The Daily Beast Podcast - Joe Biden and the Democrats Fail to Fight Days Before Midterm Battle Begins

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

President Biden’s Wednesday speech at Union Station in D.C. where he warned of the perils facing US democracy ahead of next week’s Midterms just wasn’t forceful enough, according to host Andy Levy on this week’s episode of political podcast, The New Abnormal. In his speech, Biden made reference to the hammer attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul last week, warning the country faces escalating threats of political violence. He also criticized ​​Donald Trump over the former president’s refusal “to accept the results of the 2020 election.” But it wasn’t enough, according to Levy and guest host Josie Duffy Rice, who writes about prisons and prosecution at The Unnamed. Also on the podcast, Mike Isaac, a technology correspondent for The New York Times discusses whether Twitter can survive under Elon Musk’s ownership. Then, Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, discusses how Republicans twisted the story of Paul Pelosi’s hammer attack from a crime story to a national conspiracy; that the violent assault was the result of some sort of gay lover’s spat or falling out.  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. And I'm producer Jesse Kennett, 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 great guest co-hosts, as well as some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try to make some sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh, through the tears. What an excellent show we have today. First, we're going to be joined by Mike Isaac, who's a tech reporter at the New York Times, and he's going to tell us what in the hell is going on with Elon Musk's Twitter. Then we'll speak to Matt Gertz, who's a senior fellow at

Media Matters, and is going to tell us all about all the conspiracy theories swirling around on the right wing. But first, we're lucky enough to be joined by the author of the substack, the unnamed Josie Duffy Rice. Joining me now as guest co-host for this episode of The New Abnormal, it's Josie Duffy Rice. Josie, thank you so much for coming back. Thank you so much for having me. So let's jump right into some politics. On Wednesday, President Biden gave a speech at Union Station in D.C. He basically warned, as he's done, I guess, one other time,

he warned of sort of this danger of what he calls this ultra-maga force that he says is going to try to subvert the election in 2022. And he used phrases like silence is complicity and talked about the rise of political violence, violence and voter intimidation and how this is all coming from that sort of that wing of the Republican Party is how he described it. And I don't think anything he said was untrue. The only quibble I would have with the speech is that it wasn't forceful enough. And I kind of feel like Democrats are not making this argument enough. And but I don't know because I seem to, I feel like a lot of the sort of media reaction to it was like, oh, he's overblowing a danger to democracy.

Right. People don't want to believe that we're on the precipice of a major impact, if not close to destruction of our political system. But he's right. It's sort of like preaching to the choir, people who are going to listen to that. It's really hard to convince people who are so far gone in one speech that this is a major crisis if they're not already convinced it's a crisis. But he's not wrong. Well, and that's the thing. And that's why I say I feel like, you know, the main thing wrong with this speech is it's not enough. And the Democrats in general are not doing enough at sort of sounding the, you know, the alarm bells on this issue. You know, I understand why you generally, the way you run a campaign is you run on certain issues. You run on the economy. You run on, you know,

civil rights and civil liberties and stuff like that. Foreign policy. That's the general way we conduct campaigns in this country. But we're in a new abnormal. dare I say. And we have here, we have a party that doesn't seem all that interested in democracy. We have a candidate in, is it Wisconsin who is saying that if he wins, Republicans will never lose again in Wisconsin? Right. The gubernatorial candidate, yep. Yeah. And so you have to combat that rhetoric and you have to draw people's attention to it. Then I see these, again, I see these, you know, responses to Biden's speech from people, and I don't mean from the people who are doing. this shit because they're obviously that, you know, they're doing it.

I see people saying, oh, so what Biden is saying is that democracy is in danger and so you have to vote for one party. Isn't that anti-democratic? No, not when the other party... Right, he's trying to ruin democracy. Yeah, I don't get it. Please make it make sense for me. I would love to make it make sense for you.

It doesn't make sense to me either. But it also highlights a fundamental problem with the Democratic Party, which is, on the right, they're organizing. They are electing local, you know, public officials who are willing to overturn elections for their preferred candidate. They're mobilizing, you know, people to quote unquote monitor elections, which we'll talk about more in a little bit. But you see that like we're talking about infrastructure on the right and like narrative among the Democrats. And I just don't think narrative is a good enough foe for the war that we're fighting. I just feel. feels like you said, it's just not enough. And it's also, we know that so much of this country right now has been essentially is living in an alternate reality. Right. You can make the best speech possible, but they don't, they're not occupying the same space you're occupying, right? Like, it's just kind of a lost cause. No, I agree. And there is, unfortunately, I do think there's a, there's a percentage of this country that at this point almost has to be considered a

lost cause, at least in the short run. You know, maybe something will change down the road. But I totally agree with you. There's whatever percentage of the country it is. And, you know, I used to think it was like 5%. Now it's, I think it's somewhere between 20 and 50. Look, you're correct.

There's no point. Giving this speech changes nothing for those people. And then there are the people who are fully aware of what is going on and are scared as hell about it. And the speech isn't for those people either. It's for the people in the middle. It's for the people who are sort of like, in their mind, they're not following politics every day because

they have lives and they have families and jobs and kids and whatever. And, you know, that's most of the world, which generally I think is maybe an okay thing. I prefer to be them. No, absolutely. Oh, I'm insanely jealous. Don't get me wrong. But this is kind of a dangerous time for that. And particularly when, you know, as you said, like one side is sort of making its case a lot more strongly than the other side. And then also a lot for a lot of those people, it's just, it's all sort of, it's all noise. It's all white noise. It's all, well, you know, the Republicans say this, the Democrats say that. The answer is probably, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. And again, that may be true for some things and that may be true in some elections.

I mean, I don't really believe that. But it sort of can be, you know, it can be okay to sort of feel that way on some things. Not this. Not this, exactly. Because this really is, there's no truth in the middle here. There's no middle between stealing elections and not stealing elections, between stopping people from voting and letting people vote. Like, there's no middle ground.

