The Daily Beast Podcast - Damn Right Republicans Are Scared of the Voting Rights Bills

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

Republicans are terrified—with good reason.  Utah Sen. Mike Lee went viral this week when he sputtered earlier that one of the new voting rights bills making its way through the House was “written in hell by the devil himself.” And Lee’s GOP colleagues didn’t exactly knock the notion down.  “They should be scared of it,” Rep. Eric Swawell, the California Democrat, tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest edition of The New Abnormal. “What we saw this past election in Georgia and Arizona —states that have historically made it harder for African-Americans and Latinos to vote—was that when you expand access to the polls, Democrats can win. And so I'm sure it was not comfortable for Georgians and Arizona leaders to certify the results for Joe Biden and [Sens.] Mark Kelly, [Raphael] Warnock and [Jon] Ossoff.”  “But instead of doing the right thing and standing on the integrity [of the election], they're learning the wrong lesson,” Swalwell adds. “What they're doing now is they're going back and saying, ‘Well, we don't ever want to do that again. We don't ever want to certify a Democratic victory. So let's just change the rules... Let's get rid of early voting. Let's get rid of Sunday voting, which benefits the faith-based communities of Georgia. Let's make it a misdemeanor if you pass out food or water to a long line.... And that way we can protect ourselves from another Democratic victory.’”  “If we do not pass HR1 and HR4—the two voting rights bills—you will see this institutionalized across the country, and the results will be devastating,” he continues. “HR1 gets rid of the dirty maps of redistricting, gerrymandering, and the dirty money. It strips down to the studs as much as you can legislatively the Citizens United ruling. HR4, The John Lewis Civil Rights act really puts back in place what's called pre-clearance—requiring approval from the courts before you can move polling places or purge voter rolls. And so if there was ever a reason to break the filibuster, which was put in place to block voting rights, it would be to advance both voting rights. It's almost a perfect completion of the circle.” Then, Justice Democrats spokesperson Walid Shahid talks about how President Biden can avoid the traps that snagged Obama. And Carl Zimmer—a top science reporter for the New York Times and author of Life’s Edge: the Search for What It Means To Be Alive—joins Jong-Fast to discuss the pandemic, and the botched response that we are only now beginning to counteract. “People knew this was coming for 20, 30 years, and yet we didn't prepare well enough,” he says. “If you look at countries like Nigeria or Senegal, and look at their case rate, their death rate, and all the rest, they have done incredibly well. And, and I was recently listening to a Nigerian disease specialist, talk about why this is. And one reason is that they'd been through Ebola and been through other outbreaks. They know what a virus can do when it goes berserk. And so they coordinated very early lockdowns and everyone was on board and they had good, consistent public health messaging. They didn't have a lot of money, they didn't have a lot of resources, but they were coordinated and effective. And I think we could learn a lot from them. And we should also look to ourselves and say, ‘well, why did we in the United States that makes such a spectacular mess of it.’” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, and welcome to The Daily Beast, The New Abnormal. I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor at large at The Daily Beast. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. Our world has been turned upside down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how we get our out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure everything doesn't go too far off the rails while we have fun discussions about our world gone mad. And while I take that

duty seriously, ourselves, not so much. On today's episode, we're going to talk to Justice Democrats spokesperson Walid Shaheed, who's going to talk about a more left-wing vision of how the Democrats win in 2022. And then we're going to have Carl Zimmer, who's the popular science writer at the New York Times who covers COVID extensively. But first, our most returning congressman guest, Eric Swalwell, who represents California's 15th congressional district, is here today to talk to us about a host of issues, including the insurrection, his lawsuit against the former president Donald J. Trump, and a whole lot more. Hi, Eric Swalwell.

Hi, Molly. Very excited to have you back. I think this may be our third or fourth appearance. Yes, frequent flyer. That's right. you're a regular here. Let's talk about insurrection, shall we? Yes. Talk to me about the 14 senators. Yeah, you know, we tried Trump for insurrection.

57 senators, including seven Republicans, voted to convict. In my book, that's a hell of a lot closer to a conviction than an acquittal, but technically I guess that's what he can call it. So there are 14 who are up for re-election in 2022. And if we do this right, my goal is that none of those 14 are, as few of them as possible, we'll be around in 2024 when we need to certify an election again. Tell me who you think are reasonable candidates for Democrats. Well, certainly Rubio in Florida, right?

Right. That is a real opportunity. I wouldn't count out Iowa either. You know, we're making gains. We made gains in 2018 in Iowa in the midterms. And so I'm not sure what Grassley does if he runs again or not. So, you know, I would say those, you know, there's two targets there. Ron Johnson and Wisconsin, right?

He's really, really leaning into the insurrection. He's gone pro insurrection, which is a hot take, Ann. Yes. And then, of course, there's the open seats now. You know, you've got North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio. So there's an opportunity for us to build on this majority. I know there was anxiety among my colleagues, right? It's weird, right?

Sometimes Democrats, we win, and then we immediately start to worry about, you know, the next election. And I saw that right after Joe Biden had won. But post coup, I think we're recognizing that that's not what voters want. You know, this is not a coup country. And so we have an opportunity to expand the majorities in the House and the Senate and making them own this all the way to election day, you know, is pretty important. Talk to me about the COVID bill, because it seems to me, it looks to me as a person who's completely bipartisan, as you know, that Republicans have voted against giving their constituents money. You know, they really, I think, have learned the wrong lesson about trying to show unity after Trump has left office and they've been in chaos.

