The Daily Beast Podcast - Does Trump Not Know That Hitler’s Generals Tried to Kill Him?

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

The New Abnormal’s Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy are baffled. Donald Trump meets the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed to, and seemingly has no understanding of the concept of rule of law. So why are so many Americans still intent on voting for him? Also on the pod this week: Geoffrey Fowler, a Washington Post journalist, who talks about Meta’s covert operation to shadowban political content. Plus! Denny Carter, the founder of the Bad Faith Times, who has an astute comparison to draw between an NFL quarterback and this year’s presidential election. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

columnist Jeff Fowler is here to tell us about his recent article. Don't say vote. How Instagram hides your political posts. All about how a meta has been suppressing content on its platform. Then Denny Carter, the founder of the Bad Faith Times, joins us to talk about his recent piece, Jimmy Garapolo, the 2024 election, and how I learned to watch the game. And they make the case that stats that you're seeing from polls, much like Jimmy G, don't pass the eye test. But first, let's have some fun. So, Danielle, it's another week closer to the election, and that means once again, I have a browser tab group that I've labeled Nazi shit.

Because it's just absolutely unbelievable that in the year of our Lord 2024, this is what we're dealing with. So earlier this week, John Kelly, who was the longest serving chief of staff, for Donald Trump talked about how in his mind Donald Trump is a fascist. He meets the definition of a fascist and he would govern like a dictator if he was allowed to and has no understanding of the constitution or the concept of rule of law. Thank God he's not even close to winning re-election. Am I right? I don't want to get off topic here. The problems in this country right now are so deep. Even if Kamala Harris wins, which God help us she needs to, we have to reckon with the fact that close to 50% of the voting population apparently enjoys fascism.

To get back on track. So we have John Kelly saying all that. We have Kamala Harris at a CNN town hall on Wednesday night being asked about that and agreeing and saying, yeah, Trump's a fascist. And they're right. You know, it used to be back in the day people on the left might. I'd call Republicans fascist and look, I would roll my eyes and be like, come on, stop it. They are fascists now. I don't see any way around using the F word at this point. Do you, Daniel? There's a lot of F words that I'd like to use. But fascists being the number one of them. And I'm just like, why did it take so long to get here?

You and I have been talking about this ad nauseum for I don't even know how long, the last couple of years. Donald Trump has literally said and done. everything. And what we know, and I think that what you just said about, I don't want to say that it's half of the country, maybe it's like 30, you know, 30 percent, 40 percent of the country that is comfortable with Hitler. Like I thought, Andy, that if there was one thing that we could all agree on, not only as a country, but as a world, that Hitler is bad. I did not think that we needed to go back through history and say what Donald Trump said, which is, quote,

Hitler did some good things. What the fuck would those good things have been? Yeah. I'm so confused here. And the fact that his former chief of staff, John Kelly, had to tell him, don't ever say that out loud to anyone. Like he's a toddler that honestly does not know how to keep his inside thoughts, you know, from creeping out.

But the fact is, is that Donald Trump has showed us over the last nine years that he's a white supremacist, that he is a Hitler apologist, that he loves Nazis, that he loves militia groups, that he wants the military to be as obedient and loyal as Hitler's German soldiers were. How much more fucking information that do you need? Honestly. And if I hear one more bullshit comment from an undecided voter, it's like, what are you undecided about? Or do you just need attention. Because at this point, I don't care if Donald Trump was running against a mop. Like, unless the mop had a fucking Nazi sticker on it, I'd vote for the mop. So the decision shouldn't be that fucking hard right now. And yet, here we are. Yeah, it's just unreal. I mean,

the German generals thing is, you know, being reported by, I guess, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in a book called The Divider, Trump in the White House. And apparently Trump asked, John Kelly, his chief of staff, why can't you be like the German generals? And apparently, even setting aside the fact that that's a ridiculous thing to say, apparently Donald Trump is unaware of the whole little thing where a bunch of Hitler's generals tried to assassinate him more than once. Kelly says that he said to Trump, he said, do you mean Bismarck's generals? Because he just couldn't believe that he meant Hitler's generals. And he said, do you mean the Kaiser's generals, you know, surely you can't mean Hitler's generals. And Kelly says that Trump then said,

yeah, yeah, Hitler's generals. So it's like, once again, you know, what is the point? People try to give Trump the benefit of the doubt and try to, you know, downplay what he's doing and, you know, sanewashing and all that stuff. Ultimately, it's just like, you know, you said, well, surely what you mean? No, no, no, no, no. I meant I meant the worst thing every time. I no longer really believe the people who say they're voting for, well, Trump is, you know, he's going to cut my taxes. I don't care about all the other stuff. He's just going to cut my taxes. If you don't care about all the other stuff, you are a fascist. And if you don't care what he is going to do to the rule of law, if you don't care that he's going to, you know, that he says he's going to round up 20 million people and deport them and, of course, put them in camps.

