The Daily Beast Podcast - Bannon and the Right Have a Scary New Tactic to Take Over Politics

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

Co-hosts Andy Levy and Molly Jong-Fast parse out whether Jim Jordan is telling the truth about his Jan. 6 knowledge, Jared Holt, a fellow at AtlanticCouncil’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, explains two big tactics far-right kingpins like Steve Bannon are using to take over democracy and Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin of Check My Ads join the pod to explain how to play a role in bankrupting people like Charlie Kirk, Dan Bongino and other notorious disinfo machines. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN, HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objective. 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 the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. What an interesting show we have today. Nandidi Jami and Clara Atkin of Check My Ads are going to talk to us about their important work to funding right-wing misinformation and extremist groups. Then we'll talk to Jared Holt of the Atlantic Council about his recent report on how extremist groups have evolved since January 6th.

But first, let's have some fun. Andy Levy. Uh, Molly John Fass. Today we must talk about America's most unctious senator, lion Ted. Yeah, that was an easy call. His mistake this last week was that he was mildly little bit nice about the Capitol Police, whose job it is to protect him and his fellow congresspeople and senators. And so to make up for his being moderately nice to these people who've risked their lives

and some who have died. He had to go on Tucker Carlson's White Power Hour and Miyako. Discuss. It was like watching the gimp scene in Pulp Fiction. If it were ever possible for me to feel sorry for Ted Cruz, this would have been the moment. And I didn't. I didn't, in the least bit, feel sorry for him.

But my God, it was, I have now. I don't think I've ever seen. And then he. tweeted out a link to the segment. Oh no. No, he did not. He did. Yeah, Ted Cruz tweeted out a link to the segment where he gets completely

eviscerated and neutered by Tucker Carlson. But here's the thing about Ted Cruz. Why is he so pathetic? It's a good question because up until 2016, you know, nobody liked him, but he wasn't like this. He just was annoying. And then suddenly he became you know, he became a total submissive. And he's just, whether it's Trump, you know, it started with Trump

making fun of his wife and then Ted, you know, supporting Trump. And then it's just gone down that path. I guess he found out he likes it. And I'm not here to kinkshame. Like, it's a legitimate lifestyle. And I really do think that once he gets, you know, once the people of Texas come to their senses and don't reelect him, and he figures out that no TV, Network even wants to hire him because he... In another five years, because he just got reelect. I know, but down the road, I'm talking about, he does have a career as a professional submissive, I think.

My understanding is that they can make fairly decent money. When your work is something you love, it's not work. Here's the question, though. Like, if you think about the other senators who ran against Trump in 2016, right? Little Marco, Ted Cruz. of all those sort of senators who have been in competition with him, Ted has really been the most destroyed by the experience, though, now that I think about it,

Marco has also been completely flattened by Trump. He has, I think what you're sort of getting at is nobody can say he's not smart. Right. Or maybe except for Jesse. The problem that I would always pay Ted Cruz is that he's the best debater the Republicans have. Like he's actually, like if you're just doing debate clubs, skills. He's like got the best skills. Right. Yeah, but high school debaters are the worst people in the world. It's like Ben Shapiro. It takes some sort of brain to do that though. Like you can't call that

person like a subprime IQ as we've called Kevin McCarthy on this podcast. You know, that man, that man can't debate. He's not Kevin McCarthy. And, you know, Marco Rubio seems like he's not Kevin McCarthy either, but he's closer to Kevin McCarthy than Ted Cruz is. So you sort of see him doing that and Marco just seems like he's kind of fumbling around trying to find something that works whereas Ted is just like he has made a calculated decision to be this person. Yeah. And that's what makes it worse than, you know, some of these other people. Like, like McCarthy, you know, he's just like, yeah, okay, sure, I'll go along. Trump, okay. But, you know, Cruz is like he has definitely made this, you know, he has figured out this calculated position that this is what he needs to do to win. And he's

doing that. And that's what makes it even worse and I guess even funnier when you see him debase himself. But what's interesting about Ted Cruz, which I think is worth going into for a minute, is that he has some of the worst political instincts of anyone in the entire world. Like, remember Texas, the power grid froze. It still hasn't been fixed. And he was like, I'm going to go to the Ritz Carlton in Mexico with my wife and children. And like, they're in the airport. And it's like, I mean, it's so stupid. I mean, it's the kind of thing that's so stupid,

Trump wouldn't even do it. That's a good point, and it's hard to square with everything I just said about him being smart because that was like ungodly stupid. And but I think that's, you know, that goes more to ego where it's, it's just like, you know, he thinks he can do whatever the hell he wants and Texas is going to keep electing him.

And he probably thinks that because Texas keeps electing him. Right. Let me turn it this way, though. Some people were saying this was Tucker character assassinating him so that Tucker can clear the way more for himself for a presidential run. Do you guys think there's any truth for that? I don't think Tucker Carlson is real worried about Ted Cruz if he wants to run for president. I don't think Tucker Carlson is planning a presidential run. I mean, I could be proven way wrong on this very easily, I guess.

