The Daily Beast Podcast - Jeff Zucker’s Out, and CNN’s Stars Are Pissed

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

There were rumors just a year ago that Jeff Zucker was going to run for mayor of New York, and now the chief who was “in some ways the voice to the network” and “the guru for a lot of the top anchors” is out.  Daily Beast media editor Andrew Kirell breaks it all down with The New Abnormal crew, as co-host (and former CNN guy) Andy Levy says “pretty much everyone knew that the two of them were in a relationship for a long time. I mean, I knew it and I couldn't have been lower on the totem pole at CNN. I heard people talk, nobody seemed upset by it, particularly, but it was just like, it was just known. It wasn't even an open secret cuz it really wasn't even a secret.” Then co-host Molly Jong-Fast talks with New York Magazine's David Wallace-Wells of New York Magazine about the biq questions: whether or not the virus is endemic already or still a pandemic, and if the environment has already passed a point of no return. Plus, the gang rips into conservative cuckold Jerry Falwell, and former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander explains what it is that the coasts don’t get about politics in the middle of the country, and why the key to winning there isn’t about being in the political middle. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. 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 the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. We have a pack show today. DailyB's senior editor, Andrew Cairo, will join us to tell us what the hell is going on over at CNN with this Jeff Zucker exit. Then we'll talk to New York Magazine's David Wallace Wells about our current COVID reality. And then we'll talk to Missouri Secretary of State and host of the Majority 54 podcast, Jason Kander, about the Dem's midterm strategy.

But first, let's have some fun. Andy Levy. Molly Jong Fest. I don't know if you've ever been to CPAC, but I've been to CPAC. You forget where I worked. Were you a speaker? Did you do a panel at CPAC? We did, Red Eye did a panel.

Yeah. Did you do it on the main stage? God, no. I guess we forgive you then. But I can only imagine, did you sell swag? No, no. I drank a lot. That's the only appropriate answer.

When I used to go to CPAC before I got so harassed that I could no longer go there, one of the crucial and critical things about CPAC is it's run by a man called Matchlap. And much of the programming features Matchlap promoting himself and his lovely wife Mercedes. So a lot of us were pretty interested to see today that Matchlap is being paid for political endorsements. It's kind of sounds, I mean, is that a crime? It sounds crimey. It's definitely crimee, you know, if it's not an outright crime. But yeah, I mean, a Senate campaign in Arizona, a guy named Jim Lehman, paid 20 grand to a firm run by Schlapp.

And then two weeks later, Schlapp endorsed him. And then the guy made another $20,000 payment to Schlapp's firm. So it's like, look at it. It's good work if you can get it, right? I mean, what do you do? You do basically nothing, and you got 40K in your bank account. I mean, it's just... It's quid pro, oh, no.

Sorry, I have been... Quit pro quo is so, you know, it's so poetic. I just have been, you know... Quit pro yo matchline. Uh-huh. Yeah. But I think there's reason to believe that this... He may be taking his cues from someone even...

more crimy. Who's that? One reality television host, Donald J. Trump. Because in December, the Washington Post had reporting that said that there were 30 events held by GOP candidates or conservative groups at Trump properties that were sort of quid pro quo-ish, right? Your organization spends money. You do a wedding, a bar mitzvah, or a fundraiser, and you get Donald Trump. The Bar-Lago wedding greeter. Right. I'm man, my kids, my younger kids will definitely be Bar Mitzvah and Mar-a-Lago. Oh, yeah. Oh, that would be amazing.

Oh, man, I can't wait to go. Bring in the heat. It does seem like these pay-for-play endorsements are becoming a sort of more normalized in the GOP. Shocking, absolutely nobody, I suppose. I mean, I just keep thinking of, like, you know, we've recently got even more details of Jerry Falwell. Junior's endorsement of Donald Trump, which a lot of people credit as bringing him into the evangelical vote. And, you know, it was all because Michael Cohen had these pictures that he called were fucking disgusting. So, you know, the cuck of Liberty University, this is just more of the downfall of this party.

Let's just fill you in on the story here. There was a story last week, Gabe Sherman Vanity Fair, where he interviewed Jerry Falwell Jr. and Jerry Falwell Jr. admitted that Michael Cohen had pictures of his wife having sex with the pool boy, which of course this story has been ongoing. And that was why Falwell Jr. endorsed Trump. And we should make it clear pictures where Jerry Falwell Jr. would watch them have sex. I just want to always make that clear because it's Right. It's righteous Gemstone season.

They couldn't even go that far in fiction and parodying these people. Right. Well, this season isn't over yet, but yes. Yes. Andy Levy, questions, comments, discussed. On the Falwell thing, it is, I love that it's ironic that the type of people who enjoyed calling people cucks actually like to be cucked. I do think it's important to separate the Falwell thing from the Schlapp and the Mar-a-Lago stuff. The Falwell thing wasn't quid pro quo, the fall-co. The fall-well thing was Black Man. Yeah. And that's a lot more fun.

So. What fun is what? way to think of it. Well, when it's someone like Jerry Falwell Jr., it's a lot more fun, is what I mean. Not in general. Blackmail is bad kids. I'm not any kids that are listening to this. I'm not saying blackmail is good.

My thought, though, is that it's like it's already pathetic how stupid these endorsements go. The fact that anybody takes them seriously, like we've gotten past that thing where the newspaper endorsements mean anything. It seems like we should be getting past that there's any basis that these endorsements happen that is above board in this part. at this point. Yeah, a lot of it, it's just become like, you know, if you read a lot of books and you see blurbs from other authors on the books.

And sometimes, sometimes they're absolutely legitimate. And the same with endorsements. Sometimes they're absolutely legitimate. And sometimes it's the authors are friends or they have the same publisher or the same agent or whatever. So they do a blurb. And that's what political endorsements have become. It's like you don't know if it's authentic or if it's just, you know, somebody saying a good thing about his friend's book or her friend's book.