First, you are a fascist. You can't be Switzerland. You can't sit in the middle and say, well, I don't approve of that stuff, but he'll cut my taxes. Now, you are enabling fascism, which makes you functionally no different than a fascist. The word is just too big, Andy. Like, maybe, I mean, this is obviously where civics has failed us. Maybe people don't understand what the word fascism means, but you certainly know what Nazi means. Like, you certainly can see that if Donald Trump has, had a boat parade down in Florida, and there was a boat going down the parade that had his flags, a Nazi flag, and white power. Like, this is who these people are. And you know what? I don't think any major news outlet covered it. And so here we are where people are just like, oh, Donald Trump, like, he just says things,

or he just makes things up, or he's just confused, or he just doesn't understand history, or X, Y, and Z. Why would you want a man that you have to make so many? fucking excuses for leading this country. Like the amount of excuses that Republicans have made for Donald Trump over the last nine years to try and make him seem competent, to try and make him seem like anything other than what we know that he is. All I know is that these elections are only close because of the electoral college. If we went on one person, one vote, Donald Trump and the Republican Party would be blown out of the water. Like, we know that. And,

And so if Donald Trump becomes president again, actually, I can't even say it. I don't want to say it. Let me just put that back in my mouth because I really don't want to go down that dark path. But what I will say is that Kamala Harris in the limited time that she's been running for president, she made the case day one when Joe Biden left the race. And either you want competency, you want thoroughness, you want lawfulness, or you don't. That's the decision here. Or you know, you want a healthy economy.

You want your kids to be able to go to college and for you to be able to afford to send them. Like you want public schools to continue to exist. There is only one choice. There is only one choice. You want not to be monitored as a pregnant person crossing state lines. There's only one person to choose in this election. So the fact that we are here holding our breath not knowing what country, what kind of country we're going to be living in, in 12 days is really terrifying.

Yeah. I mean, it straight up is. And I'll discuss this later in an interview with Denny Carter. I'm trying to be less of a dumer. I'm trying to be less into dumerism. And I have sort of come to the feeling that she is going to win. Really? Yeah.

Say more, Andy. I just, I want your positivity right now. Please. I think she's going to win. I can't give you, like, data points for why I think she's going to win. I just, I think everything Trump is doing. lately has sort of, it has the whiff of desperation to it. The Dukakis stink.

Sort of, yeah. It feels like he's acting sort of like a failed candidate. I think she's the opposite. I think she's been out there doing things that you do if you think that you are going to win, but that you still have work to do. And I think she's conducting her campaign more like that. It's vibes. It's my gut.

I'm not going to point you to, you know, numbers with women or college graduates. both of which are great for her. But it's just a feeling. And I don't think he's doing himself any favors with all these reports of him talking about Hitler doing good things and wanting Hitler's generals. I really do think that if there is a third rail in American politics, it is invoking the name of Adolf Hitler in any way that is not one of history's greatest monsters. So if you're looking at the people who are, again, as we point out all the time,

somehow, some way still undecided, truly undecided. I don't think hearing that kind of stuff pushes them into his camp. I think it hopefully anyway pushes them away from him and like, all right, you know, I can live with him saying he's going to deport 20 million people and I can live with him dehumanizing trans people. But the Hitler thing is a step too far for me. You know, I know. As I say it, I'm like, you know, I know. But look, we've talked about this. Like, I don't understand how anyone is undecided now. But even if that stuff, that God awful stuff isn't bad enough,

I do think that quotes coming out about speaking of Hitler in any way positively, I just don't think that flies for anyone who's not in the all right. Yeah. I mean, you would hope so. It's just scary. I want to believe that Harris is going to win because she is the most qualified candidate because her policies will be good for America. And, you know, it will be the first time in, I think, decades that we don't go from a Democrat to a Republican and that our economy can continue to cannot fall off of a cliff, you know, and then have a Democrat come in and dig us out again. Like, it would be nice to continue, you know, to move. up the graph in a good way. There's a new article out that says,

Trump flirts with the ultimate tax cut. No taxes at all. This is now the closing message. What? I know. So no taxes for anyone. Eliminating the income tax? We're going full idiocracy here.

We don't have to pay taxes. What's going to fix the roads and the schools? Just vibes? I think the vibes are always good for getting things paved personally. Okay. Street lights, all that. Yeah, okay. Okay.

They say the road to hell is paved with vibes. Something like that. The plants crave Brondo. Yes. Okay, look, that'll make all my, what few libertarian friends I still have left. That'll make them very happy. Look, this is when I said earlier that I think he's flailing and that he has this, his campaign has sort of the stench of loser dumb to it. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Like, I just, he gets more and more extreme every day. And really, like, for the past month, it feels like every day he tops himself. And I don't think that's what you do if you think you are going to win this election. And if the people, you know, so, so I just, again, it's vibes. And I have, I don't know any of the internal polling or anything like that. But it's just a feeling that he is conducting himself like someone who is very stressed out and realizes that he may actually go to jail because he's not going to win the election. Would you visit him, Andy?

I would visit something upon him. Will you bake him a cake? I would visit something up. Yeah. I don't mean to get biblical, but I believe Pharaoh had some things visited upon him. Mm-mm. I would Old Testament him in that sense, yes. You would have to explain it first because you know he don't read the Bible.

Right. The only book that he's had on his nightstand, according to one of his ex-wives, was Minecraft. Right. And unclear if there's an audio edition of that, because then I would believe that he actually got through it. Well, I would read it to him from the Trump Bible. But part of me actually thinks the Trump Bible probably portrays Pharaoh as a good guy. The biggest election of our lifetimes is less than a month away, and the news is only going to get crazier and more important as the countdown continues. As each day brings new headlines and critical campaign up to.

