The Daily Beast Podcast - First States to Enact Abortion Bans Have One Thing in Common

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

On this week’s episode of The New Abnormal, Mini Timmaraju, president of  NARAL Pro-Choice America, talks about where we stand one year after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Then, Vice’s Anna Merlan weighs in on RFK Jr. and all the misinformation he’s spreading. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Minnie Timurajou, the president of Nairal, Pro Choice America, subsplied to talk to us about where we stand one year after the overturning of Roe versus Wade. Then we'll talk to Vices Anna Merlin about RFK Jr. And all the misinformation he's spreading everywhere about vaccines and Wi-Fi and a whole lot more. But first, let's have some fun. Danielle, you know, let's start with something that's actually kind of a little fun today. It is the actual definition of trash talk because it's Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Bobert going at it on the floor of the house and Marjorie Taylor Green calling L.B. A little bitch, the other L.B. to her face.

And is they're apparently fighting over who gets to impeach Joe Biden or something like that? They have competing resolutions. and they've been going at it. And this has been brewing for a while, as they say. And we've heard talk of like confrontations in bathrooms and other really fun stuff. But now the former BFFs are apparently, I think they're not even frenemies at this point. They just don't like each other. They're stepping on each other's toes, Danielle.

I have never seen such fucking trash in my life. When I think about how the, I don't even know what to call it, is it the sanctity? of the office? Is it the prestige of Congress? Is it, you know, it used to be, dare I say, like a place that had, for lack of a better word, class. This Republican cohort is, I mean, we saw fist fights on the floor over Kevin McCarthy's failed 14 votes before he finally became the Fisher Price Speaker after 15 votes. A fight almost broke out. Like, how do Republicans look at this, like the voting Republicans, ones that their constituents look at this and say, yeah, these are my people. It's like you should have known Sarah Palin and her six-pack Joe, they were foreshadowing to like how low we were going to go.

That kind of language and I'm a person that loves cursing. But on the floor of the house, I'm beside myself at just how trashy this entire party is. cult trashy garbage. And if you vote for these people, like people looked at Marjorie Taylor Green and they said, she represents me. I want to talk to, I actually want to talk to

those people. I want to, I want to rub their two brain cells together and say like, what is it you see through your eyes that I don't see? I'm going to disagree with you. I don't think you want to talk to those people, Daniel. You're right. I don't. You're right. I don't. Because you know what? You can see them all day

long on Twitter and places like that. And within one sentence, you can tell that you don't want to talk to this person. But so the exact quote was MTG saying, I've donated to you, I've defended you, but you've been nothing but a little bitch to me. And then she accused her of copying her articles of impeachment, to which Bobert, I guess, replied, like, I haven't even read your articles of impeachment. So this is a real Lincoln Douglas situation. We've really got, you know, the best. and the brightest going at it, like an Algonquin roundtable. It is just unbelievable to watch this. And like I don't, yeah, I've just given up on that whole, you know, sort of sanctity of the

congressional floor. And I'm not even sure it was ever true. I think, you know, if you go back in history, I think there were people, you know, you might have to go back to like the 1800s, but, you know, there are probably people slapping people in the face with a white glove and stuff like that. But they were slapping with a white glove, Andy. Do you understand what I'm saying? Yes, we've got from white gloves to white trash is what you're saying. Yes, that is what I'm saying. It's just, it's a lack of class. And I don't know how else to put it. But I'm not talking about like the kind of class you get from like going to finishing school or something stupid like that and being hoity tooty or anything like that. I'm talking like the basic human level of

class that most people have this sort of guard. governor in their brain that's like, you know, oh, I shouldn't do that. And I shouldn't do it here. Like, I should save it for outside. But they just completely lack any sort of semblance of that. And it's just sort of like it's, look, this is, as you said, this is a Trump Republican Party. This is just the freely expressed running wild id of the brain where there's nothing, there's nothing to keep you in check. You just, whatever feels right at the moment, you do it. And it doesn't matter how it affects other people or whether it's wrong. It's just, it's whatever makes my little P-Brain happy, I do it. That's basically, I think, sort of the credo of today's Republican Party. You're totally right, because unfortunately,

it isn't about the collective. It is about a few, like, marginal people who want to be celebrities, who want, who just want to be on Fox News, right? This is who they are. They don't really have any ideology outside of hate. They don't have anything to offer their constituents. Like, they didn't go run for Congress because I wanted to better my community. They ran for Congress because they wanted to own the libs and get a cushy spot every night on Fox News and have microphones in their faces. Like, it is the reality TV trash of politics. That is where Donald Trump has taken this party. A hundred percent. And I love Zach Trissot and Zacketrizo and Sam Brody in the Daily Beast article about this, had a great kicker. It was a quote from a GOP

lawmaker saying, I personally don't think it's helpful in any way, which is already like hilarious, but this is a GOP lawmaker who would not give his name. Like that is where this party is now that somebody does not want to put their name on saying that the two of them fighting on the floor isn't helpful in any way. Because he or she knows that that's not what people want to hear on his side. So, like, so they won't even put their name on it. So anyway, moving on to something that's a little more serious, I think. There's been a lot of back and forth on, you know, what is Merrick Garland doing? Is he going to get moving? Is, you know, and then the Moralago thing came along. And that sort of was an easy thing to act on. But people forget that there's still the whole January 6th investigation that the

Justice Department has been doing now for, I think, 24 years. 25 by my count, but, you know. 25. I'm not the best at math. These days we hear about from Republicans, how everything the Justice Department done is political. It's aimed at Republicans. And we got a big story in the Washington Post a couple days ago about how the FBI, in fact, has pretty much been slow walking the federal January 6th investigation. And they've been slow walking it for the exact opposite reason that Republicans keep harping on. It's because they don't want to appear political. I'll let you get more into the details of this if you want.

