The Daily Beast Podcast - Dope Fiend For The Dow Jones

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

On the first episode of The New Abnormal by The Daily Beast, Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast talk Trump, Tiger King, and why asking grandma to die for the sake of the stock market may not be the wisest political move. Then Rick and Molly chat with The Beast's Will Sommer, who's been talking with lots of anti-lockdown protesters. Weirdly, they're obsessed with Bill Gates ... and motorboats?! Take a listen as they try to make sense of this world gone haywire.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, this is Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly Chang Fass, novelist, an editor at large at The Daily Beast, and the person who tells Rick not to tweet the things he wants to tweet. I'm an editor at large at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. The new abnormal is about one nation under a pandemic and how it's changing all of us. We'll talk about what's happening in the country and the culture and look at good and bad people, leaders, and ideas. Molly and I come from very different political worlds. But what brings us together is that we both love America and we realize that putting our country over party and ideas over ideology might be the only thing that gets us through this. We'll be joined by smart guests from politics, media, culture,

medicine, and science. I'll also try to keep writ to the minimum number of curse words and try to keep our pets and other wildlife sounds from invading our respective bunkers. Molly, don't you think part of this is just that, you know, Trump always likes to have a bad guy. He always likes to have an enemy. He always likes to have somebody that he can point at. But Trump wants his base to have a monster without a face in some ways. He wants it to be, you know, some sort of idea that it's socialism or it's... The squad.

Or the squad or Islam or caravan or something like that. That's where he gets super comfortable in sort of revving up all this, you know, completely lunatic rhetoric. And he tries to brand people with his stupid nickname. and things like that. I just don't understand why he can't use Nancy Pelosi or he's just sort of worked through Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters and the squad. Well, attacking them doesn't do much more for him. Those people are already so maxed out on the hate on the Republican side that there's like

diminishing returns. My contention is on the one hand, like I said, he likes a faceless enemy, a caravan, the mysterious Chinese Wuhan lab that released the virus, all these things. But his origins as a guy who grew up in the New York tabloid culture always bring him back to like these petty fights with individuals and trying to name call people and trying to get into these page six style spats with people. That's always where his instinct leads him in the end. It's not really to his advantage a lot of the time lately because in a time of peace and prosperity, it's kind of fun to watch President Jackass do his thing. But right now there's over 42,000 dead people who didn't have to be that way. And a lot of Americans, you know, they're grading Trump pretty sternly on his poor handling of this.

And he always likes to make up an enemy. But in this case, he ought to look in the mirror because the enemy of his numbers right now is Donald Trump. I also think that those two-hour grievance sessions are not serving him anymore. But the thing, but those, I feel like they used to help him. And all of a sudden, they've started really backfiring on him. Well, and you can always tell when he knows some bad news is coming the next. day, because he's exceptionally pissy and defensive and snapish. On days he thinks he's going to have a good story coming. He's bantering a lot more, praising his team. But on the days that something bad is coming

the next day, who, he is pissy. But it's interesting to me, like, what constitutes, he's had so many bad stories written about him. He's such a disaster. Why does he think one more article in the New York Times, The Washington Post is going to move the needle? Wall Street. And he's also afraid, there's a level he's also very scared about. And that level is that he recognizes the fragility and the small nature of his coalition. He knows that the hard nut of the old Republican Party was about 30%. Like you couldn't break them no matter what. And now the hard nut of the Republican Party is 26, 28%. And in the key electoral college swing states, that is going to be a very close run operation. It is not going to go easy. And he's worried that there are going to be things where there's so few degrees of separation

from the tragedy caused by COVID that you're going to have that suburban woman who's maybe going to vote for Trump and doesn't love Joe Biden, but her grandmother died or her coworker died, or her husband's in the hospital, or she thought she could go back to work right away, and all of a sudden, two weeks later, there's another bump in the numbers. Well, I also think the reason that Joe Biden is so dangerous for Trump is the, are these numbers that these Bernie numbers where Bernie won much, did much better against Hillary than he did against Joe Biden. And I think that the, I think, well, I mean, there's two factors there. One, the Bernie magic was kind of fading away.

