The Daily Beast Podcast - Can You Force Fox News To Be Less Racist?

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

There’s so much packed into the latest edition of The New Abnormal, it’s hard to know where to start. Let’s see… Molly Jong-Fast heralds the return of Matt “Hot Tub Crime Machine” Whittaker, the one-time Attorney General. (He mixes “a toxic cocktail of macho mega swagger, the angry cant of the Christian [ultra-conservative], and the whining of a petulant child.”) Rick Wilson wonders whether Trumpists could “solve a complex puzzle, like stacking blocks in order,” and ponders the contents of Ted Cruz’s erotic fan fiction. Plus! Former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu goes deep on his long fight to take down confederate monuments. And Sleeping Giants’ Matt Rivitz talks about what it’s like to take on Brietbart, Bill O’Reilly, and Tucker Carlson — and win. He’s been pushing advertisers to drop the race-baiters, and they’ve responded. “This is like the Super Bowl... It's like, okay, brands finally get it. What they choose to support with their media dollars really drives the conversation.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, it's Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, a left-wing pundit, an editor-at-large at the Daily Beast. I'm also an editor at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, business, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of F-bombs and try to keep our... kids, pets, and other wildlife sounds from invading our respective bunkers. So we have a lot of news today to cover, but I thought we should first talk about, like, the real important stuff.

Hot Tub Crime Machine has written a book. Matt Whitaker, for those of you who aren't frequently into our little slang world, we will, I promise you guys, we're going to produce an episode at some point on just the obscure slang that we have in our little squad here. We're doing it. There's a lot of it. We know, we're going to do it. We're going to do it.

I believe in it strongly. So tell me about Hot Tub Crime Machine. new book. Well, I have a question for you. Who do you think wrote the foreword to Matt Whitaker's book? Was it Jim Jordan? Was it Matt Gates? Oh, is it Louis Gohmert? Is it Louis Gohmert? Not Louis Gohmert. I don't think Louis Gohmert can write English sentences. What congressman has a more broken brain? Oh, oh, oh. You gave me the clue. Is it Devin, my lawyer, spent a shit ton of money trying to find an anonymous Twitter account named after a cow Nunez? That's right. And he still couldn't find the fucking cow. Hey, what would happen? if Bill Mitchell, Jim Hoff, and Louis Gomer were trying to solve a complex puzzle like stacking

blocks in order? It's like a trick question because it would never happen. Correct. I have a question about Bill Mitchell. Have you ever seen that picture? I don't watch the videos, but I always look at those photos of him and it looks like his head is enormous. And I have an enormous head, so I have a lot of sympathy for that. But then I saw a picture of him and his head is actually really teeny. I too have an enormous head. My head is so enormous that if you were to throw a baseball and it missed, there's a chance that the size and gravitational field of my gigantic bone dome would alter its trajectory ever so slightly, measurably but slightly.

But no, yes, I've seen that one picture of him. And he looks like that scene in Beetlejuice where the head hunter guy has his head shrunken on a normal-sized body. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's weird. It's like people with small heads want to be people with big heads. So you want to get back to actual news? I'm sorry.

We're just lucky. That's right. Count your blessings. So, Molly, as much as we're going to do a spinoff podcast about our love of her and interpreting the scrying the size of our enormous heads. And our enormous niggins, yeah. Size 8 hat, folks. I really am curious because I haven't read or even read much about Matt Whitaker's brilliant new

nonfiction book. Is it number one yet? Well, I just would like to read one piece from this amazing review of the book in the Washington Post. Do tell. It's the kind of lead that all of us really, really, really want. Really wish we had written. There are good books and bad books.

There are books so bad they should be tried, convicted, and sentenced to life without parole in a literary prison, never again to see the light of day. Gentle reader, this is such a book. For those of you who forgot, Matt Whitaker was the Attorney General of the United States for an entire 17 minutes in between Trump's hissy fit of firing Jeff Sessions and his selection of Interior Minister Bill Barr to begin the long dark night of civilization. Exactly. Matt Whitaker's claim to fame before he became the Attorney General of the United States of America, the highest law enforcement officer in the land, was that he invented a toilet with an extra deep bowl for people with big dicks. That's right. Big Dick toilet salesman. Big dick toilet salesman. He's called that by Marcy Wheeler. Yeah, and also by Empty Wheel, Marcy Wheeler is one of the best follows on Twitter at empty wheel. But also Matt was famous for a working for a patent and invention company that applied for a patent on a time machine. That's right.

And had been a hot tub salesman. That's right. You know, that old Steve Jobs rule of A's hire B's and B's hire C's and C's hire D's. Well, Trump hires Matt fucking Whitaker. Which are Z's. Who is now written a book? I'm by book. I'm going to guess it's sort of a pamphlet-ish.

Riddaker writes the way Trump tweets, mixing a toxic cocktail of macho-Maga swagger, the angry cant of the Christian right and the whining of a petulant child. I can't wait to not read Matt Whitaker's new book. But speaking of the whining of petulant children, I noticed that since we last spoke, Donald Trump has rescheduled his Juneteenth rally in Tulsa in the Oklahoma Stan province and has now moved it to a day later. That's right. And has summoned a lawyer jirga of his Trump hodies.

I'm mixing all kinds of metaphors, all you Middle Eastern scholars, just let me roll. So that next Saturday, they're going to have super spreader palusa. It's like a fish concert for MAGA people in Tulsa. And Tulsa actually doesn't want them. There was an op-ed today in the Tulsa newspaper that said, like, please don't come here. We can't afford you. We don't want you. We are having a spike of coronavirus ourselves.

You know, this rally is set to be sort of a delicious, toxic slurry of everything. It's got Trump racism. It's got someone dividing the country along racial lines and a moment where, you know, everything's calm, racially speaking. It's got the chance to jam people into an arena to serve as plague bearers for the super spread of COVID. It's just got everything. Every contact tracer's dream, right?

It really is. I mean, and luckily Brad Parzcal is out saying, I've got 800,000 people signed up to come to this rally. Woo, hoo-hoo! Okay. The punchline is that the venue only seats 19,000 people. Look, outside of the venue, there will be the Moss Isley Cantina of the usual Maga stuff. You want to make any bets with me, Molly,

on the presence of the Confederate battle flag? No, I won't do that bad because I don't want to lose. Right. And Q and on flags, I assume. Right. Q&O, yeah. I mean, look, definitely this signals the beginning of the mass arrest, finally at long last.

