The Daily Beast Podcast - Ayn Rand Would Have Loathed Elon Musk’s Support of Trump

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

Would novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand have loathed Elon Musk? Philosopher and writer Wolfram Eilenberger, author of The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times, comes on The New Abnormal to answer that question and another question with an answer that he can’t seem to full grasp: How libertarians can support Donald Trump. Also on this episode: Danielle Campoamor, reporter for TODAY Parents, shares the story of Celeste Burgess, a 19-year-old who is serving a prison sentence for taking abortion pills when she was 17. Plus, co-hosts Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie use the intro of this episode to share some of their favorite things—and which social media platform (Threads, the site formally known as Twitter, and Bluesky) they’d fuck, marry, or kill. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. We're on vacation this week, but that doesn't mean we didn't

already tape you an excellent show to listen to today. Author Wolfram Islandberger, will stop by to talk to us about their latest book, The Visionaries, Arendt, Beauvier, Rand, and Weil, and the power of philosophy in dark times. Then we'll talk to NBC's Danielle Campbellmore about the teenager was just sentenced in Nebraska for having an abortion. But First, let's have some fun. All right, since we're on vacation this week, Seamus and I prepared some questions for you guys, and let's start off easy.

So far in 2023, who's the politician that's made you the most angry? Oh, boy. Like on a Richter scale of emotion? Like, how are we measuring this? I like that. Like my Richter, my personal Richter scale of like zero to I need to see a doctor. Hang on. I've labeled all the holes that I've punched in my wall.

Oh. So let me do it. Let me just do a quick count. It looks like DeSantis is winning. Damn it, Andy. 17. I am going to say plus one to that. DeSantis is an actual piece of walking trash. And above everybody else, he's not as stupid as Marjorie Taylor Green.

He's not as charismatic as Donald Trump, but he is probably as cruel as Hitler, if you give him the leeway. I am right there with y'all. So I'm sorry I asked, but how about this? What's the best TV show you've watched so far in 2023? Oh, mine is, it's a series, and it's called The Age of Influence, and it's about, like, all of these influencer feuds and people who went to jail and people who were grifters. It's so frigging good. And it's done by, I think, ABC Studios on Hulu. It's so good.

It's so bad. It's good. It's a lot of cringe in it. I guess I'll go with the two shows I'm enjoying the most. Silo on Apple TV was very good for the first season. I enjoyed it a lot. I love the books by Hugh Howie, and they've done a really good job with the show.

And also, the show that is just killing it is Star Trek Strange New Worlds. And I am not like a huge Trek dork. And this show is just fantastic. It's just so well written and so well. acted and just fun to watch. So those would be my two. I'm going to abstain on commenting on Star Trek since there's that person who reviews our podcast once in a while and says I talk about it too much when I've never talked about it once. We're all saying that. Yeah. Yes. Okay. How about movie?

Oh, everything everywhere all at once. It was phenomenal. My girlfriend put it on and I said, what is this foolishness for like the first 10 minutes? And then I was captivated. So fucking good. So good. I guess for me, the best movie that came out this year that I've seen, I think probably John Wick for. There's other movies that I've watched this year that I've seen before or whatever that are just fantastic. I mean, Moneyball is just a classic. Spielberg's Munich is a lot better than people remember. The Banshees of Inasharon was fantastic. Tar was fantastic. But those movies, I guess, came out. I don't know if they came out. I have no concept of time anymore.

I'm looking at my letterbox to see when I watched them and it was 2023. Tar is probably the best movie I've watched in 2020. That movie is fucking fantastic. I agree. How about book? Excluding authors we've interviewed here, of course. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I have read a couple that I've loved so much this year. Lighter by Young Pueblo is amazing. Part poetry, part memoir, an incredible book. untamed by Glennon Doyle, which came out in 2020, but I read this year. Also really incredible falling upwards. I'm reading right now, which is really good. But those three so far this year. I just finished a book a little bit ago that I really loved.

It's called Silver Nitrate by Sylvia Moreno Garcia. It's a fictional book. It's horror, but it also is sort of, I learned a lot about the Mexican film. industry. I mean, the plot of the movie has to do with a curse or a spell being woven within a movie. It gets into a lot of Mexican cultural stuff. And it was one of those books where the characters were as interesting as the plot. And as someone who reads a lot of genre fiction, that's not usually the case, or it's not always the case anyway. And it was really nice to read a book with these incredibly developed characters. And also just, it really is.

