The Daily Beast Podcast - How Is JD Vance So Bad at All of This?

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

The hosts of The New Abnormal explore JD Vance’s unimpeachable weirdness. Then Maya Wiley, former New York City mayoral candidate, ex-MSNBC legal analyst, and current president and CEO of The Leadership Conference, arrives just in time to discuss her new book, Remember, You Are a Wiley. Plus! A conversation with independent journalist Justin Glawe about election officials who just so happen to also be election deniers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What an excellent show we have today. President and CEO of the Leadership Conference and former New York City mayoral candidate, Maya Wiley, is here to tell us about her new book.

Remember, you are a Wiley, a memoir. Then independent journalist Justin Glaw joins us to talk about his recent piece in the Welcome to Hell World newsletter, titled Collective Hysteria, which is all about election officials who happen to be election deniers. and just how that happens. But first, let's have some fun. So, in case you were making the rounds watching Sunday news on cable, you would have come across everyone's favorite man to hate, or at least mine, J.D. Vance, sitting down with Dana Bash on CNN, where Dana Bash, surprisingly, I don't know if she's reading our tweets,

at least mine, Andy, because I know you were on Blue Sky, but somebody started asking real questions and following up with facts. So J.D. Vance goes on CNN and continues to spread lies about the migrant population of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. Dana Bash says, I need to stop you here and basically say this has been debunked. It's been debunked by the city commissioner. It's been debunked by the sheriff. and J.D. Vance then said, well, you know, sometimes you have to create stories. Sometimes you have to create stories. Now, that to me is a euphemism that one uses where sometimes you have to spread lies in order to get the media's attention.

That is what J.D. Vance basically said that in order to bring attention to what was happening in Ohio in terms of the systems being overloaded, sometimes you just have to create stories. Now what Dana Bash then followed up with was, you're not like a regular bystander like in Ohio. You're the senator. So couldn't you instead of, oh, I don't know, saying things that are not true, actually decide to do something,

to which J.D. Vance called her a Democrat with a bunch of talking points and said that he was disgusted by her insinuation that his rhetoric could possibly. possibly lead to violence when he condemns violence. Andy, you can't make this idiot make sense. He is so very bad at this, and by this I mean seeming normal, being able to do regular interviews and not get himself caught up in a web of lies. Or as he says, stories he creates from time to time. Oh, God, there's so many things here. First of all, we keep calling them migrants. I don't think they're migrants. I think they're immigrants. They're not here temporarily.

True. Yes, you're right. You're right. You're right. Therefore, they are J.D. Vance's constituents. So he is literally out there making up stories about his own constituents, which seems like a really odd thing for a senator of the United States to be doing. I think we need to talk about that more. This is a guy who has decided that, much like Donald Trump, who never thought of himself as the president of the United States, he thought of himself as the president of the United States. He thought of himself as the president of. of the people who voted for him and of the states where the governors kissed his ass. This guy, Vance, doesn't apparently think that all Ohioans are his constituents in the Senate. And I think this needs to be hammered home because this is exactly the kind of country. This is their vision for America where the quote unquote real Americans are the people who voted for them and anyone who did not is suspect and is other. and is not really American. So there's that whole level, and then there's the whole thing of, which we're now, I guess, used to from Republicans, of pretending to be angry when you talk about how their words

lead to violent acts from their supporters. And suddenly, they're all like, well, I didn't encourage violence. The fact of the matter is, you know exactly what you did. You said what you said to stoke fear. In no small part, whether you wanted violence to happen or not, you didn't care if violence happened. This is, like they say, when people show you who they are, believe them. This is who they are.

These are people who have shown time and time again that they either want violence or at best they are indifferent to it. And they, of course, take absolutely no responsibility. You know, we saw that at the debate, as we talked about with Donald Trump trying to now say, I just showed up for a speech on January 6th. You know, they told me to show up for a speech, as if he bore no responsibility for the violent mob that stormed the Capitol. And this is J.D. Vance. It's the same playbook every time.

No, you're not getting away with it. You wanted violence, or at the very least you didn't care if there was violence. You wanted fear. You got fear. And deal with it. We're going to call you out on it. Yeah, and that's what I think that needs to happen on a regular basis, is this calling out and this connecting the dots. Because these things are not isolated incidents.

They're not isolated events. They're all leading and building to something. And J.D. Vance and Donald Trump know exactly what they're doing. Case in point, you have Donald Trump over the weekend, right, who truth, so whatever the fuck he does on that site, puts up a message that says, quote, I hate Taylor Swift, all capital, because that's. Donald Trump. He's a toddler. The immediate reaction to this is people saying that look at this small man, you know, he's clearly deteriorating. Look how fragile he is. But here's what I said when I saw that. This is what stochastic terrorism looks like. Why do I say that? Oh, because over the summer, there were reports that came out that Taylor Swift had to cancel not one, but I think a couple of her

shows in Europe because of there being acts of terrorism that the security teams were sussing out, an attempt to kidnap her, an attempt to cause harm, I think to the audience in the form of some type of shooting or bomb or anything like that. And because of that, she had to cancel tour dates. And so it isn't just Donald Trump throwing a tantrum and posting that he hates Taylor Swift, what we know is that every time that Donald Trump, whether it's telling people to go take their capital back and that January 6 will be wild or that there are Haitian immigrants taking over an area, what we know is that what follows those things, acts of violence. So the rhetoric that is directed at and is a very loud bullhorn to his followers, I don't like these.

people, you need to handle it, they go ahead and do. So by posting that about Taylor Swift, you are trying to ratchet up the potential violence, online threats, and real-life violence that she could face. Because whenever his followers hear that he doesn't like something, they take it upon themselves to get rid of that thing. We've seen it with the voter workers, Shea Moss and Miss Ruby down in Georgia. who were able to sue Rudy Giuliani for his slander and lies. But it cost them so very much personally, emotionally, and physically in order to do that. We saw it with a Judge Mershon and over and over again.

