The Daily Beast Podcast - Josh Hawley Is On Verge of Being ‘Senator from QAnon’

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

Josh Hawley is attacking Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and is using the word “pedophilia” to do it. Naturally, The New Abnormal hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Andy Levy have choice words, and a new title, for him. Also on this episode: NBC News political analyst Susan Del Percio has a very scary midterm prediction involving Jim Jordan and Danielle Carnival, head of Biden’s White House Cancer Moonshot program, breaks down how exactly her team plans to meet the president’s goal of decreasing cancer by 50% in 25 years. 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 objective. 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. What an interesting show we have. Susan Del Persio, a MSNBC political analyst and Republican strategist, will talk to us about what she's seeing driving them in terms. Then we'll talk to Dr. Danielle Cardable. The White House's Cancer Moonshot Coordinator in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will tell us about their initiative. But first, let's have some fun.

Andy Levy. Molly John Fast. Today is a day of a lot of very, I want to say, hideous Republican grandstanding. Is that fair? Yeah, I just don't know how that, you know, why is today different from any other day, as my forefathers said.

Yes. Today, we listen to Republicans' grandstand as it's the first day of Senate hearings for Biden's Supreme Court Justice, Justice Jackson. She's one of the most qualified judges. She's been a public defender. She's been a circuit court. She's been a this.

She's been of that. She's very, very, very, very seasoned and had a ton of experience. And so Republicans are going to attack her as much as humanly possible. Well, yeah, especially for the one part of her resume that you mentioned that they really don't like. and that's the fact that she was a public defender. And I think would be the first prior public defender to sit on the Supreme Court, which would be a really, really nice change. They do what they do, and they got your Josh Hawley's who are saying she's soft on child pornographers.

We knew this was coming. Holly laid this out in the last week or so that this was going to be his big line of attack. Yes, he's been trying to smear her. with us. Not surprisingly, it collapses under its own weight if you take a single, you know, hard look at it. But they don't care. I mean, it's just the idea that we have to treat Josh Hawley as if he's some kind of man of principle. That he's not acting in bad faith. And the whole weekend, we saw lots and lots of smears about, you know, not being a tough enough sentencer on child pornography as a way to get at Judge Brown. I think what's interesting about this line of attack

is like clearly, like with so many very coordinated right-wing attacks, they couldn't find anything else, right? So they had to rule on her, you know, they had to attack her for her rulings, which as you know, anyone who's been a judge has rulings. I mean, it's like having been a pundit. You're going to have bad takes. You're going to have rulings that might not, you know, looked at 10, 15 years later may not stand up or not even stand up under scrutiny, but maybe the times have changed or maybe the circumstances have changed. So they couldn't even find something to attack her on that was her. It was a ruling.

So I think that's a really important thing to mention. And I mean, this is the thing that strikes me is in this piece in the Times this morning, there's a really good piece about her and how she went to Harvard. She went to Harvard Law School. She was extremely focused on social justice, but she was also a very focused student. And when her friends wanted to protest this Confederate flag hanging in Harvard, and her friends wanted to protest it, and she said she didn't want to miss her classes, she wanted to protest it, but she thought that it was important that they kept their grades up, too, because the idea of this white supremacy is to make it so that these women can't succeed, right? So they're trying to undermine their academic careers with the racism. So I thought that was a really good and smart point, and it shows that she is both, extremely smart, extremely driven, and also focused in a good way. So what was interesting in that article was there was a comment from one of the worst senators, Roger Wicker. So Wicker of Mississippi called it an irony that the Supreme Court was hearing cases challenging affirmative action while adding someone who is a beneficiary of this sort of quota. Again, I would just like to say to Roger Wicker, and we're not even in, fuck that guy, but you mediocre white guy think,

thinking that you're not the beneficiary of the system. Think about how hard she's fucking worked, and you think you're not the beneficiary of a system set up to advance you, Roger Wicker? I mean, go fuck yourself. Yeah, no, it's, I mean, look, it's the same people who are saying, like, well, it's not fair that Biden said he was going to appoint a black woman

