The Daily Beast Podcast - Donald Trump’s Latest Clinton Conspiracy About BleachBit and Hillary’s Emails Is a Total Trip

Episode Date: March 17, 2024

Donald Trump’s unfounded new claim that Hillary Clinton used acid to delete her emails shows the former president doesn’t quite grasp how the BleachBit software program works. Plus! Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman join The New Abnormal to talk about their New York Times best-selling book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

We thank you so much for being here. Today we have extra special guests with Tom Schauer and Paul Waldman. We're the co-authors of the new book, White Rural Rage, The Threat to American Democracy. And they'll tell us all about that book. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. Clips.

All right, so Dementia J. Trump, he's at it again. And this time he's writing senile fan fiction for the Clinton White House, which is really studding since I thought after all these years of suicides and heart attack guns, we aren't getting any new material. Kind of like Twilight novels, just dying out. Maybe they'd have to remake something. I was wrong because Dementia J. Trump's here with an entry into the canon. It's egregious what he did.

But by the way, they released Hillary Clinton. She hammered her phones. She used all sorts of acid test. and everything else they call it bleach bit, but it's essentially acid that will destroy everything, you know, within 10 miles. I mean, what she did was unbelievable. Nothing happens to her. Nothing happens to Bill Clinton.

He took it out in a socks. You know, it was the famous socks case, which he actually ended up winning. Now, when he says acid, what is he on exactly, you think? I think we learned from that pharmacy. It's a lot of adophinal. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Where does he get this shit? Bleach bit is software. Just so we're clear on this, Bleach bit is a software program to delete emails. It is not acid. It is not acid. It's not bleach. It's not shrooms.

And he says this shit and people nod. And I will bet you money, the majority of people in America, think that Hillary Clinton personally took out a jug of acid and poured it on the servers. By the way, I'm not defending what Clinton did. I think what she did was wrong. Yes.

But get the facts right. Like, stop saying it's acid and now it's acid that could take out a 10 block radius or whatever. So it's a nuclear acid. It's a software program you download. Oh, my God. Andy, are you sure? I am very sure.

Oh, okay. It is an open source cross-platform software program, Danielle. So there. I'm not so sure. I, you know, this is, like, I don't know if you remember, but like Donald Trump is also a doctor as well as a tech wizard because. He told us about the bleach in COVID, and look how well that turned out. I know.

So this has to be true and right. I know. Guys, I got sad news, though. Like, when he hears this stuff around the obelette station at Mar-a-Lago, that's like person paid, there's no fact checkers at the omelette station. I know. It's not even a great program. It's a kind of program that a person would download to just wipe out some old emails to

save up storage space and stuff like that. It's not something that you would do if you're trying to. to, there are much stronger deletion programs. Like if you're really trying to just wipe shit clean so it can't be recovered, it's the whole thing is so stupid and he's so stupid and I'm sick of his stupidity. And I'm sick of Jesse making me listen to his stupidity. But Danielle is still on my good side. Thank you.

Well, you know, I don't need to be liked to rule. I don't need to be lectible. He's trapped, guys. He would rather be feared. He would rather be feared. And he is. by the way. Unfortunately, your complaint was stupidity.

And we now have who I think is the underdog for the stupidest person in Congress that we don't discuss enough. One representative of victorious sparts went on Maria Bartramo's Fox Business Show to do her side gig of punditry. And I've heard many stories of stappers keeping their bosses off of TV because they don't like what they say. They make the congressional phones go wild. But I employ her staff to learn what techniques they're using for that because they're She'd keep her away from the TV. I should say she's talking about Robert Herr here. Are you of the mind that he should have pressed charges?

Well, listen, these people are con artists. They're very good at presentations. But it's unfortunate what he did. I mean, one thing, yeah, he can claim that, you know, Biden probably does have real serious memory problems because he could even see from the recording interviews of his ghost writer. But he definitely understood his memory is not that bad, not to understand he was retaining and disclosing classified information. That was very obvious.