Yeah, it really is over and over again. And that's why I am willing to concede that sometimes, you know, someone might say something and not realize what they're doing and that they might be stoking violence. But the thing is, a person who truly doesn't realize that. that when they're told or when they see what happens is like, oh, shit, I better not do that again. I really screwed up there. That was not my intent. I'm not going to do that again. What we see with Trump, what we see with Vance, what we see with Republican officials over and over again, is they just keep doing it. And that is just, you don't need a clearer sign that, again, they either want violence

or don't care if it happens in the wake of the language they use and the things they say and the stories they make up. It is absolutely part of what they are looking for in the sense that, again, it's all about fear, it's all about creating fear, it's all about saying whatever you want about people who don't look like, quote, unquote, real Americans in their eyes and hopefully spurring the people they do think of as quote unquote real Americans, white Christian, straight, et cetera, to turn out to vote for them. It's all about voter turnout. And again, to the point where J.D. Vance will trash his own constituents in order to potentially drive up voter turnout. And I can't think of a better definition of just a completely

immoral person than that. And that's what we've got here. And you're right. Trump saying this about Taylor Swift, look, you know, it's very easy to say, hey, he's just given his opinion about Taylor Swift. He's allowed to have opinions. But you got to look at context and you got to look at history and you got to look at, as you said, what happens when he says things like that. And he knows that. He's not the smartest guy in the world, yes, and he's sundowning beyond belief, yes. But he still knows. He knows. He knows, just as he knew when he gave the speech on January 6th, that there was a very good chance that it was going to lead to a violent mob storming the Capitol. He knows. Yeah. And so we can't fain and the media can't fain that, you know, he'll grow up.

Eventually, you know, he'll come to his senses. He'll grow up. He'll learn. He'll learn. No, I think it would be safer for the rest of us to learn before somebody else could potentially get hurt. Still waiting on that softer Donald Trump that a lot of pundits promised me we were going to see. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

The twist on this, of course, is that Republicans and Trump and Vance, et cetera, will be the first people. to point their fingers at the left and accuse the left of stoking violence. And we saw that over the weekend when there was apparently a second assassination attempt against Donald Trump, where a guy was discovered by the Secret Service on a golf course where Trump was playing and arrested him before he could do anything. First of all, we get Trump obviously fundraising off of this because that's the only thing he knows how to do. But then he also talks about how it's the left-wing's rhetoric that is leading to this. Never mind the fact that neither one of the would-be assassins seem to be of liberal or left-wing persuasion.

I mean, the guy who was arrested this weekend was tweeting fan fiction about Ramoswamy and Nikki Haley forming some kind of dream ticket, which is not something you hear from a lot of people on the left. It is wild. They will take no responsibility for their own words actually leading to violence, but they will, you know, make up stuff about how left-wing rhetoric has led to violence against them. Hmm. What to say. I have not heard, but therefore I don't hear everything, but I will say that I have not heard, quote-unquote, left-wing violent rhetoric from, any sitting politician or former politician ever. So the person that we have heard and we just gave multiple examples of over the last close to a decade is Donald Trump

and the Republican Party. I think that what is happening and somebody said, and I think it might have been Marjorie Taylor Green, who said, you know, how would they know he was at the golf course? My response being where the fuck else would he? be. Right. Day ending with why. You know, like, yeah, I just, I was confused, like, at his desk. I don't think so. So I think that, again, all of these pieces need to be brought together. You ratchet up your violence, and therefore that violence goes from online into the real world. And so if you wanted to

cool situations off, maybe you would think about what it is that you say and how you say it. But also, I think somebody had reminded us all of the fact that we're in this situation where people with mental illness are able to access weapons like guns, because when Donald Trump was president, I believe he rolled those things back, you know, and we need a Senate and a house that is democratic so that we can undo the damage that he has done. Because as, as, But as, you know, let me quote J.D. Vance and Donald Trump in terms of where they are right now with these attempts, you know, it's a fact of life. That's what J.D. Vance said about school shootings, that it is just, it's a fact of life and we have to deal with it. So until they're ready to do anything of note about gun reform, gun regulation, gun safety, yeah, these unfortunate events are just, you know, things that we should quote as Donald Trump.

Trump said, get used to. We should leave this topic. There's just not much more to discuss about it. But I do want to point out that the kind of rhetoric that they're talking about is they're trying to draw a line between saying Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. So just two quick facts. One, he is a threat to democracy. He's shown that by his actions. He's shown that by January 6th. He's shown that by trying to overturn a free and fair election. And he's shown that in his rhetoric leading up to the 2024 election. On the other hand, he's out there. He's out there calling Kamala Harris, comrade Kamala, and calling her a communist and things like that.

And first of all, the idea that Kamala Harris is a communist is laughable. Yeah. But also, there's a history in this country of violence against people for either being communists or being suspected of being communist. So, no, Danielle, as you would say, miss me with the pretending that you're side is all angels and halos, and the other side is saying nasty, unfair things when the other side is speaking the truth and you are lying. Speaking of lying, I guess we have to talk about someone who, I was surprised before we started recording, Danielle, when you said that she is one

of your favorite people and sort of a mentor. I know that you are not. And she's kind of a mentor to you, you would consider her. And I'm talking, of course, about Laura Lumber. Of course you are. Danielle, tell us why you consider her a mentor. I think that you were confused, and maybe it's because we sit with earphones in all day long, but I said a menace, and maybe you heard, maybe you heard mentor. Or maybe it was mentally ill. Mm-hmm, but it was definitely a menace to society. Laura Lumer, she's getting a lot of play in a lot of different ways and also in the press.

