Pod Save America - “The Fear Olympics.”

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

Democrats make another run at passing a voting rights bill, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health Dr. Ashish Jha talks about what the latest CDC guidance and scary Covid headlines actually mean for you, and a new analysis about why we’re all so angry points to Fox News as the culprit.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau. I'm John Leavitt. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's pod, Democrats make another run at passing a voting rights bill. Leavitt and I talk to Dr. Ashish Jha, the Dean of Public Health at Brown University, about what the latest CDC guidance and scary COVID headlines actually mean for you. And a new analysis about why we're all so angry points to Fox News as the culprit. Wow.

What? Sometimes it's the person you most expect. But first, some fun news. Crooked Media's very first book is now for sale at crooked.com. It's called The Crooked Guide to Societal Reentry. And it's a hilarious, beautifully illustrated 75-page book that has everything you need to know about how to make a seamless transition back into public life after being stuck at home for more than a year. The guide is written what a day newsletter editor sarah lazarus and illustrated

by crooked's own dianita ramesh get a copy for yourself and all your friends now again that's crooked.com store cool fun book guys it's awesome everybody should check it out it's a good gift it's a good gift looking for a good gift looking for a i guess not a stocking no nope not that i don't know i don't know when you i don't when you when you go in celebrate your nonsense you don't know when we celebrate christmas not in the summer that's a tough sorry sorry to make you know that fact uh all right let's get to the news i'm performing for elijah because he's in the studio yeah i'm doing a lot of jokes directly i'm all directing them just to Elijah today.

Like the old days. All right, let's get to the news. After a strategy session at the White House on Friday, Democrats in Congress are expected to unveil new versions of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act this week. The idea here is to scale back the original bill so that they're focused mostly on preventing voter suppression, electoral subversion, and partisan gerrymandering, which will get Joe Manchin on board and, at least in Joe Manchin's mind, hopefully get some Republicans on board. Not holding our breath there. We also keep getting

reminders about why this is also important. Mother Jones's Ari Berman just reported on a new analysis from the Democratic data firm TargetSmart that shows Republicans can take back control of the House in 2022 by drawing gerrymandered congressional districts in just four states that they already control, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. And on the election subversion front, we just learned from notes that the Department of Justice officials released to Congress that Donald Trump called acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen a few days before the attack on the Capitol and told him, quote, just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressman. That's great. That's a cool quote. All right. Lots to unpack here. Let's start with the twin

threats of gerrymandering and election subversion and then work our way towards the solutions. Tommy, what does Ari Berman's piece tell us about the size and scope of the Republican advantage when it comes to redistricting? So I thought the best overall quote in the Ari Berman piece was from everybody's favorite pill pusher turned member of Congress, Dr. Ronny Jackson, who said that redistricting alone should get us the majority back. So Republicans get to draw 187 congressional districts total. Democrats get to draw 75. The rest get drawn by commissions or states with divided government. According to Ari's piece, Republicans could pick up six to 13 seats in the House via redistricting in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas

alone. So in other words, the majority could be handed from the Democrats to the Republicans just because the maps get redrawn, not because anything else changed. So we are staring down the barrel of a gun right now, at least the congressional majority is. They need five seats to flip. They might be able to get five seats just out of Florida. Forget about the other three states well yeah i mean they the because our majority is so narrow they probably won't do that they will probably not over gerrymander in some of these places because yeah they're famous for showing restraint well no the reason no no not because they care but not out of restraint out of politics because you know one they can

you can't over gerryander, you can draw the maps and distribute your Republicans just too delicately. You get too greedy. And then all of a sudden a wave election could overcome the gerrymander. The problem is our majority is so narrow that they don't have to do that. They can actually draw pretty strong Republican seats in a lot of these States. Uh, even though they've lost the ability to gerrymander as, as extensively in places like Wisconsin, because we now have the governorship and a few other states, they can do it in a way that is kind of insurmountable, even with a wave election, even if we have a midterm in which people turn out

as much as they did turn out in 2020. The White House has been telling voting rights activists that they can out-organize some of these voter suppression laws, which, you know, there's a big debate over whether you can. People are upset that the White House is saying that, understandably putting it all on activists and organizers. But like, how much more difficult is it to out-organize gerrymandering? Tommy? So I get something. I kind of get the messaging goals here, which is we don't want to make it sound so dire, the voter suppression tactic so dire that Democrats get sad and give up, right? Like they want people to stay motivated. But you just can't out-organize a gerrymander. You can't out-organize election

subversion laws that take the power away from voters and hand them to state legislatures so they can overturn an election result. That's just, it's impossible. Like the problem with gerrymandering is the further and further we go, the computer software and other programs get more sophisticated and allow you to draw up just perfect maps for either side that are almost unbeatable. You can't organize your way out of that. And so I don't know if they were talking about voter suppression laws or voter ID laws or something associated with gerrymandering and not gerrymandering itself. But the suggestion that you can out-organize gerrymandering is wrong. And I can understand why that would land as almost insulting sounding if you were an activist who cares about this deeply.

It's part of the reason also why I've been sort of annoyed that most of the coverage about voter suppression since the election has been focused on some of the voter suppression laws and not the fact that Republicans are about to gerrymander the shit out of the map for a decade. Because, like, it is horrific to, for example, you know, ban people from ban volunteers from giving food and water to people waiting in an hour line. Like, that's awful. Right. But there are ways to get around that. Right. There are ways to make sure that people, voters are educated about the hurdles they have to jump over to register to vote and to make sure they're not purged from roles. Like all this stuff is horrible, but there are ways to get around it. You know, David Shore, Democratic data analyst, says in this Mother Jones piece, if everyone voted the same way as in 2020, Republicans would win the House through redistricting alone. That's how hard it is to out-organize a gerrymander. And he said the ban on gerrymandering that's contained in this voting rights legislation is about five times more important than the rest of the bill combined. Yeah, I mean, you can't organize someone's house from a 90-10 Democratic

