The Daily Beast Podcast - How RFK Jr. Supporters Are Trying to Spin The Anti-Vax Thing

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

Daily Beast politics reporter Ursula Perano shares more details about the anti-vax rhetoric she saw in RFK Jr.’s campaign-run Slack, including wild comparisons of vaccines to household cleaners from the 1900s. Plus, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks what’s next for new social media site Threads and the feature that could change platforms forever—if Mark Zuckerberg enables it in Europe. And of course, hosts Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie unpack Elon Musk’s dick measuring comments they for sure thought were fake and the latest lawsuit hitting Fox News. 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. 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 a great show we have for you today. Neely Patel, editor-in-chief

of The Verge, host of The Vergecast, stops by to talk about threads and where exactly Twitter went wrong. Then, Daily Beast Politics reporter Ursula Perano joins us to break down her adventures in the wild world of RFK Jr's public Slack channel. But first, let's have some fun. So, folks, you know, for the longest time, Andy, we've been making jokes about billionaires doing a dick measuring competition to outer space of whose rocket is the biggest and whose social media account is bigger. And then it was, let's actually have a physical cage match, which was shut down by Elon Musk's mommy, who did not want him to get into a physical fight with Mark Zuckerberg. Now, now, oh my God, it is, it's like, is it the more money you have, the less maturity you have? The more money you have, the less intelligence you have. I don't know what it is.

But we have a fascination in this country with capitalism and greed and billionaires. So, of course, we talk about them all of the time. But Elon Musk is clearly losing his fucking mind since Mark Zuckerberg, his meta, launched the competitor threads. And now Elon Musk has tweeted, which everyone thought was a joke. I mean, everyone thought was like a fake tweet. We should have a real dick measuring contest. What? Do you think his mommy is going to shut this one down too?

Maybe she'll hold the ruler. I don't fucking know. Oh, Jesus. The fact that, like, this man is worth the most money on the planet. Like, just think about that level of wealth and disgust and disgust and just greed and there are people that can't afford to eat and he's like deciding which yacht he's going to pull out that day but like this idea is that we're name for yeah it is little yachty little yeah that you want to have a real life dick measuring contest like he's in his 40s right

like I'm not wrong about how old he is right think he might be in his 50s to be honest that's what Jesus Christ, really? Yeah, it's 52. Mm-mm. Yeah. But 40s or 50s, I mean, I'm trying to think of like what age is even, it's obviously never appropriate to say, let's have a dick measuring competition. But it is something that like a teenage boy would do. Correct.

For an adult to do it, let alone an adult in their 50s, it's sad is what it is. It's pathetic. know what other words to you. I mean, it's embarrassing. There's nothing complimentary about it. And I don't think Grimes left you. I don't think your daughter won't talk to you. I don't think any of this has anything to do with the size of your dick. Like, maybe it just has to do with the fact that you are a dick. Are. Yeah, exactly. The size of your dickiness. So it's like, get your shit together, man. Like, it really is just there's that, the sort of meme or joke template. men would rather do X than go to therapy.

Yes. This is like a perfect serious example of it. Like this dude needs hardcore therapy. And instead of doing that, he will post shit like this online in public for millions and millions of people to see. And it's bad. But the worst part of it is is he doesn't realize how embarrassing it is. And that gets back to, I think, to your rich guy thing. It's like you, you know, you hit a certain level of wealth and power.

And you are just surrounded by yes people. And you are surrounded by people who will not tell you something is a bad idea or something is stupid. And if you look at the replies to this tweet, which as you said, I thought this was a parody account. I didn't believe it was even my loathing for him. I was like, oh, come on, that can't be real. Can't be. He didn't just say that. But if you look at the replies from the paychecks, the people who pay for the blue checks,

They're all like, you know, yes, King, and they're all totally on his side and think this is a great idea. It's amazing. So from Dick measuring to just actual dick, right? Let's talk about Fox, shall we? Because I can't get over the fact that you have an entire network that makes a profit, a killer profit, killer ratings on perpetuating lies and spreading them. And so Fox News is being sued. I don't even know how many times this is at this point, but they're being sued yet again in what the New York Times is saying could potentially be yet another Dominion style case

for them, meaning that they're going to have to pay up. So just to give, you know, our listeners, just a little bit of a background. Now, we know that Tucker Carlson has since been fired from Fox News and that was part of the cleanup for Dominion and probably, you know, the leaked messages that he trashed his employers. But here's this man, a man by the name of Ray Epps, who, according to the New York Times, is a two-time Trump voter. And he took part in the demonstrations in Washington, D.C., on the day of the insurrection and the night before. And he was captured on camera, urging the crowd to march with him and enter into the Capitol building. Now, unlike the thousand other demonstrations,

Federal prosecutors have not charged Epps with a crime. And you may be asking, okay, Danielle, so then why are we talking about this? Oh, because for more than 18 months, Taco Carlson made this man, Mr. Epps, a target on his show, insisting that the reason why he was not charged by federal prosecutors is because he is somehow, a quote unquote secret government agent. And this man has since, him and his family, have since fled the state of Arizona where they were living. They're hiding out in another state. They've sold their wedding venue business, their ranch, and they're receiving death threats based on this conspiracy theory. And mind you, let me say again, the man believed Donald Trump so

fucking much, he was at the insurrection. Tell him people, come on, come into. the Capitol building. Now, I don't know why federal prosecutors haven't charged him, but at the same time, this would be your secret fucking agent? This whole thing is so bizarre, and it sounds a lot like the whole Seth Rich thing that Hannity went through. And I believe he eventually had a, I think Fox had an issue on air apology for that. This is just so bizarre. This is a story that has been like all around the conservative media sphere or whatever. And I honestly can't remember if Tucker started it or if it bubbled up from other people. But it is so bizarre that they have, I don't know, they focus on just the weirdest things. And in this case, the thing about Epsis, yes, he was there.