Like, I kept looking stuff up because I'm like, is this true? It's stuff about the Mexican film industry. And it always was. And it was just absolutely fascinating to sort of read this interwoven, like, horror book that also dove so much into Mexican film culture and just Mexican culture in general. So it was really interesting. Oh, also reading All About Love by Bell Hooks right now. And I'm halfway through that.

And that's extraordinary. Okay. How about a great podcast you've listened to this year? Aside from ours. Yes. Mine is woke-a-off. Thank you, Andy, for the bloke. I'm going to pimp out some friends who have a podcast called Irin Loathing that comes out once every other week.

And it's just a really fun and funny look. There's three of them that do the podcast. Every week, one of them is in what they call the torture chamber. And the other two people have to play an incredibly awful song for them as torture. And then they pick which one is worse. And it's really, really fun to listen to. And the musical choices are sometimes very inspired. Just recently, one of them used the We Didn't Start the Fire remake by Fall Out Boy.

Yeah. I mean, it's so bad. But others are like, I had no idea that like Teli Savalas did a spoken word album. So you get to hear stuff like that. And all three of them are really funny. And it's just, it's a really enjoyable podcast that I look forward to every couple weeks. I am not listening to anything new because I'm one of those people who Columbus things, particularly podcasts. So I am catching up on Brune Brown's podcast, which is finished now on Spotify, but unlocking

us. And I've been going back through it had, I think, three seasons and it was started during the pandemic. So listening back to how people were dealing and sounding and kind of working through things in 2020 and 2021 is really like, again, we talked about this recently. It's just really wild to imagine all that we've been through and kind of just are not talking about it. So to listen to these shows are really good. How about what's your most played song on Spotify? So I don't really use Spotify, but I will tell you what my most played on title is. It is because I am murdering this album since it came out. It is Janelle Monet's Art of Pleasure. The album is sick. It's sick. It's 32 minutes long and I can't get enough of it. But the song that is on repeat is

float. I live for it. If I could have a soundtrack that went on every time I walked into a room, it would be that song. I love it. Janelle Monet is an unfair freak. Because she's just so ridiculously talented at different things and it's very annoying to me personally. I also don't You use Spotify. I use Apple and I have all the metrics turned off. So I'll have to guess at this. I've been listening a lot. There's a new Pretender's song that has strings arranged by Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood called I Think About You Daily that I think is just an absolutely gorgeous song. I have oddly been listening a lot to Terrence Trent Darby's first two albums. What? Oh, throw back. About 10 years ago, I did that too.

I somehow got in the mood a while back, and I've been playing them a lot on repeat lately. I guess his name now is Sananda Matreya. He has changed his name. Introducing the hard line is just a classic album, and I always thought that neither fish nor flesh was a super underrated album. That's his second album. And I've been tearing those up on repeat. Whoa.

I love it. Okay. Fuck Mary Kill. Twitter. I'm not calling it. X threads are blue sky wow now fuck as in like fuck them well I think that's not how this game works okay because I was just like oh this is so easy this is impossible because two of them need to be I know Jesse I mean this is the this is the dilemma here I know okay I don't know enough about blue sky

because I was on it, but I wasn't really using it. So I will fuck them because they seem nice. And then, and threads I will marry because there is only one possible thing that you can say for Twitter, which is to kill it. I guess I would marry Blue Sky, although it would be an unbelievably annoying spouse. But it's out of those three, it's. The thing it's got going for it is it's not threads or Twitter. Threads I'm not on because I am Zucker Free in 23. Oh, look at you with the slogans.

No Instagram, no threads, no WhatsApp, no Facebook. I don't know. I guess I will fuck threads only because Twitter needs to be killed. Okay. Strong agree. Worst Supreme Court judge. I feel like this question would have been a little hard about six months ago, but now it's so easy.

Yeah. I don't know. Is it? Oh. Do you have a couple that you hate? I mean, I definitely do, but there's definitely one that is outstanding, Andy. Why don't you go first? Okay. I mean, outstanding to me is Clarence Thomas.

Like, I mean, just sucking on the tit of billionaires, you know, got his home paid for, nephew's school paid for, you know, life paid for over the past 20 years. like the rot with that motherfucker is deep. So, yeah, hate him and his wife. Let's add her to the mix too. I can't argue with that other than I'll go with Alito just to spice it up. Yeah. Yeah.

As awful as Thomas is, Alito seems to be, at least right now, sort of the, like the standard bearer for that wing of the court or maybe the torch bearer. would be a more accurate description. So I'm going to go with Alito and I'll put Kavanaugh third because he really just seems like he's in over his head. And to me, he just seems like a little rich kid who got appointed to something and doesn't really belong there. Oh, so he's a legacy appointment. Kind of, kind of. Yeah. Yeah. He's an ideological legacy candidate. But I can't argue with Thomas either. So. Yes, today is Wolfram Islandberger, author of the critically acclaimed 2020 book, Time of the Magicians.

