Today, we're looking at a series of viral controversies that really highlight this problem, starting with the Cornell Jane Doe case, then Kelly Clarkson's bizarre fight with a Brooklyn store, and wrapping up with some political stories that have everyone talking.

And before we get to Cornell, we need to talk about the cultural backdrop here.

Megyn Kelly recently went after Alex Cooper and Call Her Daddy pretty hard, arguing that Cooper has built this massive brand around telling young women to behave like men sexually while positioning herself as some kind of voice for women's empowerment.

Kelly stresses that consent was present throughout.

And that's being used to demonize fraternities and young men more broadly when the actual legal question is much narrower.

But here's where the media coverage gets really problematic.

What are they leaving out? Context.

Major outlets are reportedly omitting text messages where Jane Doe allegedly referred to the encounter as a gangbang and said, our bodies, our choice.

Your thoughts, Em.

This is so much, and there's so many new developments to get to as well.

I mean, the Alex Cooper Podcast is a remarkable arte- artifact of fourth wave feminism, because her entire shtick is telling women that they can have sex like men, and, this is two parts, one, that you can do it, and two, that it will be empowering to you.

So yes, physically, can you do it? Two, uh, is it going to be empowering to you? In the vast, vast majority of cases, no.

And that is part of why women are often traumatized, as Jane Doe very clearly was, by the sexual experience that she was told by the same people who told Alex Cooper this lie, uh, that she now promotes everywhere, that it will make you feel empowered, that you should be able to do it, and it will make you feel empowered.

And the vast majority of cases, women can't do that.

It is a chemical biological fact.

As the mother of two sons and an empowered daughter who would never listen to that show nor allow herself to be in that situation, how dare she try to rope my boys and other women's boys into her perverse world as disgusting, perverted rapists when she, the sex podcaster, has been training women from the, and girls from the age of 11 how to do the glug glug as soon as they get to college campuses like Cornell.

What do you make of the ad? And tell us about the reaction.

So this is a really fascinating dust up on the right right now, actually, because some people were saying, just as Andy alluded to, that it's weird to almost go out of your way to then attack the white working class or the white non-working class in this case that you clearly tried to do if you're Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Like they say, the argument is that she... went completely out of her way to make this about somebody who was white when statistically it would likely not be a white guy.

That's the argument.

And on the other hand, you can see it also as very un-Trumpian because it's a direct attack on the voter that if you are somebody who's family, it's not just the person who's doing it.

It's the parents who have the kid in the basement.

It's the neighbors who maybe like the kid, don't know why he doesn't get out of the basement and are frustrated with it.

What do you know about where the Hispanic vote is going this time around?

[laughs]

... like, artists mixing politics when it's sincere and when it's smart, and this is not any of that to me.

I mean, it's clearly sincere, but it's not particularly clever.

It's just kind of normal advocacy, activism type stuff, um, which i- it is annoying unless I think it's built into the art and into the song.

Doesn't mean he doesn't have a right to do it, and now he's been turned into a martyr.

So while he was canceled by the Robert Kraft-led effort to cancel him, he has now become uncanceled with a huge swath of the population [laughs] who is rushing to his defense.

So you could be the most vociferous defender of Israel, of America's alliance with Israel.

No

wouldEmily, is it, is, is Karl right? This is a, in part, a communications failure on the part of the administration?

Well, it's tough with Trump because so much of what he does, it's plucked straight from The Art of the Deal, is both public re- relations and substance.

He is kind of the master at tying those two things together.

But right now, the Strait of Hormuz is not open.

Before the war, the Strait of Hormuz, 20% of the world's oil and gas transit going through the Strait of Hormuz, was open.

There were no tolls.

There was no fighting over it, I mean, at least not kinetic fighting over it, and that right now is his single biggest hurdle to getting out of this war.

But don't get sort of stuck in the middle," which is where he's been for some time now.

Today, we're breaking down election shocks in Wisconsin and Minnesota, the latest culture war battles, a WNBA backlash, and a heartbreaking but hopeful fight over Baby Gabriel.

Let's start with Wisconsin, because that upset was stunning.

Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong lost despite polling ahead.

Her campaign was defined by some truly bizarre public comments, including claiming her son gave her a proximity to whiteness.

Plus, she expressed disdain for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Valentine's Day.

The results showed that even in a blue-leaning environment, voters can reject candidates who feel too extreme.

What do you think the polling missed here?

That opens the door for a competitive Senate fight between Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan and former sports broadcaster Michelle Tafoya.

It's going to affect the right to life in this country, and it's going absolutely to affect surrogacy in this country.

Absolutely it is.

And this puts, again, to the test the idea that abortion is about, totally about women's bodily autonomy.

