The Daily Beast Podcast - Elon Musk Isn’t Coming Back From the Far-Right Fever Swamps

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

The hosts talk with Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) about his new bill, “End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act of 2023”—and why America needs a paradigm shift in the way it thinks about housing. Plus! A conversation with senior Rolling Stone political reporter Asawin Suebsaeng about his recent investigation titled, “Inside Trump’s Plot to Corrupt the 2024 Election With ‘Garbage’ Data.” 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. One excellent show we have today.

Congressman Adam Smith joins us to talk about new legislation that would take Wall Street out of the housing market and what it would do for average Americans. Then Rolling Stones Aswin Tsubisang stops by to talk about the horrifying new way the Trump campaign is trying to taint the next election. But first, let's have some fun. So we have truly entered into extraordinarily dangerous times when a court and not a woman, not her family, not herself, can make a tremendous decision about their safety and the needs for an abortion. Over the weekend, I guess, the Texas Supreme Court temporarily halted what was a small, small, small victory in a lower court's decision that was going to allow a Dallas woman to have an

abortion. Now, why is this woman seeking an abortion? She is 20 weeks pregnant and has found out that the fetus is not viable, will die upon giving birth. And rather than go through that traumatic, horrible experience, which can be bypassed, has petitioned the court to allow her to have an abortion. Ken Paxton has threatened basically all of the doctors in in that state if they so choose to decide to use their medical experience to provide an abortion for a woman who is pregnant with a baby that is going to die. Andy, this entire experience since the overturning of Roe v. Wade on women and people with uteruses, particularly in red states. States has become so depraved at the hands of the Republican Party. I'm so sickened by these

stories. I'm sickened by these horrific stories that these people are going through. Even in the times we live in and given how particularly certain states have been acting toward women, this story is jaw dropping. This woman, Kate Cox, I believe is her name. She found out her fetus has a fatal genetic condition. She, her she, her state. herself, as CNN and others reported, she has been to three different ERs in the last month because she has unidentifiable fluid leaks and severe cramping. And as her lawsuit says, continuing the pregnancy puts her at high risk for severe complications, threatening her life and future fertility, including uterine rupture and hysterectomy.

None of this mattered to Ken Paxton. And he immediately, after the court basically put a temporary restraining order on the state's abortion ban to allow Ms. Cox to abort this unviable fetus. He immediately, even before appealing to the Texas Supreme Court, he put out a statement reminding doctors that they could be held liable legally if they helped her get an abortion. And then he proceeded to file this case before the Texas Supreme Court, which they have stayed that law until they can issue a full ruling. Meanwhile, this woman is 20 weeks pregnant. And every day that this continues, she is in pain and her life is apparently in danger. So not only do you have Ken Paxton, who I honestly cannot imagine a hell bad enough for him, but you have this court that is also,

by saying, oh, we're just going to put a stay on this, they are in effect, at least temporarily ruling against her and causing her actual physical pain on top of the emotional pain that must be unreal that she is going through. So if you want any more proof that there is absolutely nothing pro-life about people like Ken Paxton and the Republicans in general when it comes to an issue like abortion, if this doesn't do it for you, I don't know what will. You know, and on top of this, I just have to say that Ken Paxton is not a doctor. And this is the thing with these Republican politicians being the ones that are able to dictate what is going to happen to people's bodies. They did not swear an oath to do no harm. As a matter of fact, their entire platform is about

doing as much harm as possible. And what I fear is that the next stories that will come out will be the announcement of women and people with uteruses dying. Because every hour, every minute that this woman is forced to wait is putting her life at night. risk. And the fact that we would rather take direction in this country from fucking no brain politicians than from doctors who went to school, right, and swore an oath to do no harm, I cannot comprehend it. And then on top of that, these are the very same people that are not going to stop at abortion, because they are coming for your contraception next. So if you need any more information, any more examples, understand that Republicans do not care about women. Like I like this is it. This woman could die

before she receives the care that she needs because what is important to them is to win and be right, not about life. I hate even saying this because obviously this is a real person we're talking about here. So I don't want to say this lightly. If she were to die or if she would to suffer irreversible medical damage, physical damage to her body, these people would not. not care. They simply would not care. And it would not, for one instance, make them rethink what the hell they're doing with their lives. And they would continue. They would do it again the next time and the time after that, et cetera, at infinitum. They do not care. Ken Paxton does not care if this woman, Kate Cox, if something horrible happens to her. That's not even part of the equation for him.

and he would simply shrug his shoulders and pour himself a glass of bourbon or something and go about his day. These people are, Ken Paxton should be in jail, first of all. We all know that. But beyond that, there is no moral conscience acting here. I have to stop myself from saying things that could get me in a lot of trouble when it comes to what I would not be mad about happening to Ken Paxton. These are the worst people on the planet. And these are Republicans in good standing. And they are not outliers. And this is an important point. They are not outliers in the Republican Party. They are the Republican Party. And people need to remember that. And to hammer a point that we've made time and time again, ain't nobody telling you to like Joe Biden. And ain't nobody telling you to agree with

Joe Biden on a lot of things. And ain't nobody telling you to not dare criticize Joe Biden when he does things that are very wrong. But you better damn well keep in mind what the alternative is. Period. That is it. Period. We cannot play games with these people because what is happening in Texas right now is going to happen nationwide. There will be no safe zone. There will be no place. There will be no sanctuary space for reproductive freedom and rights in this country if Donald Trump becomes president again or any Republican becomes president again. Period. I'm so mad, Daniel. I know. It's just like, I don't like to feel this kind of, like, we need to start like a group yoga after everybody listens to the new abnormal.

