The Daily Beast Podcast - GOP Keeps Embarrassing Itself Trying to Justify Biden Inquiry

Episode Date: September 17, 2023

This week’s episode of The New Abnormal highlights how Republicans are tying themselves up in knots while attempting to explain why we need an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden. 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. Welcome to another special bonus episode of The New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here.

Today we're going to be joined by author Kashmir Hill to talk about her new book, Your Face Belongs to Us, a secret of startups quest to end privacy as we know it. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. Clip it. I texted Andy the other night that I wanted to just make this whole episode a thing where we would reenact a fan fiction of what happened in the theater of Warren Bober, but I didn't get the enthusiasm, I thought, so I now have to play clips.

No, dear. So sorry I didn't want to be part of your sick little theater kid. Listen, man, Twilight started as fan fiction, and look how bad that goes. It's bad enough you've gotten me into Olivia Rodriguez. Okay, okay. All right. We've talked a lot about the dementing of the Republican Party on this podcast. podcast. And one of the striking things is how they continue to be the party that has branded itself

law and order and note I say branded itself since bitch, please. But the departure from this becomes more animated each day. And when I really saw that this week was when Governor Meatball Ron went on Sean Hannity show. And he told his audience that he's going to murder people on US soil without trial, which was a lot of fun. We're using lethal force against the cartels. If they're bringing fentanyl in, breaking into our country, we're going to leave them stone cold dead at the border. Trust me, they will get the message. There is just no one that cosplays like macho bullshit and toxic masculinity

the way that these Republican men do. Stone cold dead at the border, pry these guns from my cold dead. Like, shut the fuck up. It's not a cowboy Western, right? And you're actually like talking about real, like, huge. human beings that are seeking fucking asylum, not like everyone from Mexico is a part of a fucking cartel. Shut the fuck up.

I said my piece. I don't really have anything to add to that. I know. All I want to do is say shut the fuck up also. So I don't even want to dignify this by saying, you know, well, let's look at this logistically. How are you going to know if these are cartel members bringing in fentanyl? Andy, they have watermelon legs like Steve King from Iowa said.

Oh, okay, okay. I don't know, the Republican Party, like all the presidential candidates have literally declared war on Mexico. And nobody seems to care. Somehow this is not a big deal that they're all sitting here talking about bombing a foreign country. Someone else said they would send in special forces. Like, all of these things are acts of war against an ally. Nobody cares. I don't get it.

The other striking thing to me is that this is exactly why Ron DeSantis' campaign has gone the way it is, is because everything he says is to get a Sean Hannity audience to clap like that and to hoot and holler. But most people can understand exactly what you two said here. And yet they still don't get that it might be a good idea to get out of that bubble. Look, he's just trying to make himself sound more like Trump, but Trump is in the race. Trump was going to stick alligators on them, which I'm sure to them sounds, way cooler. Yes, exactly. They just want to live inside of like the medieval times. Like that's, that's their goal here. So now it's time to talk about another illustrative part of the Republican Party.

One representative Nancy Mace, for those unfamiliar, I'm sorry that you don't remember when we previously heard from Miss Mace on this podcast in our clips where she talked about how she had to turn down sex with her fiance to make sure she got to Tim Scott's prayer breakfast on time. Oh, God. Even Danielle forgot so you could be forgiven for that. But many may know her as the pretty white woman face of the mainstream media likes to put out there as a sane Republican. And what I keep thinking when they do that is if this is the best they got for sane Republican, that party's real fucked. Let her demonstrate herself.

The people deserve the truth and nothing but the truth. Isn't it supposed to be the evidence that leads you to pursue impeachment and impeachment inquiry? Well, that's what the inquiry is for. But there's already no investigations. I think that's where people are confused because it's not like there's no investigation happening. We don't have Joe Biden's bank records yet. And so one way to do that, my understanding would be through an impeachment inquiry. So if that's what gets us those bank records, then I'm going to support it.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. She has embarrassed herself so many times. It's at the point where I feel like we're piling on. She's just such an embarrassment. Yeah, that's all I have. She's embarrassed. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

Just. dumb, embarrassing. Why don't these people have to take a test in order to become like a representative? Why must people take a test, a citizenship test, in order to prove that they know the inner workings of America, but yet the people that represent us don't? Okay, here's going to be my pushback. I think that she's smarter than this because you don't have to be very smart to do this. I think this is just what happens when you have to contort yourself to follow along with the bull. bullshit needs of Donald Trump all the time. And it's like even a moderately intelligent person, you can't keep up with the fucking

insanity that he brings these people to and it dements these people are quote unquote the same people. So you're saying she's not dumb. She's lying. That's what I'm saying, Andy. It's almost like you're, you're chewing up something. Stay tuned. Stay tuned.