If Tucker wants to run for president, he does not have to worry about Ted Cruz. That's pretty fair. John Ossoff is proposing a bill to ban stock trading for members of Congress. And their spouses. It has to be the spouses. That's incredibly important, I think. And look, good for Asaf. I sort of haven't thought about him for a second since he got elected.

He's skinny. He's young. He's Jewish. No, which is fine. Like, I don't, like, it's, you know, the way politics is now, it's not bad to not think of a politician. But, you know, I don't, he hasn't. really been in the news much. He hasn't done anything particularly splashy that I can remember,

but this is really, this is splashy and good. If you're looking for something that Democrats and Republicans have been like equally bad on, it's this issue. It is just, it's so beyond egregious that members of Congress and their spouses can trade stock and there's, there is no good argument in favor of allowing this to continue. But what Pelosi said a couple weeks ago or whatever it was, she said that it's a free market economy, so it would be wrong to prevent spouses from participating in that free market economy. Free market economy. I got to say, this was very welcome news to her husband who recently purchased millions of dollars in options of alphabet, which owns Google, you know, as a parent company of Google, which, you know, never testifies on the hill and is never the subject of legislation. So no conflict of interest there whatsoever. It's just the whole thing is insane. And good for Asov for trying to, I don't think he's going to succeed. I mean.

Right. But I wish he would too. He said he's waiting for a Republican co-sponsor to bring the bill to the floor. And that means, I don't know what I'm going to make it to the floor at that point. Can you imagine the Republican co-sponsor? Who will it be? Will it be Mitch Romney, you know, millionaire many times over? Or perhaps it will be, you know, I mean, like, it's going to be Ron Johnson.

Russian, Ron Johnson. You know, if he can ban vaccines in the bill, then maybe Ron Johnson will be interested in it. I mean, like, the Republican Senate, like, I mean, just, you know, we have so many legislations that are sitting basically on the desk

of Chuck Schumer, who is not married to Sonia Sotomayor, for those of you who we tiger beat on the Potomac. And you have so much legislation that just waiting for 10 sane Republican senators, and then you look at these 50 Republican senators, you can't think of 10 sane, you could maybe think of three who might on the right day not be completely

batched. Yeah. And in this case, I don't know how many Democratic senators also, you know, I mean, so he can't get Congress to co-sponsor with him. I think the squad is pretty much like it. Well, actually, Bernie, I bet you will co-sponsor with them. That's why they're there. Right. But I did, look, even if it doesn't. make it to the floor even if it fails, I think it's good that he put this out there and, you know, let people see that just hammer at home that this couldn't even get a vote or whatever. Good for him. Yeah, agreed. The other reason this is important, though, is like, while you'll never be able to get rid of both sidesism, having at least one side fight for this and having some people be honest,

it does help the discourse of that, I think. Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, it's like this, Democrats have not been good on this issue, as we see from Speaker Pelosi. So it's nice to get a Democrat out there saying this. So at least there's one and maybe more, you know, even if it's not enough to pass, you know, at least I agree. Like get it out there. The Democrats should be the party of banning stock trading for members of Congress and spouses.

And it's awful that they're not. It feels like the understatement of the year. I totally agree. Yeah. Maul, you retweeted this very smart Amanda Littman quote. Right, which was from a piece in the Times. Yes, about how Democrats should be spending their money. So Amanda Liman is the creator of something called Run for Something,

and she's actually been on this podcast now twice. She's an activist and very, very smart. And one of the things she always says, so this is not something new, is that Democratic donors like to give to things that are flashy and not necessarily things that are, you know, the sort of boring kind of meat and potatoes of legislation, but they're actually the most important thing. And so in this article, it talks about how one terrifying bathtub math making political pundit, obviously he doesn't make math. Steve Bannon has been working on like

encouraging people, you know, he has this wildly successful podcast called The War Room, which has been the New York Times also an article about this, has the sort of highest rate of disinformation. And after the election spent the like the three months between the election and January 6th, spreading lies about the election, Steve Bannon has been working the school boards. Like he's really gotten down to the grassroots stuff, which is the stuff that Democrats should be focusing on, but they don't want to. They want to give money to flashy stuff. And that was the quote.

And she's right. Yeah, she's absolutely right. I mean, the school board stuff is insanely scary. Ben Collins has been writing about this stuff too. If you're online, at least if you're on Twitter, you see it a lot where it's, you know, in all these little areas. I say little because it's a, you know, it's a school. I don't mean like unimportant or anything like that. It's just because it's a school board.

