The Daily Beast Podcast - Comedian Says Vance Told Him Trump Was a Threat to U.S.

Episode Date: July 21, 2024

The liberal redneck, Trae Crowder, says he spent time with J.D. Vance in 2016 “pounding beers” and lamenting how bad President Trump would be for America. Plus! Jennifer Berkshire, host of the podcast, Have You Heard, joins The New Abnormal to talk about her book, The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal. We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Jennifer Berkshire, who hosts the podcast Have You Heard and is an author, and they're here to tell us about their new book, Education Wars, a citizen's guide and manual defense. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? No, but clips.

I have great news for you guys this week. It was a terrible week, and I'm going to brighten it, and this is actually a good crop. I promise. Clips! Okay. Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has known for many things, including weird text to his son about porn, but his most notable feature is being more full of shit than most politicians, which is really saying something. Let's listen to him speak to Laura Ingram and watch his behavior at the R&C to contrast it. Unless the president is reading off a teleprompter, I don't think he's capable of making these big decisions.

And that is something that should alarm all of us. And it's something that we need to be talking about. I think people are... Ladies and gentlemen, it is now my honor to introduce the Attorney General. And there goes to teleprompter. And I swear to God, I did not add in that bad blues rock rific. That's really just the shitty bed at the R&C. You know who's the band leader?

Who? G.E. Smith. Jesus, that's why it's so bad. It's G.E. Smith and the Saturday Night Massacre band. Is that literally what they're called? No. G.E. Smith was the band leader for a long time of the Saturday Night Live band, so I made a little joke. He just walked off the stage.

He literally walked off the stage because he was incapable of doing anything without a teleprompter. Literally all he had to do was read a name, right? Right. Introduced to the Attorney General, assuming somebody he knows of, riff a little. But apparently the limp gavel is also limp without the teleprompter. I mean, we saw a lot of that at the convention. Was it Ron Johnson or Jim Jordan? One of them read a speech and then someone was like, well, that wasn't really a new tone.

And he was like, well, there was a teleprompter error. They put an old version of the speech in the teleprompter. Yeah. I think that that was a lie. I think that was a lie too. But you've got people out here acting like, Joe Biden is helpless without a teleprompter, and they're sitting there reading entire wrong speeches, supposedly. Yeah.

No soul in these ones. Okay. Here we have comedian Trey Crowder. Oh, good. And while you may be thinking, Jesse, this is a political show with the comedy, he's going to read J.D. Vance dead to rights. You know, if you had told me when I was a kid that one day a white trash hillbilly would have a shot at the White House, I would have been like, what? Like, like, with a potato gun? Like, no, no, as the vice president.

Oh, damn, that's wild. Tell me more about this hero. What was he a man of the people? civil rights attorney? No, Ivy League educated venture capitalists who first rose to fame by settling us all out. Oh, oh, well, that's disappointing. That's like telling a kid, hey, you're going to have a Mario themed birthday, and on the day of a fat Italian shows up drunk on mushrooms and kills his pet turtle. It's like, that's not what I thought you meant. I'm talking, of course, about J.D. Vance, who is now Trump's VP pick. You know, JD made headlines because he said Democrats were to

blame for Trump shooting because they compared Trump to Hitler. He also made headlines in 2016 for himself comparing Trump to Hitler. Yeah, I know it's hard to believe, but turns out Trump's VP pick is a McAvelian sycophant with less integrity than a Boeing 737. And it's right, but that's not the only way in which J.D. betrayed MAGA back in 2016. He also brought his wife to My Comedy Show and hung out at you. Yeah, I saw you loving all that woke shit, JD.

You know you was into it. That's actually true, y'all. 2016, Trump rose. I went viral. JD's book came out. Me and J.D. started getting called on the cable news to explain Jimbobs to bow ties. and we got to know each other a little bit. It came to my show, hung out afterwards, went to a bar.

You don't know what we talked about? All we talked about the whole time was the existential threat. We agreed Trump posed to the American people. That's right. So while I was not charmed by the man, in fact, it was like pounding beers with a spreadsheet, I did leave there thinking at least there's some sane Republicans left, right? After that, I finally got to his book. It's like, how did this book capture the zeitgeist of all the intelligentsia, right?

