The Daily Beast Podcast - How Tucker Carlson Wanted to ‘Save the GOP’ Live On Air

Episode Date: May 7, 2023

The New Abnormal zeroes in on the former Fox News host’s plan to save right-wing politics and unite warring factions of the Republican Party. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Paul Kicks. We're going to talk about his new book, You Have to Be prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live. 10 weeks in Birmingham that changed America. He's going to talk to us all about the peak of tensions in the civil rights movement. But first, let's have some fun.

Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clip me. Give me clips. Okay, so something that got missed this week and, you know, we had so much news and so many things to be mad at, was some more of the interesting how the congressional sausage party gets made in Congress. Abby Grossberg, who's a former Tucker Carlson producer, well, she had some really interesting dirt on some behind the scenes at the show. Persona. Yeah.

I mean, they believe that he could broker who was speaker, house speaker. House Speaker. He wanted to do that live on air, but Kevin McCarthy said no. What do you mean? He wanted to do that live on air? His plan was to have Kevin McCarthy come on the show, according to Justin Wells revealed this grand plan to us. Tucker a few days earlier had sort of set some terms for McCarthy, which included this church kind of committee that he said about, I think this was about January 5th, so about January 2nd. He said, you should have this church committee. So fast forward to January 5th, they started asking me to book McCarthy on the show that night. I had worked with him a lot when I was at Sunday morning futures and had a relationship with his

team. That afternoon, Justin came in and he said, here's the plan. Tucker's going to first have Kevin on, hear him beg and grovel, then we'll bring in Matt Gates, and Matt Gates will then kind of set his terms. Then Tucker will set his terms that McCarthy has to agree to. Parker Carlson had terms. Had terms. Yeah, had terms. And we're going to make this whole thing happen on air and save the Republican Party. Fortunately, for McCarthy's sake, he said no.

But he did call Tucker the next day from his office with Representative Thomas Massey and had agreed to some of Tucker's terms, according to a text that Tucker had sent me. And he said that was a win. A couple things here. Jesse, you referred to this as a sausage party. I think that has a different meaning. I was referring to the congressional sausage party of the Republican Party. I know.

I got it. Got it. Got it. That was weird. I just wanted to check. Tucker, the one thing he wasn't wrong about here was I don't think he was overestimating his influence. Oh, yeah.

Nope. Had McCarthy said yes, I think Tucker could have pulled this off. And it's actually, I would be interested in knowing why McCarthy didn't say yes because he has figured every other way out to grove. and I wonder what made this sort of a bridge too far. I mean, and he was already humiliated on national fucking television as we watched the 15 votes that needed to take place over the course of four days. So I don't know why he thought that that was going to go easier than a, you know,

two on one with him, Tucker and Matt Gates. This had to have been before that, right? Yes, he didn't want to be humiliated. But I mean, he knew he didn't have the fucking votes. Oh, I got you. I got you. That's what I'm saying. Like, there was no humiliation too strong for his kings, except this one?

Like, this is where he uses the safe word? Like, that's, I don't know. That's a weird choice to me, but okay. No shaming. It's just so funny because, like, these people are so afraid of their base and they have to fear the fucking frozen fish stick air. It's like, what a miserable job these people must have. The populist frozen fish air. Oh, yes, yes, I'm sorry.

But truly, like, to be beholden. and to both these sides, who would want this fucking job? I can't imagine. Like, that's how badly you have to want. Because it's not even power. You can't even say it's how badly you have to want power. Because what is he, what does he have? He doesn't have anything with his Fisher Price fucking limp gavel.

He has the title. I guess that's what he wants. Yeah, he wants to be in history books and have it for his dating profile and plenty of fish. Yeah, I too want to be a princess. We can arrange that. Okay. So we all know that Fox News is Apo dumping on Tucker Carlson post his exit.

And so far the stuff's been a little week since it's just things we assumed about him already. But this video I like to think of as half his predecessor, Bill O'Reilly's famed, Fuck It Will Do It Live video. And the second half or ingredient is kind of demonstrating that he's even worse at flirting than Jesse Waters,

which is really saying something. I ask you a question. We don't have to answer it's personal. Not speaking of you, but more in general of ladies, when they go to the ladies' room and powder their noses, is there actually nose pattern going on? Sometimes. Ooh. I like the sound of that. Most of the time is lipstick.

Do pillifies ever break out? You don't have to. Not in the back. Okay. Not in the back. That'd be more a dorm activity. Okay. This is not a good person.

