents, Susan Collins, just just look at it. It's pretty, has some blue marks on it, silver. Okay, that was more exciting than what we saw in Maine last night. We thoroughly went through this thing to try to find anything to show you what's going on between these two. We found a couple of sad options and I'm going to show you one. The race is super tight. I mean, it is razor tight, which is saying something since Troy Jackson is stepping his cousin. I'm like, I don't, is it me? I feel like that should be a deal breaker when you're reproducing with your cousin, but I guess not because it's super tight in Maine, according to the real clear politics average of polls, Susan Collins last night, emphasizing that she has opposed President Trump's tariffs. I'm sorry. I don't say I didn't warn you. They started arguing about road salt. Here it is. Troy mocked it, but I was successful in getting concrete pulp and road salt removed from the tariff list. Well, the manners can afford to pay their bills with a press release or a strongly word letter like Senator Collins keeps talking about. I didn't mock the fact that she got road salt back. I mocked the fact that what about everything else? We can't eat road salt and the thing about it is is that everything that she's doing with iron, war and stuff like that, there's going to be so many less people that'll be able for the drive that I'm not even sure the road salt is going to be worth anything either. How's your cousin? Joining me now for an NR Day, the guys from National Review, Editor-in-Chief Rich Lowry, and Charles C.W. Cook is Senior Editor-in-Host of the Charles C.W. Cook Podcast. Become an NR+ subscriber today to get all of their great content. What happens when a potential customer calls your business and no one answers? They might leave a message, but there's a good chance they will just call someone else. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo. Spelled Q-U-O, the business phone system that helps you stay connected with customers wherever you are. Quo brings your calls, texts and voicemails into one place so your whole team can see conversations, pick up where someone else left off, and respond quickly. It's easy to set up, it works on any device, let's you keep your existing number, and makes adding teammates as simple as you possibly can make it. Along with your business growing, you'll see your customer base grow too. When your team is unavailable, Quo's built-in AI agent can step in. It can answer after hours calls so leads don't disappear just because no one's in the office. Quo also connects with tools like HubSpot and Clawed keeping you and your workflow connected. Because look, every unanswered call could be a customer you never get back. Money's on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com/MK. Guys, welcome back. We're trying to get excited about Maine, really trying the, I got salt accepted. I guess I get what she's saying. I get it, but this is so boring and honestly, like, what is it? Why a state that's elected Susan Collins five terms now? Why would they be eyeballing the guy who's stupping the cousin rich? Well, it's a democratic year. It's basically a blue state, nothing. If you just listen to Susan Collins or look at her in isolation, nothing would suggest that she's a good politician at all, in fact, you think she's a very good politician. But she's really fortunate independent brand there, a real survivor. I think she's probably going to win this year. You know, she won six years ago when she was behind the eight points in the polls. So she's a real survivor. But the problem she has, she's no longer running against a malevolent sociopath with the Nazi tattoo, Graham Platner. She's running against basically a non entity. And this is kind of year when she could lose to a non entity. A lot of Republicans could lose to a non entity this year. I think she'll probably pull it out, but the polling is neck and neck. Mm-hmm. Okay. I'm done with Maine. I'm over it. It is disturbing for Republican voters, Charlie, that the president is now in his last minute swoop, going not to swing states, not to blue states where Republicans are running competitively, but to red states, like Nebraska, to help my friend Pete Ricketts and to Texas where he's getting the Heisman from Greg Abbott, who does not want to be seen with him. This as Ken Paxden was caught on tape telling donors, he knows why he's struggling against the man Trump refers to as James Tallahfreakow, listened to this tape via Axios from October 7. He could barely hear it, but you heard enough, he's saying it's gas prices. It's the war. Those are the biggest drags in his campaign and he doesn't know what's behind some of the decisions being made, obviously, meaning by the administration. So what do you make of the president's schedule and the tight races, gubernatorial and Senate in Texas? Well, I hit the other drag on Paxden's campaigns, Paxden, who shouldn't have been chosen. Yeah. He's a creep and a corrupt man who would, if he were in any other state, be definitely going to lose and may well manage to lose Texas and if you add in the environment, which is a big part of it too, it's pretty much a perfect storm. The first thing here is before you get to the war and the gas prices and the tariffs, all of which I think really are a problem, and Paxden's right about that, you also just have to remember that we are now in the eleventh year of Donald Trump as a public figure. In a most presidents do badly in the midterms in their sixth year, and by sixth year that usually means they showed up round for president one, then six years past, and then public was tired of them. When Trump showed up in 2015, he won an election, then he lost an election, then he said he'd won the election, then he won an election, it's very, very difficult to keep people on your side for that long. So you've got fatigued with Trump, which would be fatigued with anyone, although it's particularly pronounced with Trump because he's such a character, you've got the gas prices, tariffs, continuing inflation, not all of that's Trump's fault, some of it is, and then you've got the fact that Paxden is a bad candidate, who in my view should not have been picked over John Cornen, who had his own flaws, but not flaws worth losing a Senate seat over any year where Republicans are struggling, it's really difficult. The only saving grace in Texas, and I don't know if this will be enough to save Paxden, but the only saving grace is that they are running against one of the weirdest people I've ever seen in American politics. And James Tyler. Yeah. Yeah. Trump's got a great nickname for him. Yeah. I heard MBD say on the editor's podcast that every time he fills up his gas tank, he thinks about the war and Iran, same. I think that's true for most of us just because the I, the numbers are so iPod. I was always told that like I could just fill my car up with the regular unleaded, so that's what I do. But then somebody recently told me that for my car I should be having the nicer, you know, super. So I was at the gas pump yesterday and it was showing for the regular 499 for the super 550, 550, a gallon rich. I mean, these are big numbers and the average consumer is already suffering at the grocery store, on the rent or the mortgage, the insurance, the health, the medical payments, health insurance, and so on. Then you get to the gas pump and you're like, now that one I didn't have to have. That shouldn't be there. We had low gas prices. We went and fought this war in Iran, which is very unpopular, very unpopular now. And, you know, the president and the Republican Party that doesn't stand up to him is getting blamed. It has Harry Enten, who did a little back look at the feelings about the war in Iran, wasn't favorable, reporting the following on CNN today. Well, Kim Paxen kind of had it right, you know, look at these numbers. Okay, this is on gas prices. This is among 2024 Trump voters. Remember, 100% of these folks voted for Donald Trump, but in the key Senate state average, look at this. The net approval rating for Trump, the best he can do is one point. That is just one point more of Trump voters approved than disapproving my my gas prices. 100% of these voters went for Donald Trump. And nationwide, look at this. Among the Trump voters, he's actually underwater. He's underwater. The line is dragging the Trump voters underwater and taking them away from the Republican Party. He looked at the Senate and the House and found the same that Trump voters were preparing to leave and not vote GOP in part, large part, according to Enten, because they're so angry about those gas prices. Yes, a price is election, right? That's the road salt discussion in Maine is ultimately about terrorists, which are increasing prices. Prices of gas, price of diesel, now layered on top of that. So the economy is actually cooking on every other metric, but this is the one that matters to people most. What matters most is real wages. Maybe you're getting slightly bigger paycheck, but if you're getting less with it, that really matters to you. So this is the biggest issue in the election is why Republicans are going to have a very bad night here in a month or so. And you know, the terrorists, they increased prices at the margins. But the one thing the Trump had going for them form is the price of gas was low and then had the Iran war and the price of gas is high and the price of diesel is high. I would have thought if you told me, you know, five months ago, or whatever it was, that price of gas, 450, going into arriving season with midterm election coming, I would have thought Trump would have looked for an exit ramp, but instead he's demonstrated incredible. Stick to it in this year where he just seemingly doesn't care. He says he doesn't care. I think he does care. There isn't one Iran. He tried that. He tried that last spring with JD Vance and the, you know, memorandum of understanding it collapsed in about two minutes. Like you can't. There's no exit ramp when the enemy is just dug in and obstinate as the Iranians. Yeah, they wouldn't let him have it. So look, Republican pollsters, I talked to, I don't know whether they're right, but they're convinced that there's a big polling era in the Midwest because there's just no way to get rural voters to answer these polls. So some of them legitimately think, you know, Iowa and Nebraska, Kansas, these are mirages for Democrats. Maybe they're right, but if they're not right and or you get even more of a Democratic tilt at the end, sometimes these elections, they tilt one way at the end. It's going to be a debacle. Now, if they're right and or there's a little bit of a Republican tilt or coming home in the Midwest right before the election, then they can hold the Senate. I think a win for Republicans in this context, you lose the House and you hold the Senate. That that would be a good night at this point. Totally agree with you. Latest polling out today from YuGov, Charlie, they just released a new round in the seven key states show Democrats leading Republicans in five of the Senate races. Texas, New Hampshire, Ohio, we didn't mention that. That's supposed to be a red state now. According to these polls, Kansas and Michigan. The poll conducted September 18 through October 5th. They show in Texas, Tallarico's overpaxed in six points. Ohio Democrat shared Brown leads Republican John Hughes did by four points. Kansas, the Democrat Adam Hamilton leading Republican Senator Roger Marshall by three points. Michigan, they have L.C. Ed up over microaggers. One point, but our pals over at the Real Clear Politics podcast, you know, Bev and Cannon and Walworth say that in Michigan, L.C. Ed has been ahead in every poll like the whole time. He's up one, but he's been up in every poll. Now, in my experience as a political journalist, when that happens, that person wins. I don't remember an instance in which the person was up. There could be one point, could be two in every poll prior to the vote who then went on to loss. That's just anecdotal, but I always pay attention to that. Then there's Nebraska, which I mentioned. Pete Rickets down one point. I don't know. I feel like he could pull that out. New Hampshire. This is a bad one. The Democrat Chris Papis is leading the Republican John Sonuno by eight points. That one seems gone. And in Florida, the Republican Ashley Moody is leading the Democrat Nixon by five points. But that's the point is simply that's Florida. That's your state. Why is it even five point? Like how can we have five point race down there and do we? You skeptical. I know Florida better than the other states. Obviously, I would be shocked. I don't think Florida is in play. I expect those races to be ten points or more. So that one would surprise me. How about Texas? No, I think Texas could go. I mean, these are all different. Right. So Texas, we've discussed. That's a big problem. That's a huge deal. Ohio is an odd one. I mean, you're talking about Sherrod Brown. He hasn't been the senator before. So people know him. He held on for a long time. I think I'm writing saying that that's only for two years, which might incentivize people to vote for Brown if they want to send a message because they wouldn't be stuck with him after 28. I think as JD Vance resigned, I think it's only a two year before the next election deal. So that would help Brown if so. The really worrying ones. You mentioned Kansas, Nebraska. Michigan, you expect to go blue generally. I do think it's worried that else I had just doing as well as he is that that should push back the other way. That said, fundamentals do often prevail. You Hampshire, obviously not pleased with, but I never expect Republicans to win Senate races in you Hampshire. So I didn't, especially in a blue year. I didn't think that was going to happen. So to me, it's the Kansas, Nebraska, Texas races that are the ones that would raise my eyebrows. Florida, I sort of poll yesterday in Florida from an a rated poster, one of the best pollsters here. They just shows Republican, the blowing Democrats out across the board. And they have, you know, almost 10 point advantage among Hispanics here in Florida. The state as in 2018 just seems to be different at the moment. I don't know how long it will last, but it just seems to be against that trend. The, by the way, the gubernatorial race in Ohio has the Democrat up four points over Vivek Ramaswami to remember when we were saying like Florida in Ohio are officially red states after 2024. The Hispanic vote is tending. It's trending Democrat right now because their number one issue is everybody's number one issue. And they're not happy in the average voter. Yeah, they're, and they're blaming Trump and they're right in a way because Trump