Okay. But if that weren't enough to. drive my point home. This isn't the only time Ms. Mace embarrassed herself this week. So we had a hearing this week on drug prices being negotiated through Medicare as President Biden seeks to lower those prices to help American families. And Ms. Mace does the other thing she's very, very good at and sucked up to donors, which many a Politico report about how this is how she spends most of her time. And then AOC has a word. And one last note of business, I'd like to say thank you to the many groups and organizations that reached out in anticipation of this hearing today with letters

outlining their stances on the issue. I'd like to enter into the record letters to the committee from the American Tort Reform Association, American Property Casualty Insurance Association, the Advanced Medical Technology Association, the Institute for Legal Reform, the International Legal Finance Association, National Association of Manufacturers, Jerry Theodore, at the R Street Institute without objection, so ordered. All right. And then who's, okay. I would now. like to yield five minutes to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you.

And I think for the listing of all the special interests involved in addition in this hearing. Now, I mean, that's fantastic. You know, part of me is like, my God, that was such a layup, but so many people would have missed that layup and AOC did not. She slammed it home. Wow, did I blow the metaphor there? But anyway, yeah, it's just unwel. real. And this goes back to, you know, the old joke that people in Congress should have to be like

NASCAR drivers and wear patches saying who is, who their sponsors are. And so obviously, AOC was completely right to call this out. And also, it's just so ridiculous listening to her, read that list of groups, most of whom are lawyers. And it was just like, oh, my God. They don't even know what they're doing. Like, that's the thing. I'm like, do they even know what they're doing. I would love it if they would have to wear patches like the Girl Scouts and be able to show us, you know, here's how I got this badge from the oil company, from firearms, from, you know, whomever. And as a matter of fact, you know, let the Supreme Court do that too. They're, I think, I think they're, I think the black robes make a wonderful blank canvas.

Very good point. Yeah. I personally look forward to all the Republicans who like to make fun of rappers with face tattoos, making fun of Clarence Thomas. Thomas. What he has to get lettered Leo's name written across his entire face. So speaking of NASCAR races, unlike Andy, I'm not much of a fan of racing, but there's one race I am greatly enjoying. It's the one between Senator Tommy Tuberville and Senator Joe Kennedy of Louisiana over who will be the Louis Gomer of the Senate. I have to say Mr. Kennedy has really put a strong lap on the board here this week.

I'm going to point out this clip here I'm going to play is directly from C-SPAN so this was aired on the air. Parents, if you have children around, I encourage you to skip after the commercial break because it's going to get a little rough around here. But Mr. Kennedy read from a children's book, supposedly, and this goes for a whole seven minutes, so I'm going to play it until someone says uncle. Okay. Let's take two books that have been much discussed. The first one is called All Boys Aren't Blue And I will quote from it

I put some lube on and got him on his knees And I began to slide into him from behind I pulled out of him and kissed him while he masturbated He asked me to turn over while he slipped a condom on himself. This was my ass, and I was struggling to imagine someone inside me. He got on top and slowly inserted himself into me.

It was the worst pain I think I have ever felt in my life. Eventually, I felt a mix of pleasure with the pain, close quote. All boys aren't blue. The second is another much-discuss book. I'm sure you're familiar with it. It's called Gender Queer. Let me read an excerpt from that.

Quote, I got a new strap-on harness today. I can't wait to put it on you. It will fit my favorite dildo perfectly. You're going to look so hot. I can't wait to have your cock in my mouth. I'm going to give you the blowjob of your life. And I want you inside of me, end quote.