But this to me is like, we say this all the time on here. Like everything, and I'm not counting the FBI as Democrats here because the FBI is not notoriously staffed by Democrats. But they are bending so far over backward that there is absolutely no way they're not wearing back braces at this point. They want so badly to appear to not be political. And all it gets them is the Republicans saying they're political. So why do they even bother? That's my question for you, Daniel. Yeah, this is a thing that I don't understand. You go out of your way to not be perceived as political, but the decisions that you're making are being based on politics. There was more than enough evidence. We've talked about it on this show. We've talked about it until we're blue in the face. More than enough evidence to point to the fact that Donald Trump incited the January 6th riot. There was more than enough evidence. Like, you're telling me, and this is what people have said because they've rested their laurels on this. Oh, we're going to go after those that.

entered into the Capitol building before we go after the architects. Tell me how the fuck that makes sense. After you had arrested the 850th person, you're telling me that you don't think to yourself, maybe those people wouldn't have entered the building had they not been told, had people not been sitting inside of the White House, hashing out plans to overthrow the government. And that maybe if we don't move quickly, right, if we don't move with haste, that this could be a dress rehearsal for what is in store.

And that instead of perceiving some type of bullshit integrity of the Department of Justice with a group of cult members that regardless of anything that you are going to do, they are going to say that you are evil, you are the dark state, you are the enemy of the people, it doesn't matter. So how about you just do the right thing? How about you have enough of a backbone and do the right thing? And so for 12 fucking months, 12 months. 12 months. They did nothing. 12 months. No interviews, no investigation, nothing whatsoever. Where would we be

right now in terms of Donald Trump having announced his second run at the presidency if they had charged him before? Where would we be as a country? Where would the Republican Party be? It was Mo Brooks who wore a bulletproof vest when he stood up at the Stop the Steel rally. But like you had people that were clearly members of Congress who were prepared for battle that day, who were wearing gear that said that they were not just giving another speech. So you're telling me that the Department of Justice and the FBI collectively decided that, oh, those people are good. That's part of protected speech. Get the fuck out of here.

And so I'm like, because they were playing politics, they've actually put our democracy. at risk for a second time. Yeah. And look, remember, it was Trump who on that day told them to shut off the metal detectors because he said, they're not here for me. Yep. Meaning the people with the guns were not there to shoot at him. So, yes, absolutely to all of that. And I'm looking at the, you know, the Washington Post article.

And it says inside the Department of Justice, some lawyers have complained that the Attorney General's determination to steer clear of any claims of political motive has chilled efforts to investigate the former president. Quote, you couldn't use the T word, Trump, said one former justice official. It's so anger-making. And like you said, look, get the strategy of starting from the ground up. Okay, that's, to me, a legitimate strategy. But as you pointed out, and not that they should stop going after those people,

but you've got a number of successful prosecutions of the people on the ground. At some point, you have to start saying, you know, When are you going to start making your way up the chain if that was your idea? You know, you could spend another probably six, seven years just going after the people on the ground. So that is the literal definition of a slow walk. And you're right, because it feels like a lot of this is, you know, obviously I can't get into the mind of Merrick Garland and Chris Ray and those people. But there's two things here. One is it feels like they sort of want this to be decided at the ballot box and that they're feeling is, well, if you think Trump did this, then don't vote for him.

That's not the way justice is supposed to work. That's a Republican talking point stemming from the Mar-a-Lago indictments. And it feels like they've been working along the same lines for these past years. And again, I could be wrong. This is sheer speculation on my part, but it's what it feels like. And the other thing is, I think they are so damn happy that the Mar-a-Lago documents dropped in their lap because it gave them a really clear path toward inditing Trump. It allowed them to stay away from the men.

of the January 6th stuff is my point. Like they can say, look, we indicted him. We indicted him. And it sort of pacifies people. And then we kind of forget that, wait a minute, there's this whole years-long investigation about January 6th. It kind of gets pushed to the back burner because it's like, oh, well, they did indict him. They're doing their job. And I don't think that. Okay. I think that. You're allowed to be wrong. I think that Merrick Garland did a C-YA by announcing Jack Smith as special counsel. I think that they were praying to God that Donald Trump would just eventually return the documents because they gave him two years, two and a half years, actually, to return those documents. And it wasn't until finally we're going to announce after two and a half years, oh, now here is

a special counsel because it seems like he's going to keep, you know, the nuclear codes. He's going to keep the map of whatever country we're going to attack and invade and bomb next. And oh, maybe this is part a breach of our national security. Two and a half years, Donald Trump was sitting on information that he could have sent to God knows who, to God knows where. And you want to talk about national security threat. So I think that Merrick Garland, when he heard the news, as he claims, right, I didn't know it was Jack Smith's idea to indict him, that it was just like, oh, God, you know, why didn't

you just return the documents? I don't think that he is happy about this at all. I think that he wanted to just shove it away, bury it, put it under the carpet. America will forget about the day that our country was attacked, will forget about the fact that a president who sends love letters to dictators, who praises our adversaries over our own intelligence community, that that man has documents that he should not have, that we would all just be like, oh, that's not a big deal. has stuff. What? I hear what you're saying. And I don't know, somehow I feel like we're both right. I agree with you that they went above and beyond and giving Trump every chance to return these documents. I'm actually kind of okay with that because the actual person of Trump, the person of Trump aside, I'm okay with giving an ex-president a little bit of deference on something like

that and giving them a chance to cop to making a mistake and returning the shit. That honestly doesn't bother me that much. So I agree with you there, but I do think that once Trump put them in the position, you know, of really leaving them no choice, that I do think it sort of became a, okay, you know what, we can do this. We'll prosecute him. And then, you know, that'll sort of justify a slow walking the other thing because we've got him on this. So I don't know. I kind of feel like maybe we're both right here, but maybe that's just because I'm a uniter, not a divider. I don't know. It's hard to tell sometimes. But getting back to this, you know, this slow walking thing, I encourage everyone to read this

Washington Post article. It's really well researched. But there's, you know, they talk about the idea that by taking so long to get to this, you know, and by not even talking to witnesses until, you know, years after the fact, people forget shit. People become harder to find. And in general, a case, you know, and it's just common sense that a case becomes harder to make the further away from when the alleged crime was committed.