campaigned literally with the words he can fix it Trump can fix it about the economy at every arena he went to. So I mean, you know, he said he would and that he could and it hasn't really happened. He keeps telling them it has. It has, you know, like it's a great economy and like keep the Republicans in power. And it will and they don't seem to be buying that. Did you want to weigh in Charlie? Well, I just, I think, you know, Trump really does deserve some blame here and my assumption in 2024 was that if Trump won, he would have a rough two years because I thought that it was going to take some time to wind the inflation out of the system. And so my back of the envelope assumption for a long time has been still is actually all things being equal that 2024 to 26 will be tough, but I think the economy is going to raw in 27 28 and I think that could confound our expectations of the 20 28 presidential election. I think people assume that it will be really bad for Republicans. Maybe it will. But I have always assumed that was going to happen and people would notice. But then on top of what I assumed would be latent problems with the economy, you had Trump, he starts off with tariffs, race prices. Then he's obsessed with low interest rates, but you need to have higher interest rates for some period to drive down inflation, which is the thing that everyone is worried about. He's put all this pressure on. They did a tax cut. I was in favor of renewing the tax cuts. I didn't want a tax increase, but they extended them with salt and all these gimmicks. And then the war in Iran has been the worst of all. So he's made that two-year period that I already thought was going to be tough for him much, much worse. So he really does deserve a lot of the blame for this. And at the same time, instead of going around the country, and I don't know if this would have solved his problems. But instead of going around the country and saying, I inherited a mess. I'm trying to turn it around. It takes a long time. I'm really sorry. We're going to work it out. he's telling people they live in a golden age. And I don't think the economy is as bad as some people do. I mean, I just spent the weekend in Cincinnati, Ohio, went to a football game, went to an amusement park, absolutely packed, it's hardly 2008, but there are real problems with the economy, but it's not a golden age. And so he's telling people it's a golden age, instead of saying, I need time, he's essentially saying mission accomplished. That's just political malpractice. And so he does deserve a lot of this blame. That never works when you try to tell people it's better than they feel than they feel. By the way, how many matches of the word salt in the first 20 minutes of this show? Different kind of salt when it comes to the tax cuts. For a lot of, that's a theme so far. That means it's going to be a spicy hour. Rich, your own Jim Garrity says it's not all doom and gloom. He has a piece up where everybody should go subscribe and our plus member, where he writes that the Democrats are convinced in Kansas, for example. Adam Hamilton has an extremely good shot at knocking off Roger Marshall. The polling is closed. He says, but we're talking about a state that has as of June about 496,000 registered Dems, 891,000 registered Republicans. As he's basically like calm down. And he says South Carolina. I know Darling Graham is not that well known or that impressive, basically, is what he says. But she hasn't trailed in a poll since July. And he said, this is an extremely familiar narrative of this Democrat really has a shot in a deep red state that rarely pans out. And just for good measure, Garrity, never before. But as of today, is in the exact same boat as Rod Blagoiavich. Those two like two little peas in a pod. Blagoiavich, who's got his issues, but we kind of love him. I have to say he's an astute political observer. Rights as follows yesterday. Don't believe the polls. There will be no blue wave. Once again, fake polling design, not to inform, but to persuade and suppress turnout are misleading voters. I know what I'm talking about. As a twice elected Democrat governor and three time elected Democrat congressman, I never lost an election. Trust the people. They won't be fooled. Collins wins in Maine. Texas and Kansas State Republican and L. Syed loses in Michigan. What do you think? Him last year, by the way, and there's a reason why he never lost an election, right? Yet other problems. He's charming. He's charming. Got a natural politician. I look at Maine and Texas as real linchpin's here, because they don't knock off Susan Collins and or somehow Paxton holds on in Texas. Then you've got-- you're looking at-- you need something of a sweep in rural red America. You have to win Ohio. You have to win Iowa. You have to win one of Kansas and Nebraska. Probably you have to win Alaska. Maybe that happens, but I think that's really hard. But if Texas falls, and if the election were held today, I think it probably would, then it opens up the map in a big way for Democrats. So to Charlie's point, Trump made the classic mistake. Every politician makes this, but he makes it even to a greater extent to others, because he's so enamored of himself. 2024 wasn't about him. In part about him, he has amazing political skills in many respects. But it was about Biden and the failure of Biden and prices overwhelmingly. And people were pointing out in '24, you promised a lower price, and you promised to increase tariffs. These things don't match. You got to choose one or the other. And he chose the other, because he really believes in tariffs. This is 110% conviction on his part. But they increase prices at the margins. So people are going to be disappointed by the other promise. And if it's a horrible Republican night, that's going to be a huge reason why. OK, now, shockingly gentleman, you've never heard me do this before. But I may get a little blue on the program in my language, but it's not my fault. It is the fault of Carl Kenan, of real clear politics, the sweetest guy I ever meet in your life, who told a very dirty story on their podcast, which airs on the MK channel on Series XM. And it's about the following sound by all right. First, I heard you guys on the editors' railing about this, Charlie. I'm very interested in your take. This is the Trump sound bite that's being used to batter the president by saying he basically invited Iran to bomb Los Angeles and bomb San Diego in telegraphed. That would be just fine by him. Let's play the sound bite first. Here it is. And again, remember, with the words just artificial, it's a little bit high. It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. That's-- this is a very small price to pay. And it's going to be only $13, which is actually almost all going-- OK. Now, to me, it's very clear. He's saying, what do you mean Iran's not a threat? Let them tell us that when they take out L.A. or they take out San Diego. I've been covering the president very, very closely for a long, long time. To me, it's very clear that that's what he's saying. If he wanted to say, let's bomb Los Angeles, he would have owned it. He would have leaned in. He would have had fun with it. That crowd would have loved it. And he wouldn't have said San Diego, which is more red. But OK, so that makes no sense. But here's some of the freak out, Governor Newsom. Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should take out L.A. and San Diego. He's deranged and dangerous. L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, keep L.A. out your damn mouth. The Atlantic's Jamil Hill. When Trump eventually passes away as an L.A. resident, I'm going to keep that same energy, blah, blah, blah. Joe Scarborough, his crowd cheering on the possibility of nuclear destruction of two American cities and the killing of millions of Americans, Maria Shriver, and so on. You are failing to feel outraged. Tell us why. Because it's a lie. I think everyone you just mentioned, except perhaps Jamil Hill, knows that it's a lie. Gavin Newsom knows exactly what he's doing. Maria Shriver knows what she's doing. These people all know what they're doing. They know that's not what Trump said. Trump, meanders, Trump is unclear. Trump talks in a way that I don't like. I spend a lot of my time, Megan, as you know, criticizing Trump. I'm hardly a Trump whisperer, a Trump defender, a Trump apologist. I'm not even a Trump voter. But he very clearly, in any construction of the English language, said the precise opposite in that section than what he's being accused of having said. And it's not just the opposite of what he plainly said, given the literal words of the transcript. But it's the opposite of what he's been saying now for six months. I mean, the knock on Trump, the criticism of Trump, is that he was a guy who ran saying that he would focus on domestic issues, that he wouldn't get involved in the Middle East. Now, I know that's not always the case, because he has been hawkishan Iran. But that has been a vibe that he's put out there. And then the hit is, like every other Republican president, he thought the Middle East was more important. And he says that himself. I mean, that's his case every time, is Iran can't get a nuclear weapon. It's worth having high gas prices, because Iran can't get a nuclear weapon. And what he was doing there, and I don't know whether this is geopolitically likely, so I don't know whether he's scaremongering or not. But what he is doing there is saying, yes, prices are high, gas prices are high. It's artificially high, though, because we're currently engaged in a conflict to prevent Iran from being able to strike an American city. And what he's saying is, this isn't a structural problem with the American economy. It's not that we're not producing gasoline. It's that we're fighting this war. He's making a case for war, being more important than domestic policy. I get you can criticize that. You can say he betrayed his voters. You can absolutely say that he doesn't speak clearly enough and should do better as president. You can even criticize the crowd. I'm not quite sure what the crowd thinks it's doing there. People behave weirdly at political events. Maybe the crowd was cheering that. But that's just not what Trump was saying. And I think we all know that's not what Trump was saying. So what's happened here is this. Trump said what he said in the course of a battle, one or two minutes speech, where he waves around the point. Someone, Aaron Rupar probably, but someone like that, has clipped that little part of it. That then went out across the internet. Lots of people got outraged about it. They're addicted to being outraged. They didn't check it. They didn't click it. You're right, it was him. Yeah, so they then start talking this up and they get into high-dutch it. I cannot believe that the president said this. Then someone says, I don't actually think that he said that. In this case, by the way, that included people like Daniel Dale, a fact checker at CNN, who does a fact checker. That's the CNN fact checker. Trump ever in a positive light. Suddenly he says, I don't think he really said that. You had all these people, including me, who were very critical of Trump, including on Iran, saying he didn't say that. And then instead of those people saying, yeah, actually, I think we got this one wrong, they attacked the motives of the people who had heard what Trump said and weren't going to play the same game and was too late by that point. And then you've got Gavin Newsom, who's just loathsome, who's not only did he get all upset about it and start the political game, he started to think he was going to have briefings with the California Defense Organizations to make sure that the president come on, we all know what happened here. And it just drives me crazy, because look, this is why no one trusts the press. And it's also why Trump's won in 2024, because Trump does say outrageous things that need condemning, but just no one believes it. Because no one in the media is capable of distinguishing between what he actually did and what he didn't do. And this is a didn't do situation. - So, right. All right, so Carl Cannon said rich that. Except he was, he was saying the actual words, which is very unusual for him. He said, the problem here is not exactly, is not the Trump was threatening, you know, we should blow up a couple of American cities or encouraging Iran to do it. The problem was that he was in Nebraska trying to get buzz going for Pete Ricketts in this, you know, senatorial run. And instead all the buzz is about whether Trump wants two American cities bombed. And he said, he stepped on his D word. And then, then Bevin said, well, if you're going to say that, you got to tell everybody the story about Haley Barber. And so Carl told this story about Haley Barber, who apparently said once to Carl. The public understands that you, that you as a politician are out there all the time talking so much every once in a while, you're going to step on your D. He said, and they'll forgive you. They don't want is for you to take it out of your pocket and jump up and down on it. Classic Haley Barber. So is that what the president did here? Not quite. I don't think it was jumping up and down on it. He caught himself, right? He shouldn't have said, if you could go back, you wouldn't have said, let them, right? Let them do it. Los Angeles or San Diego was absolutely clear what he meant. And he began to say, that's a small price to pay as though, you know, getting L.A. and San Diego Nuke would be a small price to pay for something. And then he goes to this, corrects himself. This is a small price to pay, which actually connects to what he was saying earlier about gas prices. So this faux outrage reminds me very much of the coverage of the Madison Square Garden rally towards the end of the 2024 election, where because there was one ethnic joke told two hours before Trump took the stage. And because once like 40 years ago, the American Nazi party had a rally at Madison Square Garden, put aside that Democrats had political conventions there, JFK had events there. The famous Marilyn Monroe, happy birthday, Mr. President, was that Madison Square Garden? They said this was basically a Nazi rally. And if you actually watch the thing and watch Trump's speech, it was the most upbeat. I think it was the best speech he gave the whole campaign, totally disconnected from what you heard on Morning Joe and places like this. So part, you know, obviously they're dishonest and cynical. They also think they're clever. They also kind of feed off each other and they're kind of going for the headline or the news clip that an ordinary person who's only paying a quarter attention, because he or she has more important things