That's right. It's only been three years, and yet we walk free. Speaking of the weekend, did you catch the Trump flotillas? Was there a Trump flotilla in the east or Hudson rivers? Did you notice? No. In New York City, we don't have Trump flotillas, but I saw you tweet out a photo that involved a Trump flotilla.

Where was that, Rick? That was in Panama City, Florida, home of Congressman Matt Gates. The boats in the picture in question, which we will throw into the show notes, included Confederate flags and QAnon flags. So it just makes me wish I had a submarine with torpedoes, but that's just me. QAnon and Confederate flags seem to work really well together. Have you noticed that? They are kind of the peanut butter and chocolate of lunatic, revengeous hate fantasies, yeah.

Right? It's kind of impressive. Yeah, sort of the Reese's peanut butter cup of, like I said, Confederate revenge fantasies and lurid conspiracy theories. But you know where Confederate flags seem not to be playing so well is in the Republicans' desperate quest to try to keep the Senate? Really? It's amazing to me that Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, Corey Gardner, Martha McSally, and Tom Tillis are all feeling what is the way I'm thinking of? Oh, in Montana, too. Yeah, and Montana. It's that sense of dread that tying yourself to a verbally incontinent lunatic might not be the best political strategy in the world. They're staggering down towards defeat in the same way that the president of the United States staggers down a ramp. Oh, ramp gate. We forgot to talk about ramp gate. So Trump delivered a graduation address on Saturday. Was that Saturday or Sunday? I can't remember.

Saturday. We have one vote for Saturday and one vote. for Sunday. It was on Sunder Day. The days are all the same. The days are all the fucking same. Trump gave an address at West Point, which meant that all the West Point graduates had to come back

for Trump to give this teleprompter speech. And the only two things that anyone remembers from it are... That Donald Trump had to double fist a tiny, itty-bitty bottle of water. His little wee lemur paws were gripping that bottle for dear life, and he held it up to his quivering lip. a tiny rivulative drool. I'm making up the rivul of drool part.

But he held it up as if it were the Holy Grail itself, containing the life-giving waters that would give him a mortal life. And ramp. Then he walks down this ramp, which is probably like a five-degree ramp, which you would barely notice, and he looks so frail, so delicate,

and so shaky going down the ramp, that, of course, as Trump Well starts tweeting, it became the story of the weekend. Because, look, he is like all of these authoritarian things, figures. He has this robust fantasy in his head, and his followers have this robust fantasy that he is this picture of masculine vigor. And when you see this, frankly, kind of semi-tragic, looking, frail, shaky old man walking down a ramp, clearly about to fall on his ass, people will notice. So, of course, we got the tweet. I'm going to do the tweet in the Trump voice. By the time he's

defeated, I will have my Trump accent down. So we have a new rule on this show, which I have just made up right now, which is that only one person can do a Donald Trump impression per show. And luckily, we have Mitch Landrieu, and then we also have the founder of Sleeping Giants. And neither of them, I think, we will allow to do a Donald Trump impression in your honor. Okay? Okay. Well, the ramp that I descended after my West Point commencement speech was very long and steep, had no handrail, and most importantly, was very slippery. The last thing I was going to do is fall for the fake news to have fun with. Final 10 feet, I ran down to level ground. Momentum. You sound like Alec Baldwin. All Trump imitations are basically imitations of Alec Baldwin imitating Trump. It's sort of a meta-Trump

imitation. But the idea of Donald Trump running the final 10 feet to level ground, it is the same peculiar physics that the Antifa super soldier in Buffalo, he fell fast, lot harder than he was pushed. If you watch the video, if by running, he means slightly accelerating the senility shuffle that he's engaged in. If by running, you mean he had that sort of like, oh, God, I've sharded my depends. I'd better get to a somewhere else slight increase in velocity. That would be what he refers to as running. So it was an embarrassment.

Trump insisted on doing this event at West Point and delivered, I mean, back away for one second from the creepy retro, let's retcom the history of what he actually did. The speech itself was a teleprompter class. Yes, it was. He read the speech off the teleprompter about the bold and amazing historic legacy of West Point soldiers who are very soldiery and brave. Also, they are brave and they are our soldiers who are brave and the military soldiers, which we have from West Point, are brave. It was terrible. It was a bad speech badly delivered.

You know what's interesting to me about these speeches, these Stephen Miller, Santa Monica Gerbil's speeches, is that they're never good. No, they're never good. These speeches are not good speeches. They are bad speeches. Look, you could get the best speechwriter in the world, okay? You could get Peggy Nooner, David Cousin, whoever you want to put in that job. And when Donald Trump goes to the prompter, you're going to know two things. First off, he's never read the speech before. Right. Never. Never, ever. He skimmed the pictographic version presented to him earlier. I'm not even sure that, but yes. He doesn't read. There's no narrative sound coming out of Donald Trump's mouth that professes his intimacy. with the material. He has never read this before. He's never thought about it before. He also isn't a good reader. Even on the prompter, he's not a good reader.

The only time Trump comes across as seeming like he's engaged with the material is in the asides, is in the ad-lips. The racism. He really comes alive when he gets to say racist stuff. Look, when you see the window open into Donald Trump's ego or his id, that's when it's real.

That's when you hear the real thing. And you can see those moments. And this speech, he didn't really break away from the speech much. But if you look at Trump, reading off a prompter, and then when he jumps out of character where he's playing the president, like a guy you wouldn't hire for a day part, okay? When he breaks out and he's the real Donald Trump, that's when it's genuine. But just like all these, it's like he's playing the president in a Shark Nato part 19 movie for five minutes and reading off the teleprompter as if he is whacked out on Thorazine. He's basically only genuine when he's making fun of people.

Right. Or insulting people, aggrandizing himself, or soaking racial hatred. Right. So that's when he really comes alive. The rest of the time, it's like President Zombie. Hey, folks, with us today is Matt Rivets, the founder of Sleeping Giants, which is an online campaign to defund hate and bigotry in the media. They have been doing absolutely amazing work and pressuring advertisers to get off sites like Breitbart and shows like the Tucker Carlson Frozen Fish Racism Hour. And Frow Ingramham's White Power Hour on Fox.

They are bringing this pressure on social media that's actually managed to drive real results. And we're delighted to have Matt with us. Matt, I'm so excited that you're here today. I'm a big, big fan of Sleeping Giants. And I'm curious, can you talk about how you got started with this? Because it's a new kind of thing. Yeah. And I'm kind of confused how it all started myself.