But secondly, Joe Biden scans in a way that, look, back in the old days, when we were trying to run against Barack Obama, both in 2008 and in 12, we threw everything against the wall on the guy. He's a socialist. He's a, he's a communist. He was educated by Bill Ayers, all this stuff. right? But Obama scanned to voters, and I sat in a dozen focus groups and watched them tell me, oh, he seems like a modern guy, kind of like him, he's a good dude. And you couldn't break it. Okay, you couldn't break it. Yeah. And with Joe Biden, they believe that there is a fundamental

decency to Joe Biden. They may think he's goofy. They may think he's, you know, a little bit of an odd ball. They think he tells wacky anecdotes. But a lot of voters don't think Joe Biden has malice. And a lot of voters do the majority, a good solid majority, think that Donald Trump is corrupt and mendacious and does have a degree of cruelty in him. And that, like I said, that idea that the president can be nasty and transgressive and a dick, it kind of plays when there's peace and prosperity. It doesn't play when we're in the Great Depression, part two. We're in a situation where we don't know how this disease is going to play out and how many people are going to die, that suddenly gives more serious to voters.

It's hard to sell, we're going to kill your grandma, to voters. I mean, I don't know how you do that. But don't you think they should be willing to die for the Dow Jones? For a slight bump in the Dow Jones. If Wall Street needs a little bit of juice, why shouldn't Granny take the long dirt nap? I mean, come on, Molly. You're such a snowflake. It's very selfish of us to want our grandparents to live.

I do think it is interesting to me. He has such a like, Trump has such a limited knowledge of economics that it's not even that he wants and of the economy of the whole. It's not even that he wants the fundamentals of the economy to be strong. He just wants the Dow to go up 100 points. Like, it's, you know, he's like a dope fiend when it comes to the Dow. Dope fiend was one of my grandmother's favorite phrases. It's true, though. And it's true.

He chases the dragon. all the time. He wants to go out and say, It was the greatest stock market you've ever had. Thank me. Thank me. Right. And it's not even... Yeah. It's really strange. We're delighted to have a very special guest for our first show is Will Summer from The Daily Beast. And Will has a fantastic beat with The Beast. And he covers some of the edges and the extremes of the Trump movement, the alt-right, the conspiracy universe. And we're so happy to have you

with us today, Will. And I wanted to bring up a... a piece, Will, that you did last week for The Beast on the conspiracy theories around Bill Gates and the coronavirus and COVID-19 will lead us into some of the stuff you're covering now and some other things that are very much apropos to the conspiracy elements of Trump world. So thanks so much for joining us and welcome. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm so excited about the podcast. So this is a real treat. So you were at a piece last week about some of the conspiracy theories the Trump world and the Maga world have about Bill Gates. Can you just run us down on that a little bit? You know, there are really so many conspiracy theories going on surrounding the coronavirus. You know, I mean, it's almost daily, as I'm sure a lot of people have experienced that, you know, whether it's people claiming that the death count is overstated, stuff like that. But really, a lot of it centers on Bill Gates, strangely enough. I think if people are seeing these sort of anti-shutdown, anti-social distancing protests, you'll see Bill Gates's name on a lot of protest signs, which can be a little confusing. But basically, people have taken these statements he's made, like in the past he's. He's said vaccines help with overpopulation, with the idea being that people can plan their families better. And so that's kind of been spun into this idea that vaccines are meant to kill people. And of course, he's put, you know, he's committed like $100 million of his own money to fighting the coronavirus. And so naturally, you know, as with anything, any conspiracy theory,

often the people who are trying to help become the targets of the conspiracy theories. This has gotten to the point where people like Diamond and Silk and Laura Ingram are claiming that Bill Gates wants to install tracking devices on people. So, I mean, it is really, really spun out of control. Would that be noted epidemiologist Diamond and Silk? Yes, exactly. But I had a question for you. So Bill Gates is actually funding seven different coronavirus vaccines that they're making at once in the hopes that one or two of them might be. So it's like this incredible project. So is that where this all came from? Yeah. So really, it's kind of been building for a while. Going back several years, you know, he made this comment about vaccines helping with overpopulation. And there's kind of a, the idea being that people can plan their families better if they, if their kids aren't going to die. But, but this was picked up on by anti-vaccine people a couple years ago as him basically saying, like, you know, we're just going to poison a bunch of people with vaccines. And so now, obviously, vaccine talk is really at the forefront of our politics, as is, you know, Bill Gates, because as you say, he's funding all this vaccine research. And so, you know, for people who think that the coronavirus is, you know, that there's like a puppet matter.