The future of the country may be decided by the stories that cut through the noise and capture our attention during the next few weeks. If you want to stay informed through all of the twists and turns, The Daily Beast's new daily newsletter, October Surprise, is the reliable resource you're looking for. It will keep you in the know on everything that's happening as we race toward election day. Sign up now at beast.pub slash October surprise. Beast.pub slash October surprise. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal Jeffrey Fowler, who is the Washington Post's technology columnist based in San Francisco, who writes in the perspective of advocating for tech users. His recent piece that caught my attention is entitled, Don't Say Vote, How Instagram

Hides Your Political Posts. Jeff, let's jump in. What made you decide to delve into the meta platforms as the subject of your piece, as opposed to TikTok and X and, you know, and YouTube. What was it specifically about meta that made you want to make it the subject of your piece? So here's the truth about Instagram and still about Facebook and threads. Way more Americans use them to get their news than use TikTok to get news, then use Reddit to get news, then use X to get news. So I know a lot of the politically minded people really focused on what's going on on X or elsewhere, but if we're talking about where Americans are getting their information about the world around them, they're still in the zone of Mark Zuckerberg. One in five Americans now

gets their news, according to Pew from Instagram. And so I think it's really important for us to understand what view of the world are they getting. What view of their community are they getting? What view of issues are they getting? Because this is what's going to be ultimately, I think, important in helping people decide whether they care enough about this election to get involved or to go vote. So here's one of the things that you write, and I want to read it, is, quote, if you've suspected that you're yelling into a void about the election on Instagram, Facebook, or threads, it might not be your imagination either. Downplaying politics is a business and political strategy for meta, the social media giant, and users just have to accept it. Talk to us about the business and political strategy of meta and what I would call the suppression of democracy. Yeah, I think suppression is the right word to use here.

In this last year, a lot of folks may not have been paying attention. There have been some of the other things going on in the news. but Mark Zuckerberg has sort of officially thrown his hands up in the air and says he's over politics. And the way that that is rolling out into the lives of lots of Americans is Instagram has now caught up with Facebook, as well as threads, their sort of text-based platform, in saying that they do not want to fill your feed with content that's about politics or social issues. We've been talking for a long time, for many, many years, both politicians and activists of all kinds. I've been talking about this idea of shadow banning.

That's when certain topics, you know, are, you can make a post about them, but weirdly nobody sees them. And for a long time, Zuckerberg and Meda sort of downplayed that idea, and they said it wasn't a real thing. But now they've come forward and they said, yes, we are actively not going to promote not going to recommend posts about politics or social issues to our users. That's a pretty big shift. And I don't think most people sort of realize that that happened and that they did some monkeying around behind the scenes with everybody's Instagram and Facebook and Threads account to make sure that that's what happened.

I mean, I just think that for Mark Zuckerberg, a straight white male billionaire, to say that he is just over politics. So I'm going to put my attention elsewhere and then have the ability to suppress information for billions of people who use his platforms. I mean, it's probably the most egregious form of white privilege that I have seen. Similarly, on the other side, you have Elon Musk, the world's richest person who has the ability to just throw his money around in a different direction to ensure the election of Donald Trump. You're somebody that has been covering technology for a while. Is this something that you foresaw coming to like this kind of collision point where this is not, it's no longer the place where people go to engage in community, but it's the place that

they go to engage in arguments, to argue with bots, to be degraded, that like these two titans would have the ability to sway elections one way or the people. other. Was that something that you even foresaw? Well, we have a little problem in the United States and around the world with allowing monopolies to form in the technology industry. And the reality of that is that there are a very small number of companies that are controlled by a very small number of usually white men that have the power to define the terms of our conversation. And when their attitudes change, when their political beliefs shift, when their business needs shift, that could shift with it. I mean, like, let's go back in time a little bit. I've been a tech

journalist for a long time. And I was there back in, I think it was 2011 when President Obama came to Facebook headquarters. And he sat down with Mark Zuckerberg to do a Facebook live. That was the big thing back then. And they could live stream video. And he did an interview with the two of them did an interview together. And during that interview, they talked all about how social media and Facebook could play this and should play this critical role in democracy as a place for people to have a two-way conversation with elected officials and to be able to sort of talk with each other about what mattered in their lives. And then going into the years that followed, Facebook lead really heavily into this, right? They wanted to make money

off of political ads. They wanted politicians to set up accounts and use Facebook. But then, as the years passed, Mark Zuckerberg started to get a lot of heat for this, particularly from Republicans. Republicans were saying, dragging him to testify in front of Congress saying, oh, you are favoring Democrats, often without much evidence of that. There were also these problems that Facebook didn't want to invest in enough protections to keep things like Russian disinformation out of people's feeds on Facebook. So politics increasingly became a headache for Mark Zuckerberg. And so around 2021 is when we first saw him start to say, you know what, we just don't think that politics belongs on Facebook. So the official line now from Meta, which I did speak to and doing the reporting from my column, their official line is Americans don't want politics on Instagram. They don't want to see politics on Facebook.