Well, it turns out is because that book's whole message is, Hey, you know how y'all think that my people are inherently worthless pieces of shit with nothing to offer society? Well, you're right. We suck. We said, but not me. I'm different. No, I once got paddled by a tycoon's son in Connecticut. Please accept me, right? And they did.

They did. And that's when my opinion of them started to change. Because me and JD have stuff in common. White trash, you know, pill-billy mama's higher education got out. But I don't hate my people, right? Like, I'd sooner throw it all away than line my pockets with predatory payday loans or big pill profits, okay? I love my, I understand that my people struggle not due to some inborn cultural affliction, but do instead.

to the capricious malice of the same masters he serves. All right, because you look at him, you wonder, how did this guy? What does he do? What is he good at? Well, JD's great, actually. He's great at one thing. He's great at knowing when, where, and to what precise angle he should bend over. Nobody tongue-pilches a boot heel like this.

All right, the only reason any of us know who JD is is because he is bought, paid for, and wholly owned by Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel, the billionaire, whose current pet project is military AI. So, yeah, if you thought Dick Cheney and Halliburton was bad, You just wait to my boy Jim Dave unleashes his sugar daddy's armada of autonomous murder drones on Gaza, all right? J.D. Vance. Love y'all. I love this man so much. Like, after I saw this, I posted basically, I would say, if the DNC doesn't invite him to give this exact little monologue in prime time at the convention, they have fucked up.

So do you want to just say in advance that they have fucked all? Absolutely, they're not going to. But I have not heard anything this pitch perfect in a long time. Yeah, it was brilliant. Brilliant. Particularly to the thing that he says that I think really is not outlined enough is the bootlicking part is that throughout JD's life from getting an internship at the fucking Heritage Foundation immediately on up to this moment.

If he rises further than this, we might have to redefine Machiavellian as Vanson, because that's how good it is. he's had a fucking insane talent for knowing exactly how to get in the room and lick properly to the top of the boots. Damn. Yeah. I like how you add it to the boots at the end. Yes. Yes.

See, that's a little producer trick we call saving it with the end, I guess. Okay. While the RNC was mostly the usual absolute bullshit and lies, most of which are even worth playing since it's so boring. There was one speech that actually stood out. Sean O'Brien from the Teamsters Union gave a speech that was a lot different than the other ones. American workers own this nation. The corporate elite treat us like squatters, and that is a crime. We've got to fix it.

Under our current system, massive companies like Amazon, Uber, Lyft, and Walmart take zero responsibilities for the workers they employ. These companies offer no rail health insurance. no retirement benefits, no pay leave, relying on underfunded public assistance. And who puts the bill? The individual taxpayer. The biggest recipients of welfare in this country of corporations and this real corruption. We must put workers first since the end of the pandemic. When was the last time you heard major news outlets regularly to refer to workers as essential?

You have it. The men and women who provide goods and services, deliver packages, stock grocery shelves, care for patients, pick up your trash, and keep our communities safe are taken for granted. All the while, the stock market boom. Housing crisis hit record highs in corporate salaries skyrocketed. But the income of everyday Americans are shrinking in the face of inflation. at the gas pumps, at the grocery store, with the electrical bill, and with the car insurance. This has got to change. Did he take a wrong turn? He's so close to getting it. I'm so confused. Yeah, it's a great speech.

It's just in the wrong city. Well, what a lot of people are saying that is interesting is that he wanted to take that message to them and put that on the air. Some people are saying it's much more of a play. that he's doing this in case Trump wins. Sure. That he doesn't want to totally alienate it. But particularly the feature I noticed the most was the tepid applause to a lot of it. Right.

Like, almost like they were afraid to applaud. Yeah. And whereas if you said this added Bernie Sanders rally or D&C. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But you're saying it at the convention of the party of corporate tax cuts. Right. And calling out corporations and saying that they're taking the most welfare.

I'm like, who you think gave them the breaks? That's very confusing. Yeah. I mean, look, good. for him if it was, hey, I want to go into the enemy camp and deliver a message. I'm not entirely sure that's what he was doing, but, you know. He had to be. The teamsters are a funny union.