You're doing one or the other, absolutely. In some ways, this suffers from the climate change problem, which is it feels so big and scary. And it's just sort of like, I can't think about it. Like, I can't even process. Right. I think for so many people, it's like, I can't actually process the idea. that lots of earth won't be inhabitable in 50 years or that our democratic system could be

actually falling apart as we speak. It's sort of like, what am I supposed to do about it? It's so much harder to play defense, to inspire people to play defense than offense. Like, it just feels hard, I think, for us to figure out how to say, like, we're really at risk of this happening. And also, this is avoidable with just a little bit of action on your part. And look, the right has done a really great job of, making people think that like the biggest threats to them are murder, you know, they're going to get murdered any second or a trans kid is going to come in like whatever, come in their kid's bathroom versus the end of democracy. I mean, like there's objectively one thing that puts us all at

the most risk, but that is not the perception of so many people. No, I think you're right. The climate change analogy is a really good one in terms of the scope of the problem. The only thing is, like, I do kind of feel like if climate change were going to be a problem in the sense that tomorrow we were all going to suddenly be living underwater or everyone was going to be starving because there would be no more crops, people would then start worrying about it. They probably won't until then, unfortunately, and when it's too late. But I do feel like this is something where it's literally, we're talking about an election that's happening next week where a lot of bad things could happen.

So it's sort of like, yes, I get that it's still, you still do run into the problem of this is too big. And, you know, I have to care more about, you know, look, I've got kids in school. I'm concerned about those issues. And, you know, I don't want to get stabbed on the subway because if you look at the media and listen to people, you know, you would think that 100,000 people a day are getting murdered in Manhattan on the subway. So I get that part of it. but it's the sort of the immediate existential danger that I don't think is being communicated well at all by the Democratic Party.

I agree. And I think, you know, it seems like during the Obama years, this is just a theory, but that Democrats, just their messaging was so much stronger, right? Like they had such a strong messenger. They had a much more strong narrative, I think. And if I were 3,000 years in the future, looking back at this period just kind of historically,

I think my number one takeaway would mostly be, wow, Republicans have done a really great job of shaping people's reality because it's just objectively not reality. It's not even their reality. Like, these people are not living in the reality that they profess to live in. And yet it really is pervasive. There is a large group of people in this country who are totally fine taking away your right to vote and my right to vote, right? They're totally fine with that because they think that we're evil groomers giving. having kids fentanyl. I don't know what they think. But like, you know, it's like this, this total demonization of an entire party in a way that like, I think a lot of them are okay

if we don't have the right to vote. I think they think it's their moral obligation. The thing that it's hard to translate is like, if our right can be taken away, so can yours. And surely you want it. So like, we're in this in a weird way together. Yeah. And, you know, it sort of reminded me of the unbelievably dumb stories that were going around about the schools that were having cat litter. Oh, my God. Because the claim was that some students were identifying as felines and needed the cat litter boxes to go to the bathroom.

And there has been literally not one instance where that has shown to be the case. No, it's absurd. Of course. But it gets repeated over and over again. Uh-huh. And it just becomes, you know, people are like, and like you said, it's not happening to them. They're not saying, oh, yes, this happened in my school district.

It's always, well, I heard that, but they accept it as true. And they accepted that it's happening somewhere else and that it's somehow it's Joe Biden and the Democrats. Like, that's what they want. That's the future, you know, the liberals want. Look, these people truly are with a straight face saying the Democrats. And by the way, like lots of Democrats and people on the left and journalists are repeating the same thing. That the Democrats are the people who want to suppress free speech and Republicans love free speech. And books are being banned at like a rapid clip, right?

You know, like, you can't teach, you can't talk about race in schools anymore. You can't, like, it's just like, this is not, this, you, it's such a weird denialism, refusal to acknowledge what's happening on, on their side and a true belief that we're the problem. Again, it is, it is one of those things and it's, you know, it's, it's been a sort of long held tenet of Trumpism that anything. they accuse you of they are doing themselves. Right, right. And it's sort of along those lines. But it's true because I see so many people who, you know, call themselves libertarians or whatever, who you think would be the most outraged about, you know, what's happening with libraries

and what's happening with education in schools and stuff like that. But instead, what they get mad at is that Dave Chappelle had to move his show to another venue. And they either equate the two things. or they actually somehow give more weight to what happened to Chappelle and to, you know, silly stuff like that. And it just, it blows my mind that they sort of just refuse to actually look at what's going on right under their noses. Right. It's not actively bad for them right now because the censorship is on their side, right? But it's like, this is just so myopic.

It's so short-sighted. And I know that that's asking a lot from people, a lot of officials are spending half their day on Twitter to, like, think long term. But, you know, I feel crazy half the time. I'm like, are they not seeing this? And the truth is they are, but it just doesn't feel the same. Yeah. You know, next week is Election Day. Just a few days ago, this is not a normal thing.

The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the U.S. Capitol Police put out a joint warning about lone wolf terror attacks leading up to and right after the midterm elections. Vice reported that on a, you know, there's this message board called the Donald, I believe. Sounds like a really joyful place, I'm sure. Yeah. A user wrote, quote, we will post up at every single drop box. If you try to drop off more than one ballot, you will be beaten without question. Better tell your grandma to drop off her own vote because no games are being played this time. You'll see violence have caught stuffing ballots in a drop box.

Now, of course, it is perfectly legal for someone to go with their ballot and their family's ballots and drop them all off in a drop box. There's nothing illegal or unethical or wrong in any way about that. it's no different than, oh, you're going to the post office? Hey, can you mail this for me? Right. Like, it's literally the same thing. But this is the kinds of stuff that we're looking at for next week. And as you said, there are also a lot of these right-wing groups, people from the proud boys,

people from the oathkeepers are setting themselves up as sort of poll watchers is what they're claiming to be. But obviously, they are there to intimidate. And they're not there to intimidate people who are voting Republican. Yeah, absolutely. there's between the actual like vigilante election violence that I think we all agree is more likely now than ever. And then the state election violence, right? I mean, like, forget even the policies that have been put in place by a state and local elected officials over the past couple of years since 2020 that give them more power over controlling who gets to actually control who wins an election.