You know, there's the Cheney Kinsinger camp at war with McCarthy and Marjorie, Taylor Green. And so they haven't really been able to show unity on anything. And so it seems like they're trying to show unity on this. But the problem is America has also shown unity because 75% of Americans like this. So this is a hell of a way to try and show a united front. And so look, they're going to go down with this. It's too bad they couldn't have been a part of it. I think we probably could have delivered even more.

But this is going to be incredibly helpful for people who need this the most. This is the opposite of what the Trump tax cuts did in 2017. This is the opposite of, you know, what even Trump's relief package that was bipartisan, that this helps the folks truly who needs it the most. This is not, you know, a giveaway for anyone at the top. Although I think you can at least understand why we did some of the, you know, small business packages. But, you know, that slush fund, that Mnuchin put in, you know, the $500 plus million that he could control. That's not in here this time.

Let's talk about MTG, okay, for a minute. So you're in Congress, you guys are passing COVID relief. You're doing, I mean, there really is now you can legislate, right, for the first time in a long time, because you know the Senate will pass stuff, right? It's not Mitch McConnell's graveyard anymore. Can you explain what Marjorie Taylor Green is doing that's so disruptive? Well, she is every day asking for the Congress to adjourn. And, you know, fine, look, when you don't have any committees, she's, you know, going to be a master of floor procedures, right?

I mean, I don't know if there's going to be a book called Master of the House, you know, by Garrett-Carrot, or by Robert Caro about Marjorie Taylor Green. But she really is learning, you know, the floor procedures. So she's calling for motions to adjourn every day. yesterday was particularly unnerving because we were debating not only the COVID relief, but also the background check bill. And as I thought about it, you know, she wanted to adjourn the debate to take the most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the most dangerous people. You know, there are a lot of students who would love to adjourn, you know, the mass shootings

that they have to, you know, fear every day when they go to school. and she doesn't want to have a conversation about that. But what is most maddening about this? Because look, fine. She's one irrelevant member of Congress who doesn't have any committees. But the majority of the Republican caucus votes with her to adjourn, which I absolutely understand. And, you know, again, Kevin McCarthy,

we have one week where we're, you know, doing committee work in our districts, and he's complaining that Congress doesn't want to work. Well, every single day he and his colleagues are voting. to just leave. Again, it's not going to work, as you said. We have majorities in the House, the Senate. We've got what I call the Holy Trinity with also having the White House. And now I think it's just a matter of all these bills that we're sending, you know, to the Senate. If Republicans over there are going to obstruct and prevent what the majority of Americans want on background checks, on minimum wage, on voting rights, do you allow that to persist or do you break the

filibuster so that the will of the American people is achieved. Do you think that we're going to hear more about the Congress people who gave the tours before the insurrection? I hope so. I hope that the reports that the FBI is investigating this is true, because if that is the case, that would certainly be bad, Molly. It would explain some of the evidence that we saw in the trial, which was that, You know, members of the oathkeepers knew our evacuation routes.

They knew which floor we were on. They knew that we were going through tunnels. That's of concern. But, you know, look, we're also in this era. And as I've read the FBI affidavits for some of these arrests, it's also really clear that many of these individuals who've been arrested were using encrypted apps. And so that may limit just how much they can learn. We do know that there were Congresspeople who gave tours.

I have colleagues of mine have said that they saw members giving tours that day. And all of us recall seeing people in the Capitol who were wearing Trump paraphernalia the day before. And because of COVID restrictions, the only way you would have been able to get into the Capitol would have been a member letting you in. Now, I don't, you know, that doesn't mean to conflate that just because you were wearing a Trump hat and you were in the Capitol on January 5th. that you were also in the Capitol on January 6. But any of us who were here saw, you know, those folks walking around the Capitol. And they could have been with staff members, but only a member of Congress or, you know, their staff would have been able to let them in. But we'll let the FBI run that down.

I mean, it is a shame that, you know, not only do we have an enemy within this country. You know, this is not foreign terrorism. This was a domestic attack. And the threats also are piling up. but we have enemies within and the Congress who are emboldening these extreme groups. You know, if you are continuing to claim that Joe Biden is not a legitimate president and that the election is stolen, you are emboldening Q and on. You are emboldening the oathkeepers.

You are emboldening the three percenters. What you do by making these irresponsible claims is that you fire up and incite people who are already anti-government, people who are armed to the teeth, and we risk another attack where people would take up arms against their government because you've been telling them that it's not a legitimate government. It's a very perilous time we find ourselves. Do you think the FBI is following up on these tours? I hope so. I know that they are limited by encrypted apps, but we do have, as you saw in the impeachment trial, we have surveillance footage of the Capitol. you can't really go too far in the Capitol without surveillance footage picking up your movements.

And I hope that's being reviewed by law enforcement. So we should talk about the voting rights bill in the House. You have this holy Trinity right now where you have the House, the Senate, presidency, but you have this very, very conservative Trump Supreme Court, right, where a third of it was appointed by Trump. It seems to me the fact that the Republicans are attacking it and they've decided it's the as Mike Lee said, the devil's bill, is a sign that they are really scared of it. Yeah, that they should be scared of it because what we saw this past election in Georgia and Arizona, states that have historically discriminated against voters and made it harder for African-Americans

and Latinos to vote, was that when you expand access to the polls and they did this because of COVID, that Democrats can win. And so I'm sure it was not comfortable for Georgians and Arizona leaders to certify the results for Joe Biden and Mark Kelly and Warnock and awesome. But instead of certifying those results, doing the right thing and standing on the integrity, they're learning also the wrong lesson because what they're doing now is they're going back and saying, well, we don't ever want to do that again. We don't ever want to certify a Democratic victory. So let's just change the rules so that we never are put in a position like that again. Let's get rid of early voting. Let's get rid of Sunday voting, which benefits the faith-based communities