We'll just start putting in meditations after this. Play Andre 3000's flute album. Like after. Can we get a sponsorship from Xanax? Right. For somebody. But just to put more fury behind the fire at that. Andy and I feel again, folks, Donald Trump is telling you what he is doing, what he plans to do,

because he has reaffirmed again, again, that he plans to be a dictator on day one. I just don't understand because let me tell you something, folks. People have been coming in my comment sections recently talking a whole bunch of hot shit about how they're not voting for Biden, how like he's not it. and all I continue to say is that I am not asking you to vote for a person. I'm asking you to vote for democracy. And when Donald Trump says and doubles down on the fact that he's going to be a dictator, that he is coming for everyone and everything,

when the Heritage Foundation has their 100-day plan to clean house of all career political appointed people and clean house and then replace those people with folks that did not pledge their allegiance to the Constitution but to Donald Trump, And he reaffirms that. I don't know what else you fucking need. Right. Things are bad. But I just want to remind people they can get worse.

Yeah. They're going to get worse if Trump is reelected. There's no getting around that. There is an absolutely zero percent chance that if Trump wins re-election next year, that things will not get unbelievably worse for Americans. And particularly for Americans who are not. straight white male Christians and leaving out a cis and a whole bunch of other things. Never in my life have I not been.

You know what? Yeah, this guy's bad, but, you know, this is America. We've got checks and balances. You know, we'll be okay ultimately, even if it is bad for people in a little while. I'm not that guy anymore. And it is purely because of Donald Trump and what he has done to the Republican Party. because as we've hammered home again and again on the show, he is the Republican Party, and the Republican Party is him. And there's no daylight between them anymore. A vote for a Republican

anywhere at this point is a vote for Donald Trump. I miss that other guy that didn't feel like this all day long, but he's gone. He's dead. It's every movement that the Republican Party is making. So we open up, we talk about abortion in Texas. We can talk about the legal cases that are pending to wipe away every and any aspect of affirmative action that goes well beyond college campuses, that goes well beyond banning books, that goes into businesses that want to target outreach towards marginalized communities, right, to get people into certain industries. We're talking about VC firms that can apply capital to places. They want control.

The white fascists want control over every aspect. of our lives and our bodies. And with a Trump presidency, they go all the way in. And just so folks, remember, of course we found out about it, you know, when people decided to write books after they left the Trump administration. But understand that even though I think that a bill bar is an abhorrent person, I think that Jeff Sessions is a weasel, I think that Mark Meadows is an embarrassment to what a chief staff should be. Those people still provided a little bit of help to have Trump not completely and totally destroy our democracy. They will all be gone. Mark Meadows, God willing, will be in jail, but everybody else, Mattis, they'll be gone. And probably in a Trump dictatorship, they will be on

trial for whatever false crimes, ideas, anything that is made up, so long as it hurt Donald Trump's feelings, folks, and we know that that motherfucker is the snowflake of all snowflakes, that if his little feelings were hurt, those people will be on trial. And for everyone that says, oh, but that can't happen here, I'll just say it again. There are a lot of things that we thought would never happen over the last nine years, and they seem to happen every day. Yeah, for sure. They won't make, I guess you could say the same mistake twice, even though they made it over and over again in the first time, where they picked people who, as you pointed out, as loathsome

and as apparent as they were, even they, at least some of them had a line they wouldn't cross. There ain't going to be no line in the second administration except wherever Don Jr. is. You know, they're talking about Stephen Miller as Secretary of State, Cash Patel as head of the CIA. Stephen Miller, I know he's considered handsome on his home world, but you look at his face here on earth. And it's just, it is sort of, it's like the face of evil. All of these people, they don't try to hide it. They are rotten people to their cores. And these are going to be the people in charge of the apparatus of our government in a second Trump administration. You're right. It's not going to be a Mattis or even a, and I share your opinion of sessions and bar,

but we're going to be nostalgic for them. That's what's fucked up is we are going to be nostalgic for a Bill Barr type when the Attorney General is Rudy Giuliani or Steve Bannon. We are truly in insane times. I just want people to think about their own personal worst day under the Trump administration. Just think about like that day that they, The phone buzzed, you know, your stomach dropped. The headline came out.

How you felt on your worst day over those four years. And then I want every single person to multiply that times infinity. Because like every time that we thought during those four years, laughed off the lies about the crowds at inauguration, laughed off the alternative facts, laughed off the upside down Bible after he used police to violently remove people from Lafayette Square. Look the other way when he said that there are good people on both sides. We're beginning to be outraged when we saw children in cages and parents writing numbers on their arms. Children, by the way, who years later are still many of them not reunited with their families and may never be. Where you see a governor abbot putting down buoys that have spokes on them

to impale people and needed to be taken to court over that, imagine that just being the way. Every disgusting, dehumanizing, depraved thing that they imagine and dream of, they have put on paper and have a draft in place on day one. As bad as we think that things are, remember that they can always get worse. Ugh, like I'm just depressed. I am. You're right, though, as bad as things were for those four years, usually when someone says this, they mean things are going to be even better. but in this case, I'm going to use it for the opposite reason. You ain't seen nothing yet.

Now I'm like in therapy. Right. But it is truly, Jesse will remember this. Jesse and Molly, before they brought me on board, you know, I remember them telling me, yeah, our only concern is that maybe you're not angry enough. That's true. That's true. I know.