That's good, because that's about how long I had the cliff for. I can't say anymore. So what was the point? What was the point of this lack of thought experiment on his part? Because first of all, I have interviewed George M. Johnson, whose book All Boys Aren't Blue is a memoir on his life as a black queer man living in America. It is not a fucking children's book. So neither is gender queer. They are not books that are in elementary schools. So I'm curious as to why adults can't make decisions about what kind of fucking books they want to get from a library, from an online bookseller, from a bookstore, I'm just confused. And the fact is, is that the fucking obsession that these Republican white men have with queer people is wild.

and you are fucking telling on yourself with the detail with which you like will research everyone else's fucking lives. Everyone else is fucking sex lives but your own because that shit only comes out in fucking scandal. Ugh. Yeah, I mean, I just want to point out that that book, All Boys Aren't Blue, was named a New York Library,

Best Book of 2020, Chicago Public Library, Best Book of 2020, a Kirkus Review's Best Book of 2020, Publishers Weekly, Anti-Racist Reading List Pick, etc, etc., etc. Again, as you said, first of all, the entire book is not graphic descriptions of sex. There's a reason stuff like that is in the book, and it all goes back to everything you just said. This is a memoir of someone describing his life growing up black and queer. And as you said, also, like they want to act like these books are being taught in first grade or something like that. And no, what is being proposed is that, or what it's being done is these books are being removed from public libraries, where, as you said, adults can go. Also, this is not a kid's book, but it is in a lot of ways. I think it's, I think it was marketed as a young adult book. A young adult is in their late teens or, you know, 16 or so, whatever. If you don't think that 16 year olds have heard and seen stuff like this before picking up this book, you're out of your mind. What they're getting from this. book as opposed to picking it up somewhere randomly on the internet is context and they might actually

learn some things so all of this is just insane and the fact that i just had to listen to john kennedy with his drawl read those sentences is i i should get hazard pay yes jesse as a matter of fact you know this this is going to take you off of my holiday list this is This is this one is up there. But I will, I will add this point, too. These books, to Andy's point, are for young adults. Mind you, the same young adults that Republicans say are mature enough to have fucking kids. The same young adults that are mature enough to work in meat plants and factories and facilities,

but are not somehow mature enough to read. Got it. Well, I guess I'm taking off my holiday. The gift I was going to get you both, which was John Kennedy reading 50 Shades of gray on audio book. Oh, fucking Jesus. First of all, I don't want to read that milk toast, BBSM stuff.

You can get me the real stuff or get out. Get out! All right, Fabio novels, only for you, Andy. No one's going to get that reference, Jesus. Facial recognition company Clearview AI operated mostly

in anonymity until New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill published a piece called The Secret of Company that might end privacy as we know it in January of 2020. And now she's written a riveting book about Clearview and the technology that propels it called Your Face Belongs to Us, a secretive startup's quest to end privacy as we know it. Out September 19th. She joins me now to talk about it. Kashmir, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me on, Andy. This was an absolutely fascinating book to me. And I wish I could talk to you for like an hour about Matthew Turk and Egan faces, but I can't. So I'll just jump to talk to me about Wantan Tat,

Chuck Johnson, Richard Schwartz, and a company called Smart Checker. So this is like a kind of rag-tag crew of startup entrepreneurs who were inspired by the idea of building a tool that could judge strangers, which in it was really fascinating. I had a chance to read the kind of early emails that they were exchanging. And they really had the idea that the face could tell you whether somebody might be a criminal or not or how intelligent the person. maybe, or whether they're a cheater. They thought that you could kind of data mine the soul from the face. Yeah, that's just, I mean, you talk about in the book how facial recognition technology sort of, you know, has antecedents in phrenology and things like that.

And it's just wild to me. Yeah, and it really comes from, I think, because one of the places where this app kind of was born, where Smart Checker was born, was at the Republican National Convention, where Trump was being annoyed at the candidate in 2016. And Juan Tantat was there with Chuck or Charles Johnson, just kind of wandering around, seeing all these people, going to see Melania Trump speak, going to see Peter Thiel speak. And they just started talking about an app that they could build.