because that limits the potential pool, as if the potential pool hadn't been limited for hundreds of years to white men. They refused to see the island. and the truth behind the history of this country, to be quite frank about it, that has, you know, favored white men from its inception. And they just, like, the minute that starts to change, I think in the back of their minds, they know, because that's why they get scared. And in the back of their minds, they know that if all people had been given the equal opportunity to

succeed, they would not be there. Would not be there right now. It's always the same thing. And it's, I mean, And Holly at this point is like he's on the verge of becoming the senator from QAnon. Right. Well, that was the goal. So that that discourse, him reading all those sentencing can be used by Q&N people. I mean, whether or not he consciously knows it, talking about pedophilia sentencing is only a dog whistle to one group. Oh, absolutely. Holly absolutely knows that.

And he's, you know, I don't think he's uncomfortable at all with being quoted by. by Q and on. I mean, this is the guy that gave the, you know, the power fist sign to the January 6th. Insurrectionists, I guess, yeah. So, look, he knows what he's doing. He also knows he's polling at, like, 0% for a 24 bid for president, and he's clearly not happy about that. So the idea that we have to pretend he's a good faith actor is the, is the worst part of all of this. Like, well, we don't. By that, I mean that, like, you know, C-SPAN has to sit there and cover him saying these stupid, stupid things because he was elected to the Senate, so we have to pretend that his opinion is meaningful and somehow principled when everyone knows it's not. And honestly, I would prefer at least Ted Cruz

during his little portion of the hearing plugged his podcast and showed us where his future lies. And, you know, I will at least give him credit for that. At least he's, it's a little more honest. Is that the first Supreme Court hearing ever where a senator has plugged their podcast? I'm not going to bother the fact check without just say yes. I can't think of another one. Imagine you're a U.S. senator, but you have a real job, which is area podcaster. Right.

Which, by the way, is a very difficult and challenging and rewarding job. Ain't that the fucking truth? I'm not going to sit here and pretend otherwise. It's way more important than being a United States senator. I mean, after all, there are 10,000 of us area podcasters, but only 100 senators. But yes, delightful. After Cruz did that, I put up a tweet of Cruz like reading a blue apron ad during the hearing, which whatever, but a guy named Joshua Clyde saying, use promo code Cancun, which I thought was really funny.

So I just wanted to give him a little mention. Wait, Ted Cruz went to Princeton with the Menendez brothers. I saw that. There we go. It must have been awful, but it still doesn't excuse what they did. Yeah, I saw someone tweet. What I love to is that he's the person that everybody discusses how bad he was in college. It's like, you went there with those guys?

I mean, I don't know if you guys heard Rush Ron Johnson complaining about dark money groups. I talked about this last week, but really this is in my craw. We're sort of encouraged not to say people on the right are morons because it alienates them and also because it's elitist and whatever. But like hard to see how Ron Johnson, he's sandwiched right before Sheldon White House. We know Sheldon White House is obsessed with dark money groups and is quite a bit smarter than Ron Johnson on Ron Johnson's absolutely best day. And so Ron Johnson starts complaining about dark money in politics. And then, I mean, I don't know any dark money group that goes, you spend years and years working as a public defender, but okay. And Sheldon White House just picks it up and is like, oh, yeah, you want to talk about dark money?

And he just goes right into the federalist society, like a layup. That's as big of a buck you as you can possibly get. Oh, my God. The other thing I love that they're doing with her is that they talk about, you know, well, she'd have to recuse herself from affirmative action cases. because as if Clarence Thomas isn't sitting on the court. Ruling on his wife. Ruling on arguments and, you know, hearing arguments from groups that his wife supports. And like he hasn't done it hundreds and hundreds of times, but they have no problem with that.

But suddenly she can't rule on affirmative action cases because they think she was a beneficiary of affirmative action, which whether she is or not, she can still rule on affirmative action cases. That's just absolutely absurd. Yeah, it's fucking bullshit. But the other thing, Ted Cruz asking her if she likes beer, I just want to go back here for a second to remember Justice Keg stand. He was the one who said, I just like beer. He was the one who made that so crazy. Again, there were allegations, numerous allegations, and women came forward. Republicans now like to pretend that those allegations were discredited.