to do, says, oh, okay, Trump threatened to nuke Los Angeles, right? They're deliberately trying to lie to people and it's disgusting. I don't think he's going to have much back one way or the other here, but we've been experiencing this for more than a decade now. Charlie, this just in, just for you, Gavin is watching and just to aggravate you. He has posted additional thoughts with him on cam on his ex-feed. Here is his latest messaging around this comment. So if you didn't think the November election mattered, just considered what just happened. The pressing United States, the same one who sent in the National Guard into Los Angeles sent 700 active duty Marines to the second largest city in the United States of America, just invited Iran to take out Los Angeles and San Diego, where by the way, over 130,000 active duty personnel are stationed are best and the brightest. This is not only madness, this is dangerous and it's deranged and the question is self-evident. Where the hell is Congress? Where the hell are you, Speaker Johnson? Mark O'Neill, the great JD Vance, where is your outrage? Find a backbone. Do your damn job. The absence of that's time for all of us to do our job and we'll do that. We're going to stand up this November and we're going to put an end to the presidency of Donald Trump as we know it. We will take this country back. Charlie, are you inspired? No, I really, I genuinely cannot convey to you the extent of my contempt for people who do this. And it's not limited to the left, this is a type in politics who know that they're lying, who know that the thing they're talking about is not true or is miscast. And they're not only make political hay out of it, but get all emotive and mortgage and say how dare you and start talking about puppies and small children and soldiers. I mean, this is such nonsense and maybe it works. I actually don't think it does. I think the average person is capable of seeing through it. I suppose it might drive turnout, jumping on anything they can at the moment. I know that's how politics works, but this sort of thing just makes me never want to pay attention to politics every again. I just want to get out of here. Lucky didn't send out alerts, you know, from the department in California, Donald Trump just threatened to bomb loss and raise the threat level. Where is Congress rich? Where is Congress going to do? I used to think, man, just quickly on this, I used to think that this with Biden, there were two things Biden did when he was president, and I remember having the same reaction. One was when the Democrats had convinced themselves, or pretended to, that George's new voting law was Jim Crow and they all went on TV and Biden made that speech where he said it's Jim Eagle. And there was nothing about this law that was remotely like that and they knew it. And the other one was when Biden was running and he said the reason that I'm running for president is because of the Charlottesville speech, right, which just was leaving aside that it was a mischaracterization of what Trump said. That was true. There was no one thought that was true. But there's something very creepy about people who will look you right in the eye and get all emotional talking about something they know is a lie. Yes, there is something creepy, you're right. Now I want to shift gears a little to presidential aspirations because we have news in both the Republican and the Democrat Lane. I'll start with you on this, Rich. Ted Cruz taken a shot at JD Vance. So JD Vance had made some passing comment about Ted Cruz. And then Cruz came out and shot back calling JD Vance insecure. He didn't. It wasn't direct, but it was clear, but here's Cruz in 311. Look, I think going forward, we're in the midst of a debate about who our party is and what we believe. And I think economically, we've got a debate. Are we a small government free market conservative party? Are we a big government nanny state party? Is this a party that has coalesced already behind JD Vance? Oh, no. There's going to be a full discussion about who we are and what we believe. Listen. Are you going to be a part of that? They'll be time to figure that out. I'll certainly be part of the discussion because I care deeply about economically, I think we should be a conservative party and an unformed policy. We've got a debate. Are we an isolationist party that withdraws from the world? Or do we believe in American leadership? And I care deeply about both of those issues and who the party is. Okay, so that was the sound bite that set the whole thing off. After that, Vice President Vance gave an interview to NBC suggesting Cruz was prematurely eyeing a White House run. Quote, it's really obvious to me that at this very moment Ted Cruz is running for president said Vance. At this moment, I'm not. I'm trying to help elect Republicans. That's what I'm going to keep on doing. Someone came Cruz who said the following in a phone interview with political. In my experience, people engage in political bomb throwing when they're feeling insecure. So he's welcome to make whatever comments he likes. I'm going to keep focusing on the midterms and helping us win an election day in the next 30 days. That was Cruz. So shots fired. Clearly, JD Vance was the first to say he's obviously running for president and Cruz did not let his actual loyalty towards Trump or fained loyalty towards Trump stop him from taking a shot at Trump's vice president. What do you make of the exchange? So Cruz clearly running for president. It's not that he's prematurely eyeing presidency now. He's denying the presidency for decades and decades. These two guys, they don't like each other. They have disdain for each other. There's also a deep substantive differences between them. So this is just the start of what will be a really fierce fight between the two ideologically personally, everything beginning soon. I think there are two things we may not be fully realizing about these midterms. After these midterms happen, the grains of sand and the hourglass on the Trump presidency won will begin moving down real fast within a couple months. It's going to be less than two years and a mixed metaphor, the starting gun begins in the presidential race to try to be a successor immediately. So Cruz is in this, obviously JD is going to run, you know, could be another senator to, you know, I think Rand Paul might run a Glenn, Glenn Youngkin or Brian Kemp might run. on a couple others. But these races are always contested. Even coronations end up being contested at some point. So I think JD will have a race at some point here, but obviously he's the heavy favorite at this moment. But Rich, the other possibility is that if Charlie is not correct about the economy over the next two years, and it continues to struggle, the American people continue to struggle, then JD is, he is going to have to fight for it, right? Because if Trump's poll numbers stay down where they are or God forbid for him and his party go lower, the, the challengers to JD and or Marco are going to be coming out of the woodwork. Are they not? It will not, it will not be a, a passing of the torch. It will be, it lots of torches running toward the podiums to debate and to fight for it. Yeah, I think it's going to be contested no matter what. It's still hard for me to see, even with the catastrophic midterm, say lost the six or seven Senate seats, that everyone in this race or most people in this race wouldn't still be running for a version of Trump's legacy, right? JD be emphasizing the populist aspect. Ted Cruz would be emphasizing the more traditional Republican aspect and both would have something, you know, have evidence, right? Trump has kind of straddles this, this divide, that's hard for me to see where it'd be so bad that you have a Republican saying, you know what? Screw it. We need something totally different. We need to turn our backs on this guy. That's very hard for me to see happening. Yeah, especially with Trump still in the White House. Very much so. Yeah. With the bully pulpit. Okay. No longer in the White House. I think much to all of our relief is Kamala Harris, but she's out there, Charlie, and she's talking and she is inspiring. She had this to offer on the Democrats go TV livestream where she was asked to participate and seems to have been working on coming up with more substantive messaging. Here's the latest, stop 13. There's so much power in this and there's so much power in each of you. You know, I have a saying, I have many sayings, but one of them is, you know, when you feel powerless, you are powerless. When you feel powerful, you are powerful. And we are powerful. That's her saying. That's her special, her special saying. So why does she need to vote? Why do they need to elect anyone? Because she could just feel powerful than she is. Right. Just a terrible message to get people out. Right. What's the name of she's the best, the actress from Best in Show, Jennifer. Oh, yeah. It's like getting another message myself. In any event, she's back, Charlie. And there's a big debate about whether, by the way, that was Democrat, out the vote livestream. There's a big debate about whether she can, should, and will, more more, you're starting to see think pieces from, you know, so-called mainstream outlets allegedly speaking with her own team, saying she's not going to. No, she's not going to. It's not going to happen. And yet, the Dems start in South Carolina for a reason that's exactly her constituency. Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom, your friend is saying if she runs, he won't win, which, you know, if you believe that, I don't know. But so what do you make of her chances of actually running? I think she thinks she's going to run, but I think she's going to be disabused of this notion early on, whether it's by people not giving her money or polling or the entrance of other people, I don't know. But I think she still thinks she should be president and that she should have beaten Trump in 2024. And we're obviously, that clip confirmed it once again, talking about somebody who doesn't know what she doesn't know. I mean, she doesn't know that she's a joke, or she doesn't know that she comes across like that. She doesn't know that these pearls of wisdom that she puts out are badly read fortune cookies. She thinks that she is someone and it's going to be quite hard to disabuse her of that notion at this stage in her career. She's failed upwards for so long. But I think she's not going to actually run for president because I think she's going to be told by people who don't share those delusions externally that it's a no go. I don't know. I had to bring the fortune cookie in it. I mean, unlike Kamala Harris, the Chinese tend to be smart. So it's gratuitous insult by cook over there. >> Wow, insults in the Chinese. I mean, insulting the people who write fortune cookie messages, which might for all I know be Kamala Harris. >> In fact, that would be a great, that would be a great restaurant. I go there just for the cookie. Only Kamala Harris profunded ease in the cookies. Here's another one for your rich. She had some thoughts about Kevin Kylie. Watch, sat 12. >> Well, this guy who was that guy and is still this guy and that guy. Come on now. >> Oh, the cracker. >> Vote it for that big bad bill. >> Oh, my God. This is a politician in California who's trying to go from a Republican to an independent. So that's, I think the problem is, she genuinely thinks she's funny. And she's not. They're never laughing with her. >> Yeah. Total lack of self-awareness. It's a weird combination. She's saying nothing at the same time. It bends your mind at the same time, right? It's trying to follow these vague contradictory totalologies. So look, usually you lose a presidential race. You're party never wants to hear from you again. I don't think we've seen that reaction to her yet. Maybe it's coming and everyone's just kind of being nice to her. But what else is she going to do if she doesn't run for president? So I think she's definitely going to run. Maybe Charlie's right. She flames out early like she did the first time around in 2020. But, you know, she has some appeal to black voters, really important in South Carolina. I think the candidate I fear most on the Democratic side at the moment is John Allsoft. I think he hasn't appealed to black voters, right? He's won in a purplish state. He's not as crazily woke as some of these other candidates at the same time. He's fiercely anti-Trump, which might be a way to appeal to the base without getting an insane cultural territory. He's going to win a pretty big victory in November. And he's pretty good communicator. And I think he's going to run. So that I think he's he's a real serious probably top three contender for their nomination. I'm guessing. Is anybody you fear on the dem side, Charlie? Well, I do fear him as well. And I would say as an aside that this is one reason you don't want to lose in, say, Texas, not because James Talleriko is Ossoff, but because when you break streaks, then people get into habits. And those habits are now that they're voting for Democrats in places like Georgia and Arizona when they haven't for a long time. So it's really important not to lose your hold on states that you win every time. The problem, John Assoff, I think I'm right. He's Jewish. And the Democratic primary electorate right now is really not very comfortable with Jewish politicians. As we've seen also in Pennsylvania with Josh Shapiro. So it's possible that they'll overcome that and pick someone more palatable, but that would worry me if I would John Assoff because his party's gone crazy. Senator, Democratic Senator from Georgia. Rich, I saw you tweet this out just before the show, the athletic, which is the offshoot of the New York Times. It's their sort of sports website has a piece just out shifting gears here entitled fever should part with Sophie Cunningham. She's too turbulent to be paired with Caitlin Clark. It begins this season Royce White showed up to an Indiana fever game while wearing a long blonde wig and a scantor freedom in a shirt that defined the word woman got into a yelling match with an opposing player at another fever game. Indiana attorney general Todd Rukita, not wearing a wig and Riley Gaines posted a video together inside the fieldhouse, essentially rehearsing a political ad before talking taking in a fever game. They all showed up to be a part of a circus, not to enjoy a WMBA game. They attended solely to antagonize and amplify a non-existent issue in this basketball league, all because of Sophie Cunningham. This was the season when the fever and even the whole Caitlin Clark experience took a back seat to a bench player with big opinions. So if the fever ever want