The Megyn Kelly Show
The Minaj Moment, Vance vs Crockett, Creepy New Epstein Photos, and Charles Murray's Faith Journey
24 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, everyone. Welcome to After Party. It's Christmas week, but we're, of course, still working right now, at least. This is going to be our last show of 2025. We're excited to see all of you in 2026. As a reminder, there will be happy hour episodes available this Friday and next Friday, so make sure you subscribe over in the podcast feed, Apple, Spotify, whichever podcast feed you use.
That's where I answer questions directly from all of you that you send to emily at devilmaycaremedia.com and also email
the after party emily instagram i spent i don't know i think it was probably close to three hours taping happy hours last week so got some good stuff pre-taped you sent in some super super interesting uh and fiery questions dare i say so i take a stab and go through them live actually today's guest on after party is charles murray one of my very favorite authors and thinkers it is always
a rare privilege to be able to pick the brain of somebody whose work you hold in such high regard. Coming Apart is, of course, I think the most important book about journalism that is not particularly a book about journalism. So we are going to have Charles, we pre-taped this last week, so I'll be in the chat, which is exciting as well.
I get to talk to all of you as soon as we toss to the Murray interview, but we have a lot to get through tonight. busy, busy, busy news week leading up to Christmas. Make sure you subscribe, not just on the podcast feed, also the YouTube feed. We appreciate it. Now, just dropped, Sean Ryan's interview with Hunter Biden. That's all a lot, but it just dropped.
And as we were prepping the show, a couple of clips started popping. And so we're gonna take a look at a clip of Hunter Biden talking about his father's immigration policy Is he defending it? Not really. We're going to be talking about Nicki Minaj at AmFest and her interview with Erika Kirk. J.D. Vance reacted to that. Jasmine Crockett reacted to J.D. Vance kind of in general.
Just more stuff from I actually think the theme of tonight's opening that I'm going to get to in just one moment is what should make the left nervous about the Democratic Party going into 2026. Don't get me wrong, the right has a lot to be nervous about as well. But we're going to talk a little bit about the DC police chief who's leaving her job, Incredible video if you haven't seen this yet.
Just incredible. Compared herself to Jesus. So, make sure you stick around for that one. Dave Chappelle dropped a new special on Friday where he actually talks about Charlie Kirk. He talks about Israel. So, we are going to dive into that. And I'm actually going to do a breakdown of some things. I went through all of the new Epstein pictures. I haven't gone through all of the files myself yet.
I don't know that anybody could. And this is actually being in real time. I mean, even just tonight, there are new developments as people get through files, as Ryan Grimmer Dropsite gets through some of these files. But I wanted to pull out a few things just that I saw going through the pictures.
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Chapter 2: What makes Nicki Minaj's message resonate with young girls?
And another point she said, we're not allowed to think out loud anymore. She also said, we're the cool kids, meaning the right. She said... At one point, God, as she was praying, said to her, where have you been? I've been waiting for you. Cause she's was talking a bit about returning back to her faith and it raises so many different, there are a lot of threads that we can pull on here.
So first of all, we start with the kind of CRT and it wasn't really named.
Chapter 3: How do J.D. Vance and Jasmine Crockett respond to each other?
Nobody was talking about critical race theory and a technical academic sense, but Nicki Minaj speaking from her heart and very graciously, by the way, I have a couple of other points to get to on that, but speaking from her heart graciously, eloquently, and wearing her heart very clearly on her sleeve with great production value, by the way, from Turning Point USA.
Now, if I had to think about Nicki Minaj speaking at like 2011 CPAC, It's just, it's different now, right? Her saying, quote, we are the cool kids hits totally differently when it's coming from a person on the right in 2025, almost 2026, because Donald Trump is now the president. He has this whole vibe shift post 2024. So it makes more sense to see something like that.
And it does make it, it does kind of, for me, at least watching that, it, it, underscores the shift in the culture, and especially for younger people. But Nicki Minaj had the everyman's reaction to critical race theory in that video. And let's put up how JD Vance responded. He said, Nicki Minaj said something at AmFest that was really profound.
I'm paraphrasing, but she said, just because I want little black girls to think they're beautiful doesn't mean I need to put down little girls with blonde hair and blue eyes. Vance continues, we all got wrapped up over the last few years in the This was because the people who think they rule the world pit us against one another. Nicki Minaj rejects that, we all should.