And right now there are all these stories that are popping up, who is Laura Lumer? What is Laura Lumer? How close to Donald Trump is she? And well, we've seen video and it's apparently close. But she's known for a lot of things that are wildly racist and also insane. One, Donald Trump brought her last week to a 9-11 event. Notariously, Laura Luma has said that 9-11 was a quote, inside job. So just bringing somebody like that to a memorial event to me is beyond disrespectful and disgraceful,

but such is the path that Donald Trump walks. She most recently said that if the vice president is elected, that then the White House will smell, quote, like curry, and phone calls will go to a call center. Let me just make a caveat here that when asked to speak on Laura, Lomor and the racist things that she said, Jady Vance, whose wife is Indian, said something to the effect of it wasn't good what she said. And that was him standing up for his wife and family. So, bravo. If he can't stand up for them, folks, he ain't standing up for you. It's giving Ted Cruz.

Right. I think it was giving less than Ted Cruz, which I didn't think was actually possible. So, okay, she was on Tim Poole's Timcast, so lovely of a name and branding, where she said that Democrats should be, quote, rounded up, tried for treason, and those that disagree with Donald Trump should be executed. So just going back on the heels of what we've said about the rhetoric, about the violence, all of these things. And this is who Donald Trump is spending a lot of his time with. Birds of a feather.

She's a racist. she's vile, and this is who has Donald Trump's ear. I'll leave it there right now. So a mentor, no. A menace, yes. If you want to know how loony Laura Lumer is, look at the fact that even Donald Trump's allies are worried about the fact that she has his ear. And they are concerned that she is actually going to cost him votes.

You know, these are people who are comfortable with a lot. Even they are not comfortable with her. And we saw that with Marjorie Taylor Green also getting into a spat with her last week. We've all seen the pictures. We all have noticed the fact that it ain't Melania out there with him and around him. Because she has been invisible since her little pop-in at the convention. It's Laura Lumer, who has been. who has been there. Make of that what you will. But look, clearly he is putting a lot of stock in what

she is saying. There were reports that, you know, she was one of the last people he talked to before the debate. And we see how well that fucking lot. And look, I've been saying, you know, for the past week or so, I think she should advise him more. Mm-hmm. I think she should advise the hell out of him, you know? Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be hard for him to get rid of her because she has what he values above all else, which is sycophantic loyalty. And she will defend him to the ends of the earth. And that's what he loves.

So I am hopeful that his allies fail in their attempts to push her away and that she gets even closer. Yeah. I mean, if you've seen the video, I don't know how much closer she could get, but hell, TBD. Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly.

Yeah, I like lawyers too. Allegedly. Yeah, you want to talk about a glow-down, hope hicks to war a Louber. Folks, I am very excited to welcome to the new abnormal. Just a brilliant mind, a brilliant person, somebody that I love to call a friend, who is the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Maya Wiley and who is the author of a new book, remember you are a Wiley, a memoir. Maya, first off, it's good to be in conversation with you.

I love the fact that I got to be in conversation with you a bunch on MSNBC, on and off air, in makeup chairs throughout the last couple of years. Let's start off with talking about your new book. And why now a memoir? And tell us a bit about the title and what readers can expect. First of all, Danielle, I have to say, I am so grateful you consider me a friend. And so much miss our makeup room conversations. We're often between the green room and the makeup room, folks got to know those were often the best parts of the conversation.

Yes, very much so. I often thought they should just have a show where the camera just rolls in the makeup room. But listen, I'm really. I was excited and a bit terrified to have this memoir coming out. I wrote it. And, you know, truth be told, I was thinking about this book and started the process and exploration of this book even before I ran from mayor. Because we were in a time where, you know, as a child of activists, both my parents and of a father who really left an entire career and really budding in brilliant career as a black man in organic chemistry to become a full-time activist in the civil rights movement

and then the economic justice movement and just how radical my mom was as a white woman, not only because she married him, a black man, but also just because she was already an activist before she met him. All of their lessons were so formative for me and how I looked at not just the world, but the world of making change. And how important it is to have that bridge from generation to this next generation that is activist, that is as a generation very progressive, that's thinking about policing. It's thinking on climate change. It's thinking about women's rights.

It's thinking about all of the things that are impacting society. And yet there does need to be this interrogation of, well, how do we learn from the past, what really shapes us, what actually makes us activists and what kind of activists, and what really is the change we want to see. How do we be the change we want to see? And that's a hard challenge in a society that does a lot of wrong. And it's a hard challenge when we have all of our own personal hurts and pains and traumas and at the same time need to figure out how to make sure that the world becomes a better place. And for me, this book, at a time of incredible turmoil in our country and real danger about losing so much that we've won because

of our parents' activism and our grandparents' activism and the folks that came before them. It was just important to not just have an intellectual book about social movements, but something that was much more of our personal storytelling, connecting the generations and really reflecting in a way that I think hopefully would break through because, you know, It's the storytelling. It's the personal experiences. It's what shapes us that I think is important for us all to look at as we look forward. I think that it's important for us to truly unpack what activism means to each of us, what it means to really be involved. Of course, you have the definition of activist and activism, but I oftentimes think that because we're in such the busy work of doing, that we don't actually think about what got us to that. place at the first point and similarly to you I would not say that I came from a family that

would traditionally be named as activists but I think that when you decide to leave your home country to venture off into a new world to develop a life and to fight against preconceived stereotypes and discrimination and continue to forge a way forward I don't know that to be named anything other than activism other than the ability to take action to forge change and and so So when you saw, right, and I believe that we're still living in the shadows and the remnants of the trauma that we collectively experience through COVID, that we collectively experienced through the Trump administration and just this heightened over policing in many ways and authoritarian rhetoric, what do you think now would you say calls people into movement, into this idea that they can affect change? We saw a lot of that, particularly in the summer of 2020. And I think that we see it in various forms with Generation Z. But how do you think that folks kind of reconcile with this Webster definition of activism