But again, that seems like a very short memory for the folks that met at HQ, given what they were saying just a decade ago. So if we're saying, if the data shows us, right, that one in five, as you said, of people get their news, get their politics from Instagram, then talk to us about then what that means in terms of people's education, in terms of is it just outlets like, which you highlighted in your piece whose primary job is to post news and political content, or is it also like person Y who may have a couple of hundred followers, but they say, hey, register to vote here. They're also being suppressed. Is it all the way around? Yeah, really, it does potentially impact everyone. And to get a sense of this, what I did in my column is, So as a tech columnist, I love to do investigations into sort of the secret hidden aspects of the technology in our lives, how they're dig into things like how they're taking our privacy

or how they use our data and where it goes. So in this case, what I wanted to investigate is what actually happens to the account of an Instagram user in this new world where Mark Zuckerberg says that they don't want politics and social issues anymore. To do that, I got some help from this account that maybe listeners, are familiar with. Its name is Mrs. Frazzled, and Mrs. Frazzled is kind of well known in Instagram and on TikTok as well for posting these videos where she uses kind of like a high-pitched teacher voice to parent misbehaving adults usually. Like she'll take the point of view of a bartender

who has like misbehaving patrons at their bar and she'll use this voice. So her stuff is kind of funny. And she's also a teacher. Or I should say she was a teacher. And now she's in graduate school and got two kids and still making this content. So Mrs. Frazzled handed me the keys to her account because I wanted to figure out something. As the election has approached, she has increasingly done some posts and videos about the election. Not all the time, it's not 100% like a politician, but some. And many of her posts and videos are not even particularly partisan. They're just kind of educational.

She said to me, you know, people say like, gosh, I never learned in school about things like rank choice voting or what exactly. gerrymandering is. So she's been making instructional videos even. It's just like, here's the basics of democracy. But she was super frustrating because she noticed that whenever she did her goofy videos, those would go viral. A million people would see those. But whenever she did her stuff about the election, about democracy, it would get crickets. So I went into her account and I ran the numbers and everything she's posted in there over the last six months. And what I found is whenever she posts something related vaguely to politics, the election, social issues, the reach, the number of people who saw what she posted declined about

40%. Wow. But then it gets even crazier than that. So I said, well, are there any like key words? Like, what is the things that she can't say? So I looked at what happened whenever she posted the word vote in one of her captions. And when she did that, her audience dropped more than 60%. So basically fell through the floor. So here we've identified at least one forbidden term according to meta. The new V word, will, is you can't use if you want people to see, to see what you're talking about. And so what was happening behind the scenes is, our listeners might still think of Instagram or Facebook as a place you go to see your friends and see stuff from your friends or people you want to follow. But these days, the reality is most of Instagram, most of Facebook is algorithmically generated recommendations,

right? It's like stuff from like accounts you never heard of before, you never seen before, but they think you'll react to it until they put it into your feet. So what's happening is Instagram is still showing what you post to the people who've already followed you, but they're not going to recommend your post to people who don't already follow you if it involves politics. And that last part is the key, right? Because if you want to get seen on these social networks these days, you've got to get into the algorithm. You've got to get into the system.

But this allows meta to say with a straight face that they're not censoring anybody. Your friends, your followers still get to see what you have to say. But then, of course, they control the reins of the feed and decide what folks get to see. And they decide that, you know, if you post something really interesting about the election that not that many people are going to see it. So where does this then, Jeff, leave creators? You know, you use Taylor Swift as an example, somebody who has 283 million followers and was able to use Instagram, right, to endorse the vice president. But, you know, she's Taylor Swift. So I don't imagine that meta was going to suppress her.

So where does it leave other creators? Does it just have them jumping ship from this platform and going, you know, back into the ocean of apps to find another platform to build on? You know, what do people now need to do? Yeah. Well, in the case of Taylor Swift, again, using the system that I learned about when I did this investigation, She already has 283 million followers. So she did not need to be algorithmically recommended to anybody. So she was able to reach lots of people with her endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Most people are not, however, Taylor Swift. And so we are much more reliant on their algorithmic recommendations to reach a wide audience. And so that's where Meta has left everybody else. You're at the whims of its algorithmic systems and the rules that they put in place about it. But the thing is, they don't tell you exactly what the rules are. So when you ask me, when you said, where does it leave creators? I find when I talk to them, it leaves them in a state of what I would call kind of algorithmic anxiety, right? They do not know when or why something that they post is going to go viral or not.

They don't know what words they can or cannot say. They don't even know what exactly counts as a political or social issue. So, for example, is your post going to be suppressed if you mentioned, Taylor Swift, now that she has become political? Or what about if you mentioned coconuts now that that is a symbol of the Harris campaign? And so this was part of the reason why I wanted to do this investigation. So I went to META with a long list of questions about, okay, explain to me, tell me what words are forbidden. And they refuse to. Really? Yeah. I showed them all the evidence about using the new V word, right, the vote word. They wouldn't even acknowledge that. They would just say, oh, there are many

the different things that go into deciding whether, you know, posts get recommended or not. So they're not being transparent with their users about what is and is not allowed. And in fact, I even asked them to define political and social issues. And their definition of social issues was so broad. It would include basically like large swaths of like the human experience. like that they would just say, you know, you can't be recommended if you talk about. Let me read you the exact way they define social topics. It was, quote, content that identifies a problem that impacts people and is caused by the action or inaction of others, which can include issues like international relations or crime.