to go back to being a basketball team again and follow the lead of rivals openly clashing with the forces trying to hijack their lead, then Cunningham has to go. He's preposterous. She didn't make this a big issue as an aside and ESPN profile, which just said men shouldn't compete against females on top level athletics because they have inherent physical advantages. This isn't a controversial view. The WMBA is not actually going to let any men play in the league. Players actually haven't been critical of her, most of them, because they know the truth themselves. But as such a woke league run by such woke people, they believe this is something controversial. And if this pressure campaign succeeds and gets to getting the fever, not to resign her, she's not getting signed by anyone else for political and ideological reasons. So she'd be out of the league. This is an attempt to drum her out of the league. And yes, she's a backup guard, but she has a great, you know, she's great from three point range. She's an asset to the team, but they They want to be done with her just because she said something that everyone knows is true, but it fends the political sensibility of a politicized league. Not only this, but this columnist, Candice Buckner writes, she's too combustible, too combustible. Her takes too turbulent to be paired with Caitlyn Clark. On the same team as too much, Clark by her presence alone already can't get through a season without being thrown into a, into gutter debates that pit white against black hate that appears even in the DMs of her own teammates, cunning him with only a few words, introduced new divisions. So the racial divide within the WMBA is her fault, too. We all know where this is going. Stand by. We're going to a break, but we will be right back with the guys. When it comes to supplements, we all know there are two things that matter that it works in that you can trust it. Rather than just tell you about relief factor, we often bring you what their real customers have to say. One named Jim said he ran out of relief factor, not once but twice, and both times his aches, stiffness, and pain came back. Once he restarted it, he says he felt better again. As Jim puts it quote, you know something's working when you run out of it. I know many people who have used relief factor and had it work for them, including yours truly. I took it from my shoulder and then I ordered it again and found real relief. They make it easy to find out if you're going to join me as a satisfied relief factor customer, and talking about how much it helps you tackle your daily aches and pains. Three weeks for just $17.76, not even a $20 bill, and you could be relieved of those daily aches and pains. Simply go to relieffactor.com or call 1-800-4-RELEAF. You see this thing works by attacking the inflammation around your pain and the actual pain itself. You're going to connect with their friendly local team and they will do everything they can to help you. And maybe you will be sharing your story with them and with me soon too. We are back now with our pals from National Review where you should definitely go and become a subscriber, a member, Rich Lowry and Charles CW Cook. So guys, I know you've been covering the Cornell 7, who I think we might need to start calling the Cornell 8 since the accuser herself has now been accused of being a sexual molester or a harasser and a salter by defendant number one, a guy whose name we now know is Matthew Ingalls. He's alleged in this proceeding that if the standard is you were intoxicated and someone had sex with you notwithstanding that fact, very intoxicated, then she is an accuser. She is an assaulter as well because he was the defendant who was passing out repeatedly during the course of three, some number one, which was between Matt Ingalls, John Newell and Jane Doe and she was aware of that that he could not stay awake and was continuing to perform sex acts at least in bed next to him shortly thereafter. And according to her own allegations kept trying to wake him up, according to his allegations, which he might not remember because he was asleep, but John Newell is one of his besties. Well much so he asked him to join their threesome, may have told him, but Ingalls testified during the course of the Title IX proceedings on Cornell's campus that she was performing oral sex on him while he Matt Ingalls was in and out of consciousness, trying to stay awake from from all the drugs he'd taken and the drinks he's had, he'd had. Cornell didn't take it seriously. He wrote a very accusatory letter saying, I knew you'd do this. I knew you'd only take her allegations seriously that she's the only one who could possibly be assaulted, not me. And now twist in the story, I mean real twist actually, he met Ingalls appears, according to reporting online, forgive me because there was somebody who broke it online and did a good job of tracking down who he really is. And then the Daily Mail advanced it. He is not originally named Matt. He's got a different name, I'm trying to find it here. And he's from the UAE Omar, his name is Omar and he is from the UAE. So Matt Ingalls appears to be a Muslim from the UAE where the Daily Mail reports he has returned to Dubai in the wake of all of this. Who could blame him? I looked it up to see if they have an extradition treaty with the United States and they don't, they don't. So Matt Ingalls is out of here. He got expelled from Cornell along with Newell and Jane Doe proceeds forward. But now the reason it's a real twist rich is not just because we're throwing Muslims into the mix for no reason, but the four men who had sex with Jane Doe, according to Jane Doe against her will now, it's not what she was always saying, are a Muslim, a black kid, an Asian and someone from, I believe, Portugal or whose Portuguese. So you got four guys who fit squarely within Tish James's identity politics, which will elevate them in the world of Tish James over a white young woman from the deep south who uses terms like y'all regularly, and I do think it's interesting. I do actually think this could tip the balance in the minds of somebody like Tish James. But John Newell is clearly black or mixed race. He has an afro and now the other main perpetrator is Muslim. This is getting very interesting. So what do you make of the racial identity piece of it and the fact that it turns out Matt Newell or Matt Ingalls accused her of sexual assault if we're using her standard? I think it's going to be hard for him to make that case just because he was the initiator in so many ways and when he woke back up, what's the first thing he says? Let me in. Let's have a four sum. And then when the guy who did the right thing shows up and clears out the room, he takes her to another room with another guy to have yet another three sum. Okay. But let me stop you there. Let me stop you there. I had that thought same thought and then I had another thought which was so does she. She said yes at every turn. She said yes. When he said you want to have a three sum, she said yes. And she is on the record as having said yes, like from her, she admits that she said yes and that she she liked this Matt Ingalls. She had a crush on him and then in writing after the fact told him, I really enjoyed my time with you and Jonathan Newell in the first twist. So all right, so already they're both there and they're both willing participants. What distinguishes them from that point forward? As far as I can tell, it wasn't Newell, sorry, I keep screened up. It wasn't Matt Ingalls who busted out the ketamine. That was Newell and he put it on, you know, his unit and asked her to snort it and according to her to the cops, she said, I figured I had already done ketamine that night. So why not? That's her. Now that they're in trist number two, he's not involved, but willing participants here, the whole way. I actually am failing to see the distinction between them. That I totally agree with. So look, the Jane Doe Ingalls thing, that's that's row this whole thing. She goes to the fraternity to see him, right, dances with him flirtatiously. He just could have had sex with her and we wouldn't be talking about this, right? He didn't want to know. Yes. Newell, we want to have a three sum for whatever reason. She says yes, because she's excited about that idea, but also really into Ingalls. Ingalls is there the whole time. And then after the room is cleared out, she goes with Ingalls for the other three sum because she's into Ingalls. And as you pointed out, the most pathetic statement, the whole thing is what happened to you and me, right? Because she was so into him when he clearly was not into her, except for as an object. So she said in the Cornell University investigation that we're now seeing heavily redacted, but she's pretty responsible and fair as far as I can tell. She said that he had a chokehold on her and not a literal chokehold. That's the one thing that didn't happen there in that room, right? But an emotional chokehold and she would do anything to please him. So that's clearly the motive in what was going on here. And just one last big point, you know, we have three big documents now that we haven't seen all of them. We've seen all of one of them, but we have her sworn statement a month later after she regrets it. Like let's throw out all the text and say, you know, she was just trying to make a light of something she was having a hard time processing, whatever. Her sworn statement that she attested to, that she corrected, that she apparently said in the transcript, I'm 100% certain about this, didn't elect any coercion, didn't say at any point she said no and she was ignored. And that seems to jive with this heavily redacted Cornell University report that says the first threesome that got everything started, she consented to it. And then there, there, it goes into great detail and unredacted parts about the ketamine who was taking it and why and how, et cetera. But in that, when we're past the second threesome as well, she's, she's talking to these guys, right? She's having conversations with them, they're asking, can we do it off your body? She says yes, that's something she says by her own account as well. So clearly, this is all consensual to this point. And then let's say that the third threesome is a black box for the moment in involved angles. So you're going to, you're going to tend to say yes, she did that willingly as well. The only thing that's different is the civil suit, two years later, right? And what are we supposed to believe a much more? more contemporaneous account that, of course, with other documentation or something she's come up with after people worked on her for years, after she's probably told herself now, I regret this, it must have been assault, and there's a lot of financial rewards potentially on the table, as well. Obviously, you believe the first document. I'm not saying this thing is case closed, but everything points to consensual incidents that night. I just think this is a very interesting twist, Charlie, because this guy Matt Ingalls is really forcing the system or tried to, and if he gets indicted, could potentially have to try again, to make them look at the double standard here. Because what we have, this is Jane Doe in her own words, okay, the police officer didn't interview with her, campus cops when she first reported it after she got rejected from their Halloween party. That was the day she turned. She was with them, nothing illegal happened. People are going to have to get used to this. Attitudes about sex and sexuality are changing. Maybe I'm just really open-minded, but love you, King. That's what she texted to Matt Ingalls prior to being rejected. She was eager to attend the Kaifai Halloween party with her alleged gang rapists. And then when the president of the fraternity pulled her invitation, he told her allegedly for her own good. That's when she turned 180. I was raped, then came the rape test, then came the visit to campus cops, then came the calls to the guys trying to set them up on November 3rd that we're getting leaked out now where she got at least two of them on the phone being recorded, including Matt Ingalls and Winston Lee, two of the men who did have sex with her. Okay, but this is Matt Ingalls who's fled to UAE. This is what he's saying. And Trist number one, he was part of one in three. Number one, he couldn't really see it through because he kept passing out. And he also tweeted, or Snapchat posted a lot of the bad messages. His initial three-some partner, Jonathan Newell, posted the worst one, free P word upstairs. But Matt Ingalls quickly responds on the chain like you can just walk in and whip it out, then someone posts a picture of Jane Doe in the room and it's Matt Ingalls again who writes, boys come whip it out. So Matt Ingalls is problematic, no question in terms of his posts. But his argument is going to be, I was out of my mind. I had ingested God knows how much liquor and multiple lines of ketamine. And I was not myself. That is why I sounded like this complete ass on this chain. And it's why I made the decisions with Jane Doe. But as for Trist number one that we were a part of, I asked and she consented. And you need to look no further than her six page statement to the Cornell cops, which she then read and verified under penalties of perjury and added 20 handwritten notes to in order to know this. This is what she wrote about Trist number one, that she agreed to a three-some quote, do to how attracted she was to male number one who's Matt Ingalls on top of her drunken curiousness. That's the word she used when she learned that male number two, John Newell would be the third participant, Jane Doe quote, remembered being, this is her words I'm quoting, remembered being excited because she thought that Matt Ingalls and John Newell wanting to have a three-some meant that they were gay. She was excited. So there's just no question that Trist number one was proposed and accepted. Her lawyers now arguing she showed up drunk with 10 drinks in her. There's a dispute. Matt Ingalls says on that phone call released by ABC that she told him she was sober and hadn't been drinking when she got there. The frat house gave her one beer and she claims to remember doing some ketamine at some point between arrival and Trist number two before she did it off of the guy's member. Anyway, my point is simply they're all intoxicated off of some or multiple substances for Trist number one. And by the time we get to Trist number three that this guy Matt was also a part of, he's done the same amount of ketamine as she has. We don't know that he was the supplier. It may have been null, not that it's relevant. If she takes it willingly, it's irrelevant that he provided it. And