pulling the strings, you know, Bill Gates has kind of become the face of that. This is very reminiscent, you know, the conspiracy theories surrounding George Soros. It's kind of like they just swapped him in and they're like, well, now you're the evil guy because you're more the public face of this research effort. Wait till they find out he's not Jewish. Right, right. So, well, the other thing we've been looking at, speaking of conspiracy theories and edge cases, you know, I saw that Alex Jones was leading one of the many reopened protests down in Texas this weekend. And they're these AstroTurf things. things have popped up all over the country. And have you been following that story very much? Because these groups are not, to put it mildly, organic. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there's a lot of different sort of strains of these, whether you want to call them like the reopen protests, the anti, you know, social distancing protests. Yeah. So just really over the past two weeks, I think we've seen a lot of, you know, actors with maybe sort of agendas of their own that go

beyond, you know, wanting to go back to work, you know, launch the Facebook groups around these events and sort of try to hijack them for their own ends. Well, we, you explain what astroturfing is? Sure. So astroturfing is the idea, it's sort of a play on the idea of grassroots political action. So, you know, ordinary folks, not political operatives, sort of getting together to do something. So then the converse of that would be astroturfing, which is made to, you know, it's like fake grass, right? So it's made to appear to be genuine grassroots activism when really it's being funded or directed by special interests, by political groups or lobby, you know, different parties. Do you see a lot of parallels?

to the Tea Party? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of obvious parallels. I think it's often very sort of a similar demographic, which is to say middle class, sort of upper middle class, white people with, frankly, with a lot of SUVs, as we see, because they drive around the town and, you know, often are deliberately trying to cause traffic jams.

You know, it strikes me as, you know, I think a lot of conservative pundits who are favorable to these outfits have sort of spun them as, you know, these people who just want to get back to work. But really, like, every time, I've talked to the organizers of one of these things. The top issues.

Why can't I go to my summer house? Why can't I buy garden seeds? Why can't I use my motorboat? I mean, obviously, there certainly are people, I'm sure, who are out of work and their businesses are struggling. But these are not necessarily the issues that are driving them. I think they're often sort of more picayune, you know, kind of like talk radio gripes you might hear.

Can you just talk for a second about Michigan? Because I feel like what's happening in Michigan is a little bit different. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think Michigan has been sort of a hotbed for a lot of this. The group that organized the Michigan protests last week received money from Betsy DeVos, who obviously is the Secretary of Education. And I think in that way it's very reminiscent of the Tea Party and that, you know, these groups that seemed to be organic kind of grassroots expressions of really frustrated citizens were really receiving this money.

And obviously, I don't think they're, you know, paying these people to come out or something. But I think that kind of there's a guiding hand behind a lot of these protests. We saw out West, the Washington Post had a story on. how a bunch of these Facebook groups and most popular sort of people against excessive quarantine, which is often the phrase they use, that they were all organized by these brothers who sell guns. And so we're essentially using this as a list building measure and sort of to promote their own gun sales. Never forget that the Tea Party existed for about five minutes as an actual grassroots movement and was immediately weaponized and monetized.

And I have longer stories about that for another day. But, you know, Will, one thing I started to pick up on a little bit is the traffic about these protests seems to have put a little jolt of life into our friends, the alt-right. You know, the gab traffic has picked up in the last few days. And, of course, you know, the Confederate flags and the Nazi symbols are showing up at some of these protests as well. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, I think the first thing to note about, you know, the alt-right, you know, white supremacists or whether we're talking about, you know, militia groups. I mean, these are people who thrive on spectacle. and as I think a lot of the organizers of these protests have realized,

there's really not a heck of a lot going on otherwise that the media can film. I mean, you know, unless you're putting on a hazmat suit and going inside a hospital, you know, this is really the only show in town. And so even when these protests only get a couple hundred people, I think, you know, it's really just getting blasted across the country. And so I think the white supremacists have keyed into that. And, you know, they're showing up with their guns and their Confederate flags, as you mentioned, Rick. I think there's a lot of groups sort of trying to,

to insert their agenda into this. Because, you know, I think in some ways it's a palatable agenda if you don't look too closely at, you know, the potential that, you know, opening up too soon is going to cause all these deaths. I think it's sort of an agenda in which you say, yeah, why can't you buy seeds? And then you have, you know, white supremacists or conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones sort of trying to direct people in their own way from there. Do you think these people understand the virus? Do you think they don't care? Do they, do you get what is your of their kind of grasp on this. Right. So it's, I mean, obviously it's difficult to speak for, you know,

the organizers of all these protests or the people going to them. But I've talked to several of them. And, you know, first, I think all you need to know about how the larger amount of people who, you know, how much they understand this virus or not is, is look at how many people are not wearing masks. Right. And how many people are just packed in. I mean, there was a rally today in Pennsylvania where you basically,