So it's a small community. As Trump would say, we're seeing this more and more. People are, many people are talking about it. Many, many people are going to school boards and, and they're pushing, you know, QAnon stuff and even stuff that's, you know, doesn't. quite reach to that level of insanity, but stuff about curriculums. Book banning. Curricula, if I were going to be grammatically correct. Curricula. Yes, like you said, like book banning and, you know, all these methods to get teachers in trouble. If they, if a parent reports something, you know, again, all modeled on the lovely Texas abortion law that encourages people to turn other people in. And,

And it's frightening because this, Bannon is, you know, for all his other things, this is, this is a good strategy. Like going local is a very good strategy. And I agree, you know, this needs to be countered. I, I 100% agree. And, you know, a little less throwing money at a candidate for Senate in, what was it, North Carolina, who had no chance to win, really? Right.

No, she was talking about the woman who ran against. Amy McGrath, who ran against Mitch McConnell. Oh, Amy McGrath, right, right, right, yeah. Yeah, Jamie Harrison at South Carolina. That's what I was thinking of, yeah, South Carolina. But, you know, those were two candidates that got an awful lot of out-of-state money from Democrats who were excited about their big chances to win. And, you know, well, Amy McGrath didn't even come close and never was going to come close.

But, yeah, it's a really, really good point that this local stuff has to be taken much more seriously and also state-level stuff, you know, which everyone has been saying for a while, The Republicans are very good at targeting local and state-level stuff. Yeah, and I mean, there are certain states where Democrats don't even run, and we've seen, and actually Amanda Lipman talks about this, if you run a candidate, even if they lose, Democrats do better in that area, in future campaigns, which is why it's worth running people in R-plus 27s. It actually, it all matters. Oh, that's interesting. To break that down more for people is that, I mean, it's so funny as like, you know, from marketing perspective, it's the thing of like point to point contact brings out votes. And even if you're just running for dog catcher and there's more people, there's those 20 people who wouldn't have voted, but they're voting for your personality who vote D all down the ticket. It really does make a difference. It's almost like doing volunteer work as a candidate. Yeah. Yeah, it does. It actually really works. So, I mean, Democratic donors, I mean, you know, they got very excited about Trump. But, you know, Trump is. is more than Trump, as we all know.

Yes. So with that, we should change the subject to that sore spot and talk about all the fun stuff that's happening around January 6th. So Jim Jordan, favorite of the podcast, is refusing to cooperate with the January 6th committee. What do you guys see there? Look. Jim Jordan says he has no relevant information to share with the committee. And I believe him. Because the Congressman Jim Jordan that I know would never say he has no information that could help the investigation of a scandal unless it were completely true.

He's not famous for ignoring crimes. No, there is nothing in his past that would lead you to believe that he might know more than he's willing to admit. So if he says he has no information that could help the January 6th Committee, I think we have no choice but to believe him. Next story. It's not like the man spent 11 hours grilling Hillary Clinton about Benghazzo. Right? I mean, he didn't do that. Because if he had done that, he would be an enormous fucking hypocrite,

but we all know he didn't do that. He would never. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. He would never. Too classy. Subpoena his ass and hold him in contempt. If they can do that legally, I don't know if they can. Now, there's a question of whether you can subpoena members of Congress.

Well, they're actually in the... I don't know either. I think they can. Are you basing this on anything in particular now? I'm not basing on anything other than what I want to happen. Excellent. Listen, podcasting and wish-castic. They're the brother and sister.

Very close. Very smart. What's interesting, I think, about Jim Jordan is that he then posted this big lighter. What I wish Democrats would spend a little more time on is that Republicans truly do believe that they can get away with anything they want. Whereas, like, you can tell, like, he's so indignant that people would ask him to testify about, like, what's clearly, you know, crimes he's talked about on television. And, like, I wish Democrats were a little more indignant like that. Yeah, although I have to say this committee is doing better work than I thought they would.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I'm a little surprised at how much they're getting out there. And I really just didn't, you know, with my usual Gen X cynicism, I just didn't expect anything from this committee at all. And if nothing else, they are getting a lot of information out there that we didn't know before them. Yeah. And I think also the thing that I'm impressed with is there's a lot of really good theatrics. And I don't mean that in a pejorative way. Right.

Like Liz Cheney reading those text messages, like the only way you're going to get people to give a shit about the death of democracy is if you have. have like smoke and fire and and this is what they're doing, which I think is good. They need to hire, I think if they hired Michael Bay to shoot a recreation of January 6th, that would be incredibly helpful. Isn't this basically what Dan Crenshaw's ads are all like now? Exactly. I hired the people who did Dan Crenshaw's ads. Hey folks, if you haven't heard every single week we do a special bonus episode for Beast

Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soladadad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening in the news. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice

by becoming a beast inside member where you'll support the beast's fearless journalism as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to New Abnormal. That's new abnormal. That's the dailybeast.com. Nandini, Jami, and Claire Akin are the founders of Check My Ads. Welcome to the New Abnormal, Nandini. Hi.