Juan Tontat was a coder who'd spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, trying to kind of build the next big app without much success. Charles Johnson, Chuck Johnson, had this history on the Internet of kind of being a provocateur, who trolled liberals a lot. Yeah, and they just wanted to have something they could point at a stranger and figure out who that person was. It was quite a journey they went on to creating what eventually became Clearview AI. Yeah, and Peter Thiel gives them $200,000, which I like to think he found, like, in a winter jacket after putting it on for the first time that year after it was in his closet, you know, for the rest of the year. And then, so they developed this smart checker to actually ID people.

one of the first times it's used is at this 2017 Trump supporter event called the Deplorable. Yeah, so they went and started getting photos from the internet, kind of started with Venmo, was one of the big places where they first got people's faces and were able to develop this app that could link a face to the person that belonged to and all their social media profiles. So one of the first places that they tested this out, as you said, was at the Deplorable. And the idea was there were hundreds of people who were buying tickets for this kind of inauguration event that was happening in D.C. with Trump coming in as president. And they had a feeling there were going to be some people there trying to disrupt events. And so according to Juan Tontat, as he later told the Turkish government when he was trying to pitch his tool to them, he said he had

basically checked all the people who had bought tickets and was able to find some liberal extremist and make sure that they didn't attend the event. I mean, even at that early stage, it's frightening. But not long after that, Tontat and Schwartz, they decide to scrap Smart Checker and they reconstituted as Clearview AI. Why did they do that? So early on, it was so interesting with this company. It was really kind of just a collection of whoever was around to help. And one of the people that ended up kind of helping in the early days of Smart Checker slash Clearview AI was a guy named Doug Mackey. And he ended up becoming kind of infamous because he was linked to this. this big troll account, Ricky Vaughn. And Ricky Vaughn was this Twitter account that was putting out memes,

kind of putting out disinformation, misinformation, no one knew who was behind the account. And eventually somebody tied it to Douglas Mackey. He was outed by a very conservative, kind of alt-rate politician Paul Neelan as being the person behind the Ricky Vaughn account. And it was a big deal because Douglas Mackey wasn't what you would expect from a conservative troll. He'd gone to middle. He's a very kind of liberal seeming person. And it caused an uproar in the alt-right world. And somebody discovered that Douglas Mackey had been working with this company called Smart Checker, basically trying to assist politicians research their voters and research their opponents. Anyway, so Smart Checker kind of got pulled into this crazy alt-right blogosphere and people are talking about racism. And it just

was not a good image for the company. It wasn't a good Google footprint. And so they decide to ditch the name smart checker and change the name of the company to Clearview AI. And they also sort of take that opportunity to pretty much cut Chuck Johnson out of the picture, right? Yeah. So Schwartz and Tontat were in New York. Schwartz has formerly worked for Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor. And Charles Johnson was across the country in California, later in Texas. And, you know, according to them, he just wasn't doing much to help the company. He was talking it up. He was telling people he was associated with it. He had the app on his phone. He was able to search people's faces. But other than that, they said he wasn't really helping. It took a while for me to find out because they don't like the fact that Charles Johnson

was ever involved at their company. And so they ended up filing new corporate documents that had only Schwartz and Ton Tat as the principles of the company. And Charles Johnson didn't know about it at the time. And when he found out, he was not happy. So all of this is going on completely under the radar, really. Nobody knows what Clearview AI is, when they form it. In the prolog to your book, which, first of all, the prolog alone would make an amazing movie. Thanks. It was just such a fascinating journalistic read on how you put this all together. But you talk about how you came to hear about and then break the story of Clearview AIs, even just its existence and its use by law enforcement. Tell me about a man named Freddie Martinez. So Freddie Martinez, he works for a nonprofit

in D.C. and basically does a lot of public records requests. He's super concerned about government surveillance, you know, how it can be used to suppress dissent. And so he starts putting in public records requests with police departments around the country, asking them what facial recognition companies they're using and how much they're paying for it. And one of the foias, he gets back from the Atlanta Police Department mentions this company called Clearview AI, which claims to have scraped billions of photos from the web, including social media sites, and to have a facial recognition app that works with something like 99% accuracy. And this public records request from the Atlanta Police Department includes a legal memo marked privileged and confidential. And it's written by Paul Clement, a