I'm sorry. So you are such a good sport, such a good person. Thank you. I know you do, but you do not deserve that, and I mean it with great affection. I got you, man. Which way do you want to go? Yes, ma'am. Sorry.

Let me tune in. Oh, dear God. Pillow fights in the bathroom? What kind of, like, this in-cell fucking, like, fantasy shit that they got going on is wild. This man is married, right? Like somebody married him? Yeah. Somebody claims him?

That's amazing. He's got kids. He's got kids that he asked Hunter Biden to help get into college. It's so cringe. It's just he got excited because she said sometimes they do powder their nose. Yeah, and they use lipstick. Like what? You know, a guy who looks like Tucker, him getting excited by weird things, it kind of works with his whole American psycho vibe. I think he's more excited about, you know, the three white men beating up. the quote unquote Antifa kid. I think that that's more his steeds than women powdering their nose.

But, you know, that's just me. Oh, my God. But, like, I'm wondering, like, I'm thinking book deal for the three of us. The Fox News flirting method. And, like, we go into the, like, you know, Tucker Beal like, could I ask you a question, which is always the lamest,

flirting technique, and then as well, like, you know, deflating a woman's tires, like Jesse Waters. Like, I think we got a book deal for, are the three of us. Oh, my God. Yeah.

It's not all tanning testicles. Andy, do you think he could go back, get some inside words for us? It's not all tanning testicles, but that's part of it. Yeah. Okay.

Well, as we know, we sometimes use this time to showcase the real freaks of the GOP. And Florida representative Jeff Holcomb has some interesting, nuanced foreign policy thoughts for someone at the state level. I think this fellow's going somewhere.

He's really bright. We labeled as racist and discrimination without a response. ISIS, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. Those are the folks who discriminate. We bombed a building in 2017 like we never usually do. We bombed it because they threw homosexuals off that building. Our terrorist enemies hate homosexuals more than we do. They're the ones who discriminate.

Our job and the military, our Navy Creed, I'm committed to excellence and fair. treatment of all. That's what we learn in boot camp. That's what we drill into ourselves each and every day while we're in boot camp. Please vote up on this bill. Thank you. Time having expired. Representative Gregory, you're recognized to close on your memorial. What was that even about? It's kind of hard to tell. You know, he was really making the case. That the Taliban hates gays more than he does because they're willing to go the extra mile to execute gay folks, but he'll only execute legislation.

That makes it hard for us to actually live and exist. Got it. Got it. Selling point. Oh, my God. They hate homosexuals more than we do. That's your slogan? 2024.

Party platform. They're going to finally have one. And then he wants to say the Navy Creed right after that. Like it sounded like he wanted to add it to the Navy Creed. And that's, you know, I mean, first of all, an unfortunate branch to pick for that. Sailors, geez. Still, I just, I really, I have to find out what this was, like, how this even came up.

Like, this seems like a, sir, this is an Arby's moment. All right. While we're in Florida, oh, dear. There's a woman who's known for being from Arizona, but spends so much time down there, one Carrie Lake, who lives in an alternate reality, perhaps because she spends every, every waking minute at Marilago. And anytime I see pictures at Mara Lago, I think it looks like another planet. So I think that's going to explain why we're going to hear such weird stuff from her now.

Media is lying to us about President Trump. For eight years, they lied and they slandered him and tried to destroy that man. And in a way to get people to not vote for him. And when that still didn't work, they realized they had to unleash COVID in order to steal an election and to stop him because he was going to stop this push toward globalism. I know we haven't seen any stories about water being contaminated in Arizona, but something's got to be rotten down there. I think maybe there's lead in the filters she uses for the pictures. The bronzer and the tanning beds could have a lot of contaminants.

Yeah, I mean, there's something going on there. Does she bring her vacuum when she goes there, Marlago? Didn't, oh, right to Marlago, yeah. Trump say something similar? Yeah, this is her imitating Trump just like she does what the election was stolen from her. Yeah, it's bad enough. They only have one joke. Now they only have like one COVID theory.

Yeah. And, you know, I think like it's so funny too because it really is the thing of like this woman reportedly running for the Senate against Kristen Sinema. She literally like lives in an alternate reality and she thinks this is going to be a winning strategy. And it's fucking crazy. I mean, I can't wait until she becomes the elected. representative of Marlago that she thinks is a state. Well, the funny thing here is, like, Trump is going to dump her ass like as soon as possible. And she thinks that all this sucking up to him is going to work.