And for the Department of Justice not to press this charges and, you know, a special prosecutor. So I think that is really unfortunate special counsel should have done that, but I'll tell you, Department of Justice being covered up, now Biden and Clinton family for a very long time. They have a significant double standard

and two-tier system of justice. And unfortunately, they didn't do it. Okay, we'll leave it there. I have thoughts. Go ahead with your thoughts and then I'll have my thoughts. Okay. First of all, she's lying. There is no evidence whatsoever that Joe Biden was disclosing classified information. What there is evidence of is that he had classified information in his possession somewhere in storage unknowingly. And as soon as he became aware of it, they contacted the Department of Justice to return it. the exact opposite of what Trump did.

And I also, I just, I don't normally go after people's appearances, but I want to say, if you want to talk, I mean, Trump keeps talking about Hillary Clinton using bleach and everything. You want to see some bleach girl? Look at Victoria Sparts his hair. Oh, man, that was good. And that's all I have to say on the matter. That was so good. I really have little to add other than the hypocrisy is just so wild to me.

So you want Biden to be investigated on the very thing that Donald Trump is being investigated for. You want presidents to have full and complete immunity, but you want Biden prosecuted. Like, which fucking one is it? I honestly, and like, again, ask them the questions. Which one is it? Should presidents have full and complete immunity being able to do whatever they want, which means that then in turn, your witch hunt over Joe Biden, which you've been doing, an investigation into him and to Hunter for years now has turned up with nothing. So either president should be immune and be able to do whatever the hell that they want.

And there should be no prosecution whatsoever. Or they should be investigated and prosecuted. And there's all of these coverups. You cannot have it both ways. The thing that depressed me is, so on my former podcast, I also did for the Daily Beast, fever dreams. We would discuss the epoch times often, which is a. newspaper that is propaganda that they intentionally hand out to people that they deem

not educated, they go into areas specifically where they find that and they try to put it out for free. This whole theory came from that. And it's really something when our representatives are reading the propaganda, but also not getting that it's propaganda and thinking it's true because that's definitely the case with this one. Yeah, 100%. I forget what it was.

We talked about her like once before. Yes, on this, yes. And you're right. She is definitely in the running. She's sort of low-key, one of the stupider members of Congress. Well, we got another one. Of course. Now we come to Representative Nancy Mace, who's a craven liar, desperate with Pick Me Energy for Trump to pick her as VP. And this week, she had a dust up with George Stephanopoulos that she was widely ridiculed for. But funny enough, she had another one after she embarrassed herself with that, where CNN's Manu Raja caught her in her usual eyes. opposition is that why you opposed it? No, I've been against this from the very beginning before anyone else weighed in. I was against, if libertarian in me, it's not the role of government to ban apps from the apps or nowhere in our Constitution. Does it say that?

But, you know, the Chinese are using it to spy on Americans and the algorithm, what they're doing to our culture and society, and spying on our data is wrong. And we need to get to the bottom of it. We should ban it from all government devices. That should be step one. Mm-hmm. Well, whatever Trump does, these people have to agree with now. Yeah, I mean, it would be interesting to see if she switches on that. I don't know.

If you want to ban TikTok from government devices, I guess I could see an argument for that. I mean, I think all social media should be banned from government devices. That would save us a lot of trouble. That's fair. It's a really interesting thing that I've been thinking about, though, a lot this week of that. You could point to so many times that Trump has switched once somebody donates to him. there was recently on Kaiser Bush. But it's so funny because then the tail of the dog is wagged

because all of these sycophants then have to go his way. And you saw it with the votes this week. Yeah, absolutely. There is no clearer way to say that Donald Trump is a two-bit grifting hooker for sale. Like, I just don't know what else to say. Like, he goes where the money is. And all of these fucking sheep follow behind him. him. So he goes to, you know, he goes in one direction. They're like, yeah, ban TikTok. Ah, the Chinese are

terrible. And then he gets some money out of the table. And then he's like, oh, well, you know, actually, I think that TikTok is a great. It's just like, what? Just follow the fucking money. And these people look like fucking idiots. Yeah. They look like idiots. He is making you look stupid. But y'all keep playing along. Yeah. I just, it's, it's wild. Like, I don't think, Nancy Mace is stupid in the way that Victoria Sparks is. I think Nancy Mace just has no soul. Yes. She's stupid in the way that she does very poor miscalculations, and this is going to be one of

them, but not in the same way as Victoria Sparks, which is just, we should get that one in the lab. The lab is full, Jesse. There's a waiting list. Yeah, we need to raise more money because the lab is full. I'm a big proponent of government grants. I'm with this. Come on.