of Georgia. You know, let's make it a misdemeanor if you pass out, you know, food or water to a long line. Let's just make it absolutely impossible for, you know, marginalized communities to show up at the ballot box. And that way we can protect ourselves from another Democratic victory. If we do not pass HR1 and HR4, the two voting rights bills, you will see this institutionalized across the country. And the results will be devastating because not only will it affect you. controls and makes decisions, you know, about your life. It will just be reinforced over and over and it'll be just quicksand that we will not be able to get out of. H.R. 1 gets rid of the dirty maps of redistricting, gerrymandering, and the dirty money. It strips down to the studs as much as you can

legislatively, the Citizens United ruling. HR4, the John Lewis Civil Rights Act, really puts back in place what's called preclearance, you know, requiring, you know, approval from the courts before you can move polling places or purge voter rules. And so if there was ever a reason to break the filibuster, which was put in place to block voting rights, it would be to advance voting rights. It's almost a perfect completion of the circle. Do you think you can get that passed because you can't use reconciliation for it? Can't use reconciliation. We passed it in the House. And look, I'm not going to tell the Senate what to do. I know my act. I know my scene, but I can tell them what will happen if they don't break the filibuster,

which is that it's going to be really hard for minority communities to vote. States like Florida, Texas, Ohio are going to go out of their way to limit any Democrats' ability to win house seats there. By the way, they're going to draw the lines. And we could see permanent disenfranchisement for millions of people of color across America. I want to talk to you about Rick Gernel. running for governor of California. He seems to be mostly interested in just being famous.

I've never seen him really. He's known more for what he has tried to obliterate or demolish than for anything that he's built. He went over to Germany and blew up, you know, a longstanding relationship with, you know, one of our strongest post-World War II allies. Yeah. Then he came back home as the acting director of DNI and, again, lost a lot of the trust between the director in the intelligence community,

you know, did a lot of Devin Nunes' bidding on the inside there to try and undermine all of the reports of the president's contacts with Russia. So again, he's great with the jackhammer, I guess, but never really has, you know, built anything that's helped anybody. So that Californians, I still believe, you know, we are, we're builders and dreamers. And he's the opposite.

He's a demolition man that would be a night. Can you talk to us a little bit about this lawsuit? I'll say that the suit speaks for itself. It's about holding the president accountable for preventing me and my colleagues from doing our job to certify every American's vote on January 6th. And then, of course, the harm that came when he assembled, inflamed, and incited a mob. And so, you know, we're in the early stages of it. It's a civil rights statute. Can you explain a little bit about that?

Yeah, it's called a 1985 suit, you know, impeding me essentially from performing my, you know, official act of being in Congress to certify the votes on that day. And then, you know, also there's some negligence claims. There's, you know, the harm caused by inciting thousands of people, you know, to terrorize Congress. There's another congressman who's also. Penny Thompson, and he's partnered with the NACP and also, I think, a suit that absolutely has to be filed. It wouldn't surprise me if there are more to come, whether it's staff members or members of Congress. But again, I think.

Didn't Mitch McConnell sort of encourage this? He said while he was trying to give himself an off-ramp or a loophole from holding the president accountable, that doesn't mean Donald Trump's not going to be held accountable in criminal and civil courts. And that's what you're going to see going forward. So again, I'll leave it at the client. You know, it's nearly 70 pages, you know, of facts, many of which the public heard in the Senate trial. But it would, to me, it would be just a dereliction of my duty as someone who has to represent 750,000 people. to not file this claim because of what Donald Trump's conduct impeded and did the harms that ensued.

So I'll leave it at that. What actually happens if you win? Well, again, I don't want to go. In this suit, we lay out what's called a prayer for relief. You know, one of them, there's, and again, it'll be up to a judge and jury to decide ultimately what the consequences are. But certainly preventing Donald Trump from being able to organize. a rally again is one potential outcome. And again, I don't want to go too much into it because I think the claim speaks for itself. And I think it's better that way, you know, as we litigate it.

But this is primarily about holding the insider-in-chief accountable for what he did. Yeah. No, that's very good. And I think, do you think there'll be just from your information as not insidery, but just as someone who has been a prosecutor? Can Trump be? a civil suit target for the people, like, for example, for the people who've died during the riots? We believe so, and it depends on who is, you know, bringing the claim and where you are and what they call, you know, the zone of danger. But, yeah, we are bringing this because we believe in the merits of the claim. We believe in our standing. And I believe that there are others who likely have what they call in the court standing as well. This was so helpful. Thank you so much. Of course. And

Something exciting that your listeners should know is right now, when I check out of this podcast, I'm headed to the floor to pass in the House the background check bill. And I'm really excited for that. You know, I'll never forget when I was running for president, a mom in Greenville, South Carolina, she told me, you know, please don't stop fighting to end gun violence. And she said, when I put my babies in the car, car and, you know, I take them to preschool and to the elementary school. She said, I look every day at what they're wearing and then I close my eyes to remember it in case I have to ever identify them. And this bill and its passage and hopefully being signed into law will mean that we don't have to live that way anymore. That the right to dance at a concert and pray at church and come home from school is greater than any other right. it's the right to, you know, be safe.

And that's what this bill does. And so it's a big deal. And I'm excited that we're going to do it again. And it's going to have it. I'm looking at the board right now as I'm about to leave. It's bipartisan. We have Republicans and Democrats who voted for it. Very cool.