Okay. So if you have family that lives in Israel or in Gaza, can you talk? talk about that? Like, is that allowed by the meta rules? Or, okay, let's say you are gay or trans and this is your lived experience. Can you talk about that? Or is that not allowed by them? Again, questions that meta would not answer for me or for their users, that they're really letting down their users. Now, Mark Zuckerberg has a First Amendment right to decide what to promote and not promote on his platforms. This is America. But we don't have a lot of choices left.

You're going to the latter part of your question. You know, creators, places to express yourself that we don't have many places left on the internet. We can do that where we know we at least have our friends or at least have our family members. And that leaves us in a real tough spot that we've created this world where we have so few choices and those choices are controlled by people that can kind of make choices like this. And I think that that, you know, it's so interesting because initially, when social media, when these platforms were created, it was marketed as community, as online

community, as being able to stay in touch with your long loss relatives or, you know, connect better with your college friends that you lock, you know, like all of these things. And then it has built out to be a business model for a lot of independent creators. But then also understanding that you don't own any piece of that, that like your account could be shut down. And all of the work that you put into building up a following to making a living potentially is gone in the blink of an eye. And I think that what we are seeing and thankful for your piece is just the instability of this industry based on the whims of those that are in control. Absolutely.

To your earlier point, there is no regulation that has been at play that allows for transparency for the users and accountability. for the platforms themselves. And so, Jeff, I just have to say, thank you so very much for your research on this because it was incredibly eye-opening. And I know that more people are feeling this, but they thought maybe they were crazy and your piece lets them know, no, it's not just them.

So I just, I want to thank you so much for making the time for the new abnormal and for writing this piece. Folks, again, it is at the Washington Post entitled, Don't Say Vote, How Instagram Hides Your Political Post. Thank you so, so very much. Thank you. Joining me now is someone who says that we all need to stop looking at polls that tell us the presidential race is a toss-up and trust what we see with our own eyes.

And to use a sports metaphor, he says we need to stop overemphasizing computer-driven analytics and actually watch the game. Here to explain what all this means is Denny Carter, founder of Bad Faith Times at bad-faith-times.ghost.io. Denny, thanks so much for being here. I had hoped that since the last time you were on, you would have simplified your web address. But, you know, whatever. We're looking strongly into it. I appreciate you having on again.

Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. So I'm actually afraid of, like, ruining the whole site by changing the URL. I understand. Yeah. Trying to find some computer geeks to help me with that. But yeah, yeah, the best way to go to Google, type in bad faith times,

it'll come up if you want to check it out. But yeah, thanks for having me on. And I have very happy to talk about watching the game, which is something that I have pushed back on in football analytics circles in my full-time job, but I think it is important in politics. So, all right, let's talk about this piece you wrote, which was titled Jimmy Garoppolo, the 2024 election and how I learned to watch the game. For our listeners who may not know, which includes our producer, Jesse Cannon,

explain who Jimmy Garoppolo is. Okay, Jimmy Garoppolo was a 49ers quarterback from like 2014 to 2022, who, you know, by the eye test. Okay, like you turn on the game on Sunday afternoon and you're watching the 49ers and you're saying this guy stinks. Okay. Like, it's clear like he's not good on any level. He's not accurate. He doesn't have a strong arm.

He's not fast. He just, he's not good, right? But you look at the nerdy analytics, okay? Stuff like expected points added and drop back success rate and all of these different ways to measure quarterback performance, right? You look at those every week and who's at the top or near the top, Jimmy Garoppolo, right? he's alongside Patrick Mahomes, he's alongside Joe Burrough, these household names, right? And it made me wonder, like, what's going on here? And I think it gave football analytics honestly a bad rap.

Like, okay, your machines, like your machines are telling us that Jimmy Garapolo is on par with Patrick Mahomes. We reject that. And for a long time, I didn't reject it. But in the end, like I said in the article, I gave up. And I said, yes, Jimmy is probably not that good. Okay. So talk about how this applies to the 2024 election. In this instance, I'm assuming, the computers, the analytics are telling us that this race is roughly 50-50.

It's basically impossible to say who's going to win with any degree of certainty. So this is the equivalent of the football analytics saying Garoppolo was an elite quarterback, right? Yeah. I mean, that's the premise. Yeah. And, you know, my NBC sports colleague, Patrick Dardy, actually introduced this idea. You know, we talk on the phone quite a bit about politics and football, of course, but mostly politics, actually. and he introduced this idea of like watching the game.

Like he's, he was, he was ranting to me. And correctly, about six weeks ago, he was saying, look, every time I see an update about congressional races or Senate races or whatever it is, right, it's always like was solid Republican now a toss up or leaning Democrat, right? And all of these little signals are all over the place. And if you're actually watching the underlying stuff happening, you're wondering, wait a second, you're telling me that this is still a coin. between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

Like, I'm supposed to believe that. And so if you're watching the game, and the game includes, by the way, as you know, as I put in the piece, you know, the rallies. Like, watch these rallies between these two candidates. Now, I know Kamala has sort of calmed that down over the past, I don't know, three or four weeks, doing more like intimate gatherings type stuff. I don't know if I agree with that, but whatever. But the enthusiasm is clearly on her side.

And you would know that if you're watching the people involved in this. this election rather than just staring at spreadsheets and going, oh my God, she's only 0.8% up in Michigan or whatever. So one of the things that you say in the piece is that if you watch the game and what you actually see is a race in which, and I'm going to quote you, you say one candidate is behaving like the favorite and the other is thrashing around like you when you get a calf cramp in the middle of the night. That's right. So, okay, show your work here. Let's start with Kamala Harris. How is she behaving like the favorite?