Okay. Okay, well, finally, more stupid. We now have Fox's Laura Ingram talking TikTok, and the girls are fighting because she's going to come for her ally and fascism, Marjorie Taylor Green. The arguments against it got more, let's say, creative, I would say, as the House debate wore on. If we wanted to be serious about stopping China,

we would stop China from buying our U.S. farmland. We would raise up our American energy independence. And if we cared about Americans' data, then we would stop the sale of Americans' data universally, not just with China. Okay, farmland. I'm losing that caboose of thought there. God bless her. Why is it so hard for some to grasp that China is a unique threat to the United States? Hmm. Now, did she say this before Trump switched his opinion? Marjorie's speeches after Trump switched his opinion. No, I mean, but Laura Ingram.

Yeah, she says this after. Oh. She apparently was not lobbied by Kelly Ann. Interesting. Maybe she missed an email. Well, Kelly Ann's running around giving the donation dollars from these people out. And, you know, Laura, she's not of the donation business. Huh.

Incredible. I just continue to laugh that they found the most soulless person on earth to lobby for TikTok going, oh, she'll do anything. She'll reverse course on one. what all of them were saying in an instant. We got the right one. By the way, I actually got a little curious about the farmland thing. So I just looked it up as we were talking. And the total amount of U.S. agricultural land owned by Chinese interests is less than

three hundredths of one percent. Well, many people are saying. Chinese buyers own fewer than 1,400 acres. We have 1.3 billion acres of agricultural land in America. This is from NBC News. Folks, I am very excited to welcome to the new abnormal. The authors of the new book, White Rural Rage, The Threat to American Democracy, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman.

Tom and Paul, hell of a title. Bravo on that. And I saw you guys, as I was saying before, on your first media appearance on Morning Joe. And for the first time, I think, since, you know, a friend of mine and also a friend of the show, Dr. Jonathan Metzell wrote the book Dying of Whiteness. It was the first time that I since then agreed with authors

on where I think the problem is and why we have ignored one of the core issues in America. So I wanted to ask you both first, talk to us about white rural rage. Why do you both see this, see it as enough of a threat to democracy that you were like, we need to write a book about this, as a columnist, as political scientists, like, why do you think that this is so important? And Tom, I'll go to you and then, Paul. Well, we think that the country is at a point of existential crisis.

Other people's mileage may vary. We saw the constitutional guardrails in 2020 hold, but very barely. We had a domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol after the losing candidate and his supporters falsely claimed that an election that they were trying to steal was being stolen from them, in conspiracy theories and antagonizing of some of the worst instincts of some of the Trump MAGA base. So I don't think anybody's going to dispute the fact that our democracy is in trouble. And the fact of the matter is it's easy to just say, well, the threat is coming from Trump

and his MAGA followers. And on the broadest sense, that's certainly true. But that requires us to look a little bit more closely at who comprises that movement. And nobody would assert, because it would be utterly untrue, that the threats to democracy, are coming in equal measure from every corner of the country. And when you look closer at the Trump base, it's disproportionately white and it's disproportionately rural and therefore white and rural. Now, we never say in the book that every white rural American has abandoned democracy and it calls for violence and has racist or xenophobic attitudes or traffics in, you know,

crazy conspiracy series. We also don't say it's limited to white rural America. There are plenty of Trump supporters, a majority of Trump supporters, live outside rural America because the majority of Americans, 80% don't live in rural America, and 85% if you count rural minorities. Rural whites are only about 15%. That's not enough to elect a president. So it's not unique to white rural America and it's not exclusive to every single white rural American. But what we show in poll after poll, and we use very careful and superlative language, most likely to agree with this, least likely to support that, highest rate of support for this, lowest rate in agreeing with that. We use superlative language.