Thank you so much, Congressman Swawa. Reports. Thank you, guys. Carl Zimmer is the popular science writer at the New York Times, who covers COVID and is author of the upcoming book. Life's Edge, The Search for What It Means to Be Alive. Hi, Carl Zimmer. Hello.

We're very excited to have you back. Thanks for having me. And you have a book. Tell us about your book. The book is called Life's Edge, The Search for What It Means to Be Alive. Ooh, I'm going to read that book. I'm taking a page from Larry King. I haven't read it yet, but I will.

I will make you want to read this book then. Okay, good. Give us a little elevator pitch. Well, so life is the most. important thing in life, as it were. And certainly for biologists, that's what they study. And yet, if you ask a biologist, well, what is life exactly? Chances are you won't get a very satisfying answer. They might say, like, oh, well, I don't bother with definitions, or they might give you a definition that if you think about it, doesn't really hold up very well. Or maybe it's totally

different than what another biologist says. And I just decided that I was going to take a trip through life for this book. You know, just sort of start with some of the more extraordinary kinds of life on earth, then move out to the borderland, sort of the fringes where life and non-life meet and try to figure out why it's so hard to draw a line between the two. What did you learn? Well, you know, I learned that there's a lot of strange things out there, that even things that we consider alive kind of flip back and forth between different states of being that are kind of strange. I'm really quite taken these days with these animals called tardigrades. I don't know if you ever heard of them. They're sometimes called water bears. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do know what they are.

Yeah, they're just everywhere. They're in the ground. They're in the ocean. They're all over the place. And they're adorable microscopic animals with little bear-like legs. They're also known as moss piglets because they clamber over moss. Well, these moss piglets, these water bears, they can go into a world between life and death if they have to. If they get dried out or suffer extreme cold or if someone puts them on a rocket and blast them in the outer space, they can lose all the water in their bodies. And what happens to a tardigrade when it starts to dry out is that it actually replaces all the water in its body with substitutes. with kinds of sugar and special kinds of protein that basically encase itself in glass,

a sort of protein glass. And so it's not alive anymore. If you define life as having metabolism, as carrying out chemical reactions, this is not happening in these animals. So they're not alive, but they're not dead either. They're in this third state. And they can stay there for years or decades. and if you give them some water, they will take out the proteins and take out the sugars, put the water back in, and they come perfectly back to life the way they were before. It's kind of amazing. And that's just one example of lots of weird things that are kind of alive and kind of something else that I got to learn about working on the book. I feel so seen right now. No, you can be dead, but you can be dead. still you can eat and then come back to life.

I mean, you know, this is like kind of the dream. So besides writing this amazing book, you have also been working on a pretty enormous project for the New York Times. Can you talk about that? Well, I've been on the pandemic team. You know, it's been about a year, actually, that I've been pretty much full-time on this

when I haven't been working on my book. You know, it used to be at the times, I would write a column where, you know, I wrote about whatever, Neanderthals or jellyfish or what have you. And it was great fun. But, you know, the pandemic came and, you know, clearly there was going to be a lot of news to cover. So I've been writing about vaccines and about variants and about all sorts of other aspects of the science of this virus. And we've been building trackers to kind of to manage all the information. that we've got. It's been kind of overwhelming. So, you know, we have their vaccine tracker where we've got, I think there are over 70 vaccines now in clinical trials. It's kind of astonishing. And, you know, some of them are already out in the wild now and turning out to be amazing. But, you know, after I stop talking about my book for a while, I'm going back into writing about the pandemic for a while. And I'm hoping that at some point, you know, the newspaper will not need my services quite so much.

I'm really looking forward to not being on the front page so often because I think that's a good sign for all of us. And then I can go back to the weird stuff. What were you surprised by in this pandemic? I was surprised at how unsurprising a lot of it was. You know, I wrote a book called a planet of viruses a few years back. And there I very briefly went over what scientists had been warning us for years about pandemics to come and how a coronavirus might be responsible. And I just sort of laid out the basics of what might happen. And then it happened.

And it was sort of frustrating that people felt like, oh, this was totally amazing and mind-blowing and was unimaginable. No one could have imagined this was coming. People knew this was coming for 20, 30 years. And yet we didn't prepare well enough. And so that was frustrating. On the other hand, the vaccines blew me away as well. I mean, I was prepared for failure or mediocrity.

And we don't have that. We have amazing vaccines. Measles-level vaccines, right? Absolutely. The thing that I've been thinking about was we could have been, And people don't talk about this for whatever reason, but we could have been Australia. We could have been Senegal. I mean, we hear a lot about Australia and other English-speaking countries. But there are, I mean, honestly, like.

But Senegal is warm. So they have, I mean, that gave, I mean, there is a seasonal aspect to. Brazil is mighty warm too. Right, that's true. That's right. That's a good point. Yes. No, I mean, if you look at countries like Nigeria, for example, or Senegal, and look at their case rate, their death rate, and all the rest, like, they have done incredibly well. And I was recently listening to a Nigerian disease specialist talk about why this is. And one reason is that, you know, they'd been through Ebola and been through other outbreaks. They know what a virus can do when it goes berserk. And so they, they, they, They coordinated very early lockdowns and everyone was on board and they had good consistent public health messaging. They didn't have a lot of money. They didn't have a lot of resources, but they were coordinated and effective. And I think that, you know, I think we could learn a lot from them.

And we should also look to ourselves and say, like, well, why did we in the United States that make such a spectacular mess of it? Yeah. I mean, I also think that in Asia that was true too, right? they had had SARS, so they had some sense of how important masking was. Yeah, yeah, that was, yeah, and that was a situation where, you know, there wasn't a whole lot of really compelling scientific literature on just how good of a job masks would do. And so there was this scope for debate about whether we should be focusing on that or not.