But if there's one thing he doesn't like, it's a loser. She's going to find out really quickly, which she's apparently too stupid to realize now, that for Trump, loyalty is a one-way street. And, like, she can suck up to him all she wants. But in the end, he is going to dump her hard. Yep, and what a shame it'll be. Yeah. Folks, I am very excited to welcome to the new abnormal journalist and author of the new book.

You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live. Ten weeks in Birmingham, that changed America. Paul, thank you for making time to join the new abnormal. I want to start off with your book is steeped in the deepest, darkest, history of America that is unknown, frankly, to a lot of Americans, to the point where we are experiencing a level of erasure and denial within our public school systems, within the just swath of disinformation. Why do you think that your book is so important right at this particular moment? Thank you for saying that. I mean, I wanted to write this book because first I share

your sentiment that this is something that is largely unknown. It's kind of remarkable because we've all seen the footage of the kids getting fire hosed, right? Yep. And in fact, that word hosed comes from Birmingham in 1963. However, if you add in on top of that, what's been happening with book bans, book burning. Yep. I did not foresee that happening when I set out to write this book. I I mean, maybe it's important to frame for your audience, like why exactly I chose to write this book now. Yes, please, yeah. So I'm white, my wife's black. Our kids identify as black.

My wife, Sonia, she grew up in Houston, interstate Houston. She grew up in the neighborhood next to George Floyd. Sonny was George's age. Sonny, when George was killed, 46. Sonny had cousins that went to the same high school as George. In fact, Sonia's dear cousin, guy named Derek, he, like, knew George back in the day. remembered him as the tight end on the key championship football team at Yay Thai. So I tell you guys all of that only because when George Floyd was killed, it felt almost personal to Sonia and my mother-in-law Connie, who lives with us and she's also from inner city Houston.

And so that was the first time that we did not shield our three kids from the coverage of a black man being killed by law enforcement. Oh, wow. Yeah. We have a daughter and twin boys. Our twin boys were then nine. And the questions that followed, you know, immediately after, are all cops bad or all cops racist? They sort of quickly devolved into like almost questions of, am I inferior?

Like, why does this happen? So it became the next, the latter half of 2020 became a time that was just really, really tough for us. And the kids became more and more despondent as it went on because they would see this footage. Jacob Blake, if you remember Jacob Blake, the commercial Wisconsin cops shot him in the back, while his three kids screamed from his car. So when that happened, one of our twin boys, he ran from the room and, you know, like, why do they

keep trying to kill us? The kids were having a really tough time with this. I mean, a pandemic, the George Floyd, all that stuff. Our family wasn't the only one. However, because Sonia and I are both writers and because we had spent a little bit of time, like sort of me in particular, after the kids were born, really acquainting myself with almost the whole of the black canon in American letters, right? Sonny and I knew how pivotal Birmingham was.

And maybe this is like, so that's part of the context. But like maybe the historical stuff here is just as important. I think a lot of Americans forget this because you sort of think of the civil rights movement is like this Angelicue. You know, everything seemed preordained. Absolutely not, right? Right. 1863, Emancipation. 1963, 100 years later, nothing by way of civil rights, civil liberal.

properties, nothing. The Jim Crow South was absolute in its terror, and Birmingham was the worst place in that. After Birmingham, Kennedy's agreed to sponsor civil rights legislation. That sponsorship leads to the Civil Rights Act of 64. That leads to the Voting Rights Act of 65. That leads ultimately to King's death. That leads after that to what I believe is like a new life for his country. And one where, you know, you not only see the rise of the black middle and upper class across the latter half of the 20th century, not only like President Obama's, just the fact that Barack Obama could be a president, right? But then even very particular to my household, the fact that I could marry Sonia in a former Jim Crow state, the fact that we can now live on a shaded street

where like nobody harasses us for who we are. The lesson I tried to tell the kids was, look, Birmingham made everything possible in America. Birmingham changes the trajectory of America and very few people either A, know that context and if they broadly understand it, I don't think a lot of them to bring it back to your first question, really understand, like, what exactly happened in those 10 weeks, how very dangerous it was. Like how Birmingham wasn't even really a city, but more like a site of domestic terror. Like these were the facts of Birmingham. That's why I was like, I want to do this book for the kids.