what we have as Rich alluded to in the rest of her written statement, which is why the DA didn't charge this case, is her outlining the number of times she consciously said, yes, or no, to what was being proposed. I'm going to give you just a couple of examples and I'll give you the floor. Mail number one said he was going to take it. That's Matt. He was going to take a nap and refresh himself and would eventually stumble his way from the couch to the bed. So he gets off. They're fooling around on the couch. So he leaves. He goes to the bed. Then while he slept, Jane Doe and John Newell would start making out for a very short amount of time. While they were making out, mail number two, Newell, reach for the area near her badge several times. And each time he did, she would swap her hand away. This is her in her testimonial. It's quote, I would swap his hand away. She's making conscious decisions. I don't want to do this. I'll do this, but not this other thing. Mail number three, that's Jillio Loops, who's from Portugal or a Portuguese heritage. He then knocks on the door of the room. Jane Doe, this is in her words, quote, decided to let him in because it was his room. She quote, opened the door. She has made, now it's all a gang rape, but according to her lawyer, but she decided to let him in. She decided to get up out of the bed. She opened the door after she had been swatting the other guy's hands away, saying, I didn't want that particular sex act being done to me. Mail number three introduced himself to Jane Doe, reached out to shake her hand when Jane Doe made contact with his hand. Mail number three, Loops pulled Jane Doe into him and they began making out while Loops was kissing her. Nuel came back over and quote, began drooping her eventually. Nuel, Loops and Jane Doe would end up in the bed next to where mail number one Matt Ingalls was sleeping. They began to have a threesome. He wakes up. Mail number one Ingalls and said he wanted to take part and asked if they could make it a for some. Jane Doe replied, this is in her words, hell no. She rejected this in her words, quote, because I knew that a for some meant that I would have to take part in anal sex and quote, Jane Doe then remembered that Matt Ingalls left the room and we, I could go on because there are multiple decisions she makes in connection with the behavior thereafter that show a consciousness of thought. At 305 AM, she texted a roommate who said, are you coming home? She's like, I'm not sure yet. So my point is simply, where do we draw this distinction between what she did to Matt Ingalls and what he did to her? Why is he the Cornell 7 number one? And she is just alleged victim survivor. Yeah, I find it very hard to pause out too. I mean, my overarching thought, if I'm honest, is all of these people should be pushed out of a helicopter, but that notwithstanding, the problem is less of a double standard, which was the phrase used, and it's more of no standard. If you look at the clear ways that you could approach this, you could take what for bond of a better, where it might be a Christian approach and say, right, or a church approved approach and say, well, this shouldn't have happened in the first place, therefore it's wrong, right? Well, that line was breached, or you could say that men should be chivalrous, which they won't hear. Once you get into consent, it's a fine standard if everyone involved is a pure libertarian. The problem is, this standard is still being held up as the key one, but what we're doing now is we're all arguing over what point it was given. At what point it was withdrawn. It seems to me that this argument assumes that it can be given, and then withdrawn, and then given again, and withdrawn, and in some circumstances given, and withdrawn. I mean, you know, there are seven people here, eight, if you include the supposed victim. I don't know where to grab onto this, and I'm not sure Megan that the people who are calling for bloodhead know either. A lot of this seems to me to be driven by vibes. People who, depending on the details that they saw come across TikTok, are either sex positive or are appalled by this. People who will not apply the same standard to men as they would to women, people who won't treat intoxication as having the same effects on some people as others. I mean, the racial angle is interesting. Insofar, as some of the initial reports were assuming that everyone here was white, and so you got people on the left saying, "Oh, look, more white male, you know, entitlement or white male privilege." Well, and ask yourself, Charlie, whether Tish James wants to go after a young black man for allegedly raping a young white woman from the deep south. Yeah, under these circumstances. And that's where it, that's where it also does. become interesting, because if you go back to the dear colleague letters that the Obama administration put out, the Obama administration in following it, the institutional left, became very comfortable with the idea that men should have absolutely no recourse on college campuses whatsoever if they were accused, they were accused, even if it was long after the fact, even if there was no evidence, and it was pointed out to them that the majority of people that this ended up hurting were black men. And there was a little bit of many of them. Yeah, and it was sort of true, but I mean, there was a little bit of pushback but they sort of ignored that when it didn't suit them. This is what I'm getting at. I know that it sounds like I'm not sitting here as you and Richard Dunham powers every single detail, but I've become a little bit nihilistic on this one, because I don't actually think A, that this can be pushed through our justice system. I just don't think our justice system and the laws that we have are set up to deal with this circumstance. I don't think that a court or a jury can be expected to make factual determinations as to what constituted consent based on this testimony long after the fact when that testimony has changed. I don't think that could possibly lead to justice is 0.1, but 0.2, again, I'm not talking about you or Richard here or those who have written about it, but the people who are getting in high dutch in about this and want to see what they call justice. I don't think that they are on the level. I don't think that you can persuade them. I don't think that you could have a debate or a conversation about the fact that wouldn't lead to the goalposts just being moved. I think that they would see consent differently based on who was supposed to be consenting. I think they would see intoxication differently based on who was supposed to be intoxicated. I don't think that this is anywhere within the realm of what we might usually consider to be American notions of logic or American notions of fairness. I think this is all vibes. What I hope happens is that, and I have no confidence in this at all given her past conduct, but what I hope happens is that Latisha James sits in her office with all of these documents and throws them up in the air and says, "You know what? I simply cannot," as is supposedly in partial member of the government in the United States. "I cannot evaluate this because I think this is just so far beyond." What it becomes in my mind, and I hope this doesn't sound like a cop out. What it becomes in my mind is a moral warning. I hope that there are people out there, men and women who read this, who think, "Don't do this." Do not mix ketamine, alcohol, and orgies in college, or preferably anywhere else. It's not going to end well for you. It's not going to help your reputation. You said this guy said to go back to the UA, it means he's no longer studying. You know, I'm not approved. I'm far from it. He got expelled. Right. I am not approved. But this isn't about prudishness. This is the sort of story that I think almost everyone in the country, Republican or Democrat, man or woman, religious or not, religious would read and go, "Sorry, what the hell are you talking about?" And it's such an outlier, and I feel as if what's going to happen is that people are going to project their own desires onto this, and eventually it's going to fade away because there is no satisfying answer to it. I don't know. I don't know, Rich. I think we are playing with fire. We're playing with fire right now by trying to shove this into the criminal justice system, which absolutely Tish James is going to do. I mean, among, I think you probably like this guy, as do I, Ellie Honig of CNN. He's their legal analyst, and he's a straight shooter. He's very smart. He's a former federal prosecutor. He just wrote a piece in New York Mag ripping Tish James as the special prosecutor in this case, saying her, she prejudged the case, and what she posted online on X and Facebook, talking about how I stand with survivors like Jane Doe, poor Jane Doe. All of that is disqualifying. Tish James wouldn't speak to it. She's too busy sharpening her pitchfork. And I truly feel, Rich, that the only hope these young men have now is the fact that they all four of them appear to be men of color, which is the only language Tish James understands. I don't think it's going to matter because the analogy I would make is how much doesn't matter when those of us who are pushing back against the left wing narrative on a police shooting, when we say, oh, well, a couple of the cops are black or this guy was Asian or this guy was Hispanic, never matters because the narrative is yes, the left is obsessed with race, but the narrative always triumphs over that if it's most convenient. Let me just challenge you on that. Let me challenge you on that. What did Oprah do? What did Oprah do when it was Obama versus Hillary? She went with the skin color that she prioritized getting a black man elected. And do you really think Tish James is going to look at this white Southern woman and say, that's the one I'm going to protect over this black boy who got into Cornell and the Muslim boy. She won't care about the issue. But the context here is she is inherently she is by definition the victim. That's that's the narrative. So the race isn't going to matter. Maybe she'll be convinced it's going to be a bismophilia if she tries to do that. I do this. I think that's the only hope, but I think she's she's going to she's going to do it. And the people who are most committed about this case know nothing about it. They don't even care about that. Well, by the way, I bet you should know the race of the defendants when she weighed in on X and face. I guarantee you, Tish James did not know she'd be prosecuting a young black man who got into an Ivy League university, but I don't think it will when she first said I don't. So I agree. I agree with that. Go ahead. I agree with you, Rich, about the narrative. But I don't think you can just downplay the the caveat, which is, well, maybe she'll be convinced because she she's not a dictator. Like if this were England and the king got to decide this, there's a memory will be dead, right? But this would have to go through the justice system and the law doesn't sustain what the TikTok ladies wanted to, which is why a hooker came out and suggested that it be changed. If it were already in place, it wouldn't need changing. I I don't know if the race has anything to do with it, but I have a lot of confidence in American juries. And if you look at, for example, in the middle of what was it was a massive national moral panic, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial came out as it did because on the law and the facts that intersected with that law, Rittenhouse was not guilty of what he'd been accused of. I think that the teacher James might well try to bring this. I think she'll crucify those people. I think they will struggle in their future. I don't I don't think that this would be as simple in a core. I'm not sure. I wouldn't say, oh, totally agree with that. Yeah. Oh, no, she's going to get destroyed on the witness stand. I could do it. But that matters, right? Without without any prep. Never mind these season trial lawyers. We don't have to agree that. It matters. But my look, look, I'm not I don't I don't think they're in the clear by any stretch of the imagination. A New York this is going to be a New York jury. Now on the bright side, they tend to be no nonsense. And they don't they're not a bunch of bleeding hearts in New York, but they are liberal. They're leftist. And so if they think this is coming down, you know, along sort of political lines, they're more likely to lean towards Tish James. I just think this is the first glimmer of hope I've seen for them. I did not realize until this report came out over the weekend about Madingles being Muslim and from UAE that all four of the defendants who actually had sex with her are minorities. That's a good fact in trying to prevent this from going forward because the in Tish, in our world, no one gives a damn, which your skin color is or your religion. In Tish James's world, it's the first thing she wants to know about you. I mean, that's I just think that determines whether you're a good person or bad. Something stays her hand. It's going to be realizing this case will end in humiliation if she brings charges or actually hurt her ambitions one day to be governor of New York. That's huge. Maybe that happens. Maybe it happens. But the fact that everyone is saying the system failed in this case. No, the DA did exactly the right thing. He gets a sworn statement from the alleged victim that has no crime in it. So what is he supposed to say? Go back and change your sworn statement to make it more damning about what happened that night? Or is he supposed to go talk to the guys? They're not going to have a more damning account than she had. So he made absolutely the right call and Cornell as far as we can tell did the right thing. Now, of course, you wouldn't think they want to sweep rape under the rug as being as being as as being alleged, but they produce this investigation more than 50 interviews, 32 people, a thousand pages of documents. What we've seen of the report seems detailed and reasonable and fair-minded. And they punish these students not because it concluded they were guilty of sexual assault, but because they violated various university rules, right? And these were harsh punishments in that context as you're pointing out, Megan. So the system has worked at this point. The question now is whether the system will stop working, at least stop working enough for Tish James to bring politicized charges that we can hope have a strong chance of failing. Here's the law just once again as stated by the DA who's now been pulled from the case. The law in New York State is clear that if you are voluntarily intoxicated or under the influence of drugs