And there was reporting last week that Trump was actually toying with the idea of endorsing two people in each race. Because his hit rate has been, so two people in each primary race, because his hit rate has not been great. You know, he's endorsed some people who were even too disgusting for the Republican Party, if you can imagine. So the idea of him covering his bases by endorsing two people is kind of incredible. Well, two things there. One, it's double the weddings at Mar-a-Lago. And bar mitzvahs. It's just smart business.

But the other thing is that's sort of the funny thing about the Mar-A-Lago aspect of this is that Trump's endorsement record is not that great. Yeah. So you're paying to have your wedding bar-mitsvah confirmation, whatever, at Mar-a-Lago in that disgusting place. And you're getting an endorsement that might not even help you. So that, I mean, that's... That's just hilarious. Like, what's funnier than that? There's a lot of talk about is Trump's grip on the Republican Party loosening?

And that would be, I mean, again, we don't know, right? We don't really know. There's some polling that says, yes, there's some polling. This is no. But Trump is supposed to be the man who can beat anyone in a primary. So if he's not able to deliver primary wins, that would be tangible proof that his grip on the party is slipping. I'm not sure I agree with that. I mean, in a ruby red area.

Well, the thing, because the thing about Trump is he is unique in a lot of ways. And he doesn't necessarily transfer to other people, even if he endorses them. Because for whatever reason, he can pull off the shit he does. And a lot of Republicans love him. Like, it doesn't matter what he says or does, whereas they sometimes don't apply that same lack of standard to other people. Except they do to junior. To some people, yeah, no, I'm certainly not making a blanket statement. Oh, to Junior and MTG and there are others that clearly they do.

His endorsement record is spotty because he is so much about personality and it's so much about a cult of personality that it doesn't always translate on the ground for other candidates. It's possible that his endorsement record could stay spotty, but he could still walk through the 2024 field if he decides to run. I read reporting from Terrapal-Marry in Politico, who happens to be my friend, that he had wanted to announce he was running again before he left the White House, which sounds very trumpet. It does, except I guess the problem with that is if you're going to go out there for the next couple of years and claim that you actually won the election. Right. That saying you're going to run again in 2024 is an admission of defeat in 2020. Right. So that may be why he didn't do it, you know.

That's a very good point. Very, very good point. For this very special part of the new abnormal podcast, Andy Levy and I are going to talk to Andrew Correll. Welcome, Andrew Correll. How you doing? What's going on, man? Seems like this week has been like media news central. CNN is kind of imploding, I guess. Jeff Suckers out after eight years, basically being the face of the entire news organization, all because apparently, according to Warner Media CEO,

C.O. CEO Jason Killar, accordingly, because he didn't disclose his sexual relationship with Alison Golost, who was longtime as sort of his lieutenant. And so now he's out. And it seems like a lot of CNN people who owe their careers to Jeff Zucker, who was a very hands-on sort of leader of the newsroom, are very, very mad. They're suffice to say they're very mad.

They're pissed, as we reported a couple days ago. And we have to have Andy in here because Andy did actually just work for CNN. And I'm sorry, Andy, to throw you under the bus like that, but I figure you can add your own experience here. He has been talking about leaving for a long, long time, right? Yeah. When Warner and Discovery were the merger was happening, the news was that, you know, Jeff was finding a way to wrap up his duties. You know, I mean, there was the rumors he was going to run from mayor of New York. So it did seem like he was kind of on the way out and, you know, we framed it initially as an early exit.

But, you know, with 2024 coming up and Trump possibly running again, I also could have seen it just being, Jeff was just going to stick around because Like I said, he's, in some ways, he was like the voice of the network. He was constantly feeding stories to people. He was constantly leading the editorial tone of the newsroom. He was on all those 9 a.m. phone calls. He was sort of the guru for a lot of the top anchors. So, I don't know. The sense I've gotten from reading your report and others is that CNN staffers don't really

believe that the reason being given is the full reason. Like, it might be part of it. It's not the full reason. And, you know, they'll point to the fact that pretty much everyone knew. that the two of them were in a relationship for a long time. I mean, I knew it, and I couldn't have been lower on the totem pole at CNN. This is we're hearing people talk. Nobody seemed upset by it particularly, but it was just known.

It wasn't even an open secret because it really wasn't even a secret. Right. So what are people thinking, is this corporate infighting or, you know, I've seen the Chris Cuomo thing connection being thrown around that maybe he's trying to, you know, to burn the place down after they fired him? What are we thinking here? Yeah, so we reported today. The staff is clearly based on this,

they had a meeting yesterday in D.C. with Jake Tapper and Danabash and a bunch of the star reporters, Jim Shuto, Caitlin Collins were all in the room. All these D.C. stars for CNN were all in the room with Jason Kilar, the Warner Media CEO, who I guess is sort of responsible for the ultimate decision to let Jeff go. And they, you know, they let it fly. And they were very, very clear that the two different things, I think that come up a lot is Chris Cuomo is dragging Jeff Zucker

hell with him. Honestly, in my opinion, that's definitely the real thing here is there's some in the threat of a lawsuit because Cuomo hired one of the most high-powered sort of bulldog lawyers on this exact beat, something in the threat of a lawsuit has forced CNN's hand and forced Jeff's hand. And it's something that maybe is embarrassing or I don't know. But they brought this up in the meeting. And then they also brought up the fact that Jason Killar, this executive for WarnerMedia, who used to work under Jeff at NBC years ago. does not have a great relationship with Jeff Zucker. And so there's this fear, and like I said,

the newsroom is very loyal to Jeff Zucker. So there's this fear that this guy, this usurper, is coming in and removing the head of the entire operation when they're just about to launch CNN Plus. And, you know, they had kind of a tough ratings year, but also that we're going into, you know, possibly another Trump election, like I said. And so there's definitely this suspicion.