His latest book, The Visionaries, Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Vile, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times is out on August 8th and he's here to tell us all about it. Wolfram, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me, Andy. Okay, I hate to start with the ridiculously obvious question, but sometimes just because the thing is obvious doesn't mean it's not important. So why a book about these four women? And I guess it's actually a two-step question.

What made you think to connect the four of them? And then what made you say, I should write a book about this. It's a book about human beings, trying to find their way through dark times by thinking for themselves, that is doing philosophy. And I think what connects them to our time is that we seem to live also in very dark times. And the question that is at the heart of the quest of these four female philosophers is the question of freedom. What does it mean to be a free human being, to be autonomous?

to live in a free state and society. And my impression is that that's a question that's actually at the heart of contemporary discussions that we are having in politics, in ethics, and also at the academy. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And along those lines of the dark times, the book basically covers the period 1933 to 1943, but you start in 1943 before going back to 1933 and then working your way forward. You start with the women in different circumstances, but as you say, they're all in conversation with the same state of the world, basically the height of World War II. Simone de Beauvoir is already an author and professor. She is in occupied France. She's in a relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Simone Vile has left France and via America is now in England, but she is trying desperately

to get to the front lines to take it to the Nazis as a nurse. Einrand is in New York City. She has fled the Soviet Union, and she is currently not happy with the PR for her soon-to-be-published book The Fountainhead. Hannah Arendt is also in New York. She has also fled from Nazi Germany, and she is maybe having an existential crisis. Just a pivotal moment for all four of them, it seemed like. Yes, and a pivotal moment for the world, because when we talk about Dark Times, the year of 1943, the hate of the Second World War was probably the darkest year in human history, I

imagine. It's the year when the Holocaust really started in the concentration camps of the East. It was the year when the greatest battles took place. And it was the year when the totalitarian systems on both sides, which is Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany really had to fight for their survival. And it was a very deadly battle all over the world at that time. And as you mentioned, my four heroes of the book, they are also refugees because three of them were also Jewish, so they had to leave Germany or had to leave France, for that matter, which was occupied. So it's really a very, very critical time in their lives. And as they try to think of what it means to be free, it is also a critical time because these times were the hate of the totalitarian

systems in which freedom was a very rare commodity. And along those lines, there was a thing that struck me throughout the book. And it was the many ways in which Vile and Rand were almost mirror images of each other. Vile, on the one hand, she is an extreme altruist. On more than one occasion, she is looking to sacrifice herself for others or for her country. Rand, of course, was philosophically the ultimate egoist. Vile was raised in a secular environment. Later in her life, she had, I guess, what you could call religious revelations. Rand was famously an atheist and hated religion. And something you write early on, you say, if Rand had wanted to find the epitome of all the values, which in her view were responsible for the disaster of the world war, she could have found

no more suitable candidate than the very real Simone Vile in London. And yet both women believed in sort of the primacy of the individual. Yes, that is totally true. And I think that's actually a very important point to me. And I think it's an important point to contemporary politics, too, that you might have the very same question and this very same longing, which is freedom, freedom, where are you? I want freedom too. And then you have people to think about what it means to be free and they are all very gifted. They are all very good philosophers, but they have radically different ideas of what the meaning of freedom is and what it means to be in such a society and what such a society should look like. Because oftentimes we think of philosophy as a kind of a quest to find the one right

answer to the one good question. And I would like to present philosophy as a way of living, experiencing your life and the way you experience and shape it can have very, very different outcomes. So there are, as you said, very, very different, radically different answers to the very same good question. And this is the polyphony or the pluralistic approach that we live today in society. I mean, if you would ask an average American right now, what it means to live in a free society, you would not have one answer. You would have very, very different answers. And some of them might be good, not only one. An interesting thing, we were talking about this a little bit before we started recording.