But yeah, in South Korea, they had just decided like, no, we're going to just start cranking out masks in industrial numbers, and we're also going to combine that with testing and tracing and all the rest of it, so that, yeah, South Korea just had such an incredibly great response to COVID, even though they're right next door to China. The same with Taiwan. The thing we don't talk about so much, and for good reason in some ways, is that the MRNA vaccines are a completely new kind of vaccine that has never been approved ever. Did you have faith in that? Were you like these people are out of their minds? Like it's not going to, the vaccine's not going to come until we get to the viral vector vaccines like the J&J?

Or did you have faith that because the MRNA technology has been kicking around for a little while that it was going to work? It's not faith so much as, you know, a sense that it was possible they might work. But, you know, so much in this realm is hard to predict. You just don't know if something is going to work until you've got that randomized clinical trial. You just, you have to wait until these things really prove their metal. So I was, you know, holding my breath. I mean, these MRNA vaccines make sense on paper, but, you know, there could have been something along the way. like maybe there was some enzyme that nobody had really taken into account that would gobble these

things up before they could do what they needed to do. So, you know, all the pieces made sense on paper and we just had to wait to see if they really worked. And even when they were working well in animals, you know, you still, again, had to say, well, okay, but humans are not animals, so let's see. You know, I certainly would not have bet on 95% for them. Yeah. And when my editor were saying, like, which vaccine would you be interested in following as they go through this development? I said, I'm curious about Johnson Johnson because I just thought, well, they had a longer track record with these viral vector vaccines. Right. And that's also, there have been viral vector vaccines approved. Yes. And Johnson Johnson has had had one for Ebola, which got approved last

July. And so I wouldn't say it certainly wasn't a classic kind of vaccine like with Jonas Salk and his, you know, inactivated polio vaccines. But, but, you know, I just sort of thought, well, like any of these might work or they might not work. I'll follow this one. And, you know, the irony is that if Johnson Johnson had been the first ones to publish their results, I think people would have been over the moon. If they had said 72% efficacy in the United States, side. With one shot. With one shot and with about 85% efficacy for serious disease, nobody gets hospitalized after 28 days. Everyone in said, this is amazing. This is fantastic. The irony is that Pfizer-Moderna came out of the gate saying, hey, check this out. So, you know, if they can make them

easier to use, we could be taking them a lot in the future for all sorts of diseases. Well, and they're the fastest to be made. So there you certainly another pandemic comes or we have. J&J really has sort of lost a public relations war there, right? Because the thing is, it's a very good vaccine. It's a one-shot vaccine. It works faster than the MRIs, right? It works a little faster. And there's a lot, you know, and it's much, I mean, there's just a lot of great stuff about this J&J, but because people don't quite understand, you know, the statistics on how they work. They think that there's some, you know, huge, I mean, I do think that ultimately the J&J is just as good a vaccine. Yeah. The thing is that, you know, we're all suddenly getting intimately familiar with

the ins and outs of vaccine design and vaccine trials, you know. I think before 2020, nobody really paid close attention to the word efficacy. But it's a tricky concept. You know, efficacy is not effectiveness, you know, just for starting. So I've written some things in the time. Will you explain that a little more? Effectiveness is basically how well does a vaccine work in the real world? Just after it's approved or authorized and it's being given to millions of people,

you just look at a large scale and just say, okay, how much does it reduce your risk? of getting infected. Whereas efficacy is a measure of what's going on in a clinical trial. Clinical trials are really important because you can control everything. You can say, all right, we're going to randomly give placebos and vaccines to people. So they're in the same population. They're exposed to the same risk. And then we're going to just look at the statistics and sort of estimate what's the relative reduction in the risk if you get a vaccine. I mean, if there's no change in the risk, then you have zero percent efficacy. If you completely get protected, it's 100 percent efficacy. And then there's everything in between. But what people also forget is that

these numbers we throw around, 72 percent, 95 percent, that's a little point estimate, which sits in the middle of what's of a range of possibilities that's known as the confidence interval. So the real efficacy could very well be anywhere in that range. And so, So if you look at the efficacy confidence intervals for these things, if you lay them out in a graph, you can see they overlap. And also, like, trying to make, you know, really close comparisons between vaccines can be complicated by the fact that they're doing these trials at different times and different populations. You know, a variant may pop up that another vaccine didn't have to deal with.

So, you know, basically, what it comes down to is, like, these all rules. work well. They all work well. Right. And the J&J was tested later. So the J&J has been in South Africa going against variants that are a little bit trickier, right? There's some evidence to support that. Yeah. And that was just pure luck that South Africa was where some vaccine makers ran their trials. And South Africa was also where one of the most worrisome variants called B1351 popped up, probably like in October, and came to dominate that country. And then since then, it has spread to lots of other countries, and everyone's keeping an eye on it. It looks like it can definitely, you know, partly escape from the antibodies that are made from

vaccines. The question is, well, do some vaccines do a better job of covering it than others? Maybe we need boosters for it. So Pfizer and Moderna and other companies are already making and testing B-1351 boosters. So those are, you know, you could, you could expect to, you know, maybe to be getting one of those in the fall. Right. Though I actually talked to Pfizer and they said they, my trial at Yale, they said they're not doing a booster yet. But I know Bidurna is. So we'll say. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think a lot of places are going to be getting into this. I know Novavax is doing some work on this. A lot of companies that hadn't even gotten to advance clinical trials have decided to basically pivot and start to focus on the variants now because all the