versus where they find themselves now? That is such an important question. And I don't want to move into it without first acknowledging that incredibly important point you made about your own personal history and activism is taking action because it is very personal. I think, you know, one of the reasons I wrote this as a memoir was a book I started as a book on social movements because, you know, we had the hashtags like Times Up and Black Lives Matter and fight for 15. The reality is all of those have long, long struggles behind them. They're not just a hashtag that pops up, right? There's a link. And I was really always moved by the stories of how my

parents became activist and its personal experience, just as your saying, you know, the personal experience of immigration, migration, the racism, all the things that people experience can produce that as a form of action to take that action, but it's also what do we do it? Once we're seeing the change that has to be made, what pushes us to make that change? And then how we make it? Because I actually think it's as important to think about the how as this period. So, you know, for me, I had to examine both the resilience, the kinds of resiliences we get either through our experiences or through the supports we get through other people that enable us to be more whole in the activism. I say that because COVID took away a lot of

our wholeness. It was full on traumatizing and it was traumatizing. You know, people forget that there's also secondary trauma, right? You can be traumatized because you're seeing those, those images of the trucks with bodies in them, you know, because you're constantly worried about somebody in your family who might have to go to work or just showing up at the grocery store or the people you can't see or touch and the vulnerability that it creates and the wondering what what's going to happen, you know, that real sense is we had in New York City that was ground zero. But I think it is, and when I think about this generation, you know, it's both of a fierce vision for what should be, which is so important, clarity about what's wrong. And I think the question is how do we, even in the

face of all of the trauma and all things that are so wrong, find compassion. Because, you know, the thing that was so powerful about my parents and what they did as activists was their ability to be outraged and yet compassionate. And if you think about the nonviolence, the principles of nonviolence that was such a key part of winning, of strategy, of building the tent bigger so that change could be made. It did require, nonviolence requires a kind of compassion and a way of finding and being compassionate and being willing to try to build and broaden that tent. And I think that brings us right to where we are today, right? Where we are rightly really fucking angry. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes. And we should be the racism, the out front in our face. Yep. Playing in our face racism. The rule rigging, the claiming,

the not to believe our lying eyes when we say, gee, it looks like free and fair elections, looks like there was an insurrection on the Capitol on January 6th, looks like there's overt racism and sexism happening out here in plain sight and that violence is increasing because of this rhetoric from politicians and people, right? Both politicians and regular folks who actually endorsed this as legitimate action to preserve for white supremacy. I don't know what else to call it. That's what it is, right? But, you know, I think back to my father who in confronting the white powers that be in Syracuse, New York, around school segregation and, you know, having this white man who was a Barry Goldwater Republican.

Okay, let me say that again. Very Goldwater Republican in a Rockefeller Republican state. So this was their version of Trumpism, right? Right. So he was to the right. So he was to the right. of the Republican Party. He was a wealthy businessman in Syracuse, New York, and in charge of the school board. And so he just dismissed and all these black parents protesting outside that my father had helped organize to protest for the first time hundreds of black people protesting in Syracuse, New York. They've been so beaten down. They hadn't done it. But here's the point. He had to create the pressure, right, through engaging people and what they cared about for the pressure points, but then he had to be willing to actually open up and try to help this guy who ran for

governor against Rockefeller as a Barry Goldwater Republican. Help him see what he didn't understand about the Black experience. And I won't go through the whole story. And it's in Remember You Are Wiley. But the point is, he got him. He got him by the end of his process. And he took him into the hood. He had him go look for and rent an apartment that my father would show up and try to run behind him to show him how racist it was. He actually made him sit down in people's living rooms to talk to these black women about what was happening to their children in the schools. And by the end of it, Jake was said, okay, you're right. This is wrong. And he became for years after that the person crusading for integrating schools as a Barry Goldwater Republican in New York

state and it created the state's human rights commission that activism, but also that willingness to talk to someone who said and did ugly. I think in this time when we're so rightly outraged, it's not about losing the outrage. It's about being able to channel the outrage into the compassionate activism that is willing to find those who are willing to explore, even outside of agreement and even outside of agreement on everything. And I think that's the hope we have for the future, but also the opportunity because of the activism that we're seeing, but also the importance of saying, you know, compassion is not capitulation. Yes, yes. There's a way to be activist, to be outraged, to challenge that is compassionate and not capitulation. And it's necessary right now or we lose.

You know, and I think that that is so right because, you know, I am a person that has been told often that like having the level of rage and indignation that I have at the injustices that I see is not helpful, that, you know, we need to be able to come together, come together. But I think that in the story that you just told, there is something to the both and, which is both being enraged by the levels of injustices that still exist and willing to find the various avenues that can. can get us to a different place. And one of those avenues being, how can I reach people who refuse to hear? Because there had to be, to the word that you used, a willingness by this man to sit in a living room with black people, a willingness to hear. And what I find right now that is at the source, at the root of our political rot, is this

unwillingness, this belief that somehow compromise is capitulation to the other, and that there is strength in never having reflection. Yes. I think this is the important thing that we have to remember. Like, you're right. I mean, there's some people you can't, they won't sit down and talk. They're not open. And they're not going to be open, right? And the point isn't to spend all that time on people who cannot and refuse to hear. The activism opened up the opportunity, though, right? I mean, I think this is the point about the direct action, marching and protesting peacefully and with a clear set of demands. I mean, these parents were calling for a commission to look at how school boundaries were changing and the impacts it was going to have on their kids,

right? It was very clear, but it was very activist. And this Republican, Jake With thought, these are ruled, unruly, you know, criminals out here, you know, doing the wrong thing. I think the point was my father being inside the hearing room, getting Jake with to say that he could not be convinced. He actually said to my father, you can't convince me. And my father said, yes, I can. And so that became the challenge. So he didn't enter it open-minded. He entered it close-minded. The activism. And I think this is where it's important, right? The activism created the opening. the opening, my father's, part of my father's brilliance, I think, in his activism, and he said, go listen to the people.