They never were. Republicans decided they didn't care. Just like what happened with Clarence Thomas. There were allegations. Anita Hill was never discredited. I mean, they just decided like, well, whatever, we don't care. It's a woman. I mean, that's what happened here.

You know, now Republicans are like the discredited allegations against Kavanaugh, no baby. And, you know, they're like, they just came after Kavanaugh because he was Republican. Democrats didn't come after Gorsuch. Speaking of Republicans being horrible during hearings, the midterm plan for the House Republicans is Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. It's Benghazi on steroids. It's going to be Jim Jordan sitting there yelling at Dr. Anthony Fauci about why he can't take apple flavored Ivermectin and why no one will give him the lupus medicine that he longs for to treat COVID and how dare Anthony Fauci say that masking works.

and it's going to be the worst fucking two years of all of our lives. Yeah, no, it is. I mean, it's not out of the realm of possibility that there will be like a House Committee on Defense where Marjorie Taylor Green will be looking into Jewish space lasers. Oh, yeah, no question. Either why we don't have them or why we do have them, depending on what day of the week it is, I guess. And if they've caused fires. Right.

There's like a two-headed strategy here, and the first head has kind of failed. And the first head was, this was to sort of neuter the January 6th committee, right? It was like, well, if you guys do this, then we're going to do this. We're going to come back with all these hearings. On most days, I'm not giving Nancy Pelosi a lot of credit, but to her credit and to the House leadership's credit, they said, be our fucking guest. We're doing this. And, you know, at least so far, the January 6th committee has turned out to be a pleasant surprise,

you know, in how hard they're going. That's kind of failed. but the second head is just that they want to do these anyway. Now they portray it as revenge for the January 6th committee and stuff like that. And this is why I give, for once, I give Pelosi credit because Democrats usually cave when it comes to stuff like this. And then it turns out not to matter anyway. Like a typical thing in the past would be Republicans would say, if you do this and we're going to do that. And Democrats would say, okay, then we won't do this.

And then Republicans would do that anyway. So at least for once, the Democrats were like, you know what? We know you're going to do this anyway, so we're going ahead. That's what these guys do. This is all theater. And Hillary Clinton sat for 10 million hours. People have said this before, and I really think this is true. Democrats don't have to be the good guys.

Like, first of all, I mean, what Democrats are doing and what Republicans are doing are not the same, right? Like Republicans tried to undermine the election. They did a coup. It didn't work, but they had fake electorates. They had, you know, there's reporting today. we just saw that Mark Meadows may have been on the January 6th planning call. There's a witness that places him there. Like, clearly, these people are not doing good stuff here.

Like, this is crimey stuff. This is not seeing why the State Department money didn't get to where it should have gotten. This is, like, full-on, like, criminal activity. And so Democrats need to do what's right and not worry about reciprocity. And besides which Republicans are going to do. go after them anyway. Yeah. And even like Benghazi is a perfect example, because there were failures there and Americans

died. To me, that's a legitimate thing for a congressional committee to look into. But that's not what the Benghazi committees looked into. Because the sad truth is, the Republicans didn't really care that Americans died in Benghazi. What they cared about was trying to use it against Hillary Clinton,

who basically had absolutely nothing to do with it. So they turned it into a complete circus instead. They showed themselves for what they are. And that is, they are not people who gave one shit about the Americans who died in Benghazi, they didn't care at all. That was pure politics. And you could tell it was pure politics by the way they went about it. Whereas I will give the Democrats credit. They are going for, they are actually looking for the truth on the January 6th year. And again, like it astounds me when I give almost unreserved credit

to Democrats in Congress. I almost never do it because they almost never deserve it. But this is the one case where they're actually showing, and look, that doesn't mean it's not to their political advantage to do it. It is. But they're also doing what they should be doing. They are, as you said, Molly, they're looking into crimes and they're looking into what happened and they're trying to get to the bottom of what happened. And they're not making it into a side show about some Democratic secretary of state who they have not liked for 30 years and just want revenge on. Because of whitewater. Yeah, exactly. I'm not Hillary Clinton's biggest. And maybe the heart attack gun. Well, there is the heart attack gun, yeah.