But there's also this thing like you're seeing in Florida with Ron DeSantis where he's arresting people for voter fraud who by all means thought that they actually had. their right to vote back, formerly incarcerated people. Or you're just seeing these different levels in which the actual act of voting has people scared that they will end up in prison or dead. And that is not a functional democracy. It's just not a functional system. My son is five and was staying with my parents last weekend and they went to go early vote. And I was nervous about him going to early vote with them. I mean, that's in so many ways the damage has already been done. And what we see happening with these kind of, again, vigilante election watchers who have no authority except the authority of their fists and their guns. I mean, it's terrifying. Yeah, it absolutely is.

And again, it needs to be pointed out over and over again that this is all coming from one side. This is not a both sides issue, and it never has been. But pretty much any time in the history of this country, there's been any attempted voter suppression, it's come from one side. Exactly. Whether it was the South or what, it just doesn't matter. It's all. always been from one side. There's one side that wants more people to vote. There's one side that wants fewer people to vote. Exactly. This is a crude shortcut, right, to winning because their policies are not actually popular, right? I mean, the way that they win is by calling us groomers and keeping us from the ballot or controlling the end. I mean, that's it. That's all they have. And they are

weaponizing it in the strongest possible terms in a way that, like, I agree that we're just not taking it seriously enough. It's an excellent point and it's a point that can't be said enough that they know in their hearts that their views, their reactionary views, they're in a lot of ways, whether it's racism or anti-Semitism or homophobia or transphobia, that in the end, those are not majority views in this country. They're too close to, you know, they're bigger than they should be. I mean, they should be zero, but, you know, they're way too close to 50% for comfort. But at the end of the day they are not the majority views in this country. And the only way that they can win elections is if fewer people cast ballots. Yeah, absolutely. And there is such a reward for being

reactionary right now. I was talking to someone a couple weeks ago who said that in the state legislature in Texas, there's no longer any political benefit to doing anything bipartisan, right? In fact, you pay a price. And so there's a sense of, yeah, of just being aware that you are losing maybe the values battle and doing whatever you can, the most depraved, immoral, anti-democratic things that you possibly can to maintain power. Joining me now is New York Times Technology Correspondent and author of the fantastic book, Super Pump, The Battle for Uber, Mike Isaac. Mike, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me.

Well, that was creepy. That's my offline person. Okay. So I have a sort of a general question. first. Obviously, I want to talk to you about the big thing going on right now, which is Elon Musk buying Twitter. I go back and forth between thinking this is a story that's only of interest or importance to the people who actually use Twitter and maybe not even to all of them. And then thinking like, you know, no, this is actually a huge story and it's going to have ramifications that reach far beyond

people like us who waste far too much of our lives tweeting. Which of those is closer to reality? Okay, let me be clever here and say I think both are reality actually, because I, so One of the things about Twitter, it is that it is probably the most influential social network used by the smallest amount of people on the planet, right? And by that, I mean, like you said, you and I are on here staring stuff, staring at stuff all day or tweeting and rifting and like fucking with people and like, that's fun, yeah, and like a lot of folks in the media are kind of messing around with it. But there was an internal doc and a story that leaked recently that said, like, you know,

most people don't tweet. the most active users on the platform tweet like three to four times per week once a day. And like it just gives you an idea of like how much of the minority we are by we, I mean like you and I sort of like huffing Twitter fumes all day. But it has a very outsized influence on society. And things that pop on Twitter trickle down to other networks, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Reddit, whether it's television news, whether it's radio, whether it's podcast. And so it's it's sort of like this weird, it's a real, it's in a real weird position where it's like incredibly influential and spreads to everywhere, but also not necessarily used by a lot of people all the time and doesn't have like a hugely active user base, you know. And the hundreds of

millions of people that are counted in their quarterly earnings reports when they were public, only had to log in like once a, maybe once a day or once a month or something to really count. So it is both largely influential and also kind of not very important at the same time. Okay. That's fair. It's kind of like my career. So since he took charge, which has been, I think, it's still less than a week, right? Yeah. Jesus Christ. I think tonight will be a week. Okay. Mosker's been tweeting potential like business moves like crazy. He started, he was proposing $20 a month for user verification that also included a bunch of other perks. And then Stephen King, was like, I'm not paying $20 a month and Musk tweeted back at him, how about eight? And now it seems

to be that it's eight. Aren't these the kinds of things you plan, you have a plan in place like before you buy a company? You know you're in a good position when you're negotiating the price of your network with the author of like it in real time in front of like millions of people. Yeah, ideally this is what kind of got me throughout the week is like ever since this thing actually went through. And like, to be clear, no one knew. if this was actually going to happen for a long time, including me, and I've been writing about it. And like, it's been like on and off and they've gone to court. And back in April, when he made this, you know, 44 billion or whatever dollar bid, it looked reasonable at the time. And then a lifetime

of economic upheaval has happened since then, you know, like, like the markets are shit, interest rates are driving up. Like the war in Ukraine has thrown everything off whack. So like, now his bid looks insane and like he's overpaid. And he's overpaid. And he's. spent many days in court trying to get out of it. He was not able to get out of it. And so this guy who lined up tons of financing on zero business plan and zero due diligence on buying this company now has to figure out, oh my God, I need to turn this into a viable business, which, by the way, has not been profitable for eight out of the last 10 years as a public company. It's like the dog who caught the car, but the car is on fire and also bleeding money.

at the same time. That sounds like a good deal. Yeah. So one of his other potential moves, again, that they're floating and that we now here may come as soon as next week, who knows, is giving users the opportunity to put up basically paywalled video. You would have to pay to access it. And I assume Twitter would take a cut of that.