Don't listen to me. I'm a faculty member at the University of Syracuse. Put him in the position of having some of the experiences, like seeing that racism was real because he rejected how real it was and then talking directly to mothers of school kids. In other words, my black father with a PhD in organic chemistry didn't become the voice of those people. He let them be the voice for themselves. And that became very hard for Jake with Ben to intellectualize away because they just kept batten down. It put them in a different position.

But I think my point about this is, you know, when you try, you see where you open up the opportunities. And, you know, we have seen there is the majority of this country. And I think it's important to remember what it means to think about power and to build it. Recognize where we have it. And it is in the people who are impacted. That was always the lesson from my parents. Power is always with people. It's never with leaders.

It's with people. And it's with people who are willing to the exact example that you gave Danielle, willing to stand up and take a step for themselves. And how do you enable that? How do you, as a leader, support and enable that? But then how do you recognize where the bridge building is? So for my father, you know, he always saw the need to broaden the tent to end black poverty. but they had to be led by black women on welfare.

The role that he was able to help play was a bridge role that said, okay, this is a base that can make this much more multiracial because there are all these other women on welfare who are not black. This is the opportunity to really lay bare what's broken in this country and how it's broken for other people. These are the ways of thinking about that big tent, but that has real authenticity in recognition of racism, of sexism, of the way they worked together

and to think about it from a real, a truth tell and vantage point. You know, it was not shirking away from racism and sexism, right? It was taking it on directly. And I think that's where we find, where are the people who are movable and those

people and we're seeing them, you know, frankly, we're seeing the opportunities and some of the never-trumpers who are actually open to, I had a conversation recently. I never thought I'd have before. I won't name the person, because you'll know the person. But I said, okay, we should start to have a conversation in addition to just having a democracy, which we know we agree on. We should start having a discussion about, what are we going to do

about racism? Like, what are you willing to do? What are you willing to understand about racism and sexism at the root of this threat to democracy you see that right now is mainstreamed into the Republican party? Like, where are we going to agree on that? Because it's an opportunity to build not only to say we should have a functioning electoral democracy, but say we have to address the racism and sexism, the xenophobia, the homophobia and transphobia that has become and has always been, you know, the isms have always been, the original sins of this country, has always been the wedge points. And so unless we're willing to collectively face it together, to be compassionate in the experiences that we're all having. And to recognize in that compassion, that's the way we find the path that we can agree on

and walk together. You know, that's the way I see the activism coming together with the compassion and finding the right people because you're right. And 100% of folks. But there's real opportunity. There is real opportunity. And sadly, we will have to leave it there today. But there is. I say this often that there is opportunity in the obstacles if, in fact, we choose. choose to look for it. And we have to do so together, which is why, you know, the work that you do, Maya, I think is so incredibly important in front of the camera, behind the camera. And with this book that I tell people to go ahead and go and pick up, remember you are a Wiley, a memoir. Maya Wiley, thank you so much for making time for the new abnormal. Really appreciate you.

Thank you, Danielle. And thank you for all you do and for your friendship. It means a lot. Justin Glaw is an independent journalist who has written for The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Vice, and The Guardian, among other outlets. He's the author of the forthcoming book, If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible, and he writes the newsletter, American Doom. He recently wrote a powerful piece called Collective Hysteria for Luke O'Neill's excellent newsletter, Welcome to Hellworld, about election officials who are also election denialists.

And he joins me now to talk about it. Justin, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So you start this piece off with a woman named Pam who gets up at a county commission meeting in Reno Nevada and says the first thing this morning I got on telegram and the first thing I see a smarter person than me, Elon Musk, election voting machines and anything mailed is too risky. We should mandate paper ballots and in person voting only. And you write that few things you've seen in your four years covering election denialism struck you with such a strong sense of doom. Explain why. You know, part of it was just like the fact that somebody who looks like they could be friends with my mom is saying, oh, when I got on telegram this morning and is reading something that Elon Musk is putting on Twitter about paper ballots, which is a, you know, a big sort of thing in the election denier movement. Just the fact that somebody like that is so sucked into the online world of right-wing misinformation was just really jarring. It just reminded me like how far all of this has gone where somebody who's, like I said, is, you know, a middle-aged, white woman, maybe closer to older age in her 60s, is involved with that stuff.

You know, this used to be the purview of Fortan, you know, right-wing insanity. And now it's gotten to the point where it's really just mainstream. Yeah. And, you know, you say that you felt pity and sadness for her because you know she probably wasn't always like this. And she goes on as she's giving her little speech in front of this county commission to talk about immigrants and how they're taking all the jobs and lowering wages, et cetera. And you say, you know she probably wasn't always like this, that something changed inside her and that as you write, whereas she once believed that the world was generally a good place, she no longer does. That was sort of a really moving line to me. It speaks to a lot of things.