district to a 55-45 Republican district. Yeah, here's how we're going to beat that. We're going to move you out of the district. And I do think actually, even though it is absolutely true, like we've seen this in Pennsylvania to Georgia, you can organize and educate voters to overcome these things. And there are knock on effects when you tell when you tell people their vote is threatened. You can sometimes instill people a kind of real pressure and desire to get out there and overcome these hurdles. That said, it is a frustrating message. I agree, Tommy, that it is about just sort of signaling, like, we think this fight may be really, really hard, if not impossible. And if we lose it, we still want to make sure people understand that we can win in the midterms. But it does

take the pressure off of Congress to say that we can overcome these things with organization when the message needs to be, this is dire, this is an emergency, we need to act. We need to act right now. Yeah, look, we don't want anyone to give up hope, we're going to stay, you know, involved in fighting all this. But like Dave Wasserman from the Cook Political Report drew up a hypothetical map of what an extreme gerrymander in Texas could look like. And you could end up with Republicans having 25 seats compared to 13 seats for Democrats, even though Biden lost the state by only five points. So that is how much you can distort what a state actually looks like when it comes to its partisan breakdown compared to its congressional representation. And that's

why it could be a disaster. And one other thing I just add about this, Democrats, even if we controlled all state legislatures and can draw all maps, because Democrats tend to live in more Democratic districts than Republicans live in Republican districts, it's actually harder for Democrats to gerrymander to the extent that Republicans can do it because Democrats live in these concentrated areas in a way that Republicans don't. Even these rural districts in which Republicans kind of draw these maps to give themselves an advantage, there are more Democrats there than there are in the heart of, say, like Nancy Pelosi's district or Adam Schiff's district or any or AOC's district or any of a number of very concentrated Democratic districts. There is one last thing on this. There

is a timing issue here, too. The census releases the data that allows states to draw the maps on August 16th. So it's coming fast. But even if Congress passes a law banning gerrymandering sort of after the census data is released and some maps are drawn, it's the ban would still sort of put the legal challenges to this on firmer ground. You know, John Roberts wrote himself in an opinion where he said gerrymandering was OK. He said the framers gave Congress the power to do something about partisan gerrymandering in the elections clause. John Roberts himself is basically tempting Congress like it's on you. You want to pass something. It'll be fine. But if you don't pass anything, we're not going to uphold any challenges to gerrymandering. And he also gave that aren't racially. Right. Well, that's the thing. He also

gave Republicans an instruction manual for how to get racist gerrymanders through by leaving the part in which they are trying to sort by race out of the conversation and making it partisan, because that, according to John Roberts, is protective. Tommy, I want to get your thoughts on this Trump story, which once again falls into the category of shocking but not surprising. Philip Bump at The Washington Post did point out that what's new about the story is the note suggesting that Trump and congressional Republicans may have been coordinating their efforts to overturn the election. What should we, and especially Congress, do with that information? I am very upset by this story. I found it not surprising,

but shocking, as you say. I just want to spend a minute talking about Trump telling the attorney general that he may not be following the internet the way I do and therefore didn't understand that the election had been stolen from him. This seems important to harp on because it does speak to where he's getting his information and how, you know, I think it was one week ago or two weeks ago, we talked about the conspiracy theory that somehow the Italians had stolen the election or someone in the U.S. embassy in Rome had stolen the election. That's literally what he's talking about. And he's not just saying these things before, you know, a crowd of Aryan youths led by Charlie Kirk. He's saying this stuff to the attorney general of the United States that he appointed. And that's scary. I think the bigger question is,

why wasn't he following the Internet as closely as Trump? I mean, you know, if you want to be good at your job, you should know what your what your boss is up to and reading, you know, so you can make conversation. Got to read the whole Internet. Love it. What do we do about this? What do we do about it? That's what I would say. Two things. One, I know we know, but it is amazing how close we were to it all coming apart. We are very, very lucky.

We are very lucky that even after Barr was gone and Trump tried to find someone who was more loyal to him in this job, there were these places where there was resistance, where there did not have to be. There did not have to be resistance in the Georgia Secretary of State's office. There did not have to be resistance in terms of political decision making at DOJ. The other piece of this is we need to get to the bottom of what kind of conversations Trump was having with members of Congress, like Mo Brooks, like Jim Jordan, like Kevin McCarthy. That needs to be part of the investigation that the committee is running. Right now, they need to treat those members as what they are, which is some combination of

witnesses and perpetrators. Yeah. There's a CNN piece over the weekend where there was some question about whether they would be calling members of Congress as witnesses or potentially subpoenaing or how they might get that information from them or that testimony rather. I hope there's no question about whether someone like Jim Jordan will be called to testify. I mean, did you see this fumbling interview he did with some local journalists from Ohio where he was asked if he talked to Trump on January 6th? It's clear that guy is hiding something. He definitely talked to him. Yeah, it's been like a couple interviews like this where he's like,

I talk to the president all the time. Jim Jordan, always very careful with his work. You know, it's like these guys, these guys only sand the edges off in moments like these when they're worried about what could happen if they're under oath. You're absolutely right that this is why it's the one six commission can't just be about the attack itself. It's about everything that led up to the attack, including Trump's efforts all along the way from the day after the election through the insurrection to overturn the election itself and

the members of Congress who coordinated with them. And I also think I was glad to see that as Democrats make this new push for like a revised voting rights legislation, that they're going to include language to prevent election subversion. I think that language really needs to be quite strong. I mean, there's a question of how much can you do about states trying to subvert the election, Republican officials and states on the federal level. I think they need to amend the Electoral Act of 1887 so that you need like two thirds of both houses of Congress to send the electors back to the states. That way, if it's two thirds, it's less likely to be partisan in nature. Like this idea that now whoever controls Congress can reject the president, whichever party controls Congress can just reject the results of a presidential election is fucking

absurd. Yeah. And it should never have been a law. The I feel like there was this there's this question, like when Trump said to Rosen, leave it up to me and the congressman, what did he mean? Right. How, how concrete were the conversations he had with members of Congress? And I think that's really, really important, except that in the end, he, I want to know

how much communication there was. I want to know how much coordination there was. But I think one of the lessons of January 6th is even if there was none, they coordinated on television. They coordinated on Twitter, on the Internet, on the Internet, Trump's Internet. And they and they knew what they had to do. They didn't need the same. The members of Congress needed the same amount of instruction as the people on the National Mall. They knew what Trump wanted them to do.

