Inspirational Kentucky Derby Winner, Viral Tucker-NYT Interview, and Blake-Baldoni Trial, with Emily Jashinsky | Ep. 1309

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24:27Birch Gold can help you convert an existing IRA or 401k into a tax-sheltered IRA in physical gold. Text MK to the number 989898 to see if you qualify for a first-time gold buyer rebate of up to$10 ,000. Emily, it's such a great story, isn't it? You're killing me. You're killing me.

24:48Emily Jashinsky:You just did 25 minutes on horses. We watched Secretariat clips. We were watching highlights. It was such a journey, Megan. I had no idea. Megan Kelly horse girl. Such a journey this morning. Yeah, I am. I'm a sucker for any of those, like, you know, come from behind victories. But I do love horse racing. I do. I know it's controversial with some because sometimes they mistreat the horses. But, like, I know some of these people. I know some in the Phipps family. I've known them. And they're wonderful people. And most of them, I think, dearly, dearly love the horses. And it's like there is nothing like watching a horse race.

25:28I love the whole thing. You go for the day. You can either do it the fancy way. Like I've been to the Derby a couple of times, which is super fun. You wear your most outrageous colors. You sip those mint juleps, which are awesome. Or you can do it, you know, lower brow. You know, you can buy the cheap ticket in and do the$2 bets here and there, which is so fun. If you see your horse come in, you know, win place or show, it doesn't matter. Like, it's so thrilling. It's like, I don't know what it is. I guess I'm just like a gambler deep at heart, even though I almost never gambler. But it is so exciting.

26:01Do you ever do it? Have you ever done it?

26:03Emily Jashinsky:No, I haven't. But, you know, I love any moment in sports where the announcers are so good at channeling the excitement of the moment. And I feel like that's what we got out of the Derby this year. Like that was actually really, really incredible. There's an art to doing that. And it was totally nailed. Yes. I remember one time years ago, I was with some friends and it was I think I was in college. I had no money. We went to I think it was Belmont Stakes. And it was, trying to think about exactly how it went down, but I know we ran out of money by the end of the day. And then our last race there, and back when I was in college and law school, I was an avid aerobics instructor.

26:43It's actually how I helped put myself through college and law school. I taught at like 15 to 20 classes a week. It was insane. And I did aerobics and I did step aerobics. I was in the step Reebok demo team back in my day, Emily, and a different body. In any event, the last race of the day had a horse named Aerobic Stepper. I was like, oh, my God, I've got to bet on that horse. And it's like this horse, Golden Tempo. It had terrible odds. We all scrounged. None of us had any money left. We came up with 20 bucks and we bet it on Aerobic Stepper. And damn it, the horse won. It won. We had won a few hundred bucks.

27:21We were in like seventh heaven. We thought we were rich. you paid for our whole evening, like the group of us. I don't know. It's like this small turn of fortunes and you feel prescient when you see your horse go across first and you feel like a winner. Even if, even if your life is, I'm like pushing people to go to the gambling track today, but like, even if your life isn't going that well, your horse wins, people can probably relate to this is probably why they love regular sports that I don't watch that much. Like your team wins in basketball or baseball or football and you, you feel like a winner, you know, it's true joy.

27:56It's joy for the team that you love or the horse that you believe in. And it's joy for you because you feel smart. You feel prescient, you know, like you backed the winning horse. That's a saying even outside of racehorsing, you know what I mean? Like a horse racing. So I love it. It's a feel good story and America needs one of those right now.

28:13Emily Jashinsky:I feel good story. That's the story about aerobic stepper and Megyn Kelly. That's the movie that I would watch. That hasn't been made into a movie yet. The cinematic quality of that, especially as you just told it, astounding. Wait, I have to tell you one more story about a racetrack, which is just so funny. I went to the Kentucky Derby years ago and there was a fair amount of conservatives show up at that thing. And there was this one sweet woman. This is many, many years ago. And this woman said, can we have our picture taken? And I said, sure. So I put, and she's much older. So I put my arm around her and she said, darling, would you do me a favor?

28:57I'm like, sure. She goes, would you mind just reaching behind my neck and just pulling the skin tight for the picture? I'm like, sure, I got you. So I pulled it. No way. And she loved, she was with her sister too. They both laughed. They thought it was hilarious that she does this. I'm like, you know, you can pay a doctor to do this to you just one day and it will stay that way for many years.

29:22Emily Jashinsky:Like asking. Yeah. You know, I like, cause I, you seem really nice, but I can't follow you around forever. She was like, she didn't care. She had no humiliation over it. No embarrassment whatsoever. She just want to look good for the picture. And I, I've never forgot that dear sweet lady. She was great. she and her sister. So that was my other horse race story. And I am going, I'm going again this summer. I plan to, to Saratoga. We're making our plans now. It's just such an enjoyable thing. So anyway, to the listening audience, you guys let me know, do you like going to the horse races? Will you be going this summer?

29:54And what did you think of the wonderful golden tempo? Cherie and Jose, God bless them. Maybe I can get one of those folks to come on this show and talk about it since I'm now America's horse racing aficionado expert, self-declared, 2026. It's been decided. Okay. Oh, one other thing I'll tell you. The family, now for years, what we do in my family, you're not going to be surprised because the listening audience knows I love costumes. We have a box of costumes for the Kentucky Derby and I have ascots for all of the men in my family and like the sort of bowler hats and like a bright jacket. And for my daughter and for me and for any female guests we may have over, I have super, super bright derby dresses and fascinators for everybody.

30:44So if you just happen to swing by, I will put you in one of these dresses and a fascinator. And Doug makes mint juleps, real ones for the adults and mocktails for the kids. And we all place our bets. Not one of us bet on golden tempo, even though we did bet long shots as well, but we did not pick golden. And it was thrilling. So fun to watch the race. We sort of freeze it on the Peacock or NBC coverage. And then when we're all ready, we come down and we watch that 20 minutes. And then it's such a fun tradition. Anyway, you got to make your own fun in this world. Okay. And speaking of fun, let's talk about what's happening in Iran.

31:21Perfect transition. Now you see why I wanted to begin with something more fun. Um, that changed my mind. We'll get to Iran in a little bit. Let's start with what happened with Tucker because that's actually really interesting. And then we'll get into what's happening with the actual war. So Tucker sat down with Lulu, who I actually really grew to like over that interview that I did with her at the New York Times. Um, I really think she tries to be fair. She's obviously a liberal and a New York Times journalist, but I like her. And, uh, she, I thought did a very nice job with Tucker. Um, was it perfect?

31:53No, there were a couple of low moments where she's really, really focused on Nick Fuentes. But overall, I thought she gave him a fair shot. And Tucker handled himself, of course, very, very well and was very deft. And anything, any sort of would-be traps she was laying, he saw from a mile away. And it made for a very interesting, robust exchange between the two of them. There was the obsession with Nick Fuentes, but Tucker, his answer on it was very, very good. Nick Fuentes, of course, for listening audience, is like, they call him far right. I disagree. I don't think he's far right. I don't know what he is.

32:30He's non-ideological, really. He's like more of a black-pilled young guy who hates both parties, says very controversial things about Jews and blacks and women. But outside of that, says a lot of things that, you know, have turned out to be prescient, unlike politics. So he's got a bit of a following because he's got a good track record on his political predictions and insights, but he's incendiary in his discussions about any group of color or vulnerable, marginalized, whatever group. So anyway, he's become more and more popular over the past five years with a certain segment of especially young, disaffected men.