Iron Rand is obviously still to this day often quoted, often cited. I am a former libertarian, and I went through what I can only describe as my obnoxious iron Rand period many, many years ago. Simone Vile is not very well known these days, and I want to get more into that later. What is it about Rand that has made her sort of last, as long as she has. You see her legacy in Silicon Valley, a lot of the leaders of the tech companies seem to be very appreciative of her. What do you make of her relation to contemporary America? Well, first of all, I would think it's important to stress that Ayn Rand thought of herself as a

philosopher and as a writer. And I think she was a much better philosopher and writer that most people give her credit for. She was very gifted mind. She was a very gifted logician. She had really a privileged, precious mind, and she tried to employ it in a philosophical way. So, you know, in the U.S., Ayn Rand is a big name, but in Europe, she's not. And for me also as a German writer, it was important to introduce Rand to the European mind because I don't think you can quite understand contemporary American politics without the absolute importance of Ayn Rand to contemporary right-wing and libertarian thinking. You said Elon Musk is a randian. Many of the big tech guys in the Silicon Valley were highly influenced by Anne Rand, especially by Howard Roke,

this hero. And I would also imagine, and that was actually the question that got me triggered, how is it possible that good libertarian and maybe a good Randian can support a person like Donald Trump, which for a good Randian, if you think correctly, is the absolute opposite of what a human being and a human leader should be like. So for me, it's puzzling to think, looking at American politics, there are people who call themselves libertarians and claim that Donald Trump can be their man. Because if you read Iron Rand as a philosopher or as a novelist, Donald Trump is the nightmare of American politics as a libertarian can conceive it. And actually Ayn Rand in her diaries and in her lectures says that, she actually says that there might be a human

being in American politics coming, which has no ego, no value of himself or for other people, who has no straight thinking at all, doesn't even have opinions, and he will be able to seduce by demonic means, the American public and the American democracy. I say this because some of people, I think, in America, I think that Iron Rant is kind of a, you know, the legacy is Donald Trump. And even Donald Trump says sometimes in his speeches that he loves the fountain hat. It's his favorite book. I don't think he has read it, but he claims that. Yes. But if you think of what Howard Roke is and what Donald Trump does, it's a shame. Every libertarian in the U.S. should be ashamed of himself or herself to be, in fact, Trump,

because that cannot be. It's just mutually exclusive. No, I completely agree. And, you know, when I hear Elon Musk and people like that talk about Iron Rand. Or Peter Thiel, for example, yes. Yes, or Peter, too. I think to myself, she would have loathed you and everything you stood for. I don't think she would have lost essentially Elon Musk or Peter Thiel because she believed in the great individual innovator, you know, who really gets society forward. And I can totally understand why, so for example, Elon Musk or Peter Thiel identify with Howard Rock. What I cannot understand is being as smart as they are, that they can think of Donald Trump as an embodiment of their values

because he's not. He's the exact opposite. I absolutely agree with that. This may be a very bland statement and the response may very well be, well, yes, that's what philosophers do. But one of the things I was struck by in the book is how each of these women wrestled with the question of the relationship of the self to others. And again, they didn't all come to the same conclusion. Am I making an unbearably banal point or am I being incisively brilliant right now? I think you're being incisively brilliant because that's actually the main question of the book. What does it mean to be free in face of the other, in face of the group, the community, the state that I'm living in. And actually that's also a reason why these four female voices should be very interesting for our time

because they were seeking freedom. They were thinkers of freedom, but none of them was what we would call now a liberal progressive. Neither were the liberals, nor were they are progressives. And they had a special allergy, all four of them, to be sorted in a kind of a category like a collective or a group, what we would call now identity politics. And I think that's a common core. all four of them share that they think the end and the biggest danger to human freedom politically speaking is being categorized in a group and that your identity is fixed by belonging to a certain

group, be it racial, like being a Jew, for example, or the color of your skin, or for example, if you are proletarian, to categorize people in groups and determine their way of being by being part of that category is for them the greatest danger for human freedom. And I think if you look at contemporary politics and what we call identity politics, we have much reason to think about the relationship between being an individual and being part of a group in a more refined and differentiated ways. But didn't Arendt in particular, didn't she talk about or write about sort of being forced to think of herself as a Jew and also even as a woman by what was going on in Germany in that period?

Absolutely. And there's this famous quote by Hannah Arend, which you refer to, I guess, is if they attack me as a Jew, she said, I will defend myself as a Jew. But the sad tragedy of this quote and, of course, the value of this quote, because she was a very brave woman and she did defend herself as a Jew, was that in 1931, 32, before she had to fled Germany to Paris, she did not think of herself as a Jewish woman. The others, the Nazis who came to power, defined her as a Jew. they determined who she was. And then she said, if they define me that way, I will fight back as the Jew. But that doesn't mean that she sought it as an advantage or a good thing to categorize people according to their religious beliefs or racial minorities they might belong to.