And this would obviously lead to content of an adult nature, also known in the business as porn. And I guess not surprisingly, you tweeted, quote, honestly, this is not a bad idea to me. And it's not particularly because of my pension for porn, but we could talk about that on another show. For one thing, there's a ton of porn on Twitter. I'm not, I haven't looked through your follow list lately, but there's like a lot of adult accounts on Twitter. People use it. Sex workers use it as like a place. I mean, like how often do you see like area congressman faves boob tweet, you know, in stories or whatever? Like that is not out of the norm. One could argue that Twitter is squandering a lot of, of money, a lot of opportunities for making money off of it because essentially who these people are are creators on the platform. It's just that the content they're creating is people fucking, right? So instead of offloading that to only fans, which their model is pay whatever, pay

$5 and see this video or, you know, subscribe to my thing, it's sort of like a Patreon sort of hybrid, why not do that on Twitter where people sort of follow them anyway? Like, I don't think that's crazy at the same time, and this is part of the reason I use this site every day, is like, Randos showed up in the thread and pointed out here are the host of problems that come with it, whether it's payment processes being huge prudes and not wanting to like have that on their transactions, which I wasn't aware of. Maybe I need to start paying for porn and find out. Or a child sexual abuse material like running through the platform or just there's like it's not as easy as turning it on and I think this is what Elon's going to run into very quickly. It's not as easy as

sort of like throwing these product ideas against the wall and flipping it on. There's a host of different issues that come with everything. Maybe he can navigate that as a private company more than he can as a public company, but I still feel like, you know, we're in week one and it's going crazy and reality might catch up pretty soon. Yeah. And again, this just feels like another instance where it's like maybe you should have had a business plan in place before you dropped $44 billion. But what the hell do I know. And that's why you don't run a rocket ship company. Well, and speaking of what the hell do I know, there are a lot of people who have been openly scornful of the idea of charging to have your account verified. Couldn't be me. But I don't know strictly from a revenue raising

perspective. Is it actually a good idea? It doesn't seem like it is to me. But again, what do I know? This is a real hard problem. I mean, again, this is also, like you said, what do I know? This is why I'm not running a social media company. But Twitter is an advertising company, right? The entire history of Twitter has basically been an ad-based company, and Elon has expressed his disdain for ads and clearly wants to make it into more of a subscription business, and he's doing that very quickly by pissing off all of his advertisers as soon as he takes over. There's a few problems with that. One, Twitter is not the best ad platform out there if you're a brand who wants to spend money and get return on your investment, right? The reason Google and

Facebook make so much money is because their ad products are just better. They suck in more data about their users and they can tell marketers whether or not they're actually getting their return on their investment, whether people are buying their products or using their, you know, whatever they're advertising. And Twitter just doesn't do that in the same way. Their tools are piss poor and a lot of marketers have complained about that for a long time. So if you're in the ad industry and you see the platform melting down and like the My Pillow guy tweeting like turds and Nazi content

sort of flooding back. Like are you thinking, hmm, should I stick with this because Elon's running it? Or should I move my ad dollars over to Facebook or whatever? Right. And I think that is the calculus. A lot of them are doing right now.

And like turning a thing into a subscription business where people have not paid for a lot of these things for the majority of the network's lifespan is really hard to do. People don't like paying for things, you know, especially like paying for a network that doesn't always make me feel great when I go to it, you know? Right. So it's like, I don't know, it's like, I mean, unless you're a pay pig, which, which might be a sideline of business that they might be into. Yeah. It may just be also that they're, they're sort of, it's sort of like the drug dealer, you know, your first taste is free.

And now there are all these people out there who are completely addicted to Twitter and who, you know, and then suddenly it's like, all right, now you have to pay $8 a month. And there are, like, well, I'm never going to do that. And then after a week away, they're like, here, take my money. Here's $50 a month. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. I was talking to someone about this earlier. Like, there's a weird social pressure being created to like not pay for it because people who pay for it are big nerds. I started paying for it a month ago, but under the auspices of it's for my job or I need to like investigate these features. But I don't know, man. I don't know if I'm going to be able to continue paying for it when I have the like scar.

letter of a blue badge on me after this goes through. They absolutely should change the badge to Ray. That would be a great idea. There's a bunch of things. You mentioned the advertisers. L'Oreal has suspended its advertising. I think General Motors suspended its advertising. And then additionally, I know Bloomberg News initially reported that he's going to get rid

of half of the current employees, which is roughly, I guess, letting 3,700 people go. Yeah. And most of the senior staff has been cut loose. Is all of this just kind of standard new guy in town move, or is it concerning? We have a story about basically the moves he's making, and a lot of this is in the vein of we need to cut as many costs as possible and spin up in as many lines of revenue as possible. And that's because he's on the hook for $12 billion in financing that he got from the banks, which carries a billion dollars in interest that he has to pay every single year.

Oh, my God. It's a shitload of money that he has to pay. Like, he's gotten into a really rough deal, and he's inherited a shitty business. Like, they've been unprofitable for a lot of years, and turning that around overnight is going to be very difficult. So now he's in this mode, and we go into it in our story where he's dispatched a ton of teams to throw everything against the wall that he can in terms of product ideas. And the paid video is one thing we mentioned. Resurrection Vine. I got some information on paid DM.

paid direct messages and what he's trying to do with that, which is really wild. And the vibe inside is basically come one, come all with ideas if you work on the product teams, while at the same time slashing and burning as many cost centers inside as possible. So it's this really difficult position if you work inside of there where you're like, man, I need to cram on this product because the boss is like really needs me to make it work. but I also may not ever be there to ship it because I might not have a job next week or something, you know. That's unbelievable. Super brutal. Morale is in the toilet. Everyone's freaking out. It's real bad.