That is the left's position.

That's exactly why you see bills like the one in Massachusetts being signed so proudly.

Because if you really do believe that, if you believe that a woman's bodily autonomy is a, a right that is higher than the right to life, then of course you have to defend this.

You have to defend this vigorously, and you have to defend this proudly.

How dare she try to play the white privilege card?

So as the pressure, you know, to hit these numbers grow, is it becoming less about targeting dangerous criminals and more about reaching this quota?

It's an interesting question because I would still say from a, the perspective of like if I put myself in the shoes of a Republican member of Congress here or a Trump voter, a third is a pretty high number because it's disproportionate to probably the, the level of violent criminality if you look across studies, like the Cato Institute has done some of these, about, uh, like violent criminality among the illegal immigrant population.

This is excluding the crime of, of course, uh, crossing the border illegally or overstaying a visa or not showing up for asylum hearings, those sorts of things.

So I, I think they actually might be pleased that it's a third.

So f- they would not even say only a third.

They would say a third of these are, are violent criminals, and there has been support, of course, until Minneapolis really exploded months ago.

There was widespread support in the American public.

But do Americans want tougher immigration enforcements but not like this?

He's not wrong.

W- Democrats structurally, I think, have had more control over their grassroots.

I think that's how they were able to, like, squelch Bernie's run in 2016 and 2020, but they didn't squelch the momentum.

And so in some ways, I wonder if they're just a bit behind what Trump was able to pull off in 2016 when the old guard of the Republican Party tried every avenue to shut him down.

But because he's Donald Trump, he's a singular political figure, they just could not pull it off.

And I don't know what happens to the Republican Party after Donald Trump, but I think I know what happens to the future of populism, uh, in the next 10, 20 years, which is that it's, it's actually not going anywhere.

It's rising on the left.

Mm-hmm

Yeah

... as well.

He's clearly, clearly paying very close attention to it and believes that Republicans aren't offering, uh, the correct counterbalance to the rise of DSA-type candidates.

And I, I think that diagnosis is accurate because the reason, you saw with Zohra Mamdani, so many people said they don't support socialism, but then they voted for Zohra Mamdani [laughs] in the election last year.

And that's what should really concern establishment Democrats and what should really concern Republicans because that, what that tells you is that the politics being offered by the people who don't want socialists to win elections are so, uh, unattractive to voters that even people who don't like socialism are siding [laughs] with the socialists.

And that, to me, is a big statement.

That, to me, is why the DSA politics, whether we're talking about the DSA as a formal organization or more the, the tone, tenor, and policy agenda that they're setting for the Democratic Party now, that's...

But how would you characterize what that does to your brother's worldview as compared to yours? Does it make him a, a shorter attention span maybe, but what's the id- what's the generational identity that derives from being part of an algorithmically served short-form video life?

What did you make of this? And how big of a deal is this?

Yeah, that's where I was just going to go, Tom, because people outside of D.C. might not totally understand ActBlue, WinRed, and their centrality to the political process right now.

Unless you're somebody who's a small-dollar donor, even bigger than a small-dollar donor, you might not even be familiar with these platforms, which have basically become the funnels for political donations, which is interesting in and of itself that there's so much power vested in one funnel on the right, mostly.

I think they're more like I guess you said two on the right and then mostly just one on the left.

And it was their own law firm.

I pulled up the New York Times story that a lot of this is in response to.

It was their own law firm.

It seems like everything they did was a misstep.

Mm-hmm

... care for depression for weeks.

And if you look at what happened to Fetterman, he has changed some of his positions on those issues that progressives cared most about.

Um, like, there's a certain kitchen table progressive economic policies, those sorts of things.

He's changed his disposition and his temperament.

So I, I think that is actually kind of an interesting comparison is that, like, when somebody is, is thrust into a job that is enormously stressful and high stakes, and they're dealing with significant mental health problems that would go back to being in Ramadi in 2006, where Plattner was, along with a lot of, uh, other men who've served the country and have dealt with PTSD.

I think that's actually a, kind of a fair question.

Uh-That, so I can't talk about it? I don't think those are the rules

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.

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's 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 cro- cause, basically, across the board inflation, and that's not, I think this is, these assessments are correct.

Trump himself acknowledged in a, an interview with Maria Bartiromo a couple of weeks ago that, "Ah, yeah, the, the prices could remain elevated all the way up until the, the midterm elections." And so, uh, when you're asking the public to make a sacrifice for safety, and then you, uh, 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.

Because if you lose American lives in the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Hormuz was obviously open before the war began.

But 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?

It's hard to believe." And, and I think this investigation and the fact that a grand jury has issued these indictments pretty much blows the lid off things, does it not?