Yeah, it's funny. Before I read the book, I thought to myself, well, Ayn Rand is going to be the odd woman out here. She just seemed to me to be so different from the other three. And yes, I think there's some truth to that, that in at least some respect, she was. For some reason, by the end of the book, I almost felt like if there were an odd woman out, it was Simone de Beauvoir. And I'm not exactly sure why I felt that way. And maybe you can tell me if I'm right or wrong. I thought, you know, among the four, I believe she's the only one who never actually fled totalitarianism. She had a much different personality, it seemed to me, at a much different personal life.

She was sexually adventurous. She obviously, she goes on to write the second sex, the now famous proto-feminist work in 1949. Am I wrong in thinking that she is a little bit of an outlier among these women? I would think so. And in French, bourgeois and bourgeois, they rhyme quite well together. And actually, that's what Simone de Beauvoir, up to 1945, was a bourgeois woman. And we now think of her as a very political mind, but in her late 20s, up to her 30s, she was not political at all. She actually didn't know where other people would exist in the first place. She was very encapsulated, almost narcissistic. And it was a very long way for her to acknowledge that other people exist and might matter to her own well-being.

And I think in the book I try to tell the story of how one woman, Simone de Beauvoir, does not care about politics and other human beings. And by philosophy and by the circumstances that she's thrown into, realizes that that might be the actual question in her life. So she really changes. She develops a lot. And in the beginning, she's already together with Sartre and they form a very an open relationship and a pair. She is really not understanding why anyone would get into politics. And what she really doesn't understand, and I think that's most fascinating. Why do other people exist in the first place? She looks at them, you know, at the streets and think they have nothing to do with me. I'm alone in the world. And it's funny to think that now we have this iconic view of Simone. Neburois as the great feminist, as the great socialist, but she was not in the beginning. She turned into that in the 50s, not earlier. You describe in the book that, again, when she was very young, she actually knew Simone Weil. And as you describe it, she was absolutely sort of baffled by Vile's extreme altruism and in this caring for other people and this wanting to do for other people. Yes. You see, there's this great scene. They were studying together at Sorbonne and Paris. And

they met at the courtyard and Simone Vale was crying. It was 1929 and she would cry there on the courtyard and Simone de Bois would see her and then they would ask and you know, why do you cry? And Simon Vale was crying because there was an earthquake in China and she was crying for the suffering of the Chinese people which were 10,000 miles away from her and she had nothing to do with them. But her sensitivity and her altruism was that extreme. Where Simone de Bois in that very moment could literally not understand. how a human being could be as sensitive to the suffering of other human beings. And then they talked and she said, Simone LeBouard, you know, that is the real question.

The real question is to find a sense for one's own life as she would as an existentialist, you know, trying to find out who I am, becoming who you are. And that was not Simon Dale's urge in philosophy. She tried to think about the suffering of other human beings and how to amend them. A very interesting part of the book for me was all the parts about Simone Vile, because of the four women, I knew by far the least about her going into the book. So it was a bit of a shock to me. We get to the end of the book.

And again, the book covers 1933 to 1943. And we learned if we didn't already know that for Simone Vile, 1943 was her last year on this planet. And then I very much like that you ended the book with the sentence, her work is worth discovering. Because that's what I thought. As I was reading the book, I was like, I need to read some of her stuff.

because I really am very uneducated about her. I'm glad that you say that. And actually, that's, so to speak, one of the, if I have a mission, a mission of this book that I really think that we have to rediscover Simon Whale as one of the great minds of the 20th and hopefully 21st century. I mean, Adakamu said in 1950s that she was the only great mind of our generation. And I think he was right. And it's also very important to me to think of Simon Whale as someone that I would call,

she's a different kind of woke. I mean, a lot of people who call themselves woke nowadays could possibly totally identify with Simon Vale and her commitment and the way she lives and the way she servers, her solidarity, her activism. You know, I sometimes think of Greater Toonberg as kind of a reincarnation of Simon Vale. They're very similar also to their being on the autistic spectrum.

But what is very important that the philosophical basis of Simon Weil are quite different from what we would now present. as liberal, progressive politics. And I think she should be, and I hope she will be, a very, very important voice in the conversation we have about the future of ourselves on this planet. Oh, I absolutely agree. I just found her an absolutely fascinating figure. Before I let you go, I want to ask, this is now, I think, two straight books you've written about a group of four philosophers. Are we going to end up, you know, 20 years from now where you have seven books

about groups of four philosophers? No. I'm glad that you ask this, but there will be a third book. You know, it's kind of the Lord of the Rings. And in the third book, I'll try to destroy the ring, so to speak. Ah, that's absolutely fascinating. And I'm excited to see what the third book is. I'm walking through Morda right now.