It speaks to the misinformation cycle and the rabbit holes that people get sucked into via social media algorithms. But I think the larger point here is that like, this is what right-wing authoritarianism does, right? It convinces you that the world is a very dangerous and scary place, which, you know, in a lot of ways it is. But the difference is that authoritarianism, like the stuff that we've seen rising, I think, in America, thanks, you know, primarily to Donald Trump, their solution for that fear and that uncertainty is, you know, essentially different forms of oppression and violence. In the case of this woman, it's, well, we need to make sure we cut down on the amount of immigrants that are coming here or, you know, whatever thing she was talking about how basically they're making the area

in which she lives a worse place than it was before, because that authoritarianism driven by politicians and social media algorithms and the misinformation that this woman consumes, you know, also has lots of solutions in the form of people to blame. We know that's immigrants. We know, oh, that's the left. Bizarrely, it's also like the tech companies that are feeding all of this stuff to these folks.

So what struck me about it was that, like, This woman and so many other people live in this world where they are just like controlled and consumed by this fear that is driving that. So talk about what happened at that county commission meeting and with the commission's vote on certifying that particular election, which I think was the June 22 election. Sure. So for those who aren't aware, certification of election results is largely sort of a ceremonial process. Has historically been a ceremonial process. You know, there's 3,000 counties across the country. In a lot of states, those counties are sort of the first counters of election results. And they vote to certify those results. And historically, that has been that they are quite literally like a scoreboard, right?

Team X got this many points. Team Y got this many points. Okay, do we all agree that this is the score? Yes, we sign off on it. But since 2020, there has been a phenomenon of, vote election officials who are election deniers saying, well, if we have this vote, then that means we can vote against certification. And so they've been using that as sort of a cudgel to push conspiracies about potential fraud and to question irregularities and to vote against

certification. And so Washoe County in Nevada has not been immune to that. But what happened at this meeting was they had already voted against certification. two of the five board members who are Republicans that voted against certification. And at this particular meeting, they were going to vote on it again. So this woman was one of scores of people who got up there trying to convince the board, which also has two Democrats, to vote against certification. And what happened was the third Republican ended up changing her previous vote and voted to certify, not to certify, excuse me, the results of her own election win.

So she basically caved to the election. denial activists who were speaking at the board. And it was a very, it was a surprising, unexpected move on her part. After that, obviously, the hammer came down from the Secretary of State who said, look, this is a ministerial task. You guys have to do this. And so they eventually certified the results. But it just showed the power of the election denial movement that they could have sort of forced that action to occur. Yeah. Another thing you say in the piece, to broaden this story out is you say that you've been building a spreadsheet for the last four years. And as of now, you've got about 100 election conspiracists on it who work as local election officials, nearly

70 of which are in positions of power over election administration in six swing states. This seems to me to be whatever the word is for the opposite of good. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's very much not good. And, you know, some of these people are, you know, like, look, the one who went back on her previous vote to certify in Washoe County and then voted not to cert certify, you know, I now qualify her as an election denier, although she's probably, to be fair, just barely qualifying as that, right? But a lot of these people that are on that spreadsheet, I mean, they are, I found them, many of them by finding their Facebook pages and finding out what they were posting on their Facebook pages, which is, as you can imagine, in some cases,

just prolifically posting about right-wing conspiracy theories about elections, and then beyond that into the entire, you know, right-wing conspirators, as it were. These are very much, in a lot of cases, not serious people who should not be in positions of power over administration of elections, but because they are appointed by local political parties who are in rural places a lot of times that kind of support this line of thinking, They've sort of flown under the radar until I and other people started, you know, writing about that. But, you know, so, okay, maybe this will affect some local elections, but, you know, on like a national level, on a federal level, a presidential level, we've got all these checks and balances. We've got the governor of the state.

We've got Congress that ultimately certifies it. And surely there can't be any issues on those levels, right? Well, there can be. but more to the point is the result of these election denial officials refusing to certify results is the larger issue of calling into question election results and sowing further distrust in our elections, right? This is something that I always go back to, which is that in 2020, folks might remember there was a never issued executive order by the Trump White House in which they talked about

seizing voting machines to try to prove why. spread election from. And in that executive order, there were two counties in the entire country that were named. One of them was Coffee County and Georgia. And the reason Coffee County was named was because they refused to certify the results that showed that Trump actually won in that county. But regardless, they refused to certify the results. So this executive order said, look, here's this county that refused to certify results because they think there's all these problems. And they were using it as justification in the executive order to seize voting machines. So that's a concrete example of how the refusal to certify results can and will be used

by the right and Republicans to say, well, there's all this fraud. We've got to investigate. We can't really certify these states where Trump lost potentially in November. So therefore, it needs to go to alternate slates of electors or perhaps state delegations within the House of representatives who can then decide on how to allocate electoral college folks. So it's about sowing distrust in the system. Yeah, of course. And also, I was being a little facetious because it's obviously very easy to imagine a red state governor, or Ron DeSantis, a Greg Abbott, or a number of others going along

with this. And it's absolutely easy to imagine Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, doing it, because he was one of the architects of the Stop the Steel campaign in 2020, right? That's right. And let's not forget that after county certify election results, they then go to the secretaries of state who then have to certify them. And then the final stop before the electoral college in Congress is governors signing what are called certificates of ascertainment. Those certificates are the final approval of statewide results for, you know, whether Kamala Harris won Florida, for instance, or whether Donald Trump won Florida. up and then those results have to then go under the new deadline of the Electoral College Form Act, the Electoral Council Form Act by December 11th.

So, you know, these governors, they do have a role in this. And so if there are a ton of counties in Florida, for instance, that say, well, we're not going to certify and those counties happen to have voted heavily Democrat, theoretically, Ron DeSantis could say, yeah, I'm not going to include those results in my certificate of ascertainment. That's my understanding of one of the potential problems that could occur. Man. You mentioned Facebook earlier, and you place a lot of the blame for this rise in election denialism on Facebook. Why? These people are on it constantly. You know, so many of them that when I found their pages, you know, the amount of content that they were posting about right-wing conspiracy

theories, like I said, was simply prolific. And so this is what I can see. right? This is what is viewable to me as a member of the public who just stumbles upon their Facebook page. So I can only imagine what it looks like for them because if they're sharing, let's say they're only sharing one out of every four pieces of content that they consume on Facebook, the volume of misinformation that they are consuming is out of control. And as people who are on the older side, a lot of these are white baby boomer age, middle class folks, you know, they're probably not on other platforms. So they are getting sucked into things and really being radicalized in a lot of cases by Facebook. And you can see the timeline.