And that's all that really mattered. And so, like, the fact that he was in conversation with them is important. But ultimately, what we are watching is a threat that if basically what we know is that if Republicans have both houses of Congress, the ability to actually have a presidential election is completely in doubt. Let's talk about the path forward on protecting voting rights and democracy. On Sunday, Joe Manchin told Jake Tapper that while he's optimistic about coming up with a compromise on voting rights, he still doesn't support a filibuster carve-out to pass it. Here's a clip. Jake, I can't imagine a carve-out because I was here in 2013 when it was called a carve-out.

We're just going to do the cabinet for the president. And then it went into we're going to do the judges who are lifetime appointments for circuit and district. They're even going to do Supreme Court, but they didn't at that time. The Democrats were in control. 2017, Mitch McConnell's in control, comes right back in, and guess what? That carve-out worked to really carve us up pretty bad. Then you got the Supreme Court. So there's no stopping it.

If we don't put this place back in order, you get rid of the filibuster which makes us work together. I've said this the whole the the brilliancy of our of our founding fathers was this why in the world did they give two senators to rhode island and delaware at the time they were forming this great nation of ours when they told new york and pennsylvania and ohio hey you only get two two it was basically to make us work together so that the big states wouldn't overrun the little states. It's a minority participation. Killing us, Joe. You're killing us.

One thing I'll just say about that clip is like he actually that is an accurate history of what happened in the past several years to the filibuster. It does seem as though that is where he started learning history. And he has zero knowledge of anything that came before that first vote to change the filibuster rules. Love it. What are the options here? Like, why do you think Democrats are going through all the trouble of introducing new legislation and compromise legislation, et cetera, et cetera, if that's Joe Manchin's position still? I think that's the only option, right? We have to we have to fake it till we make it. We have to hope that there's some chance that either either by some miracle, and I think this is all but impossible, Joe Manchin finds nine other senators to join it till we make it we have to hope that there's some chance that either either by some miracle

and i think this is all but impossible joe manchin finds nine other senators to join lisa murkowski and doing what republicans as he as mentioned correctly points out we're willing to do uh only you know 13 or 14 years ago which is uphold the voting rights act yeah he mentioned in that tapper interview that it was something like 98 to nothing yes when they last voted on this um or at some point joe manchin will reckon with the fact that he will answer his own question He mentioned in that Tapper interview that it was something like 98 to nothing when they last voted on this. Or at some point, Joe Manchin will reckon with the fact that he will answer his own question. Why has this changed? Well, because one of the two parties has turned against democracy.

And at every turn in our history, when it became time to defend the right to vote, the equal citizenship of every person in this country, it was a partisan decision. Because one party knew they would lose because of it. And so he will either come to recognize that. I don't think he'll say that. Well, I don't either come to recognize that. I don't think he'll say that. Well, I don't think he'll say that. I don't think he'll say it. You should send him that. You should send him those remarks.

But he always finds new words. Now Jake's question, which is a totally fair question, can you imagine doing it? No, I can't imagine doing it. Even if he can, in his beautiful, fantastic imagination, conjure an image of him passing a voting rights bill with 50 votes, he can't say that right now anyway, because he has this theory that he can get these votes. So you have to just hope that that is what he's saying now. And he will allow the circumstances of Republicans blocking the bill to lead him to maybe pass it in the future. Barring that, I don't know what else you're supposed to do. So we have to just go through the motions and try to pass it. What do you think, Tommy? What's going on in that big, beautiful houseboat sized brain of his? I wonder who wrote that that carved out,

carved up quip. And if they got a big old pat on the back after they came up with it, I bet somebody did. My only hope with Manchin is that he's just not going to change his answer until he does. And in some ways, that's the smartest path for him just to just hold out. When you decide to flip flop, you flip flop and you do it until you're ready. You don't do it. To Lovett's point earlier, Jamel Bowie had a great piece in the New York Times about how the attack on voting rights is partisan, so no one should be surprised that the response is partisan as well. The 14th Amendment with the Equal Protection Clause passed on a party-line vote. The 15th Amendment that prohibits denying the right to vote based on race passed on a party-line vote. Yes, the civil rights bills in

the 60s were bipartisan, but the parties hadn't divided like they are today. So it's sort of an apples and oranges comparison. So it's just a very frustrated kind of half-assed look at history by our friend Mr. Manchin. As Lovett said, it doesn't start in 2013. It goes back a lot further. Also, I don't know if I've mentioned this person before. There's this reporter at The New Yorker that I love, Jane Mayer. She wrote a book. Have I ever brought this up on the show? Oh, man. Here we go.

She had an amazing piece today in The New Yorker. It's about dark money, isn't it? About all the big dark money groups leading the fight on these voting restrictions. It's the Heritage Foundation. It's Alec. It's Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society. It's a bunch of weird billionaires you've never heard of. The Lind and Harry Bradley Foundation. There are these like reactionists, you know, weird, racist,

old white people that funded Charles Murray, the author of the bell curves scholarship. So it's all these sort of usual big muddied interest groups pushing these voter suppression bills. I forgot your question, John. I just got so caught up in the carved up, carved out. No, no, no. I was just waiting for you to go from the Jane Mayer reference to a Rick Pearlstein book reference. So I don't know if you could work that out as well.

Oh, Reagan land. I'm still working through that one. I jumped over to the Facebook book, which is very, it's quite good. Oh, that's good. That's good. God, he's a reader. He is a reader. He is a reader.

Our guy's a reader. quite good oh that's good that's good god he's a reader he is a reader he is a reader our guys guys i'm just i'm just a small town boy from los angeles in in brooklyn right now so it's just me and my book company tommy's live right now he's in uh he's in the big apple um okay uh there's nothing to say i don't know eat a big eat a bagel let's keep going love it love it doing the show from here is unbelievably luxurious you get three extra hours to prep in the morning i didn't know what to do with myself i was getting room service on room service the east coast crooked media life is pretty fucking great it's incredible guys okay i'm saying um john you're cool too no no i'm i've been in los angeles for over year, so it's fine.