former U.S. Solicitor General, top lawyer in the country under George W. Bush, now in private practice, explaining to police why using this app would not be illegal. It's saying like it won't break constitutional law, won't break state laws, don't worry, you can use this. Before I go any further, for people who may not know, explain what scraping is. Okay, so scraping is, it sounds kind of nasty, but it really is just collecting information from the web in mass. It's like downloading a bunch of information from the web. And so is what Clearview did. They scraped billions of photos from many, many different sites without the consent of the sites and without the consent of the people in those photos. But again, nothing illegal about that. It was a bit of a legal gray area at the time. But there has been one big federal court that said that scraping public information is not illegal. Okay. So in the years since your expose, as you said, Clearview has faced a number of lawsuits, but it's also continued to grow. And you lay out in the book, the NYPD is the first law enforcement

agency to use Clearview. They did so on a trial basis. And the Indiana State Police was the first actual paying customer, I think. Yes, that's right. And eventually Homeland Security takes notice. Yeah, the Department of Homeland Security has now spent almost $2 million on Clearview AI. That's unreal. What's the latest, count on how many photos Clearview has access to and how many law enforcement agencies use it? It's hard to say for sure how many law enforcement agencies are using it. I know it's been used by thousands of law enforcement agencies, even around the world. But I can say their database is 30 billion faces strong, which is incredible because there's not that many people in the world.

So that means they have, you know, many, many different versions of individuals' faces. There's something that happens sort of over and over again in the book is they do this demonstrations for people, including you, and they'll put in one picture of you and all these other pictures will, you know, without your name or anything. And all these other images will pop up, you know, identifying the person. And time and time again, these are pictures that the people themselves, like for instance, you yourself did not even know were online somewhere. Yeah. I mean, one time I remember they ran a search of, Juan Tontat, ran a search of my face. And there was this photo of a woman kind of walking in the background of someone else's

photo on a city street. And at first, I did not recognize my own face, but then I saw the jacket I was wearing was this coat I bought in Tokyo years ago at a vintage store. And so I knew it was me. And so it can be facial recognition technology has come a long way. And sometimes it can match the face of a person in two different photos that to a human being, even to me, you know, I can't even tell it's the same person. It's pretty wild. I mean, it is truly frightening how good the technology has gotten. And, you know, you point out in the book that when this first started, it was basically useless. You talk about the Snooper Bowl, which was the Giants, I believe, Super Bowl, where this not clear view, another company, it came out afterwards,

had been contracted to do facial recognition to see if any known criminal. were coming into the stadium and they trumpeted this. And meanwhile, the technology at that level was basically useless, but law enforcement couldn't wait. Yeah, that was back in 2001. And the technology just really wasn't good then. One of the vendors involved in scanning the faces of people at the Super Bowl told me they had to actually pull out of a pilot project that they were doing in South Africa because the technology just failed otherly on people that had darker skin. And that really has been a problem with the technology historically. It just, it didn't work that well on all groups. It didn't even really work well on individuals and definitely not in the real

world. But there's been a lot of improvements since then. And there was something I found fascinating in the book is you note that both Google and Facebook had the technological capability of building what Tontat did, but that these two companies, neither one, we should point out, noted for their robust privacy protections for their users. But both of these companies thought that this was crossing a line. And you have an interesting line in the book. You write, the significance of what Clearview had done was not a scientific breakthrough. It was ethical arbitrage. Yeah, this really surprised me because when I first heard about Clearview AI and I told experts about it and asked people in the field, everyone was shocked that a company had done this. I mean, I thought this was a

technical mastermind that Juan Tontat must be some kind of coding genius. Right. put this all together. But as I started doing the research for the book and learning more about it, I did find out that essentially the tools were there. These tech companies, as you said, not known for protecting privacy, decided to hold it back because they thought it was too dangerous to do this. But Juan Dantat was able to do it. And he's not, you know, an expert in biometric technologies. This is kind of a feat that anyone who is technically savvy and, you know, willing to brave privacy laws and maybe violate them can do, can make. And so that's scary because CliveUAI has decided to limit their technology to police and law enforcement. But now we're