You know, some of these folks, I went back to 2020 to see what they were posting about that. And it really starts around that, right? The stop, the steal stuff. Oh, Trump saying the election was stolen. And then boom, just right down the rabbit hole, just gas on the fire. And you do say that ultimately the blame for all of this falls pretty squarely on Donald Trump, right? Yeah, there's, I mean, he and Republicans have had four years to make their case and to provide the smoking gun for widespread election fraud, and they'd never been able to do it. And in a way, they don't sort of need to. I don't know if they even want to, really, because it's besides the point, because this authoritarianism that, you know, that we talked about, that, that, you know,

causes people to be so fearful, you know, in a way like chaos benefits them and not having the smoking gun and being able to constantly just say, well, I'm just asking questions about why there are these irregularities or why there are these double counted ballots in Fulton County, for instance, in 2020, that helps them because it really just shows that distrust that, well, I don't really know what's going on here. I don't really know what to believe. And so therefore, or there's probably something out there that's bad and fraudulent and somebody's cheating or something, right? And a lot of that falls on Donald Trump because he doesn't understand the technical interworking

of election administration, but he can sow that distrust by spreading these conspiracy theories and spreading the distrust that he has, apparently, in election systems. So you end the piece by saying the question isn't whether there will be political violence as a result of Trump's lies, but when and in what form it will come? And you say people like Pam already gone might get even more fired up. They might do something about it. Justin, I've done a close reading of this, and I've decided this does not paint a picture of sunny optimism.

No, it does not. I mean, look, I am optimistic about a lot of things. I am optimistic that some of those checks and balances will hold. I am optimistic that judges even. and once appointed by Republicans will act judiciously and thoroughly in determining the merits of what are going to be all sorts of challenges brought in November by Republicans claiming fraud and essentially claiming that the election was illegitimate. But like, I don't know, am I missing something where, like, I'm seeing the temperature lowering or I'm seeing folks, you know, becoming calmer about all of this? Absolutely not. I mean, I see people getting more and more fired up with each passing week about ongoing claims that the November election is going to be illegitimate. You've got Republicans basically claiming that illegal immigrants are going to vote in mass numbers. You've got the recent stuff with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance about Haitian immigrants eating people's pets in Ohio. And this all comes down to a deadline of January 6th when a House of Brex representatives that Republicans hope will be run by Mike Johnson and have a GOP majority get to decide

again on whether or not to certify results that they don't like. I just don't see the temperature coming down in any measurable way. That's why I think that, yes, there probably will be, you know, I'm not saying there's going to be another January 6th, but I think that you will see things like bomb threats or other threats of violence to a local election offices and officials. I think you will see people trying to stop the counting from happening like we saw in 2020 in Maricopa County. And in Wayne County, Michigan, where protesters from the right tried to get into election facilities and stop the county. And yeah, so like, unless I'm missing the temperature being lowered, I think that this is all just an inevitability. Yeah, I don't think you're

missing anything. That's my opinion as well. Hey, before I let you go, what the hell is going on in Georgia with Mike Lindell. Good question. I found out the other day and reported for a story at Rolling Stone in my newsletter American Doom that an election denial group run by Mike Lindel basically impersonated an organization that works with the Department of Homeland Security to help local election offices kind of shore up their security apparatuses to help them with stuff that is sometimes outside of their abilities, I guess,

kind of like really in the weeds tech stuff. Anyway, Mike Lindell's group called the Election Crime Bureau, ironically, impersonated this DHS affiliated group and send out emails to pick this survey, put your home address and your cell phone number into this form and also tell us whether or not you are running these two security systems

that are run through the DHS, EHS affiliated group. But they basically impersonated that group, right? They made it seem like they were actually that group when they were not. And eventually the Secretary of State learned about this and they sent on a warning to all of the election offices in Georgia. This was a spear fishing attempt. This was an email that you or I get, you know, from, that looks like it's from Capital One credit cards, but isn't, you know, and says, hey, give us your personal information and we'll give you a new write and credit or whatever. But it was fake. It was fraudulent. Why? like Lindell was trying to do that.

I guess you'll have to ask him because I don't understand. My God. Wow. Justin, thank you so much for joining us. Folks, check out American Doom. It's at American-Doom.com. Fantastic newsletter.

And I really appreciate you coming on, man. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Andy Levy. Danielle Moody. How are we kicking off this? Ah, end of summer week, officially. here with your fuck that guy.

All right, so I'm going a little off the board here with mind. And I'm picking a guy who was a school district of business administrator in a place in New Hampshire called Goffstown, or possibly Joffstown, if you're the kind of person who says Jif instead of Giff, I guess. This is a guy named Scott Gross. And he is very, very upset about student lunch debt. In other words, that is debt from families who failed to pay for their kids' school lunches and have incurred debts. Now, here's the thing.

The school board in Goftown last year, according to reporting from patch.com, the school board voted to Scott Gross to sue families with this delinquent debt in small claims court. And right around that same time that this policy was approved, a guy named Jason Wells, who was a reverend as St. Matthews Episcopal Church in Goffstown, he said, hey, I'll cancel the debts. The church will pay for those debts. Scott Gross declined that because he so very much wanted to sue these families to take them to court. We're talking about, by the way, an amount in total from all the families of roughly between $3,000 and $5,000. So we're not talking six figures or seven figures here. So Reverend Wells made this offer.