I know. And it's true because I've always been that guy and not to be generational about it, but I always just had that sort of Gen X cynicism, you know, where it's like, yeah, this shit sucks, but what do you expect? You know, and I am not that guy anymore. And, you know, there's a reason I'm talking to lawyers now about sending my therapy bills to Jesse. He thinks I have a fairly good case. But the times we are living in, I know in the not too distant past there was Nixon,

but Trump is making Nixon seem like McGovern. I'm just at the point where I don't think it can be oversold. And if I sound like a crazy person, if we sound like crazy people, then so be it. But sometimes the sky is falling, Danielle. Just fun fact, nobody was ever concerned about whether or not I'd be angry enough. So I like to say that I carried the angry black woman trope just really super well because it was actual facts. They're like, Danielle, can you temper it down? You know, the sky isn't always falling?

And I'm like, isn't it? Isn't it? In my defense, I've known you for a lot of years. True. True story. Truth story. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal Congressman Adam Smith, who represents the 9th congressional district in Washington and has co-introduced a piece of legislation that, let me tell you, before I read the article in the New York Times, I had no idea that this was happening.

And the legislation is entitled, End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act of 20. In the New York Times piece, Congressman that came out on December 6th, entitled New Legislation Proposes to Take Wall Street Out of the Housing Market. Please just start with how Wall Street got into the housing business, single-family home business, to begin with. Yeah, well, I think what I want to start with is to understand that two big problems converge in this one issue in America today, right now. Problem number one, affordable housing.

of the challenges that people face, and there are many. And I do understand climate change, war, but in terms of the basic economics of what it means to be a working class American, which is the family I grew up in, the high cost of housing is number one. I mean, education is a lot of things are high, but you got to live somewhere. I mean, that's where it starts. And the fact that housing has become so much more expensive. The house my father bought in CTAC when I was five years old, cost him $15,000. That same house in CTAC is now going for $500,000. He was a ramped serviceman baggage handler at United Airlines. The pay of your average baggage handler has not gone up by that same amount in that time frame or anywhere close. So number one, cost of housing. Number two,

and this is where the Wall Street folks get involved, when you look at what's happened over the last 50 years and you ask, well, why don't working people have more money? You know, why haven't wages gone up? It's been concentrated in the hands of shareholders and executives. We have consistently rewarded investors and we have consistently created an economic environment while those investors can go in, suck the wealth off the top, pay as little as possible to the workers and laugh all the way to the bank as the cliche goes. In the area of housing, the way they've commoditized it is your typical first-time home, what you're looking for when you're going to go start is the cheap homes that are

out there. They have begun buying those up as part of broader hedge funds. So they come in, they pay cash, they don't care about inspections, they've got all these advantages over your average person trying to scrape their money together to get that first house. And then they rent them out and they own them. So now they control the market. Now, I'm not going to tell you that this is the single biggest cause of the high cost of housing because it's not. But it is a contributing factor. And it once again is taking the wealth out of, if you will, average lower income earners and putting it in hands at the top. Because I'll tell you, certainly it was my case. When you part of the way you create wealth is you buy a house, housing market has gone up.

And I am not going to walk you through the whole history of the houses that I bought at different points. But I bought them and they went up somewhat in value, which enabled me to accumulate that wealth. Well, now what we're saying is we're going to take ownership away from you. I mean, the analogy I thought of was back to like, you remember company towns, back to the turn of the 19th century where the company owned everything and you owned nothing. And that was one way that they can control you and make sure that you've never had any wealth. This is happening. I want those hedge funds that you should not be able to buy a first time home if you are a hedge fund, private equity, any of those categories, you know, as an investment that makes it harder for average

people who are just trying to find a place to live to afford it. And I appreciate the overview so much because I think that what's important to understand is that the way to create generational wealth, which we hear this term thrown around a lot and have thrown it around a lot, is in America still through home ownership. But when you have mortgage rates right now that are at, you know, eight in some instances, nine percent, you're already denying a large portion of the population. But for me, myself, I'm looking to buy my first home. And I am looking around and I'm seeing in a lot of areas, particularly where I live, which is in an expensive market in New York City, where it says all cash buyers, all cash buyers, right? And so what you are offering right now is that it isn't just an

individual wealthy person coming in and saying that they have $600,000 in cash on hand to drop, but that it is a corporation, a hedge fund that has this ability to come in. What I noticed in the article as well is that can you talk about some of the areas where this is happening? happening in because what also coincides with this greed that we are seeing is what neighborhoods and areas these houses and spaces are being bought up in, which are largely low income, which are largely in mostly populated with black and Latino population. So can you speak a bit about that as well? Sure. If you first hear about that, you would think, gosh, if a hedge fund's buying a house, you know, they're buying a house, sorry, I know Washington State real estate

better than elsewhere. They're buying a house in Medina. They're buying a house on Mercer Island. You know, they're buying these big, you know, million plus dollar mansions. But in this case, they're buying it as an investment, an investment in a large portfolio of houses that are going to be rented out. And, you know, so these first time more affordable houses, which would typically be bought by people from disadvantaged backgrounds of one kind or another, people just trying to get an economic start. Then those people are desperate for housing. And if they can't buy it, they got to rent it. And then they're renting it from the person who came in and paid the cash. So they would typically be in blue-collar working class starter home neighborhoods.

Again, I'm more familiar with geography in my neighborhood. But South King County is sort of that place. That's where I grew up, C-Tac in Renton, Kent, south of Seattle, south of Bellevue and some of the more upper-middle-class suburbs. I bought a townhouse on the West Hill of Kent when I was 25. that's where they're going in and buying those up because they can get a lot of them, relatively cheap price, and then the rents are going to make them a profit. But those are precisely the homes that people just getting starting out trying to build the wealth that you mentioned, you know, have to go to find a place to live.