I'm glad to you. But I can't tell you what it's about. Fair enough. Fair enough. The book is The Visionaries, Arant Pouvoire, Rand, Vile, and the power of philosophy in Dark Times. Again, it is out August 8th. It is an absolutely fascinating read.

Wolfram Island Berger, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Andy. It was a great pleasure. Folks, I am so happy to welcome back to the new abnormal, my friend, and today, parent columnist, Danielle Campomor, to discuss a myriad of things that are happening across this country as it pertains to reproductive freedom and the ways in which women and people with uteruses are because criminalized. Danielle, first I'll start off with saying, how are you? My friend, it has been a hot, cruel, smoggy summer in so many regions of the country, but how are you doing? I am doing well,

I think, just trying to stay cool like the rest of the world, but I'm doing great and so happy to be here to discuss these important stories and topics with you, as always. So, Danielle, you know, I want to jump in with the horrific. story of Celeste Burgess Burgess that you wrote about last week, a Nebraska teenager who took abortion pills at

23 weeks pregnant and is now sentenced to jail for three months in Nebraska. And this story is making the rounds all over my social media, all over social media. And so can you bring us

inside of this story that you covered on Today.com? Absolutely. Well, first, a huge shout out to the local journalists there in Norfolk, Norfolk Daily News. Just given the state of journalism and media in this country, I think it's always important to center those local journalists, because they're the reason why large media outlets and mainstream media outlets know about this to begin with. So big shout out to them. So yes, when I came across this story, I then pour through court documents, affidavit, search warrants. And this all started actually when Celeste was a a minor. A police officer started investigating after she allegedly spoke to a co-worker about experiencing a stillborn birth. So they started investigating. They subpoenaed and got access to her medical records. They determined that she was probably around 23 weeks gestation. And then they actually subpoenaed and were able to look at Facebook messages that were shared between Celeste and her mother, Jessica. In those Facebook messages, Jessica details how to assess.

eventually obtain a medical abortion via abortion pills where you take one abortion pill. It stops the hormone progesterone, which stops the pregnancy from progressing. And then 24 hours later, you take additional pills that causes the body to expel the pregnancy. Given all that information, the police officer went to, you know, talked to Celeste. They actually showed him where they had buried the remains. They had buried the remains a few different times. They had attempted to burn them so that they wouldn't be caught because they were afraid. At the time, Nebraska was illegal to have an abortion passed 20 weeks gestation, although it was not illegal to self-manage an abortion, which is what this is.

And so they were both charged. Celeste pled guilty to concealing or abandoning a dead body, quote, unquote. They did not charge her with any abortion crime now since Roe v. Wade abortion is legal passed. 12 weeks gestation in the state. But they also charged Jessica, the mother. and she pled guilty to providing an illegal abortion, false reporting, and tampering with, quote, unquote, human skeletal remains. And she is yet to be sentenced. So this is also not over.

Celeste is right now in county jail. And her mom is sure to potentially join her in the near future. I mean, I don't even know where to begin with this horrific apocalyptic story. What has transpired, Danielle, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade and, just the picture, the image of Celeste, handcuffed, hysterically crying, whose body has already been traumatized, to now turn her into some type of criminal for having the audacity to just control her life and her body. I don't know where to begin. So please continue. I think that actually is a really good start to begin. And one of the reasons why Danielle,

I always love our conversations is in your continued reporting and highlighted. of these stories, you do what I am to do, which is to center the people most impacted. That is Celeste right now. That image is extremely jarring, but I'll actually go and speak about what the Norfolk Daily News reported, she said, in court before sentencing, which is truly heartbreaking when you put yourself in her position. She was a minor. She was turning to her mother for help. She was scared. She said, and I quote, I was honestly scared at the time. I didn't know what to do. I freaked out. I didn't know what way to turn at all after everything had happened. And it's so easy to get lost in the back and forth in the way that this has been politicized,

the way that it's covered as this side versus that side, despite the fact that the majority of people in this country support bodily autonomy, support the constitutional right to access abortion care. This was a child who was afraid. and now she is an inmate at the Madison County Jail. That in and of itself is indicative of not only what we are likely to continue to see, now that it's been a year post-Robi Wade, there's no denying the fact that this also happened prior to Roe v. Wade falling, especially among black, brown and indigenous people in this country whose pregnancy outcomes have long been discriminated against and have long been used to jail them.