And bundled into that package actually from Vans is this idea that the people who rule the world were trying to pit us, or they think they rule the world, were trying to pit us against one another, that gets to what Nicki Minaj was saying about being tired of people telling her what to think, saying we are not allowed to think out loud anymore.
And that is actually very profound as well, because we think now in published social media, she's been using X a ton, by the way, but we think in like these social media bites or you have a thought, you post it. Because when you open up your social media to check in what's going on, it tells you to post what's on your mind. Literally, that's what happens when you open the apps.
So it comes out on Instagram, it comes out on TikTok, it comes out on X, it comes out on live videos, it comes out on videos that are published. And as you go through life, your thought process, your thinking is happening aloud. And along the way, you're not allowed to sort of be on that journey, right?
And that was very interesting to hear Nicki Minaj say, because she's somebody who has been absolutely getting attacked, wildly getting attacked, for again, thinking aloud, she's clearly been on somewhat of an ideological journey. And you can see how at points in that journey, when she started getting this pushback, it was like,
pushed her maybe further in the other direction because she realized that the side she was disillusioned with was also trying to get her, sort of clinging to her, jealously clinging to her and trying to get her not even to think freely. And that's again, I mean, I remember 10 years ago, people on the right saying,
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Chapter 4: What insights does Charles Murray share about his faith journey?
I'm sorry, but anybody that you talk to knows my credentials. They know that I've gone to school. They know that I'm educated. I never tried to put on some random story about where I came from. But at the end of the day, I am who I am and I am authentic.
And that is actually what they are fearful of is my authenticity, because it rings true with every single American, whether they're a Texan or not. Baby, let's talk about your record, because the only reason you're the vice president is because the current president tried to have his last president killed. I have been a black woman my entire life.
I promise you there are other people just like J.D. Vance who have tried to do the same racist tropes my entire life. And somehow I ascended and became a U.S. congresswoman. It will not be different when I become a U.S. senator. And we can have a conversation when I get to the Senate floor if he wants to talk.
When I get to the Senate floor, now Jasmine Crockett, of course, is running in what I believe to be the most interesting Democratic primary of 2026 against Timu Richie Cunningham, James Tallarico down in Texas. They want to take on John Cornyn or, to be fair, whoever wins that Texas Republican primary.
for Crockett to say, on the one hand, it is a racist trope to refer to her as a street girl from J.D. Vance, and then to say, on the other hand, she is just totally authentic. You see the struggles of the nascent Crockett Senate campaign because she wants to pretend now that she didn't intentionally talk like she was on the street about Republicans and about other Democrats, which she did.
I mean, I call it I wrote a piece recently calling it stylistic populism or something like that. I don't even remember my own quote, but and that's different from like policy populism. Crockett wants you to think that she's populist because of the way that she acts, but she wants to govern the way Hakeem Jeffries says, right? The way the Democratic establishment wants her to.
And so that's not authentic. And I think people, the more she tries to be a different version of Jasmine Crockett, now that she knows she has to run statewide and not just in her district, are going to be able to see if she really wants to push that she's authentic. If that's going to be her message, people are going to be able to see
pretty easily through it because it defies believability for many different reasons. Speaking of Hakim Jeffries, he got asked, I told you this was a weave. I feel like if there are Pulitzers for weaves, this should be a contender. Follow along with me here. Hakim Jeffries got asked about the Somali investigation and here's S6 how Minority Leader Jeffries responded.
Thank you, Leader Jeffries. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is accusing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and AG Keith Ellison of not cooperating with the committee's investigation into some of the widespread fraud happening there with the social services in the state.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of Dave Chappelle's criticism of Israel?
When Jesus was hanging on the cross, when he slayed to his father, even in the pit of agony and defeat, he said, Father!
Forgive them for they know not what they do. God bless you and God keep you.
It has been my pleasure to serve the District of Columbia. Man, this is a Wendy's.
She's at an MPD press conference with the MPD logos behind her, a formal press conference, and is clearly working something out that is not merely professional but deeply personal on the crowd at that Metropolitan Police Department press conference in which Pamela Smith compared herself in this beautiful Christmas season, sort of an Easter message, to Jesus on the cross.
There are no words, although I will say I feel much safer knowing that Pamela Smith and whatever the hell that was is not going to be the head of the police department in our nation's capital. anymore. That's sort of a heartwarming place to leave it. I have so much more to talk about. Dave Chappelle, Jeffrey Epstein, and the New York Senator race.