33:12And it's all the left's fault. It's all the left's fault who have told these young men that race is really what matters. It determines everything. It's the number one thing about you that matters. And by the way, if yours happens to be white and you're a male on top of it, fuck you. You suck. So the left has driven people to, you know, a commentator like this. they have only themselves to blame but the reporters at the New York Times would never acknowledge that by the way he says he's voting for Gavin Newsom he says that because he doesn't like the fact that J.D. Vance if he's the nominee is married to I won't repeat the ethnic slur about Usha but it's an ethnic slur about him being married to a brown Indian woman and so I don't this doesn't sound far right to me but whatever he also thinks he's hot Megan Fuentes also thinks

34:01Emily Jashinsky:Gavin Newsom is hot and good looking and has the yeah, he's got the look. All right. I have to say on the sliding scale of politicians, he is hot. It's like Chief Justice John Roberts on the sliding scale of judges is he's hot. But like then you put them out of the real world and things change. And then, of course, Gavin Newsom is like, you know, one of those like, I don't know, like a real housewife where they might look fine while they're just sitting there. and the screen grab, but then you hear them talk and you're like, oh my God, nevermind. Okay. Here's Tucker and Lulu on Nick Fuentes, 17.

34:41Emily Jashinsky:Fuentes himself is a distraction from the conversations that matter because power is displayed through the structure of the economic system globally and per country and in the use of force. So it's the economic program and the foreign policy program are what matters in every government from the beginning of time. Those are the two questions on which there's a bipartisan consensus in Washington between Republicans and Democrats that we should do this thing. The public rejects that thing on both categories. They reject the economics that are a consensus choice in Washington, and they reject the foreign policy that's a consensus choice in Washington.

35:21Emily Jashinsky:And so Washington's response, Wall Street's response as well, is to be like, let's have a race war, and you guys can argue over blacks or whites or whether JD is married to an Indian woman like what? And so Fuentes is incredibly useful for people with actual power to divert the conversation to something that is both irrelevant and divisive because it's a divide and conquer strategy. And my strong view gained over 35 years of watching carefully and being involved is that that's come to its end. Okay. So smart, such an important reframing of some of the things that we've been discussing lately, Emily.

35:59And I mean, I think this is why people who don't like Tucker find him so threatening, because he's such an effective messenger, and he can redefine an entire debate like he did right there.

36:12Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, and it's a really deep point that he's making. Neil Postman in the mid 80s was kind of hysterical over Ronald Reagan being the president as an actor. And he saw this as the television-based epistemology overtaking the print-based epistemology. And in Amusing Ourselves to Death, he wrote about how inferior the television-based epistemology of politics and culture was to a sort of political epistemology based on print. And there's, I think, merit to that. But what we're in now is like the algorithmic social media-based epistemology. And I think this is kind of what Tucker is getting at in that Fuentes, for many people, is a meme.

36:48Emily Jashinsky:They don't sit around and watch like long episodes. He definitely has like a dedicated audience on his streams, which, man, I think you're right. The left drove so many young men, especially straight into his arms and empowered him with their rhetoric that was often wildly over the top, inaccurate, wrong and bigoted against men in so many cases. Just did that for like the last 15 years and then don't want to have to reckon with the consequences. But more so, he's for many, many people a meme. They're laughing at him. They're not laughing with him. They don't really know much about him. They don't have much context for him.

37:22Emily Jashinsky:They just see funny clips that they were told were very naughty. And when you're a teenager, you're in your early 20s and people are telling you, you can't laugh at these things. The kid's got comedic timing and he says awful things that other people won't. And it's a meme. It's a meme. And Tucker is correct. It's a meme that has been used as a distraction from some of these structural problems that people would rather not talk about because it implicates them. It implicates the worldviews that they have perpetuated. It implicates the worldviews that they still hold dear about the ickiness of populism and the hoi polloi being wrong about their own fate.

38:00Emily Jashinsky:And so there, it's just much easier to fight this war with the proxy of Nick Fuentes than it is to actually deal with what's happening in the public. because if you look at it and tucker believes that there's basically a uniparty you know that the the left and the right on so many of the biggest issues are indistinguishable and he's not wrong about that on on some of the smaller issues though there are big differences like not smaller but like smaller than like the economy which obviously is the number one thing that's motivating most people um but he thinks on the economy and on war never ending war and in particular war on behalf of Israel, the parties are nearly indistinguishable and that both sides would much rather see us arguing over Nick Fuentes and his views on race than on those two things on which there's not that big a difference between the two of them.

38:55They all vote, both sides, to line their own pockets. They all seem rather corrupt and they all love war. They get paid by, they get put into office by the military industrial complex and APAC. And those are effectively their masters, which is why we continue to see war after war after war, even from a guy like Trump who ran on not doing this.

39:17Emily Jashinsky:There's another great moment in the interview where I think Lulu asks Tucker, like, why then are people so obsessed with Fuentes? I'm paraphrasing it. I don't have the exact verbatim language, but he responds, well, because it's easier to call someone or maybe they were talking about anti-Semitism, but I think it applies to Fuentes as well. It's like, It's easier to call somebody a name and to call them a bigot because it immediately stigmatizes and ostracizes them than it is to actually grapple with an argument they're advancing. And so if you're calling somebody that word, you're calling somebody, you're making this really serious charge, you actually should be able to back it up.

39:53Emily Jashinsky:But so often it's just deployed in a way that shuts a person down, shuts a person up, stigmatizes them, ostracizes them. And so that is the way to get them out of the argument. And you can basically discredit an entire opposition movement to war if you say anybody who is flirting with this is you. This is what happened with Fuentes. We were playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon with Fuentes every day last fall. Like if somebody had ever watched Fuentes clip and laughed at it. Oh, my goodness. You hate Israel. It's just happening constantly. And Tucker is right. He points it out in the interview. He's like, well, it's much easier to default to the label and to the name than it is to deal with the argument.

40:31Emily Jashinsky:It's just a shortcut. It's a cheat code. If you apply the name and the label, then you just are automatically kind of disqualifying them with a segment of the public. And it's really I mean, it's it's a terrible way to do politics in the United States. Obviously, now you have a huge section of the country that's against this war. You can't really do that. And so it's falling apart. Yeah. I went on Tucker's show months ago and said basically what I just said about Nick Fuentes, which is he has a lot of sharp insights and he's a smart political talker, but he says absolutely vile things about blacks, about Indians, about Jews, about women.

41:10And so, you know, you've got to like putting that to the side. He's got some smart commentary, but, you know, you can't like obviously you can't talk about Nick Fuentes without talking about that stuff, which I did. and my newfound detractors on the right, on the neocon pro-Israel right, clipped only the one part where I said the nice, like, whatever, what his value was, and circulated it all over X, all over X. Like, that was the alpha and omega of my own thoughts about Nick Fuentes. And fuck those people. Fuck them, the dishonest, disgusting people who do that shit. You know, I just, whatever.

41:47You gotta live with it, because the internet's gonna do what it's gonna do. But some of them are my former friends. Some of them are people who actually used to come in this show.

41:55Emily Jashinsky:And it's just it's not good for anybody. And I know, Megan, like you have really thick skin. But I also just feel like we have to pause and realize what a horrible thing that is to do to another human being, especially another human being who is like put their own skin on the line to stand up, as you have done many times in some of these campus cases and to like stand up against legitimate anti-Semitism. It is just, I don't want to get numb to a horrible thing that is for one human being to do to another human being, because in the United States, we have worked really hard to stigmatize bigotry.