Yeah, they are a funny union. Former leaders buried under end zones. Yeah, exactly. A giant stadium. Like, you know, it's a strange, strange world. Yeah. Okay, we got one last one. RFK Jr. son, who seems may have had the brainworm as well inherited.

Oh, no. Posted this clip of RFK Jr. You're on the phone with Donald Trump post-assassination attempt. And, well, I'll let these fools do the talking. And something's wrong with that whole system, right? There was this massive. All of a sudden, starting to change radically. I've seen it too many times.

And then you hear that it doesn't have an impact, right? But you and I talked about that a long time ago. And anyway, I would be, I would love you to do stuff. And I think it would be so good for you. And so big for you. And we're going to win. We're going to win. went way ahead of the guy.

And, you know, he said, he was very nice, actually. He called him, but that, you know, if I was looking straight around, right? He said, I was just showing a chart. I didn't have to tell him the shark was on all the people pouring into our country, but, you know, it just turned my head to show the chart,

and something who wrapped me. It felt like a giant, like the world's largest mosquito. And it was, it was a bullet going around. You know, what do they call that an AR-15 or something? That's a big gun. That's a pretty tough guns, right? It's like listening to a conversation between two toddlers that are just learning words. I'm thinking of the tweet that says the two dumbest bitches you've ever heard speak,

both saying exactly at each other. Yes. But, I mean, the most revealing is we're going to win. I didn't know that RFK Jr. on the ticket. Hmm. So good to know what's up here. I mean, I think he was basically telling RFK to get out of the race because he's a little worried

that the votes that RFK Jr. is going to take are going to be from him, not Biden. So anyway. Doing a little quid pro quo for that appointment into the administration it sounded like. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Probably the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Yeah, I was just going to say that. Yeah. Yeah. And we wonder how, you know, when Trump says he's going to strip Fuddig Freddy School that mandates vaccines, we wonder who will be doing that.

Yeah. Also, kind of funny that he was, he kept talking about how like these vaccines. They're like, they're for horses. You're the fucking idiot who was telling people to take Ivermectin, which is literally for horses. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal, the author of a new book and the host of an education podcast. I have to say first, Jennifer, I'm a former educator, so the cover of your new book is amazing. The Education Wars, a Citizens Guide and Defense Manual, written by yourself, Jennifer C. Berkshire and Jack Snyder. And I want to say this. The cover, folks, is of a school bus

that has the wheels of what can only be, is it like a war tanker? That's how I'm viewing this, Jennifer. Is that correct? That is correct. The brilliant artist at the New Press, which is our publisher, came up with the graphic for the book. And they basically took a school bus and turned it into a tank as a kind of visual representation of the level of acrimoning we're experiencing right now.

When they say a picture is worth a thousand words, that is it. and you were also the host of Have You Heard an education policy podcast. So here's the thing. For folks that listen to this show, I am a former educator. I taught first and second grade. I worked on Capitol Hill doing education policy. And education is something that has always been incredibly important to me. And I think incredibly foundational to a healthy democracy.

That being said, it should come as nice. no shock to people then that for decades upon decades, the right wing has used our public education space as a battleground, hence the title of your book, Education Wars. Talk to us about how and why education has always been on the front lines of holding our democracy and why it has been something that the right has seen as a target. Well, if we started in the present, you know, one of the big reasons that we're fighting about schools so much right now, and this will come as no surprise to anyone,

is we're fighting about everything, right? That schools are one of the last remaining institutions we have that bring together people, you know, regardless of their political views. And that's just gotten harder to do in this day and age. But the other thing that stands out as you look decade after decade is that, yes, we absolutely fight about schools again and again, but you do also see the right seizing on the opportunity to drive people out of the public school. So we share this anecdote in the book about the Heritage Foundation, which everyone is now

very familiar with. So back in the 1970s, the Heritage Foundation was brand new. And there was a bitter battle playing out over education in Canawaw County, West Virginia. And they were fighting over textbooks. And the resistance that time was to something called secular humanism. It was conservative parents who were really worried about their kids were being exposed to feminism and multiculturalism. Well, the Heritage Foundation is brand new. They go rushing to the scene because they see that they've been handed this opportunity to drive forward,

what was already one of their top policy priorities, which was private school vouchers. And so they go there and they put out all these newsletters warning parents that, you know, don't send your kids to the public schools because they're going to be exposed to all kinds of isms. Atheism, cannibalism, in the, you know, in the short term, I would say that their strategy was successful, right? That they chinned up a lot of fear. But over the long term, it wasn't successful. And that, I think, is in many ways why you see groups like heritage seizing upon our, you know, kind of run-of-the-mill partisan rancor right now to try to realize once and for all this larger policy goal, which is dismantling public schools, ending our practice of paying for public education with our tax dollars and overseeing it in a democratic way, replacing that with religious education. And you can really sense in the way they're talking about.