I really saw it as a chance like as an open letter to the kids as a way to be courageous. have faith, have ingenuity. But it's really for anybody. It's for you and me, too. It's like anybody who's ever struggling in life in any endeavor, what happened across those 10 weeks, again, the way that the SCLC ended up succeeding tested to its utmost, but succeeding ultimately, it's really a guide to life as much as it's, you know, what I think is a really gripping narrative. I will say this. I'm a child of immigrants. My family came to the United States in 1970, from Jamaica. And without the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the trajectory of my existence here in the United States might not have happened. What I want people to understand, and I'd like you to

speak to this, is that there is this narrative that we have, Paul, that makes it seem as if 1963, as if the civil rights movement was 100 years ago, makes it seem. as if like there is no one living now that experienced the domestic terrorism that you are speaking of. As a matter of fact, it was only what in April when the woman who lied about Emmett Till died at the age of 88. That case that happened in 1955. And so can you talk about how even American history has been contextualized as issues and things that happened so long ago when it is actually our very recent history? It's the Faulkner line. The past isn't even past, right? Like, I'll give you a perfect for instance. And I, we said just before recording, I'm actually calling you guys from Birmingham, right? I'm down here to, because this weekend, they're celebrating the whole six.

fifth anniversary of what happened. Tonight, one of the people I'll be meeting with is a woman named Janice Kelsey. Janice Kelsey was one of those kids who on May 2nd, May 3rd, and May 4th decided to do the impossible and confront Bull Connor. And again, the totality of really evil that existed down here in Birmingham. And do the thing that even the adults wouldn't do. Protest, stand up to Bull Connor. I'm going to meet her tonight and the stories she told about what it was like, to, you know, endure in the Birmingham jail, what some of her friends experienced. Like, just to give you, for instance, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Birmingham Public Library have been an amazing job of basically capturing stories like Janice's in a massive

oral history campaign that, by the way, to echo what you just said, started only 30 years ago, because for 30 years, from like 63 to basically 95, there was so much tension, living tension here that like nobody even wanted to establish a civil rights institution down here in Birmingham, right? Like that is how alive the past is. It is still very much with us. Let's just speak for a second about the fire hosing, right? Because we've, every PBS documentary showed, right? Like every little green, black and white image. And most history books show these images. Yep. But let me try to contextualize what that actually was. Okay. Let's start with just actually the fire hoses themselves. First.

off, they were mounted on massive metal tripods held by three or four firemen at a time. And why was that? Because the water rushed out at such a rate that it could knock mortar loose from brick and it could strip, bark from a tree at a distance of more than 100 feet. Okay, bear that in mind because most of the kids who went up against the cops and the firefighters and by extension the clan that day, or actually this week, most of those kids were attacked by the water hoses at a distance of less than 50 feet. All right? What those documentaries often do not show is the raw footage that I saw.

What I saw were kids who got hit by the water and were literally backflips in the air and landed flat on their stomach, like a complete 360. I saw kids whose clothes basically disintegrated on them. I'll never forget this one. girl. She's probably, I'd have to say she's probably 13, 14 years old. Birmingham firefighters have like focused one of the nozzles on her and she is literally sliding down the street. The force of the water is so strong. It's almost like a slide. She's sliding down the street. She is just absolutely screaming in pain because it's at no more than like 10 feet and in terror

because she doesn't know how long it's going to last. And you just see her in this in this camera footage like slide path, 10 feet, 20 feet, 30 feet, 40 feet, 40 feet, 50 feet. right? Then there were the German Shepherd. There were accounts from the kids there that weekend that said, first off, there was a black German shepherd whose name by the Birmingham Cops was N-word, right? That was his name, right? And N-word was a vicious dog in the words of the kids that weekend. He would grab hold of kids' throats and, like, thrash. One of the images that I lead the book with is one of the more famous images of the civil rights campaign, one of perhaps the most iconic images of the 20th century. It's a 15-year-old boy named Walter Gadsden, and he is getting

attacked by a German Shepherd, but that's not really the right words. We're like he's being feasted upon by a German Shepherd. Like the German Shepherd, you can see how he's like closing his jaws around Gadsden's midsection, and you can almost see the thrashing. But what makes that image so iconic is kind of like there is a serenity and a relaxed pose to Gadsden. The AP photographer captured it in such a way that basically, I would argue, like, almost 40 years later, another AP photographer captured another image, which is the fallen man image that like our generation knows, right? From 9-11, the one jumper who bisected the two towers, and it just looks like he's in freefold. And it's almost like a peaceful dive, right? Yeah. I say that as the comparison because