But it was all very quick. It was just after the election, 2016, you know, I just got sort of fascinated with Steve Bannon. I felt like he was a real dangerous guy. and he was using racism as a tool. And to me, it wasn't a political thing. It was a, I'm scared of racism and anti-Semitism thing. And I had never been to Breitbart before, really. I wasn't that familiar with it.

I went the first time and those articles blew my mind in a really big way. And I just didn't think that you could print that kind of stuff and couch it as news. So I'm in advertising. I still am. I'm a copywriter. And I went on to see who was supporting it from an ad perspective and found out that it was kind of every advertiser in the world. It was just the way that ads are displayed online and things are monetized online like Google and Facebook have these ad networks where they place all these brands

all over the internet without any kind of care for the brand or they don't even know where they're going to land most of the time. So I had set up this anonymous Twitter handle with an anonymous Gmail account and took a screenshot of one of the articles. I think it was hoisted high and proud the Confederate flag claims of glorious heritage, famous line. And next to an ad for a loan company called SoFi. And I just tweeted it to the CEO and to the corporate handle because I always heard that if you, you know, on Twitter and you complain to an airline, if you're sitting on the runway for two hours and they just give you like 20,000 miles just for complaining. So I'm pretty good at complaining. So I. Yeah. No, I'm great at it. And so I just tweeted it to the company. I said,

do you support this? Because at the time, Steve Bannon said it was the platform for the alt-right. And I said, are you supporting the platform for the alt-rate? Is that something you want to do? And they got back to me within, you know, a day. And then this thing just got started and it just kept going and going, going further than I ever thought. I was joined by Nandini Jami has been working on this almost from the beginning. And it's been really wild. Other people have joined in and, you know, not just on Twitter, but to do other stuff and to do some research. And it's been a crazy wild ride that just continues to go despite the fact that I would love to hop off. So let me ask you this. Bannon and the Brightbart guys, they reveled for a long time. Their basic MO was being the biggest dicks on the

block for the longest time. And they thought that trolling was fun and the controversy was uniformly good for them. So once you guys went on a higher profile with them, how long did it take before you started seeing like significant advertisers drop off from Bright Park? I mean, it was almost instant. And you saw it maybe three weeks in, Kellogg's decided that they weren't going to advertise on there anymore. And they made a very public statement about it. That was like the damn breaking. It was everyone realized what was going on is these brands were supporting these sites that, you know, it still are now, but that they didn't know they were supporting. So they said this and then Breitbart and all of their incredible genius decided to do a counter-boycott on Kellogg's on their own site, which was

directly above an ad saying advertise on Breitbart. Fantastic. Not a real genius marketing move from someone that's in advertising. That was like the dumbest thing they could have done. Also, until the day that Robert Mercer hands Steve Bannon and another I don't know, another unlimited budget for a while. The entire rev stream of Breitbart is a rounding error of one-tenth of one day of Kellogg's advertising budget every year. Yeah, and so like after that happened, I think advertisers kind of ran for the hills. They're like, look, it's not even just the fact that we're supporting this terrible articles, but we're also risking, like, if we stick around, these guys, if we decide to drop, these guys are going to like publicly slag us on their website. So, you know, this is a terrible business decision all the way around to stay there. So then talk about your pivot to Tucker. So Tucker didn't come to later, but the next one was really Bill O'Reilly.

And, you know, all those articles came out that said Bill O'Reilly, you know, was sexually harassing women at Fox. And the network had settled $32 million in sexual harassment suits for him or something. And so there was a big outcry on it because it's really a community that everyone's like, we should do something about this. So I put out a poll and everyone said, yeah, we got to get involved in this. So I was like, shit, I don't want to tangle Fox really. that seems really scary. But I just think we decided, let's go for it. And it was within, we just created these fellow Riley facts. So things that he had said over time, things about his settlements, et cetera. And we just tweeted those out to advertisers and said, do you support this? And within two

weeks, 40 of them had left. And there were other organizations involved too in that. But, you know, 40 advertisers had left. And then he went on a vacation and never came back. And so it was like, that was a real eye-opening thing. Because this is just, a Twitter handle on a Facebook page. That's all it is. There's no real organization. There's no funding, no anything. And so just to sit here and go, wow, like, I'm on my phone and all of a sudden, this guy that's got the number one show on cable that's being a horrendous person is suddenly gone. It just, all we're doing is appealing to their brands and appealing to their corporate policies and providing information. And that seems to work. This is sort of asymmetric warfare.

is you guys hit, move, and they can't hold up their own behavior to the light. That's why I think that a lot of the corporate folks that I've talked to about your effort and others have said things like, well, look, I've got to sell X or Y to 60 pluses. I've got to be on Fox. But there comes a point where that cost benefit equation flips over, and I think we're kind of past it now. As you said, they've been looking for eyeballs for so long and just chasing a demographic, and they don't think that what they're paying for is actually they're investing in more

of that and that it can bounce back on their brands pretty significantly. So the advertisers haven't thought this way before. But now, I mean, especially on the internet, they're paying for the free internet. So what they choose to invest in is what's going to win. And it's going to be the thing that's pushed forward. Unfortunately, for them, they don't know where they're landing a lot of the time, but there are all these studies that basically say that brands showing up on negative content dramatically affect consumers' view of these brands. So why don't you explain a little bit to listeners about how those rotation systems work? Because no one at Kellogg woke up in the morning and said, hey, I want to be on a page where Matt Boyle is writing about, I'd rather

my daughter have cancer than feminism. Yeah. Yeah, no one's really psyched about that. No media planner is like going to get all fired up about doing a peppy campaign. You know, that's not going to happen. So the way it used to work is, and Rick, you probably know because you're in the business as well, but it used to be when I got into the business 26, 27 years ago, you would, I'm a creative.

So if you, you know, wrote a commercial and you produced a commercial, then you, you And you would know what time it was going to be on, what pod, what channel, what show, what time zone, all that stuff. And you would get that and they would tell you to watch it and you would go watch it. But when the internet started to work, you used to make direct buys the sites. And so you would say, I want to be on, I guess it was Yahoo back then or something like that. And you would place the ad there. Then this thing called programmatic advertising came along, which is basically like, we're going

to provide unlimited reach and eyeballs for you across the internet. And we're going to monetize every site that we possibly can. So if you're a brand, it's real easy for you to say, okay, I'm going to place my ad through Google or through Facebook audience network or one of these companies. And I'm going to blast my ad all the internet. But no one ever thought about where it was going to end up. And none of these companies like Google never enforced their terms of service, which are like pretty clear about hate and everything else on these sites. And so these sites were getting all these ads and no one cared. No one even knew.