And welcome to the new abnormal, Claire. Hi. So, how did you two find each other? So Twitter. But so Nandini and I are both marketers. And she is an incredible product marketer as well as being an activist and a leader. She has incredible skills. So I was in marketing Twitter.

She was in marketing Twitter. she came to Vancouver where I live for a marketing conference and I DMed her and was like, do you need a couch? And she said, no, I have a hotel thing. And I said, okay, no worries. And we ended up hanging out three times in like two days or something. Like we were just, we had so much to talk about about all of the things that we were worried about in our industry and how our industry was affecting democracy. What did you find? For me, it was, you know, I had been running, sleeping giants for three years at this point. And I mean, I was pretty exhausted. I was like, when does this end? You know, I either wanted to move on with my life in some way or really get to

the heart of the problem and understand why sleeping giants still needed to exist because it had been so successful on so many levels. You know, we had defunded Breitbart by 90% of their expected ad revenue in 2017 alone. That's right. Four thousand advertisers had dumped Breitbart. publicly and way more did it privately. Over 30 ad exchanges had dropped them. And so we had this precedent and like the advertising industry advertisers clearly saying we don't want to be on this type of content. So why was it that I was finding like the same advertisers on the Gateway Pundit? Like what is what is going on there? So that is what Claire and I spent so much time talking about when we met up. And we kept sort of we kept thinking about what is the root of this problem? What is

the source of this problem. Why is it that brand safety, which is like the practice of wanting to keep your ads away from unsafe content on the web? Why is it that this is a priority for marketers, but their vendors don't seem to be helping them achieve that. Like, what is happening here? So we started to talk to any ad tech expert that would talk to us. We started reaching out to folks who had been in the industry, who had worked at some of these companies, and just kind of kind of just started asking them like the really dumb questions. Like, how does this work? What is an ad exchange? How does a publisher make money? Like just really, really basic questions. And Claire and I were career marketers. We think we're pretty on top of things. But we started to learn things about

the ad tech industry and how ads work and how ads are served and placed and optimized that we were pretty sure that other marketers didn't know. One of the first things and one of the most shocking things we learned was a concept called keyword blocking. So especially after the Sleeping Giants campaign, advertisers became really sensitive to having their ads on anything that was controversial. This is something that really bothers me because at Sleeping Giants, we were always really clear about why we wanted advertisers to address their ads on bright bar. We used very specific language like xenophobia and racism and misogyny. Your ads should not be funding those things. But the way that the ad tech industry and the advertising industry as a whole interpreted the problem that we brought to the forefront was, well, we're just better off not funding anything that could potentially be viewed as controversial or sensitive in nature.

And so what the ad tech industry encouraged advertisers and brands to do was to start adding to these keyword block lists. So words that could in any way be related to a sensitive story. So the reality of that was that when there's a school shooting, they block all the words related to school shooting. Like, for example, with parkland, they literally put school shooting, they add parkland. Some of them add Florida to their block lists and just like words that are not necessarily, you know, bad words. And in doing so, they block their ads from appearing on anything that uses those keywords. But instead of the intended effect, which is to keep their ads away from things that promote violence or promote crime or illegal activity, they ended up blocking all the news organizations that talk about Florida or talk about school shootings. So they were actually blocking critical coverage, critical news coverage through what was known as an industry best practice.

Yeah, it was wild because we had come into this industry thinking, this is a problem that adds. funding extremism. And what we ended up learning right away is the ad industry is also defunding local news. Oh, interesting. Can you explain that a little bit more? Yeah, so these keyword blocklists that Nandini just explained, they're being used to stay away from what advertising agencies or companies are calling like sensitive social issues. So they're so terrified of being anywhere near anything that is like bad news that now they're just blocking the news. And it started because they didn't want to be on extremism, but we don't have the technology to identify and avoid extremism or racist dog whistles or xenophobia. It just doesn't exist. I mean, you need a human to do that. You can't

do that with algorithms. So instead, they were like, I know. Anytime the word hate comes up, we're going to block it. And of course, that's like totally illogical. It's interesting. I mean, do you, I saw a lot of people are mad at you. I get a lot of this. like people from the far right who want me to die. How have you been handling all of that? Oh, thanks for asking. Nannini and I are really tight. And we support each other in a lot of ways and emotionally is one of them. Nondini has been dealing with this since 2016. So I take my cues from her and she's an incredibly strong person and also gets a lot more of the vitriol because she's an immigrant. And I mean, we also talk to lawyers and when we need to law enforcement and we, I mean,

we take our personal security very seriously. Yeah. So the Bongino report, they have all these sites. Like, I mean, I remember when I went to CPAC. It's like they have MAGA News 1, 2, 3, right? All these like fake sites that do this kind of bundled advertising, right? Can you explain how that works? Sure.