the horror is absolute, the contextual horror, the foreground and background horror is absolute. But the person experiencing the horror is somehow serene. And when Jack Kennedy saw that image, he said it made him sick. And that was the day that at long last the Kennedy brothers who had made enough, they wanted nothing to do with what Mark Luther King wanted, which was civil rights legislation. But that was the day that the Kennedy brothers began to at least be open to the idea that perhaps something needs to change in America. I mean, just your accounting, just

just your recitement of these images, let alone them leading in your book, is so gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. And, you know, Paul, I will ask you this question because when you brought up the fact that this institute was not even developed in Birmingham until the 1990s, okay, as a white man in America, why do you think that there is such a resurgence right now in? in this type of either celebration of violence, of domestic terrorism that we are seeing take hold that the FBI and many other institutions have told us

that white domestic terrorism is the leading terrorism that we need to be worried about in the United States. Why do you think that it is taking such hold again so many decades later? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanna first distance myself by saying, I don't condone any of that. No, of course, yes.

There are actually some parallels between the two. Let's start with Birmingham. So Birmingham, let's just first establish how violent it is. Birmingham cops rates black women and their patrol cars. The Birmingham clan castrated black men. Just before King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came down here to Birmingham, CBS is Edward R. Murrow, was in Birmingham reporting. And he said he had not seen any place like this since Nazi Germany.

That was Birmingham in 1963. The reason I tell you that is because another bit of context is Birmingham was also distinct among southern city. It was a steel town. It wasn't a cotton town. It wasn't a tobacco town. It wasn't anything like it didn't have. In fact, it wasn't even formed until after the Civil War. In fact, some of the farmers that lived here in northern Alabama as late as the 1860s during the war didn't want anything to do with the secessionist South.

They thought that was ridiculous. And here's why, because those people, those white farmers overwhelmingly in the hills around here in Jefferson County, they were about as poor off as you could be as white people. Now, why do I tell you all of this? Here's why. Birmingham's population for, since basically it's founding through the 1960s, from 1870 to basically it was a domestic labor town, right? It was a steel town. It was a coal town because there was coal and there were raw materials in the hills here. As a result of that, white people were almost as poorly paid as black people in Birmingham.

And that infuriated a certain number of white people. As a result of that, I make this argument in the book that Birmingham's hatred was learned. It fell along economic lines. It had nothing to do with whether your granddaddy lost the war in Gettysburg. It had everything to do with the fact. that for white people, they could lose their jobs just as easily or be, you know, sort of mangled in their jobs because it's very, very hard work, right? Very physical labor and very dangerous work as black people. And for white people, that was humiliating. In the 1920s, the Birmingham clan had

the largest claverin in the nation. It had more than 20,000 members. And it's not just me, as a journalist, who's arguing this, but other historians have said the same thing. There is something unique about Birmingham's hatred because it falls along economic lines. So you ask what connection does that have to today? Well, the one guess that I could make is that in Rust Belt cities or the sort of rural Iowa that in which I grew up, I grew up on a farm about an hour north of Des Moines that in the 1990s and 2000s was decimated by meth where there isn't a whole lot of chance for upward mobility. when you take away a certain amount of dignity. And this isn't having anything, well, it doesn't anything to do necessarily with race,

but it can have sort of, you can have, you can lash out at race as a result of, when you take away dignity, when you take away someone's chance to, like, earn a decent living, people fall back on old tropes. And a lot of times those old tropes are, well, this ethnicity, this immigrant is taking my job. And sometimes that is the case. but at the same time, largely speaking on a macro trend when there are no jobs, I think that's perhaps the reason why you have this. We have an economic stagnation right now. This is now a little bit outside my field, but we haven't seen any real rise in middle class income since what, the 1970s. Yep.

So, you know, how does that end up manifesting itself in the real world? Well, you have these deaths of despair, right? I can tell you from firsthand experience, I had two friends that died from high school, within six months and a class of 43. And one of them, absolutely a sort of a very early death of despair sort of thing. Because there's like what jobs are there, what hope is there? That's perhaps, I don't know if that's too deep into a rabbit hole,

but to the extent that I think about this, and I do think about it on occasion, just because you see what this book on Birmingham has taught me are sort of larger historical trends than even racial relations. So, yeah, that's, I guess, how I'd answer that. Yeah. Well, Paul, we will have to leave it there today, but folks, the book is you have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live.

Ten weeks in Birmingham that changed America. Paul, thank you so much for this book, for your work, and we wish you well on your book tour. Thank you so much for having me. Hope you enjoyed checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder.

Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts

as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign. Sign up today.