There's definitely a sense of what now, you know, one thing we've been hearing that, you know, CNN, and it's typical sort of slightly overreesome. broad way of looking at things that they're, you know, the question coming up a lot among staffers is, are we going to continue defending democracy as vociferously as we have in the past? You know, because Jeff's entire thing was, you know, we're not going to be vanilla. We're not going to be milk toast. We're going to be voicy and we're going to, you know, fact check. You know, CNN invested a lot in doing on-air fact checks all the time during 2020. So wait, why would they stop doing that?

Yeah, that's a good question, right? I don't know. I mean, are they going to be Fox? I mean, what's the thinking here? I think the fear is that without Jeff Sucker, you now have sort of bland corporate seat at the top who are not Jeff Sucker. And they're not setting that tone. They're not sort of rallying the troops to, you know, go hard after, you know, bad faith actors. And to, you know, go out there and do the whole fact check segment and do the, you know, railing about, you know, protecting democracy. But it's what they do everywhere. Yeah. I mean, it's not like that's a hugely controversial, like defending democracy is kind of.

Yeah. It's a baseline thing, right? Right. Corporate brands enjoy defending democracy because, I mean, there's a reason we have so many ads here. Like, this is sort of what we want, right? Yeah. If I'm trying to translate their sort of overall thinking, because admittedly, I do think it's like slightly, you know, a little per-clutching to assume that the network is suddenly going to become like a right-wing network or something. One thing we heard in the meeting, you know, I heard reported to me from that tense meeting was somebody mentioned something like, are we going to be like MSNBC now, essentially? Like I guess the fear is, are they just going to become this sort of bland sort of not this outlet that tout itself as, you know, news first and we're just calling it like it is? Or are they just going to sink into sort of a moneymaking operation where now they just have corporate suits at the top that care more about the business. Where they have really good ratings.

Is that not what they are now? Like, I'm confused by this. Like, no, honestly, like, I mean, they can backpat themselves all they want. But the myriad of people have pointed out, like, Jeff Zucker. did not hurt Donald Trump's election chances back in 2016. And even to this day, they continue to hire Alisa Farrow, you know, these former Trump staffers. So it's like, really, you're going to pat yourself on the back like that? I love that all the CNN people are loyal to Zucker. I do think that says a lot about him. There are bosses that people hate, but not to compare him to Roger Ells, but people at Fox were very loyal to Roger Ells. Not that Jeff Zucker is at. a terrible person in the way that Roger Ells was. But the point being that loyalty is not the end game here.

The end game here is putting out a good product that serves the country slash the world if you want to get grandiose. I don't think personally that Jeff Zucker has made the world a better place. I mean, this is just my opinion. A lot of what he's done at cable news has made cable news worse. I'm trying that there should be a question here somewhere since this is an interview. Right. I was going to say, I feel like there needs to be a question.

Do you agree? Yes, I do. I mean, you and I have talked offline about this, but, you know, cable news to me, you and I both worked at Fox and you worked at CNN. It is a destructive force. And yeah, the common criticism of Jeff Zucker is that he essentially created the media monster that is Donald Trump through the reality show at NBC. And then in 2016, I mean, it was like, there were points where it was just like CNN was, might as well just been doing a Trump campaign airplane watch where it was just like Trump is landing at this base. We're going to spend half an hour covering him his flight. landing. Like, you know, if Jeff was really in the, calling into the control rooms and controlling the editorial decisions, that was what he was doing, that he was in charge of that. And so one thing we did hear when he was out is like, you know, we reported, and like I said, you know, all the, all the stars who owe their careers to him were obviously very upset. They owe their on-air personality stardom to him. He's a great TV guy. He knows TV in and out. And so he's coached a lot of people to become, make them into sort of really great talkers and really great reporters on air. But then there's sort of the, you know, we've heard from some staffers in that one of the

quotes a couple days ago, that would be included in the piece after Trump responded, of course, giddily about Zucker being out, when somebody was like, well, you know, the guy who created Donald Trump now goes down in disgrace. And this was a CNN staffer. Like, they recognize it too. It's a common criticism that Margaret Sullivan used to report at Washington Post all the time. That, you know, Zucker is like, why are we here? Well, we're here because, you know, it's not just Fox News that got us here. The Fox News amplified the monster that Jeff might have created, which is, I think it's a fair criticism. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you'll come back as the story unfolds.

Yeah, we'd love to. Hey, folks, if you haven't heard, every single week we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker, or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media, like Jim Acosta or Soladadad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors

like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner, and sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening in the news. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a beast inside member where you'll support the beast fearless journalism, as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to new abnormal. That's new abnormal.thedailybeast.com.

David Wallace Wells is a writer at New York Magazine and author of The Uninhabitable Earth. Welcome back to the new abnormal, David Wallace Wells. Thanks. Great to be here. I'm so excited to have you because you write a lot about COVID. and you wrote a really smart and interesting piece, and I wanted to ask you the question that I'm sure you hate being asked the most. And in fact, I asked you already, and you were like, no.

So let's do it. Are we an endemic? The short answer is I actually don't know. And part of the reason I don't know is because that term means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I think technically what epidemiologists would say is supposed to be meant by it, is a disease that most of the population approaching all of the population is exposed to, has already been exposed to, or gets exposed to in the first couple of years of their life. And typically what that means is that by the time you age into adulthood,

those diseases are not terrifying. Like they may cause some problems. They may ultimately kill some people, especially the elderly, but they are not majorly disruptive to individual lives because, again, by the time you're an adult, like you've seen this disease, your immune system has been trained by it and can fight it off relatively easily. What strikes me is really interesting and I think potentially quite alarming about the state of COVID right now is that according to some estimates, you know, we were, we had as much as 86% of the country exposed to COVID before Omicron. Right. Some of the people putting together those estimates think that we after Omicron are only going to get up to.

90 or 95% and we can talk about why that gap is so small. Wouldn't that mean 4% weren't exposed? I mean, doesn't that seem like a small amount? Yes. I think that, you know, first of all, I should say these estimates are, people have different estimates. They're all over the map. So this isn't like the only accounting.