about stuff right now, that they feel like they are closer to realizing that goal than they ever have been. I mean, Jennifer, like, I won't say that they're the only ones thinking that they're closer to realizing it than anyone. I mean, I feel it every single day. When you have folks like Governor Landry down in Louisiana, who the ACLU recently filed a lawsuit against for signing legislation that would, that now places the 10 commandments in every classroom of every school in Louisiana, where you have down in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis,

who has decided to take away the safety and protections offered to LGBTQ people and students by taking away safe spaces, safe teachers, criminalizing them. When we're seeing the gutting and the banning of books in our library institutions and places for critical thought, everywhere that we have turned just from the present over the last couple of years, we've seen a considerable erosion of our public education space. And so when we're looking at these things and kind of thinking about how the right has worked and taking over of school boards and making those really critical elections, do you think that the left and Democrats have done their best? in preserving public education as a means of protecting our democracy?

No, I don't think they've done enough at all. And I think one thing that's really important to keep in mind is that when you see stories like the one about Louisiana and the Ten Commandments or Ryan Walters in Oklahoma, who is now mandating that teachers in that state have to teach the Bible or risk losing their teacher certification. one thing that's happening is that those politicians are they are doing that stuff in order to own the lips. Yep.

They are trying to send a signal to liberal parents that the schools are no longer a place that you can count on. And so that sense that like we can't agree on anything anymore and whoever is in charge is just going to drive their ideological program through the schools, what that does is that sends a message to people that it's too hard. It's not even worth trying. We might as well just abandon the whole concept. But I think the real danger then for Democrats and people like me and you who believe in public schools is that we have to be really careful not to, in response to that, make public education a partisan issue.

And I think that can be really counterintuitive because I feel very similar to the way you do. I am spoiling for a fight for this stuff. But I also recognize that we have just a tremendous opportunity here to reach out to and organize people who may not agree with us on all kinds of other issues, but still feel really strongly that public education is an institution, not only worth holding onto, but that we stand to lose so much if it's gone. And one of the points we make in the book is that if we lose our public schools, they are not coming back. Look, you mentioned the Heritage Foundation. and we know exactly what is inside of Project 2025. One of their big policy drivers is to get rid of the Department of Education. Just tell us, give us a picture.

As you said, if we lose public education, we will never get it back. Give us a picture of what it would mean to get rid of the Department of Education in this country. That's such a great question because I don't think most people have any idea what it would mean. And if you actually read through the Project 2025 education policy statement, you'll see that they have very successfully hidden an extreme agenda behind a lot of jargon. And this is a classic example. So one of the obvious things that will happen is that, you know, their goal is to make it harder and more expensive for kids to go to college. And that's because they now view higher education as basically a woke indoctrination machine. And so moving loans out of the public sector and back into the banks where heritage thinks they belong, that's an obvious thing right now.

It's going to make it harder and more expensive to attend college. Another big thing is that our civil rights are attached to the schools. And this is something that I think a lot of people don't understand. Way back in the era, the Brown versus Board era, in the lead up to and the aftermath to the the Supreme Court decision that schools were going to have to be integrated, you saw this tremendous push through the South to try to move kids out from under the reach of the Constitution. Right. If you're going to require that our kids go to school with black kids, we're just not going to do it anymore. We're going to move them into private schools. Something very similar is happening today.

When they say they want to get rid of the Department of Education, the Department of Education is what is in charge of civil rights enforcement in our school. And so they're saying basically, we want to roll back the last 50 years of progress, both in terms of civil rights when they come to race, but also with gay, lesbian, and especially trans protections. And so instead, what we're going to do,

we're going to get rid of the Department of Education and its enforcement capacity, but we're also, we're going to fund students, not systems. And that means that parents, and kids will no longer have right. Instead, they will have quote unquote options. That's the dangerous deregulated future that our project 2025 like vision is aiming at. It's just wild.