Yeah, okay, that's a good question. And I'm glad you're making me show my work. I love showing my work. First of all, obviously, I need to hydrate better or I wouldn't get these calf cramps at night. Yes. Now I'm looking into that as well. Yeah, so look, I know like progressives don't like what she's doing right now

where she's on the Liz Cheney World Tour. You know, I don't like that either, okay? I'm not enthused about that. But also, I'm not a normie, okay? And you know who loves that shit? Yeah. Normies love that shit, right? And I know this because I know a lot of Normies in my life who don't really pay attention to politics unless it's an election year. And they're paying attention and they're seeing this and they're telling me, oh my God, this is amazing.

A Republican campaigning with Kamala Harris? This is great. Okay. So this is a favorite. Okay. This is the odds on favorite trying to piece together the last parts of an electorate that can beat Donald Trump after spending two months, honestly, firing up the base. And that's what we liked, right? I was into it. I was more into it when we were having big rallies and the joy and the weirdness

and all this stuff, right? That was cool for me. And so she rallied the progressive base and now she's trying to get the whatever you call them, the undecided voters, the independence, whatever. And I think that's actually not a bad, not a bad idea. Yeah, no, look, I'm with you on this. On the surface, obviously, you're like, who wants to be the party of that Liz Cheney and even worse, Dick Cheney want to support. But I completely agree with you. And also in talking to quote unquote normies, which, by the way, and I don't think you were either, I'm not using as a pejorative at all. No, not at all. I am insanely jealous of what we call normies. But even talking to normies who do follow politics, they do all love this. They think it's absolutely fantastic. And I do think that,

you know, strategically it's a good move. I agree with you here. I think this is a way that she shows that she thinks she's the favorite. She's trying to expand the base or expand the vote. Expand her electorate. And also look at how the candidates are acting in the final stretch here, right? You have Kamala going to Texas to rally folks for Colin Alrid going against Ted Cruz, okay? And I do think that race is actually winnable. I know we're Charlie Brown with the next of stuff and trying to kick the football. But we persist there. She's going to Texas. Trump is going to Florida. He's going to North Carolina. Okay? That's. not a candidate who is in a strong position at all. Okay, if he were in a strong position,

he would be going to Virginia, okay? But Virginia is out of the question. He'll be going to Minnesota. Minnesota's out of the question, right? He's trying desperately to hold on to the states that he absolutely has to win. And she's playing from ahead. I mean, that's clear if you're watching the game. And what about the other things that Trump is doing that make you think he's thrashing around? Talk about his sort of unholy alliance with Elon Musk. Yeah, I think it's a big one. I mean, here's a guy who, you know, I'm old enough to remember when Trump absolutely humiliated Elon Musk in an online post and a site formerly known as Twitter. I mean, just belittling the guy.

And now they're working together so that Elon can, what, like run the federal government if Trump gets elected, something along those lines, right? I'm convinced, honestly, that that's going to fall apart in the most hilarious way possible. You know, Elon recently discovered the state of Pennsylvania. He looked strongly into Pennsylvania. And so he's, you know, and that's good. It's good. It's good when we discover different parts of the map as Americans. But so he's running the get out the vote operation for Trump.

That's desperation. Okay. Giving a million dollars a day to voters, which by the way, he's not doing. But that's neither here nor that. Yes. Does that sound like a candidate who is in the lead to you? I mean, to me it sounds like they're seeing internal data. Okay.

And we've seen internal Republican data that's very bad for Senate candidate. all right? And I know Trump usually runs ahead of those of those candidates, but they see internal data and they're reacting in this way. And I think it should give us a boost. It should give progressives a boost. And look, the other thing is Trump, and you mentioned this in the piece, I mean, his mental decline is so obvious that, as you say, even the New York Times has been forced to talk about it. And they have done everything, as you know, have done everything to not mention that this guy is losing his marbles. I mean, like, he's actually declining, like, seemingly by the day here. But they've had to raise this as an issue after basically New York Times marched Biden out of the race because

he was too old. Now that they have to acknowledge it with Trump, it's too late to do anything about it. But I don't think that that hurts Kamala Harris, the fact that people are seeing media outlets cover, hey, this guy kind of may be losing it a little bit. And I know we're used to Trump being insane. Like, I get that. And it's exhausting. but he has reached, I think, a new level over the past few weeks.

And let's just be honest about what this is. He doesn't want to go to jail. That's what he's facing. This is existential for him. And so, yes, he's reacting like this because he knows he's down. Well, and the other thing that he's doing, or an other thing that he's doing that you talk about is just the constant selling of these cheesy products, whether it's the watches for 100 grand, I think it is, whether it's some kind of Trump,

cryptocurrency or NFTs. There's the sneakers. There's, I mean, he's got selling a MAGA hat with a picture of a MAGA hat on it. And it's just, everything about this is so out there. And I have to think that these so-called undecided voters, who I assume are moderates or whatever, this cannot be winning them over. No, he's squeezing the grift for every last penny. Yeah. Just call it what it is. And honestly, I think that part of the reason you have Republican polling outfits putting out junk data right now and making the race look close is part of that getting as much of the grift as you can operation that Trump has going, right? Because if Trump truthers see, you know, the real numbers, they might not, you know, give their money. They might not buy Trump NFTs. They might not spend thousands of dollars on stupid Trump shit that he's selling, right?