and to incarcerate them, whether they had a miscarriage, a stillborn child, or tried to self-manage an abortion. So while this is nothing new, I think it is definitely alarming for those who are paying attention to what has happened since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Here's what I will say. The reason why you and I, I think, do the work that we do is because we can get so marred down in our society by the politics of the thing and not the way that the politics and the draconian policies actually affect real people, right? And so when we have conversations, first of all, about the over-incarceration rate in this country, the fact that we incarcerate more people than any other country, right, I think combined. When we talk about that industrial complex, also on top of, in comparison to the rest of the world,

our health care system, even with Obamacare, is trash. It's just like you go on system, on top of system, on top of system, and you get a Celeste Burgess Burgess' story. And the reason why these stories are so important is because you have politicians that talk about these instances of abortion in statistical matters as if it is not real people making decisions about their lives and their bodies. And in this case, a young girl. someone who in this country we don't consider an adult, but expect you to be a child raising a child

and think that that doesn't have prolonged effects on our functioning as a society in general. You see, it's just, it's the continued disconnect for me, Danielle, that throws all of this like into chaos in my mind and in our society. It's this disconnect between the ways that these systems of oppression interplay. and play out to ruin people's lives. And I mean, again, I'm preaching to the cry, but you're a thousand percent right. I mean, just look at the intersectionality of it all between incarceration, reproductive justice and reproductive health just in general.

More than half of the women in this country who are incarcerated, are mothers. In this country alone, 2,000 babies are born to incarcerated parents, meaning that women and people with uteruses are having birth in prison or jail a year. And then we also know the outcomes that happen to people if they are one, either turned away from abortion access, meaning they're unable to access it. They have a higher rate of potential pregnancy complications. There's higher rates of low birth rate. They are more likely to be driven further into poverty.

The children they already have are more likely to meet milestones later than their peers. But then we also look at what happens to incarcerated mothers. They're more likely to get driven into poverty. it's harder for them to obtain a job to care for their children. So all these things are compounded and overlapping. And as you said, makes it that much harder for people to provide for themselves or their families or to make future decisions for themselves or their potential families should they want to have one.

And to just bring it back full circle, I mean, before Celeste was sentenced, she said that instead of going to jail, she just, and I quote, really want a chance to actually prove to everyone that I could be a good person. When she gets out now, she's going to have a record and it will be that much harder for this young woman, now 19, to make that chance for herself. And that's not by accident.

Do you know what also pisses me off and let me go off on a tangent for a minute, which is the patriarchy of it all? Because heterosexual cis men get to, quote unquote, in our society, make mistakes. They get to make mistakes and they get to walk away from those mistakes. Those mistakes don't end up following them. So you have an entire judicial system that will, are they going to go after the man that impregnated her? No, they're not because that's not how our society is set up. So the cis straight men who participate in sexual acts that result in a pregnancy will not have

to bear any of the burden or the criminal injustice that Celeste's declares, experiencing because what, they get to walk away. And that again is another part of this conversation that I feel like we don't have. Because once again, the burden of either to raise this child or to manage an abortion fall solely on a woman. And I'm like, how do we shift Danielle that conversation? How do we open the door for more of that conversation? Right. Well, and to your point in an affidavit, this case, Celeste and her mom did have help from a 23-year-old man in trying to bury the remains. And he pled no contest and has a misdemeanor offense. So the law in and of itself was tougher on Celeste and her mother than the 23-year-old, who at the time he was an adult, Celeste was not

in attempting to hide their remains. So I think even just pointing that out and highlighting that, And unfortunately, again, in a lot of the media coverage, you didn't hear about that individual at all. Look, these are family planning discussions. And in my time at today, for example, I did a piece on fathers who were very quick to share how their partner's ability to access abortion care, reproductive justice to decide when they wanted to have children and with whom or the reason why they're the fathers that they are today. But unfortunately in this country, we have made this a quote unquote women's issue. And that has had profound impact on not only LGBTQ plus people and trans people who rely on these health services just as much as anyone else who may need them. But the men who benefit and who are made better by it because we've just siloed it. And unfortunately, until we remind and more accurately discuss exactly what reproductive justice is, what access.

what access to abortion care is. And again, that has nothing to do with politics. There's nothing to do with the ways in which this tends to become polarized for talking points during election years and midterm years. This is just about facts. And the fact is that this health care transforms families. It helps to create and maintain families. And when you start making concessions about that when you start not wanting to discuss that accurately because it might seem like you're picking a side or, you know, in the both sidesism that has consumed our national discourse, we're failing people like Celeste. We're failing people like the women in Texas right now who are suing the state because they

were denied abortion care when it was medically necessary and some of them almost died. Some of them can't have children anymore. Some of them were forced to hold their newborn that was born without a skull and half a brain for hours while it suffered. That has impacts not just on the mother, but the father on whole entire families, on grandparents, loved ones, communities. But we don't ever want to speak about it holistically because that would require to also center these people instead of want to make these political football talking points for the benefit of X, Y, Z person going for X, or XYZ political job. And that's where we're really failing, in my opinion.