such that your judgment is impaired, that does not legally under the penal law constitute your inability to continue. consent. You have to prove physical helplessness. If you were physically helpless, then the law doesn't care whether you ingested the substances voluntarily or whether you were slipped a mickey. But she has not alleged physical helplessness. And Matt Ingalls, by her account, may have physical helplessness. I mean, that's what's really interesting about this incidentally. That's a good law. So we need to distinguish between the moral choices these people made and the law. I think there's a definitely a role to play voluntarily if people are intoxicated and treating them differently looking after them. But that is actually a good law. I've thought about this a bit because I've been reading about the law that New York says it wants. And I certainly thought it through. It seems to me that it's just not it's absolutely unworkable to have a law that says that if you willingly get drunk, you're therefore unable to consent to sex. That would probably, I mean, that's like 80% of the people who have been born in the history of the world. You know, it's John Lennon used to joke, came out of the bottom of a bottle of whiskey. Like it is ridiculous as a legal standard. Well, Charlie started interrupt. But what about all the other decisions people make when they're drunk? What about somebody who drunk drives? Can they be held responsible for their drunken decisions to get behind the wheel? That's far more dangerous to the world than getting into a bed with a partner. Now, if you, and it's a good analogy, because if you were roofied, which is actually very rare, I mean, it's a terrible crime, but it's much rarer than people think, if you were roofied and then you got in a car and you caused a car accident, well, you would have a pretty good defense, right? I mean, you should have a men's ray of defense. If you could went out and drank 16 gin and tonics and got in a car, it's your responsible for that. And that's the same law wise here. Now again, I think that there is a lot of civil society that should stand in the way between people making bad decisions. And I would hope at a bar, someone would say to their friend, you've had too much to drink, don't get in the car. But the idea that we need to change the law here, I think is bad. So I just wanted to defend the existing law because some people have cast this as a purely, as a purely factual question, you know, well, the law doesn't support this. That is true. The law does not support what the teacher James seems to want to do. But I don't think it should. I think it would be a really bad idea for us to change that law, even though this case is gross. That's why New York didn't do it. New York, this, there was a proposal under Andrew Cuomo to change it. And they haven't done it in six years, almost seven years now. The first proposal was 2020 because they know damn well that this will open the door to so many false rape charges. They will never have time to adjudicate any other case, never mind the legit rape cases. Here's what I want to end down, Rich, Sunny Hauston on day one of this scandal came out in spoke sense because she knew what the law was as a former sex crimes prosecutor at the federal level. And you knew what kind of a shit storm is going to rain down on her for saying what was real, which is that the law doesn't support charges here. And here's a little update for you from the set of the view. So Cynthia Arrivo is a good friend of mine. That may be surprising to people, but we're both in the same sorority. We've spent a lot of time together. And I love her. And she loves me. And she called me from Paris. And she's actually working on a movie about consent and sexual assault. She had only seen the clip. And she called me and said, sis, I know you and I know your heart and I know your life's work has been about protecting women and children. But the clip that I saw doesn't reflect who you are. And she said that I need to instead of leading with the law, I need to lead with empathy so that people can receive the law, the message about the law. Got it. Yeah, it's like listening to Kamala Harris capture the mindset though, perfectly, where it's if you want to focus on the facts and what the actual law is, that's kind of a thought crime. It shows you're a bad person, right? You don't care about rape. If you just look at the her statement, say there's rape, not alleged here. So that's how you get the Lynch mob going. The appointment of Tish James as a function of that Lynch mob, the press conference that that local gave when she was announcing the appointment was all about the Lynch mob is all like, this is a terrible adjustment done. And she asked these guys have to be punished. That is Tish James's job to go try to punish them. Maybe there's some small chance she doesn't do it. But I think she will. And it's an outrage. And the, you know, it's not as though this this actress said, oh, let's discuss the law. Maybe you're right. But I view it differently. No, it's just wrong to even think it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure that the only for one side of the equation to believe all women crowd will only allow empathy for the accuser. Go ahead. So I'm sure, you know, she doesn't realize this, but I'm afraid that is such an indictment of what it's like to talk to progressives. If you don't spend two or three minutes before you make any case that makes anyone feel even slightly uncomfortable, communicating to them that you are also a nice person, or you also have empathy, or they just, they can't hear the fact that you then, and they get so upset when you point that out to them, they think it's mean. But it's so true. That is, that's an admission of what we've all noticed, which is that unless you say you're a gun control case, right, where someone gets shot. And, and you say, actually the, the facts of this case have literally nothing to do with the law you're proposing. If you don't spend two minutes telling them that you are also upset when people get shot, which should be obvious, they won't hear the next bit. So what she's saying here is that her friend called her from Paris and told her that the, the statement she made about the law as a lawyer discussing the law was lost on her because she didn't lead with a bunch of machine answers. God, that is an indictment of progressivism. I also, I don't think this is a McDonald's, ma'am. This is McDonald's. We're, we're discussing the luck. Get out. What are you saying? We're not in, on the therapist couch. We're discussing whether the DA made a good decision or a bad decision, but Cynthia Arrivo of Wicked has thoughts. I'll give you the last word, Rich. Yeah, I was just going to say, I don't think you need to go to this law to decide not to charge, because I think based on her sworn statement, based on what we've seen that the Cornell report, she wasn't, she didn't say she was unconscious in any of this, right? It's interactively. That's it. Okay, so I'm a, I'm going to steal a last word after your last word, because I did want to get to that third trist because now, so this is the one they really want you to hang your hat on. Okay. After the third trist that she had again with Matt Ingalls, she texted him, I love you, King. I mean, this is, okay, so this is her alleged gang rapist, but, but let me read you what she said about trist number three, where keep in mind that the legal standard right now in New York is you must prove physical helplessness. That's the only way she's going to successfully argue that all the ketamine she did and the booze she voluntarily drank got her to the point where she, no one could have sex with her. She's going to have to prove that those things led to her being physically helpless. And this is what she told the police. Ingalls and Lee ushered me out of the room, brought me upstairs to a small room. Ingalls stated, quote, let's do more ketamine. I remembered snorting more ketamine and I remembered feeling extremely high. Ingalls said he wanted to have sex again because he wanted redemption for passing out earlier in the night. Jane Doe initially stated that she was tired and asked Ingalls, quote, this is the line, Rich. What happened to just you and me? Jane Doe could only remember or Jane Doe could not remember how it started, but she did then engage in a threesome with Ingalls and Lee involving oral sex and vaginal sex. This is her remembering all of this. These are the guys I did it with. At first, I objected, this is the line I said to Ingalls, then I had sex. This is exactly the kind of sex that I had and with whom who did what and when to me and vice versa, she described her level of intoxication as an eight out of 10 because she remembered it at that point. The threesome continued until at some point around 5.45 a.m. Jane Doe said, quote, she was tired and needed to turn in. At that point, both guys stopped and that was what she could remember. That's it. This is not physical helplessness. I'm sorry, but it's not physical helplessness is you are passed out. You are basically unconscious and she didn't get there, Rich. Yeah. She walks to the room and look, life is life is strange. We're things happen. But how many people after a brutal rape say I'm tired and I need to turn in and go to sleep with the perpetrator who I think Ingalls drove her home, right? And then you have these friendly Texas changes. So just by her own account, they're not a crime there. That's why the DA made the right call based on what he knew. I mean, they're in a place now where they might, I mean, I don't know. If I were the defendants, I might ask for a bench trial, you know, ask for a bench trial because a judge is going to see exactly what's going on here. This is, but it would take a strong judge. I'll say that because the mob is out there. And they are coming for anybody who has doubts about this case, too bad. I've been bullied by better than those losers. Thanks, guys. Great to see you. Great discussion. Up next, James Woods. 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If your business has been open for at least one year and generates at least 20 grand per month in revenue, you can secure up to $500,000 in working capital. Approval and minutes funding the same day had to Cardiff, C-A-R-D-I-F-F, dot-C-O/MK today. Real growth, fast funding, Cardiff, borrow better. Joining us now is multi-award-winning actor, producer, musician, and all-around great guy and friend, James Woods. His third studio album called The Killer's Wife comes out this Friday. It's a ten-track epic saga based on true events from his early life as an actor on the road, just based on inspired by, you might say, and he is back with us to talk a bit about that. And the news. James, welcome back. Great to see you. Oh, thank you, or welcome to the minefield because this one is a hot topic today. You know, I was listening to you talking. I thought, you know, when you invited me on the show, I thought, wow, October 7th, it's going to be, you know, it's one where everybody's going to be screaming and yelling, you know, no matter what I say, and then this topic, this Cornell situation. And I thought, well, if the one person I know I can trust to talk to fairly and honestly and deliberately about it, it's you. So I'm here and I'm open to whatever you have to say, and it's a pleasure to see you again. Thank you. Well, I'll tell you, the other headline that I didn't get out of the case today was found in the title nine investigatory documents where there is a defendant, last name, Cretchmar, Scott, who he did not, he didn't do anything to Jane Doe from what we can see other than walk into the room. And he was found guilty of attempted sexual exploitation because he walked in there. And he appealed, he sued, he said, this is such a railroad, but in his court documents, it emerges that at some point Jane Doe allegedly got out of the bed and did, this is when multiple men were in there, just sort of seeing what was going on and did a bodybuilder's pose. So the quote was, he did not recall who poured the ketamine on Jane Doe or how much they consumed. He was not one of them. He also indicated that Jane Doe, quote, got up out of the bed and started doing like a bodybuilder pose while blank men, I guess, were in the room with her. I'm sorry, James, but somebody online was tweeting out, this, this will be the only gang rape in history that was paused by the victim. So she could get up and do bodybuilding poses only to then let the gang rape continue. I mean, the absurdity of it is laid bare by that moment, which was well into the evening. Okay, so let me say this and I am not dodging it by saying this. After the Lindsay Clancy trial and the behavior of her lawyer, I've come to the conclusion that you really have to wait till these things are fully adjudicated in a court of law. And you have to make sure that the court of law is going to be fair and unbiased. We've already got a situation which I think is more important and relevant to this case, which is that Latisha James, a notorious political activist, has now been appointed the special prosecutor already. Somebody is going to get a raw deal in the situation because let's just say I'm going to give you a hypothetical. Let's say the woman in our hypothetical equal situation was actually the liar. Or let's say that the perpetrators really were the rapist. Either way, whatever the judgment would be from the trial is overturned on appeal because of an act as prosecutor, somebody is going to be denied justice. And the problem you have in this whole situation is that automatically it's become a political and therefore judicial circus because the person has been appointed to deal with all of these facts that you're bringing up, has already made a decision when you call the woman in the situation. And by the way, you know, I lived in a time when feminism started and the pill was invented and so on and it was going to make men and women equal. And the idea was that, you know, that people, regardless of their sex, were going to be able to behave as they chose to behave and not with a sign on cultural roles. But the problem with that is they got to act equally unaccountably, you know. So a lot of women discovered acting like a man is not necessarily to their benefit. And a lot of men realized that they had to think back of what their fathers may have told them as my father did, he said, "Let me make this really clear to you. If you take a girl out on a date and at some point in the evening, it's clear that she is the slightest bit intoxicated, you are taking her home, you're going to drop her on her doorstep, you're going to give her a very gentle kiss tonight and you are going