starting to see copycats. There are just public face search engines on the web. And you can upload someone's face and get all the photos that that site has scraped from the internet. So it really is, it's starting to feel like the cat, you know, is out of the bag. And it's going to be challenging to rain this back in. We really, it needs to happen sooner rather than later. And as you point out, this being out in the wild, some guy could be in a bar and see a woman that he thinks is attractive and snap her picture and use this technology to discover where she lives, discover all kinds of things about her. And it really is. It's truly frightening. Yeah, I think it really could change how we think about just anonymity and our ability to move

through the world without our identity being out there. Because there's so many times that you go to a bar, you kind of assume that no one is going to find out who you are unless you give your name, or you're having, you know, a pretty intimate or sensitive conversation at a dinner table. And now this means that somebody could be sitting next to you, be intrigued by what you're saying, you know, get a picture of you. It does have to be a good picture to work. But then find out who you are and understand the context of the conversation. And I think, you know, that's, almost as chilling as the idea of authoritarian governments, just being able to track all of us everywhere we go. Yeah, and there was another thing you mentioned in the book. You could be sitting,

you know, someplace in public, but sort of where you can't be overheard with a sensitive source or something like that. But a picture of you with that person could turn up, even if it was in the background of a photo someone took that wasn't of you. Yes, that actually happened. Juan Tontat ran this clear research of me. And one of the photos that came up was a photo of me with a source that I didn't realize was on the internet. And at the time, I had been working on a story about that person. And I was just like, wow, I have to think differently about how I meet with sensitive sources. I used to think, you know, leave your phone at home, you know, go to a dive cafe and you'll be fine. And while I was working on the book, actually, the CIA put out a warning to their

outposts around the world that said, you know, artificial intelligence is compromising our informants. And they listed facial recognition technology specifically as one. one of the threatening technologies and that, you know, it was getting harder to protect the people working with the CIA and just said, hey, everyone, you need to be careful. This is leading to people's death. God. There was a Russian activist that you talked to, and she said she hoped that her country could find a golden middle regarding the use of facial recognition. But as I'm reading that, I'm thinking, forget about Russia, just in general. Is that even possible? I mean, there is an appeal of facial recognition technology, right? Like, I talk to many police officers

who have used the technology to solve horrendous crimes, particularly crimes against children, where they have photos of the abuse and they're able to identify, if not the victim, then the perpetrator. And so I think a lot of people like that idea of if a crime's committed against you and there's a photo of the person who did it, there might be justice there. But there's the problem of authoritarian countries having it, like Russia, which has used facial recognition technology

to identify protesters against the war, Ukraine. And then there's the problem of when it's used incorrectly. And, you know, I write about in the book how there have been people falsely arrested for the crime of looking like someone else. The most recent example of that is a woman in Detroit I wrote about in the New York Times who was arrested in February for carjacking and robbery. She was eight months pregnant. And the woman who committed the crime just a few weeks earlier had not been pregnant. It was a case of mistaken identity. But she did spend a day in jail. She was charged and she had to go to the hospital right after she was let go because she was so dehydrated and stressed out from being in prison for a day, again, for the crime of looking like someone else. Right. It's so scary. I guess my exit question is, should I stop using Apple's face ID? This is the problem, right? The convenience of facial recognition technology versus the possible harms. I mean, the way that Apple does it is they do keep your face print, is I understand it private on your device. I definitely use the facial recognition to unlock my phone.

Even when I was working on the book, I went, I traveled to London to document what's going on there, a facial recognition. And instead of having to wait in a customs line for hours and hours, I just, you know, put my passport on a scanner and it matched my face to the biometric chip in my passport and just let me write in in an automated way. So I do hope that we can capture the good that comes with this technology without ushering all. in all the harms. The book is, Your Face Belongs to Us, A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as we know it. It is out September 19th. It is an absolutely fascinating book, and I was only able to scratch the surface of what's in it in this interview. So I hope everyone goes out and reads

it because it's stuff you need to know, actually. Cashmea Hill. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on. Hope you enjoyed 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 Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.