But it is really strikingly true and I think to a degree that hasn't been all that well understood that Omicron has been primarily a wave of reinfection and immune evasion in the vaccinated. And you see that most clearly in some European data sets because the U.S. data is not so good, but, you know, something like two-thirds to 80 percent of the early infections from Omicron across Europe were in the vaccinated population. And it's one reason why we're seeing such small effects in terms of severe disease, hospitalization, and death over there is not just that they've got a lot of people who are vaccinated, it's that the disease is actually spreading primarily through the vaccinated. And in the U.S. context, I think that's probably been largely the case, but even to the

extent that it's not, it seems as though it's been spreading primarily in people who have already gotten a disease, so who had some immune protection from previous exposure. And that's really striking and startling, and I think potentially quite scary, because what it means is that we're not going to be, if we take those numbers seriously, which again, they are just estimates. But if we take them seriously, it suggests that we're not going to be in a much different place in terms of national population scale immunity after this huge surge, as we were before, which means we're not really going to be all that much more protected against a subsequent surge like the one that we just had than we were when we had it. And that means that going forward, especially with new variants,

especially ones that exhibit some amount of immunivation like this one did, we could conceivably be seen, in the spring, in the summer into next fall, conceivably, not necessarily, but conceivably see another wave just as large and devastating as Omicron and even potentially more devastating if, you know, rather than being a little bit less severe than, inherently severe than Delta, it was, you know, more severe. And, you know, one of the things that people who look at this really closely say is, you know, it's notable we have, this has been a wave of reinfection, previous infection and vaccines provide little to no protection against transmission with But they provide quite good protection against severe disease and very good protection against death.

Now, that dynamic is particular to this strain, but future dynamics might have immune evasion capabilities that didn't just solve the transmission problem, but also solved the severe disease and death problem. And that could be conceivably totally catastrophic. But the good news. Let's talk about the possibility of a like a COVID, a larger, more fulsome COVID vaccine. Yeah, I think really that if you want to hope for a real end game here where like this isn't just circulating at a low level with seasonal spikes that are not as alarming as the waves we've seen in the past, but still quite bad and could put a lot of pressure on hospital systems. If you want to look past that and hope for a future where we really get beyond that, I think the real end game there is for what they call a pan-coronavirus vaccine. So one that would protect not just against all potential variants of COVID, but all of the other. diseases in this family and really any future potential diseases that could emerge in this family.

And that is, there is, you know, exciting and encouraging work going on on those kinds of vaccines, although I don't think that the timeline for their development testing and a rollout is, you know, it's more like on the order of a couple of years rather than a couple of months, which means, you know, we may be in a sort of an in-between state for quite a while. And if we based our expectations for this pandemic on, you know, the 1918 one in which we had basically three waves and we were done, you know, that may well happen. We may well not have future variants that are that are as disruptive as Omicron. But I think it's also possible that we may see a few more before we really are able to turn the page with these pan-coronavirus vaccines. So you don't think it'll be a 1918 flu. I mean, I was just reading something about the 1918 flu.

And it did actually on the way out kill a lot of people. Yeah. Like at the end stages of it. In 1920, yeah. Yeah. Like, you'd think, you know, I'd always thought it just sort of petered out, but in fact, it really went out with a bang. There are like a couple famous charts of the waves there, but they're like particular to particular places. And different parts of the world had really different experiences, which is also likely to be the case as we move forward with COVID, which is that, you know, there are still places that haven't had much exposure. And it's, you know, it's really striking, for instance, how China is still engaging in really, really dramatic lockdowns now. I think in part because their vaccines don't work as well as ours. And they don't have Fox News.

Well, yeah, I mean, but if you have vaccines that are only 50% effective as opposed to 90% effective, you actually can't make up for that with full population-wide uptake. And because, you know, they were so successful in China, I don't totally trust their numbers, but... Right. No, no one does. But they were at least relatively successful at suppressing the disease last year. It means that they actually had a lot less natural exposure than we've had just about anywhere else in the world. So, you know, they're in a quite vulnerable position now. it seems ridiculous to us, given the way that the U.S. is going and Western Europe as well,

relaxing restrictions, heading into the spring here, that China might be doing the opposite. And yet, from a certain logic, they may be facing a disease that is a variant right now that is just as scary as the original one, which forced us all into lockdown. And from that perspective, you know, it's sort of logical, especially given that China did well the first time around with lockdowns. And that raises another point, which is interesting about Omicron, which is about that question of inherent severity in a context where people don't have really good protection, if there isn't a lot of immune protection either from vaccines or exposure, it is true that

Omicron seems to be notably less severe than Delta, depending on the estimate, maybe 25% less severe. Some estimates are as high as two-thirds, but I think generally in that sort of 25% to 50% less severe range. But that means that it's actually as severe or possibly more severe than the original wild type strain that came out of Wuhan. And, and, And the reason that we're seeing so much better outcomes all around the world with Omicron has a lot less to do with that inherent reduction in severity and a lot more to do with the fact that tons of people have already gotten sick with this and tons of people are vaccinated with vaccines that work really well to suppress severe outcomes.

But if you look at a population that is, you know, virgin to it, things could get really ugly. And we haven't seen it in a country where that's the case yet, but we may see that going forward in some scary ways too. Right. And then there's this seasonal aspect of the virus, which I think is. is worth talking about. It's sort of been the case throughout the pandemic that there are a lot of surges all

around the world that don't neatly correspond to our seasonal expectation. So it's not just the case that in the U.S., we had a fall and winter surge. We also had a summer surge. And that is, we think, because people in the South go inside in the summer in the same way that people in the North go inside in the winter. But there are, you know, and it's not entirely clear whether we can separate out true seasonal dynamics having to do with, like, the moisture in the air and how that affects the mucus in our noses versus social seasonal dynamics where like schools open and people stop hanging