There are unbelievable downsides to slow walking something like this. And that doesn't seem to have bothered them at all. And it's just, it's so frustrating that there's a line in here. Everybody keeps asking, where the hell is the FBI? Like, people were basically saying, why aren't they, you know, why aren't they talking to me? Why aren't they looking into this? And it's just like, that's, I don't know, that, that does not feel to me like a depoliticized justice department, you know, as you said earlier, by.

not making it political, you're making it political because you are conceding that there's a political aspect to it. And really, there isn't. Like, I don't give a damn if it's Donald Trump or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. I don't care what party you're in. If you do shit like this, you should be investigated. Exactly. And so the way to not make this political is to just say, hey, here's what he did. To me, that's why the Mar-a-Lago case is such an easier case. But it still doesn't matter because going back to my very original point, the Republicans are always going to say this is political. Exactly. It's the same logic we've talked about this before.

Like, you know, you can't nominate Bernie Sanders because they'll call him a socialist. And then they called Joe Biden a socialist. You can't win. Don't play their game. Exactly. And what Merrick Garland and Merrick Garland's Justice Department did was play into the Republicans' hands instead of doing your fucking job. That's what they did. And so at this stage of the game, stop being concerned with what Republicans are going to say about you because it does not matter.

They could have decided with the whole Hunter Biden plea deal. They could have decided to give Hunter Biden, oh, I don't know. Let's just throw out a number. 12 and a half years in jail. And it would have been like, you should have given him 20 years. That was a sweetheart deal. It doesn't matter. If they hung him.

If they had built a gallows instead and put Hunter embasseled on it, it wouldn't be enough. So stop playing into the hands of people that you're never going to satisfy because they're insane. Yeah, I think the key here is you have to hate the player and the game. Come on. Oh, Jesus. Folks, I am very happy to welcome back to the new abnormal. The president of Nairal, Minnie Timurajou. You know, Minnie, it has been a year now, a year since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in the Dobbs decision.

It has been a year that we have watched post that decision. Red state after red state either institute all-out bans on abortion or pretty much do all-out bans when you're banning abortion at six weeks of pregnancy. We have watched states introduce legislation to criminalize women and people with uteruses and to essentially institute a wave of cruelty towards women. and people with uteruses under the guise of caring about life. And so as we look at this last 12 months, I want to get a sense from you of what you are feeling

as the president of one of the major women's organizations, abortion organizations, women's health organizations in the country, and how you see our future. Great to be with you, Danielle. And as always, you are so clear. able to, you know, crystallize so many of the thoughts and feelings so many of us are having in this moment. You know, one year post jobs, we have to reckon with the utter disaster, the complete havoc that's been created in the 20 states that have banned or restricted abortion access.

And the consequences it's had to the larger health care, but also health care, fundamental, civil liberties, human rights situation in this country. We've created a bifurcated nation where people have to consider leaving their state or breaking the lot of access fundamental health care, right? So this is a terribly dangerous time. The stories we're hearing from states with bans and restrictions are getting increasingly dystopian straight out of, you know, horror movies and shows like the Handmaid's Tale, not that that's my favorite analogy, but it's crazy when stuff in fiction is happening in real life, you know? In this moment, the way that I'm thinking about it and the way I'll say personal versus professional, although they intermingle, right?

You know, personally, it's extremely exhausting for advocates, my colleagues, my staff, much more so for our friends and the abortion provider and abortion fund space to be quite frank, they're the front line. And it's overwhelming. Like we're fighting bans and restrictions and efforts to restrict and fights in all 50 states. But the good news that there is any good news is that, and it's important as we're talking to our friends and our advocates, and our families, right, who are with us on this, not to constantly feed doom and gloom, right? You know this is an activist. You've got to show a pathway. Mm-hmm.

The madness. The pathway out of the madness is that we have 22 states, plus the District of Columbia, that have enacted some sort of abortion access protection and expansion. So that's a big thing. It provides a clear contrast, by the way, between, like, what happens when you have extremist running your state versus pro-reproductive freedom majorities. And poll after poll by. independent organizations like Gallup and USA Today just in the past week are showing that abortion

access has become more popular than historically ever in this country. And it's a direct result of these horrific stories coming out of states of bands. And we know the longer these bands are in place, the more stories, unfortunately, are going to come out. I feel a lot of, I keep saying the word horror, but that's the word that keeps coming up in my mind. You know, at what's happening. It's so much worse than any of us could have even imagined. And many of us have been imagining a lot for a long time. But there is a pathway out of it. And so my job and my team's job is to focus on the pathway out

and to do everything we possibly can incrementally and long term to fix this problem in this country. You know, it took 50 years of relentless campaigning for white evangelical Christians to find the right. president who would put in the right justices that would overturn precedent. And when I realize that this is, this was a five decades long campaign, I think about why the movement, but not even the movement, why Democrats, why progressives, why people who believe in bodily autonomy assumed that precedent mattered.