So Bonino has two out, like two main outlets, bonjino.com and BonginoReport.com. And basically they, like they operate just like Breitbart. did in 2016, they submitted their website to various ad exchanges. They were accepted. These ad exchanges have inventory guidelines and supply policies and a so-called stringent and careful acceptance process and all that, but clearly not because a lot of these ad exchanges allowed Bongino into their inventory. And once they're in there, they get access to thousands and thousands of advertisers. So this is not just, I mean, this is definitely on Google for sure. Google is the biggest ad exchange and Google is, I would say, the worst of all the bad actors as well as the biggest. But there's companies that you've never heard of that are also ad exchanges that also, you know, they're doing the same thing as Google. They're, they've invited Bongino into their inventory and they make payouts to not Bonino directly, but they do it through a middleman. And so it's not immediately clear to the average sort of person.

how Bongino makes money, but from our research, we're able to say, you know, for sure that Bonino has a middleman and intermediary, so to speak, who does and manages like all the advertising relationships and payouts and optimization and all that stuff. Basically, their job is to maximize revenue for Bongino.com, and they handle the relationship with the ad exchanges. What is the new product? There are a handful of companies in America who are relatively unknown who make hundreds of millions of dollars a year, we largely categorize them as ad exchanges. So basically they deal, they like traffic in ads, like literally the creative and money to pay publishers when the ad shows up on their ads base on their website and data.

These ad exchanges, traffic, they're like the ushers or like I think of them as like the traffic controls with like the baton at the airport, those guys and girls with, with those long lightsaber-like tools, those people, those ad exchanges, they're the ones who are trafficking $400 billion. They are making or breaking our media sphere. It is imperative that we pay attention to what they do. And that's what we do at Check My Ads. We uncover the relationship between these ad exchanges and the publishers who they are funding. So the publishers that are the most extreme. These people, they're making our world more violent. They're making our world more hateful. And we think it's important to uncover the relationship

between the people who send them money and violence. Yeah, I will just add that that's not their money. That's advertiser money. That's small business, mom and pot money. That's your Italian restaurant down the street advertising on bonchino.com. Because when you start up an ad campaign, you like, the average person, even the average marketer doesn't have a disinformation team to help them figure out like what the bad sites are. So it's on these ad exchanges to ensure that this inventory never ends up in, these publishers never end up in their inventory. I want to point out that when Google this year, no, last year, it's 22 now, when Google dropped the Gateway Pundit at the end of last year in the fall of last year, that represented $1.1 million of revenue to the Gateway Pundit.

Yeah. And I mean, I think this is also money that could be supporting local news. That's exactly right. The money was never supposed to end up with Gateway Pundit. Gateway Pundit was clearly in violation of their publisher policies. That should have been taken care of years ago. It took, you know, it took real public pressure. It took a documentary for them to finally act. And it was really the humiliation and public shaming that forced them to eventually act. Have you gone to Google and like what is their response? I mean, that's kind of shocking to me. I didn't know what about those. The documentary I was referring to was a French documentary. It was the host of that documentary was a French woman named Odd who actually took printouts of pages and pages and pages and articles from the Gateway Pundit and other various disinformation sites. And somehow she got a Google spokesperson for an on-camera interview

and had this very adorable yellow binder full of disinformation, basically. basically. And so first she asked the Google representative, how do you handle disinformation? You guys are one of the biggest monetizers of disinformation. Why haven't you addressed the Gateway Pundit yet? And he said, you know, well, I got to go and, you know, we got to go check it out. We need some time to look into whatever you're talking about. And she's like, well, I have this binder here full of articles for you. And it's full of COVID disinformation and, you know, vaccine bullshit and this and that. And this man's like the blood drained from his face when he saw that because there is no answer. And he freaked out. His voice went up two octaves and they, you know, his handler ended the interview. I mean,

that is the level of public shaming it takes. And they, so Google dropped the Gateway Pundit. I think it was just two days before this documentary was set to air. And it aired in France of all places. But that is what it takes. Nandini, you have contacted Google too. I have. Yeah, I think we should talk about that. Like, you've been badgering them for years. Yeah, it was last year. This time, you know, in the months leading up to the January 6th insurrection, there was a website called my militia.com that myself ended up.