out outside and that kind of thing. But yes, in general, respiratory diseases like this and like the flu and all the other common colds, they do have a season and the season is the time of year that we're in right now. And we've been hoping, I think, that this would be the last peak. And by next fall and next winter, things would have really quieted down. And we may well get there. I mean, it may be the case that, you know, it just may be the case that the future variants aren't nearly as much of a game changer as Omicron has been, and we can settle back into that endemic or quasi-endemic or comfortingly endemic state that we were imagining. And most of us move on, especially with our vaccines and our boosters. You know, I think the best estimates for what that state

looks like is still, you know, comes from Trevor Bedford, who is a, you know, an epidemiologist who does statistical analysis on this stuff. He says, even in a truly endemic state, we're probably looking at between 40,000 and 100,000 American deaths every single year from COVID going forward. It's like the flu but pumped up. Yeah, like, you know, probably three times, two or three times the flu. It's probably true that if the flu was two or three times worse, like you and I probably wouldn't adjust our lives all that much. On the other hand, it could mean that in January and February of every year, most of the major hospitals and most of the country's major cities were overrun with elderly patients who were dying of the flu. And that there is a way in which even if we get pretty quick,

to what seems like a pretty comfortable endemic state, it may also mean that we need to build a lot more hospital capacity in time for next year. I think that's an important thought. And again, like, it's all numbers until it's your parents, right? Yeah. And I think that there is a way in which, you know, we are weirdly now or exclusively now, like people like you and me, focusing on this as a matter of individual risk. And we think, okay, we're relatively young, we're relatively healthy. We've been, you know, recently boosted. we're triple vaccinated. We can feel pretty confident in going about our daily lives.

And that is all absolutely true. I don't mean to cast any doubt on that at all. Like those, you know, the risk faced by a triple vaccinated person under the age of 70 is really quite low, like really quite low. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that when you look at the country as a whole, nothing's happening and nobody's dying. And we're sort of in this weird in between state where we can be going about our lives with some sense of return to.

normal. And yet we're still like clicking on the New York Times and it's like, oh, 3,500 people died today in the country. And that's a lot of people. No. And there's also, I mean, remember, losing large swaths of the population has consequences. Financial, social, psychological. I mean, we don't know what it will mean to have lost. I mean, remember all the people we lost in all the wars. This is significantly more than that. Culturally, there will be. people will feel this, you know, how we don't know. It'll be really interesting to see how it all plays out because for a large portion of the country, they have sort of, and from the beginning of the pandemic, somewhat accustomed

themselves or trained themselves to be relatively callous and cold-hearted about the deaths around them. That is to say, in these places that were resistant to vaccination, you know, I think they were less consequential, but at the time it seemed consequential, less, they were resistant to masking, resistance to social distancing. resistant to school closure. And they told themselves, like, okay, this is a disease that's going to kill some people, but it's going to kill 1% or less of the country. And most of those people are old and vulnerable already. And that sucks, but, you know, we're going to get on with our lives

rather than worrying too much about it. Another part of the country, which is where you and I live, we're much more concerned about those people. And as a result, you know, overall, I think when all is said and done, we'll have endured a less brutal experience of the pandemic with less death. That's not to say in every single place, things were better in blue states than in red states, but overall, that's the pattern that we're seeing. And yet, we also, in order to achieve that level of vigilance, I think we also really focused on and emphasized the brutality of the pandemic in ways that those living in red states did not. And it'll be really interesting to see how that affects our cultural memory going forward, whether those places that actually endured less dying may remember the experience in dark. darker terms than those in places where there was more dying because the culture around that experience was so much bleaker and living through it felt so much darker than even in those

places where the hospitals were overrun and many more people were dying. It's sort of a fascinating cultural case study we're about to embark on. Oh, that is so interesting and strange and awful. And fascinating. I mean, I write about it all the time, the psychological impact of what, you know, pandemic looks like in modern life because it runs so contrary to what we think. I want to get to climate because that is something you write a lot about and is something we need to be talking about. Been some recent climate crises, the big ice chunk falling off that, yeah, that's the technical term for it. I mean, the last couple of years, it's really been four or five years now. We're really starting to see dramatic climate events pretty regularly of the kind that we're, we're

We were warned about a decade or two ago, but chose to see exclusively as risks in the medium term and distant future. And I think what's been really striking, to me at least, about how the world has responded to those events, you know, the breaking off of glaciers, a record-breaking temperatures in the Pacific Northwest, the crazy flooding across Europe. You know, we just had an incredible cyclone hitting Mozambique that hardly anybody in the West has written about, I think, saw something 800-6. schools were destroyed by the storm. Have you noticed that America has gotten less and less interested in the outside world? If you thought such a thing was possible. And, you know, I think, but I think that's been part of the pattern is that, you know, we're just normalizing the stuff at such a rate and not seeing it clearly for what it is,

which is a sign that we are entering into a new era. There has been a lot of good news on climate. A lot of it is sort of notional, speculative in the sense that really what it amounts to is the fact that rapid decarbonization seems much more feasible and not just less burdensome, but in fact, sort of positive sum in the near term, which means that some of the worst-case scenarios now seem considerably less likely than they seem just a few years ago. On the other hand... Hey, man, I'll take it. On the other hand, that on the other hand does not strike me as good. But, you know, we're now in that phase. You know, when the global political community started really

talking seriously about climate change in the early 90s, they often said that the goal was to avoid what they call dangerous climate change. And we failed to do that. It's not that we are failing. We have failed. We are already in a climate that is dangerous to us. We will be adapting. We'll be responding.

It's not like human life is going to be impossible in this new context. Although things will get worse. We have lost the opportunity to actually win this fight and secure a stable future. The question is, how disruptive is it going to get? How much more suffering are we going to endure? And how are we going to be able to design ways to live in that future that will allow us to feel at least some of the ways that we felt in the past that the future offered some more prosperity and security rather than a picture of less prosperity, less security, less equality?