vaccines were tested on the earlier forms of this virus and those forms are getting replaced by these new variants like there's one that was identified in Britain called B117 that now is like in Florida I believe it's become the dominant one it's probably going to be dominant throughout the United States. Fortunately, the Pfizer vaccine and other vaccines, Novavax, they all work pretty much as well against B-117 as earlier forms of the virus. Can you explain what's happening in New York? Because it seems like we're still kind of having transmission. We're not, where do you see us in the sort of in the quest for sort of some kind of like we still have a pretty high transmission here yeah i mean it's it's puzzling and i mean i think it's puzzling across the united states you know

we we had this amazing decline from early january and then it stalled out and it was kind of flat for a while and now it's declining again but at a gentler rate than before so what's going on It could be that, you know, we just, we just reached this crazy peak because everybody decided that they had to go see their relatives for Christmas and we just were paying the price right after that. But, you know, why aren't we still falling? Well, you know, I think there's a lot of fatigue. You know, it's just and and also like just people, you know, there are a lot of people who have to put themselves in harm's way just to work. So there's that. The Vaccines are not kicking in enough to really start to have an effect yet, unlike in Israel, where you can just see it's happening. Yes, I mean, I think a big issue going forward is going to be between the haves and have-nots. Right. The United States is doing a pretty good job with vaccination. Most of the world, it does not have access to many vaccines yet.

Even Europe, too. That's surprising. Yeah. Right. I mean, you know. And Canada, too. Yeah. I think that the United States and Great Britain made deals early, and that was a good thing.

We're now negotiating more deals, which are sort of bank on top of that, which definitely helped. So getting the whole world vaccinated is still incredibly important. And because these variants, they don't just come from one place. There's a variant called P1 in Brazil that has gotten a lot of people concerned. And, you know, the next variant could come from, who knows, Indonesia, just anywhere. As long as you allow the virus to spread, there will be variants. And eventually there will be a variant that won't, that these vaccines won't work on. So we had Eric Topal on the pod, and he was saying that they're working on a coronavirus vaccine

that will be a sort of larger vaccine that will be able to be able to be used around the world. that strikes me is very important. That would be great, yeah. I mean, I've reported in the times about some early experiments on a vaccine that might work against all coronaviruses. Right. That's what he was talking about. Yeah.

So, you know, when the next one spills over from some bat, we could potentially already have immunity that will work against it. Right. This is so interesting. Thank you so much for joining. joining us, Carl. Thanks for having me. Hey folks, if you haven't heard every single week we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the

folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soladadad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening in the news. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a beast inside member where you'll support the beast fearless journalism, as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to new abnormal.com. That's new abnormal. The dailybeast.com. Well, Heed Shaheed is the spokesperson for Justice Democrats, who you may know got people like Jamal Bowen, AOC, Corey Bush, and others elected to Congress. And today, he's going

to talk to us about his vision for how Democrats win in 2022. Welcome. I'm Walid. Hi. Hi, very excited to have you. I'm a big fan of yours. You won lots of races. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Right?

Yeah. I mean, what's that like? Well, when I first started in politics, progressives were not winning that many things. You know, it was before I got involved in politics in 2014, 2015, and no one really knew who Bernie Sanders was. There was no such thing as the squad. AOC was still, you know, working in bars.

and restaurants. And I think for the progressive movement and the left in general, we are ascending for the first time and probably since the 1960s. And so that is really exciting. And the candidates I work with are all really great people. Last time we talked, I was actually talking to you about a principal who was running for Congress. We had him on. He's amazing. We had him on and he was just, he's a star. But we've just had a lot of your candidates on. But can we talk about Corey Bush? So Cory Bush was the first recruited Justice Democrats candidate. She actually ran in 2018 and was unsuccessful and then ran again. And during the largest uprising in civil rights history in this country, probably since the 1960s. And she ran against a long-time incumbent

Lacey Clay, whose father previously held the seat. And she ran a campaign based on her story as a nurse, as a Black Lives Matter organizer who had really got started organizing during the Ferguson uprising in 2014 and had firsthand experience with some of the worst episodes of police violence and police over-militarization. And so, yeah, she really was able to build on the support that she had in 2018 and was successful. And she's one of the rising stars in the Democratic Party. And I think she has a really bright career ahead of her. And what's funny is that so many of the candidates I work with are just normal people. And when I talk about it, I'm like, Cory Bush is like, she seems extraordinary to everyone because she is.

But part of the Justice Democrats model is just to show how out of touch the ordinary Congress member is, because most people in this country are more like AOC and Cory Bush and Jamal Bowman than otherwise. Most people are not corporate lawyers or bankers on Wall Street. Most people are nurses. More people are nurses than that, but they're not that many nurses in Congress. So, yeah, she's one of our, she's one of our stars. I think that's super interesting. And one of the things we really want to talk to you about is we've been having all

these conversations about how Democrats win in 2022. It seems like a lot of the people we've been talking to are like, shut the hell up about to fund the police. Don't talk about cultural battles. I want to see where you come from because I imagine. with the candidates you guys have run, you have a different look at this? Yeah, there's two things I want to say here, which is one, the arguments for why House Democrats underperform Joe Biden are complicated. I don't think it's one thing or the other.