42:27Emily Jashinsky:We have more people from different parts of the world, different backgrounds, living in one country than I think has ever happened in human history in such close proximity. And it is an incredible accomplishment of the American people that we have done this for the length of time that we've done it with the level of relative harmony. Like, yes, things feel tense and painful right now, but what we do in the United States is actually amazing. And it's partially because bigotry, genuine bigotry has been highly stigmatized. And so to apply that label to somebody who doesn't actually believe those things and to just, again, put the label on them, not argue about whether you're enabling it or just like have a substantive argument.

43:02Emily Jashinsky:fine. But to just toss the label around is truly disgusting. On top of just not being constructive, it poisons the dialogue. It makes it impossible for people to talk to each other. And on a human level, it is really sad. And if you're doing that without thinking about it because you're caught up in the algorithm and you're not pausing 10 minutes before you do it, that's even more shameful. Like, just take a break. Just take a break. And I know it sounds like quaint at this point because you've gone through so much of it. And many people have. But it's just it's such a bad thing to do. Yeah. No, I mean, it's unfortunate because it's not working out for the people who did it.

43:37It's like people who just jumped on the anti-Semitism train. They've dismissed Tucker as one. And I mean, the notion of calling me an anti-Semite is so absurd. The listening audience to the show knows what a lie that is. But the outside people, they don't know. Not everybody listens to the show on a daily basis or enough to know. But you're seeing it now, right? You're seeing it. Like the people who have made that their calling card to just look at all conservatives with doubts about Israel and say, you're an anti-Semite. They're failing. Their shows are failing. And I do think it's in part why we saw what I consider to be very sad news about the Daily Wire on Friday where they had mass layoffs.

44:17And this is a company that for most of its existence has been near and dear to my heart. And I still have a lot of friends over there. And I am rooting for them. and even though I've had this massive blow up with Ben Shapiro that he initiated, I have never been anything but good to Ben and we were dealing with each other behind the scenes in a very lovely manner before he attacked me publicly at the turning point thing in December. I'm rooting for Ben too. I don't want to see Ben suffer. I don't want to see his company implode, but it certainly seems to be. There are reports of 50 to 60 percent of the staff having been laid off.

44:49They officially denied it. But I think the problem with The Daily Wire is multifaceted. They invested tens of millions of dollars in this dragon movie, which they kept behind a paywall. It had no chance of paying off for them. It was just absolutely foolhardy. they expanded into, they sort of like, you know, they had mission creep, Emily, you know, like they, now they're selling razors and they're selling chocolate and they're selling, I don't know, all sorts of different products as opposed to just like doing the news, you know, and they started to do all this like children's programming and movie making.

45:24And it's like, I think if they just stuck to their core mission of doing the news in a more fair and balanced way and hadn't gotten hung up on all these other projects, and yes, indeed, the Israel first nature of Ben's coverage in particular, I think they'd be fine. I think, you know, in the off election years, it's always a little slower for, you know, any podcast. So I'm sure that's a factor, but I think they would have withstood that no problem had these other factors not been there. I just I think in general, the right doesn't take well to name calling, culling of the movement, anyone declaring themselves like the godfather of it who will decide who gets to stay and who gets to go.

46:09According to Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon had to go as of December. So did Tucker. I got lumped in there as an alleged coward in the world of Ben Shapiro for not being outspoken on his favorite issues. Barry Weiss doubled down with her free press. None of these people is doing well. The free press, not doing well. CBS is having the lowest ratings it's had in between 25 and 100 years. I don't even know if it hasn't been around for 100 years, like in a century, though, basically, since it's a formation under her leadership. And she's pushing all these messages on her evening newscast and her morning newscast.

46:43The people are rejecting it. They're rejecting it, Emily.

46:46Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, I think that's right. And I mean, at The Daily Wire, one way that you can tell I think people are rejecting it is that, to their credit, they've allowed Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh to kind of openly dissent from some of Ben's arguments. And sometimes they do it on their live streams, which I think, again, that is a good thing. And it tells me that they know, even among their own audience, that it's sort of controversial to be totally embracing every single element of Ben's arguments. I think they also, I mean, it's an interesting new media lesson. We don't totally have the full story publicly yet, but the growth was too fast.

47:24Emily Jashinsky:And you have to have diversified, I think, revenue streams, whereas if like a big chunk of your revenue is based around Ben, and you want to build a big media company that does movies and TV shows and documentaries, and also has a news website. And remember, they had a publishing imprint for a while, they were doing books and children's programming. And, you know, you're reliant on probably streams of investor money, but your big pull is still Ben. At one point, it was Candace. That's a really rickety foundation for a media company in the long term. And so I think they ran into some trouble with that, where it was just, to your point, mission creep way too fast as well.

48:06Emily Jashinsky:Like, creep is probably not the right word, but like mission sprinting in different directions, and it was not a good foundation for success. Yeah, I mean, just he he's doubled down on it many times, just when President Trump decided to attack Tucker and yours truly and some others who have been skeptics of the Iran war repeatedly in some tweets a couple weeks ago, Ben retweeted his turning point speech calling for us to be excommunicated from the conservative movement, saying now seems like a good time to re-up this. Okay. All right. I see you haven't moved at all off of your position that you get to dictate who's part of the conservative movement, who isn't.

48:47Meanwhile, I'd been at Fox News for 16 years before anybody even knew his name. Like some of us have been in this media space for a very long time, fighting very important fights for decades. That includes Tucker Carlson for sure. And it also includes yours truly and others. And he decided to double down on it. So it's like, okay, when your business is hemorrhaging, maybe cast a wide net. Maybe launch your criticisms on an individualized basis. Take on Tucker's arguments. Take on mine. Whatever. You think I'm not saying enough about X. OK, you can spend your show talking about that if you want.

49:24I'm sure your audience doesn't really want to spend its day hearing about that. But OK, you could do that as opposed to I shall decree who is in and who is out. I appoint myself master of the conservative movement. That doesn't work. Liberals may like that shit, but conservatives don't. Maybe the neocon Israel first crowd likes it, but nobody else does, Emily.

49:45Emily Jashinsky:Well, and listen, like, we've been inside these conservative movement spaces, like one of the big messages that I have to people inside the conservative movement, also like Republican and Democratic Party, like look at what just happened in Maine, where Janet Mills, the sitting governor had to drop out of the race because Graham Plattner was so powerful. Janet Mills had all the money, they thought it was ridiculous that Plattner would ever win, and she didn't even make it to the primary. Sorry. A lot of that is because institutions are less powerful than personalities now. So, you can't say that, oh, we have to defer to the power of this institution.

50:18Emily Jashinsky:Like, remember when National Review did this to the Birchers? That doesn't work on younger people. It doesn't work on Americans anymore. It may have been true. No one's true in the 70s and the 80s with William F. Buckley, but it's just not the same anymore. The institutional power is different. And so, you have to make arguments. You have to appeal to individuals and you have to have those arguments with individuals, not with institutions. And you can't just defer to that stuff anymore. This same crowd did this to Pat Buchanan, whose ideas have been vindicated 110%, whom I've read a lot of over the past year.

50:52He has so many insightful things to say about America's role in the world, about our foundational goals, about what's happening with foreign influence, yes, from the Israel lobby and others as well, and how we've been, we kowtow to them. We have made ourselves subservient to a foreign nation, nevermind just influenced by it. And that's why he had to be otherized and demonized. We'll pick this up on the opposite side of this break. More with Emily after this. Don't go away. When it comes to supplements, there are two things that matter most. It has to work and it has to be something you can trust.

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52:32Emily Jashinsky:The wrongs we must right. The fights we must win. The future we must secure together for our nation. This is what's in front of us. This determines what's next for all of us. We are Marines. We were made for this.