you couldn't imagine worse social distancing, practically no masks. But, you know, nevertheless, I personally have always been intrigued to talk to people who, you know, sort of have a different take than I do. When I'm talking to the organizers of these events, I'm saying, you know, well, when do you think it's fair to open up? I mean, are you concerned about the possibility that this is going to, you know, create a new peak or, you know, create a whole new wave of infections? And I'll be honest, like, a lot of the organizers I talked to were just convinced that basically the virus is either fake or that it was just wildly overblown. I was talking to an organizer of one of the North Carolina groups, and I said to her, you know, straight up, you know, do you think this virus is part of some conspiracy theory that it didn't just originate organically? And she got very defensive and wouldn't say what she really believed about it. Or I said to someone, you know, are you concerned about getting sick if we go back? And she said, well, you know, no, I'm not. And if I die, well, whatever. So I just don't think there's a lot of, and maybe this is obvious from sort of these very vague guidelines we got from the Trump administration on how to open. up. But I don't think there's a lot of thought, honestly, going into, you know, these are not like warring proposals from like, from AEI and the Center for American Progress on how to

open up. So you don't, so they really don't think of it as a real thing. I think the best explanation for the utter lack of social distancing, even after 40,000 people have died, is that, and I think the organizers are generally too savvy to say this, except, you know, out West where, you know, like Aeman Bundy from the Bundy families. And you have more of kind of a more extremist thing going on there. But I think in sort of these battleground states, I think the organizers are too smart to say they think, you know, it's been wildly overblown or is even sort of a government plan. But oftentimes I think that's sort of the explanation for why people just seem to be utterly unconcerned about the virus. Well, as part of this sort of the program nature of this like oppositional defiant disorder politics of the Trump base, if anything the experts are saying and anything the media is saying, they're going to reflexively just go the other direction?

Absolutely. I mean, I think that's playing it a huge issue here. I mean, you know, you see on right-wing blogs, including, you know, people who have been invited to the White House, stuff like that. You know, I'm thinking here of the Gateway Pundit, which Trump is citing all the time, just really sort of lashing out at, you know, Dr. Birx or Fauci. And now I think that's sort of that attitude has trickled down to the Trump grassroots. The people I talk to at occasion, but it really is sort of like, well, it's my right to die from the virus if I want or to expose myself. We all know that it's more comprehensive. than that because it's not just like going outside during a hurricane, potentially by exposing yourself, you're going to be exposing countless other people who did not choose to go to the rally or to, you know, open up before it was, it was time. But there really is this attitude of the government's telling me what to do and I don't like that. And, you know, so much of it is focused on these kind of very specific things. Like, why can't I use my motorboat in Michigan? Well, you know, is that really the most important issue right now? But it just, you know, and were you to say, okay, fine, you can use your motorboat. I don't think that would really settle the issue for them and then people would be happy

to go back inside. Well, I think we're going to see a lot more of this in the coming weeks because I think this is a political tool for this administration. You know, this is being promoted not just inside of a few Facebook groups, but Facebook is clearly sort of the petri dish for a lot of this, isn't it? Right. Absolutely. I mean, these Facebook groups, which really, I can't stress enough, have so many members. The Michiganers against success of quarantine is sort of, is maybe the most prominent example, has more than 300,000 members. You know, on there,

like, you go, you go into the comments and it is, we're not just talking one or two crazy comments. I mean, it is thousands on thousands. One that struck me was, there was a thread that said, you know, if a vaccine comes out, are we going to take the vaccine? And it was just thousands of people saying, no, that's the mark of the beast, you know, or that's a Bill Gates' tracking

chip. And so really, I mean, in a way, the protests are sort of the respectable face on this larger, I think, much, much fringier movement. So it's less like a comment section, more like an invitation to Darwin's waiting room. What do you think Facebook could do? I mean, obviously, if they weren't bad actors, to kind of slow this down or stop this kind of thing, is there anything they could do?

To sort of have sympathy for Facebook here, which is an unusual position to be in. It is obviously difficult to say, you know, we're going to shut down a page for a lawful protest. But then, you know, at the same time, is it a lawful? protest. And certainly, I think we've seen Facebook shut down some of these pages where the state government has said this would violate our restrictions on gathering during the, during the crisis. On the other hand, it has proven very easy, I think, for anyone who kind of wants to hijack or to influence this backlash against social distancing to pretty quickly create a page and a bunch of people flood into it. And, you know, they complain. And then you rally them. And, you know,

when you get hundreds of people not wearing masks, shoulder, shoulder. I can't wait for the rest of America to pay their medical bills when they're infected. That's going to be a great outcome for their freedom. Folks, I just want to take one second to say that this is a production of The Daily Beast. And if you appreciate knowing the good, the bad, and the bat shit, become a Beast inside member. Your support gives voice to podcast like this one. Visit New Abnormal.com to sign up today. Well, the competition is stiff among our Fuck That Guy list this week, and many of them are governors.