And, you know, I think that's very much an open question. We're heading into a pretty disorienting period. There's going to be a lot of change. There's going to be like, I think the fossil fuel business is going to decline and die much faster than. Well, that's good. Totally great. They got us into this. Yeah, I mean, you know, you think about like the Pacific Heat Dome in the Pacific Northwest last summer,

which, you know, was a meaningful news event for a few days. It was treated as a three-day event. These were temperatures in like Vancouver that were what temperatures in Death Valley usually are. And probably a couple thousand people died. But we saw it as this like isolated anomaly. And the truth is it's still going on because those temperatures produced conditions in the British Columbia forest. that created large-scale wildfires this year. Those wildfires stripped those mountain sides of everything that's holding that dirt in place,

which means that when there were some torrential rains that came, they flooded all these roadways, they stopped the railway lines, the port of Vancouver was effectively closed for a period of time. This is not, we're not talking about climate disasters here. We're not talking about the climate disasters in Mozambique, though those are horrible and horrifying and tragic. This is like Vancouver in Canada. And they are still reeling from the after effects.

You know, there's a lot more of that coming where, like, even the parts of the world that feel most safe and most modern are going to be, you know, if not entirely buckled, then really disrupted by these events. I want you to tie these two things you're talking about together because I think what I have been really surprised by with the pandemic is that Tucker Carlson tells his people not to get faxed. They don't get axed. They die. They are somehow not mad at Tucker Carlson. I thought for sure people would be like, oh, this pandemic is really, really bad. These people lied to us. This is not okay.

But that didn't happen. And when you look at climate, you see that that won't happen with climate either. Well, I think we are seeing a little bit of that in the cultural turn against the fossil fuel companies who are becoming something like the cigarette companies are in our culture. But I think it's also true that the systems beyond the narrow like boardrooms of Exxon and Shell that have supported this, you know, this lifestyle for so long or not coming in for that kind of attack. And I think that our capacity for normalization is really quite profound. And, you know, you talked about the sort of villainous disinformation campaign peddled by Fox News where everybody who works there is, of course, vaccinated. And that's, you know, I think that's really important and powerful and valuable that people are willing. to really bear the burden for fighting the cultural war fight that they want to fight. That's kind of

tragic and scary in the climate change context. But I think it's also just as illuminating to think about what's happened on the liberal side of the spectrum where in 2020, we told ourselves that this was not about individual risk, that this was about the most vulnerable in our society, and that we all had to do everything we could in our power to prevent the spread of this disease so that those people in nursing homes and with pre-existing conditions and immunodeficiencies and the elderly who live among us, all of those people could be safe from the threat of this disease. Now we're two years in and we're all pretty well vaccinated and most of us are going, you know what? If I'm safe, I'm done with it. And that is a pretty toxic reversal.

Yeah. And there is logic to it. And I don't mean to say, I mean, I feel it to some degree myself. I don't mean to say, sound holier than now. But we went from an ideological position where we believe that it was our collective duty to protect the Commonwealth and especially the most vulnerable in it to one in which we're looking at the most vulnerable in our society, namely the unvaccinated and the very old who may be vulnerable despite vaccination. And we're just thinking, ah, that's just collateral damage. We got to move on. And that is coming from, you know, people who, it's not just Tucker Carlson viewers. It's Chris Hayes. It's not even just Barry Weiss.

It's also really everybody in the country who's just done with it. And these dynamics are shaped by partisanship and ideological campaigns, but they are also on some basic level human. They live below that level. They live below the ideological or partisan level. And they amount to our desire to see our lives as normal and to see ourselves as noble actors, no matter what we're doing, no matter how much out of self-interest. And I worry about those dynamics going forward with climate very much. Although overall, what I would say is the pandemic showed us that we are capable, at least for short-term periods, of totally reinventing the way that we live, that that is a very powerful

and uplifting lesson for climate change. And one of the distressing things coming out of the pandemic, if that's where we are now, is, well, twofold. The first is we didn't take the opportunity we had because of the pandemic to really change the way that we thought about our fossil fuel infrastructure. We could have spent a lot more of that COVID relief money on greening our economies all around the world. Instead, we just spent a tiny fraction of it, and in the U.S. spent as much supporting fossil fuel companies as we did, ending them. And then the second thing is we lost the opportunity with COVID to ever declare victory against the pandemic. We are now, you know, herd immunity is a dream of the past. We're now talking, as you and I just went through,

about an endemic future in which still possibly 100,000 Americans are dying every year, and we're treating that now as like the success story. Because we did so poorly, not just in the U.S., but globally, about actually containing the virus when we could have, we are now defining success downward, not because it's actually okay or would have seemed okay to us two years ago to live with that level of disease, but because now we just have such a strong impulse to see whatever outcome we find ourselves in as normal that will call it a success, even if two years ago we would have called it an abject failure. And I think there's likely some amount of that going to play out with

climate as well. Thank you, David Wallace Wells. Thank you for having me. Great to talk to you. Jason Kander is a former Missouri Secretary of State and host of the Majority 54 podcast. Welcome back to the new abnormal, Jason Kander. Always good to be here. Thank you for having me. We have a lot on the agenda today. But the thing I want to talk to you about first is you are in the middle of the country, right? Yes. You're actually there, as opposed to all the people in Washington, D.C., or New York, or L.A., who are, you know, sort of spitballing about what's going on there.

What is going on there? The entire political conversation in the part of the country where I live, I live in Kansas City, Missouri, and have most of my life is it really boils down to everybody wants their family to be happy, healthy, safe, and nearby. And I always hear this conversation about, you know, the coastal elites, quote-unquote, coastal elites in the Democratic Party, not understanding the Midwest. And that is generally communicated as a policy conversation. Like, are they moderate? Are they progressive? And there tends to be this inclination to think that winning in the Midwest or in the South or Montana or wherever else is about being in the middle.