So there's a few other things on this in terms of the path forward. I do think, Levit, like you said, fake it till you make it is the strategy here. I was somewhat hopeful reading a quote from Amy Klobuchar that she said at a press conference last week. She said, I think if we were just going to say, nope, we can't do this because of Senate rules, we wouldn't keep going. Which seemed to suggest that there is some kind of strategy, although I don't want to guess about any kind of strategy among the Democrats because I've been disappointed before. But I'm hoping that there is some strategy behind the scenes. Angus King said something similar, too, by the way. Angus King said he's like.

He said something like, if this fails, I don't know what happens after that. Right. So the other options could be. Yeah, Gus said something similar to me, too. Yeah, of course. I call him Gus. Gus. Gus King. Go off, King. that right so the other options could be something similar to me too yeah of course i call him gus gus gus king um they're trying to figure out trying to figure out what's going on with mansion and the democrats um there is there is a possibility that some of these provisions could end up in the reconciliation bill oh give me a fucking break i know give me a fucking break

no i'm just fucking reading the news don't think i believe this is going to happen. So, well, I'm just going to tell. It's a tax credit to not deny the right to vote. I'm trying to explain to our listeners what's happening. That's what I think of that horse shit. You put it, you could say that states get money to administer elections only if they meet the following standards. You must have automatic voter registration. You must not purge the rolls and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So would that fly through reconciliation? We don't know. Would some states that are maybe Republican states opt out and decide to not take the cash like they have done with medicaid expansion for the last 10 years yeah probably i'm sorry these these governors tricky seems republican states decided to let huge portions of their population go without health care to make a point that they didn't like Barack Obama. Still are. Still are. How many years later? You think they're going to do, they're going to be like, this is against our interests, but oh well. We want that money to administer free and fair elections. Yeah, that's their concern. Very silly. Then there's the

question like, is there a car, is it not a carve out, but are we going back to some kind of filibuster reform with Manchin say, okay, 41 Republican senators have to be on the floor the entire time in order to filibuster this bill. and then hoping that, you know, some of the olds like Chuck Grassley finally get tired and have to leave and go to bed. You know, that's that's the other that's the other hope here. Yeah, I do. I think you're betting on the prostate. Get off that floor.

Yeah. Some of these guys have to pee every 30, 40 minutes. You know, that's our hope. But I do think that Joe Manchin, you know, he has expressed in the past openness to those

kinds of reforms. A lot of this is semantic. If you could do something that he can say is not a carve-out, it can still fit with what he said to Jake Tapper.

There are a lot of places this can go that are hopeful. It doesn't mean it's not a long check. We are. We are. Because these are idiosyncratic because uh because uh cal cunningham uh uh loves to fuck

and we can't win a seat in maine we're stuck with the idiosyncratic decision making of two people that are not acting in the best interest of this country and i don't know what that's that's the reality look boo on cal cunningham but i think you sort of glossed over the big fuck up in Maine there. No, no. Joe Biden won that state by a lot. Yeah. Seragadian. Okay. Still got a lot of money.

Such a Maine homer. John goes to Maine for a week and he's defending that. Suddenly I'm fucking running in the second district. Cal Cunningham screwed a mistress and Seragadian kind of screwed all of us. Truth or lie probably cut that. I agree with you guys that I don't think that this cuck the voting rights legislation into reconciliation plan

makes a ton of sense for all the reasons you just outlined. I do think it's fair to say that you could argue that the initial For the People Act was a little too broad. I want public financing of campaigns too, but that wasn't the acute threat that we are all facing right now. I think even Amy Klobuchar was critical of how expansive the

For the People Act was. So I'm hoping that she is working with this group of lawmakers that includes Manchin, that they're working on a narrowed down bill. They'll convince him to do something that gets us past the filibuster and we'll actually get a vote on it. I mean, am I holding my breath? No, but it is existential. And I think if you're going to be critical of the Biden White House, this is the one place I do think they have not been fully engaged. And I'm not exactly sure what they should be doing. But everyone that talks to them about this side of issue comes away feeling like this isn't the priority that it should be, especially considering how much of his ability to get reelected lies with the need to hold

on to the house by preventing this partisan gerrymandering so i do hope that there is a renewed push on voting rights once the biff or the bib or whatever the hell john is calling it these days is is through congress i'm just i'm very excited about an infrastructure deal i don't know what your problem is look i think i i will say that how'd you get how'd you get to brooklyn fucking zeppelin you probably took a road a tunnel or a fucking train sorry you hate jobs plane it was a plane it was a plane john i am for any very creative outside the box solutions here you know if they can figure out something in reconciliation great i'm doubtful but i'm for it you know this is a this is a mint the the trillion dollar coin moment here

still think we should have done that yeah we remember the debt limit that was our solution yeah let's fucking do whatever to get this done all right when we come back uh love it and i will talk to dr ashish jah the dean of public health at brown university about all the latest pandemic news Last week, the CDC issued new guidance recommending that everyone, even vaccinated Americans, wear masks in indoor public settings if you live in a community with substantial or high COVID transmission. What prompted the shift was CDC data that suggests the small percentage of vaccinated people who do get infected with COVID can, in rare instances, transmit the virus to others. But if you're anything like us, you may have found both the CDC's communication on this issue and the subsequent media coverage confusing and or terrifying. Here to clear all of this up for us and more is someone who's been one of the most brilliant, sane, calming voices throughout the pandemic, the Dean of Brown University School of Public Health, Dr. Ashish Jha.

Dr. Jha, welcome to the pod. Hey, thank you so much for being here. So I feel like what was missing from last week's CDC announcement was clear information that could help people, especially vaccinated people, reassess the risk to themselves and their families of getting really sick from the Delta variant. So we are sitting here in a county with high transmission in L.A. We're wearing masks in indoor public settings. But how should I think about other activities? I have an unvaccinated one year old at home. We spent a lot of time with my parents who are over 65. Is outdoor dining still OK?