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54:05Back with me now, Emily Jaschinski, host of After Party with Emily Jaschinski. It's live every Monday and Wednesday night at 9 p.m. Eastern on YouTube. And you can just get it as a podcast if you can't stay up that late like yours truly. We in the Kelly Brunt household have been up late over the past week or two watching Imperfect Women, which I highly recommend. It was so good. We just watched the final episode last night. It's hard to find good thrillers, you know, that don't have like lame ties up at the end, you know, tying it together. They nailed it. Really, really well done. It's got Kerry Washington.

54:40It's got Elizabeth Moss. It's got Kate Mara. Really, really good. So if you haven't seen it and you like thrillers, it's an eight-parter. I never know where you see these things, right, Emily? The next question is, which app did you watch it on? Who the hell knows? I don't know. I don't know what app we watched it on. Netflix or Apple, I think.

54:58Emily Jashinsky:Well, I like that you can stay up late for Kerry Washington, but not for After Party, Megan. I'll remember that.

55:07I have inside access to After Party. That's true. And the betrayal. But Doug, of all people, I expected more. I know. So usually we're there, usually. There's bad stuff happening that you should know about in Iran. Our ceasefire is not going well. You're going to be shocked to learn shocked. Here's the latest. First of all, the person updating us on the latest bad news is Bradley Cooper, which I told Steve Krakauer. We've really dropped the ball here if we're not taking these pressers live. And Bradley Cooper is the new spokesperson for CENTCOM. Turns out there's more than one man by that name.

55:43he says the following that And 15 ,000 U.S. service members are now involved in what we're calling Project Freedom. We reported on this today on AM Update. It is our new effort to help commercial vessels pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump, the administration clarified that we're not, allegedly, we're not like physically escorting and protecting them. We're just helping show them the route that will avoid mines and other dangers, I guess. No one really knows, as is typical with the reporting on this war. But the reporting is that we have 15 ,000 U.S. service members who are involved in this effort, that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has launched drones and missiles to try to disrupt the mission over the last several hours.

56:33And now we're having like return fire. The U.S. military blew up six small Iranian boats in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday after Iran launched multiple cruise missiles, drones and small boats at U.S. Navy ships and at commercial ships being, quote, protected. Again, it's unclear by the U.S. military, according to Bradley Cooper. The Iranian boats were attacked by U.S. Apache and SH-60 Seahawk helicopters. So it doesn't sound like a ceasefire. It sounds like there's some fire that's not ceasing. And this is to the surprise of no one, as President Trump claims, but no one knows for sure what's in there, that he's received a 14-point plan from the Iranians to bring this thing to a close, which he claims is not good enough, and now he's going to play hardball and he doesn't want to talk to them yet.

57:27I was on with Piers Morgan a little earlier, Emily, and he asked me, what would you tell the president to do? And I said I would tell him to just take the deal. Give the Revolutionary Guard something. It appears to be that they're mercenaries. So give them some sort of financial incentive to relinquish control over the strait. And don't make whatever around the nuclear program be the thing that screws up the end of the deal. Because we already know that we did obliterate their nuclear facilities in June. and our intelligence community already assessed that they're nowhere near having a nuclear bomb.

58:05So we'll continue to spy on them. Obviously, if we want to continue with the IAEA inspections, they'd probably agree to that, frankly. And that's really all we need, in my view. Mark Levin has a different view, I get it. But let's just get out and try to open up the Strait of Hormuz because that's the pinch point they have against us. And now our blockade of their ports is the pinch point we have on them. But we're going to feel that pain already. We've got jet fuel at the highest level they've seen in years. We've got airlines folding here in America. Spirit had many problems, but this was like the last straw.

58:41We've got American Airlines profits for this year already projected to be wiped out by the hike in fuel. The price of gasoline per gallon is now up at what? Four? What is it you guys remind me?

58:54Emily Jashinsky:425 or something? 445. Now it's 445. My own pump in Connecticut,$5.09 a gallon. $5.09 a gallon. That's crazy. And you're going to see it right now. They're projecting. I was actually just looking at the New York Times this morning. My God, it's so small. I'm getting so old. But the projection is that the Strait of Hormuz is expected to remain effectively closed for weeks, raising the prospect of prolonged high energy prices. And they pointed out something I hadn't seen, which is despite Mr. Trump's claims of gas prices dropping soon, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright acknowledged last month they could remain elevated for the rest of the year.

59:40Now, that's if things wrap up today, today. But they're not going to wrap up today. So the longer this goes on, the longer the pain goes on because these energy prices remain spiked. And that has a rolling effect that doesn't hit us here in the United States the next day. It takes months. So all of this portends very badly for the midterms and for President Trump's approval ratings and his ability to get anything done, Emily.

1:00:09Emily Jashinsky:Well, and this is where it's really bad for the president is that he is now in a situation where he has promised to win a war. And he said multiple times he's won the war, but Americans have for several months now made sacrifices at the pump. This is obviously going to cause basically across the board inflation. And that's not I think this is these assessments are correct. Trump himself acknowledged in an interview with Maria Bartiromo a couple of weeks ago that, yeah, the prices could remain elevated all the way up until the midterm elections. And so when you're asking the public to make a sacrifice for safety and then you have to find a way to negotiate something that is different from what was on the table before the war, that is a serious, serious problem for President Trump right now.

1:00:55Emily Jashinsky:because if you lose American lives in the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Hormuz was obviously open before the war began. And so if you end up losing American lives, this is an escalation that we're seeing happen right now in the process of trying to get something back to the pre-war status quo. That is disastrous, all while you're asking Americans to sacrifice their hard-earned money. It's basically wiped out the benefits that the Trump administration was excited about from the tax cuts. That's what some of the economic estimates are looking like right now. It's easy to see how those prices are so, so high and not going down anytime soon in all likelihood.

1:01:30Emily Jashinsky:And so you might end up, I pray to God it doesn't happen, but you might end up losing more troops in the process of trying to open the Strait of Hormuz. And then what is on the table in terms of actually, like we're right now seeing President Trump has said the Iranian Navy has basically been decimated. Well, we're in an era of asymmetric warfare where they have their mosquito fleet, they have drones, they can find a way to cause us pain if we're truly trying to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. So where things are looking at right now for a peace deal, your option is, I think, the sane option. But the president is in a situation where he said that he was going to change the fate of Iran.

1:02:10Emily Jashinsky:And he's defined it in many different terms, you know, freedom for the Iranian people. He's defined it as no nukes ever. And I don't know where you go from here at this point, if that's what the president thinks he has to get out of this conflict to look like. He's truly had a win. So it's a scary position to be in right now. Yeah, because you've got the risk of escalation right there, looming over every move we make and every move they make. Anything provocative by us, and they'd be happy to start this thing back up. They don't care. And they are enjoying watching Trump suffer politically. And I think the president's very frustrated.

1:02:49My own impression is he's very frustrated right now because he's used to being able to will his desires into existence, just the sheer force of him. And he's a tough negotiator. He can be a bully in his negotiations, which has always worked for him. And it's not working. And he's not used to this. I think he doesn't quite know how to get out of this one.

1:03:15Emily Jashinsky:I think that's totally correct. If they had a good idea of how to get out of it, we wouldn't keep hitting these impasses in negotiations and the like. And, you know, that's the question. If Iran wants to say 15 years, 20 years, no enrichment, and put that on the table, and it's not good enough for President Trump, then, which, again, I don't even think it's an unreasonable position for Donald Trump, who ran on non-nuclear Iran against Barack Obama, like the politics of it. You can easily see how you get that position from Donald Trump. But at the same time, if that's the brick wall that you're hitting, it doesn't go away.