Like, as we were watching over four years of Donald Trump and the eight years since he came down that escalator, we have seen an entire revolt from normalcy by the Republican Party. You know, we've seen them turn political norms into garbage and dispose of them. And so I'm wondering, what have we learned over the last eight years? And what have we learned by watching this Republican Party turn into a shadow, dark, evil version of itself to be able to combat for the next 50 years? Because like we knew, they weren't stopping at Roe. They're not stopping there.

And we can look at so many other issues and so many other communities that are under attack by this party who believes in. a Christian, fascist, theocratic regime leading this country. And so what have we learned and what tools are we going to use as we move forward, knowing that we are in truly a battle for our lives? I'll caveat this by saying that pre-Dobbs, I started my career in Texas. And we know since Planned Heron v. Casey fundamentally altered Roe, there was a rise in targeted restrictions against abortion providers that we fought the very first transvaginal ultrasound bill, the 24, 72 hour waiting periods, the corporate separation between abortion clinics and family planning clinics. All of that stuff happened very early in places like Texas, and it happened with Roe is the

law of the land. So we fundamentally didn't have access for many communities of color, folks in rural communities, folks who were already marginalized. So that's an important thing to note. I want to directly answer your question. What I've learned predates Dobbs, but it's only been under. scored and reaffirmed since jobs. And it's that our opposition is relentless. They are cruel. They not care about women and children. They certainly don't care about pregnant people in general.

They don't care about maternal health outcomes. They don't care about creating ecosystems that are healthy for families to thrive. And we know this because the states that were the quickest to enact abortion bans are the same states with the worst rates of maternal mortality that have no family leave that have no child care infrastructure that are generally terrible in terms of environmental protections and clean water and air. So these are not conditions in which anyone wants to choose to raise a family or as the conditions to have a family that would thrive. So it's important. We've always known that our opposition was hypocritical, that they used messaging as a way to hide their true intent, which has always been about power and control. It's never been

about livelihood or well-being of communities. They've pretended that that was the case for a long time. And because Roe was the law of the land and it was hard to penetrate through on these messages, we had a believability gap in this country. The average American was like, okay, these pro-choice activists are raising the alarm, even after Dr. Tiller got murdered, right? It was like, well, that's a lone wolf or that's a... Yep.

That's not organized terrorism against an entire country, which we knew it was. And my predecessors at Nairal were aggressively lobbying and putting out information and fighting disinformation about all of these things. But in the past year, what's changed is now the entire country knows it. It brings me great pain that it took the fall of Roe for the believability gap to close. But unfortunately, that is where we're at. And now that we're here, and we know that the majority of Americans are with us and understand how deeply hypocritical and evil our opposition is, we have to It's a moral obligation to capitalize on it and win elections and start restoring some semblance of humanity to these states and to our country. You know, when you use the term believability gap, I mean, that is really it.

That is really like the finger on the pulse of where this country has been, I think, for the last eight years. I think that we have been in this place of, oh, what is happening couldn't possibly be happening. Like we have gone through the Trump administration, gone through a global health pandemic, gone through the overturning of Roe v. Wade, gone through now every other storm, tornado, fire is historic. Like we are going through these things and it is so difficult for us to wrap our minds around this moment. And I have a friend the other day tell me that he was trying to tell his daughter, who is 14, that, you know, what we're experiencing right now in terms of the environment. in terms of these things are not normal. And I said, well, she's only 14. This has been going on for

about half of her life and half of her life that she has been like truly really like conscious. Like she's in middle school and is understanding, wait a minute. This is actually my norm. And so for younger women and people who are now coming of age, many, in this moment, in this what we continue to call a historic, you know, unprecedented, tragic moment, they believe what it is that they are seen because it's all that they've ever known. And so how do we convince them that while this may be a part of their every day, this may be their norm, how do we now shrink the gap between what has become their norm, Generation Z and the Alpha Generation and what is abnormal for those of us that are older.

Like what does the closing of that gap look like so that we can link arms and fight against the opposition? Oh, I think it's such an important question, you know, and we've been thinking about this a lot. The future of our country depends on our engagement of Gen Z and really empowering them to take leadership. You know, they're the generation most impacted by all these crises. You know, all the ones you just,

mentioned, you know, the crisis, reproductive freedom, you know, Gen Z is just in the beginning of their reproductive journey and slapped in the face with their bodily autonomy being taken away. So Gen Z also has every justifiable reason to not trust us. When I say us, I mean Gen X and older, right? I'm Gen X. I'm, you know, I'm 50 years old. I'm at the end of my reproductive journey. I'm in metapause. And I'm running a reproductive freedom organization.

So, you know, I recognize the challenges that it would take someone who's in Gen Z to trust leadership like ours because they say they are correct. You know, you failed. You failed us. And then I look at the older generation, you know, second way feminist who created my organization and still largely fund us. And they're like, we don't want to deal with this shit again. Like we had this fight. We thought we fixed it. What the hell?

So I talk about being in the sandwich generation of my personal life with small children and elderly parents. but I'm also in the sandwich generation in my professional and activist life. And I get why there's anger and frustration both above us and below us, you know, in terms of age. What I think is going to be critical is to bridge the gap and to rethink how we do this work. If there's any other good news in this, it's that this crisis and democracy has really unif our movements. You know, I was just at the court this morning with our friends at demand justice who've created this just majority coalition around court reform and court expansion. because we've realized across all over organs, whether it's gun violence, climate change, whether it's, you know, campaign finance reform, voting rights, civil rights, human rights,

the underlying root cause of our inability to win is that our democracy is broken and our courts are corrupt. And how this connects back to Gen Z. When young people organize, they are not thinking about, I'm a pro-choice voter or I'm a gun violence prevention voter. They are thinking about, I want the right to live my life in humane conditions. These are affecting it. So we need to be speaking to them in a much more clear and cohesive way. You know, I think it's the step beyond being intersectional. It's about being unified in our approach.