There's a website called my militia. We should laugh, but it's so dark and dystopian then. We got to laugh. It's just, it's so obvious. And I tweeted at Google a bunch of times. I think I had, I think I reached. out to their ads liaison. Like, I did everything I could to put it on the record. MyMilisha.com. They're organizing for some kind of a rally or something on January 6th. This is extremely

dangerous stuff. No movement on that. I went back after, you know, January 6th to check on those ads. They had disappeared. Oh, interesting. It was after the fact. And yeah, I'll keep, I keep going back to them. I keep being public about, I keep this conversation in public as much as possible. Google has a person whose job it is to deal with the public. The Twitter handle is Ads Liaison. And I tweeted at Ads Liaison about another website called Revolver News. That's Darren B. Beatty's website. And they, I think, so that's my last big win with Google. They did demonetize that. But really, it's like, I don't know what goes on internally. I've never really had a conversation with anyone there. It's really like pulling teeth, and I think there's just a ton of internal politics out there that I'm not privy to. So the only thing

that we can control is the pressure that we put on them. I think it's important to say, yes, the ads disappeared from my militia, but they are still funding the people who make the most money off of the insurrection. And that's what our most recent campaign is about, is to literally pressure all these ad exchanges, including Google, to stop funding people who incited real world violence. Like who? Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck and his program The Blaze, Steve Bannon, of course, and his program War Room. And Tim Poole, who is a popular YouTuber, who incited the insurrection and who has spouted, all of them have spouted lies about election, disinformation and stop the steel and the big, and they're making millions off of these ad exchanges and these ad dollars that were never meant for them.

And it's also money that could go to local news and local news could actually make democracy stronger as opposed to destroying democracy. That's right. We don't know how much money these folks have made through these ad exchanges. We can only take a guess. Steve Bannon himself in 2018, in June 2018, he still didn't know who we were. He was at that now. I think, quite infamous dinner with Paul Gozar and a couple of others in London, a couple of other extremist leaders. And while they were there, they all were bitching about sleeping giants. And he said, he was the one who basically confirmed on camera that they lost their business model because of sleeping giants. Without ads, there is no economic model, basically saying that the only way for them to sustain their operations without ads is through soliciting donors. That confirms for us that we

have the playbook for demonetizing these folks and we can do it again. How can we support what you guys are working on? Right now, it's imperative that these ad exchanges realize that they are under the microscope. So what we're doing is asking people to send emails to them, literally asking questions about their policies and about how they square their policies against the real world violence that incurred due to their decisions. And at checkmyads.org slash j6, you can see we have a page, like a fundraising page set up, but under the updates tab, even if you don't want to donate and we support anyone who doesn't have the funds or the inclination, but who can send emails, that is the most powerful thing that you can do right now to defund the insurrectionists. We know it works. We know

they hate public pressure. We know they hate being in the limelight. So let's put them there. Let's shine sunlight where there isn't any. That's great. Thank you so much for joining us, you guys. Thank you so much, Molly. Thank you, Molly. Jared Holt is a resident fellow at digital forensic research lab and the Atlantic Council who researches domestic terrorism. Welcome to the new abnormal, Jared Halt. Hey, thanks for having me. You have a very big piece out. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided to get to this piece. Yeah, so it's a big 40-something page report that I published with the Atlantic Council and it is essentially a year in review on domestic extremism. And the reason I wrote this report is because sometimes I, you know, get the feeling as somebody who works on this all the time that

whenever we have a major, you know, kind of graphic tragedy like January 6 was, a lot of the discussion, you know, and rightfully so, kind of revolves around that tragedy and establishing facts and, you know, the narratives of what happened then. But extremism is a moving target. And my hope with writing this report was to, you know, kind of get up to speed with exactly what's happened in the year since January 6th and where things stand. And things have gotten much, much better and we don't need to worry anymore, right? Yeah, it's all better. It's all done. Everybody downloaded the Hamilton soundtrack, and we're good. Candy cloth for everyone.

What? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I had to do it. It's welcome. We're lucky we all did die of cringed today. Yeah, no. Yeah, well, there's still time. Well, things did not get better. They changed. So there has been a lot of admirable accountability work between the DOJ investigating, the House committee investigating. Those are two very different investigations.

One's criminal. One is exploring legislative outcomes. And additionally, I tend to think, as somebody who's done this for a while, that the way that we understand what's going on and our kind of vocabulary for talking about it has, improved vastly over the years. So all of that has been good. But as far as the state of play goes, you know, after January 6th, a lot of these groups, extremist groups, and then also the kind of run-of-the-mill Trump supporters who believed a lot of the same stuff and ran into the Capitol with them, they went home thinking they had done something really amazing. But then arrest started piling up, social media companies started acting, and it quickly turned into paranoia. And there was actually

actually a bit of a freeze. There were a few events here and there, but for the most part, like extremist movement leaders were telling their supporters explicitly, hey, don't do anything, just lay low. Let's see if this blows over. And it was a little bit of a PR crisis.

And the rest of the year was spent by these extremist movements, kind of adapting strategy, adapting messaging, and doing the best they could to kind of adapt and resurface. And by the middle of 2021, a lot of them had been able to kind of resurface in their own way. Jared, so I have a good question. I feel like you're the most qualified to answer of this is there was a million tweets as the arrest started that this will cripple every extremist group for years to come, but that they're never going to recover from this.