And I think that's like when Sleeping Giants came around. It was the first time when everyone's like, holy shit, wait, we're on these sites. we had no idea that we were there. It's really irresponsible on the part of the tech companies. And I'm super surprised that they haven't been sued for all kinds of stuff soon, especially for brand damage, because it is really damaging to them to show up on these sites. I don't know.

I mean, the Daily Stormer, they for a while actually had Tabula on the fucking Daily Stormer. I was like, what in the name of God is wrong with you people? You know, there were Nazi sites. And, I mean, there are plenty of disinformation sites, too. But there were Nazi sites that were monetizing themselves using ads. And the fact that that was happening at all is atrocious, and it's a real indictment of what's

happened in the industry. They've lost control. The one weird trick for funding the master race. Yeah, exactly. Doctors say don't eat these three racist foods. We talk about getting doxed by Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller, quote unquote, foundation. Yeah, that was super fun. A real highlight of my life and my family's life.

I was actually on the East Coast. I wasn't at home, which is really nice. but I got a call from one of their reporters. And then my wife got a call on her phone, her private phone that is not really published. And we started getting emails and stuff from them. And I was like, I kind of had an inkling of what was going on because they were always going going to be gunning for us. And yeah, they published a report like maybe a couple hours after they called and said that

I was the founder. And they had basically like listed where my wife went to school growing up and my friends names and all the stuff that was super dishonest. Not really in the scope of traditional reporting, I don't think. You know, they did some good detective work. I'll say, like, I'll give them credit for that. They found a post on Facebook that one of my friends had written and her account wasn't private and just kept pulling the thread and eventually found me. But it was really bad afterwards. Like the next two weeks were horrendous. I got so many death threats on the bright barred comment section. My son got a death threat on there, basically saying we're going to go wish him a mazel tub on his bar mitzvah and listed the name of the

synagogue and the number and the address. And I really went directly at Breitbart. I said, do you guys have to remove this? We flagged this and it stayed up for four days. I had notified on Twitter, Joel Pollock, who's, you know, one of the editors there, I had asked him for four days straight to take it down and they left it up. I feel your pain on that. When I was in the middle of it, that guy named John Noltey at Breitbart wrote an article saying it was hilarious to joke about my daughter being raped. He thought it was hilarious. Yeah, I mean, it's real dishonest stuff. And I think these websites and these TV shows, they engage in this regularly. They know they've got a rabid fan base. They know what they're doing. They will go and attack you. They claim that it's all under the guise

of journalism, but they know how this works. And they know that the comment sections are going to fill up. My address was all over the internet within five years. My wife is funny. My wife got a call on her phone and she's a real bubbly person and I was freaking out. I'm like in the corner rocking back and forth and she answers the phone. She's like, hello, the mouth breather on the other end, didn't know what to do when he was speaking to a real person. So I'm just checking your names on this website and I have to check that it's you. And she's like, okay, bye. That's part of trolling. It's like, you know, it's so impersonal. You don't really attach a person to it, just like their online persona. And when you have no human connection, you're able to tell someone that you're going to

firebomb their house or you're going to swat you or whatever, but you don't think that there's a person behind there. And I think that's the real danger of the internet right now. Did they come for you, did the caller come for you after you had already started on Tucker or before? No, before, before. Tucker has been getting progressively worse over time. I think maybe back then it wasn't quite as white supremacistee as it is now. We call it racist adjacent. Yeah, exactly. I'm not even sure it's adjacent anymore

myself. It's like adjacent being sitting in its lap. Yeah, exactly. Look, these guys know that their business model is under fire. You can't print these things, these racist and bigoted things without and expect to get ad dollars from major corporations. It's funny, there was a video that Steve Bannon was pulled during

Allison Clayman shot this documentary about, Steve Bannon. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And this video basically said, he talked about Sleeping Giants, which was like pretty fucking amazing for me to hear that. He basically said that the business model that Breitbart has, it's not going to exist in a few years because what the things that they're engaged in are really bad. And journalism itself is struggling. So, you know, you really need these backers to get behind it. That goes for any publication, but especially these guys. Well, that's the reason the Daily Caller Foundation goes after you because it's funded by anonymous tax deductible things, by who don't want their fingerprints on it either,

but they're certainly happy to have the little, like, alt-right minions out there playing their little games. Yeah. Man, I would love for some legislation that happens at some point, and I doubt that it could, that an outlet on their website will have to list their ownership on the front page, because we need to know who's funding these messages because it doesn't matter which political ideology it is.

It's just bad to have someone behind something in, and we don't really understand who's paying for it. The racist messages are atrocious, but the disinformation is even more horrific in a lot of ways. So Fox right now, your folks you're looking at at Fox right now are basically Tucker and Frouin-Graham. Yeah, I mean, they're both horrendous. It's every night, you know, someone called it the white power hour, and I don't think

that's that far off. It's not even coded so much anymore. And if I'm a brand, I don't understand why any brand would have wanted to be associated with that. I understand they're probably going to get a great deal on eyeballs right now. But why would you associate with someone that says that white supremacy is a hoax? I just don't get that. brand, especially these brands that are right now, they're doing these Black Lives Matter

tweets and diversity and inclusion clauses very public on their website. That's how this works. It's just like, okay, you're advertising on Tucker Carlson, but it says on your site here that you strongly believe in diversity and inclusion. So why would you sponsor that? And so that's always the logic, you know? Yeah. Let me ask you this. Who are the big advertiser? I mean, not like My Pillow and Fish Oil supplements. Who are the big advertisers left on those shows at night? They're almost zero now. They're. They're almost down to nothing, I think, from big advertisers. Sandals is probably like the biggest advertising, which they seem to stick with them no matter what.

Sandals, Clemedia Beach, Bahamas. You know, they're brands that are going to be okay with that, and that's fine. Yeah, if you want to stick with it, that's on you, and that's what you believe in, and that's fine. But most of them don't. And they've all kind of run for the hills for the most part because people are just, they're noticing it now. They see it. And consumers see it. Most consumers aren't down with racism.