This is about bleeding that base dry before it all falls apart. That's how I interpret it. Let's talk about something you just brought up, which is these Republican pollsters. You wrote another piece that was headline simply, you are being manipulated by bad faith pollsters. Explain this. So I ingest a lot of polling information this time of year, every four years, and it's horrible, right? I mean, do you do this too? I try very much not to. I already have my stomach is bad enough. I don't need to be ingesting polls. Yeah, right, exactly. They don't go down well. No. And so, yeah, I mean, you're just bombarded with all of the. these polling outfits coming out with new numbers, right? And they have big swings like daily,

right? It's like, oh, wait, I thought this poll said Harris was up three yesterday and now she's down two, five-point swing or one day. What happened? Oh, the only thing that happened was Trump talked about Arnold Palmer's hog. Right. That was it. Right? And so what? Are people responding to that? Oh, I love Arnold Palmer's hog. I'm going to vote for him now. I got off base here. But I wrote about all of the junk data that's being put out there by polling firms that honestly have been very clear, brutally clear about their objective, which is to make the race seem tighter than it is. And they've been public about this, actually. So I wanted to point that out, and I wanted to point out that the aggregators, okay, the Nate Silvers of that ilk, are saying, no, no, no, this doesn't matter.

Okay, like, yes, we take in this junk data, but it doesn't affect our model at all. look, I'm not a data scientist, okay? Really, like, truly, I don't know how this works. My suggestion would be, don't take in the junk data. Why are you doing that? Right. Why are you pretending that these are independent, legit polling operations when they're not? Yeah, I mean, look, to go back to like a football equivalency, I guess, it would be like

if you were pulling up fantasy football stats, and as part of the aggregate that you were looking at, it included, like, Kansas City chief fan sites, saying, Patrick Mahomes is going to get you, you know, 28 fantasy points this week. It does just feel like there are so many of these firms out there. And as you say, they're not hiding who they are. You know, they are straight up affiliated with the Republican Party or they are ideologically affiliated with Republicans. That's right. So why are Nate Silver and people like that? Why are they even giving these polls any oxygen? I don't know. And Nate Silver, his goals here are unclear and his funding is very suspect and I feel like, you know, he's embraced the villain role here with the

polling outfit, with his polling situation. I don't want to get bogged down with Nate Silver. I will say that like it affects people. This affects people. It affects the electorate and how we're looking at it, right? Last weekend, the vibes on blue sky were atrocious. I'm talking like worse than I've seen on any social media site in my life, right? Partly because Pennsylvania started to look almost like out of reach for Kamala Harris. It was like Trump plus three, Trump plus five. And you're like, wait, what? What is, what's happening here?

She was up three. She was up four in Pennsylvania last time I looked, right? And here's what happened. Twelve, I mentioned this in the piece, 12 of the 15 polls from Pennsylvania last weekend were released by right-wing outfits. Okay. So, yes, that affects people in the way they look at this race. Yeah, and that leads me to another column you wrote, which was called Stop Pissing Your Pants.

you piss babies. First of all, I'm not pissing my pants. Please don't put in the newspaper that I'm pissing my pants. Same. But what you're talking about here is something that we call doomerism these days. And look, as a Mets fan, I'm very familiar with that mindset. And it's a very prevalent mindset among the Democratic Party and leftists, I guess, in general. And you're saying, basically, stop it. You know who never dooms, who never engages in doomers and Republicans never engaged in doomism. Okay. Republicans always think they're winning. Now, is that smart? Probably not, but I think we need to be more like that. I think we need to project some confidence on the left, right? And in the center or whatever, however you consider yourself, right? Stop. I don't know.

And look, I'm prone to this. I'm prone to it. I've been a dumer for many years. And I decided, about six months ago, I decided I'm not going to be a dumer anymore. And I do think it's a conscious decision. I mean, you really do have to make that choice for yourself. I feel like I'm giving like a seminar right now, but I'm telling you that if I were to leave it to my natural inclinations, I would be dumering all over the timeline right now. I would be, it's over, woe is us, you know, I'm moving to Canada, whatever it is, you know. But no, no, there's a lot of underlying facts and watching the game that you can do to give you confidence and to say, no, we are winning this.

We are going to win this election. And honestly, I don't think it's going to be super close because you have pulling out that's basically scared to undercount the Trump vote. They're terrified of it, right? Because they did it in 2016 and they said never again. I think that they've gone too far and they are not, honestly, it's one thing. They're not counting the biggest development of the past four or five years, which is the Dobbs decision. Okay?

Right. That changes everything. And I think we're going to see that play out on the election day. Yeah, it's weird. I see a lot more, particularly in this past week, it feels like all these articles about how, well, Trump is just performing so well with men, with young men. It's weird that I never see the sort of counterpart to those articles, which is that women seem to despise him. He's losing, yeah, he's losing women of every demographic by huge margins. And the only

thing mainstream media outlets can talk about is the fact that young men are voting for Trump because Elon Musk is also voting for Trump. It's unclear about like exactly why. Also, the data is not really there. I got to say. I got to say. I wrote a piece about like what the zoomers are doing this election. And zoomer men, yes, I mean, they are gravitating a little bit towards Trump. It's not horrifying in the rate of young men who are who are leaning toward Trump. Also, here's the thing, they're not going to vote. Okay. Let's just be honest about it. Like some bro, okay, in a swing state who's like, oh yeah, love Trump. He tells it like he's not voting. He's not voting. He's not voting. Too many video games to play. You kidding me?