to say I'll call you tomorrow and you will call her tomorrow. But you will not take advantage of that situation that is not what a, then he said, a gentleman does. And it's not what, you know, that's what a gentleman should do. But the way here's what the situation was in this corner, Elton. If you stop, if it were on some kind of magical video and in the middle of it, you stop and you said to every one of those people, not the men and the one, like she gets to be Jane Doe, but their lives are already ruined because they've been named. So wrong. But if you were to say them, what on earth are you thinking? And you can look back and say, what were you thinking? You were risking your entire life on one night. How fulfilling could it have been, first of all? I mean, it's not, not at all. That's all. And, you know, look, the alcohol culture has, has destroyed the college experience more than made it fun. And I can tell you that because, you know, I went to school and I was in the class of 69 of MIT. We're embossed in there. They were boozing it up at MIT. Well, the thing is, you would go to these mixers. We were in Cambridge, right across the bridge to have these mixers at every college. And, you know, you'd go to them and everybody was drinking in those days. The drugs weren't big yet. Pot was big. It was starting to be and people would drink, but like, I don't think anybody in that culture has certainly heard about cocaine at that time or did cocaine and those things. But, you know, alcohol, you know, there used to be jokes back in the 40s, you know, back when it was back in the, baby, it's cold outside era, you know, candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker. I mean, liquor has been, has, has, has been a destructive element in our culture, culture for as long as it can possibly, as long as I can remember. And now there's a, there's a piece in New York Mag today saying why don't colleges just ban fraternities, saying they're just drinking in social clubs. And simultaneously, the New York Times reports that the University of Arizona has suspended all fraternity activities, citing earlier misconduct that the university said it was persisting despite warnings. So now this whole thing is going to lead to a crackdown on fraternities and sororities, probably, coast to coast. Well, the irony is at MIT, we didn't have enough student housing back in the 60s. So a third of the students who are in fraternities and the fraternities were great. I was in fraternity because the older brothers actually guided the younger brothers on their behavior. They helped, I mean, MIT was really hard and they helped you with, you know, your studies and courses that were really challenging. And they, we also, we had all sorts of rules at our fraternity about how you were to create, how you were to treat lady guests. And it was, and we didn't have drunken parties at our fraternity. We just didn't. It was honest what yours you graduated from there? I'm sorry. What year did you graduate? I was 69. the classic. 69. Yeah, so I mean, and that's saying something because by 69, you know, the culture was changing to, you know, sex, love and understanding and we were getting much more permissive. So if they were still holding the line there, then it certainly should be possible to do in 2026 America. Yeah, there's no question those guys at that Cornell fraternity, Kai-Fai, needed severely some better lessons in life, some better leadership from the guys who preceded them all of that. You know, that's, but that's a given. It's conceded and it is the headline. We stand by because I just, we've got 25 seconds in this hour on live on series XM, but I'm going to come back with you after this quick break. The legend James Woods is with us. He's got a new album, which you do need to hear. It's called the killer's wife. It's right here and it's out. You got to go support James by this now. We'll be right back with him more on this case than others. Feeling sluggish, bloated, not quite like yourself. Life constantly bombards us with silent threats, processed foods, artificial light, non-stop stress, all of which can disrupt gut health, drain energy and weakened immune health. When that happens, it's not that your body is broken. It's that it might be missing the right inputs. That is why I want to tell you about arm-rock colostrum. It's packed with more than 400 bioactive nutrients that they say can work at a foundational level to fortify gut health, support immune health, fuel recovery and promote whole body vitality. Strong gut integrity can support metabolism, skin and hair health, and even performance and recovery, which is why colostrum has long been valued by some elite athletes as well. If you're looking to take back control of your health from the inside out, consider arm-rock and they have a special deal for you. Go to arm-rock.com/magan or just enter my name Megan to get 30% off when you're checking out of your first subscription order. That's A-R-M-R-A dot com slash Megan. Yes, news. Only on the Megan Kelly channel, series XM-111 and on the series XM-HAD. There it is right there. The killer's wife. This is the latest album by James Woods, our guest today, along with Bob Wayne, whose voice you heard there, produced by his partner, Shooter Jennings, in business, who we met when we were all together out in California. It's a great, great, great cut and I will say that song The Hearts of Men is amazing. Among other lyrics that you just heard, I'm reading these James and I'm thinking these apply to what we just discussed here's in part. Here's some of what you guys have. The Hearts of Men shall grow cold. I see those words today ring true when demons howl and angels cry walk with me now. The path is dark. The wolves may howl be unafraid though day and night is night and dark is light and like the fallen snow take my hand fear not the walking path. We are not alone. Here now the voices of one million angels strong. And look to the point we were discussing before we went to break. It does feel like there were Hearts of Men that had grown cold inside that fraternity house that night and with that they're going to have to deal no matter what happens with Tish James. I have to say you pick literally the sequence that was this motivation for this becoming an album. I'd always wonder what a story about the killer's wife because I'm not going to go to specifics because I want to respect her privacy but when I was literally 20 years old I think I was 19, 2021 right around that time. I've been doing some summer theater. I met those girls. She was very nice and we just started you know spending a little time together and all of a sudden I realized that she had children and I said yeah children buddy are you drawing? She had three children and I said well anyway I'm not going to go to the specific. Well it turned out I said well where's your husband and he had been a convicted serial killer and it was like okay and she was a very decent person. In fact I think I think that the only reason she survived was that there was such a force of goodness in her that for some reason he didn't kill her and I thought I really believe in life that good and evil are palpable things. Not just the condition literally they exist and I think that I wanted to write an album about this immortal, eternal battle between good and evil but I wanted to base it because I always think cinematically on a specific story of this young woman who fought the devil and survived and so there was a passage in Matthew. I read the Bible not only as a Roman Catholic but this isn't the Bible thumper moment of the show. I read it once in a while but it's also incredible. We could use it. I was going to say how do I say to even atheist you should read the Bible because it's great storytelling and by the way it could maybe do you a little bit of good and and one of the I love Mark and the book and Matthew and Matthew said it perfectly he said when iniquity shall abound iniquity wickedness shall abound the hearts of men show wax cold and I thought that's a whole album that's right it I wrote the hearts of men and the last there's an epilogue to it and the epilogue I actually speak in cadence through the music and it goes like this comes it with me on the quiet shore light breaking through the cloud feel his hand upon your shoulder his son beneath the shroud that sacrifice shall be there always when the hearts of men grow cold and if indeed that shall happen again let this story be told and we are right there right now and I'm telling you we have made certain decisions politically in this country and I'm a fanatic about this and I know I'm right when you led in 30 million or more illegal aliens during a pandemic that you make guys on a paddle board whether a mass but you'll let it in millions of people unvaccinated unvetted you don't know what their political affiliations are their madness their crazy religions that wants to kill anybody it doesn't believe in it you are welcoming a rot gut cancer into your society and then when you have a civilization based on dating apps sort of basically just hook up apps when you have a culture based on drugs and not just illegal drugs when you watch television commercials is nothing but pharmaceutical ads and every ad has 50 side effects and they're always suicidal ideation and violence and you know and by the way if that first one doesn't work to help your depression here's another one that's even more dangerous and take that one and watch out again for those suicidal impulses and then you see people who are cutting off their breasts to become a man and you know this whole thing with these transvestites and so on taking these drugs acting crazy and then shooting up schools you know it's it's the culture has literally I use a lot of imagery in my writing and two images I use a lot or standing on the edge of the abyss or a descent into the maelstrom because it's my way poetically I was saying that we really have we're not just fighting for a culture or our nation we're fighting for the survival of the species you know you look at countries Egypt what all these other countries that are now primarily Muslim they weren't before I guarantee you within 10 to 20 years if it doesn't go unbaited UK Germany France they'll be Muslim because the average reproduction rate is something like 1.8 children per indigenous French population and the comparative Muslim reproduction rate is like 8.2 children but they're just going to be just for the arithmetic but I mean that's fine if you want that culture but number one baby name in the UK last year Muhammad yeah I mean it's it's shocking how their culture has changed so dramatically and it's like this is one of those things where you're you're not allowed to say look no offense to Muslims but this is a Christian country and we kind of want to keep it that way we want to keep it the with the foundation that it was based upon and the fundamental principles that we all shared. you know, with women having equal rights and not being subjugated and with free speech and all the things and freedom of religion, none of which are huge on the list of Islam's tenets. But of course, you're not allowed to say that because then you're racist, Islam, a foe, bigot, whatever. No, I just like to go for the facts, facts are friendly and it's just simple. If you want to believe in shintoism, Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, whatever, you're entitled to. There's great, great aspects of living in this beloved country of freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. But if you believe in a religion whose fundamental tenet is anybody who doesn't believe in this religion is an infidel and must be killed, it's a problem. I mean, there's kind of a built-in problem there, you know, so all I ever want is for people to do whatever they want to do and believe in in their religion, in their bedrooms, whatever, as long as it doesn't involve damage or hurt to other people or to innocent people, obviously children and so on. So when your culture has ignored that look, I thought, "Yeah, I'm going to do the Meek and Kelly show. I'm really looking forward to this." But it's going to be on October 7th and I thought, you know, that invariably will come up and you have to have something to say and you know, people are fanatics about this. All I can say is I can look back to 1970, I think it was '77 or '78 when Meryl Streep and I were doing, both unknown in, doing a fantastic miniseries called Holocaust, which is based on the Holocaust. And we filmed primarily in the Motthausen concentration camp. I remember Meryl and I standing in the gas chamber, literally at Motthausen, 15, 20 feet from the ovens which are still there. It's the most intact of all of the Holocaust museums in, you know, surviving death camps. And thinking we're standing in a room where 140,000 people were murdered because of their religion or because of their politics. And I thought this could never happen again and now I hear people in colleges, I hear, I'm sorry, but idiot people in my former business screaming about the Jews and wanting them to be eradicated and I'm thinking, have we completely ignored George Santana or whoever else paraphrase basically if we forget the lessons of history we're condemned to repeat them. And you know, never again, never again, that's a duck cow too. Well, here's the problem. We don't teach history in our schools anymore. We teach politics. It's like, oh, we spend, you know, 300 pages on Margaret Singer, Margaret Singer, who of course was a genetic system, ironically, the people who celebrate her because she wanted to eradicate black Americans. I mean, she was a horrible racist, but you can't convince her because she gave people the ability to kill their little babies, you know, she was, she expanded the ability, didn't give it, but she expanded certainly. No, she's revered as a heroine and she's a monster, but this stuff is weighing on you now. I can, I can hear in your messaging, you're worried, like, you're worried about our civilization. Like to, to me, it sounds like you feel like we're looking at existential threats here and, and we're not talking about the AI thing. We're talking about our own cultural choices. It's another one. I mean, today I was kind of looking up some aspects of this Cornell situation because I really didn't follow the case, so I just thought, I just, I don't want to have an answer to anybody, but I thought, well, I thought, you know, you would probably want to talk about it, so I should just familiarize myself a little bit about it. I was not going to adjudicate the case on social media or on, on the podcast and just not because it's, I like to know the facts and I think it should be done properly by law. But