So who makes up the Twitter inner circle now? Like who are the people that Elon is spitballing all of these ideas with? Sure. It's getting smaller by the day in terms of existing Twitter employees. You know, as we reported this week and last week, basically the C-suite all got fired on day one, four cause, which means he's trying to get out of paying them severance, which I don't think will work, but it's funny to sort of watch him try. The VPs and sort of directors of different parts of the organizations are all resigning on Friday. And for, I think for Elon, like part of this is like, as they say in tech world, a feature rather than a bug, because he wants his own people in there, right? Like, he's trying to weed out basically a lot of the folks who hate

him and there are a lot of people who do not like him and have been pretty vocal about it. And he's like, all right, fine, get out of here. And then either keep the true believers or the smart people, or the folks willing to sort of stick around and stick this out, as well as find new folks to come in and join. And like, to be clear, he is extremely popular with a lot of people, right? Like, you and I might be looking at this in super skeptical, but like he has a built-in fan base and caters to them all the time. And so, especially in Silicon Valley, I don't think there will be any problem with finding folks who want to join up and do this thing with Elon, especially if there's a chance of like hanging out with the boss and like this guy who they think is like the coolest guy,

you know, and like that is really, you know, I mean, I think about this, maybe an article form or something, but like he's sort of like the ultimate influencer slash creator, right? Like he has his own, he's a content creator in that he provides tweets that people like hoover up and love all the time and like does all this weird stuff and has a built-in following because of it. And like he's like a true celebrity in his ability to sort of use that for recruiting and for winning over different industries and different parts of the business. And I think he on some level has to recognize that leverage that he has in a lot of different ways beyond just being the world's richest man, which is also very important.

But it does seem like there are certain people right now, like all these, you know, entrepreneurs and angel, whatever the hell they're called. Angel investor guys, yeah. David Sachs, yeah, Jason Calacanis, people like that seem to be tweeting out every day different ideas for Twitter. And to me, anyway, each one of them is dumber than the last. And somebody super smart tweeted, I'm not sure there's ever been a more wrongheaded societal belief than when we're, we looked at Silicon Valley as the best and the brightest. And that person was me. But that's sort of how I feel now.

Like, you know, it just seemed like as a society, it was always like, oh, these are the best among us. All these people, all these brains, you know, gathered in this one area. And now I look at what these people are saying. And I'm like, you are a fucking moron. Like, obviously, that's a little rough. And they have, they're good at things and they're not, you know, they don't have IQs of 20. But somehow they believe.

these unbelievably silly things. Yeah. No, I think the, I don't know what the term for it is, but just sort of like success in one industry sort of confirms the idea that you can do it everywhere else and sort of, you know, like, I mean, I've been reporting on tech stuff since 2010 and like early coverage, including my own, was a lot more wide-eyed at the sort of spectacle and the things that they were doing. And I think that has changed over time.

And I think that has rightly changed over time as folks. recognize the centers of power that exist in the valley around here where I live. I think you're exactly right. The attitude has sort of changed to like, you know, God, boy kings of Silicon Valley to, you know, really questioning that sort of mystique. And I think that's good. Like I think questioning is good. I really do grapple with is ex person a genius or are they just lucky and luck and timing has a lot to do with it a lot of the time, you know, once you nail something. or are they just a hard worker? I don't think you can just automatically assume that because ex-person is insanely rich

or has a really big company means that they're like some sort of super genius and worked unbelievably hard to get there because like that's not true for a lot of these people, you know. But to your point, there are some very smart people here and they work on some very hard engineering and computational problems. And I can't do a lot of those problems and I have to give them credit for that. So I don't think it's clear cut, but I absolutely agree that the bubble of mystique has been popped, and I think that's positive.

Yeah, definitely. This may be an absolutely impossible question to answer, but where do you think Twitter ends up? Like, what does this platform look like in six months, in a year, five years out? We just don't know, right? Dude, every day of this story has been insane. Like, this is why I'm currently working on it while I'm on book leave and not getting paid to do it, because, like, I think it's like a crazy story. I think it's, for someone like me, it's fun because I have a level of attachment

and I can sort of, you know, this is the type of thing that I'm into digging up and finding information on. He's also very unpredictable and mercurial and you never know which way he's going to go. And at the same time, God knows, you know, maybe he, like I said, a lot of this is luck and timing and maybe he finds out how to do some crazy thing that turns on the money's spigot. But I just, I'm very skeptical. And these first days are really rough.

And a lot of the people I'm talking to inside are not, do not have like a good outlook on it. And so I'm trusting the sources and what they think, which is not great. So again, who knows because this is an insane story. And I don't know. Maybe maybe he's saving us. Maybe I will no longer be addicted to this. And I have to go like do fucking TikToks for my job in the future. Right.

Well, I now have 62 followers on Mastodon. Congratulations. So thank you very much. The only Macedon I listen to is a metal band from Georgia. Exactly. Mike, thanks so much for being here. I got to let you go. I know you're working on a book about Facebook.

You've got to be thankful it didn't come out this week when nobody would want to talk about Facebook at all. Thanks to Elon. But thanks so much for coming on. Hopefully we'll have you back again. Thanks, Andy. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.

Here with me now is Media Matter senior fellow and mistaken receiver of many tweets intended for Congressman Matt Gates, Matt Gertz. Thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it. Good to be here. Thank you. I wanted to talk to you about so many things, but let's start with. There were two pieces you wrote recently regarding the attack on Paul Pelosi and the conspiracy theories that arose out of the right wing pretty much in the immediate aftermath. And the two pieces are, to me anyway, they're of a piece.

Let's get into them. So just the basic facts, last Friday, Paul Pelosi, husband. of how Speaker Nancy Pelosi was attacked with a hammer by a man who broke into their home. We have since learned that this man, David DePape, had a fairly sizable internet footprint, pretty much the bog standard for right-wing nut jobs these days, anti-vax, PizzaGate, election result denialism, throw in some Holocaust denialism because why the hell not? So you'd think this would be pretty cut and dry, but for the right-wing media, it really wasn't, was it?