I mean, we are just failing so fucking much, right? Like in every space and in every place of our society right now, there is nearing advancement that is being made on any issues that actually impact the day-to-day lives of people. And whether or not they choose to have a family or if they do have a family, how we're tending to those kids through their public education system that is also failing them. I struggle so much to keep a clear head during these conversations because I get so angry

because none of this has to happen. And the arguments, quote unquote, that are happening by these vile Republicans have nothing to do with people or the sanctity of life or like the desire to have healthy, sustainable families. Like that's not what this is about. Cruelty is the only point. Danielle, before I let you go, I do want to talk to you at the top. We mentioned the fact that this summer has been incredibly hot everywhere.

We've experienced the effects of downwind on the wildfires that are happening in Canada that have affected air quality here. And we on the new abnormal talk a lot about climate change. And I feel like it is still very much a siloed conversation. And so I wanted to give you the opportunity to share with our audience the ways in which reproductive care is affected and becoming increasingly affected by climate change. Absolutely. And I'm just so thrilled that you brought up this point because I agree with so many other topics. Everything is kind of siloed and we fail to see how they're truly connected and overlap and compound stressors for so many families. Look, the first thing that comes to mind is when I went to Puerto Rico last year after another hurricane day. devastated parts of the island that still hadn't even rebuilt from Hurricane Maria. And I visited a town

where there were mothers with their babies, no diapers, you know, they didn't have food. There's no electricity, so they can't keep their children's milk cold. So it's going sour. It's going bad. They're in knee-deep water that's now with sewage and waste. Children are getting sick and there's no access to any kind of hair, let alone reproductive health care. You know, your menstruation does not stop just because there was a flood or a hurricane, don't have access to any kind of products to help keep them, you know, sanitary during a time when their families rely on them. Look, there's studies that show them not just has climate change, but a big reason why people are choosing not to have children for fear that their children might be witnesses to the end of this earth as we

know it. But look, there are a number of studies that show that everything from pollution to climate events like hurricanes flooding earthquakes they create a number of health problems for people who are already pregnant anemia low birth weight preterm births potentially even miscarriages so they're impacting people while they're pregnant as well and so if you have someone who for instance is in Puerto Rico, living in poverty, trying to pick up the pieces from the last time that a major hurricane destroyed their village, is currently pregnant. And another one comes along. They're at risk for going into labor, for having preclampsia, for developing really serious health conditions that can take them away from their families and their pregnancies. And so this is something that

just compounds an issue related to reproductive justice. It's not just about when and if you want to start a family, but what kind of conditions will your family be living in when you do start them? Is your children going to live in a place where they can breathe clean air? Because in this country, studies show that black communities in particular are living in places where air pollution is at its highest and it's impacting the development of black children. So that's reproductive justice. All these things are overlapping. And if we live in a country where nearly half the states of banned access to abortion, we know that these bans by far disproportionately impact black communities. And those black communities are also disproportionately impacted by climate change and air pollution.

I mean, what kind of environment are we leaving for the most marginalized among us to thrive and succeed in? The answer is none. None. And that's what's really difficult for so many to comprehend, especially when we don't talk about it accurately, but when you do think about that, and to your point, with your empathy kicks in, your humanity kicks in. Despair, it's sometimes very hard to not let despair follow. And that's where I turn to people like you, I turn to people like my work, and you find those that are impacted the most, and you highlight them. You lift them up, you scream it from the rooftops because they and their voices need to be the ones that we hear the most always. Otherwise, we're listening to politicians who just don't know

what it's like and don't want to know. And that's not beneficial for our communities. Yeah. Danielle, we will have to leave it there for today. But as always, I can't express enough how much I appreciate your work, how much I appreciate these stories that you bring to the forefront, that you bring to today.com, that you bring on MSNBC and in other places so that people can see. People can see what is happening. And whether or not you know somebody that is being affected, which you have to at this point, because it's damn near abortion access is basically non-existent in almost half of the states in this country. And it's all of our responsibility to help the most vulnerable among us. So I appreciate you, Danielle, so much. And I hope that you'll come back and

join us again. Oh, anytime. Thank you, my dear friend, for all that you do. And you say the word. I always come running. Thank you. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at

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