Here's my nightmare. It's not even my nightmare. It's like I foresee a ivermectin hearing starring Dr. Oz, Diamond and Silk, Congressman, Ronnie Jackson. And I think that that hearing will probably be led by Marjorie Taylor Green or possibly Lauren Bopard. It's an honorable introduction by podcaster Joe Rogan since we're now mentioning them. There's no question that they then call Joe Rogan and suck up to him the whole time to try to get on the show. I know we're going to get a hearing on safety in college sports led by Jim Jordan.

I just know it. Oh, yeah. No question. Because irony is dead. Susan Del Perseo is an MSNBC political analyst and a Republican strategist. Welcome to the new abnormal. Susan DePersio. Oh, it's so great to be here.

I'm so excited for my first appearance. I was excited to talk to you because I feel like you've advised both Democrats and Republicans. You're sort of bipartisan before bipartisan was cool. Well, it kind of comes out of also, like, believing that government can work and in good governance. Back in the day, when people got involved in politics, it was because you believed in a certain principle idea that you wanted to elect these people to implement them. And now it's just a gig, I feel like, on both sides of the aisle, frankly. I'm watching these hearings today. It's hard not to talk about. It does seem to me, and again, I could be wrong, that a lot of these senators, largely on the

Republican side, I don't know if this is as true when it's a Republican nominee, but it strikes me that there's a lot of grandstanding going on. Yeah. The last several, Nominees or hearings, I should say, have definitely been all about grandstanding. And I think, you know, the Republicans definitely own the ugliness of it, but the Democrats have also done their fair share on Republican nominees. But that's the shame of it. I mean, do you remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 98 Senate votes? The Senate hearings on Supreme Court justices have become so partisan, and it's not just about, is the person fit to serve? Do they have the qualifications? Because if that was it, we would have seen both sides of the aisle people flying through.

But like you said earlier, right now it's the Republicans. They use it as a stage to tout there right now, especially Republicans, BS. I'm just so sick of listening to some of these people spew such ugliness. This isn't about a judicial philosophy. There are still some moments of bipartisanship. And I want to talk to you about last week, the Senate passed. a daylight savings time bill. You know, I guess that's good, right?

I mean, who knows? I'm a morning person, so I don't like that the sun is going to rise at 9 a.m. But I think they meant standard time. Like, here's the funny thing. I wondered about that, too. I think they totally screwed up. I think they meant standard time. I think this was like, oh, it sounds really good.

And daylight savings time is what people are familiar with. So, like, yay, let's just do it. Because we can. Right. I don't know. I mean, they did pass it, though. I mean, it was like something of another era. I certainly think that both parties got us to this gridlock, though Republicans are obstructionists in a way that Democrats can't dream of being.

In my mind, I wish they were more like that because I feel like they get their lunch eaten. But I do think this bill just sort of cruised. by. Yeah, I really think, like, it must have come in with, like, the lunch order, like, check it here if you're for it, along with your, like, salad or soup question. That's the most sense. No one paid attention to it because I guarantee you're going to hear a lot of people complaining about it when it starts to be implemented in a year's time. So it's, and by the way, you know, to the gridlock issue, I think the difference is, is that when Democrats were definitely part of the gridlock, they at least had an,

interest in governing. Republicans don't want to do anything. They just want to stop things. Democrats, at least they wanted something. And they could tell you where they disagreed and what they wanted to move forward. And maybe they never got past go, but at least you know what they stood. Republicans are just like, nope, Biden likes it. Nope. Pelosi likes it. No way. And that's it. Yeah. It's sort of a strange dichotomy. And still, a lot of these people are friends with each other. I think that we see a lot less of that, frankly, because A, members are forced to spend more time in their home districts because of that whole issue that, you know, came up probably about 10, you know, more with the Tea Party movement, you had those members of Congress sleeping in their office. And it became cool again to live in your district. I mean, there are some, if you remember Joe Crowley, one of the reasons he lost to AOC in a primary was because he never spent time in the district. He lived and raised his children in D.C. Yeah. But the one thing about the Ukraine crisis and the war in Ukraine is that there is a sense of unity among the lawmakers in recognizing this is a fight for democracy.