Outdoor gatherings, indoor gatherings where everyone's vaccinated? What do you think? Yeah, it is confusing, you know, and there's a lot happening here. So let's break down kind of what we know and what we don't know. What we have learned recently, which is not surprising, because we never thought these vaccines were 100%, is that breakthrough infections happen. Sometimes you can be fully vaccinated and you'll have a breakthrough infection. breakthrough infections happen. Sometimes you can be fully vaccinated and you'll have a breakthrough infection. And then the other thing we have learned, which actually we knew even from that, remember that Yankees outbreak at the clubhouse, like seven Yankee players got, you know, vaccinated people can spread it to others. So that's not a huge surprise. I think fundamentally

what people need to understand is breakthrough infections are rare and forward transmission, that is, if you have a breakthrough infection, you're going to give it to somebody else, is also pretty uncommon. And the most important piece of all of this is when it happens, people do really well. They have a kind of a miserable cold. They can be pretty miserable for a few days, but they get better. Very, very, very rarely do people end up getting hospitalized or dying from any of this. So if you have that as your mental model, it should start helping you make some decisions. And by the way, the other thing about Delta variant is it is a bad version of the virus, but it's still the same virus, still does the same stuff.

So outdoors, still really, really safe. I would not worry about outdoor dining. I would not worry about getting together outdoors with large numbers of people. Maybe the super packed outdoor concert might get a little, you know, a little uncomfortable, maybe a political rally where no one's wearing a mask, maybe a little tight, but other than that, outdoor stuff is I think pretty safe. And on the indoor stuff, you know, the way I've thought about it is if you're in a room full of all vaccinated people, you're in really, you have very, very low risk of anybody passing it on. The last part of this is about assessing risk.

If you're with a frail elder and you've been out partying and you've been exposed to a lot of unvaccinated people, it might be reasonable to put on a mask because the risk of a breakthrough infection for that frail elder could be really quite substantial. Kids, thankfully, don't get sick very much. And again, I don't want to minimize COVID in kids. There's been a lot of minimizing of that. But I have a nine-year-old who's not vaccinated. That doesn't fundamentally alter my behavior. I don't I don't do particularly high risk things, but I also don't worry excessively about him getting COVID. It's unlikely. And if he does, he'll probably do just fine. That makes a lot of sense. One more question on transmission. Israel's public health chief was on Face the Nation Sunday, and she said that their data shows

80 percent of vaccinated individuals who do become infected do not transmit the virus to anyone else. They said 10% transmit it to one person and less than 10% transmit it to more than one person. It sounds a lot less dire than the coverage around the CDC announcement. Like, does that make sense to you, that data? It does. It does. And if you think about it, it clinically and biologically makes sense, right? Because if you are unlucky enough to have a breakthrough infection, you still have an immune system that very rapidly clears the virus. That means you are contagious for a very short period of time, and you're not that contagious. So it makes sense that some people, you may get unlucky and have and catch them in the

contagious phase and they may pass it on to one person. But most people who have breakthrough infections are not going to spread it. This is why vaccinated people are not driving the surge. The surge we're seeing in America is all about the unvaccinated and the vaccinated are unfortunate bystanders to this. So let's talk about how that the disconnect between what the CDC has been saying and what the kind of news coverage has looked like in the CDC's presentation that leaked to The Post. One of their concerns was that breakthrough cases would cause people

to lose confidence in the vaccine. The presentation says they were worried the public would be convinced the vaccine is no longer working or that boosters would be needed. Important to update communications describing breakthrough cases as rare or a small percentage of cases. This was the CNN lead on that presentation. The Delta coronavirus variant surging across the United States appears to cause more severe illness and spread as easily as chickenpox. The document outlined unpublished data that shows fully vaccinated people might spread the Delta variant at the same rate as unvaccinated people. You know, the CDC has been communicating via the media for the entirety of this pandemic. It still feels as though there is a disconnect between what they wish the coverage

look like and what coverage of their of their communications ends up actually being for ordinary people trying to keep up with this. What do you think has gone wrong in how the CDC communicates and what would you like to see them do differently? Yeah. And there are a couple of things. I mean, first of all, I think the CDC has largely been right on the science and even here, I think they were largely right. I think there was one error in this instance, and this has come up a bunch, is that they didn't release the data along with their proclamation. So early in the week, they said, we are making this change because we are aware of data. But that data then leaked out two days later.

These data shouldn't be leaking. Like once you make the proclamation, put the data out there, right? This is not a national security secret. And then basically explain the data to people so they understand. When data leaks, there's always a sense that, ooh, there's something more serious or sinister or bad going on that it had to leak. That kind of stuff, I think, really does need to stop. One aspect of this that was surprising is that we did learn that one data point that led to the updated mask guidance was the breakthrough cases in Provincetown. I happen to have been there. I was protected because I refused to party and go

out because I was still reeling emotionally from the last 14 months. That was my vaccine, being a fucking loser. But it seemed to me that like... It's been protecting you your whole life. I've never gotten a cold, doctor. But it was surprising to me that this incredible stress test of the vaccine led to this update in a broader way when, to me, this was a case of the vaccine holding up really well under like a true live fire exercise. Were you surprised that the Provincetown cases were a critical part of this update? I was. I did not think there was anything from the Provincetown update that

surprised me in a negative way. And let me explain two parts of this. First of all, the big headline number, oh, these CT values were the same for the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. By the way, we knew that from the Singapore outbreak as well. So there was an outbreak of unvaccinated and unvaccinated people in Singapore at the airport about a month ago. So that wasn't a huge surprise. And the second is I keep trying to remind people of the counterfactual. Imagine the same July 4th partying in P-Town if nobody had been vaccinated. You know what we would have seen? Tens of thousands of people infected, hundreds and hundreds of people in the hospital, probably many people on ventilators and eventually die. And then a local outbreak that would have become a regional

outbreak, right? This is now kind of Sturgis rally. I mean, this wasn't quite as big as a Sturgis rally, but it's kind of these things trigger these massive regional outbreaks. Did that happen? No, it was not great. A bunch of people got infected. A few people ended up getting hospitalized. Thankfully, no one has died. And then it sort of stopped because that's what vaccines do. So you've touched on this a bit about like the contagiousness of breakthrough cases and vaccinated people. One thing you said is that it may take place, but it might be shorter because their immune systems are geared up, which is actually not something that has been kind of clearly communicated by the CDC. I thought this line from the Times coverage of what the CDC has been putting out to be