And I guess he said the word, there's video of him shouting that he's planning on margin to the capital. And then he says peacefully. And that started a bunch of people shouting, calling him a Fed, and chanting Fed, Fed, Fed, because he said peacefully. And that is apparently what started this whole thing. And then there's video of him that shows him bending down to whisper in a man's ears, like right before they basically rush the barricades and, you know, start trampling and fighting with police officers. And so they have used this as more evidence that he was a Fed and he was whispering orders or

doing whatever. Meanwhile, the guy he was whispered. to basically said that, yeah, Epps came up to him and said, dude, relax, the cops are just doing their job. And that has suddenly become, like, because there's no actual, you can't hear the audio on the video. So naturally, they have filled in the blanks with whatever it takes to make this guy a federal agent. But yeah, as you pointed out, for over 18 months, this was like a huge story on Tucker and in other parts of the conservative world. Again, they're so inconsistent. Like, on the him, the people who did all this stuff on January 6th are patriots. But on the other hand,

oh, no, this was planted by the Fed. Like, the Fed's made this app. So none of this shit makes sense. So, you know, what you're left with is a bunch of lies. And the question is, I guess, from reading a New York Times piece about this, Epps's attorney says, hey, all we asked for was an apology. Like, we wanted an apology from Fox, and that would have been enough. And when Fox, we're only filing the suit because Fox refused to do this. So, you know, go with God. The attorney, I think his name is Michael Teeter, said that on behalf of Ray Epps, all they issued a cease and desist. Essentially, stop fucking smearing my name.

Stop making up stories. And so because Fox News, much in the same way of all of MAGA and Donald Trump, can't fucking just apologize, can't acknowledge wrongdoing, now they're up against a lawsuit again. And I'm just like, how is it that we have not. had laws on the books already that prohibit this type of fucking network. I just, you know, and I always imagine it, Andy, and I'm going to take it to the extreme so that people get a better picture of it. If it were not white billionaires that ran this company, if it were a, oh, I don't know, a Muslim billionaire that ran a fox-like entity, if it was a Chinese billionaire there,

do you think that this shit would continue that was just like spreading lies or do you think somehow it would have been shut down right i just find that like there's no way to part and parcel the whiteness and the privilege away from how this network has been able to maneuver over the past several decades and how they have morphed into like the white supremacist echo chamber and they turn on their own, there is no trust. They all have this mob mentality. This man is a two-time Trump voter, but that's not enough. Like he was willing to march to the Capitol but says to people,

maybe let's not kill anybody on our way. And you are a traitor. Like, what? Yeah, no, it's amazing. But this is like, you know, every sort of extremist movement goes through this. This is like the Stalinist purges, you know. It's like, you're not with us 100% because you had a problem. with killing cops, killing capital police officers. Therefore, we have to call you a Fed and we have

to purge you and whatever. And, you know, we were talking before we went to air and Danielle, you said something I totally agree with. Like, I don't necessarily want to feel sorry for this guy. I mean, like you said, he was there on January 6th. He was part of this bullshit. He voted for Trump twice. But the fact of the matter is by Tucker Carlson doing what he did, I think it's in arguable that you're putting this guy's life in danger. 100%. There's a lawyer at the end of the New York Times article that says, basically, if Epps did get indicted, it would be tough for him to make the defamation case because, as the lawyer says, the centerpiece of a libel case is an alleged harm to reputation. So it's like if you're, if you've been indicted, it's hard to claim that this has harmed your reputation.

Are you sure? Because in Maga World, being indicted twice gives you millions of dollars. No, no. Absolutely. Absolutely. Again, it's. insane, but this is how they live their lives. It's just one conspiracy theory after another to try to explain things that have a very simple rational explanation, but it's one that they don't like. So it's, you know, this is Kellyanne Conway's alternative facts. It's just they're not facts. It's wild. It's dangerous. And the fact that there's no policy to enforce, there's no way to stop this and we can continue to lie about freedom of speech until it causes. irreparable harm. Yes, I don't like this man. He votes for everything that I fight against. Equity and

justice for all people, that all people, you know, actually should have the ability to access the American dream. You're voting for Donald Trump. You don't believe that. But at the same time, you shouldn't have your life ruined by a network of liars who are spreading false claims about you. And all you need is one of those Fox viewers hopped up on toxicity with an AR-15 that says, I'm going to do this country a favor and take this man out. It's the same way that Donald Trump, oh, I just happened to tweet Obama's address. Right. Like, what the fuck? And oh, well, we can't do anything about it because we don't know whether or not he intended to cause harm. Are you dumb? It's like, why don't our laws match common fucking sense? That's the thing that gets me. Yeah. Look, you mentioned, you know,

why can't we do something about this? And, you know, there is that pesky First Amendment. But the things you can do are you can file libel suits. And the other thing you can do is not watch. And I bring that up because I don't think it's for any good reason, but Fox News ratings are a little bit in the tank. Oh, you don't say. No, I do say. I do very much say. CNBC reporter Carl Kintanilla tweeted out, Fox News is facing viewership and share pressures. Viewership is down 19% January through June 23 versus January through June 21st. And this stat, I thought, was very interesting. He said, more worryingly, Fox News was 52% of cable news primetime viewership for 2020 to

2022. It's now 38%. That's a huge drop in your primetime viewership. That's only looking at people who watch cable news. And so they've gone from over half the people who are watching cable news in primetime were watching them. And now it's down to 38%, which look is still, you know, I'm not saying. Way too high.

Yeah, it's 38% too high. But it's a huge drop. And the reason that this becomes important, I think, beyond just the numbers is, you know, Fox News survives on these carriage fees from cable companies. Like if you watch Fox News or any cable news, the quality of ads. they get is very low. We joke about my pillow and there's catheter ads and all this stuff. But the way they make all their money is they can charge, particularly Fox, they charge cable companies like an obscene amount of money to carry them. And the reason they've been able to do

that is because they have such a large viewership. So if that viewership drops, then it makes it harder for Fox to make their money off their cable carriage fees. And look, if you want to take it to an extreme, it makes it a little more likely that maybe cable companies would think about dropping them. I wish. I know. I wish. Because if they did, then there wouldn't be the access. Then we would put up some type of dam between the toxic bullshit that they spew and the people. On top of their ratings, Fox's own ratings since, you know, and I don't know, do we attribute this to Tucker Carlson being fired? Was he their cash cow and now Jesse Waters just can't like, you know, fill his racist shoes? Like, I don't know. But Tucker Carlson in his own ratings on his broke-ass

Twitter show are also taking a nosedive. I want to believe, Andy, that this means that people are becoming more conscious. People are exhausted by the lies. That, you know, America is on the mend, maybe, you know, but I know that that's not true. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know the why. I think it is as simple as, you know, Tucker was a huge draw. And it's one thing to be a huge draw on Fox News.