Republicans may not like it at home, but boy, do they believe in it overseas, which I guess is a start. Right. Can we talk about this for a minute? Because as much as the Russian invasion of Ukraine is in my mind, like pretty much one of the worst things I've ever seen in my life. Like every day is just horrendous children, mothers. Every day is carnage of the worst variety. And it just absolutely destroys me. But there is a sense in which America has and even Republicans. They remembered that they like democracy. They remembered they like democracy.

But, you know, here's one thing I found interesting. Pew came out with a poll last week. And it said 85% of Americans support the sanctions in arming Ukraine. but only 47% approved of Joe Biden's handling of the Ukraine crisis. Right. It's right. We kind of like it in what it represents, but at home we're still as divided as ever. Yeah, that's crazy. I loathe to compare this to the Gulf War because it's very different for any number of reasons of which, one, is that America's, they're supplying, but they're not fighting.

Even during that time, Bush had incredibly high approval rate. I mean, there was a brief moment where Bush's approval ratings were like in the 80s, went up to the 90s. I mean, it was like a week, but, I mean, it happened. Yeah, and I think we see whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, when you're the president, your numbers are somewhere between 42 and 48%. Like, it's just blanked in. Those are the floors in the ceilings because people are so dug in now. even amid a crisis.

I feel like there's equal chances that Putin accidentally blows up something NATO and we end up in some kind of horrible conflict as there are that Putin just changes his mind. You know what I mean? I don't. I mean, I think it's impossible to predict. But more in the sense of like, the country's so dug in, right? The two sides are so dug in. There's not a lot of movement to the middle, if anything.

And I think this is, you know, Republicans are passing permitless carry. they're going after. Abortion is an issue, right, where most Americans believe in some kind of freedom of choice for women, right? Where that is, we don't know, but it's a large percentage of Americans agree that women should be able to end their own pregnancies. And yet, Republicans are moving further and further to the right on that. Where do you think this goes as a country? I think we stay in this pattern for a while. Unfortunately, not that we weren't polarized before, but that The harm that Donald Trump has done to this country is tremendous because you would have seen Republicans working with a Democrat administration, House and Senate on certain issues, especially, and this is the one that just, I think, shell shocked me and I think surprised the heck out of Biden when he came into office was the COVID relief bill. Like if there's at the time, over 500,000 Americans dead and you can't agree on the COVID relief Bill, you can't get any bipartisan support. That just shows me how broken we are. Because at that point,

Republicans and Democrats were spending money, like, you know, out of nowhere. And I was actually okay with it, even though I'm a fiscal conservative, because we didn't know what we needed, but we knew people needed help. Now, I mean, if you're not willing to do that over the death of 500,000 Americans, I don't know where you start to see it, except for when, you know, the former guy is no longer relevant. And I think that's going to take another, at least two to six years. It is interesting, though. I mean, I do think there's more of a shift than a lot of the pundit class is admitting. Like, I'm seeing more and more, I was just talking to someone who was at a rally or trucker rally, and they were saying, the people don't say they support Trump.

They say they support Trumpism. I don't know what's scary or what the heck is. Well, I mean, it's worse. Yes. Trumpism also. is horrible. Trumpism is basically all of the worst attributes of Trump, but it does show that his grip is loosening on the party, whatever that means. Right, which is equally scary because I think that's what Trump was so afraid of and why he tries to stay in front of the crowd so much.

Those crowds of people will continue to search for someone. If it's not Trump, they'll find someone else and who will carry that water for them and who will continue to hold the hate. I don't think it's all the Republican Party. I do think it's the deep base of it that wants that leadership of hatred and racism, frankly. It's going to take some time to cycle out because one of the things, and I hate admitting that the Trump campaign did anything right, but one of the things they did very well after the win in 2016 is they went to every Republican state committee, every single one, even in New York, you know, the bluest of blue. And they basically pack their people in into those positions, those nominating positions,