1:03:54Emily Jashinsky:It doesn't go away unless he finds some way to restore the Strait of Hormuz to what it was in the pre-war condition and then force Iran to concede while it has all of these asymmetric abilities to keep causing us pain. So I don't know how you end up breaking that wall, because it's the same thing that we keep hitting up against. They're not going to agree to no nukes ever. It's just not, it's not going to happen. And unless we're willing to keep fighting it out against this asymmetric military threat from Iran, then we're in it for the long haul. Mm-hmm. You've got Lindsey Graham and Mark Thiessen saying, if they won't give us what we want, the leaders with whom we're negotiating in Iran, kill them.

1:04:46Kill the people we're negotiating with so that we can get some, quote, more reasonable people to negotiate with. So we should just keep killing the people we're negotiating. I mean, what that would do to the United States' ability to negotiate with anyone on a go-forward basis is unthinkable. And that is, to me, so irresponsible. That's an insane suggestion. Just like, you will agree to everything we demand or we will drone you and your family. You're all going to die. This is being thrown around casually. Like, it's an easy option for us without any recognition of the fact that we have intermediaries.

1:05:19We have the Pakistani PM who's involved in all of this. Like, that's an important ally in some ways. Why would we telegraph to them or anybody else that our word is no good? We are never participating in good faith in negotiations. You disagree with us, we will fucking drone you, and it'll be over. So, like, how's that going to go? That sounds, that feels really good in the moment when you're killing the person you disagreed with across the table from Jared Kushner. The consequences long term, be damned.

1:05:50Emily Jashinsky:Well, right. That's predicated on the idea that if you kill this person, if you drone this person, what's going to come next is going to be someone more reasonable. And that assumption is doing some real heavy lifting from Lindsey Graham and anybody making such propositions. Because if you are asking people, just on a human level, if you're asking people who would be in a position to negotiate after you take out one layer of leadership to then be more reasonable rather than more radical and more doggedly opposed to the United States, again, that is a very, I mean, you are betting a lot on that particular idea of what would happen if you do that.

1:06:30Emily Jashinsky:And then what, of course, to your point happens when you're trying to host negotiations in the future and people worry that it's a setup for them to get killed or droned in the process. The long-term ramifications of that way of prosecuting a war are just frankly insane. Insane. But it keeps happening, of course. Our word used to be really good. Our word used to be very good. The word of the United States of America. And it's being eroded and besmirched bit by bit by every time we keep doing this. This is twice we've allegedly negotiated with the Iranians of good faith only to bomb them while they were negotiating with us.

1:07:07And, you know, Thiessen and Lindsey Graham would like it to be a third, at least. speaking of our word, President Trump tells Fox News in an interview that's about to hit that the Iranians will, quote, be blown off the face of the earth if they attack U.S. vessels that are guiding ships through the Strait of Hormuz as part of, quote, Project Freedom. So the Iranians will be blown off the face of the earth if they attack the vessels. I mean, they are attacking the vessels. We just started the hour by saying they've launched drones and missiles to try to thwart the traffic and disrupt the mission over the last several hours.

1:07:47That's what led to our retaliatory strikes against them. So it is happening. I'm not sure exactly what he means, if this is just more bellicose language by the president trying to escalate everything to an 11, right, to try to just scare them. We're going to end civilization as we know it. Okay. You know, like all this rhetoric. By the way, the latest poll shows the majority of the public strongly disapproves of that language. They want him to stop doing that. He won't listen. Like shit talking is something the president's really good at. And I think he thinks that's his only tool. I really do.

1:08:17I think it's like tried and true. It's familiar to him. It's comfortable. It's like the old sweater with the elbow patches. He loves it. You know, he puts it on. He feels good. He feels warm and fuzzy. So like shit talking and shit posting, he's home. But I don't think he knows how to actually get us out of this. Not against this enemy. I want to go back to the Tucker thing for a minute. Cause I, yeah, you go.

1:08:38Emily Jashinsky:Well, I was just going to say, I mean, it also, the power of it fades over time if it's not then followed up. And I'm certainly very happy that he didn't follow up on his threat to wipe out an entire civilization, but it only goes so far. If you continue to speak in the bellicose rhetoric, and then it turns out to just be rhetoric, just even tactically, that doesn't fulfill its own goal. So the power of it wanes over time anyway. It's sort of like with the tariffs, which I've been pretty supportive of, to be honest. But it's basically this idea that you can posture, get the markets to go in one direction or the other.

1:09:13Emily Jashinsky:Well, some countries have started to bet against the United States and do their business elsewhere and say, well, we can't rely on the United States anymore. We can't rely on the word of the president because it changes. And so we're just going to hedge our bets and go somewhere else. He's doing something similar, I think, on the foreign policy level. And the power of being able to intimidate other countries into agreeing with you to coerce them, it does wane over time. It's not something that lasts forever. And plus, it's like my main thing is I don't want American troops to die, number one, but I really am very focused on the midterms because the midterms get tougher for Republicans in 28, in particular in the Senate.

1:09:50I mean, obviously in the Senate because the House re-does itself every two years. But the Senate is, the map gets worse for the Republicans in 28. So they really need to hold on in 26. And now we played it for our audience late last week. Mark Halperin saying, I think the Senate may now be in play, like legitimately in play, which was new for him. He hadn't been there. And so like, if we lose the Senate, if the right loses control of the Senate, you like forget, you will not confirm another judge. President Trump will not get another judge on the federal bench for the remainder of his term, which is a very big deal.

1:10:25That is like a large reason a lot of people on the right voted for President Trump because of the lunacy happening on the federal bench. And to put a stop to that, well, you can kiss it goodbye. Never mind the investigations that we're going to see. It was just going to be nonstop investigatory. He's never going to have a nominee to his cabinet confirmed. You know, good luck changing out a member of the cabinet because they need Senate confirmation too. Like, it's just, it's going to be so stymied for him if he loses control of the Senate. That can't happen, which is one of the reasons why we are looking so closely at gas prices, which are hurting people.

1:10:56They're hurting working people. People like my mom, who lives on a fixed income. Obviously, I help my mom out. But without me, she'd be living on a fixed income that would very much be rattling her because her day-to-day would be deeply affected by these gas prices. And that's how most Americans live. Here's Harry Enten on how Americans are reacting to the rising gas prices in Sot-10.

1:11:19Emily Jashinsky:Look at this. Blame for the increase in gas prices. 77 % say Donald Trump. I look back at every president I could find on a similar question, which is when the gas prices rise, who gets the blame? Trump gets the blame more than Joe Biden did back in 2022, more than Barack Obama did in 2012, and more than George W. Bush did back in 2005. 71%. Donald Trump takes the cake. He owns this mess, according to the American people. And it is quite the mess because his gas prices climb ever higher and the increase in the percentage that blamed Donald Trump climb ever higher. His approval ratings go down in the base.

1:11:55Emily Jashinsky:But when you break it down by party, this is where it gets. Oh, my. You know, this is a Republican base that has been infatuated with Donald Trump for years. But even here, blame Trump for rising gas prices. Fifty five percent. A majority of Republicans blame Donald Trump for gas prices. That is the highest ever blame for gas prices from one's own party. Then you see 82 percent of independents. That's the highest percentage who blame the president of the United States among independents. Not much of a surprise. Ninety five percent of Democrats, but majority, majority, majority. And what he keeps saying, Emily, is that it's basically your patriotic duty to support these higher gas prices and pay them because Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, notwithstanding the fact that it was his own intelligence agencies that said they're not getting one.