kind of capture to capture the confusion in some of the coverage. Dr. Dr. Walensky, the director of the agency, acknowledged on Tuesday that vaccinated people with so-called breakthrough infections of the Delta variant carry just as much virus in the nose and throat as unvaccinated people and may spread it just as readily if less often. Just as readily if less often. What does that mean? What does it mean? What are they saying here? Yeah, I think that's, first of all, I don't think that's consistent with the science. I don't think, well, there are two problems here. One is these CT values that everybody's super excited about. They're called cycle threshold values, by the way. It's just like a term for the test. Anyway, the big picture bottom line on these CT

values is CT values are not perfectly correlated with contagiousness. Nobody cares about CT values. We care about contagiousness. The second is it's a snapshot in time. So there is no reason to believe that people who have a breakthrough infection and are vaccinated can spread the virus as easily as unvaccinated people. I just think that's inconsistent with the data. I don't know if Dr. Walensky, she, by the way, is superb. So she knows this. I don't know if she misspoke or if it was mischaracterized, but this has been a consistent theme over the last here? Like when should vaccinated Americans who are over 65 or immunocompromised start to worry about their immunity potentially waning? Yeah, the data from Israel suggests that after about six months, there is a waning of the

antibodies, which may lead to more breakthrough infections. And so I've been worried. And you know where I'll tell you I've been worried. I've been worried about nursing homes and congregate care settings. Because if you think about it, those were the folks who got vaccinated in like December and January. So they're hitting that six-month mark now. And you also know that 40-some-odd percent of nursing home workers aren't even vaccinated at all. So we're going to start seeing outbreaks in nursing homes. And the FDA has data on whether a third shot could be helpful. I suspect it is helpful. It'd be really great if this FDA would make a determination on that. Do you think that's going

to happen soon? Because I guess we're like you said, we're almost at the six month mark for December and January, folks. Yeah, yeah, it should happen soon. I mean, there's been a little bit of like, I think a lot of us have been kind of scratching our heads at why the FDA has moved as slowly as it has on so many of these things. FDA received Pfizer data on a third shot booster, you know, a while back, and they should make a determination. A bunch of other countries have done it. And it'd be really helpful for the FDA to weigh in as well. A bunch of people in LA are putting on mustaches and getting third shots illicitly. What do you think about that? Well, this is actually part of the problem, right? Is that if the FDA says, no, no, we're going to take our time, guess what? A bunch of

people are going to go out and do it anyway. And the people who are going to go out and do it are better educated, high information, high sort of social capital. And guess who's not going to do it? The frail elderly in nursing homes, the poorer people. So the best way to create more inequities is to have a government that's not super responsive and an agency that's not super responsive to the data. So speaking of scary headlines, here's a fun one from CNN over the weekend. UK scientists believe it is almost certain a coronavirus variant will emerge that beats current vaccines. What is your reaction to that? And do you think we'll be able to update our vaccines quickly enough if that happens, if such a variant emerges?

First of all, I'm deeply skeptical of that ever happening. These vaccines are really extraordinary in kind of the breadth of response that they give right we have the vaccines have now been tested against a whole set of different variants and they're holding up largely just fine i guess it's theoretically possible i i don't lose a lot of sleep over it but let's say that like it happens because a lot we've had a lot of curve balls in this menu so let's say it happens yeah we've got've got both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech that are very capable of turning around a new vaccine within weeks. And then the question for the FDA will be, how do they test it? And are they going to require, you know, kind of long test times? Or are they going to, you know, authorize it pretty quickly? The regulatory stuff is going to be much slower, but the science on this can keep up with the virus pretty quickly. So sort of last question on this, you know, over the last week, I've seen a bunch of scientists and public health experts quoted as saying that, you know, herd immunity isn't happening,

COVID will become endemic, we'll basically have to learn to live with it for years to come. I know that's not actually as scary as it sounds, but what is learning to live with COVID as an endemic disease look like from a policy and public health perspective? Yeah, it's a great question. And there are two ways of learning to live with it, right? Is that do we manage to get pretty high levels of vaccination and then learn to live with it where we have a few occasional kind kind of breakthroughs and uh and some people occasionally get sick but we develop some good antivirals and nobody you know people generally don't die or get particularly sick and then we kind of go about our lives as like an

annoyance or do we have a learn to live with it where 25 30 population remains unvaccinated. We see reasonably large outbreaks still happening among the unvaccinated, spills over. The first version, life basically returns to a new normal. Things are pretty good. The economy is humming along. Restaurants are full. People generally are not worried. In the second version, you have occasionally cities having to put in mask mandates, you have places having to shut down, you have like, these kind of countermeasures and public health countermeasures that we have to do constantly being deployed locally in small areas, hospitals occasionally fill up, we have to respond to that. That kind of thing could go on for years if we don't get to like 85, 90% of people

vaccinated. Okay. Well, that is a good warning. Dr. Ashish Jha, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate you coming us and hopefully everyone else down. It was a great conversation. I really appreciate it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I cursed in your presence. You're a very serious person and I lowered the whole debate. I know. I appreciate that. Hey, thank you guys so much for having me on. It was a pleasure. All right. I want to end with the story that caught our eye over the weekend titled The Real Source of America's Rising Rage. Mother Jones' Kevin Drum did a fairly detailed analysis of why we've become so politically polarized since the turn of the century, and he considers

a few popular theories, our belief in conspiracy theories, our use of social media, and our economic and social conditions. But ultimately, he concludes that Americans' belief in conspiracy theories has remained steady almost since our founding, that our current polarization predates our increased use of social media, and that people are about as satisfied with their jobs and their lives as they have been in the past, according to polls. What's changed is Americans' distrust of institutions and anger towards government,

and that began just a few years after the launch of the most influential source of propaganda the country has ever known. It turns out that the COVID vaccines, those wonder drugs that were absolutely perfect, that were more impressive than the moon landing, the drugs you were not allowed to question in any way, don't actually work in the way they told us they did. And now you want to mask us because you clearly failed in your effort to get us vaccinated because the totalitarian impulse within you is so strong. Nothing makes sense.