The Twitter thing was always a weird thing. And it's not surprising at all that that shit has created. The funny thing is, like, he now posts these videos on Twitter, but I hear less about them on Twitter than I did is stuff on Fox News. So it's like, I'm sure. There are still people sitting at home watching it on Twitter, but nobody's really talking about it the way, you know, oh, did you see what Tucker said last night or, you know,

an hour ago or five minutes ago on Fox? I haven't seen a hell of a lot of that. It's almost like people have decided he's sort of irrelevant now that he's just posting these Twitter videos. But look, I'm with you. I don't think this, you know, unfortunately, no, this does not have anything to do with Americans waking up. I think it's just a simple fact that he sucks and he's awful.

I get why people tuned in to watch him. I mean, if you're already in that deranged mindset, he can be a compelling broadcaster. They're all shaman. Yeah, exactly. They're all circus ringleaders. That's what they are. Like Rush Limbaugh. I mean, same thing.

Like, you couldn't pay me to listen to him, but I get it. You know, he's exactly what you just said. He's a circus ringleader, and he was very good at it. And it's hard to replace that kind of thing. And look, if anyone can replace someone, it's Fox News, we've seen it before, you know, it's been talked about to death. When O'Reilly left, people are like, oh, what's going to happen? They plugged in Tucker. I find it hard to believe that Jesse Waters is going to scratch that same itch for the same number of people.

But what the hell do I know? Yeah. And I just, you know what I wonder? Well, here's a question. Who is that person on our side, you know, that draws people in? Or is it that because we are not, I don't know, swamp people and we have like activated brain cells and minds that we're not easily wooed. So by like by one captivating figure.

But I'm trying to think of in media, you know, aside from you and I, Andy, who is that person? You know, that we can say like, that's our person, you know, that 65 million people. listen to. Yeah. Honestly, the last person I can think of was maybe John Stewart, if you want to count that. I could see that. Like Rachel Maddow gets very good ratings. There's no cult. Well, maybe there is. If there is, it's not as big as the cult for Tucker. And a lot of that probably could be lefties love to infight. And so Rachel Maddow will do one show and she'll say one thing. And a bunch of people will be like, oh, Rachel Maddow sell out, you know, or people to maybe more center left will be like, oh, that's too much for me. And it'll become this whole thing, whereas Fox is like,

that audience really is monolithic and there's nothing like it. Yeah, there is nothing like it. That's what's so terrifying. There's nothing like it. And there's no way to unstick those people. No, I agree. Folks, I am very excited to welcome to the new abnormal Nile Patel, who, who is the host of Decoder and the editor-in-chief of The Verge and host of the Verge cast podcast, an award-winning podcast, if you will. Let's see, we are on social media platform 1,6,022, and people are trying to figure out where they go,

where is the new town hall, where is the new public square for discourse that doesn't make us feel like we need to take a shower after. As somebody who has been on Twitter for many, many, many amoons, I am a political podcaster. I get all of my information, find my guests on this platform that Elon Musk has turned into a sewage dump, which has made my job really difficult. And then while on vacation, lo and behold, meta rolls out threads. And currently it feels like a, I don't know, like a beautiful oasis in a middle of a desert. I don't even know what to say about it because I'm scared.

I'm scared to enjoy it, Neelais. So you tell me what you are thinking about these two vying social platforms. Yeah. I think there's a lot to unpack in what you said there. I'm an internet old head. I came up before Twitter. My view of these platforms is that we went through a very notable period in our history where big companies ran centralized services. And that was the internet.

And that period is ending in all kinds of weird ways. And I think that is healthy and good. I don't think that that should be a state of it. So when I say there was a lot to unpacking what you said there, you said town square, right? The idea that Twitter was the town square was always bonkers. One, it was the smallest of the big social networks. Right. By an order of magnitude.

At its peak, it had maybe 300 million, 350 million people. Instagram has 2 billion people. So by any reasonable measure, Instagram is the town square. YouTube is the town square. More young men get radicalized on YouTube than on Twitter. It's just the fact. We should probably pay more attention to YouTube. But the other thing that was contained in your question is the sense that Twitter was the default answer

for everything in media and politics for so long. If we had a problem, and I'm as guilty of this as anyone, we had a problem. We solved it with Twitter. There's a politician, had a weird thing happen, a campaign stop, needs to issue a statement, Twitter. It'll get to the media. Our website is down. We're going to publish all of our articles on Twitter, which sends us no traffic.

There's never sent anybody any traffic. But it's just the answer. Whatever is going to happen on Twitter. And that is, I think, because Twitter is unique. It did not push everyone into being TikTok or whatever social media a fad was popular. It was a stubbornly text-based platform. It was not social in the way that Facebook is social. It wasn't about your friends and your neighbors and whoever else, your family, God forbid. Right. It was just this other thing. It was this weird, interest-based, one-way follow-based

social graph that allowed me to say, look, I now know a bunch of economists. That was never going to happen for me on Tumblr. Yep. So Twitter has occupied this space, but if you ever looked at it with any amount of distance, which was really hard to do in the sort of Twitter heyday, you'd be like, this is by far the small social media platform. Its brand is straight up toxicity. That's what it is.

Like no late night shows are doing mean tweet segments, but rebranded as mean Facebook posts. Like the brand of this thing is toxicity and meanness and unhappiness and argumentation. And then on top of it, it is a shit business. Like, it has been almost since inception. It had a pretty disastrous IPO. The reason that they ended up selling it to Elon was because his $44 billion offered by the company was better than any plan they had to grow the business. Yeah.

They had none. They had activist investors in their stock demanding a plan for growth. They were making promises about doubling users and growing revenue. and they realized they couldn't keep them. They had no plans. So you just kind of look at this weird moment where this mismanaged company that was a bad business

that made a product whose entire ethos was toxicity. And you're like, why was that the answer to every question? My personality is like 50% Twitter. I'm fully poisoned by it. But I quit using it when Elon, it was some slur or another that he tweeted. And I honestly feel like my brain has healed. I don't think in those bursts anymore.