No, in fact, it took them about 48 hours to put together a very, vast conspiracy theory about how depraved the left is as their explanation for this political violence that was committed by a man obsessed with conspiracy theories about how depraved the left is. It went remarkably quickly through the right-wing ecosystem. The conspiracy theory that they came up with was that there was no break in. The attacker was let into the home by Paul Pelosi, because they were gay lovers, and the violent assault on Paul Pelosi was the result of some sort of lovers spat or falling out.

They came up with this because, obviously, the existing set of facts was incredibly damning for their political movement. As you say, his internet footprint bears all the hallmarks of modern-day right-wing internet radicalization. Kewanon, Pizza Gate, Gamergate, are all mentioned in his blog, along with really disgusting comments about black people and gay people and Jews. And, you know, rather than take a look at that and say, wow, maybe our movement is going too far,

maybe we need to try to restrain some of these impulses because they're leading people who have mental health issues into violent attacks on people of the other party. They decided to come up with a new conspiracy theory that, again, makes that party look terrible. Walk us through how this bubbles up. How does this happen? Where does it start? Who are the usual suspects that amplify it, et cetera? Sure. I mean, so there's a vast network on the right in internet message boards like the Donald. not win, as well as social media platforms, not only Twitter and Facebook, but truth social and getter and the rest. And you just have a large number of internet sleuths who spend their time looking for things that they can turn into conspiracy theories. And then from there, you have a set of hyperpartisan right-wing news sites, places like gateburn.

a pundit and the like that will take that raw material, they'll trawl through these platforms and put them together into things that look sort of like articles, which could then be, you know, shared on Facebook and on Twitter and become sort of part of the right wing conversation. And from there, it's a food chain. You have influencers who have lower standards and less influence and less need to maintain any sort of integrity, channeling. the information up and up and up to the heights of right-wing press, which is Fox News. It's a fully operational death star, basically. Yeah, I mean, they've spent decades ironing out the kinks of this system.

And now, you know, when a news event happens, like the speaker of the house's husband getting violently assaulted in his own home, they're all sort of in sync from the jump. Right. They all know their roles and they play them out to perfection. from the loomiest trolls that will go all the way through the conspiracy theory and accept it to, you know, people like, you know, national review writers who won't say they were gay lovers. They'll just say, oh, there are all these questions. Why won't people answer these questions that we have about the details of this ongoing criminal investigation? The issue that keeps coming up for me here is that breaking news events are notoriously. for having initial reports that are wrong. Of course. Every time there's like a mass shooting,

you will see an initial report that there's a second shooter. Yes. And then the second shooter account is discredited. It turns out that there wasn't one. It was just people making mistakes in the sort of heat of the moment. And then you have the set of conspiracy theorists that come in and operationalize that and say, well, there was an initial report that there was a second shooter. Why was that dropped?

It's probably because it was a false flag, and the FBI was involved in killing all these people. Right. Occam's razor is right out the window with these people. But one of the things that you say in one of the pieces is you say the right-wing audience is uniquely vulnerable to these narratives. Why is that? Well, because they've been in this right-wing media bubble for so long, the right has done a really effective job of cordoning off its news sources from the rest of the world. world. They have for years warned their audiences that mainstream news sources cannot be trusted, that if they see contrary information in the newspaper or on CNN or what have you, that that

information should be discounted. And in fact, that all of those news sources should be ignored and that they should be paying attention to places like Fox News because only they will tell you the truth. This is simultaneously a business strategy, right? It's a great way to create and keep customers. You tell them that all of your competitors are, you know, in league with dark elite cabals. But it is also an effective political maneuver because it keeps you from having your base question the assumptions of the Republican Party and the rightman movement. I mean, once that bubble is in place, and once you've used it to talk about all of these conspiracy theories about how terrible the political enemies are from Vince Foster getting murdered

by the Clintons on the line, he's created an audience that wants to hear more of that and does not want to hear contrary information. And you don't have people with prominent positions and influence on the right who spend time debunking rampant lies that are beneficial to the right. When Tucker Carlson talks about QAnon. It's not to say, oh, my God, people shouldn't believe this. It's crazy town to think that there is a global conspiracy of media and political elites who are drinking the fluids of children and sexually molesting them. And soon Donald Trump is going to have all of those nefarious people executed. He doesn't say this is crazy. It doesn't make sense. He says, you have reason to question what's happening. And it's wrong for people to say,

QAnon is a conspiracy and is dangerous. Let's talk about the role that Fox News, a place I know nothing about for the record, plays in this. You know, we always talk about Tucker Carlson, and as well we should, because he has, you know, the largest viewership there, and it all kind of ends up with him. You talk about, and you mention this with the National Review Writers as well, he won't come out and say this was gay sex gone wrong. What he'll do is he'll pretend to give the viewers facts and then ask questions, questions. quote unquote, even though we already have the answers to those questions that completely rebut the phony narrative they're trying to help. And in this case, it was like they're obsessed with the glass pattern from where this guy broke into the home. And they're saying, well, if he broke in

from the outside, why is there glass on the outside? The glass would be on the inside. And that's easily rebutted and violates every law of physics known to man. But that's what they glom on to. Yeah. I mean, the sort of issue with this is that any new information that is introduced is always going to, in fact, become evidence that the conspiracy theory is right. We learn that the assailant has a couple of blogs that detail all of these right-wing conspiracy theories. By Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson is claiming that this is actually a little too convenient. It's like a liberal's fantasy of how right-wing conspiracy theorists think. The unanswered questions that have sort of moved around on the right rely on these little

miscommunications and faulty reporting that always happen in the early stages of a breaking news story like this. So one of them is that there was a reporter on Friday right after the attack was reported, who said that he had a source who said that the assailant had been in his underwear when the police got there. Now, that would have been weird, but it doesn't seem to have been true. And in fact, it was retracted by that same reporter within two hours of the initial report. That's because they got to him. Could be. But, I mean, this is the internet age. So what happens is the snippets of the article or the initial tweet saying that this happened have already gone all around the right-dwing conspiracy theory network and that impression has been set in their discourse and so you end up