And when we look at, you know, for instance, your ability to have purchased a home at 25. And what Gen Z is saying right now, which are folks that are just graduating from college, that are entering into the workforce for the first time. So we're talking about 20s. And now we're moving into, you know, millennials who are about to turn relative middle age, depending on what your definition of that is. They are not buying homes because they don't have the equity to be able to buy homes. So speak to us about why this type of legislation, which, again, when people are thinking

about the competition and buying a home, they are not thinking. about competing with a hedge fund. They're thinking about competing with, say, they're, you know, the other person that lives across the hall in their apartment building, right? Who is also going out for a home. They're thinking about it in those terms.

So can you just speak to kind of how this idea of generational wealth, how we build it has shifted over the last several decades and why this piece of legislation you think is not a solve-all. It's not a silver bullet. it, but why it's necessary?

Yeah, they shifted for a couple of reasons. One, and again, back to housing and education. So I got seven years of education, started college in 1983, graduated from law school in 1990. I went to Ford University, actually, for undergrad. So I got a little bit of New York background there. Love New York. But then I went to University of Washington Law School.

And from 83 to 90, those seven years of education cost me in tuition just a little less than $30,000. $3,000. Today, if you started, it would cost you over $300,000. And that's assuming nothing goes up in the next seven years, which is a bad assumption. The house, the townhouse I referenced, I bought for $94,000. Okay, it was a 1,500 square foot three-story townhouse, you know, not that great a place, but you can't touch anything in that area for less than like 400, even in that area. And wages haven't gone up by four times in the, and I bought that house in 92.

they haven't gone up in the last 30 years or 31 years, by enough to compensate for that. And then you are competing, and this is where the bill comes in, you're competing against people who have boatloads of cash to come in after you. And that competition is one you're not going to win. It's supply and demand. And I got all kinds of complaints on the supply side, which we can get into. But in terms of the demand, you are now bringing in sort of artificial demand that is driving the price up even higher and driving people out of the market. And we get caught up in all manner

of different issues that we're arguing about. And I'm not saying these things aren't important, but between, you know, Trump and the left wing and what are we doing about crime and what are we doing about you? And all these issues are important. Don't get me wrong. But at the core of the angst, the anger, the reason people are turning to people like Trump and other problematic elected officials, just put it that way. They can't afford a house. They can't afford to get the job training in education, they need to make a living. That's it. I mean, that was, you know, my life. Growing up, blue-collar family, I had a chance. It wasn't easy. I worked from the time I was 11 years old for one thing or another. But if you did, that was a chance. I think people today

moving into this market, whether they're thinking about themselves or they're thinking about their children, they're like, what chance? I can't pay $500,000 for a crappy little house. How am I ever going to save the money for that? You know, I need an education. $50,000 a year tuition, $70,000 a year tuition? How are you ever going to make that work? And we have not taken the dramatic steps necessary, I think, to bring those costs down. And we also haven't gone after the investor class. And God bless them. I'm a capitalist. I believe in investment. I don't believe they should get absolutely everything. Right now, if you have stock, if you're a shareholder, you've seen an incredible boon in the last 50 years. If you're working for a living, living off your wages, with a couple of notable exceptions,

it is tough to make it. And most people, most people are going to have to work to make their living. They're not going to have the money to simply make an investment and get a return. And plus, we need people to do that work. Right. We need bridges built. We need houses built. We need, you know, we need all those jobs being done.

We need people to take bags on and off of airplanes. All right. And if you're not paying them a living wage to do it, you're creating a very unjust society. Can you speak to and you mentioned before the demand and what has happened in terms of like there being a, first of all, an inventory, right, of homes for people to be able to choose from, which we don't see, but also this false demand, right, that is increasing. So you buy up all these hedge funds, they buy up all of these properties, they turn them into rentals, and then the rent increases in a considerable way.

So speak about this kind of chicken and egg, this kind of rat race that then is created. by what they're doing. Well, frankly, to some extent, it also incentivizes the investors not to build more houses because if they build more houses, it just makes rent less expensive. And that's the trap you get in. And the one big piece of it that we haven't talked about yet is on the supply side. We are not building enough housing. And there's a lot of reasons for that.

But two articles I recommend to you both in the New York Times. One was about Tokyo. Tokyo does not have an affordable housing crisis. They got like 38 million people living there. you would think this is right for an affordable housing crisis. But they don't have an affordable housing crisis because they built housing. It seems like a radical idea, but that's what they did. And then Houston. Houston has finally started to get a big article in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about how Houston is making progress on homelessness. A lot of different reasons

for that. And there are some sensible policies they use. But one is a lot cheaper to build in Houston. And we've got to look at permitting and zoning. We have driven up the cost of building housing by all of the requirements that go into building housing and all the people say, well, you can't build it here and you can't build it there. Well, you can build it here, but you have to do these 10 things. And once you get through those 10 things, we go, oh, sorry, we forgot about the 11th. All right. And, you know, we have got to reduce permitting and we have got to increase zoning so we can build more housing in a number of areas across the country. That lack of supply is also driving up costs. I would be remiss to not mention this. But the fact that,