I was looking at, and I was looking at the sources that the AI app I was using was referring to Wikipedia, which is totally by its bullshit. And then snopes, which is a complete joke, you know, and I thought, I'm sorry, we're going to get information based on snopes, it's, it's literally laughable. That's horrifying. Oh, James, a dear friend of mine was just traveling for two weeks on vacation. And she came back and we were talking and she said, what's going on with the Cornell case? And I said, well, do you know anything about it at all about it? She said, well, I just saw a couple of reports like online on my phone, you know, from whatever it came up on the feed. And I said, what, why don't you tell me what you know about it just to start? And it was, I mean, it was basically, every allegation made by the accuser with absolutely none of the bad facts for her and all of the bad facts for the young men, but none of the good facts for them. It was as biased as, you know, the accuser's lawyer could ever hope to make its way into the feed of somebody who didn't know anything about it. And she was, I guess, you know, it sounds really horrible. This is what, you know, they said, and all I said, I said nothing about my own opinions. I just presented the other facts around this case, some of which we discussed over the last two hours. And she was stunned. She was stunned. Of course, none of that was making its way into her feed. No, no, no, no, no. It's like, it's crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy. No, no, no, no. It's crazy. It's crazy. You get exonerated on page 38 and, you know, no matter what, you know, if you're in a pissing match with a skunk, you're going to end up thinking, no matter whether you want or lose. And these boys lives, they're destroyed completely. Her life isn't destroyed yet because her name is, of course, protected. And I mean, so I don't know, you know, I was reading. I thought, well, somebody said to me, I was checking it, they said, oh, no, you can't believe. I mean, the things that some celebrities are saying, you know, you're going to be on the wrong side. And I said, well, I'm not taking the side because I don't know the facts, the facts, the facts, the facts. That's what's important. And, you know, there are people that are saying they should be castrated. It's like, talk about rush to judgment. You don't know what the facts are. And, you know, but yet these are people who will defend their anger issues about men in general. That's, that's sadly what I'm saying. That's, I don't think, I didn't think we were past it. But like the men hatred is really rampant. And that's why everyone should be paying attention to this case because this is about more than whether these seven guys at Cornell misbehaved exactly in ways that a normal person could find disturbing. It's about man hatred that is leading to literally calls for death and castration and to have their lives ruined without really pausing to find out whether there are any facts that might mitigate some of the terrible headlines about them. There's no interest in mitigation by this crowd. None. And let me say something to you. I don't, whenever I watch Sheldon, I watch Apple TV, so I don't ever see commercials. But we started watching football and, you know, football is on regular TV and I'm looking at the commercials that come up, aside from all the pharmaceutical stuff, I defy you to see a commercial where the white man is not a buffoon or the blunt or an idiot or the bad guy and so on. The white male in every commercial, every commercial made in the past 20 years, literally everyone is a fool or a jerk, everyone. That's part of the culture. And, you know, you know, the TV show, you know, it's the whole TV show dedicated to sexual crime. So it's the, you know, men or shit show. It's like that's it. It's just. Yeah. This is what we're teaching generations. So let me ask you something because I tell the audience this and it's true. I always feel like the show is my therapy. You know, I always feel much better after I do the show than before the show. Did you feel like that when you would, when you would finish the album? I, I did because the way we write, you know, I write every word, every lyrics of all the albums I do and I produce a shooter Jennings, shooter did all the music on the first album on this, and the second album Bob did the music and across her with lyrics. On the third album, shooter had an idea for two songs. But what had happened is a Dwayne Allen of the Oak Ridge Boys had said, I love your first album, man. Would you write some music for us? And I was so honored. I said, oh, great. Yeah. So I call shooter and I wrote, I am the blazing sun and I am the blazing sun and hearts of men bookend the whole album. And shooter kind of put this musical idea this vibe, but we didn't really have the song yet. And he said, you know, hold on to this yet. I'll explain the Dwayne that we might want to do something more with this. And I started writing, Bob said to me, hey, I was driving past a street sign today. It's so funny. It says, harm's way. And he knew the real story took place. Sarah, my wife did that beautiful album cover. It looks like a crime scene photo and the title is actually like a stamp, you know, like an evidence stamp set. That's it. We don't use any AI none of, no auto tune. Everything's real. Yeah. The title is up. there, the killer's wife, case number, blah, blah, blah. And so we decided we were going to do this story as a fictional story based on this real event and kind of set in that environment out by the sand dunes because the bodies in the real event were buried in the sand dunes. And Bob said, "Hey, I went past the street sign today." He said, "Harm's way." Now, when I write, like sometimes Sarah and I'd be in bed and I'd be doing crossword puzzle, whatever, and you know, we both got the lights right on her phone. They were, you know, showing each other Instagram videos and all of a sudden they go, "Oh, wait." And she's a writer. She's a wonderful, wonderful novelist. Yeah. And crime novel. And I'll say, and she'll know that I've got an idea for a song and I'll just start writing a song. Well, Bob said to me, "I drove past the street sign and said, "Harm's way." And I went, "Bob, don't say a word." He had a standing there with his guitar in my living room. And I wrote "Harm's way" right then and there. And it was, you know, I drove past the street sign on the dark side of town, you know. And it's because "Harm's way" is like a nautical expression. When John Paul Jones and the American Navy all these years, whenever they are going into battle, they're sailing into "Harm's way." And in the story, I'm trying to find her a house down this rabbit, rabbit warren of streets on a dark night. And because I'm being lured by the siren call, our hero in the story, is in love with the killer's wife and the killer's wife as a secret and all this stuff. And as I started to write it, I got to purge my experience from my youth finally. But I also didn't realize the cinematic structure that I was creating. And all of a sudden just fell into place, same with tombstone opera, you know, it fell into place. And the shooter said, "You realize this is the story of like the burning of the palisades, but it's set in 1870." I go, "Yeah, I guess so. I really didn't plan it that way because I don't like to plan what I'm writing." Because when you, people said to me, "Oh, my life, you know, you're very verbal and you can turn a phrase fairly well." And, you know, did you ever think of writing? You have so many stories. And, of course, I do do in this week on my website on Jameswoods.com. And it's every week. Well, I started writing lyrics and writing stories. What happens if you had an urge to write, but never did? I was always so busy working as an actor. When you start to write, and novels will tell you this, songwriters will say it, poets, screenwriters, the first one writes itself. I mean, you can't literally write it fast enough, because it's just aching to get out. I've written, since shooter Jennings said to me that fateful night, had you ever think about writing lyrics? I have written 75 songs. I have 30 that are now published. We just cut the fourth album for next year, that's 13 songs. So I'll have 43 songs that are published. It's cool. Quite a new act. And the old act was working out pretty well. So it's extraordinary. Well, listen to what's going. Look, I want everybody's got to support you. It's, again, Jameswoods in Bob Wayne. It's got a, I mean, if I may, it's got a Johnny Cash type feel to it. And I mean that in the best sense, of course, there's no other way to mean that. And, honestly, like I can, I can feel your, I can feel your emotionality behind it, because it does take somebody with a deep intellect and soul to write something like this, like this, James. So I, I got to run, but I love talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. And our love to Sarah too. Thank you so much. You're the greatest. Thank you. Ah, you are. All right. Again, the new album is called The Killer's Wife. And now listen, I just want to say one thing before we go because we've been talking a lot today about politics. That was kind of fun. It wasn't dark. But the Cornell story is dark. And we've been focusing on it a lot. And there is a lot of focus on men doing the wrong thing, which is why I wanted to show you this next clip of Harry Connick Jr. Before we go. So my husband Doug has a, he has a podcast. It's called Dedicated with Doug Brunt, and he interviews other authors. And Harry Connick Jr. has a book out about his mom. It's really sweet. We saw him perform over the summer in New Jersey. So Doug had him on, undeticated. It's on this week. If you want to go download it, I think you'll really enjoy it. And he told a story that I had never heard Harry Connick Jr. tell before. And it related to the Sandy Hook massacre, with which he has a remote connection. And he explained that to Doug. And honestly, well, I'll explain why I think it's relevant. Take a listen. I think you have friend whose child was killed at a school shooting. Yes. And so you wrote a piece of music, recorded it, but have never performed it. I can't. I remember being at my house in Connecticut. Don't try to be watching TV. And I remember seeing the shooting in Newtown and just being horrified by that. And all of a sudden, my saxophone player, Jimmy walks across kind of among the crowd, six foot eight, three hundred pounds, genius tenor saxophone player. And I call my buddy Jerry. Jerry. Where does Jimmy live? He says he just moved back to Newtown and my heart sank. And I got in my car, and I drove to Newtown. Everything was roadblocked. I said, whatever I had to say, drove to his house. And he said, my little girl was shot today. He was sitting there with his wife and his son. I felt compelled to write something for him. And I did. It's called, do you really need her? And it's basically about being angry with God saying, are you serious? Do you really need my daughter right now? I can never, I haven't listened to it since I recorded it. I'll never sing it. I can't do that. But I asked Jimmy. I said, can I record this for you? And he said he would love that. And then I wrote another song called Love Winds because even on that night, he looked at me and he said, love always wins. Wow. How amazing is that story? I was so moved by that. There's another clip from that interview that's actually gone totally viral where Doug asks Harry Connick to pair this artist versus that artist. Who do you like better? And he does a great job with it. But that was my favorite clip because think of how well handled that was the darkest thing that could possibly happen to his friend happened. And first, in telling the story, he says to Doug, I said whatever I had to say, he doesn't repeat it. He keeps it private. He's got dignity for himself and his friend is not looking for pets on the back. Doug raised this. It wasn't from his book. It was a story that Doug found in some small footnote about Harry Connick Jr. And then he writes his friend a song. And it's a song addressing what the friend must be feeling, what Harry was feeling toward God. Do you really need her in like, why do you have to take a six-year-old? Why? And just that what we all battle when someone dies horrifically or too soon or in the case of Newtown, both. And then says he'll never sing it. And apparently he never has because he doesn't want to commercialize it. He doesn't want to make money off of such a thing. It was truly a gift from his heart and soul to his friend who was suffering. And what what can Harry Connick Jr. do to make him feel better? He can sing. He can do that thing that great musical artists can do, which is put lyrics and sound together to make your heart heal just a bit or to allow you to lean into sorrow if that's what you need to be feeling. But there is a real power in having the ability to do that. And he used it for good privately for his friend, not to make money, not to make himself look good to the contrary. He wanted to keep it private. And he's never. He does not sing it publicly. He asked his permission. Can I? The friend said yes. And then that final bit about finishing it off with something uplifting. Love wins. Based on what his friend said that night. God bless that friend for being able to say, love always wins in a moment like that. I just thought, wow, what a what a man. He's been married to the same woman his entire life. They got married 30 plus years ago. Jill Goodaker of Victoria's secret fame. You know, beautiful, stunning person slash model. Now mother. He adores his daughters. He talked at length about them at the concert. We saw him perform at. And we were all our friends and Doug and I were all moved by what was clearly a very deep, well thought out soulful man when we saw him perform. And boy, was that confirmed in the interview. Doug just did with him, which is also fun. It has later moments as I mentioned, but it is a promo for Doug's podcast. I guess dedicated, but it was really more about talking about the goodness of men. This, you know, and I'm not saying that the Cornell seven are not good men. I'm not willing to say that. I think they made some mistakes that night that they're probably very ashamed of. But we do need to be reminded that there are great men out there who do extraordinary things for other people who are vulnerable and suffering. And my own husband is one of them. That's certainly Harry Connick Jr. is too. So check it out. Thank you all for listening. And we will see you right here tomorrow with Matt Taibi and Shelby and Eli Steele. I got a treat for you. See you then. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. [Music]