So I think that's one big thing that this crisis with the courts that Dobbs has done, Dobbs has made everybody aware that we have a crisis with our courts. It's made everyone aware that we have to be unified and how we fight together, that what happens over here with abortion is going to affect voting rights. What happens with voting rights affects abortion. There's no separate movements anymore. We're moving towards a more unified structure and a set of policy recommendations and activism. And that's better and more attractive to the younger generation.

And then finally, we have to create conditions for them to take the reins of their own destiny. And by that, I mean, we have old models of organizing. We have old models of communication. You know, I'm on MSNBC often, but young people aren't watching MSNBC. Right. Like, how do I talk to them or am I even the right person to talk to them? How do the young people in my being talk to the young people who are newly awakened to this post-job's reality and how do we engage and organize them?

So we're doing a lot of different types of organizing and we're experimenting with new technologies and we're trying to understand how do we best communicate with them. But more importantly, we've learned that it's important to empower younger activists to let them create the modes of communication for themselves. And we need to take a step back and listen and learn to younger activists in order to be effective in communicating with them. And we can't treat them like a constituency. We have to cede some power to them and let them lead. Yeah. That's tough for some folks in my generation. I think that that's right. And I think it is necessary. You know, when we look at what happened recently in Tennessee with the young people

taking over the state house there following the mass shooting at the religious school. When we see young people walking out in Florida over book bands and changes to curriculum through erasure, these young people know how to organize. They know what is happening. And it's funny because as they blame their Gen X parents, it's like the rest of us are blaming the boomers that are still very much in charge in a lot of ways, still very much their money is what is funding the opposition on the right. And so it's really an interesting place to be in, in this intergenerational fight where we're in, where it is very important to understand who is to blame, sure, but I also think that it's really important to understand how we move together as a collective in this moment, because

is if we don't, if the right is successful at pinning generation against generation, community against community, then by the time we're done fighting with each other, we wake up and we have no rights left. That's right. And what I'll say is they've been doing this for a very long time. And it's been really effective, the divide and conquer strategy. And we've just got to be much more unified in how we fight back. And I think it's a big to start now, but it's a little late.

So we've got to be more aggressive and rapid with our progress. Well, Minnie, you know, we continue to watch this space and continue to, you know, want to amplify voices and work like yours and that of Nehrel because, you know, we're in for decades and decades long fight. And without strong voices and strategy, we will always be on the defensive. And I think it's time for that to change. So as always, friend, really appreciate you.

Appreciate you too. And everything you do to cultivate these spaces and lift up voices and hoping to have more positive things to share the next time we talk. Absolutely. Thanks. My next guest is the author of The Great Book Republic of Lies about the rise to power in America of conspiracy theorists. And she's a senior staff writer at Vice, where among other things, she's written extensively about Robert Kennedy Jr. So who better to talk about RFK's presidential campaign and the disgusting scene that took place on Twitter over the past week, then Anna Merlin. Anna, thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me. Okay, so for listeners who are blessedly not on Twitter, a quick recap. RFK Jr. appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast. Somehow this ended up with Dr. Peter Hotez, a friend of the pod and a mensch in general, being harassed first on the hell site and then in real life for days on end. And as I understand it, this is somehow all your fault, right? Yes, this is my fault. Dr. Hottes was tweeting a link to a blog that I wrote about RFK's appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast.

So yes, in many ways, if I had never been born, none of this would have happened. Exactly. Food for thought. It is good to see you taking responsibility. We don't see enough of that in this day and age, I think. I take full responsibility. Exactly. So for real, you wrote a story for Vice, as you said, after Kennedy went on Rogan.

With the headline, Spotify has stopped even sort of trying to stem Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation. And you ran through a bunch of the conspiracy-minded, flat-out lies that Kennedy told, which I'm sure Rogan corrected him on. Ha-ha. What were some of those? I guess let's start with the anti-vax stuff. Right. So kind of notably, I was not able to fact-check every single claim because there were simply so many. Right. And I was not trying to write a 6,000 word blog. So some of the lowlights were obviously Kennedy claiming that vaccines cause autism, which is, the most anti-vax 101 claim. It has been debunked over and over and over, you know, making claims about vaccines not being safety tested, conflating ethel mercury, which used to appear in some

childhood vaccines and is not hazardous to human health and methyl mercury, which is. So there was just an endless sort of round of his kind of common anti-vaccine claims. And then some stuff that was a bit new to me. For instance, he talked about a story that he wrote in 2005 called Deadly Immunity that ran concurrently in Rolling Stone and Salon, which was retracted. And Salon eventually apologized for it because it contained so much misinformation and so many just outright incorrect claims about vaccines. To my knowledge, he has not claimed before, or perhaps I just haven't heard him say, but he claimed that the story had been pulled due to, quote, pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, which is bullshit. It was pressure from reality. Right. It was

mix of kind of the sort of classics and then some things that were unusual. There were some stuff about the dangers of Wi-Fi and 5G technology. He claimed that Wi-Fi degrades your mitochondria and opens your blood-brain barrier, which is a claim that caused, you know, every scientist on Twitter to immediately have an aneurysm. Proving his point. They fact-checked that claim by having Jamie, Rogan's producer, Google something, and then just pulling up the first sort of Google result without really any regard for whether it was credible. They, you know, talked about big pharma, quote-unquote, suppressing data about the effectiveness of ivermectin, which does not work as a cure preventative for COVID. It was a sort of three-hour run-through of a lot of his greatest hits. Yeah, and I should