That didn't take long. COVID hypocrite Nancy Pelosi already breaking her new mask rules. Republicans slamming the speaker for what they call a massive abuse of power in the House. If this were covered, Tucker, the way the riots of last summer were covered it would be described as mostly peaceful and i think to a great extent it was peaceful the picture that you've shown of the people who were in the capitol building milling around the guy walking around the senate chamber with the horns on and so on most of them were peaceful surprise it's fox news uh so drum acknowledges that this is not exactly a surprising or

exciting conclusion, but that while social media and conspiracy theories certainly act as fuel on the fire, it's Fox News that set the country ablaze, he writes. Lovett, what do you make of this theory and his reasoning behind it? I think it's very smart. I read the piece and I shared it. And what I actually want is, I think it's making a... So you did all that you need to do.

You read the piece, you shared it. Mission what I actually want is, I think it's making a... So you did all that you need to do. You read the piece, you shared it. Mission accomplished. I did my part. But what I... Why don't you hit that tweet button? What it actually does call for, though, is I think people who are more versed in the data that he is using

to justify ruling out some of these other causes to kind of push back on it where they can. Because it did feel... Like, Kevin Drum has a point of view. All of his articles have headlines like, Fox News, the brutal of all evil. Fox News killed my dog. Like that's sort of that's his it's his beat. And it's a and it's a great beat.

And he's very smart. But I do think that, like, it's hard to know what the compound effects of of of social media plus right wing misinformation could be. Another point, actually, is just that sometimes it's about misinformation. Sometimes it's just about tone and the tenor of coverage and how people communicate with each other on social media. I also do think there are trends that maybe preceded the changes in our politics that took place since 2000, but they kind of concluded over these 20 years, one of them being the ideological shifting that led to a kind of less heterodox views amongst Democrats and Republicans,

some of the geographic sorting that we've been seeing. So I think it's a really smart point. I think the key takeaway, though, is regardless of whether or not he's underemphasizing other causes to make a point is I think sometimes we like to talk about what's new when the underlying causes are so boring. Why is Conor Lamb mad at AOC? Well, it could be because she's taken a position on to fund the police, or it could be because she's taken a position on to fund the police, or it could be because Fox News is making everything worse. Like, why are we talking about vaccine misinformation and vaccine hesitant? Well, it could be because of all these other ancillary causes, or it could be because Fox News is making everything worse. And sometimes

it's boring to talk about the same thing over and over again, but we should concentrate on it because we actually just need to figure out what the fuck to do about it. Tommy, what do you think? There's a really interesting piece. I think it's hard to point at one thing and say that's the reason we are more polarized. But a lot of the pieces of the story rang true to me. He talks about how Fox News almost single-handedly manufactured the hysteria over critical race theory. Anyone who worked in the Obama administration would not be surprised by that. We watched them manufacture controversies about the war on Christmas, death panels, tan suits, Benghazi, the election lie, the vaccine coverage.

Now, what's changed, I think, is the mainstream media at the time used to make the Obama administration treat Fox as real and credible and nonpartisan or like they were fair and balanced or had fair and balanced components. Now, I think that that lie has been put to rest a little bit. Kevin Rudd, who's the former prime minister of Australia from the Labor Party, has made similar observations about how the Murdoch empire has distorted politics in Australia because it is just relentlessly opposed to any sort of progressive economic policy. It pushes climate denial. You've also seen Murdoch outlets fuck up politics

in the UK. They fought for Brexit. And then you look at Canada, where Murdoch hasn't gotten into the market and their political process and debates are not nearly as broken. I do think that, you know, Kevin's piece probably underestimates what we discussed in this first topic, which is how gerrymandering has changed political incentive structures in this country. And, you know, if you had a Fox News driving the Republican Party to the far right, but 50-50 districts, it would be disastrous for the Republican Party because in America, we have a unique thing, which is party primaries and then party elections that are also popular elections. Our parties don't choose the person in the primary, right? We vote for them twice. So if we were just getting far right candidates out of Republican primaries, thanks to Fox, they would get trounced in the general

election. But we have gerrymandered districts, so you don't. You know, the challenge of like what to do about it is in recent years, Fox has been supplemented by other right wing outlets that we talk about a lot, the Federalist, Breitbart, you know, there's social media, things, sites like Parler, there's Newsmax. There's also Facebook. He talks about how social media is exacerbating the problem, but sort of dismisses it. I do think the problem with Facebook isn't just sharing Tucker Carlson clips on Facebook. The problem is also that QAnon and anti-vaccine groups were able to organize and reach a critical mass on Facebook and then get covered by Fox. So it's this vicious death spiral happening. So I don't know, at the end of the day,

Fox's core product is like white grievance and fear. I will never forget 2012 and 2008, Fox News found this one random member of the new Black Panther Party just standing outside of a polling location in Philadelphia and did roadblock coverage of this guy all day long because they were trying to scare white voters out of voting for Obama. And that kind of tells you all you need to know about them. When the chips are down, that's what they focus on. That's the side that they're on. And that's what their goal is, is just to scare these old white voters out of progressive politics. I totally agree that it's an excellent analysis that does minimize a bit, in my view, the role of social media. And I always think about

the story that Dan tells about the IRS scandal in 2013. And when that first happened, you know, everyone at the White House was like, okay, it's another Fox driven thing, right? Fox only reaches a couple million people. And so it's probably an inside D.C. Fox thing that's not going to go anywhere. And people in most of the country aren't going to give a shit about this. And then we did a bunch of focus groups in Ohio and everyone was talking about the IRS scandal. And the difference was Facebook and that there hadn't been Facebook or Facebook hadn't really taken off in some of these past scandals. And so I think that, you know, you can't underestimate enough or, you know, you can't minimize the role of social media and especially Facebook in giving Fox just a new weapon to spread all of their lies and bullshit and conspiracy theories.

And I think Fox News, you know, they sort of set the tone and they sort of drive a lot of this bullshit. But without Facebook, without social media, I don't think you'd have the reach that you have today. And I think that you wouldn't have people as angry as you do today. Yeah, I do think it is hard. Some of this, you can look for it in data. But I think it's in this piece or maybe it it's another piece, where he talks about how everyone just kind of, we know the people in our lives are angrier. We know. We see it in our lives.

We see it in our families. We see it in our communities. We see it on television. We see it everywhere. How do you find that in the data? How do you source that point to what caused it? We're not doing a double-blind experiment with an America that doesn't have Fox News, but does have social media.