I mean, there are some. sure, but most of them are. And so you just want to avoid that. Besides Kellogg's, who did you find were the sort of big ones where you got them and you were like, it sort of turned the tight? It was endless. I mean, like, I had people from Mars that were like wanting to talk on the phone and said, like, these are 10 brands that we're going to remove from here. And we would like you to like announce this very publicly because we want everyone to know that's not what we support. And like, that's the goal. You know, you want brands to come out and not be in favor of racism and not be in favor of racism. And not be in favor of

disinformation. And I think that's happening more and more. I think the last two weeks, especially, there's a real awakening around this. And this is like the Super Bowl we've been getting ready for for the last three and a half years. It's like, okay, brands finally get it. What they choose to support with their media dollars really, you know, drives the conversation. So I know that we look at Fox is like the big, it is the Mount Everest of right-wing racist adjutant prop. But have you guys started to look at Sinclair? Because they're sort of more stealthy. They're more at the local station level and they're doing the same kind of content. Not really. I mean, it's a much more complicated thing, right? It's like it's all wrapped up in local news and and it is crazy dangerous. But again,

this thing has been really focused on racism and hate. And so it's also just hard to see all that stuff. There's so many channels and there's so many people saying things. We're in an information war right now. And disinformation is a huge problem. And I'm really hoping that like industry groups get together in advertising and say, what do we believe in here? I think that if you're in the marketing business. You have to look at disinformation as a major problem because if no one believes anything anymore, then no one's going to believe you either when you say your product is awesome. I'm just hoping that they end up finding a line for themselves that they feel like, okay, I want to support truth. I want to support diversity and inclusion. I want to support all the things

that we outwardly support on our websites. We should support with our media dollars. That's the hope. But Sinclair is like a major issue, you know, that's if you can get into all these local markets and start lying to people, that's super dangerous. What about O-A-N-N? They're horrendous. really pumped these conspiracy theories like crazy. And I think there's been a huge outcry on Sleaving Giants. Again, it's a community. And so people bring all these ideas to the table all the time. But what's wild is that they've, in this environment, that they've managed to get on all these streaming services, on all these cable companies have picked them up. And once again, we're dealing with Breitbart mixed with Alex Jones, but on a much higher level. And it's scary. You know,

it's scary that these companies, these cable companies are sort of willing to carry this junk. And I guess it's just because people are demanding it. But man, that's pretty scary stuff. It's like Breitbart and Alex Jones had a love child with no editorial standards. You'd mention community a couple of times. Can you just talk to us about that? Yeah, I mean, it truly is. There's so many people that are following now. It's really big. And so originally this thing started because I was tweeting to one advertiser individually and saying, hey, showing them a screenshot. And then I was like, wait, what are you guys all doing just watching and cheering on? You can do this too. It's super easy. and just tag sleeping giants on the back end of this.

And I put a pin tweet at the top of the page, basically with directions on how to do it. And that's when things really caught fire. And advertisers started peel off Breitbart by the dozens. From that, and I realized, like, everyone can contribute to this thing. And it really became this place to share ideas and to amplify things. And a lot of it's like editorializing. I just never wanted to, you know, make this about, okay, now,

what's the next thing we're going to go after? Because I just think that's a dangerous thing to do. You have to have a reason. But it's really good. And it's gone international, which has just been mind-blowing. This is crazy, but maybe a month ago or less. There was an interview that I had done in El Pais, which is a Spanish language newspaper. And it ended up in all over Latin America.

And it landed in Brazil. And I woke up in the morning. And there were like 5,000 new followers on Twitter. I was like, what is going on? There's something crazy is happening. And I realized that three people had started sleeping Giants chapters in Brazil. And I was like, hold on a second. Like, we need to know who you are, what you're doing.

And I got in touch with one. And we had a good conversation and they seemed to understand how it worked. And they now rapidly approaching like 375,000 followers in like three weeks. And we have 290,000 after four years. So I'm a little bit bitter about it. Because they've grown so fast. I'm kind of jealous. But it's pretty wild.

They have a huge disinformation problem down there. And they just saw this as the things that come at it. And so far it's been working. I always feel like when you do things like that, you feel less powerless. Yeah, for sure. I definitely have a lot of friends that call that are like, how do I get involved? You know, especially in the last two weeks, there are people in businesses like, how do I figure out how to become more diverse and care more? And I think everyone's just grasping right now for something to do. And I remember, I think there was an onion article that they wrote after 9-11 that said, not knowing what else to do, area woman bakes America flag cake or something like that. I think everyone's looking for a way to get involved and to care. And I feel super lucky.

that stumbled upon something that worked and that I can pour myself into it because other than that, I'd be punching holes in walls all the time. So look, aside from the cable networks and the egregious websites, I mean, I think the hub of all disinformation and a home base of a lot of racism is Facebook. Indeed. Have you guys focused on Facebook much? Yeah. I mean, we're trying right now and trying to come up with a plan.

I think that, again, if advertisers want to support something that they believe in, right now, Facebook has bent their rules all over the place. And they've got very clear rules for all kinds of stuff on the same. their platform and they're just not enforcing it. And being able to lie with impunity and election ads, no matter what your party is, is incredibly dangerous for democracy. As long as you pay the bill, you can say whatever you want is a terrible policy. And I think that's really going to hurt everyone. It hurts everyone across every political party and every belief because in the end of the day, lying is bad and it really hurts our political discourse and it hurts our discourse in general. And so

I think that is a real problem. And I also think just allowing people to incite violence on the platform is awful and it doesn't matter who you are. Those rules should apply to everyone across the board on the platform. It doesn't matter who they are. And it doesn't matter what their position is in society, those rules should apply for everyone. So I would really hope that advertisers would really reconsider taking part in that for a while until they get their shit together because it's just going to bounce back on them too. Hey folks, if you're a fan of the new abnormal podcast, you're going to love The Last Laugh. Hosted by The Daily Beast Matt Wilstein. The Last Laugh is a podcast where comedians get real. Every week, Matt talks to some of the biggest names in comedy, including Sarah Silverman,

Sasha Baron Cohen, Samantha B, Larry Wilmore, and Steve Bannon, oh, wait, not Steve Bannett, about how they're staying funny as the world falls apart around them. Hi, so today we have Mitch Landrieu. I actually read his Confederate Statute speech before I heard it, and it wanted the most incredible speeches I've ever read, and it was a speech about how we should take down Confederate statues. He was the mayor of New Orleans from 2010 to 2018 and the lieutenant governor of Louisiana from 2004 to 2010. Since he left City Hall in 2018, he started an organization called E. Pluribus Unum that is working on bridging the race and class divides in the south. So, Mitch, the reason why I desperately wanted to have you on today was to talk about Confederate monuments because they are suddenly we have this moment in history where it looks like we could maybe get rid of these things.