point out that just a little before we recorded this, I saw that Joan Walsh posted a story. She was the editor of the RFK piece you mentioned at Salon at the time. And she posted a whole story walking through exactly why they eventually pulled it. And it was obviously, as you said, it had nothing to do with any pressure from Big Pharma. It was they kept publishing correction after correction. And eventually they were like, okay, this shouldn't even stay up at this point. Yeah, it was like five multi-paragraph corrections by the time they decided to retract it. I mean, it's a really interesting kind of incident in the sort of history of journalism. And I think it's something that will kind of refer to a lot in the exhausting grind towards election day in which there was this desire to hear Kennedy's side,

in which he leveraged his then, you know, pretty big platform as an environmental activist to make a variety of claims in a sort of non-science publication with editors who I think were not just sort of versed enough in what he was saying to really, to really run it down and really fact check it. And he's been dining out on that story ever since, both the fact that he was allowed to run it and also the fact that it was retracted. Right. Exactly. Right. It has used it as evidence of conspiracy, as evidence of his, you know, anti-vaccine sentiments being too dangerous and too powerful and being silenced by the powers that be. I mean, it's, it would, it provides a blueprint for a lot of what is going to happen during his campaign. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so you write this story.

Peter Hotez tweets a link to it and then off we go, right? Every right-wing Chud on Twitter is screaming, debate me at Hotez. One asshole actually shows up at his house. Elon Musk calls your story dog shit, which Mazel Toff, by the way. No, Joe Rogan. That's maybe even better. I don't know. That's a tough call. What started the pylon was Joe Rogan responding to Hotez and saying, you know, I forget what his exact wording is, but essentially demanding that he come on Rogan's show and debate Kennedy about his claims. And then, yeah, saying that my article was dog shit, which, you know, Fair enough. Matter of opinion. T.H. his own. I don't think Joe Rogan is a regular vice reader, and that's fine. You then wrote a story about the harassment campaign. And you wrote something interesting

in it that I want to just kind of quote here. You wrote, the entire incident, which remains ongoing, illustrates a growing and increasingly destructive alliance between tech billionaires, the anti-vaccine movement, and various self-proclaimed heterodox thinkers who between them make up RFK's most vocal base of support. So as the author of Republic of Lies, You seem almost uniquely qualified to answer this question. How did America get to this place? Oh, boy. Well, do you want the answer that goes back to the founding of this country?

The answer that goes back to World War II, the answer that goes back to the 1970s. The kind of broad overarching point that I make in the book is that, like a lot of countries, we are uniquely positioned to engage in conspiratorial thinking because our levels of trust and our institutions are rightly pretty low. you know, since the founding of this country, we've had anxieties about, for instance, interference in political campaigns, you know, almost as soon as we had voting in the U.S., we had concerns about interference in voting. Medical conspiracy theories of the kind that RFK traffics in are incredibly common in the U.S. because our levels of trust in sort of medical institutions, the kind of medical industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industry, all those things are very low for a lot of reasons, both sort of actual historical. historical reasons and then kind of more what we might call vibes-based reasons. So all of this kind of positioned us to be a country where conspiracy theories take root, where they're sort of hard

to push back on in a lot of ways combined with the fact that we really like celebrities and we tend to give celebrities a lot of voice and a lot of room to say stuff to make claims, including claims about public health. And that is again another thing that we are seeing here. Yeah, it is just a just an unbelievable sort of coming together, coalescence of whatever, of all of these different things. You know, you touched on the celebrity thing. And, you know, I've been sort of hesitant to call RFK Jr. a nepo baby. But let's be honest, you know, you see these polls where he's getting like 20% and whatever. And, you know, you got to figure 15 to 18% of that is name based. Yeah. I mean, there's some evidence in the polling that some of the likely Democratic voters

who are saying they would be receptive to voting for him are saying so because they recognize the family name. And of course, as has been pointed out a lot, RFK is already kind of banking on discussions of his dad, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., who is, of course, assassinated during his own run for president, and then his uncle, John F. Kennedy Jr., who was also assassinated. Two incredibly beloved figures in American politics, people who especially older Democratic voters probably have a very strong,

sentimental attachment to. So, you know, he is really playing up the family name. He mentions his dad and or his uncle in pretty much every interview. He, as we discussed, made his campaign announcement in Boston where he has some family history as opposed to, you know, his home on the very Tony west side of Los Angeles. Like, he is doing a lot to draw attention to the family names. I mean, he's certainly not running away from it. Let's be blunt about it. So what do you think his endgame is here. Earlier this month, you co-wrote a piece with Tim Marchman saying that he could be laying the groundwork for a third-party run. Do you think that's where he ends up? So the reason why we said that is because of this sort of aforementioned heterodox base of

support that RFK has been building up, I mean, most notably from tech billioners with a lot of money. You know, he obviously has the endorsement of people like Joe Rogan, Jack Dorsey, major sports figures like Aaron Rogers, a lot of people who have already kind of shown a willingness to engage in, let's say, unusual ideas about science and health are very excited about him. And when we asked his campaign, you know, if he would support the Democratic nominee, if it wasn't him, they essentially just said, you know, we think he's going to win the nomination. We're not focused on that, which is not a no. It is not, for instance, what somebody like Bernie Sanders does, where he immediately, you know,

comes out and backs the Democratic nominee. Right. And that's because, you know, Kennedy, although he is running as a Democrat, he is making an appeal to disaffected voters on both sides. So I think that there is a very strong chance that he tries to mount a third-party run. But even if he doesn't, I think the larger purpose here is to, again, like kind of milk the family legacy to create a little bit more of a name for himself outside of, and in addition to his anti-vaccine activism and to at the same time kind of catapult the ideas that he's been pushing for so many years further into public life. We have seen so many