And I don't think that's true. I actually think that it is just about making an argument for whatever you believe in, but making sure that it is centered in the fact that we want our families to be happy, healthy, safe, and nearby. And of those four, the part that gets whiffed on the most by people on the coast is the nearby. And that's not in a policy sense, but in a rhetorical speaking to it sense. And it's because if you live in New York or you live in D.C. or you live in L.A. or San Francisco, you're unlikely to share that same anxiety about your children. having to leave and raise their kids somewhere else in order to have a job that they can pay the bills. And if you live there, like one time I was sitting down with Marty Walsh when he was mayor of Boston and I was talking about this and he said, yeah, we are the place that your kids come to. And I was like, yes, that's exactly it. And that's why people miss it.

So what's happening in the Midwest, I think, is that that is just not spoken to enough, that when we talk about democratic policies, when we talk about progressive ideas, we don't. talk about the fact that these things make it more likely that your kids won't have to leave and raise your grandkids somewhere else. So does that speak to inflation? Is that you're talking about inflation, right? I'm talking about literally everything. You just asked me generally about like politics in the Midwest. And to me, that's what jumps out in my mind because you name the policy, particularly any economic policy. And I can tell you how we have failed as a larger party to speak to this. So, you know, college debt, for instance. I mean, college debt is a great example. Right? Like, there are people in our party who do a fantastic job talking about this, but the people who just talk about it as an issue and just say, oh, well, college is too expensive. You shouldn't be in debt after school. What we should be talking about is the fact that because college is so expensive, people end up with these huge loans. And the only way they can pay them off is they go to a place where the incomes are higher. And therefore, they can't continue to live in the community where they want to live. So it's tearing communities apart and it keeps families apart.

I mean, that's sort of a complicated issue, and I'm curious to know how you would threat that needle. Oh, like inflation? No, like the idea that these people want their kids to stay near them, and that's what they want. How do Democrats speak to that need? Because you have one party who wants to help people, right? That's what the goal, sort of the Democratic Party as a whole, you know, the sort of ethos is to help people and not to cut taxes for wealthy people. So how would you thread that needle when you're talking to people? Yeah, I actually think it's not that complicated. I think it's a matter of instead of talking about these issues in a way that just treats them as individual issues, like as if candidates vote on issues, or as if voters vote on issues, they don't.

Talking about every issue that's out there, talking about it in terms of focusing it on this singular mission. I am a Democrat because I believe that the policies we advocate make it more likely that my family can be happy, healthy, safe, and nearby. Like, talk about healthy. Like on health care, clearly going from Obamacare to now, absolutely, the Democratic Party is more interested in making sure that my family can go to a doctor safe. On gun safety, for instance, on vaccines, on the pandemic. Clearly, my party is more interested in making sure that my family is safe. And on nearby, you know, making sure that there are good jobs at good wages by increasing the minimum wage, by stimulating the economy with the American Rescue Plan, that's all stuff that makes it so that,

you know, the kids in my community don't have to move to Chicago or New York City in order to get a job that can pay down their student loans or afford daycare, for instance. So I just think it is just simply a matter of remembering where home base is. Right. I think that's really interesting. Some of this is also about Democrats running candidates who can speak to local issues, right? Yeah, and allowing candidates to talk the way people talk where they're from, right? And so, and we make the mistake of thinking that that means, you know, attacking to the center necessarily. If the candidate is genuinely a moderate, like, let them be.

But if they're not, like, don't force them to be because nobody buys that, right? An example I'll give you is when I was running for the U.S. Senate in 2016, three weeks before the election, President Obama, his Department of Education, I believe, issued guidance on transgender bathrooms, on like having bathrooms that were accessible for transgender kids in schools. And that was the point. And I'd run a pretty progressive campaign. And that was the point where I said, well, now candor has to break with Obama, right? That's like three weeks to the election. Well, I didn't. But I also didn't come out and sound exactly like somebody from Washington. I didn't lecture the people of my state about transgender rights. What I did is I took the exact same position as the president. I just took it in a way that somebody where I'm from would say it. I gave a very simple answer. I said, I don't know why my opponent wants to discriminate against other people's kids. I'm not interested. Period. End of discussion. It wasn't a factor in the race at all because there was nowhere to go with it from there. So it's just let people communicate in a way that is natural to where they're from.

That seems like a very useful thing to be focused on. Now, I want to pull back for a minute. Like, there's a lot of talk in Washington, D.C., on the Beltway, that Democrats are in for a shlacking. I mean, I don't, you know, again, we don't, you know, conventional wisdom dictates that, but we do have a party that's killing its own voters. So who even knows? But I'm just curious, if you were running the DNC right now, what would you do? Look, from a messaging perspective, I think the first thing is it's really important to not spend any time on the predictions of what's going to happen because it's like you can't control that. And what I would say is this, is that to me, the focus, regardless of what happens in the midterm elections for Congress, like I'm not saying they're not super important. They are. But where my focus is is on shoring up the very foundations of our democracy among the positions that actually administer the elections. So,

Like to me, like on our show on Majority 54, we are spending a lot of time talking about Secretary of State races, County clerks, county recorders, county auditors, mayor's races in places where they're going to appoint the local election board. Because when you look at 2024, yes, it would have been a whole lot better if we had passed voting rights legislation at the national level and hopefully we'll have another opportunity to do that. But regardless of that, if you look at where the Republicans, particularly the Trump like coup oriented wing of the Republican, Republican Party is focusing their time. They are focusing their time on capturing those local positions. And if I were in a position to set that kind of strategy for the party as a whole, I would be putting a lot of funding and a lot of money into that. I recently saw where the Republican Secretaries of States PAC had raised like 33 million and the Democratic one had raised like one million. That to me is a huge red flag. For the state level, right? What is it called again, just for people who are listening?