And I think that is probably good for everybody. You say so many things that I'm just like, wait, why did we think all of these things about Twitter? Like, why did we make it the default for so much? And when I really think about who it was good for in the beginning, I think about media. I think about journalists. I think about activists and organizers that were using it to reach as many people as possible outside of the gatekeepers. So if I want to publish something and I'm not. not a name. And the Washington Post and the New York Times are not going to publish my stuff. It was a way

to push out content. And because it wasn't attached to video or attached to pictures in any type of way, it was really about your wit. It was really about your intellect. And for some people, they showcase that by being just straight up mean, as opposed to I want to engage in discourse and have conversation and try and find out where we can meet in the middle if that exists anymore, which it does not. But when you think about the way that it had morphed over the past several years and then definitely under the helm of Elon Musk who said, straight up told everybody, basically, I'm a white supremacist.

I'm transphobic. You know, I'm anti-Semitic. And like, I'm now owner of this platform and I'm opening up the floodgates because that's what my free speech looks like. He told us from the jump, this is what I'm doing. And I'm the richest man on the planet. So paying $44 billion, well over market value for this platform, is Trump changed to me. I don't really care. But when we look at the power that a Twitter had, and I think about Ferguson, I think about the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, that mainstream media, cable news, was not going to cover. Without those.

on the ground activists and reporters, we would have never known. It could have been a new Tulsa for all we understand, which is that meaning hundreds of years later, maybe we know about what happened through bits and passes. And so when I think about Twitter as being able to inform us of the Arab Spring, of the uprising in Iran, it is a powerful force. And I just, I guess my question for you is, one, does it get replaced? Because the way that these businesses and platforms work, they don't work the same as they did in the early 2000s. And then two, why hasn't it ever been something in the traditional sense that has been profitable? Well, Twitter just did a bad job running their business, like a miserably bad job running their business.

We can get into that part of it. I think that is maybe a little more boring than the other party question, which is look at this tool. that enabled so many people to speak. What you're really highlighting there is Twitter was an unprecedented distribution medium. It wasn't the biggest, but it was the most focused and it was the most vibrant, right? There were scientists could predict earthquakes by doing Twitter analysis, analysis of the Twitter firehose and saying people are tweeting it before the sensors are going off. That's crazy.

You see all of that and you say, okay, you let all these people have access to this kind of distribution. All kinds of things happen that you never expected. I take your point about Ferguson, about George Floyd, but the Arab Spring, the Arab Spring, if you really dive into what that moment meant for internet companies around the world, Twitter is running around in that moment saying, we are the free speech wing of the free speech party. We have given a voice to the oppressed in the Middle East, and they are fomenting revolutions in their countries. Hey, did that work? But there are a bunch a democracy's in the Middle East? No, because their oppressors had guns, right? And like, the way that the tech companies in Silicon Valley, in that moment, at that Web 2.0 moment,

thought about the products they were shepherding into the world was almost willfully naive, willfully idealistic. If you just connect everyone, we will export democracy around the world. Like, the CIA couldn't have made that shit up. It's nuts, right? It turns out, if you connect everyone. Yeah, you end up with a Black Lives Matter movement. You also end up with January 6th. And you also end up with a renewed nationalism around the globe. You've also given these distribution tools to a bunch of influences that 50% of this country think are great. And 50% of this country think are dangerous to the health of democracy. And you increase the polarization of all of us. And I think there's never been a real reckoning with that.

particularly the early Twitter, the Arab Spring Twitter, its position was, we just let everybody talk. Everything will be better. And I think that's where I come from, right? There's something that pulls on my heartstrings when you say that. I still want to believe. Right. And I think there's a weird moment right now where on the left and right, everyone's like after government speech regulations. You see it all over the place. We've got to make lies legal. Like that's on the left. On the right, it's we got to. make gay people illegal. Like, you can't even say it. And there's this notion that the government should start dictating what people say. And I think a lot of that is a reaction to these companies not instilling any values into their products. And so what I'm hopeful for right now, to bring it just back to threads, yeah. Facebook has a point of view, right? They're like, it's going to be nice here. Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Aseri are responding to Verge reporters

and saying, hard news is not it for us. Like, we know it's going to be here, But hello, we've done it. You know, 2016 happened on Facebook. Like we've lived this life and we're going to focus on entertainment and fashion and sports and building communities around these verticals that are just sort of nicer. And you can believe them or not, right? Like, I think entertainment and fashion and sports are inherently political. But you can see why they're trying to get away from this is where the election will be decided.

And maybe that will be more successful. But what it is, in any case, is a point of view about what should be on the platform and which shouldn't be on a platform. And Twitter might represent a different point of view. And I think that's a much healthier way to have a debate about what speech is acceptable to more people than to have the government mandated or have one sort of monopoly mandated all by themselves. Yeah, because, I mean, frankly, what we have known, right, like what we've understand

and kind of the lessons that have been learned from 2016 onward is that government in the wrong hands is a weapon against the people. And so if you say, oh, yes, well, under the Biden administration, we want, you know, hate speech and all of these things to be regulated and we want to make that kind of violence, right, that was able to turn rhetoric into actual violence on January 6th have some type of legal repercussions. Well, then, okay, what does that look like under a DeSantis administration or Trump administration? It is going to look the complete and total reverse because with the government, being able to regulate speech in that way, it is only going to be as good as those that are in power. And what we have seen is that those that are in power are inherently corrupt. Looking at you, Supreme Court, right?

So it was supremely naive to believe that if you gave everybody a microphone, then everyone would connect in the right ways. Or it was supremely naive to even suggest that there would be agreement on the right way. Right. That's just at the heart of Silicon Valley. a very myopic view of what people will do. They might have learned it now, maybe, but the story of technology writ large is you give people a tool, they use it in completely unexpected ways,

and then the next version of the tool is based on that. And it's never what anyone thought was going to happen. And in particular with these large social media platforms, it's almost like we just don't want to believe that the Nazis are going to be there. And now I think the companies, right, they've had to build these massive content moderation shops. You know, meta runs like a Supreme Court of moderation because it just doesn't want the

responsibility. Like, we've built a lot of infrastructure here now to just deal with the reality of letting everyone talk to each other. I'm hopeful that maybe we've learned some things along the way. But, you know, the main problems of the Elon Twitter are one that, yes, he is running it capriciously and he fired everyone. But B, he refuses to trade on the massive. body of expertise about how to run a social network that exists that most of Twitter invented.