So I do think these things are ultimately hard to tease out. But I do think what I took away from the piece is let's not take our eyes off of the challenge. Fox News is, regardless of these other causes, one of the greatest threats to this country and its future. It is every single day. And I think sometimes it is discouraging because we don't know what to do.

But I do think we need to be more explicit in saying it. And then I do think we need to have conversations about the kind of boycotts that work targeted boycotts. We should look at the moments when Fox News changed course and what caused them to change course. Sometimes it's boycotts. Sometimes it's other forms of public pressure. I think we need to be more proactive and more deliberate and more concerted in our attention to the threat Fox News. Yeah. And when you say we, I totally agree with this. Like, I think that, like you pointed out, Tommy, reporters have gotten better about this. Mainstream reporters at calling Fox out and being confident enough to say that Fox is a propaganda outlet. They never

used to be. Then it sort of started where some of the media reporters would say it. People like Brian Stelter would write on stuff like that that and now it's gone to more mainstream reporters you see some folks on cnn calling them out regularly so that's good but i still think like reporters should not treat fox reporters and people who work at fox as their colleagues they should not show them like they fox exists to destroy the mainstream media and to undermine trust in the mainstream media and reporters all should recognize this and if they and if they do recognize it, they should say it publicly. I also think progressive donors. Right. Like, you know, I talked to Stephanie Valencia about this in terms of the Latino vote a couple episodes ago. But she pointed out that story that,

you know, progressive donors, liberal donors dropped 14 million dollars in South Florida in the last week of the election, while Republicans bought a radio station in South Florida for three hundred fifty thousand dollars that they turned into a right wing radio station. So a lot more bang for your buck there than just dumping money on digital ads in the last week of the election. And one other one other distinction, I think that we should stop pretending matters is the distinction between their quote news and quote side and their opinion side. Huge. And he makes that point. It is obscene. It is obscene. If you had a fire department where six of the firefighters put out fires and three of them set fires, you wouldn't be like, I don't think we're giving enough credit to the ones on the truck that are helping.

They'd be like, that's a terrible fucking fire department. Shut them down. Shut them down. Don't call them. Drum makes the point in the piece that that's actually one of the big reasons Fox is so influential because he says part of the answer probably lies in the fact that Fox News is cloaked in the trappings of news.

And that's one reason you get 65% of Republicans and independents saying that they trust Fox News more than any other news outlets, right? It's not just Tucker and Hannity, even though they're the worst defenders and say the worst shit. It's that they see other news that's supposed to be nonpartisan, fair and balanced, and people fucking buy it. No, no one knows. We are the only ones who know there's a distinction. It's a bunch of white guys in ties at desks reading news.

And like there's no like the chyron that goes up when you go from news to the opinion side. But if you love it, if you love it, the shows just get better for three hours. That's right. I mean, like, in terms of what to do about like, yeah, I give a lot of credit to groups like Sleeping Giants that have gotten advertisers to stop advertising on shows like Tucker Carlson, when he does or says racist things. I agree that strategic boycotts are good. There's an effort called unfox my cable box that is trying to get providers to drop Fox News from cable packages. But it's basically just a letter writing campaign. And that's a broader challenge because Fox makes most of its money by charging cable news subscribers like all of us, whether we watch

Fox or not. So, you know, my hope is that long term that their revenues will be hurt by cord cutting. But I think that my own self-interest view here is that progressives need to create our own progressive media, fight fire with fire. It doesn't have to be racist, lying, nonsense. It could be a different flavor and tone than Fox. But like we need to make a counter argument because I don't think that these right wing outlets are going anywhere. In fact, I think they are growing and proliferating because right-wing donors see them as political weapons to help them get regulations stripped away and tax cuts. And it's an investment for them and it's paid them handsomely over time. Yeah. We always want more competition here at Crooked Media where we welcome more competition. I the uh no uh no but i do think actually like this points to another asymmetry that's part of this and actually a way in which uh like the

yawning chasm where we have these super rich people with unlimited funds like influences our politics in other ways republican money supports right-wing media and you know who writes uh really powerfully about that never heard of her the the uh if you're gonna say jane mayer i've never heard that name before i was gonna say jane mayer i told me i don't think was paying attention but i was like but the but the but the further you get the lot like liberal money like the grassroots gets behind someone like bernie but the further you up the money ladder you go the more moderate moderate become the quote unquote democratic like backers. And so like you just don't have the same thing. There is no Koch brother. You talk to talk about

Soros as like an exception that proves the rule. But they look more like Bloomberg, you know, like looking for a moderate, a center left or even a center option. And like that asymmetry isn't going anywhere. Yeah. And they're spending like billions of dollars on like depolarization efforts. Yeah. Yeah. let's bring more people together at conferences i don't know whose voice that is that's really i don't know either anyway so yeah we have to so fox is bad in conclusion fox news is bad that's why you come here for hot takes like that i do think look it's it's valuable to see a data-driven case made like Kevin did in that piece. Because I do think, look, a lot of very serious, very smart, good reporters would beat their chest and yell at

the Obama administration when we didn't include Fox News in some, you know, round robin set of interviews with the networks, and they made us treat them like they were on the level and they were not. And that made the reporters who did that part of the problem and like pieces like this i think helped make the the counter argument yeah and one one last thing i'd say too is one way i think you can take you can kind of deal with this in your own life is i do think like a lot of political conversations uh are a lot of like what happened what happened to our country what led to this these kind of rhetorical big sweeping things just answer like i should fox news yeah i don't think it's that complicated i think you should just made a bunch of people really angry uh hate our institutions and our government yeah we should fight it and now we

can move on to appetizers all right that's our show for today thank you to dr ashish jah for joining us and calming us all down um thank you tommy for joining us from brooklyn hey you're welcome i'm making you guys just this much cooler. Tommy is in a VW bus following Jane Mayer around on tour. I put on the headphones just in time to hear Lovett telling the doctor about how his lack of social life saved him from the Delta variant. So that was a fun treat for me. It was the highlight of the pod today.

It's reality. All right, everyone. We'll talk to you on Thursday. Bye. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Flavia Casas. Our associate producers are Jazzy Marine and Olivia Martinez.

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