is, as I was going through, I'm like, this is a great piece of legislation. This is a kind of legislation that people didn't know that they need, but once they read that article, once, you know, you were talking about it in districts, people get it because they know, like you said, where they're being squeezed. And this squeeze is causing them to go and drift into someone who's saying, like a Donald Trump, I alone can fix this. Just give me all the power, absolute power. you don't have to worry about a thing, I'm somehow, you know, going to be the Wizard of Oz for you. We know that that is a lie, but that's not what everyone sees. And so in a Congress right now that is said to have been the least productive since the Great Depression, Democrats, folks,

are putting together legislation that the American people need. Is it going to go anywhere? This is the biggest point I want to make on this. We lack a sense of urgency. on this issue. Right now, it's not going anywhere. Because on every single one of these steps, again, if you narrow the problem down to, how do we make life more affordable for your average person? How do we make, you know, housing more affordable, education, more affordable, better wages? You know, there's a whole bunch of different ideas. And on a lot of these ideas, people go, yeah, but I don't like that. And I don't like this. On this idea, for instance, well, who is Congress to regulate the free market? You know, let's let the free market go. And the thing is, yeah,

a little bit of merit in that argument. You know, I'm not a socialist. I don't believe in government controlling the means of production because I don't think we're particularly good at it. But there is an urgency here that is missing. Okay, this is maybe something you wouldn't just want to do. But when you look and you see that people cannot afford housing, you have got to start looking at a new paradigm. And the old arguments don't apply. All right. If this is one small thing that we can do in another seven or eight, we have to have a sense of urgency on affordable housing that we do not have. And by the way, this is a right and a left phenomenon. Okay, the right won't do that. But when I go to Seattle King County and I argue for reducing permitting and I argue for zoning changes, you know,

they all say, well, you know, we have to make sure that it's in the right neighborhood. We have to include everybody's voice in how we decide this. Okay. Well, if you include everybody's voice and how you're going to decide where to build something, then you're not going to build anything. Right. Because everyone's going to say, well, I don't want it here, you know, or, you know, If you build it, you have to, you know, forgive me to get into this, but, you know, okay, but it has to have all electric stoves. And the installation has to be this thick. No, we think it has to be that thick, you know, and the ramp, you don't just have to have a ramp. Yeah, the thing is, I would never say to anybody that any of this, it doesn't matter.

It does. I get it. Okay. It does matter in an ideal world. I'll give you one final example on this. So we actually change zoning laws in the state of Washington to basically say, if you own a single family plot, you have the ability to turn it into a fourplex if you want to, period, you know, where it is. But, you know, legislature being the legislature, they put some exceptions in

there for homeowners associations. And there was some question as to who applied. So in my neighborhood, I live in a 55, 56 home neighborhood that has a homeowners association. They started to petition around to make sure that we would be included in the exception to that. So the people couldn't put fourplexes in there. And they asked me about it. I said, yeah, I'm not going assign that. I said, look, you ask me in my ideal world, would I rather have a single family home next to me than a four-a-plex? Sure, all right, but it's not the end of the world. And what is the end of the world is so many people being homeless and so many people not being able to put a house? All right. So you've got to pull yourself out of this paradigm of the ideal and start thinking

about how do we actually include more people in our society in success? Because the fact that so many people can't access it is causing all manner of disruption across this country. So that's a long answer to your question. But in a typical Congress, well, we get, no, we have got to have a sense of urgency and say, we're going to give this a try. I mean, I like the FDR line from back in the Great Depression, radical experimentation. We're in a very difficult time. We're going to try something.

If it doesn't work, we'll try something else. But what we're not going to do is keep doing what we've always been doing. Yeah. Representative Adam Smith, I so appreciate you for making the time for the new abnormal. And I seriously appreciate you introducing this legislation and introducing I think so many people to an issue that they know is happening, but they don't know one of the causes as to why it's happening. And I think that it's incredibly important. I hope that you will make time to join us again. Anytime. I really appreciate the opportunity. I really appreciate

your show. On Friday, Rolling Stone ran a piece headlined inside Trump's plot to corrupt the 24 election with garbage data, written by the great Adam Ronsley, along with Aswan Subsang, aka Swin. I wanted to get Adam, but apparently Swin through a tantrum, so he's here instead. Hey, thanks for joining us, I guess. Especially when I'm second byline, nobody puts me in a corner. I put Am Ronsley in a cage the day, so you're getting me instead. All right, fair enough. All right, so let's talk about this plot.

It involves something called the Electronic Registration Information Center, or Eric. Explain what Eric is. Someone pointed out to me on social media that this story is way funnier and way less horrifying if you read Eric as Eric Trump and not Eric, this multi-state nonprofit thing. But unfortunately, we're talking about all capital letters, Eric here. Now, there is no real reason that your listeners should have to know what this is, except the fact that Trump and his cronies are trying to use it against itself to try to, what some people may perceive this as, to try to rig an upcoming presidential election next year. Eric is this incredibly once non-controversial nonprofit group that was started by Pew Cheritable Trusts, which is a nonpartisan organization in the year 2012. Right. At its peak, I think it had roughly 30 out of 50 states as members. And to just boil it down to a core component here, its purpose was to be an actual voter integrity network, not voter integrity or election integrity in the way someone like Donald Trump

would define it. But something that would help states submit and try to organize their data, a lot of which is still on paper-only records, try to forestall things like duplicate registrations and to make it easier for secretaries of states and other election officials to figure out who is registered properly, who is or isn't registered. You know, very nitty-gritty, basic election administration, stuff like that, that should not be a lightning rod for controversy. all it was. And that is primarily why your listeners probably had no idea what this member's only optional nonprofit group was. It's set up to do things that conservatives pretend to care about very much, making sure voter registration is above board and all that stuff. But as you write,