All right. Well, I'm going to end it with. your cheap shot at zoomers. So yeah, Zoomers who are mad, you can find Denny on Blue Sky. And you should head over to Bad Faith Times and read his stuff. It's really interesting. And I have to say it has made me sort of put my also natural inclination towards dumerism at least a little bit in check. So I appreciate that. Denny, thanks so much for being here. That's great to hear. Yeah, thanks for having me. Danielle Moody. Andy Levy. Danielle, let's see if we can can make it out of this week safely. Who's your fuck that guy?

I'm basically crawling out of this week, so, and I'm doing so on the hooves of Mitch McConnell. You know, Mitch McConnell, we haven't talked about him enough over the last several months, because he is actually, aside from Merrick Garland, one of the major reasons that we're here in this moment. And so one can only call his recent comment. coming out of an upcoming biography, fucking audacious. And here is what Mitch McConnell has said. Quote, the MAGA movement is completely wrong

and that Ronald Reagan, quote, wouldn't recognize the party today. He said, quote, Trump is appealing to people who haven't been as successful as other people and providing an excuse for that, that these more successful people have somehow been cheated

and you don't deserve to think of yourself as less successful because things haven't been fair. He has called Donald Trump erratic and said all types of things in this upcoming biography. But you know what he didn't do? Vote to impeach Donald Trump. Do you know what he didn't do? Get his party behind impeaching Donald Trump so that the Republican Party could have potentially moved on. And the country could have moved on. from Donald Trump. So once again, these people out here wanting to sell books and in the process

selling the country out and our democracy out with it. Mitch McConnell stood on the House floor after the insurrection, after those insurrectionists, terrorists were removed from the Capitol building, blamed Donald Trump for what had happened. And then a couple of days later would completely backtrack. This man should go down in history as such a piece of shit. Just such a terrible human being. From his Obama will be one term to his sycophantic following of Donald Trump. So for that reason, Mitch McConnell this week, he can go take that biography, you know, because I, you know, he can take it and shove it. Fuck that guy. You mentioned all those things that he didn't do, you didn't mention the one thing that he has done, and that is endorsed Donald Trump

for president in 2024. So it's like, again, yeah, I know a lot of this stuff is coming out now, and it's stuff that he said back in 2020, 2021, 2022. But the fact of the matter is, you knew what Donald Trump was, and you still know what Donald Trump is, and you sat up there and you endorsed him. You endorsed him to be president of the United States again, after saying that Trump is stupid as well as being ill-tempered, after saying that he's not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about every quality you would not want somebody to have. You endorsed him.

So, yeah, fuck that guy forever. So, Andy, how are you coming up out of this week with your fuck that guy? So I have a first timer. Oh. I guess he's a virgin. to fuck that guy. And it is a man named Patrick Sunshung, who, if you're not familiar with him, as most people probably aren't, and honestly, I barely knew who he was last week. He is the owner of the Los Angeles Times. He bought the Los Angeles Times for a half a billion dollars back in

2018. A couple weeks ago, the LA Times was set to endorse Kamala Harris for president. And Patrick Su-Sung, the owner, informed the editorial board that, no, they would not be endorsing Kamala Harris, and that, in fact, they would not be making an endorsement for president. Which, by the way, an endorsement for president is something they have done pretty much every four years going back. I don't even know how far. So he completely blocked the content of the newspaper he owned, which, of course, then allowed Trump's rapid response team to put out an email saying, in Kamala's own home state, the Los Angeles Times has declined to endorse the Harris Wall's ticket despite endorsing the Democrat nominees in every election for decades. Of course, that was going to happen. If Shusong didn't know that was going to happen,

he's an absolute moron, but I suspect he did know that was going to happen, and he's totally fine with that happening. He has said things in favor of Trump before. So I want to shout out Mariel Garza, who was the editorials editor of the Times. She resigned over this. And she told the Columbia Journalism Review, she said, I'm resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent. In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I'm standing up. Obviously, good for her. And I'm sorry she lost her job. And I hope she finds another one quickly. But we throw the word oligarchy around a lot in addition to fascism. And the two go hand in hand. And we see this with Elon Musk.

And we see it with a lot of the other tech pros, the Mark Andresens of the world, Bill Ackman. And we see it here with another ultra-rich guy who has decided that because he owns the newspaper, that he supersedes the editorial board. I can't overstate how dangerous this is to a free and democratic country because it just slides us further into this sort of fascist realm. where a lot of the media is propaganda and, you know, and looks out for the regime and has the interests of the regime at heart. So I didn't expect to have a first timer this close to the election because there's so many usual suspects who are out there just be clowning themselves, but I had to do it. So Patrick Sunshung, you get a huge fuck that guy from me. This is how the fourth estate falls.

So, bravo to him for being an absolute total punk. And shout out to Mariel Garza for taking a stand. We need more people to take a stand when they know that their institutions are absolutely and completely fucking flawed. Fuck that guy. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder.

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