Unfortunately, they're Republican governors. Brian Kemp, Bill Lee, Rhonda Sannis, they've all had uniquely bad takes on what they should do about reopening the state on coronavirus. Most of them are following, of course, the lead of the great leader, Donald Trump. And so they're racing each other to see who can kill more of their population. In Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp has announced this week he's going to be reopening gyms, salons, and bowling alleys on Friday because, you know, obviously, gyms, salons, and bowling alleys are vital to the civic discourse and the civic life of the state.

So Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia gets my fuck-that-guy of the week. So my fuck-that-guy of the week is not actually a guy. It's diamond and silk. Perhaps you've heard of them, noted virologists and scientists, Diamond and Silk, also Trump's surrogates. I'm going to read to you what Diamond and Silk's most recent hot take. And actually, I thought it's sort of interesting because you could see them, like the last couple weeks they've been trying to figure out just how nuts so they can go with this. And they've gone pretty nuts. Okay, so they recently wondered if somebody can use 5G towers to infect people with the virus to fill supposedly empty hospitals.

Clearly Trump is going to replace Dr. Anthony Fauci with these two. And they are my fuck that guy of the week. So now we talk about the. Good Guys of the Day, which is not really my brand. But since Rick took fuck that guy, I'll take the good guys of the day. So my good guy of the day is a rare one. And it's really off kilter for me. But it's Facebook. Facebook today started removing the posts from these groups in states that have stay-at-home orders to try to organize these Trump-driven, campaign-driven protest rallies. And they've taken away a key organizing tool of some of the bad actors who are trying to drive some of this. I'm a very stern,

of Facebook on the whole. But this is an action they're taking that's finally showing a little bit of corporate responsibility. And no, Trumpers, it is not a violation of your First Amendment rights. They're a private company that provides a free service for you. And their terms of service say things like, you're not allowed to post shit that is going to get people killed. So for today, my good guy of the day, is actually Facebook. Probably never happen again. I was going to say, the thing that we've all been really focused on, or at least a bunch of us have sort of seen as like a great thing is this animal shelters. People have been adopting animals. And today, US animal shelters across the country are emptying out around the pandemic. And actually,

you've seen, there was a video this weekend of the animal shelter in Palm Beach County, Florida that was completely empty. And so the one bright spot is that people are adopting dogs and cats. I love that. Now, where can I get a tiger? You cannot have a tiger, Rick Wilson. Why can't I have a tiger? I have property. It's tropical. I could have a tiger. I could start a park here. I could grow a mullet. You're going to get eaten by the tiger. No, you're not getting a tiger. Speaking of that, our next segment is one nation under a pandemic where we talk about how to stay safe, stay sane, and help our families, friends, and neighbors and country get through this.

So, Molly, what are you doing right now to keep yourself together in your Tower of Solitude in Manhattan? We're taking walks. We're still allowed to take walks here, which is great. I'm trying to keep my kids from killing each other. So that's how we're not staying sane. Rick, what are you doing to stay sane? Outside an awful lot. We're planting a garden and we're cutting down trees and doing all the things that I do in my redneck paradise down here. Have you killed any gaiters? No, no gaiters have made themselves known this year, although we're just now entering water moccasin season.

So I'm really looking forward to that. Water moccasin is a snake, right? Yes, it's a venomous snake. The weather's warming up enough now, so the snake jihad will begin soon. Have you watched Tiger King? I have watched Tiger King. And I will say this, I've been to Oklahoma a few times, but I never met anyone quite in the sort of Joe Exotic tier of that place.

I think the big regret a lot of people are having right now is that Joe Exotic can't be out there at some of these rallies right now to reopen the economy. Do we think I think, I think Make the Tiger King Great again is a great slogan. Wait, I'm not convinced Joe Exotic would be a Trump supporter. Have you seen that mullet? I've seen the whole thing. And in fact, I also, I would like to add that though I have. I've never been to Oklahoma.

I have been to the crazy Miami drug dealers zoo. Outstanding. Tab row. Yeah, I've been to his house, and I've been with the animals, and he's talked. He's great. I mean, he did kill somebody and dismember them, but he's great. On that note, we'll wrap up episode one of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks in The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science, who will help us understand.

understand what's happening in our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. We're just getting started and we don't want you to miss an episode. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly Chongfast and he's the Rick Wilson. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again on Friday. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the dailybeast.com slash podcasts.

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