Yeah, and what the grand jury returned to that indictment yesterday from the DOJ is really shocking because actually nobody really had evidence, and this was a minor suspicion about the SPLC that was mostly relegated to people who follow the story really closely, that perhaps they were, like the government has often done unfortunately, funding informants to infiltrate some of the events and groups that the SPLC was then turning around and funding off of.

But conservatives for years, you know, this was...

I was at The Washington Examiner back in 2017 writing about them going after conservative, mainstream conservative groups.

They went after Ayaan Hirsi Ali for criticizing Islam, uh, over and over again.

They were going after groups that were, for example, hawkish on immigration, uh, traditional values Christian groups that opposed gay marriage, and then putting them on hate watch lists alongside KKK groups and Neo-Nazi groups.

So on the right, the SPLC has been a huge thorn in everybody's side for many, many years.

When you watch it, you watch those guys in the khakis with their mask and their flags, like people are like, "Wh- who are these guys? Where'd they come from?" Somebody's paying them to be there, but it's looking like that might have been the SPLC.

The de- the discredited reporter who r- had all the scoops on Russiagate that turned out to be completely false.

Yes.

And interestingly, that scoop she had last week with Jim Sciutto, who was, like, chief of staff to the ambassador to China during the Obama administration.

So clearly this was coming from somewhere in the, the, I would say, like, military intelligence world.

That was about how actually Iranian m- uh, their, this, Iran still had, like, 50% of its missile launchers and that type of capacity.

So you're trying to, like, piece together why that story came out when.

But this is why, I mean, there are decades of pieces of evidence that people brag about afterwards in our own government when it comes to propaganda that they were feeding to the press over and over again throughout the Cold War.

[laughs]

Uh, so what do you make of her arrest now for DWI... or DUI, which is slightly less severe than DWI?

Well, I was gonna say exactly the same thing about that statement.

It sort of presents this glass half full perspective on what just happened.

Because as you were pointing out, the conservatorship was, you know, to hear Britney Spears put it at this very moving hearing when the conservatorship was on the table, uh, she spoke in court about how because of the conservatorship, she had been drugged against her will for many, many years.

And so when I'm reading between the lines of that statement, I'm thinking, did she, you know, with all of the drugs that she had been given, including lithium, while she was under the conservatorship for many, many years, go from having this cocktail, um, that was given to her under that legal control, to not getting at all, uh, the right off-ramp, medically the right off-ramp from many years spent on all of those different drugs? Uh, because I agree with you, Megan, she's clearly on something in all of these videos that are posted regularly on her account.

They're so uncomfortable.

They're so sad.

[laughs]

I'll get back to this.

Well, uh, yeah, I mean, there's a lot about...

If you, if you just search the files for, like, CIA, NSA, you find that Epstein FOIA'd himself in 2011, and the CIA gets back to him.

He FOIA'd himself at NSA, CIA, FBI, [chuckles] and at least the CIA FOIA.

He's, uh, FOIA-ing, so Freedom of Infor- Information Act, um, he's asking the CIA to produce any evidence basically of an affiliation with him, which is extremely interesting.

It, it's a very odd thing to do if you know you have had no affiliation, you have had no status as an asset with the CIA.

That's already bizarre.

... or kitty, and it's all over the Epstein emails.

Do you see Mayor Frey giving up any of those?

No, absolutely not.

Absolutely not.

Um, and this is another point where he says violent criminals should be held accountable based on the crimes they commit, not based on where they're from, he- where they're from.

He's also saying that about plain criminals, uh, because that's what's happening.

You have people coming out of the county and city jails, and they've put their foot down over and over again over the course of years now in sanctuary jurisdictions around the country.

They're absolutely not budging, and my sense is that what we've seen from the administration over the last, like, 48, 72 hours is, uh, a kind of reckoning with the reality that the sanctuary cities have not been pressured, uh, in the court of public opinion.

Oh, and by the way, okay, we'll do it, just as long as you agree, no more arrests of any illegals unless they've committed additional felonies." [chuckles] I mean, like, the- they're going so radically left on it, that they're risking turning those poll numbers, which have now turned in their favor, back around the other way.

Emily, I just want to ask, what do you think of the administration's argument here, that this was brought on by Pradi's decision to carry a gun to the protest, and also the way that the officials have kind of pre-judged this and pre-spun a narrative before there has been any investigation, exactly the same playbook we saw with Renee Good?

Yeah, I mean, Kristi Noem got out right on Saturday afternoon, so did Attorney General Pam Bondi, and were pointing the finger squarely at Pradi.

Um, and in such...