you gave like probably one of the greatest speeches I've ever heard of my life about Confederate monuments. And can you talk about this speech and also the decision to make it because you were the mayor of New Orleans when you made this speech and it was controversial. Well, first of all, thank you for that. I appreciate it. You know, the speech was really about America. The Confederate monuments were just a subject that brought us to calling the question on the issue in America of whether we really meant it when we said that all of us were created as equal. and we all come to the table of democracy as equals, or are some of us better than others? Those Confederate monuments weren't just steel and concrete. They were manifestations of an idea that not just were displayed by the presence of the monument,

but in the laws and the policies that have governed the country for a long time, based on a seminal notion that some of us are better than others, and some of us are welcome in others and not. And there's no more stark symbol of that than the Confederacy and the monuments that will put up, based on this notion called the lost cause, that somehow the country lost something terrible when the Confederacy lost the Civil War. And of course, nothing can be further from the truth. And those monuments were put up after the war was over in reverence of the people that fought to destroy the country for the purpose of preserving slavery.

Well, nothing can be more un-American than that thought right now. And it just seemed to me to be wrong to have those kinds of monuments in cities like New Orleans who value that diversity from their inception. and who believe that diversity is a strength, not a weakness. And so I think it did make any sense to have those things on public property, especially if you looked at it from the perspective of an African American who would be walking by it, and that as a minimal gesture that those monuments that are on public property that have been put up in moments of reverence should be taken down. I'm glad we did it. I think we were early to the fight, even though people, I should say, have been trying to do it since the day that it had been put up,

which was a long time ago, and that the rest of the country is now beginning to follow suit. And I'm very thankful for that and think that it couldn't happen sooner. Well, you know, Mitch, as the Southerners on this podcast today, you and I have both seen that what I call the New South, in our lifetimes, it has always been this aspirational goal, this slow, sometimes unsteady, sometimes we get off course and get back on it, of trying to write the wrongs of slavery and of Jim Crow. And I don't think a lot of people realize how late in the game all these Confederate monuments, not all, but the very large majority of these Confederate monuments were, put in essentially as trolling. Folks don't realize a lot of those things were put in when the civil rights movement started, basically as a sort of middle finger to the civil rights movement and to folks who were trying to bring the Voting Rights Act about. Well, the basic idea behind those monuments is pretty simple, and that is whites are superior to blacks. And that notwithstanding

the fact that the North won the Civil War, that the people that fought for the Confederacy were going to still be in control of the land, the property, the government, the government, the money, all of those things. After the wall was over, as you people know, we went through a period of reconstruction where there were actually a number of different African Americans that were elected to Congress and to governorships. We had an African American governor in Louisiana in the 1800s. His name was PBS pinchback. But then came the clapback on the black codes and then a period of lynchings and then all of the terrible things that happened in the South. Because people did not want to fully appreciate and or understand or become part of this

notion that everybody was created equal. And consequently, four million of our fellow American citizens was shipped left to South because it was an uncomfortable place for them to be. And as a result, the South lost some of its greatest talent and that talent went elsewhere. And, you know, this whole concept of the New South has never really been born. We've been pushing it for a long time because they have been dark forces intentionally pushing them back. Rick knows this in 1972, the Southern Strategy by Nixon. It was designed to keep whites and blacks apart based on race, so that they wouldn't find themselves in common ground on the economy and on health care and jobs and all of those other things. And as a consequence, I think the South has just really been hurt

by that and the country as a whole. And those monuments are just symbols of it. And, you know, what's the difference between a confederate flag, a monument, the name on an army or navy base? It's all part of the same stuff. And it's not that far away from institutional bias and racism that you see in your police departments in the health care system and the disparate impact that COVID has had on African Americans. And it all comes from a seminal notion of whether or not we're all equal or some of us are better than others. And I just think that they need to go away. I imagine you got some pretty bad pushback from that. Yes, there were massive protests from folks that thought that they owned the city. People came from all over the country as though

they thought that they could tell the people of New Orleans what to do with their own property. They fought us every day. There were death threats. We had the car of one of the contract as one of the original contract is blown up. Now, it was before. the unfortunate death of Heather Hire, but it was every bit as hot and tough on the ground as it could have been. And oh, by the way, because it's relevant to the moment, both the alt-right and Antifa showed up to try to sow more discontent relating to nothing having to do with the monuments.

And we had all of the same stuff that you're seeing right now on the streets and folks trying to interrupt protest and bring in a different agenda. But for the most part, the protesters, those folks that were in favor of taking the monuments down, did an excellent job of our arguments. organizing and staying focused and keeping their eye on what the ultimate goal was. But I still can't, as a Southerner, I still have trouble understanding why some Southern people have a difficult time looking at our past and admitting that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of history. That's the thing that I

struggle with the most because it's so obvious and it's so clear. And why even as we begin to rename these events, why people want to hang on to a false sense of who we are and what we were because it's just a big lie. And I think that we ought to be honest. this country about what we did wrong and how we can make it better and why the initial proposition that the founding father's made was actually the right one, that we are indivisible. Out of many, we are one, that we are a nation of immigrants. All of those things turned out to be right. Those ideas turned out to be right. We just have never learned how to really live in that space, and I think that we are the less for it. And we're going to be much, much better when we find that

moment where we begin to live what it is that we have preached about ourselves since the beginning of our wonderful country. I've talked to a lot of folks about this in the last couple of years, and that one line that Martin Luther King, it's not one of the ones that gets quoted all the time, but Martin Luther King said segregation is wrong because it presumes God made a mistake. I remember reading that years and years ago, and it struck me so hard. It's funny, Mitch, because I think like me, the South has so much richness to it. We have amazing culture. We have food, music, just glorious natural beauty, all these things that are so marvelous about it. And this idea that the one thing we're missing is that we can't fly the stars and bars, it stuns me that how

backward that is and how much it denigrates the wonder of this region. And how self-defeating it is. Yeah, of course. It's a complete dead end. It has always been apparent to me, and I have been blessed to grow up in neighborhoods and have people who have been my friends and love me that have come from diverse backgrounds and cultures and thinking how much richer we are. When you think about the United States as a mosaic, as a quilt, that's intricately woven with different colors and different ideas and the strength of what that brings to you. And, you know, just on a practical basis, every organization, every business that has remained insular, that has remained all one thing, has gotten smaller and weaker and slower and worse over time.