Right. So if you want to run a social network, you can go hire a lot of people who have been doing this for a long time. You can go hire a lot of academics who have strong critiques about how we have done it and say, we're going to do it a different way and still base it in rigor. Instead, he's just making mistakes that everybody made five years ago. And like boldly, you know what I'm saying? It's like, I'm going to fuck up, but I'm going to fuck up extraordinarily so that I'm in the headlines all day, every day. I mean, to be fair, that is part of his charm. Is that what we call it, Nele?

You call it charm? Okay. I think that's why people like him. It's hard to deny that some people are very taken with him. I don't know that I am one of those people, but I see why people are attracted to somebody who is confidently going to say, this was bad. I'm tearing it down. I'm going to start over.

Now, what you are usually supposed to do is then have a plan. And in this case, I think he thinks that it's easier than it is. And he's a bad politician, right? He's a politician that relies on effectively bullying people. But running Twitter or running Tumblr or running Facebook at scale is basically being a politician. And instead of passing laws, you direct your engineers to write code, right? Or you direct your lawyers to write content moderation policies. And if you don't have the ability to persuade people at large scale that you've weighed the trade office, you've weighed the trade officer. and made a rational decision. Like, you're going to just get thumped, and that's what's happening to him. Well, with the couple of minutes that we have left, what predictions do you have for threads? Like I said at the beginning, for me, as somebody in media,

it is a breath of fresh air. I have literally felt like I have come up from the sewer. And I'm like, oh, look, the sky is blue. Like, I forgot. Like, I forgot what fresh air smelled like, because I've been breathing in shit for the past, year plus. What are your predictions for how Threads moves forward and this battle between Musk and Zuckerberg

plays out? So first of all, Threads is kind of a mess. The algorithm is a mess. It is just super confused about what anybody wants. They need to add a bunch of features. They rushed it out to capitalize on Twitter's various fiascos. So the product is undercooked and they know it. But it works. All the people are there, which is by far the most important thing. And they need to be a start adding features to it. They need that reverse chronological follower feed to be good for media. They need to build something that looks like tweet deck so that we can all stare at a million posts all day long. They're going to build that stuff. What you have is sort of the first open competition between content moderation regimes in quite a while, right? So it used to be there

was a Twitter and then you'd get something like a parlor or a truth social. It was like, we're like Twitter, but racist, or whatever we're going to allow here. And they would lose because most people don't want to hang out in those spaces. And then they would like increase their content moderation and turn into something that looked like Twitter. It's a weird phenomenon that you see happen over and over again where you feel like, what we are is Twitter, but with less content moderation, nobody uses it because you're like, no one's there and it's worse and it's full of racist. So they all end up turning their content moderation wheels to basically resemble Twitter. Now you've got Elon has turned Twitter into a truth social or a parlor. And does that

Zuckerberg has gone the other way, right? He's saying it's going to be nice and we're not going to do politics in our news. So it's going to be even nicer. Okay, well, 100 million people picked that. They were like, yeah, we want the nice one. Right. That's market competition in a way that we just haven't seen it before. I don't know how Elon's going to react to that. Like, he's mostly react to it by threatening lawsuits, which is absolutely foolish. I don't know how we will react to that. We are not used to as Americans that kind of competition. We're just not. Like, everybody already is we got to pick a winner. Well, one, dominate the up. Maybe it will be better for us to have more competition for these services with different points of view about what is and is not allowed so that we are not constantly running to the government to pass speech regulations. I think that's the worst thing we can do. And then on top of all of that, they haven't launched threads in Europe yet. And I think in order to do that, they have to enable this thing, which is very nerdy, but you can go read about it on the verge called Activity Pub, which basically decentralizes the network. So anybody can run their own server and connect to threads.

Lots of people can run their own versions of an app that connect to threads. And so you can leave. If you get so mad at Zuckerberger, he de-platforms you. You can take your followers. You can move them all over to another server and start posting there. And that feels like a big, important next turn of the internet. And when I say this moment of the internet has been all about these like billionaires running centralized services. I really hope the next version of the internet is about being able to leave.

and having lots of services that we can choose from that interoperate more. And that is a big, heady dream. But it is very notable to me. There are 100 million signups now. I don't know if you caught this when you signed up for threads. It says, we're going to join the Fediverse on the signup screen. That's that activity pub thing, right? That's that interoperation between different kinds of social networks idea.

They're showing that to 100 million people. I think they're going to do it. I think they have to do it to launch in Europe. And fundamentally, when someone as big as meta shows, up and says, we're going to try to make a little more decentralized internet. That's a big step. And that's the thing that I'm most excited about. Well, we will have to leave it there today. I'm excited and also terrified to see what comes next. So we'll have to have you back, Neelais. I would love to come back. This is great. To help us wade through. But thank you so much

for making the time for the new abnormal. Appreciate you. Of course, this is great fun. For those listeners who may not know, Slack is an instant messaging program mostly used by businesses for internal communications. But for some reason, the RFK Jr. Presidential campaign has set up a more public Slack channel for supporters of the conspiracy mongering Nepo Baby. And as Daily Beast politics reporter Ursula Perano discovered, they don't seem to care who joins it. Well, I care who joins us. So here is Ursula to tell us more. Ursula, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. Okay, first of all, how did you come to join this Slack channel? So the first notice I got of the Slack channel existing was I actually got a text

message from the RFK Jr. campaign. It looks like it was probably one of those texts that just generically goes out to anybody who's signed up for keeping updates on the campaign, which is something that a lot of reporters do to keep a track of campaign messaging. It had a link to donate, a link to volunteer, and a link to a public Slack channel. So I did some crash-checking. This Slack channel had also been posted on Twitter twice. And since publishing, I found at least one more instance where somebody had posted this Slack channel on their website. And so it's public. There were no barriers to entry. You could go right in, throw your email, and instantly you would be inside a Slack channel that is effectively public record because they're sharing it out, but it's still owned and moderated supposedly by the RFK campaign. So I'm just going to go out on a limb and say this is not standard practice for presidential campaigns.