back in March, Trump called for Republican governors to immediately pull out of Eric, which I'm now understanding is not his son. No, not at all. What's the reason he gave? What's the MAGA conspiracy? theory here. I forget exactly how he so succinctly put it in his truth social post. Something about how this was a conspiracy to a Democratic or Marxist, as he might call it, a voter registration at the expense of Republicans. I think that is the premise here. I don't think it's going to surprise any of your listeners or subscribers to learn that it is a remarkably faulty premise. But look, this truth social post out of the bagelion he posts a day or a week probably went unnoticed, by the most hardcore of hashtag resistance people who follow his social media postings for

signs of authoritarianism and things like that. But I think the important thing to keep in mind here is it absolutely did not spring out out of nowhere. It sprung out of a multi-pronged Republican and Trumpland campaign and a scorched earth effort carried out across multiple states since roughly the start or shortly after the beginning of the Biden presidency. that has been well-martialed, well-organized, and actually very concretely effective over the course of the past couple of years. And throughout the course of this pretty vast operation, it is, of course, enlisted at this point very publicly. So the support of former leader of the free world, Donald Trump, who is, of course, the 2024 presidential frontrunner for the Republican Party,

and who continues undisputed as the leader of the Republican Party. As you said, this is like a well-coordinated effort. But in particular, as you point out in the article, back in January of 22, Gateway Pundit, which is the god-awful misinformation and disinformation pro-Trump blog, they pretended to be journalists and did a three-part series and talked about how Eric was a secret plot created by George Soros, right? Yes. And that is really reaching here. And look, it's the Gateway Pundit, anybody who spent a second Googling it, or knowing about Jim Hoff. and his stupid fucking website knows that for a long time,

long before Donald Trump as a political phenomenon came along in 2015, it has been a hotbed of just conspiracy theories is almost putting it too mildly, just lies. Yeah.

Just rabid, bigoted, far right, sometimes borderline fascistic, if not, crypto-fascistic propaganda. And they decided, early last year, that Eric needed to be one of their new boogeymen. Surprise, surprise, they chose the conservative bet noir of George Soros

to argue why Republican-led states should want to have nothing to do with this thing. Now, the Soros connection is because Eric was started in 2012 by Pew Sharable Trusts. George Soros donated money to them at one point or maybe more than one point. It really does mirror a lot of the other mostly insane and unhinged George Soros conspiracy theorizing, because it's all about like, okay, this billionaire liberal benefactor who very publicly gives his money to a lot of things, obviously if he's given something to something, that must mean that he controls anything that that entity has touched. It's really stupid. I don't think we have to justify it with much more conversation about it. But surprise, surprise, there is little, if Amy, and I'm going to be very

generous here when I say there's very little evidence that George Soros has had anything to do in terms of controlling Eric and much less concrete evidence out there that he and his people are using it to try to control American presidential elections in the Democratic Party's favor. When you say his people, do you mean the Jews swim? I meant the Freemasons and the Irish, but sure. Okay. All right, fair enough. The Jews are at least tangentially involved. So let me ask you, there were, I think, 33 states that participated in Eric prior to all of this. And how many GOP-run states have now left Eric? Nine, including Alabama and Ohio, Ohio being the state I currently reside in. And this has been done because there has been a sustained pressure campaign led by Trump allies, including but not

limited to Republican attorney Clita Mitchell, who was, of course, involved with his plot to steal the 2020 presidential election, mostly in the state of Georgia. Basically, she and her group, the Election Integrity Network and other groups that are very publicly anti-Erek, that are very MAGA and very Republican, have been spending roughly the past couple of years holding strategy sessions, training different activists, pressuring different Republican elected office holders. whether they be governors or secretaries of states to pull out of Eric. Clea Mitchell, herself as we show in our reporting at Rolling Stone, has been holding meetings, including with Republican secretaries of states, who kind of give them a policy briefing on why Eric is a nefarious Democratic voter registration tool masquerading as a voter and election integrity project. Why George Soros is the man pulling the strings by it.

Basically, if you get readouts, as we did for this reporting on what she and other groups are telling these elected officials in their widespread pressure campaign over the years, it is basically part and parcel for what you could read on the Gateway Pundit blog. It's just almost entirely made out of just thin air and bullshit. But in almost a third of the states that were once enrolled in Eric, it has been very affected in getting the states to withdraw. And this has not been without consequence.

Let's get into what this means for 2024. How does this, as your headline states, how does this help corrupt the election with garbage data? Well, as we found in talking to different secretaries of states and different election officials, including in battleground states, not just the places where the Republican-led governments have already pulled themselves out of Eric, election officials are already sounding the alarm on this. And these are both Republican election officials and Democratic ones, who we spoke to, some of whom very much on the record, who were saying that this is really scary. stuff because if, and these are scenarios that they have gameed out that they've talked to us about. This is not a hysterically coming up with a liberal paranoid fantasy about Donald Trump trying to

seize power again. They have said that it really ups the ante and the chances that you can create confusion between states and in states about the voter data you have. Since one of the things that Eric specializes in is helping actually identifying and maintaining integrity in the voter roles. It makes it easier for, shall we say, partisan officials to flood the zone with potentially garbage data in a replacement apparatus that isn't Eric that may or may not be significantly more faulty than what Eric is. We can talk about the nuances of that a little bit more in a second, but some election officials who we spoke to have already been telling this that the states that have pulled out of Eric are already sort of doing these ham-fisted slab-dash efforts to try to

rebuild a different form of Eric that they wouldn't have had to do if they hadn't pulled out of it. It's already starting to create confusion between states that have to sometimes communicate with each other on these issues. And perhaps most important for MAGA election warriors that wish to, shall we say, tilt the scales towards Donald Trump's favor for 2024, it is creating the kind of problem and confusion that they are arguing already existed with Eric, that they can then exploit, especially if the election is close in 2024, to say that, well, there's a bunch of garbage data here and there's reason to be suspicious about the integrity of this election. Well, that may very well end up being the case in a bunch of states, largely because of what