The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. And you would say that in your mind, and I think that a lot of people think this too, so I'm curious what your take is. A lot of times Democrats, and Amanda Lipman has talked about this. She runs for something. Someone I met through the Arena Summit. A lot of times Democrats love to get on an exciting race, like the guy who's going to try to take out Marjorie Taylor Green. But it makes a lot more sense to support these. these sort of less exciting, but really much more important to democracy, candidates like

Secretary of States and also governors and AGs. And, I mean, right, that's what we're talking about here. Yeah. On Majority 54, we're doing a new segment called Road to the Midterms where we are focusing on those sorts of races. Because while it is, you know, it's easy to engage in political hobbyism by focusing only on the stuff that makes it on MSNBC. But the truth is, it's actually a lot more productive and frankly a lot more fun to get involved in races that are closer to home or that have a greater need for support where you can make a bigger difference. So like let's say you live in Arizona where Adrian Fontez is running for Secretary of State. Well, if you get involved with Adrian Fontez's campaign for Secretary of State, you get two things out of that. One, personally,

you're involved in a Secretary of State's race. It's not overwhelmed with volunteers. Like you're going to spend time with the candidate. You're going to get to know the person who is hopefully the next Secretary of State. And I think that makes it more interesting to be involved. But the second thing you get is you get to be involved in a race that may literally be the difference maker in whether we retain democracy as a form of government in this country. Because if in 2024 you have somebody who was in D.C. during the insurrection as Secretary of State, and that's the Republican candidate. We don't know exactly where they were, but they were there in D.C. during the insurrection. That's going to make a big difference in a close vote and when you have a Trump pushing overturning the election.

And maybe it's not even that. Maybe it's not Secretary of State. Maybe you get involved in the race for county recorder in Maricopa County, right? Like, well, I mean, that could be the one that the entire country, you know, pivots on, that our democracy pivots on. I always remind people that had there been a different Secretary of State or even a different Miami-Dade election administrator in 2000, there never would have been a war in Iraq. No, and I think it's important. especially Michigan, which is such a crucial state. Right now, there are three women, AG, Secretary of State, and Governor, and the three women have been really killing it, and also keeping Michigan, which is a swing state, from sliding into fascism,

because Michigan has a lot of crazy stuff going on, including a militia. Absolutely. And I can tell you, as somebody who has run for U.S. Senate in a race that wound up getting a ton of national attention because of one ad, and because it was so competitive, and previously before that, had run for Secretary of State in a race where I had to claw for every single dollar. It is frustrating, and there's a helpless feeling to be running in a down-ballot, statewide race that is of incredible importance, but really hard to get on the radar for. And the thing about it is, is you realize, like, you're going to work your tail off, and the amount that you can move the needle in your own race can be very limited. and you just have to maximize, you have to maximize the amount you can move that needle within your own control. And the more that people can help those candidates and those campaigns do it, I mean, look, that's what the other side is doing. I mean, even back when I, in 2012, when I was elected

Secretary of State of Missouri, I mean, there was a national Secretary of State's PAC for the Republicans that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in my race. And I think I got like a $5,000 assist from the Democratic organization. We won. But, like at one in the morning. So, I mean, it is very difficult to run those races. Those folks need the support. I think that's a really good message. Jason Kander, I hope you'll come back and talk to us some more about these state-level races

that are so important and that our listeners should get involved in. Anytime. What's crazier than QAnon, more outlandish than Pizza Gate, and scarier than a Mexican getaway with Ted Cruz? The answer is what the American right wing has planned next. Be one of the first to listen to Fever Dreams, new podcasts from The Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers,

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which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. Andy, Levy. Molly, John Fass. Who is your fuck that guy to die? The right honorable gentleman from South Carolina, Lindsay Graham. He has spent, he's got some sort of whiplash thing going on because he has spent after describing Trump in the worst of terms back before Trump got elected, he then went to becoming a total simp for Trump. And then all of a sudden, the other day, he was asked about Trump's little speech where he said he was going to, he was thinking about pardons for the people convicted of crimes for the January 6th stuff. And he said, no, that's a, that's a bad idea.

We shouldn't do that. And Trump responded by calling Graham a rhino, a Republican in name only. If you're tempted to feel bad for Lindsey Graham, don't. He deserves all of this. He gave his loyalty to a man who obviously does not deserve loyalty, but also doesn't really return loyalty. Like it's a lifetime fealty thing with Trump. You can't support him on some things and then suddenly say something, even moderately against what he says. And Graham should have known that.

And he threw his lot in with a horrible person and he's now paying the price and it's delightful, but also fuck That guy. That was good. You really, you kind of got, you rounded up. My fuck that guy is a sort of continuum of people. We're going to start with Mask Singer. It's a reality television show. I do not watch.

Thank you. But I am smart enough to get the idea you wear a mask. You sing. They try to figure out who you are. Someone in Hollywood decided to make the Mask singer one. Hair paint sweating, scary, government overthrowing, Rudy Giuliani. Is this true? Are you a Rudy Giuliani's not the best singer-truther now, Andy?

No, no, no, no, I just can't believe it. As the person who watched one episode of this show, I believe it because it was one of the dumbest things I've ever put eyes on. Right, but it can be dumb without laundering a criminal. Right? Things can be stupid without helping kill democracy. And that is, you know, there are a lot of stupid celebrities in this country a lot. Like thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. You want a housewife.

You wanted this. You wanted that. But Rudy Giuliani has recently had had his house and his office rated by the FBI. This is not a guy that you need to start rehabbing the image of. And so for that, I say, and again, you can pull back. and see that a lot of reality television shows have featured really shitty bad faith Republican actors like Sean Spicer, who did a rehab tour on Dancing with the Stars, and Donald Trump, who exists because of The Apprentice. And so I say to you, I understand that you need to kill

the culture. Fine. You want to put stupid crap on television. Go ahead. We don't mind. It's in our Constitution. But don't fucking take someone like Rudy Giuliani. The man has got criming in the blood and fucking make him an adorable grandpa who might want to overthrow the government. And to that I say, come on, people. You can do better or at least you can't do worse. Also, can you imagine how bad that mask wants to smell. The cigars, the whiskey, the hair paint, just all over it. But, you know, Robin Thick said no. So imagine a world where you're too primy for Robin Thick. Right.

Well, you're too gross for the guy who did duets with Chris Brown. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, good, good, good point. Yeah, possibly the most rapy top 40 hit of the decade. Yes. Yeah, not great. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture,

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