knock on effects already from him running for president, including, and this sounds frivolous. He was banned from Instagram for several years over his vaccine misinformation, and as soon as he announced his candidacy, he was allowed back on the platform because his campaign complained that it would be undemocratic to have a presidential candidate who wasn't allowed to have an Instagram. Instagram is, of course, a major way to communicate with folks, especially, you know, slightly younger voters. So just having him back on that platform and being allowed to spread the misinformation that he spreads there is already like a huge sort of triumph for the campaign. Yeah. And also I think this sort of gets to like, he doesn't strike me as a grifter in the sense that I think he's a true

believer. I think he honestly believes the absolute nonsense that he's peddling. And I think he does want to spread this message far and wide, not necessarily for personal gain or not just for personal gain, but I think he honestly believes he's doing the world of service. You know, Whenever I'm talking about anybody who spreads conspiracy theories in public, whether it's somebody like Alex Jones or somebody like Mr. Kennedy, I kind of stay away from saying whether or not they truly believe in what they're spreading because I don't know. I can't see into anybody's heart or mind. I'm not omniscient. What we can say is that he has been remarkably consistent in what he has promoted, even as his explanations for how vaccines cause harm has shifted, become a bit more deficient. and more vague over time. But yeah, certainly he has made this case in public for a super long time and has tied it to his previous work as an environmental lawyer and activist. And, you know, I think his beliefs are pretty obvious. That said, in the early days of the campaign, he has also downplayed his anti-vaccine activism. You know, he did not talk about it in his campaign announcement, despite the fact that the room was full of his supporters and supporters of children's health defense, the anti-vax organization that he runs. And in a lot of interviews, he sort of stayed away from that downplayed it. There's been a couple of interviews where it hasn't really come up at all, all of which is super interesting. So, as I say, I think that he is doing a bit of a thing here where he's trying to present himself as not just an anti-vaccine activist, despite that being, you know, the thing that he's best known for and the thing that he's devoted the last, I don't know, 15 years or longer, too.

Yeah, no, that's fair. And look, if I weren't omniscient, I suppose I wouldn't make the statements that I make either. Thankfully, that's not an issue for me. I mean, good for you. Wow. That must be really helpful in our line of work. It is, but it's an equal part blessing and curse, I think. I'm sure.

So, yeah, it sounds great. God bless. No, thank you. It sounds, it's a burden is what it is. Well. I now see that Kennedy is going to be speaking at the Moms for Liberty Summit. Would you bet against him getting a nice speaking slot at the 2024 Republican convention? Because I don't think I would bet against that.

It's an interesting question. Yeah, I definitely would expect to see him. at like CPAC, for instance, if not at the, you know, at the actual RNC, you know, why not? Yeah. Especially, you know, I think they have a bit of a candidate problem themselves, obviously. So who knows? Maybe they'll decide that this is their guy. I would be surprised for other reasons.

But I think there'll be plenty of Republican and sort of like far-right spaces that are happy to give him a hearing. Yeah, no, I think that's true. I just keep thinking, you know, what a coup would be for the Republicans to get a Kennedy to speak at their convention. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. I think we're going to see a lot of unholy or unlikely bedfellows over the next few months. Yeah, I'm just, I'm looking at the other speakers at this Moms for Liberty Summit. Donald Trump, Ronda Santis, Nikki Haley.

Other than his name, it's kind of hard to reconcile Jr. being a Democrat, I think, at this point. Yeah, and I mean, as I think the New Republic noted, he is the only purported Democrat who is speaking at Moms for Liberty. So yeah, it's just absolutely fascinating. And I would be very curious to hear a post-mortem from him about what he thinks about the other speakers. Though I doubt we'll get that in any kind of truly transparent form. Yeah, no, I'm with you on that. Do you think the media will save us from RFK the way it did from Trump in 2016? Oh, wait, wait.

You know, this is going to be, God help us. Yeah, no, this is going to be the million-dollar question that we're all going to be discussing. ad nauseum, which is, you know, how much coverage do you give to Kennedy before it helps him? How much coverage, how much critical coverage ultimately amounts to free advertising. And, you know, this is a conversation on which I ultimately come down on the side of coverage. I don't think we ignore candidates. I don't think that's our job as journalists. You know, I don't think it is helpful to ignore the reality of what is going on. At the same time, I am hopeful that we learn some things from how the media covered Trump. And I'm already seeing both. for RFK and for Marianne Williamson, like much more kind of rigorous stories about their record, their past claim, how they're presenting themselves now versus how they presented themselves historically. Like, perhaps we have learned something. Yeah, but, you know, as you pointed out, I think in one of your pieces, Michael Spurkanish on CNN, certainly doesn't seem like he's learned anything.

No, that was pretty bad. That was a very sort of bizarre softball interview that was managed to, I think mentioned the word vaccines once, was largely about Mr. Smirconish's band. of RFK's wife, the actor Cheryl Hines. Yeah, that was a weird one. Yeah. I don't know how many of those were going to see, but it's not going to be zero. I don't think you have to be omniscient to know that. Anna, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your information and I love your writing. And for the record, when I said that Republic of Lies was a great book. I wasn't just saying that. I absolutely loved that book. Thank you. I'm a bit of a conspiracy theory nut from back when they

used to be fun and interesting before they were like, you know, actually destroying lives and killing people. Well, you know, it waxes and wanes. I mean, maybe at some point we'll get back to the fun ones, you know, when we're all roaming sort of a desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland fighting in the water wars. But, you know, we'll talk about Bigfoot over the trash fires. I am going to find you and talk your ear off about Kubrick filming the moon landing if that happens. Okay, sounds good. Anna, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Thanks again. I appreciate it. Andy Levy. Danielle, who is your fuck that guy to end this fabulous week?