Like everything that is being offered right now, particularly around our education system, whether we're talking about K through 12 or we're talking about our secondary education system is all about regression. It is all about removing critical thought from the, from the classrooms, removing any advancements that have been made around diversity, equity, and inclusion, removing these parameters in order to do what in your mind, Jennifer? What do you think is the end goal here if we are moving to a place of the dumbing down of our citizenry?

What's the end goal for them? When I write and tweet about this stuff, the most common response I get is that, well, no surprise, Republicans just want people to be dumb. And I always push back against that because I feel like it's overly simplistic. But there's, you know, like there's certainly a case to be made that when you hear these guys really just owning up to the fact that they want fewer people to go to college, you know, there's something to be said for that. They see inequality as a natural state and they'd like to return us to, you know, the kinds of

hierarchies that they think are more natural. right, like bosses with more power, white people with more power, you in your home wearing your cute little apron, perhaps no shoes on your feet. So that's part of it. But it's also that the folks who are in charge of thinking about these policies and thinking about how to get them into law, they look at the polling data about how young people see the world and they recoil in horror. And so much of what's happening, whether it's the policy agenda of a DeSantis in Florida or Landry in Louisiana, is about trying to reverse engineer kids so that not only will they be less quote unquote woke, but they're less likely to view collective action as the way to make serious change in this country. And I think that's really like so much of what's happening here that, you know, they're like, they know that they look at that polling data, how enthusiastic kids are for, say, labor unions or that kids today, they want the government to be much more involved in solving big problems like climate change and student debt. And so if you're a DeSantis, you look at that and you think this is unacceptable, what can we do with the sorts of things that kids are learning?

or where they're learning, or this larger project of defunding education, how can we ensure that we make that vision impossible? And that's the thing. I believe that everything that we are experiencing right now is a reaction to the progress that has been made. Is a reaction to a Generation Z that is a lot more conscious and aware of injustice and actually wanting to use their platform, and their power to do something about it, that have different ideas as it pertains to how they've

been forced into a binary, a binary of thinking, of ideology, when they are recognizing the world to be a lot more fruitful and abundant than what they've been sold in terms of how do women see themselves, men, trans folks, LGBTQ people, race, and racism, they're unpacking things in a way. and at a speed that other generations have not. And I think that that is what the right finds absolutely terrifying. And so they just want to cut it off at the knees. That is so spot on. And think back to when this really started to pick up steam in earnest.

It's the aftermath to the murder of George Floyd. You saw protests around the country, led overwhelmingly by young people, and often in places that had never seen protests before. And so you have, you know, you have, you have, Republicans and conservatives and just people who are concerned about the pace of social progress being too fast. They look at that and they're like, where are these kids getting this? Can't be, it wasn't from me. It must be from the schools. And so you then see this kind of systematic effort to, you know, to change what kids are learning in school, to limit what teachers

can talk about. And, you know, think about like in Florida, for example, over the weekend a story broke about if you have a want to get a textbook approved in Florida, a social studies textbook, you cannot refer to climate change in it. That is absolutely preposterous. And I think it shows you what a losing battle this is, that somehow if kids don't read about climate change in Florida, in their textbooks, that they're not going to notice,

the ferocity of the hurricanes, the fact that it floods now even when it's sunny, I encourage people to be clear-eyed about this stuff. There is real damage being done. But, you know, the force is with the next generation. And there really is very little that these guys can do about that. Yeah. Well, we will have to leave it there today.

Folks, the book is The Education Wars, a citizen's guide and a defense manual by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider and also tune in to Jennifer's podcast. Have you heard, which gives you insight into our education system? I can't thank you enough for writing this book, for getting the word out, and for making the case around the importance of our education system and the fact that it isn't something that should just be a foregone conclusion because it is something that can be lost. Well, thank you so much, Danielle, and I'm a big fan of the show, but I especially like the fact that you were a former teacher. And I feel like that routinely comes through in the form of your smart insights. Oh, I appreciate that a lot.

Thank you. Thank you. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Shamus. Calder. Want more great listens?

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