with Donald Trump Jr. in a fairly disgusting moment posting a picture of a pair of tidy whiteies and a hammer and saying that for Halloween some people should dress up as the assailant and they're just really sick stuff but it's that sort of like like nitpicking the details while ignoring the very obvious broader picture, trying to get people sort of wound up about discrepancies that the end of the day don't really matter. There's this whole discussion about who opened the door when the police arrived on Friday in the early hours. And this spun out of a sort of miscommunication or sort of vague language that the police chief used in an interview, which got interpreted by some reporters as suggesting there was a third person in the home,

but there was subsequent clarification to explain, no, actually there were only two people in the home. And so at that point, it doesn't really matter who opened the door of the two of them, unless you really want to create as much paranoia about the broader story as possible. I mean, I think a key factor here is that Tucker Carlson is aware of the conspiracy theories that are swirling around this, he knows what his viewers are able to easily find

if they go looking for the answers to all of these questions. But rather than try to give his viewers the facts, what he's doing is creating as much skepticism as possible about the official storyline so that his viewers can then go off and get an alternative narrative from other people on the right.

Yeah, it's become unfortunately impossible to talk about this without getting to a question of, what the hell happened to Glenn Greenwald? Because he's out there, and that's exactly what he's doing, and he's out there tweeting, it reminded me of this specifically because of what you said, because what happened was,

I forget it was the police chief or whatever, said that the door was opened by an unknown person. And basically what he meant was, he wasn't sure if it was Paul Pelosi or DePape who opened the door, but this got sort of taken as, oh, there was a third person there. And Greenwald jumped all over this and used this as an example of, you know, one of the things we don't know, one of the things that hasn't been explained. And he gives it this veneer of, oh, so you're saying that we should always trust the official reports? And it's like,

well, no, no one is saying that. And it's usually the left that is saying, hey, stop believing everything the cops say, particularly right after something happens. But they sort of jump on that and And they go from there. And as you said, with Carlson knowing what he's doing, I have to think Greenwald knows what he's doing, too. I guess what I found baffling about this is that Greenwald made those comments on Tucker Carlson. Greenwald was personally the victim of a home invasion himself in which he was tied up. At least, that is what he has written. And I have no reason to doubt any of that.

it never occurred to me that maybe because Glenn Greenwald is a prominent person, I should scrutinize the blog post that he wrote about this terrible thing that happened to him. It's important to be skeptical, but like you need to have some line at which point it's important to be skeptical. It's important not to dive into conspiracy theories because you're constantly seeing dark forces working in the background. No, absolutely. And it's just it sucks what's happened to him. And of course, you know, Tucker Carlson himself also had an incident in which protesters showed up at his house. And he alleged they attempted to beat down his door and damaged it severely and that his wife had been cowering in a closet at the time. Right. And this was widely reported. And lots of people said that this was a terrible thing,

including myself, on social media after that. And, you know, it later turned out that the door hadn't been damaged. Some reporters did follow up on that. It didn't seem to be true. And there was other reporting from a reporter who had been present at the protest as well that poked holes in various aspects of this story. So, I mean, maybe Carlson is sort of speaking from personal experience about how some of these home invasion stories can be trumped up for political gain. Yeah. Just because I'm getting short on time, I want to move to some other stuff that you've written about. And one of the things that you've talked about is how people like Tucker and it's, you know, also elected officials like Ted Cruz, they're sort of

prepping their audience on the idea that if Republicans lose on Tuesday, particularly in certain places like, say, the Pennsylvania Senate race, that the only way that Oz can lose to Federman is if the election is rigged. You know, how bad is this getting? I am very worried about this. Honestly, I think we're seeing a lot of stuff that it's happening right now that is quite similar to what we saw. in the lead up to the 2020 election, except sort of on steroids, because they've had two years to prepare for efforts to try to subvert election results. And so right now, in Pennsylvania, you have people like Tucker Carlson saying that if Oz does not win, it means that the election has been stolen. He's saying the same thing in Arizona with Kerry Lake and sort of on down the

line. The impression Republicans and right-wing media figure, you're are trying to give is that the only possible explanation for any election results that go poorly for them is some sort of election fraud. They're using some pretty nonsensical claims to do it. There's a lot of discussion around Pennsylvania specifically and a report that the head election official there made saying that it could take days to get the results of the election. The reason it's going to take days to get the results of the election in Pennsylvania is that Republican legislators refused to pass a bill that would have allowed election officials to start opening and counting early ballots before election day. Instead, they cannot open the envelopes until,

I think, 7 a.m. on election day, and it just takes a long time to move hundreds of of thousands of ballots through the system. And so it's going to take a while. What Republicans learned from 2020 is that it is a effective strategy, at least amongst their own audience, to have politicians declare victory before the votes have been counted and is clear who was actually won, because it sort of gives you the initiatives. You had Trump declaring victory on election night in 2020. You had Dr. Oz during his primary, which was very, very close declaring victory before the election had been called by any other reputable sources. And so I think we could see something similar during the general election on Tuesday. Yeah, it's a great system where they can create it so that the counting has to go more slowly and then they can say, oh, the counting is taking so long, that must be because they're falsifying votes. just amazing how they create their own conditions for their conspiracy theories.

They create their own crises, yeah. Yeah. Matt, unfortunately, I'm at a time. I got to go. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. And hopefully we'll have you on again. Sounds great. Thank you so much. Josie Duffy Rice. Andy Levy. Who is your fuck-that guy for today? My fuck-that-guy for today is the ultimate fuck-that guy. His name is Bo Heines.