1:12:42We're good. That's not a concern we need to have right now, especially in the wake of the bombing that we did in June. So it's not the public is not buying his rationale at all. And what he keeps saying also is, look at the stock market, the stock market. OK, that's a rich person thing. Like, I'm sorry, but like, yes, the average person may have 401ks that get affected by the stock market. But the true average American is worried about what's in their weekly disbursement from Social Security, what they get in their paycheck. And they don't have a ton of money in the market. Right.

1:13:20Emily Jashinsky:Right. Stocks are a long term concern for probably about 60 percent of the country, but it's not their monthly, their monthly income is not coming from that. And so it's he takes so much credit for the market that I think it's actually why Harry Anton was just pointing out those numbers are historically high of your own party blaming the president for where gas prices are. Because if you are constantly taking ownership of the markets, it looks to the average person like you're taking ownership of the economy. And he's done that in various ways over, you know, gas prices are great. He's taking credit for the gas prices being great.

1:13:54Emily Jashinsky:And so he's, you know, if anything economic is happening in a good way, he's taking credit for it. He's very intentional and strategic about that. And so it's much easier than for people to blame you when the economy is in a bad position. And Megan, I remember you and I were talking a month ago about some of these Senate races. I think the big ones to watch are Ohio and Nebraska right now, because if you're in Ohio or if you're in Nebraska, you're Pete Ricketts and you have to defend the administration at every campaign stop that is taking money, it feels like to the average person, is taking money out of their pockets for the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war began.

1:14:27Emily Jashinsky:And if you have to defend that at stop after stop, your support for this war, your support for this president to voters, those two races are really, really, really wants to watch. Susan Collins is kind of always vulnerable, but always persists. So I don't know what's going to happen in that race. Texas, I think, is probably safe for Republicans. North Carolina is going to be a real problem for Republicans. North Carolina, Ohio, Nebraska. Yep, that's a big, big problem across the board. Georgia, certainly. So a lot of serious headaches for Republicans, especially as they get into the summer and they're back at home.

1:15:03The one in Maine concerns me, too, because this Graham Plattner, who is now going to be the Democratic nominee, you know, even Tucker was like praising him somewhat on that New York Times interview because his foreign policy sounds like Tucker's, you know, like don't intervene, like stay out of other people's wars, which I like, too. However, you look down the resume and you see he wants to pack the Supreme Court with extra seats and make Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico states. No, it's a no. No. Oh, my God. If that were to happen, you know, like we'd have amnesty. We'd have mass amnesty if we had a Democrat in the White House and a Democrat-controlled Senate with people that radical.

1:15:44It's very scary to me. I care about foreign policy, but it's not my number one issue to the place where I'd be willing to vote for a guy like that. But he's got I don't know. He's got some. Is it charm? I don't know if that's the right word. Is it like charisma? I'm not sure he's he's new and he's young and he's interesting in a way that Susan Collins can never be and never was.

1:16:05Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, we've interviewed him before at Breaking Points, and he's very raw. Like, he will just have a conversation like a normal human being. And so policy disputes aside, looking at him as a candidate, I know it's such a low bar for politicians, but he's the type of guy, like, I was just listening to him with David Sirota on Lever News yesterday. David asked him if he would go on Tucker's podcast. And Graham's response was, you know, I don't know, to be honest with you, I'm just sort of torn on this question myself. I've been thinking about it a lot. And I just don't, you know, he's like, I just want to be honest.

1:16:36Emily Jashinsky:I don't have an answer for you right now. It's like that to the average voter right now in this, as we were talking about earlier in the show, the algorithmic social media based political discourse that we have, it's like, oh my gosh, that person sounds like a human being. They're not reading talking points. So I think he's just a very, very good candidate. Policy disputes aside, again, he's very anti-establishment. He says the problem is with both parties and he's just able to talk like a normal human. So he'll be tough. He'll definitely put up a good fight in that race. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.

1:17:10It's like, it's funny because the Democrats will vote for him, notwithstanding his Nazi tattoo. And the New York Times will sit down with Tucker, notwithstanding the fact that they've been telling us he's like chief racist of all times, right? Like on the front page of its paper just a couple of years ago. But now they're interested in him, right? because he's crossed the president. It's like, they're so predictable, these left-wing media outlets and the Democrats in general. They're so predictable. It's like, oh, whatever. A certain male gesture comes to mind. Okay, I want to keep going. I did want to get to this one.

1:17:43I did think this was interesting. Tucker was asked about the Nick Fuentes interview. He had told me this privately, but he said it on camera. Here it is, thought 18.

1:17:50Emily Jashinsky:I wish I hadn't done the Fuentes interview because - Really? Yeah, it was totally not worth it. I mean, it was kind of interesting, I guess, but it was used as I added to the distraction. What I really wanted to talk about was where we were going in this war with Iran. And I spent like a month getting calls from people being like, you're a Nazi. And I wish I hadn't done that. Not that it didn't imperil my soul. I've interviewed far worse people than Nick Fuentes like Mike Huckabee the far worse person than Nick Fuentes hurt many more people than Nick Fuentes same with Ted Cruz but so I don't think it affected me I interview people I disagree with all the time and often I'm polite to them including war criminals the only person I've really been impolite with is Ted Cruz because I have limited self-control and he's just so repulsive I couldn't control myself and I was a I was a jerk and I tried to apologize, but if you had to sit across from Ted Cruz, it's just, there's something about him.

1:18:57Emily Jashinsky:It's just like repulsive. I mean, it's like disgusting. Like if you entered a men's room and Ted Cruz was there, you would be like, I can hold it. I'm leaving. And I broke down under the strain of his repulsiveness. But in general, I try to be nice to everybody, but man, that Fuentes interview, I just added to the distraction. Okay. So we've established he does not like Ted Cruz. But I play that clip, not for that piece, but for the Fuentes thing. I knew that he'd regretted doing it because it's truly like they turned Tucker into a Nazi for sitting across from this guy. And it's crazy, Emily, because, you know, she pressed him to she's like, well, I saw your Ted Cruz interview was much more contentious.

1:19:34It was more prosecutorial where your interview with Nick Fuentes was like more friendly. And he explained there why he doesn't like Ted and why they got contentious. And, you know, Ted gave as good as he got in that exchange. But it's amazing how much of our national conversation revolves around this guy, Fuentes, and some of these characters who make their way into the news. They have their opinions. They're controversial, of course. But it's like, why wouldn't she want to discuss more what the policymakers are doing than what this kid in Chicago, I don't know if he's a kid anymore. I think he's like 29.

1:20:11could be wrong uh but he's you know in chicago thinks about life like why why is she so focused on that and not actual policy that'll appear on the pages of the new york times the next day and

1:20:23Emily Jashinsky:the day after that i had the exact same reaction to the interview that it was like genuinely generally okay but then the focus on the fuentes stuff was absurd like wildly over the top uh it was interesting to me that tucker said he didn't think that it was worth it it quite obviously was not worth it. Like the juice was not worth the squeeze. There was a middle part of that interview that was really critical of Fuentes as it was happening. And nobody went with that section of it at all. You saw no clips from that part of the interview. It basically just didn't exist where Tucker was questioning him on how you can consider yourself a Christian and be bigoted and believe in blood guilt and the like.