It seems like this report does not agree with that. No, I don't agree with that at all. After Unite the Right in Charlottesville in 2017, that neo-Nazi rally that left, police officers insured and Heather Heyer murdered in the street, people said kind of the same thing. But it's not as if white supremacy has gone away. You know, the leadership of that movement shuffled a bit. Things don't look the same. And I guess that's kind of the same point that I'm making with this report is like, sure,

there was some damage, you know, groups like the oathkeepers. don't exist the same way that they did prior to the attack. The proud boys don't exist the same way prior to the attack. But the group didn't go, like, none of these groups or movements really went away. They were battered by the attack, but they weren't broken by it. Do you think they got sort of more sophisticated on the way that they communicated with each other? I don't know if sophisticated is the word I would use, but it has changed a bit. There's kind of been two big things happening in extremism in the last.

year. And one of them has to do with the ideology. The ideology, thanks to the help of elected officials and media figures in conservative influential spaces like Matt Gates, Marjorie Taylor Green. In media, you've got Tucker Carlson. On social media, you've got a whole host of people with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers helping this effort, kind of pulling stuff that even a decade ago would embarrass the living shit out of like a Republican politician for being associated with this. that kind of declined that into the mainstream. Maybe the best example of that is January 6th historical revisionism, you know, advancing these conspiracy theories that what happened that day was this, you know,

FBI orchestrated plot or something like that. So that's been happening on one end. And then kind of the flip side of that has to do with the actual organizing. So there hasn't really been an appetite to return to D.C. or to try to, you know, take these more anger-filled or hate-filled causes and jam them all together into these massive rallies. Instead, it's kind of dispersing at the instruction of many of the kind of influential, like, thought leaders or organizers in far-right movements to go down into state, regional, and even local levels sometimes. and that's enabled them, A, to avoid the same kind of scrutiny they would get from doing this on a national scale. And we can see exactly what they're afraid of, for example, in September 18, when they did the justice for J6 rally.

And it was like 30 people, like 500 members of the press there. You know, that kind of scrutiny, that kind of attention isn't something they need right now. And then, so they avoid some scrutiny in that respect. But also sometimes these local venues can be a more efficient way for them to accomplish what they're trying to do. And people like Steve Bannon have been very explicit in, you know, telling their followers that, you know, if you run for a position in your local Republican Party or your school board or something, it doesn't really take that much to get elected. And if enough people do that, you know, you can kind of deal out death by a million paper cuts to, a system that they think ultimately failed to, you know, prevent Trump from losing an election that he lost, if that makes sense.

Yeah, it seems like I just saw this piece from the New York Times yesterday about disinformation coming from podcasts. And the War Room, Steve Bannon's podcast, was like the largest spreader of disinformation. Yeah, it's, I feel like people don't really realize how many people listen to that show. It wasn't always like that, but especially in the last year, his listenership has seemed to have grown a whole lot. And I think maybe more importantly is like, A, the audience is growing, but B, B, Bannon has these pre-existing connections in the Republican Party. So the ideas that are being espoused on his show, you know, if not directly face-to-face because they're a guest on the show, but even indirectly through the distribution, is reaching members of Congress and lawmakers, policymakers, you know. And that is also like its own huge danger to get elected officials who, you know, swear to uphold democracy being inundated with these ideas and these pressures to do the opposite.

And it strikes me one of the largest people with the largest platforms larger than Tucker Carlson even is Joe Rogan, who has sort of dipped his toe in a lot of this stuff too. Yeah, yeah. His show is huge. I mean, there's this mass delusion, paranoia thing. It's like some, I'm probably botching the last word. Right. No, but he had a psychiatrist on where he was a anti-vax. Mass psychotic formation.

Mass psychosis formation. Thank you. Like that term is spreading around the MAGA universe. And it comes from a Joe Roken podcast appearance by this weird doctor guy who claims to have invented MRI vaccines or something. But yeah. So even Rokin's podcast, even though you're not going to like flip it on and see Roken in a MAGA hat or something, has emerged as this massive like influence node in Maga Land. Yeah, it's pretty scary.

One of the things that intrigued me when I was reading through this, Jared, was Gab chief executive officer Andrew Torba, who has stated he's attempting to build a parallel Christian economy. I think my what the fuck meter went into the red and nearly broke. You give me a little bit of a TLDR on that? Yeah, so something that I know in the report is the spread of what I kind of call prepper mentality. Oh, yeah. If anything, it's like, it's maybe even closer to the type of psychology that motivated the American redoubt in like 2000, what was that, 11, 12, something like that, where. Life straws and. Yeah, just this idea that like if you're white and Christian.

and have these right-wing views that society eventually is coming for you, and you need to prepare yourself in some way, whether that is buying food buckets from Tim Poole or like supplements from Alex Jones, or sort of the translation into the digital space we're seeing of that philosophy, is sort of what Andrew Torba here is giving voice to, which is, you know, coming up with, you know, if you're white Christian conservative, big tech has it out for you. So maybe you won't need it today. But for now, we need to build

payment processors and web platforms and browsers and video services and chat rooms and stuff, like stuff that we own that can exist as a backup for the end times of posting or whatever. The end times of posting. So in all this, there's a lot to be concerned with. Is there anything people can be doing to try to diminish this? I think a lot of it just has to do with acting like we're in the moment that we are. You know, if you believe that there is a threat to democracy should fucking do something about it. I don't know.