It is not. It's standard or at least not that uncommon for campaigns to have slacks, particularly for volunteers to organize with the campaign. And that's what this was. But, you know, it's very unusual to be so cavalier in sharing it out, especially because when you have a space like this where there are a lot of different voices coming in, you make promises to moderate it, but sometimes that can be tricky. Yet if you were the one who owns the slack space, you're accountable for what's in it. And what we saw in this is that RFK campaign was not doing a very good job of moderating their slack space, yet still being willing to just post it out for everyone to see. So actually, that was going to be. My next question was, is it moderated? And I guess the answer is yes, but not very well. So from your time in this Slack channel, what kinds of people are in it?

Yeah, it's definitely a sometimes grim reflection of, I think, we're our case supporter bases at. It was a lot of anti-vax conspiracy theories. I would say that is the biggest bulk of sort of the less campaign-focused conversations you would see in there, whether it be conspiracies about it causing autism or it being part of a bio-weapon sort of thing. So there was a lot of anti-vax stuff in there. there were some questionable conversations from folks about what journalists, particularly black journalists, RFCN. Jr., should be considering interviews with. There were a lot of just conversations theorizing that the establishment and, you know, the deep state is working against RFK.

And really, a lot of the stuff that you would expect, but it's just so odd to see in writing and to see it then shared out publicly by the campaign. But yes, they did say, you know, we plan to moderate this space. but within the varying channels, including a meme channel, which was also a space in there that was particularly questionable, had a lot of somewhat graphic content. All of that coming together definitely wasn't the best reflection of exactly, you know, the campaigns work in that space as they were willing to just let everybody see it. So you put some of the messages in the piece you wrote about this for The Daily Beast. And there was one, I absolutely love this one.

It says it's no problem with going on totally crazy extreme shows after the primate. It's kind of like getting into the club with your fake ID. You're not going to turn it up until you're sure you're past the doorman, understand. What was this about? Yeah, so that was about Candace Owens, the conservative journalist, had publicly tweeted that she wanted RFK Jr. to come on her show for an interview. And one of the users who seems to have been elevated to a volunteer leadership position as a media coordinator, was posting about how we can't do those crazy shows before the primary.

And that was a pretty common theme within the Slack among supporters discussing RFK, was this idea that he has to be one candidate before the primary in this pitch to get him to the Democratic nomination, which is obviously an extreme long shot. But that he can then be himself after. It's so sort of teetering the line that he needs to look a little more like a true Democrat. He needs to tone down some of the vaccine talk, all of these things before the primary,

so he can seem more likable to mainstream Democratic voters, but that after the primary he could really turn up, he could go all out, he could pander to Republicans as well. and that there could really be a coin flip if he were to somehow get the Democratic nomination. Yeah, I mean, the funniest part about that was the after the primaries thing. I'm just sitting there thinking he can do whatever the hell he wants after the primaries. He's just going to be a private citizen. But again, this is the kind of stuff that you would expect sort of, you know,

it would not be unusual for a campaign to internally discuss this kind of stuff. But what's weird about it is that this is just being said on this public slack. Yeah, and I think that's the reality of it. It's that, you know, campaigns do have conversations about pre-primary strategy versus post-primary strategy. But it's sort of saying the quiet part out loud when you're going to just post it out there for all to see, it's very openly say, yeah, I'm going to be a little disingenuous for a while and that if you give me the nomination, which again, I don't see any way he gets it. But I can really be myself then and I can turn up and I can do all these different things. I mean, I will say it's reflective. I think of kind of, of where his base was at when you were looking at the intro channel. There was a welcome channel when you logged on to the Slack. There were a lot of people outlining, oh, I voted for Trump, but I think the RFK Jr. is the guy now. Or a lot of folks who were somewhere between party lines. There were also a lot of messaging from campaign folks on the Slack to make sure that if you live in a closed primary state, you switch to be a democratic registrations that you can

vote in the primary. So people were very aware RFK's inherent base, the folks you might be willing. to turn out for him right at the start are not necessarily Democratic mainstream voters, but that they know they need those folks to come along and join him on the campaign in order for him to gain any sort of momentum over the next few months. Yeah. And the same person who posted the first message about the going on the extreme shows after the primaries, she went on to say the only other black interviewer he has had so far was with CNN. And I feel like this going on Candace Owen show is going to be a red line for a lot of people. And if he blows this by going on her words, Uncle Tom, Black Show first, he might blow the whole election.

And she obviously shouldn't have said the Uncle Tom thing. Although, look, I don't know who this woman is. So I guess it's not my place to say what she's allowed to say or not. But again, there's two things here. One is it's like, I don't understand this red line thing because as I think most of his supporters would have no problem with him going on a Candace Owen show. But I guess she's basically saying, again, it's sort of saying the internal part externally. Yeah. I mean, he's done so many interviews with particularly far right or controversial hosts.

The Joe Rogum interview was another sort of point of conversation in the Slack channel where some people thought he talked about vaccines too much. Some people thought he should be talking about them more. And sort of that cognizance from his supporters and that awareness that that's a point of contention for him gaining momentum. And so it was kind of weird to see that there were some supporters who were saying, hey, we need to be a little more disciplined about what media outlets we go on, what journalists we go on to speak with. But at the same time, it's a question of, is RFK really listening to that feedback from his supporters, really being that strategic about it?

Or is he just sort of going wild, which really does seem to be the vibes of what he's doing in this campaign cycle? Yeah, for sure. And you mentioned that there's a lot of, you know, talk about vaccines on the channel. I saw some of the stuff you put in your article and it seemed like there were a lot of people trying to help him or coming up with their ideas to help him finesse it and to, you know, saying he should talk about vaccine safety. That's how he should frame him it, which is a thing, you know, that's not an uncommon thing from anti-vax folks is to do it like that. Was that the majority of what you saw on the channel? I would say the majority of people thought it was important to switch the language, to try and when somebody would come and say that RFK is anti-vax, which a lot of supporters said that when they were having conversations with their friends, with their families, about Kennedy, that was often a point of holdup and what people knew about him the most, that the effort from supporters should be to try and change the conversation to say, no, he's not anti-vaccine. He's pro-vaccine safety. And he thinks we should be, holding the pharmaceutical companies accountable, which you're right. It is something that a lot of anti-vax people do to try and spin it forward. But at the same time, in those same conversations where users of this Slack were saying, this is how we can spin this, they were very often also echoing the anti-vax claims that Kennedy has made, that vaccines can cause autism,

that vaccines are dangerous. There were comparisons of vaccines to cigarettes and opioids. And at one point, in conversation. I saw a reference comparing vaccines to 1900s era recommendations for household cleaners to be used as vaginal duches. So that's how down the rabbit hole things really got in there. But again, it makes sense. If you are one of those early adopters of the Kennedy campaign, you yourself are probably anti-vaccine. And the campaign is likely not going to be pushing back on any claims that you make doubting the efficacy of vaccines. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned earlier that there was a meme channel and there's nothing I hate more than a meme channel. So tell me more about the meme channel.