He is the Republican candidate for North Carolina's 13th congressional district. And he wants to, or he has suggested creating a community review process to determine whether survivors of rape and incest can get abortions. These are basically like rape panels. His belief is that if you have been raped, if you've been a victim of rape, if you've been a victim of incest, you should have to go in front of a group of people in your community. outside of the, quote, outside of the jurisdiction of the federal government, and tell them what happened to you, and then they get to decide what you do with your body, whether or not you have to

bring that child to term, whether or not you have the right to any bodily autonomy whatsoever. It is, I mean, it's dystopian, it is apocalyptic, and it just betrays an entire disregard for not just, you know, women's bodies and pregnant people's bodies, but the ability for those people to make choices. Why on earth would someone in the community be better equipped to know whether or not I should get an abortion than I am? They wouldn't? Right. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say they wouldn't. The amazing thing about this story to me is that this is a softening of his position on abortion because he has liberalized himself. This is his version of being. progressive because he used to just have a, you know, he used to just say no exceptions, no, you know,

and now, and now he's liberalized. It's just amazing to me that this could be you softening your stance. Totally. And it's just an example of, I mean, over the past few months, right, what we've heard from anti-choice Republicans has been mind-blowing, right? You hear people say, oh, it's a blessing for a 12-year-old to get pregnant by her father. You hear, you know, you hear, you hear, you know, you hear, people say things that they actually can't say out loud. I have to believe they can't say out loud and think, ooh, that doesn't sound good. And so they are, you know, trying to mitigate their position by stuff like rape panels. But it's just, this is the better position and it's still so horrifying. Look, I'm a guy, so I don't have to imagine this, but I'm just, I'm trying to imagine the most

horrible thing happening to you and then you having to go sit before a panel, which we know, is going to have a bunch of men on it. Right. I mean, like, imagine getting rape panel jury duty. Like, it just feels so nuts. God. Right? It just shows how deeply, deeply, it just shows how deeply, deeply warped this position is among

the right and how any kind of hope we had, and I guess we'll see after the midterms, but any kind of hope we had that, you know, Republicans would be kind of clawing their way back towards the center on this issue once they realized how morally complicated. their positions are, has kind of been diminished because we're actually just seeing people really stand by and further convince themselves that it's perfectly acceptable to ask a child who's been raped by their dad to carry a baby to term. They're at a point where they think that is a reasonable thing to ask. Yeah, fuck that guy. Yeah. Do you want to hear who my fuck that guy is? I would love to. My fuck that guy is a woman.

It is probably or possibly, maybe probably the next governor of Arizona. Oh, God. I know. It's Carrie Lake. She is out there crack and wise about Paul Pelosi being in the hospital with a fractured skull. This to her is apparently an incredibly funny thing. And she said she was talking about school security. and she was saying it's not impossible to protect our kids at school.

We act like it is. Nancy Pelosi, while she's got protection when she's in D.C. Apparently her house doesn't have a lot of protection, which. Oh, my gosh. And the crowd laughed. I mean, which is just the worst part of this is that the crowd fucking laughed at that. It's just insane where this party has gotten to. And then Wendy Rogers, who's a state senator in Arizona.

I don't know what's going on in Arizona these days. She tweeted out. a fake Amazon ad for something called a Paul Pelosi fake attack novelty item headpiece. Oh my gosh. It was a hammer with some blood on it that you could wear wrapped around your head. It had a little headband attached to it. And you could go as, I guess, you could go as Paul Pelosi for Halloween with a hammer in your head. It seems like even just five or six years ago, this is the kind of thing that would be in, like,

a Republican elected officials email inbox that they afford that they sent to their friends. And then it came out during a FOIA and they'd have to apologize. I mean, you know, it just feels particularly horrifying that they, it's so public and they are tweeting it and they are saying it. There's no even, this is funny to me, but let me keep that between friends. It is, this is funny and this helps me and I'm going to weaponize it. And then just the second thing I would say is that there's something about the Paul Pelosi thing that reminds me a little bit of the Kyle Rittenhouse situation in that with the Kyle Rittenhouse

situation at the very fundamentally we were talking about a child who committed murder or who killed someone. Whether or not you think it's justified or not, that is inherently sad to me, right? That like that's an inherently sad situation. And yet you have all these people calling him a hero and saying he should be president and cheering him on on the right. And it's sort of the Paul Pelosi thing. It's like we're talking about a guy, an elderly man. who was harmed. That's just inherently sad. Right. Like, what's wrong with you guys? Yeah. And as you said, you know, it does feel like six years ago, this was not something

you would make public, or if you did, you would have to apologize for it, and it would hurt you. And now, as you said, they have learned that this actually helps them. Stuff like this helps them, and that's the worst part of it. It's the crowd laughing when Carrie Lake cracks her joke. It's the fact that, you know, Wendy Rogers tweets out stuff like on a regular basis. And I don't see her going away anytime soon. And it's just, it has, everything has switched. And the things that used to hurt you correctly in the warped reality we live in,

now they help you. So fuck all these guys. You think about Gabby Giffords. If what happened to Gabby Giffords happened today, people would be gleeful about it. And they would blame Mark Kelly. It is just so remarkable how much their hatred for a party has just, made them devoid of so much of humanity. Yeah, and particularly like something with Gabby Giffords.

Like there were people, obviously, because they've always been depraved, you know, just sick people. But they were, they were fringe people. And like, they would be repudiated and they wouldn't just be repudiated by liberals or by Democrats. Like Republicans would get up and say, no, we condemn this attack. Now that's not the case. Now it's, you know, I haven't seen all that many Republicans just straight up condemning the attack on Paul Pelosi, and even the ones that have, like, sort of said it was bad, then sort of add something, they always put a caveat on it now. Yep, they kind of went backwards, you know? I mean, you saw all these good tweets at the beginning of, we're so sorry, and then you

have Ted Cruz retweeting whoever, you know, with these conspiracy theories. I mean, it's just, it's so craven. Fuck all these guys. Fuck all these guys, agreed. 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. See you next time.

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