Maga and Republican officials are actively doing right now. It's kind of the same thing with the Crusade Against Dominion that began in 2020, where you cast doubt on election systems and voting machines and say there's a lot of reason to believe the election was rigged. You convince a large chunk of the electorate and a whole legion of your Republican followers that something was suspicious here. They tell the public opinion pollsters that they think the election was suspicious. And then you cite that lack of public confidence in the presidential election to justify your crusade against it to cling to power or to seize power. Now, this is a little bit theoretical because we obviously don't know what is going to happen on election day

24. We don't know how close the election is going to be. We don't know if Joe Biden or Donald Trump are going to win so conclusively outright that it kind of upends any legal battle that may put the country through hell. We don't know what we don't know. What we do know is that if you were a leading presidential candidate and if you and some of your most prominent aligned organizations and attorneys were trying to rig a presidential election with the utilities and tools at your disposal in an American system. It would look a lot like what Donald Trump and his cronies are currently trying to do. At risk of repeating myself, this isn't just us at Rolling Stone kind of like breaking out about something that may or may not happen. These are seasoned, long-time

Republican and Democratic election officials across multiple states, including battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and Georgia, who have been halling us, including on the record that they are getting really spooked by this, and this could turn really south in a year. So basically, you sabotage the system that helped lead to at least somewhat clean voting, and you end up with bad voter registration data that leads to things like lines on election day, delays in counting, et cetera, and then you point to all the things that you've caused as reasons to be suspicious of the election. That we think might be the plan here, or it might be the effect here. It could certainly very well be an effect. And the plan, as we concretely see it,

is a fairly successful effort so far to pull states out of a system that would help alleviate at least some of the possible confusion that could come about on election day 2024, especially if it is a close election. And you mentioned that some of these states are having to come up with replacements for Eric because, surprise, surprise, Eric actually provided an important function and by all accounts did it well. I know there's one called the Eagle AI Network. We talked about it a bit on the show when I guess it was Columbia County in Georgia signed up for it, even though the state told them that it was rife with problems. What are some of the problems we're looking at with these alternative systems? Well, the alternative system of Eagle AI, which I think is the

premier one that he's being bandied about right now as a potential Eric replacement, is, shocker, plot twist, explicitly backed and promoted by Cleita Mitchell and other people who are trying to influence 2024 election administration in a way that would favor Republicans like Donald Trump. So if that weren't fishy enough on its own, if you talk to election officials and secretaries of state who have dealt with Eagle AI and who have checked out the system, they will pretty much across the board, as long as we're not talking about the most moggified of Republican election officials in America, that this is not a good replacement. This does not actually do what we need it to do and is not even a shadow of an appropriate or acceptable

Eric replacement. And it is very clearly something that could lead to a lot of garbage data flooding the zone. And to give you an example of some of the Republican secretaries of states, what I'm talking about, just so this isn't completely anonymized or sound too general for your listeners. For our story, we talked to a guy named John Merrill, who was the Republican Alabama Secretary of State until January 2023. To be clear, this guy is not a squish when it comes to Maga diehards. He is a very Trumpy Republican. He is still

in touch with Donald Trump. They still have personal meetings and breakfast sit-downs at Mar-a-Lago. They talk to each other on their cell phones. They snap photos with one another and hell, they even text from time to time. This guy is someone who is currently running to be a Alabama delegate for Donald Trump at the 2024 Republican National Convention. He wants Donald Trump to get back in office, ASAP. The reason I stress that is to kind of underscore his MAGA bona fides while showing you that he is also someone who, when he was Alabama's Secretary of State and when he was invited

to Washington, D.C., along with other Republican secretaries of states, to have a four-hour private meeting with Cleed of Mitchell. There was this moment where during the policy briefing, she brought up Eric and explained to them all the stuff I was telling you before about why she thinks these Republican-led states need to pull themselves out of the system. And John Merrill was kind of found himself to be a lonely defender of Eric, where he spoke up and said, like, if you care about election integrity, there is probably no better system than Eric to get it done. This is something important, even though you're claiming that it was founded by George Soros or something

like that. This is an important pool that Republican or Democratic secretaries of state need to use to try to ensure voter and election integrity in their state. And he full-throatsly supported Eric and vowed not to pull the state from it on his watch. He left the office in January 23. His replacement, another Republican, a guy named Wes Allen, announced as, I believe, as his first official act as Alabama's new secretary of state that he was. withdrawing the state from Eric immediately. So that's where we're at right now. Well, it all sounds incredibly frightening, but at least we don't have the architect of the attempt to nullify the 2020 election sitting in the Speaker's Chair in the House of Representatives, and at least we don't

have Donald Trump as the presumptive GOP nominee. Swin, thanks so much for being here and cheering us up as to the prospects of having a free and fair election in 2024. I really appreciate it. Can I say one more thing before I sign off? Sure, we're out of time, so we'll cut it, but go ahead. Something that you and I did not get into in this conversation, which we flick out in the story and which we're planning on reporting on much more at Rolling Stone, is that this is only one component of the many components from Trump and many of his influential followers to try to affect the 2024 election. And that is something important to keep in mind, that this is only one small piece of a much larger tapestry of them trying to get their way a year before.