And it is important to also know that if House districts weren't so gerrymandered, you know, if you just took that overall national popular vote of Democrats in the House and compared it to the Republicans, Democrats won overall. the districts are designed in such a way that they're made to be uncompetitive, and that's why if Democrats are able to pass H.R.1, that would make a more fair and even playing field. So one key piece of all this is, I think sometimes consultants conflate things too much. So Republicans cannot be the only party talking about race and racism in this country. So sometimes we have these campaigns where Republicans are talking about caravans and shirreel.

law and Black Lives Matter and Democrats do not say anything. They're talking about race to largely white voters. And Democrats cannot just ignore the conversation about race that is happening. And so sometimes this conversation about defund the police and immigration is a coded conversation about why Democrats should not talk about these issues. But I think the way that Democrats should talk about them is to connect them to economic justice as well. And so you don't see that many. campaigns in which Republicans are saying, you know, there's a caravan coming, there's Ilhan Omar wants to impose Sharia law, Democrats are going to change the face of America. Democrats don't inoculate voters to understand why the Republican Party is saying these things, which is to

divide and conquer the American people to serve their plutocratic, oligarchic donors, largely. And often what Democrats are told to do is say, well, we're ready to reach across the aisle, with the party that is saying that Ilhan Omar will impose Sharia law on the entire United States. And I just don't think when the fight is so escalated to this extent, I think you really have to call out the strategy of what Republicans are doing, which is the 40 or 50 year culmination of a strategy that's based on convincing white voters that they have nothing in common with black citizens or immigrants or Muslims or people who are not like the Republican Party voting base. And I think you started to see Senator Warnock give a message that was basically that in his election campaign where he called a lot of what Kelly Leffler was doing, a distraction to divide and conquer the people of Georgia on behalf of one of the wealthiest residents of Georgia, Senator Lopler. Then the last thing I'll say is that there's a governance piece of this, which is that if Democrats don't deliver concrete things that people feel in their material life, that they can say, oh, Joe Biden, or my member of Congress gave me that, then they're going to be in real trouble. And so the stimulus is

the first piece of it. Obviously, we're going to get to talking about things like green jobs, a $15 minimum wage, criminal justice reform, immigration reform. They really do have about nine months or so to deliver before this election cycle gets underway. And so I think those are the three pieces of some of the ways I think Democrats should start thinking about the 2020 midterms. Why do you think the Green New Deal got so much, I mean, I sort of know why, but I'm curious to know what you think. Like Fox News became so passionately involved in trashing it. So Rupert Murdoch's mission in life and the people around him is to create propaganda all around the world in the UK, in Australia, in North America, to convince

older white people that they should be scared of demographic change and people of color rising to power in countries where the white voting base is shrinking. And so AOC becomes a convenient character and the Green New Deal becomes a convenient plotline in this larger story that Republicans have been focused on and Donald Trump ran his whole 2016 campaign on to do that. I think what was unfortunate is that while Republicans were attacking the Green New Deal, what you ended up seeing on

center-left news outlets like CNN or MSNBC was, I experienced this firsthand. Like, I first started going on TV to talk about the Green New Deal, and most of the time, the questions I would get was about Fox News and not about the climate

crisis. And so you have this sort of I'm just like, why are you asking me about what Fox News is saying, and why aren't we Why aren't we talking about what the Green New Deal is? And so you ended up having an entire team red organized in opposition to the Green New Deal, and then very few young people supporting the Green New Deal, and then people like Dianne Feinstein telling the young people how stupid they were and how they had everything under control.

And so in such a circumstance, like even today, more Republicans know what the Green New Deal is than Democrats because of this dynamic. And then the way Democrats also hear about the Green New Deal is through, the Fox News framing. So despite all of that, the Green Deal still has been largely successful despite all of the odds stacked against it. And you saw that Joe Biden's climate plan through the, by the end of the Democratic primary, he brought AOC and the Sunrise Movement into his campaign task forces. And they, they improve Joe Biden's climate plan. And so we're looking forward to seeing what Joe Biden proposes. What do you think Democrats can do, just to go back to what you were saying before,

because I think you're right, the Democrats aren't messaging against this kind of Trumpy, Fox Newsie stuff. How can Democrats do that better, are you think? I think they have to have a positive agenda that they can claim they delivered for working families across the country. So the checks that are going out is one step of that. But, you know, when it comes to transitioning our country to 100% clean energy and providing every American, a job who wants one to retrofit the local school and their neighborhood toward 100% clean energy, giving people jobs to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, delivering criminal justice reform and police accountability after huge protests that took place last year where one of the largest

constituents of the Democratic Party, African Americans, are looking for something to be delivered on behalf of such a large sweeping movement that didn't just take place last year, but started in 2014 under Black Lives Matter's rise in Ferguson. And so if they can point to concrete things that they said we delivered for the American people, that will go a long way. And I hope that Joe Biden doesn't fall under the trap of, I think right now he isn't, of the Obama administration where the programs you create are so complicated, like the first relief package or like the ACA, that voters don't really understand how the government delivered something for them. Yeah. Second thing is, I do think that they need a much stronger message around why the Republican Party's message is one of divide and conquer.

And it is to serve people like the Koch family, people in the fossil fossil fuel billionaires, people on Wall Street who are bankrolling their campaigns. And I just don't think the Democrat, I don't think a message where you're like, we are ready to work across the aisle is going to be efficient. I think they just need to have a much more assertive and aggressive message about this. This is like a passion project of mine because I'm obsessed with this idea that Democrats are just not, they just give up on messaging. And they're like, we do good stuff, so it doesn't matter. And I actually had a really one of my real favorite senators on here. And I said, Democrats don't message while you're doing this, but if you don't tell people it doesn't, you know, they're not going to vote for you again. He said, well, we're going to do such great stuff.

They're going to vote for us again. And I was like, no, it doesn't work like that. And one thing I'll say to that is like, I'm not saying every Democrat in the country needs to run on the Green New Deal. Right. If you look at Rafael Warnock's campaign or John Ossup's campaign, I think that is more akin to what I'm talking about. They painted their opponents as members of an economic elite who lived behind gated fences. Which was true. And they said, if we're elected, we will deliver you stimulus checks as soon as possible.