where it applies. We also provide comparative statistics. So if we say the Trevor Project shows that 49% of rural youth say that their communities are hostile to LBGTQ people, we don't just throw that statistic out alone. We put in the fact that about a quarter of people in the suburbs in the cities also say that. But it's a two to one ratio. And we're very careful. We don't say, again, it's everybody and it's limited to just white rural American. And the fact of the matter is on poll after poll and on peer-reviewed studies and not just university polls, as our critics are saying, university peer-reviewed articles of the American National Election Study and the Cooperative Election Study, these are tens of thousands of respondents in some cases, show that the sort of

tip of the spear, the leading edge of the MAGA movement is white and rural, and we think it needs to be said, and we have seen the backlash to even daring to say it. I was going to say, and Paul, I want you to be able to jump in here because the backlash has been swift. And from the critiques on your sample sizes with regard to the polls and the data that you have run, but also this idea that essentially, how dare you? How dare you categorize a whole group of people, a geographic set as being rageful, which, and I will tell you that as a black queer woman, I'm like, it's about fucking time. Because I don't know how often black people, queer people, brown people, Muslims, every marginalized group is lumped into whatever statistics and stereotypes

that the mainstream want to put up. But when you do that with white Americans, with white rural Americans, somehow you're off the mark. So Paul, I want you to speak to the criticisms and the backlash that the book has been receiving. Yeah, well, we've been getting it from a couple of different areas. As Tom says, some of the academic critics who have attacked the book, they have some methodological critiques about some of the, you know, many dozens and dozens of polls and academic studies that we cite that other people conducted. And, you know, some of those points may have some validity, yes,

in this survey, maybe the subsamples are not all that big. But the thing that I think that gets them the most unhappy is that they don't like to talk about, this. Even when their own data show that there are, for instance, more racist attitudes among white rural people, you can find it in their work, in their own data, but they always downplay it. They use euphemisms to talk about it. They are really, really reluctant to say anything that might reflect too poorly on white rural Americans. That's one aspect of it. The other aspect, though, is the right-wing critics. And this is something that, frankly, I get a little worked up about because they're attacking us saying, oh, you know, we hate all rural Americans. And we're so

so vicious and so elitist. So we're getting attacked by people like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk, Dan Bongino, and other Fox News pundits. But, you know, tell me something. When was the last time you heard Steve Bannon talk about the fact that 200 hospitals in rural America have closed over the last 20 years? And access to health care is an absolute crisis in rural areas. When was the last time that you heard Charlie Kirk talk about the issues of rural brain drain and young people not finding enough economic opportunities and feeling like they have to move out of the places where they live. And older people telling pollsters 60% say they'd advise young people to leave their communities. When was the last time you heard Dan Bongino talk about the fact that drug companies poured opioids into rural communities targeting them for addiction? And now the Republicans in those states are underfunding the treatment programs people need to deal with the problems that they have that are so horrifying.

These people don't give a damn about what happens in rural America. We talk about all those issues in our book. There is more concern for rural Americans in our book, White Rural Race, than there is in a decade of right-wing podcasts and Fox News segments. These people, the only thing they want is to get rural white people to be in rural. raged and resentful and to keep operating within a political paradigm that says that they should not demand any accountability from the people they are actually electing. They should point to the cities and to Black Lives Matter and to coastal elitists like Tom and me and say those people are the cause of your problems and not the people you are actually electing because in so many rural areas,

every single person representing those people from United States Senator through their congressmen, they're members of the legislature, all the way down a dog catcher. They're all Republicans. And never is anyone saying, what are you guys doing to actually improve our communities and to solve these profound, deep problems that we have? All of rural politics that the right wants is just about anger and resentment. And it's never about solving problems. So that's my response to those critics. Yeah. I think that what is really important about all of the things that you both have laid out is the fact that what we've never discussed, and this is historical, this is going back to seating Jim Crow to, you know, to the South after the Civil War and just saying, okay, we'll halt reconstruction