And I don't want to be a part of that. Number one, not only because it's an unjust place to live and it's unfair, clearly to African Americans and people of color, and that's not who we said as a nation, but more equally importantly or an important thing to consider is that we would be so much better and so much more. Can you imagine, think about this, when four million of our fellow Americans basically had to leave the South and they have to go someplace else to do what it is that God gave them the talent to do or whatever their hard work taught them to do or whatever opportunity they could find, allow them to do, it gave them the opportunity to do and they added value to it. Wentmore Sell us and the great things that he's done in his life, all the doctors, the lawyers, the artists, the musicians, all of that stuff left the South. And somebody else got the benefit of it, not the South. And so when we look back on it and you look at all of the indicators that matter, life expectancy, low birth weight babies, maternal mortality rates, the amount of money that we make, the number of jobs that we have, all of the indicators that you would want to be up or down. Now, that's just, that's not. That's not.

accident. That is because some of the decisions that we have made and the choices that we've made have put ourselves in a position of not being able to capitalize on the intellectual capital, the raw material and the raw talent that we have, that by the way, because I'm a southerner and have a chip on my shoulder, I put the South up against anybody. If we could get everybody on the field, if we could get the best players on the field and make sure that the universities are available to everybody, I'm pretty quite sure that those of us are living in the South, black and white, richie poor, we're pretty good. We can talk. We have shoes. We know how to read and write.

I feel like we've just hurt ourselves and hurt the country in the process. Is there a place for Democrats in the South? I mean, I was the mayor of a major American city for eight years. You know, Keisha Lance Bottoms is the mayor of Atlanta. Stacey Abrams is in Georgia. Yeah, there's a place. I will say this, it got harder for a while. In 1988 when I got elected to the legislature, 30 years ago, Bill Clinton was the governor of Arkansas.

Buddy Romo was the governor of Louisiana. Ray Mavis was the governor of Mississippi. Three white guys. who had been Ivy League educated, who had come back home that were part of this burgeoning, growing New South that was progressive, fiscally conservative, socially liberal, racially progressive. Those guys couldn't get elected in the South today right now, although in Louisiana, John Bill Edwards got elected. So it's hard. Trump is emblematic of it, but it has gotten harder. I think that that's going to change over time, as demographics change, and as policies change

and how if the country becomes more enlightened, especially around issues of race, which is why I started my organization called Eplora Basuna. The whole point of it is to try to find common ground between white people and people of color to really focus in on the things that we can do better and how we've been hurt by allowing ourselves to be pulled apart. And essentially, what it means is white people have a hard time understanding the existence of, the presence of, and the consequences of institutional racism and think that racial problems are just one person doing one bad thing to another person. Well, that's partly true, but institutional designs matter a lot. And the system are the way they are because they're designed this way. So we have to fix them. And the most obvious

one that's confronting us right now is the way some police departments have been high and trained and are supervised, not because every police officer is bad, because it's quite possible that the framework within which they operate has produced fairly bad results because of the rules that they're being asked to follow and a whole host of other things. Was that something you encountered in New Orleans in terms of the police department and the need for reform? Although I think New Orleans is a fairly multicultural department, doesn't it? Well, it is. But when I took office, we were under the threat of federal consent decree. So I invited the Department of Justice to come in and the entire time that I was here. And remaining through today, we have completely redesigned and rebuilt and reimagined NOPD.

That basically said, look, we've got to hire correctly. We have to train better. We have to supervise better. We have to give police officers the tools they need to do their job well so they can protect and serve, not hurt. We have to have early warning systems. We have to have peer counseling so that if two police officers are on the street and one of them is doing something wrong and the other one is trained to stop them. Sounds familiar because the George Floyd incident is a great example of how that young officer was not trained appropriately or did not do what he was supposed to do and taking Chauvin's foot off of George Floyd's neck, body cameras, things of that nature. And by the way, not asking police to do things that's not their responsibility, like being

a substance abuse counselor or a mental health counselor or a coach while they're working because people have put a lot on police officers as well. So it's a combination of a lot of things. However, the gravamen of all of that is the fact that some people think that black lives do not matter. And so the benefit of the doubt that would normally be given is not given. And that is at the root of the monuments. It's at the root of some of the police issues. It's at the root of the expansion of health care or economic growth. All of those things are laid upon this underlying notion about race that we have never, in my opinion, or forthrightly dealt with in the United States of America. And we would all be better for it if we would get through it.

You have to go through it, though. And it's obviously painful and it's scary because we don't know how to talk about it well with each other. We've talked to different mayors. And did you have trouble with the policemen's union? Was that? I'm not anti-union. I really am not. I believe in the ability of people to collectively bargain for better wages.

But sometimes organizations that do that find themselves doing things outside of what they were supposed to. to. It's not at the union's job to make sure that a police officer keeps his job no matter what and that there's no self-policing within certain organizations, which is why you always have to have outside organizations to do it. If a police officer got out of the way and did something wrong and the chief thought that he should be fired, it wasn't just the union, but it was a union in partnership with civil service whose mission is not supposed to be, but turns out to be never let anybody get fired no matter what. So it's hard to have accountability measures in place. Over time, though, with the consent decree, that changed. And it was really more about making sure that

police officers did the right thing and that for those who, for some reason, did not learn de-escalation techniques appropriately or misusing the use of force issues that they could be held accountable. But it is very hard to fire a police officer in the event that you think that they're not acting appropriately. And they just have to be really important accountability measures. And for this particular reason. There is no more powerful public employee in America than a police officer. He as she is at the moment that he meets you the most powerful person because they can take your life and or liberty. And that is why there needs to be really extra training and extra accountability. It's really just as simple as that. And I think that this notion of reimagining

police departments is a good one because use of force has gotten to be, in many instances, of first resort rather than an absolute last resort. De-escalation techniques are not easy to implement and they're harder to learn, but they're absolutely necessary. And of course, you've seen a huge amount of evidence when that does not work. And you've seen extra examples of that just this week and disparate use of it, depending on who it is that is the potential victim in that particular case. So all of these things are critically important.

They're very, very hard and they don't come voluntarily. I have one last question for you, Mitch. I'm a big fan of Jason Canders, too, and this problem of being in a state that's so red, will you go back into politics? You know, in politics, the only answer to that question is you never say never. I don't have any intention, and I'm not planning on it at the moment, but who the heck knows? What you do is you go where you think you can make the most difference for the most people in the shortest amount of time. Some of that is just political calculation, even if you wanted to get back in, whether you can win or not. And, of course, you see the same problem.