And I just think that it was a much more aggressive message than what the candidate who ran against Susan Collins, Sarah Gideon ran, even Jamie Harrison in South Carolina, Cal Cunningham of North Carolina. Ossup and Warnock had a distinct message from some of these other Senate campaigns that took place in 2020, and I think we should learn from that. Yeah, Maine was Democrats to win, and then they didn't. Well, she ran a campaign. Sarah Gideon ran a campaign that was. focused not on attacking Susan Collins around how out of touch she was with working families, more about how Sarah Gideon would be a better partner to work with across the aisle than Susan Collins would, which was Susan Collins. Right. And the reality is, I mean, you don't get elected on bipartisanship right now. Not in these conditions. No, I don't think so. Talk to me about,

or can you at least paint a picture for me? Do you have, do you think you can find exciting people for some of these open Senate seats? So in 2018, we helped elect the squad. We recruited AOC to run. In 2020, we successfully elected Marine Newman over Dan Lipinski, Jamal Bowman, over Elliot Engel, Cory Bush, over Lacey Clay. And in the next election cycle, we're going to continue to look for candidates who represent, you know, the 99% of America that are not millionaires and try to see where there's excitement for change in these districts. There are so many districts in this country where people just feel like, you know,

if a member of Congress has been there for 20, 30, 40 years, they, that's, we thank you for your service, and it's time for someone new. And what do you think Democrats have to do to actually deliver for the American people? I keep talking about this, that Democrats have to deliver, and they will not be able to deliver solutions to people's problems

at the scale that's needed to win the 2022 midterms unless they eliminate the, the filibuster. And there's one key reason why, because Republicans are working overtime in state legislatures to gerrymander even more the districts that they already gerrymandered in 2010. They already gerrymandered them in 2010. Now they're trying to gerrymander on top of the existing gerrymander of 2010. And if Democrats don't pass H.R.1, which the only path I see is through eliminating the filibuster, then we are fucked. So that, without filibuster reform, a lot of Democrats really are hurting their chances at re-election and keeping the federal government.

Yeah. And they're going to have to get Mansion and cinema on board, though. Mansion did say he was open to just having the talking filibuster. So basically that just means that Ted Cruz or Josh caught Holly have to, until they have to pee. Are you concerned, though, that my big concern with these voting rights bills is that the Supreme Court will then go in and just strike them down? You have to force that to happen, and I am concerned about the Supreme Court. I mean, we support Supreme Court reform too. We have a country where it is extremely difficult for the majority of the population to enact laws. And they can be vetoed by the filibuster.

They can be vetoed by the Supreme Court. They can be vetoed by, you know, Republicans having disproportionate power in the House for gerrymandering. And so on so many levels, we need democracy reform that updates our institution. Like, I don't know if you guys know this, but we have one of the oldest constitutions that people still use. So it needs an update. Yeah. This was really helpful. Thank you so much for coming on.

Appreciate you reaching out. Hi, Jesse. Cannon. Hi, Molly. How are you doing? I'm great. I just love living. Living life. Jesse, tell us your fuck-that-guy for today. My fuck-that-guy is what we like to call the frozen fish sticks air. But I like to think of him as a man who plays a tiny little boy in suits. Like he always just wears those suits like the immature little boy he acts like.

And his rage towards women is just the same as a boy who hasn't become a man. and he used to wear those cute little bow ties. But what I find really disturbing about Tucker Carlson this week is he's engaging in the behavior that his predecessor in this time slot, Mr. Bill O'Reilly used to engage in when he would talk about Dr. Tiller, the baby killer. And eventually Dr. Tiller was murdered in cold blood after Bill O'Reilly would not stop repeating his name over and over. And Tucker Carlson has long done things like this, but he is very much. really last night's rant about Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times. It's the second night in a row, right? Yeah.

And it was just the glee with which is hypocrisy for that she's saying, I just don't want to be harassed when this is a man who cries about any harassment he has and make sure to keep himself into ivory towers where he's never held accountable so that no one would ever even be able to harass him. He's so far away from the public. and the glee he takes in her being disturbed by the behavior he incites in his audience is just he's always a vile person. But last night I really felt he took it to a new level of just disgusting. Yeah.

He just is so committed to getting somebody killed. It's kind of amazing. I think the little boy doesn't realize he's playing with fire and he may get burned and it may be really awful at some point. Yeah, it's just shocking to me how irresponsible he is. Um, my fuck that guy this week is going to be the royal family. I mean, if anyone who saw that, that Oprah interview knows that, you know, the royal family has been enabling and keeping safe Prince Andrew, who has all of these allegations against him, and it's clearly a really bad dude.

And then they can't just be nice to... Megan Merkel and they, you know, made her life so difficult and then sort of painted it as it was her fault, then we're just completely insupportive. And so, look, I understand that the royal family lives in a completely different century. And you know, that's where they belong, probably. If you're going to protect and run cover for terrifying, scary, sexual abuser, you know, God knows whatever else. This is a family who's protected Andrew and done the wrong thing on so many occasions. And here's an opportunity for them to do the right thing and to be just normal and human with their grandson's wife.

And they couldn't do it. And so fuck them. Yeah. And also, being concerned about baby Archie's skid with Prince Phillips walking around looking like that. It's like there's a skin problem we got to deal with elsewhere. Yeah. That family is just atrocious. and also to have all these conservatives, you know, these Tea Party patriots defending the Royal Family is really something.

So, you know, fuck you, royal family. Always to be defending the racist. Yeah. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode.

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