Yeah, the meme channel was just one of the biggest liabilities you could see you right off to bat when you log into the Slack. Again, lots of campaigns have slacks. But if you're going to have a meme channel, that's obviously going to be a risky spot. You saw a lot of anti-vax memes in there. You definitely saw a lot of just general RFK Stan memes. Folks really loved that part where he did push-ups, that viral video. So he was getting jacked Kennedy memes left him right.

Also memes, though, trolling Ukrainian President Vladimir Selinsky. Obviously, a lot of our case supporters are on the end of the Ukraine war where they're not necessarily supportive of continued aid. There are a lot of memes trolling Biden. And quite a few memes as well, trolling Hunter Biden was another common theme, showing photos of him in his underwear, showing photos of Hunter Biden as memes as well that the channel was definitely sharing around. And it was just one of those obvious places that the campaign was lacking the moderation that it had promised on this channel. It does seem a little weird for RFK, who very publicly was an addict and went through rehab. It feels a little weird for them to be mocking Hunter Biden, but whatever, I guess.

What does the Kennedy campaign say about this slack? I assume you ask them about it. Yeah, so they acknowledge taking part. in the Slack, but I will say for many of my questions, they were very dodgy. One of the listed owners of the Slack has identified within the channel as belonging to the campaign. I asked about that. I asked about how the Slack was created. They acknowledged that they were part of creation, but really tried to distance themselves from it saying, oh, this isn't necessarily reflective of the campaign itself. But the end of the day is that they were sending out this link in campaign

text messages, and members of the campaign have been posting it online. And when you're doing that, you do endorse this content. So they did say in a statement to me that they can't speak to the views of Mr. Kennedy's more than 100,000 supporters and very much trying to sort of dodge specific questions I had about why this content was allowed in this space. But they were a part of it. They have shared it out. And therefore, they have effectively endorsed and condoned it under the RFK campaign name.

Have they done? Like, I have to assume that, you know, you tweet something like that publicly a link to a Slack channel and you're going to get trolls. Have they had a problem with that? So they had, as of the point that I got kicked out of the channel, they had over 800 members. So I have to assume there were certainly some trolls in there. There was at least one instance that I was able to find scrolling through. Obviously, there are thousands of messages, so I probably could have missed others. But in a May Zoom meeting, organized by the campaign for volunteers to join, it appears as if somebody did infiltrate that Zoom and put porn on screen.

And the campaign, I guess, freaked out, shut it down. Afterwards, members in the Slack channel were saying, oh, my gosh, like, that was crazy. And it was a great meeting until those people showed up. But I saw the reactions from that meeting echoed in future conversations within the Slack about potential other Zoom meetings where people would reference, oh, yeah, and that made meeting porn popped up on screen. And so, yes, I think that from what I could see after that meeting,

they seem to be a little more cognizant, oh gosh, we shouldn't share our Zoom links publicly. It seems like they may have. But they didn't think to shut down their Slack channel. Sort of little amateur hour behavior there to say, oh, yeah, we have this problem. Somebody's showing porn on screen, but to not think, gosh, we should really make our Slack private. So you mentioned that you said a few minutes ago until you got kicked off the Slack channel, so they kicked you off. Yeah, and it was in slow motion, too, which was kind of crazy.

I expected when I sent my notice the campaign that I was planning to write on this on a Friday night, giving them until Saturday afternoon to respond, that I would be kicked out pretty instantly. I think I sent the first email around 6 p.m. on a Friday, very common to report over the weekend. And I, like, checked in that night, still was in there, checked it in the morning around 9 a.m. still was in there. It wasn't until around when I sent a follow-up email saying,

hey, I wanted to re-up this in your inbox to make sure that you guys have it. But I started to slowly notice I was being removed from channels one by one. And I don't know if it's that they didn't know how to remove me from the slack all together. But I was just watching myself be removed from individual channels and then watching them archive a few channels until it was finally later in the day that I got a email that my entire account had been deactivated. So not the speediest response from the Kennedy campaign there. If I recall correctly, did you write that the meme channel is no more? Yes, that was something that as things were going down in slow motion, I had specifically mentioned the meme channel as something that I had noticed in my reporting to the campaign,

doing the common, you know, detailed requests or comment. And that was completely gone by the time I logged off. I could still search for channels. I was just blocked from certain ones. and the memes channel did not exist anymore. Oh, well, that's just a shame. Another thing you mentioned that I actually meant to bring up earlier and forgot was you said that there was, you saw some anti-trans posting. Yeah, there were some anti-trans sentiments in the meme channel mocking the idea of there being more than two genders.

And I think that's also reflective of where the supposedly Democratic RFK junior bases versus the broader Democratic voting base where these supporters, were definitely less LGBT friendly compared to, I would think, the broader sphere of Democratic voters that would be supporting Biden or anybody else, really. So what's your overall sense of the use of this channel by the campaign? I don't even know if it's possible for you to have any kind of sense of this, but do you think that there are like people at even like a medium level of the campaign going through this and passing ideas up? Or do you think it's more of just like, ah, we'll set this up and let people vent,

and feel important, but we're not going to pay attention to it at all kind of thing. I think it's a mix. There are at least a few instances where the owner of the workspace who was listed as the Kennedy 24 campaign contact as well would say, oh, let me check with the campaign on that, or I just talked to the campaign. So there was some collaboration between this. And there were instances where that campaign contact came to the Slack and asked for help on surprisingly trivial tasks that you would think somebody on the employed campaign could do.