And according to Wells, Gross told him that the offer would need to be approved at the school board, which is true. And Gross said that he would speak against it at the school board. I cannot, and I guess I'm thankful that I cannot understand a person like this. A person who looks at families who cannot afford. to pay for lunches for their kids and who are getting, you know, again, it's 10 families and it's between $3,000 and $5,000. So let's figure between $300 and $500 a family. They get a little behind. And again, we're not talking huge amounts. We're not talking bank breaking

amounts. But this guy looks at them and says, oh, I want to sue the hell out of them. I can't wait to get them in court to drag them before the law. And it's bad enough that he wants to do that in the first place. But then to turn down an offer from a church that says, hey, we'll cover those debts. Because we are part of this community and we believe that we are supposed to do good works. And basically representing everything that is good about religion, which in a world where we see a lot of stories about the bad sides of religion, is a fantastic thing to see. And by the way, I'm sure stuff like that goes on all across the country and we just don't hear about it. But it's nice to hear about an instance where this is happening.

Instead of just saying, oh, that's fantastic, you know, Reverend, we will take your money and we appreciate what you're doing for the community. And we shake hands and the parents can, you know, have a load off their minds that I'm sure they're not very happy about. I don't have kids. I cannot imagine the stress of knowing that you cannot pay for your kids to. eat, but I have enough of an imagination to know that it must be god-awful. So I wanted to highlight this guy, this Scott Gross, very aptly named, and I wanted to put him on our list along with the J.D. Vances and Ted Cruz's and Donald Trump's and Ken Paxton's of the world, because it might be on a much smaller scale, but it is still just so, so horrible

and disgusting. And so for that reason, Scott Gross, you are my fuck that guy to start out this week. Yeah, he's a vile human being. And we have to always remember that this is never about the money. It had nothing to do with the money because if it was about the money and collecting on the money, well, he got that. What he wants to do is punish poor people. Because as many people have said, the cruelty is the point. It is to cast those that, do not have economic standing out of society and to punish them for the crime of being poor. I'd like to live in a world where kids regardless of income are able to just go to school and fucking eat, where we don't have things like running debt for children to have the bare necessities

to go through their school day and to learn. Because guess what you can't do when you're starving? learn. And so for him and others like them that always, you know, find it in themselves to claim religion as a weapon, I say fuck that guy and fuck those guys. Yeah, it's so, well, gross. All right, Danielle, closes out. Who is your fuck that guy? Take one of the week. Mm-hmm. Well, he is no stranger to our Hall of Fame. He is somebody that loves who had line and loves to see himself in them. And so says things, tweets things, post things, says things in interviews that remind us all how vile and inept and small and stupid he is. He is also the reminder that wealth does not equal smarts. And that would be Elon Musk. I know many of you

thought it was going to be Donald Trump, one and the same. But Elon Musk saw fit after the shooting on the golf course or outside of the golf course where Donald Trump was to post on his broke down social media platform. And this is what he posted. Quote, I'll say a repost of this comment. Why they want to kill Donald Trump? Question mark. Elon Musk's response and no one is even trying to assassinate Biden slash Kamala with a thinking face emoji. He has since removed that dangerous, stupid, and possibly illegal post when asking why nobody has tried to assassinate Biden and Kamala Harris in response to this shooting at Donald Trump's golf course. Elon Musk has since deleted and said it was a joke.

I don't think that there's anything funny about it, do you? I don't think that there's anything funny about trying to bring harm to the president and the vice president of the United States using your platform where you have millions upon millions of people that follow you to post something so fucking reckless. I really wish that these people who are all about stochastic terrorism would actually be charged the way that the rest of us would be if we posted something to that extent

and not just have the ability to pull it down and say, oh, it was just a joke. I didn't see where it was in parentheses, joking, kidding, ha, ha, ha. I didn't see a laughing face emoji. It wasn't until he got immense pushback that he then took it down. And this is the type of shit that will lead to people getting hurt or worse. And these people would love to just be able to wash their hands of it as if they, oh, I just said X, Y, and Z. But I didn't specifically call for an assassination attempt or call for somebody to

get shot, but we know what you're doing. We're not stupid. So for that reason, and so many, many, many other reasons, Elon Musk is my, fuck that guy. Yeah, he's such a loser. So he deleted it and then he posted, well, one lesson I've learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn't mean it's going to be all that hilarious as opposed on Twitter. He said X, but I refuse to say that. And a lot of people are rightly pointing out that it's like, yeah, this is what happens when you surround yourself with sycophants who you say things like that too and they say, you know, epic, sir, epic. I think there's also the possibility that we're overlooking that maybe when he told it in person, maybe his delivery was just perfect because he's really, really known for being

an incredible public speaker and for his incredible comic timing. And of course, I'm kidding because he has no comic timing, just as he has no comedic sensibility at all. He's one of the most unfunny people on the planet. And the only people who ever laugh at his jokes are sycophants and employees who have no choice. So he's just, he is such a loser. I do want to quickly call out the New York Times because I feel like we almost went a whole episode without yelling at the media. And I don't think we're allowed to do that. I don't think we're allowed. In the article about this, this is how they describe him. Mr. Musk, the world's richest man, has established a reputation as an edgy plutocrat, not bound by social conventions when it comes to expressing his opinions. What? No, he's not edgy. None of what he says is edgy. It's stupid. It's dull. It's boring.

And to even call him edgy is giving him praise he doesn't deserve. He's not Lenny Bruce. He's not Chris Rock. Stop it. He's just an unfunny hack. who has a ton of money and a bunch of people who don't want to tell him the truth around him. Don't be one of those. Fuck that guy. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder.

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