And like this problem, like January 6th was a symptom of a problem that's been brewing for a long time. And it is continuing to brew to this day. It was a violent expression of a broader societal sickness. Because it's gone untreated in a meaningful way for so long, it's unfortunately become this kind of whole of society problem. You know, it's easy to think of what's happening as some weirdos on a fringe platform or some proud boys over in New York City fighting with Antifa or something. But really, these are expressions of a social move that's occurring in the U.S. right now.

And the only way I think we're going to triumph over it is to kind of beat it at its own game and, you know, form a new social movement of people who care about multiracial democracy, about inclusion, about truth and legitimacy, and, you know, take these collaborative approaches and kind of try to have a whole of society fixed to a whole of society problem. It's going to take a bunch of different things on different fronts. There's roles for tech companies. There's roles for law enforcement. There's roles for the average podcast listener going to mypillow.com slash Jerry. No, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. We have no good sponsors here. Not of that. But, you know, there's roles for everybody to do. Even if it's just, you know, if you hear

the chuds are going to be at the school board just showing up and being the person that says, fuck you, you don't represent this community, is doing something. important thing is just to do something. And not everything is going to work. There is no silver bullet here. But if all of us try, there's more of us than there are of them. Right. That's a really good point. I'm very hopeful. Thank you, Jared. Thank you for being hopeful. Jesse and I are just, we have to be more hopeful like that. That's good. Have you tried getting a small dog? Yes. Tell me more about these dogs. What's crazier than QAnonon? We're outlandish. than Pizza Gate and scarier than a Mexican getaway with Ted Cruz?

The answer is what the American right wing has planned next. Be one of the first to listen to Fever Dreams, new podcasts from The Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday hosts Swin Tsubisang and Will Summer, checking in on the movement of the radical right. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts

or your favorite podcast player to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's Fever Dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Molly JongFest. Who is your fuck that guy today? My Fuck That Guy is the newly anointed permanent host of the 7 p.m. Weekday Show on Fox News, Jesse Waters. And if there were ever an example of failing up in this country, it would be Jesse Waters,

who I, and I don't say this lightly, because, It's a big pool of people who would be up for this, but he is the dumbest person on cable news. All of cable news? Like, would entertainment tonight be in that category? Like, QVC? Chris Saliza? I'm talking about the big three. No, I'm including Saliza in this.

And that, again, like I said, it's a bold statement considering the competition. I think he's just straight up the dumbest person on cable news. And now he has his own primetime show on the number one radio. cable news network in the world. And so congratulations and fuck that guy to Jesse Waters. It's interesting too because he's picking up a spot that at one time was actually news. Yeah. And it's just further proof of the devolution of Fox News into whatever the hell it's becoming.

And I mean, at one point, look, they could have legitimately said between Shep Smith and Brett Bear and you had, you know, Martha McCallum at seven and whatever that there were some hours of the day that were, you know, good or at least not bad. And now it's just, you know, now it's just Jesse Waters and Laura Ingram and whoever else. And it's just, yeah, it sucks. Tucker Carlson all the way down. Fuck that guy. Do you want to know who my fuck that guy is? Molly, I was just going to ask who your fuck that guy is. He owns a ostrich, jacket. That narrows it down to 14 people I know.

He was ultimately allowed to keep his $15,000 ostrich jacket, though he had to turn over multiple properties in New York. Okay. Now I'm down to six people, I know. Paul Manafort. Oh. Perhaps you've heard of him. That's a wig, right?

I'm not getting it. I'm not going to a week. I don't know. That's a piece. He has a book coming out. It is called Political Prisoner. Persecuted? Prosecuted. But not silenced.

Go off, King. Go off. That's right. Through the course of his two trials, it was revealed how Manafort was able to live a lavish lifestyle. A federal judge ordered him to pay $24.8 million in restitution. He was Donald Trump's campaign manager in 2016, yet another member of Trump world who went to jail. But he did get pardoned by Donald Trump. I don't think it's a piece. Trump's pardon of Manafort came in December 2020, amid other pardons for political operative, Roger Stone, Charles Kushner.

That was one of the better ones. Yeah. So during pardoned Gait, he pardoned Paul Manafort. And now Paul Manafort is settling the score with his piece. Hairpiece. No, his book, Political Prisoner. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media.

Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at thedailybeast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a daily, Bees subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the dailybeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.