Stacey Abrams said it. O'Rourke has it. Jason has it. Pete Buttigieg, for example, has it about this guy's a superstar, but I don't think he can win in his state. He might not get elected dog catcher in Indiana. But, you know what? He's a terrifically talented guy. And my guess is the reverse is probably true for some young Republicans that may be in California. It is a particularly difficult issue that we may not be in a position to raise up our best talent irrespective of party because of how partisan state legislatures and governors' races have been. I think the country's less for it. I think if we had a, and Rick don't jump out of your seat when I say this, but if we had a

robust, thoughtful, intentionally well-designed Republican Party and a good Democratic Party that the country through the battle of those ideas and maybe other parties would be better. But that's not what we have right now. Donald Trump has so perverted politics in the United States of America, the Republican Party has currently constituted, not people who consider themselves to be Republican, but the party apparatus in their unwillingness and cowardliness and standing up. to this man who is obviously out of bounds of the Constitution and mainstream political thought is just to be condemned in the strongest terms possible, and they will pay a price for this historically. And I just think that we're at one of those moments where this really cannot be about

party. It has to be about the country. And we have got to get a new president. And if we don't like the next president they will have, we'll find another one four years later and then another one four years later. But we have got to get ourselves back into the guardrails of the democracy, and we are well out of those bounds right now. Now we're at the part of our show known as Fuck That Guy, very classy. And in this theme, my Fuck That Guy today is Brett Kavanaugh, the worst person in the world. Why is it your Fuck That Guy today, Molly? Well, because right before we started taping this, we were taping this on Monday midday,

the Supreme Court sent down this landmark civil rights case protecting gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, hello, it's 20-20, and we don't have that, okay. And the vote was six to three, right, which is pretty exciting, right? Gorsuch writing the majority opinion. He was joined by Roberts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Brower, Sonia Sotomayor, and Kagan. And the dissent was Thomas, which you expected, Alito, which you expected, and the worst person in the world, Brett Kavanaugh. Well, I will say this. I think the decision was correct. from a liberty standpoint. I know there are a lot of people right now on the Trump right who are livid with both Roberts and Gorsuch. I'm hearing a lot of that out in the chatter today. A, I'm not a lawyer,

and B, I haven't read through every page's opinion, but it looks as if Gorsuch took the individual liberty position, which is what non-evangelical conservatives believe in how the government should treat all of its citizens. And so gay lesbian and transgender Americans are, I know this shocks our evangelical friends sometimes. They are, in fact, citizens. I mean, I think the thing was rightly decided, and it's a big deal. This is a big decision.

And although your boyfriend, Brett Kavanaugh, did not join the pro-liberty segment of this, it's kind of a big deal. I can't believe it isn't already true. We're so backwards. But Brett Kavanaugh really sucks. But I will say this. I will say this.

I'm not like a Kavanaugh defender fanboy here. He did note that his decision to go against the majority on this was, I think it was kind of a cop-out. He's like, oh, but millions of gay and lesbian Americans have worked hard for decades to achieve. equal treatment, in fact, in law. Okay, well, that's nice. That reminds me of horrible Phyllis Chadfly and the Equal Rights Amendment. You know, the idea that you shouldn't be protected because you don't want to be protected because you want to be treated like everybody else, which, of course,

you're not. Well, I think there's a lot of unhappiness right now among Trump evangelicals about Gorsuch. They are, first off, they're ready to declare, like, ready to send Roberts to Gitmo. After all, he was appointed by the evil George W. Bush. That liberal, George W. Bush. That Prague. But again, this is actually, I think, a decision where the Burkean conservative idea that you're not going to try to legislatively or judicially engineer the world to look like white 1950s suburbia where their quote-unquote were no gay people is actually heartening. I mean, you saw on this, conservatives on the court, and by no means is John Robert.

or Robert Gorsuch, some sort of progressive stalwart, siding with people on a pro-liberty decision. I'm delighted by it. You know, what's interesting is, you know, I'm still in New York City or... Are you? This weekend, there was actually a really exciting pro-trans, African-American march, which the trans community has been really decimated lately,

and we've seen a lot of murders of African-American trans people. And so it's so interesting to see the culture shift right before your eyes, you know, and there is so much support for this. And yet, our laws are like so behind. It's just interesting. Well, again, equal protection is equal protection. If you believe that individual liberties must be preserved, then equal protection should be interpreted broadly.

You're becoming a Democrat, aren't you? I feel like we're almost there. Actually, you're becoming a Berkian conservative, who thinks that the power of the state should not be engineered to achieve desired social outcomes that are fashionable in the moment. To be continued. Dude, who's your fuck that guy? Yeah, my fuck that guy today is our old friend Ted Cruz.

You know, you can't pick Ted Cruz for every time, okay? I'm just saying. So apparently this weekend, Ted Cruz ran out of milf-b-and decided he was going to get in the weirdest, dumbest Twitter spat of the weekend, where he decided to attack Ron Perlman, the actor. Not Ron Perlman, the cosmetic mogul. No, no, no, not Ron Perlman, the cosmetic mogul. Ron Perlman, the excellent actor. And he goes after Ron Perlman over Perlman punching. punching Matt Gates a little bit.

But Ted Cruz tweets, Listen, hellboy. You talk a good game when you've got Hollywood makeup and stuntman, but I'll bet 10K to the non-political charity of your choice that you couldn't last five minutes in the wrestling ring with Jim Jordan

without getting penned. You up for it? Or does your publicist say too risky? When I read that, all I thought was, Oh, dear God, Ted Cruz is posting his erotic fan fiction again. And this is going to be so ugly.

Ted Cruz is my fuck that guy because he thought of a scenario where Jim Jordan was wrestling an actor. This is something that Ted Cruz thought was either funny or witty or cutting and not just like pegging the squick meter to 11. It's so creepy. It's so bad. I don't want to think of Jim Jordan wrestling anybody.

And yet Ted Cruz put that in everyone's head in America. It was horrible. And also, Jim Jordan is most famous for ignoring the sexual assault of the wrestlers. He was coaching. As someone to you this morning, Ted, you can't make this offer. Jim Jordan would wrestle Ron Perlman and never tell anyone about it.

Yes, so Ted Cruz, mill-fix, Fisianato, and Jim Jordan, Matt Gates, Defender is my fuck that guy of the day. Wait, that's two. That's close enough. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast.

In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science who will 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.

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