You know, to the point you just made, I'm trying to, uh, kind of separate two different things.

One is, uh, this question of how the administration has discussed the firearm, and then the other is what actually happened, and their discussion of the firearm has been, uh, infuriating.

Like, if you are a, a gun owner, I mean, even if you're...

Some folks were just in the Virginia State Capitol, um, doing, uh...

Um, because those people are just here to do a job, and, and also, when you, when you fire the people at the meatpacking plants, why do you think grocery bills are going up?

You know, Tucker's talking points this time last week was, "I guess we've decided to be an empire," and okay, at least we're saying it out loud, but that's dangerous, too.

Yeah, it...

And in this case, I mean, the uncertainties, as we've just been discussing, there's just been a lack of humility.

If you go back and, and read the reporting about the Iraq War, and just what was happening behind the scenes with Dick Cheney and others, there was a total lack of humility about what would come next.

And to your point, the question is, if what is there right now is bad, I think all of us agree that it is, does what come...

I- is what would come next worse? And you have to have some humility about your ability to predict what would come next, and that is just not something we've seen from the foreign policy establishment in the United States for a very, very long time.

Now, of course, neither the Shah, originally...

Me understands you can hear both sides." Stop! Uh, it's nonstop opinion, and it's, it's egocentric.

(laughs) I didn't even see it.

Ryan and I never prepare.

It's sort of our signature.

All right.

(laughs) We didn't know who was gonna go first until about two seconds ago, so... (laughs) All right.

Um, well, I am a bit of a Luddite.

But you don't actually have to disagree with most of what you will hear from our opponents to vote against them in this debate.

(laughs)

I mean, how does this happen?

Au- Aus- Australia's obviously already talking about guns, but they should consider that whether it's guns, uh, pressure cooker bombs, or cars, we have seen plenty of car attacks in- in Europe, actually here in the United States.

Uh, what they're sharing in common here is- is Islamic militant Islamism, and Rod Dreher had an interesting, uh, note on his Substack this morning where he wrote, uh, reportedly, uh, the- the hero in this case, when you were playing that video I basically wanted to jump out of my chair and start applauding, is also Muslim.

And Dreher wrote, you know, there are- are Muslims around the world, uh, we should keep in mind who are also sick of this bullshit, uh, militant Islamism.

And that's what you see in this case, apparently, with, uh, the- the hero who stops the shooting.

But if you're gonna talk about guns, uh, there is something so much deeper, so much deeper that political correctness in the West has blinded us to, uh, paying attention at the degree...

We all know this.

They don't normally tack on the ISIS flag and make super clear exactly what they're doing.

Yeah

... uh, in the, the State Attorney General's office saying that, uh, they're weaponizing these charges because in the United States, racism is highly stigmatized, as it should be, uh, and discrimination is highly stigmatized.

And so the Biden White House weaponized that over and over again on the age question.

They weaponized it on immigration.

Uh, and they, they weaponized, uh, the idea that everyone...

Or they, they weaponized a distrust of, like [laughs] the Soviet Union to say anybody who was questioning Zelenskyy was a Putin apologist and was in the pocket of Russia.

Uh, and so it's over and over again, this, this weaponizing stigmatized, uh, issues and using them as shields.

Yeah

(laughs) Uh, what are your thoughts on it, EJ?

Well, this is obviously a, sort of an amplified example of the kind of thing that happens behind closed doors, and sometimes not even behind closed doors, in Washington DC, in New York, Los Angeles, among very powerful, wealthy people.

But, uh, I think everybody understood that this was a messy relationship.

Certainly everybody in DC seemed to understand that this was a messy relationship as it was happening.

Ryan Lizza had kids, he was much older than Olivia, and it all just seemed, like, tornadic the way that they got together and, uh, carried out their relationship.

But, uh, listen, like, where I'm from, this would be s- these would be people you wouldn't want to babysit your children.

These would be people that you wouldn't want, you know, around your, your family or your kids because the behavior here is just grotesque and sad.

What have you found?

Okay.

We, we don't talk about it that much, because after October 7th, it was so... we did so much Israel coverage.

And when she was killed, I started asking some people I really trusted on the right, because I had to cover the story, "What's going on here?" Like, "This seems, this seems weird.

It looks like she was targeted.

What's happening?" And what I heard made a lot of sense to me, which is the IDF has no reason to do this.

Why would the IDF do this? And I saw the Biden administration basically taking the Israeli government's propaganda and regurgitating it, and I really didn't like being lied to about a American, about a Christian, and about a journalist's death.

And eventually, the IDF came out and said, you know, "This is, this was our mistake," but it took weeks, and they pretty clearly knew it right away.

(audience applauds)