1:21:01Emily Jashinsky:Again, nobody picked up on that part of the interview. Didn't see any clips of it. But yeah, it did become a distraction. It's not even really Tucker's fault that it became a distraction. I was getting actually kind of angry when I was listening to this recent episode of Tucker's show where he did a great interview with this head of a startup that is doing reproductive technology, very high-tech reproductive stuff. And it was, you could tell, a technology that Tucker found abhorrent, morally abhorrent. And I'm listening to him give this kid a really fair, kind, polite, civil, decent interview.

1:21:38Emily Jashinsky:And it was a fantastic conversation, which made me angry because if you listen to every episode of Tucker's show, you realize he does this all of the time. He's truly correct that basically it was the Ted Cruz interview and the end of the Huckabee interview where he lost his cool. But it's something he's like, he's a conversationalist and it's why his show is successful is because he's very good at getting people to open up and genuinely press them as a human being, from one human being to another, on the questions that the conversation is leading them to. It's not super prepped. It's really him up in Maine, just having a conversation, the cameras are rolling.

1:22:14Emily Jashinsky:And so that's why people like him. And that's why this effort in the long term is going to backfire to try to smear him. Because again, when you dig into it and you watch the reality, just like I thought Lulu did a good job of bringing out who Tucker is by giving him the space to talk in this conversation. He sounds a lot more reasonable outside the clip ecosystem. And when people have that experience of seeing the long form versus the clip, sometimes it's radicalizing for people and in a good direction where they realize they are being lied to by the people who they thought were against the media, who they thought were against the institutional legacy media who are acting just like the institutional legacy media.

1:22:57That's exactly right. He's going to be on the program on Thursday. So we'll talk to him about some of the other clips that are making the rounds and more. All right, I'm going to take a quick break, Emily. We will come back and we've got to get into the massive, massive piece that just dropped in Vulture on Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively with some new reveals in there. Wow. Talk about dysfunctional. Stand by. Paying$70,$80,$90 a month to big wireless for unlimited data is insanity, especially when Pure Talk is going to give you unlimited high-speed data for just$34.99 a month. Unlimited high-speed data at Pure Talk used to start at$55 a month, but because Pure Talk is constantly pushing to give you more for less, you can now get unlimited high-speed data for just under$35.

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1:26:54Along with the Megan Kelly Show, you're going to hear from people like Mark Halperin, Link Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily Jashinsky, Jesse Kelly, Real Clear Politics, and many more. It's bold, no BS news. Only on the Megyn Kelly channel, Sirius XM 111, and on the Sirius XM app.

1:27:14Back with me now, Emily Jashinsky of the After Party Show and the MK Wrap Up Show as well, live right here on Sirius XM after the MK Show airs. And you can call in and speak to her just as soon as that starts in a short time. Okay, so Vulture does a very, very deep dive into the Baldoni Lively saga. This is part of New York Magazine's media empire. And it was a fascinating read. I have to say it was 30 pages long. And what I learned is that you should never work with Blake Lively. You, every errant word, suggestion, story, personal anecdote, or moment with the guard down will be used against you.

1:28:03Notwithstanding the power imbalance being on her side, she will paint herself a victim. She will turn her celebrity husband against you and Taylor Swift, as we know. and that the loathing of this woman extended well beyond ultimately Justin Baldoni and his business partners, even Sony, right? Was it Sony? Which was, I guess, putting out the film. I gotta make sure I have that right. Yeah, Sony. Called her a terrorist. Called her a terrorist in the way that she was behaving toward Justin Baldoni and the rest of the people working on this film because she wanted to be a boss lady, Emily. And she tried to bully Justin Baldoni and was bitter about the fact that on her prior films where she'd been hired just to act, they would not let her screenwrite or direct.

1:29:01Meanwhile, they had other people filling those roles. And that was also the case on this movie she did with Baldoni, It Ends With Us. But she thought she had a weakling whom she could bully into letting her do those things. and when, and he did, he largely did. But only when she decided it wasn't enough, he wasn't seeding enough and she started to defriend him on social media and so on, did he then realize he needed to hire his own team. And that's when she started to feel like she needed to sue him. You know, like any bad publicity must've been generated by him. There's no way people could be turning on her.

1:29:36And now we're about to go into a trial where it's May 4th today. We are 15 days away from the start of what is likely to be the trial of the century, at least when it comes to civil liability and or Hollywood. So what were your impressions? I know you took a look at the Vulture article.

1:29:54Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, well, I always love when Kelly's court is in session on this because the trial is going to be like really, I don't know. It's just there's so many tangled variables or interests that are like going through the legal process right now with this story. But the Vulture piece puts the meat on the bones. I think of the broad contours that you and a lot of others saw immediately when that Christmastime New York Times article dropped. This was like a year and a half ago at this point. It was like the first big article of the saga. and it was trying to point the finger at Baldoni in almost a Me Too way.

1:30:34Emily Jashinsky:And you could see in that story how something was being built and constructed, even at that time when we had so little context about what was happening behind the scenes. And what you get in this vulture piece is the step-by-step TikTok of how Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds roped in a network of very powerful celebrities and their reputations to try to take down Baldoni and save Blake Lively's career. They brought in Matt Damon and Matt Damon's wife. Obviously, people have known about the Taylor Swift of it all for a long time, but they are consciously trying. And you see in their text messages, which are deeply embarrassing because they are groveling to their celebrity friends, like reading them as a third party, you have secondhand embarrassment for these celebrities who are groveling over more powerful celebrities and trying to bring them to their side.

1:31:31Emily Jashinsky:They are invoking politics. Ryan Reynolds is referring to Baldoni as a fominist, like F-A-U-X-manist, a fake feminist. Yeah. Here's the quote he writes to Matt Damon and his wife. This is from Ryan Reynolds. He calls him a malignant, malignantly, malign, easy for me to say, malignantly vain, sociopathic, feminist with almost no sense of boundaries or shame. Keep going. Yeah. I mean, they are, there's message after message where they are invoking politics, feminism, being a good ally. You can see this in some of the early text messages between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. They are like bonding over allyship.

1:32:12Emily Jashinsky:It just makes your skin crawl because it's so cringy. It's just like - And their wokeness. Yes, it's just like toxic millennial behavior, which I can say because I'm a millennial, but they are just like trying to bring this huge network of celebrities to crush Justin Baldoni. And they are manipulating the media in the process. It's incredible to watch the behind the scenes happen with all of these text messages. It's amazing. And how small these huge stars are at heart. Yes, yes. You can have all the money and all the fame and all the trappings of Orion Reynolds and Blake Lively and still feel so small that you've got to rally your celeb network to try to ruin this director, Justin Baldoni, who really wasn't planning on doing anything to Blake Lively.

1:32:56He wanted to have a successful movie. He wanted to have a great rollout. She started to publicly humiliate him by unfollowing him on social media and getting the rest of the cast to do that and making him stay in the basement for the premiere. And he accurately deduced, I mean, it doesn't exactly take a genius, that she was trying to ruin him. Like this is the beginning of a smear campaign from which he was unlikely to recover, hired his own PR team to try to fight back. And that's been painted as now retaliation for the alleged sexual harassment. She, in my view, completely falsely claimed she was subjected to on set.

1:33:27The sexual harassment piece of her claim has been thrown out. But I do think one of the most interesting things about this trial is going to be the exact same dynamic we saw at Amber Heard, Johnny Depp and that trial. because she, you see in the text messages outlined in this article that her team, including starting with her and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, they're like, we will label him this fominist, like a fake feminist. Justin Baldoni was one of those touchy feely guys with a man bun who was like, oh, women, women, and I need to be a real ally and all that stuff. And they were like, he is the devil himself.