like I saw one instance where it just helped formatting an Excel sheet, which I know we all say we know how to use Excel, but I think that there was definitely collaboration, but it got a little out of hand, and I think they kind of let it devolve into the sounding board. And of course, on the campaign's end, I think they would almost see it as a measure of excitement. Oh, gosh, we have 600 members in 700 and 800, because I did see within, I think I was only in the Slack space for about a week before I reached out to the campaign and got removed, that number was growing. So the Slack link was certainly being shared around, I think, at a pretty steady pace. And there would be excitement there for the campaign to see increased supporters. But at the same time, bigger space, more a monitor, they clearly couldn't keep up. And maybe they just kind of threw up their hands at some point and just said, oh, we'll let this be. But there are consequences to that. No, absolutely. I mean, it's one thing to have a fan site, you know, in the old vernacular of the internet. But it's another thing when you're, involved in that fan site. And as you said, that sort of, you know,

incurs upon you some responsibility, I would think. Yeah. If you're going to own the workspace, or at least be part in owning the workspace, and you are going to share it out, you are accountable for what's in there and inviting people into that space, knowing that there are these series of an appropriate posts and sometimes just cringe-worthy posts. Yeah. You're owning that. And, And it does seem at this point that they seem to somewhat recognize it wasn't necessarily the Slack channel. Perhaps they had envisioned. I'll be curious to see if it is even still in existence in the future if anybody else gets in. Yeah, definitely interesting to see that. Ursula,

thank you so much for being here. This is like so fascinating and just I am morbidly interested in watching this sort of slow descent of American politics. And this feels like part of it. Thank you so much, Ursula. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Andy. Andy Levy. Danielle Moody. Andy Levy. How are we kicking off this good, good week in America?

Oh, I have, I think, a good one. So there's this guy down in the great state of Oklahoma. Somehow he is a former teacher. He used to be a history teacher. This is going to amaze you once I tell you what he actually said. He's now like a superintendent of public schools. or the superintendent of public schools in Oklahoma. And he's a nut job, and he spoke at the Moms for Liberty Summit,

and he's been out there just saying a whole bunch of crazy wacko shit. But he sort of even topped himself over the weekend, and he was at a GOP event, and he decided to use the Tulsa Race Massacre as an example of something where he is opposed to what he calls critical race theory. And the way he explained this was he said when talking about the Tulsa Race massacre, he said, let's not tie it to the skin color and say the skin color determined that. Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. So I guess to him it's just the Tulsa whatever massacre? Ah, yes. Like, I don't know what you want to call it at that point, you know. But he sort of clarified his point and he was saying, look, he's not saying that this was perpetrator. traded against black people. What he was saying was, you have to judge the people who did it as individuals. You can't say that white people did this to black people. You have to say that individuals did this to, I guess, to individual black people. But it is just absolutely

unbelievable that you can sit there and talk about one of the 20th century's most heinous, racially motivated. I don't even know what I was going to say crime, but that doesn't even begin to cover. Look, Massacre, there's no other word for massacre. They massacred black people. They massacred black people who had the nerve to become somewhat successful. And this massacre was not done by a multicultural diverse group of people.

It was done by white dudes. And to sit there and try to say, as a former history teacher and a guy who was a superintendent of public schools to try to pull this shit is just so ridiculous, but also so indicative of where so much of this country is from Florida to all these other states. And all they have to do is they say, I don't believe in critical race theory, which is just code for, you can't say that white people did bad shit. And so I'd beyond had it with these people and just fuck this guy forever. Sounds like he's running a campaign for the future. you know, head of the Department of Education.

Yeah, no, it really does. In any Republican administration, frankly, there isn't one that is a standout. So just as a FYI, people in China don't know about Tiananmen Square. Right. Why? Because the government ensured that in their teaching of history of their country, that any type of revolt and actions in that way were removed. We're the only ones.

other people around the world know about what happened during that time. They don't. And so that is the model that these Republicans want in this country. White people only do great things. This country was founded by great men doing great things. And everything else that happened was par for the course of what it means to develop a nation. That's what they want. Yeah.

And, you know, and if Republicans become, you know, if any one of them enter into the White House, this is what we will get nationwide. Yep. Fuck those guys. Fuck them. So who is your fuck that guy to start off yet another amazing? Well, it's one of our Hall of Famers, Mr. Death Star himself. And you would say, Daniel, well, which one?

It is Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who recently signed legislation last month, a House bill that was signed into law, House Bill 2127, which would make it okay, you know, not to provide water breaks for workers in certain local ordinances. And this is at a time where if you're paying attention to any news whatsoever, the earth has recorded the hottest days ever in the last week with temperatures in parts of this man's state hitting 125 fucking degrees. I don't know how you live in a state that is hotter than hell and you see fit to say that the five fucking minutes that would be allotted for people to ingest water that allows them to keep working and living their hearts beating that you would deny access to that it is such a fucking cruel bill that people

thought that it was an onion article when it came out because they were like there's no possible way. But since then, since June 6th, the signing of this piece of legislation, 11 people have died in the state of Texas. This is according to the Texas Observer, between the ages of 60 and 80 years old, have died of heat-related illness. And you're looking at a post office worker. You're looking at a utility lineman. People who have died. You're looking at prisoners. of course we don't think that they're people, but guess who doesn't have air conditioning? The Texas prisons. And so we're talking about a time where we are living in the climate change crisis.

It's no longer impending. We are living it. And instead of passing legislation or doing anything about, let's say, your electrical grid that would be conducive to people's health and well-being, this is what this motherfucker is doing. It is a crime against humanity. And so how people like Abbott are not sued by humanitarian organizations, how places like Texas are not on some type of watch list, doesn't make any fucking sense to me.

But for that reason and so, so many others I don't have time for, fuck that guy. Yeah, I was going to say that Steve Monticelli, who also writes at the Texas Observer, and then I realize he actually wrote this article. But he tweeted out a thing that, you know, he said maybe we should turn off the air conditioning. I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember the exact tweet,

but he was basically saying maybe we should turn off the air conditioning for the Texas House of Representatives and, you know, at the State House and not let them have water breaks and see how long they last. I think that's a great idea. Please don't write in and say, but this is unfair to the staff and the, you know, whoever. Yes, of course. This is not a serious suggestion.

But what it does is get to the heart of you had a bunch of people. people passing this bill and Governor Abbott signing it. And they work indoors and they work in very nicely air-conditioned locations, I would imagine. And they can have a bottle of water with them probably all the time. Yeah, fuck all these guys. I'm with you. This is like, this is just straight up murder. Yeah.

That's what this is. Yep. Fuck these guys. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. day. 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

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