that lasted all of 12 years that sought to equalize this very unequal, harsh and violent, racial environment that had been created because of slavery. And we'll capitulate to the Southerners will capitulate because we're afraid. And, you know, and I think that what is true about, you know, not unlike the South post the Civil War to Maga now is that we have not had real conversations about the roots of the rage. Because racism is something that we have wanted to shrug off and not pay attention to and say that racism is only a problem for those black and brown people that are complaining over there. But it is at the root of all of our politics. To that point, Mitch McConnell is retiring from Kentucky. Kentucky is in the bottom metrics

of everything that you would deem to be a healthy, good environment to raise children in and to have a job. Their education is in the bottom percentile. Their health care is in the bottom percentile. And yet they continue to elect these people. So talk to us, Tom, about the why of it. The why we don't do enough research into, and again, the research is different. I'm not talking about going to fucking diners and sitting down in a flannel sweatshirt and talking to white people about like, why are you so sad? But I'm saying, why is the investigation into the rage and the racism something that even when the FBI was getting reports of the rise in white nationalism, they bury that report? Why don't we investigate? Well, first of all, you're right about DHS and FBI.

putting out reports stating that the large, the biggest domestic terrorist threat in the country is white nationalism. And subset of that is white Christian nationalism, of course. And the Trump administration watered down those reports a little bit, but it was hard to get around the conclusions. And the data is very clear about who the domestic terrorists is. And by the way, just as a side point, and Paul and I argued about this, about our language, because we wanted to be precise. I made the claim after looking it up in Chapter 18, Section 113B, subsection 2331, sub-subsection in 5A, B, and C, where it defines domestic terrorism that what happened on January 6th was a domestic terrorist attack because it meets the three criteria.

And I encourage anybody to look that up in the federal code. And so what you see when you say, okay, it can be an insurrection as well, when you see people saying it's a protest or a riot, and certainly if they say it's a, it's just a rally or a tour of the Capitol, they are whitewashing, so to speak, what happened on January 6. Now, let's be very clear. We don't say in the book that rural white people are overrepresented in the actual people who are on Capitol Hill. We know that's not true. They were actually slightly underrepresented.

And that might be about economic means and the ability to get to Washington for the domestic terrorist attack. But we do know from Chicago's project on security threats run by Robert Pate that 30% of the people who agree with, and this is his definition, insurrectionist attitudes. They believe that A, the election was stolen from Trump and or B, that Trump should be restored to office. by force, that's the language in the poll, come from rural areas. Now, only 20% of America is rural, and only 15% of it is white in rural. And if you assume that most of the people that agree with that insurrectionist sentiment and that profile, again, created by C-post at University of Chicago, they're 15% of the country, but they're 30% of the insurrectionist attitude people. And so they're twice as represented. And we point this out in the book, and some of our critics

point out and say, well, they weren't in equal or disproportionate share on Capitol Hill. And again, that is true, but they're cheering from the sidelines at a higher rate than their share of the population. And this is an act of domestic terrorism that, you know, injured more than 150 police officers. And they talk a lot about back the blue. To your other point, I mean, actually Kentucky's doing a little bit better than Tennessee. And we talk about this in the books. I'm not trying to correct you. But that's because Kentucky adopted Obamacare.

They didn't call it Obama. That's right. So I would suggest you use Tennessee, which is one of the 10 states that still has it, or Texas, that still hasn't adopted the Medicaid expansion. and Jonathan Metzell points this out in his book that Tennessee is doing worse. I think maybe you misremembered it. Tennessee is doing worse than Kentucky, as bad as it is in Kentucky, because at least Kentucky adopted Obamacare. It brought the uninsurance rates. It brought the mortality rates, by the way, for babies and moms from the pro-life party.

It brought up life expectancies compared to its neighboring state Tennessee. Texas actually has the worst health care metrics. They have 254 counties. The vast majority of them are rural, 40-some out of them are rural Latino majority counties. But the vast majority of those rural 254 counties are rural white counties. And Ted Cruz doesn't care about that. He's not doing anything to solve that. All he's doing and going on TV saying, my pronouns are kiss my ass because he wants to

sell rage to get reelected and donations and volunteers. And he doesn't want to actually solve any problems. And so the people who have created this rage through ignoring it, and we can blame the Democrats a little bit, and we do, is the Republicans they elect aren't trying to solve any of those problems because the rage fuels their political agenda. It fills their campaign coffers. It fills their votes at Election Day and it fills their campaign ranks every two, every four years. To get to your point about why people don't want to talk about this, we talk in the book about white rural Americans having a kind of privileged place in the culture.