1:34:08He's a disgusting man who uses that as a label to reel in women whom he then takes advantage of, speaks inappropriately to, treats with Me Too-like behaviors. and they are going to have the chance to tell that story. They are going, we get some of the details, which I actually hadn't heard some of these about how they write in the, about how it started to go south initially over tensions around sex scenes. Reading from the piece here, some of the first hints of tension between the two emerged as they started working out the intimate scenes between their characters in the spring of 2023. Baldoni wanted the movie's first sex scene to telegraph the shifting power dynamic between Ryle, the guy, and Lily, the gal uh that's justin and blake's characters she's in charge and then he takes over baldoni wrote in a description of the scene quote two strong personalities coming together as one his character would start kissing his way down her torso until his mouth finds that precious place between her legs i mean this is like day what of me doing the dirty readings on the air after that jp morgan lawsuit and i'm not adam carolla so i can't i can't handle it quite like This is becoming like a sidekick for me.

1:35:19Okay. His direction called for the camera to then close in unlively as she, quote, moans in ecstasy. Baldoni's notes about a different scene described what parts of their respective bodies he hoped to show. Quote, I imagine side boob, an outline of butt in close-ups if she is comfortable, he wrote. I'm fine showing my butt. Female gaze, because he wants the whole scene shot through like a female gaze, he says. Lively expressed discomfort with a number of these proposals and a nudity writer that she negotiated. She drew the line at any implication of oral sex along with any nudity beyond side breast, which would be seen whilst still wearing a bikini.

1:35:57Lively, who is 38, also did not want to perform an on-screen orgasm. I'm too old for that, Baldoni later recalled her saying. She told Baldoni that some of the scenes in the script, like one in which Lively would role play as a naughty doctor, were starting to feel pornographic, and so on. So it takes you through how she started to view him as like this Me Too creep, as opposed to like the director of a saucy movie that has like a passionate couple in which she realized he's actually an abuser. Right. So it's like if Baldoni were doing this and they were making like, I don't know, the social network.

1:36:36Yeah. You'd be like, isn't this about Facebook? Why are you talking about side boob? But like, this is about love, relationship, sex and blah, blah, blah and whatever. And so that's her side versus back to the Amber Heard, Johnny Depp thing. His side, which is she's the fake feminist. She wraps herself in this cloak of female empowerment, but she instead uses it as a cudgel against perfectly legitimate business partners who happen to be male. because she knows it's a weapon. It's a tool in her arsenal in that if she, Blake Lively, deploys it, they're effed and no one will believe anyone other than, you know, the believe all woman, Blake Lively, making the allegations.

1:37:26So like, those are the dueling narratives. It's almost like, who's gonna win the narrative? Whoever wins the narrative wins the trial.

1:37:34Emily Jashinsky:Didn't one of them, I thought Baldoni actually hired the Johnny Depp, was it the publicist or the lawyer in the Amber Heard case? Like that's one of them. Camille, the lawyer doesn't work for him, but it might be, I mean, he has Brian Friedman, my lawyer representing him, who does not have the Johnny Depp lawyer at his firm, but it could be a publicist. Yeah, but it might make sense. By the way, Brian Friedman, he went on In the Well, which is one of our MK True Crime new shows with Mark Garagos and Matt, sorry, Matt Murphy. and they interviewed Brian Friedman and he offered some insights on the trial, which is great because he's about to try this thing in two weeks.

1:38:18And listen to what, this is the one I want to play because it actually telegraphs a little bit about what they, the defense, are going to concede. Stop 34.

1:38:28Emily Jashinsky:You know, are you defaming someone when you're actually, you know, what's showing up are videos that existed on the internet? You're not creating new content. You're actually, you know, you're actually just being blamed for content that was older content that is reappearing in the Internet and reappearing in, you know, in significant ways. I mean, I think we could all agree that during the premiere of a movie and the start of a movie, there's a publicity campaign. And, you know, that was another issue in why there was some organic hate. But ultimately, you know, I think that, you know, when you're basically doing nothing but showing what already exists, whether something like that can be actionable.

1:39:21Okay. So if you're showing something like that exists, can it be actionable? I thought he might have been intimating that it's possible those negative videos about Blake were recirculated by some on Baldoni's team. I could be wrong, but I thought I gleaned that from his answer. And that could be what she's trying to base her claim on. You know, that's definitely her theory, which is that Baldoni's people pushed it. There was not a lot of proof of that. There was a lot of proof that a bad PR wave overcame her around the time of this movie, but not that Justin Baldoni caused it, that he was ready to do that, that he had hired PR people to help him if he needed to do that.

1:40:05But there may be a question of whether if the PR people working for Justin helped circulate those bad videos, is that worth$400 million, as she's now claiming?

1:40:19Emily Jashinsky:Right. I think that's the crux of everything in this. One of the reasons I find this story so interesting and have from the beginning is it has potential to be a radicalizing experience for young people who are interested in pop culture and the way that people who are interested in politics have had some radicalizing experiences along the lines of what we were talking about earlier in the show, where you have the clips versus the reality. And what we see in that vulture story, especially if you go back and read the original New York Times story that has been questioned hugely throughout all of this, every step of the way, it's that you see how there's a big business now in manipulating what was supposed to be the raw, authentic future of the internet, which was social media.

1:41:04Emily Jashinsky:This has become a big corporate endeavor with millions, sometimes billions of dollars on the line. And it is absolutely behind the scenes being manipulated for business purposes, for personal purposes, by people who have more power than you, who are trying to create these images and these actual narratives. Like they know perception is reality. And so they're trying to manipulate the perception. That is one of the absolute most fascinating things about this story is the chicken or the egg component. Were people organically already starting to question Blake Lively amid this kind of vibe shift that was happening at the time over like millennial feminism and how sort of weird it was and how outmoded it seemed to Gen Z?

1:41:49Emily Jashinsky:Was that already percolating or was it planted or was it just part of like it percolated organically and then it became part of this business strategy in Baldoni's camp to get his cut of the movie to win at the end of the day? They're like manipulating screenings. It's just like the level to your point about how small celebrities can be small, but then also in this like, what is even the right way to put it? This strategic grand plan to make more money at the end of the day and protect their reputations. Like, it's really amazing to see that in action when you go behind the scenes. So true. There's one other I wanted to show from In the Well, which you guys should check out.

1:42:36It's a new podcast. with Matt Murphy and Mark Garagos, featuring Brian Friedman this week, the lawyer for Justin Baldoni's Sat 33.

1:42:43Emily Jashinsky:The lost damages on a movie that wasn't made would seem to me to be the most speculative type of damages that would almost be garbage. So is that the argument? What was the argument? Well, some of the argument was, you know, obviously that Wayfarer had the rights to the movie, so it was ultimately their decision to whether to make the sequel or not, and there was no, you know, there was no, you know, decision made and possibly the sequel could never be made. That certainly who was going to be in the sequel or not and who is going to be participating and at what level, even if one was made, was some decision that wasn't even made yet.

1:43:25Emily Jashinsky:And in fact, Sony, who, you know, was a co-financier of the movie, um you know mr call grab reported in court that that um sony had referred to blake lively as you know as a terrorist um and so there was no guarantee that sony would want blake live that he'd be involved in the um in the sequel you know when you're referring referring to someone as a terrorist incredibly telling and um you know she's trying to get damages for a sequel to a movie that never had a sequel. All right, got to run quickly, Emily. You'll pick it up in a couple minutes on the after show. Thank you. We're back tomorrow with Red Scare.

1:44:06Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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