One of my all-star favorite people to say fuck you and fuck that guy, too, Governor Ron DeSantis. Except I didn't have to do it. A federal judge did it this week when they, according to NBC News, struck down Florida rules championed by Governor Ron DeSantis restricting Medicaid coverage for gender dysphoria treatments, for potentially thousands of transgender people. In the 54-page ruling by U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, he said what many people with brains know. Quote, gender identity is real.

And he went on to say that invalid to the extent they categorically ban Medicaid payment for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the treatment of gender dysphoria. What I really love about, this is that the judge also said this was blocked strictly for political reasons. So they're not mincing words. The judge is not mincing words saying, oh, well, maybe there was a real reason behind why we wouldn't use Medicaid resources in order to treat patients. It's like, no, you did this strictly out of politics. There is no medical reason. There is no justifiable or legal

reason. And we are seeing these cases now. This is now the second one to fall in a red state where these judges are actually looking at the medical. God, imagine this, that you actually look to the doctors and you look to the science and you look to the actual real research on gender dysphoria, where you are listening to the stats that happens to people when they are able to take control over their own bodies and live a life that they want to live and what that does. And so I think that this is just, it's a major blow to Ron DeSantis who has used Florida as a petri dish for evil for the Republican Party. And I hope much like his anti-gay and anti-trans and all of these policies that develop there, I hope that this is a domino effect across red states that have tried to make a target of a very

marginalized of a marginalized community that is already under attack and turn them into these boogie people that everyone needs to be fearful of and these judges coming out and saying no this is real this is a medical condition this needs to be treated and if it is not there are serious mental and emotional consequences for denying said treatment so i hope that this is the beginning of robust cases that will come up to actually protect trans people. Two things. I want to say, boogie people sounds like you're talking about people who are really into disco. But one of the things that the judge said that I really liked, along with what you pointed out where he talked about that this was all being done for political reasons, is he said

pushing individuals away from their transgender identity is not a legitimate state interest. And that just sums it up. Yeah. You know, leave people alone. Leave these people alone. Let them live their best life and stop trying to shit. I just, it was always a falsehood that the Republican Party was the party of individual liberty, but they're not even trying anymore. They're just not even pretending. They are just straight up. They just want to run people's lives and be the little fascists that they are in their soul. And it's gross and it's disgusting and it's harmful and it's hateful. And it made me really happy to just basically see. this judge say that there is literally no legitimate interest for the government here. Yeah. Get out of people's business. Exactly. So yeah, fuck DeSantis as always. But God bless a judge for actually doing their job. Yeah. Imagine that. Yeah. It can be done. It can be done. So, Andy, who is your fuck that guy to end this very fabulous week? So my fuck that guy, I'm going a little bit lighter to end the show. Elon Musk.

a truly hateful person. Sort of, he said he would be up for a cage match with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta. Zuckerberg replied saying, send me location. This was, you know, of course, with the two of them, this was all done online. And he appears ready and willing to do this. Now, a thing to know if you don't is that Zuckerberg has been training. He's been doing jiu-jitsu. I don't know that he's any good at it. I think he got pinned. in the one match he had, but I think he's probably better than Musk at it. It puts me in the rare position of, I think, for the first time in my life, rooting for Mark Zuckerberg for something. And then to add further to the fuel to the fire, Andrew Tate, who is hopefully

going away for a very long time in a Romanian prison, he has now offered to train Elon Musk for this fight, which will be interesting because I'm not even sure Andrew Tate's allowed to leave Romania, but I could be wrong about that. It's just a world-class sort of conflagration of horrible, horrible people. And again, it's a weird group of three people where Mark Zuckerberg is maybe the least horrible of them, but I think it might be the case here. I would actually pay a lot of money to watch Elon Musk get the shit beaten out of him in a pay-per-view fight. So I hope this happens. But in the meantime, basically fuck all these guys. But in particular, fuck Elon Musk and fuck Andrew Tate. Andy, as the chosen white man for our show, I need to ask, what the fuck is wrong with white men?

Like, is it that these white billionaires, like, y'all just, like, are they just bored like they've done everything they have, you know, clearly there's no oppression. Clearly there's, you know, there's no one trying to steal their rights. There's no one trying to attack them. There's no one rolling out a bunch of racist, transphobic bots. There's no one trying to, you know, steal elections from them. So I'm just like, like, do they just make up shit to do? Like on a, like they're that fucking bored? You might be, I like how you started off by saying y'all as if I was also a billionaire. A white billionaire.

I think it's, you could be secret. This is just a hobby for you, Andy. You're very rich. Being a billionaire sort of transcends race. Like, I think at that point. you're just so divorced from reality that the point being that I don't think I can get into their mindset at all. But I do think you're onto something. I think they are very much bored with stuff and they have no real trauma in their life at this stage. So they have to sort of invent it.

And particularly Musk because look, there's nothing a right-wing white guy likes more than being a victim is something we've learned in these last several years. And so, you know, he has to act like he's set upon on all sides and then he comes up with weird shit, like saying he's decided that cis is a slur on Twitter. So it's again, it's just, it's making shit up to rail against because they

want to feel like they're part of humanity when really they're not. Yeah, maybe they can do the cage match inside of SpaceX. Yeah, or on a submarine. Maybe a submarine. We're going to have to. Now we're done. We're going to have to take that out. And now

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