Now, they will say that they feel like they are often demeaned in popular culture and disregarded. And there are ways in which that's true. You know, we all know about all these epithets we have hillbilly and redneck and yokel and all of that. But it's also true that there is a kind of reverend. for white rural people that goes throughout popular culture and political culture. You know, we all know about those Lifetime and Hallmark movies that are all about how life is better in small towns. And that's where you can find a nice hunky man and ditch your no good boyfriend back in this city. And all the country music songs about, you know, dirt roads and pickup trucks and how wonderful life in rural America is.

And there is this political idea that gets constantly repeated that people in rural America, those are the real. Americans. They have the small town values and we need to bring those small town values to Washington. And that's where you can find people who are honest and true, the Americans who are more profoundly American than the rest of us. And that is something that goes across both parties. You will never hear even a Democrat from a city say that we need big city values in Washington. Like I've never heard a Democrat say that. You can make a case for that, that cities are places that are dynamic and diverse and always changing and that dealing with that and understanding it gives you some skills that might be applicable in making laws nobody ever says that and by the way paul made this case in the

washington post and guess who attacked him tell him paul i know you don't want to talk about yourself but i want to tap my coffee tell them the story so when dug bergum the governor of north dakota ran for president he put out these videos all about how his small town values or what the country needed and that was the basis of his campaign and i wrote a column saying maybe big city values are actually valuable too and A couple days later, they put out a fundraising email with my column in it, and the title of it was, they hate rural America. And that is the message that people get sent all the time, that if anybody questions the kind of elevated status of rural Americans, then they must just hate you. And that's more reason why you have to marinate in resentment and anger and never ask what your own politicians are doing to improve your lives. I mean, it's just, I will say this to the both of you.

It is just extraordinary. It's extraordinary the kid gloves that white rural Americans are handled with. It's incredible the amount of detachment that they have from reality with regard to the fact that up and down the tickets, like you said, they have Republican representation. And yet, like, their lives are no better for it. So it never occurs to them. Maybe we should try somebody else or something else because this isn't working, but that blame is just enough, apparently. Tell us what in your mind, how should Democrats use this in 2024? Well, you know, one of the things we say near the end of the book is that rural Americans don't

necessarily need to vote for Democrats. At the very least, they need to get themselves better Republicans. But there are a lot of Democrats and progressive activists who are out in rural America doing what is really, really hard work to try to organize people, to get people to think in a different way. And Democrats are always told that you need to show up, you need to listen, you need to be respectful, and that's the only way to get people in rural America to consider voting for you. And that is certainly true, but it's not enough. And there's a lot of Democrats who have done that

and have still failed. So yes, they need to show rural people that they understand what their lives are like. But I think they also need to make a negative case against Republicans. And that's, I think, what is often missing when Democrats are so careful to tiptoe around rural voters. Just want to say, you know, I get you. And I'm here for you. I understand. I'm I'll listen to you. But they haven't done enough to make the negative case against the people who are actually representing those voters. And that, I think, is the missing piece in Democrats' approach to rural America is they have to go harder.

They have to go in and say to those people, why aren't you holding your own politicians that you keep electing year after year after year accountable for all of these deep profound problems that are affecting your community? They are not helping you. And you need to force them to do it or nothing is going to change. I want to thank the both of you, Tom and Paul, one, for writing this book. And you know what? And taking the criticism and pushing back on it because I think that the topic is important. I think that it's necessary not just in an election cycle, but in how we want to see this country moving forward. Folks, the book is white rural rage, the threat to American democracy. Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. Thank you both so much. Appreciate you. Great to be here. Thank you, Danielle. Cheers.

Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the next. 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. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts.

as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.