I'll probably have to keep some of that a little pithy because I just went on so long talking about 2026. It's coming up real fast, but I have to introduce this interview I got to do with Charles Murray. who is out with a very important new book that I read and I was gonna interview him before, obviously before I read the book and read the book and it is, it's called Taking Religion Seriously.
You're gonna hear all about it in the interview. I'm gonna jump in the chat. So if you're watching this live on YouTube, I'll be right there. It is one of the most interesting, one of the most interesting analytical books analytical, what's the best way to put it, deep dives, as Murray tries to verify over the course of his recent life, Christianity.
And boy, does he come to an interesting conclusion. So we're going to go to Charles Murray in just one moment. Before we do, though, a fresh start is possible. Debt can feel like it's getting worse every month, but that only continues if nothing changes. PDS Debt has already helped hundreds of thousands of people rewrite their financial story and take back control
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Chapter 6: What shocking details emerge from the new Epstein files?
I've been looking forward to it.
I just finished taking religion seriously. I'm absolutely going to be ordering tons of copies for Christmas gifts, so I encourage other people to do the same. And I have a lot of questions, Charles. I want to start with this line.
You write, the Big Bang gave me good reason for thinking that the creation of the universe was a mystery with a capital M. The fantastic brute facts of the Big Bang forced me to rethink everything. I just wanted to start at that point because it seemed like that was maybe one of your starting points. Could you walk us through a little bit why that moment was so important for you?
Well, a little background to it is that I am no good at spiritual perceptiveness, which I consider to be a trait in human beings that runs from low to high. And some people have more than others, and I have very little. My wife has a lot, but I don't. And so when I started to get interested in religion, largely because of my wife,
I was not going to have a road to Damascus moment in an ordinary sense of that term. That's just not in my makeup. But I did have a road to Damascus moment when I read a little book called Just Six Numbers by a guy named Martin Rees, who's astronomer royal, used to be in Great Britain.
And he made the point in this little book, non-religiously, not a religious book, that the Big Bang was accompanied by a variety of settings, if you want to think of it that way, of physical settings, that if they all hadn't been exactly where they are, then we would live in a universe of black holes and nothing else, or live in a universe of radiation and no stars and no planets.
And of course, it's incorrect to say we would live in a universe like that because that universe would not support life. Well, I finished this little book. And by the way, the odds against all these settings being right by accident are literally trillions to one.
And I got done with that and I said, I can't believe I'm thinking this, but I think the only plausible explanation is that the universe was created with intention. That's a huge leap. Because once you say the universe was created with intention, that opens up possibilities of a way different kind of God than I had been willing to consider previously.
A God who actually might be interested in human beings.
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Chapter 7: Why did Elise Stefanik exit the New York Governor's race?
And it was anomalous in the degree to which intellectuals managed to avoid thinking about and writing about the basic questions of the human condition and human existence. It was an impoverished century philosophically, and I think spiritually as well. And that's unnatural.
It is deep in the human instincts, and especially among people who consider themselves intellectuals, to think about these questions. That's what college kids should be talking about until three o'clock in the morning when they're sophomores and juniors. And that we moved away from that was, I think, a kind of adolescence.
And I like to think of the 21st century as sort of growing out of adolescence and realizing maybe our parents were right about some things after all. And this taking the greater interest in religion now, I think, is a return to human beings behaving normally. I would also add one other thing to that, which is, as you suggest, the more we learn,
the more we face a situation not where science explains away the arguments for God, we have a situation where science is raising new findings that religion has answers for that science does not.
Yeah. And if folks are interested in that Spencer Clavin, this book does a lot of it too. And Spencer Clavin wrote a book on that as well. Some really compelling stuff. Justin Briarley has done great podcasts on it too.
The response I'm curious about since you've published this book, because Charles, one of the things that comes through in all of your work, especially this book though, is that you are constantly testing your own beliefs and you're genuinely driven by an interest in truth and
So since the book has been out, since you've been talking to friends about it, receiving responses about it, has anything shifted in those conversations? Since those conversations, what's it been like?
Actually, the most revealing interchange I had was after the Wall Street Journal op-ed where I was talking about terminal lucidity, a phenomenon where severely demented people, advanced dementia, have a period of brief return to full consciousness a day or two before they die. And it provoked a response by Steve Pinker, who was sort of the ultimate child of the Enlightenment.
He's written books, of course, with that in the title, in effect. And his response, I admire and like Steve, and I thought his response was silly. It was content-free. It didn't engage the substance of what I was doing. It was sort of hand-waving, hand-waving about evidence that meets a lot of tests of scientific seriousness.
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