So another cheery thought from Swin. Swin, thanks again. I really appreciate it. Any sign. Andy Levy. Danielle Moody. How are we starting off this week in hell? I mean America.

With your fuck that guy. Oh, man. I'm going to go with a thing that apparently is going to. on on Twitter where Elon Musk has reinstated the account of Alex Jones. Oh, that seems fair. Jones was banned from Twitter five years ago, and he decided the other day that it might be a good idea to bring him back. And he ran a little poll, I guess, on the site. And 70% of the respondees said, yes, he should bring him back. It has since come out. And by come out,

I mean, Alex Jones said so, that this happened because a guy, named Jack Posobiak, who was a well-known white nationalist, one of the organizers of the march in Charlottesville. You may remember that with the very fine people on both sides. He talked to Elon Musk and told him he should let Alex Jones back on the site. And so not only did Musk agree to do this, they had themselves a little thing called a live stream on Twitter spaces, which is the little platform on Twitter where you can do live streams. You may remember that from Ron DeSantis announcing his presidential bid there with all the technical difficulties they ran into because Twitter is accessible. So they held a Twitter space and it was Musk and Alex Jones and Posobiac. It was

Laura Lumer, who is about the biggest Islamophob on the planet. It was Trump's former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who is like a big Q-Anon guy. It was Andrew Tate. who is right now facing charges of human trafficking and rape, multiple, multiple charges of all of those, and some other fun people. And they all held a nice little Twitter space and were all, you know, good friends and patted themselves on the back for being pro-free speech and whatever other excuses they like to use. So, yeah, so my fuck that guy is, I guess it's both Musk and Alex Jones. and it's also the 70% of people that voted in Musk's Twitter poll,

his little toadies online, and they can all get a big, hearty, fuck that guy for me today, Daniel. I need a shower. Like, these people are so dead. Like, when you talk about the vial of the vial, the gross of the growth, like this is all of them. They are a cesspool of just toxic white male, fragility and toxicity.

It is just so sick. This man, Alex Jones, just to remind people, like, sued for the lies that he told about children that were murdered in their classroom. And lost. Like, you don't get more fucking gross than that. Nope. And this is who Elon Musk wants to bring back onto it because people miss that motherfucker? Fuck those guys.

All of them. Yeah. Miss me with that, Daniel. Exactly, Andy. That's what I say. Danielle, who's your fuck that guy? My fuck that guy is going out to the Trump campaign as a whole. So this is according to semifor.com. But what they've done recently is this.

NBC News has demanded that the Trump campaign remove a video. They write that includes audio deceptively edited to seem like it comes from an NBC correspondent after the third presidential debate. So they did this deep fake of Garrett Haake, who is the NBC News Senior Capitol Hill correspondent, where he opens up and it's his voice talking about the, you know, about the debate and then goes into ripping the candidates. This is Ron DeSantis, an establishment rhino that wears insoles in order to make him look taller. So while they tweeted this and they.

And they followed up by saying, this is a parody before we get sued. What they are doing with this retweet with this video is sowing distrust in media by creating the conditions for people to discount everything that they see in here. And that is what dictators and authoritarian do. Only believe the things that are coming out of my mouth and that I tell you to believe because everyone else other than me is trying to dupe you. So this isn't just like a low-lift, ha-ha, look what the Trump campaign is doing

with manipulating video. This is part of their larger campaign that they began with their alternative facts to continue to cede distrust in media and spread disinformation. And NBC should sue them and just add to the number of lawsuits that they already have

because this is a much bigger issue. I'm so sick of these fucking people. I really am. And I can't stress enough. you really don't I don't care people like oh I want a choice I want a choice for 24 choose liberation or choose autocracy that's it that's your fucking choice miss me with everything else so for that reason the Trump campaign all of these people are my fuck that guy and look you're absolutely right that you know the purpose of the shit

like this is to is to seed and so mistrust of the media but it's also I think more than that because so here's the deal. So they put something like this out and then NBC is like, what the fuck, you know, and other people in media are like, well, this is fake. And then they say, as Trump's senior advisor, Chris Lasavita tweeted, to keep NBC News lawyers off my ass, please note, this is a parody. So they say that after the fact. That is the clue that what they're doing is, yes, it's partially to just, you know, say, hey, you know, you can't believe everything you hear and see. But they also know there's a fair amount of people that will see the original clip will not know it's a parody and will not see the tweet from a Trump senior advisor. Notably, it's not Trump himself saying this where people might actually see it, even if it's on his busted-ass Twitter clone.

But it's some advisor that most people have not heard of saying, oh, by the way, this is a parody. But by then the damage is done. And there are people who are going to believe this. And months from now, you'll be talking to someone. and they'll say, oh yeah, but what about that time that NBC News, that guy in NBC News just was ripping the Republican candidates before the debate? That's what I'm talking about. And they know that's going to happen. They achieve like so many goals with this. There'll be the people that believe it and you can tell them months later it's a fake and

they won't believe you. And then there are people who will know it's a fake, but all it does is make them distrust anything they see in here about the media. And that is, as you pointed out, the other goal. So yeah, this is not a small thing and fuck these guys to hell. I love the to hell part. Yeah. 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. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the DailyBeest.com slash podcasts.

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