which I think after a cycle of people losing, they will start to peter out. But it's that group, and I think we're going to talk about what's going to happen in the midterms a little bit, that will elect or nominate, be responsible for nominating their primary candidates. And if the Trumpiest of Trump candidates win in swing districts, that may be. the only hope that Democrats have of holding on to the House. Let us talk about the midterms. I liked hope of holding onto the House. Because as we were talking about earlier, Andy and I were talking about how if the Democrats

lose the House, it's going to be Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. And like, you're going to have Jim Jordan holding hearings from everything from women's sports to Ivermectin. So tell me what you think, how you see a possible chance that Democrats could hold the House. I know history is against the Democrats holding the House, but I was trying to figure out a way if there was any way to turn that tide. And I don't see one anymore, especially when I see where independents are on various state and national polls. The independents have drastically turned against the Democrats, like nobody's business. I mean, even in New York, only 24% of independence support the Democratic governor.

That's crazy. Think about that. 24% of independence. The Democrats are hemorrhaging. I think it was because they made an initial mistake of thinking they had a mandate and a progressive mandate at that, that they really lost a lot of independence overbill back better. The only hope I can think of is that you have these, you know, Trumpy, Trumpkin-type candidates that win primaries and lose in general elections.

Right. But, Molly, let me give you one scary thought, ready? Yeah. Oh, no. So you almost, if the Republicans are going to take back the House, you have to hope it's by a large number. Why? Because if it's a small number, the Marjorie Chaleigh and the Jim Jordans and all those,

especially like that 10 to 15, like, disgusting, crazy people that are in the house right now, they will have influence. They will have a lot more influence because they won't have, the Republicans won't have a big enough majority to kind of push them away. Oh, so if it's tight. Yeah. So if it's going to happen for the sake of governance, you have to hope it's a big enough number that gives McCarthy some wiggle room to actually trying to achieve one or two things. I'm not sure that McCarthy would stand up to those people anyway. I mean, he has a chance right now, and he hasn't. Well, he's not Speaker yet.

I think he's pinning all hopes. By the way, I'm not convinced that if the Republicans take back the House that Donald Trump will support McCarthy getting the speakership. Right. No, I don't think so either. And, I mean, you've got Mo Brooks saying that Mitch McConnell is bad today. So clearly, there's going to be the Trump. wimpy wing versus the more establishment, but still, I think, how we got here. The win for Republicans would be based on a huge sweep on swing districts.

Right. Well, except of the swing districts that still exist after gerrymandering. I mean, a lot of the districts are now even more baked in than they were before. Yes, but again, I think that we're, I think you're going to see a lot of upsets in the house in some of these seats because of independence. I think you're going to see a lot of one-term Republican members of Congress because they can win in this one redistricting year with the numbers so bad, but I don't think they hold it in a presidential, for example. Right. Whatever happens here does not necessarily reflect what will happen in 2024. No, not at all. There certainly is Republican infighting.

If you're seeing these Trumpy Republicans go after Mitch McConnell, and Mitch McConnell, and Mitch McConnell really is, like, is a master at the Senate. I mean, I'm no fan, but like, the man has done a lot of stuff. What kind of loyalty do you think they have to McCarthy? At the end of the day, you're going to see Mitch McConnell is just fine. I think he wants it for like one year if he could become leader again. That's all he wants. He just wants to go out on that. I don't think he'd spend two more years in the Senate if that happened. But the thing that's very interesting about the way he rules the Senate McConnell is that he kept his 50 in tow this whole year. He knows how to be a minority leader and have an impact. Whereas McCarthy is just Chick-a- running around without a head. He just has no sense of what's up, down, sideways, any which way, because he doesn't have a lead. And he also, you know, to be fair, being a minority or majority leader of your party is kind of like hurting cats. But McCarthy is especially bad at it. Yeah. And I mean, and I think a lot of that is driven by his own anxiety that they're going to find someone Trump beard to replace him. I mean, I don't know what it's driven by, but there's

Certainly that is in play. This was so interesting. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. This was great. Dr. Danielle Cardable is the White House Cancer Moonshot Coordinator in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Welcome to the new abnormal, Danielle. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so excited to talk to you about this. So let's talk about the Cancer Moonshot because it's just so many parts. Yeah. How did you? get to head this project? Oh, well, that might be a longer story than we have time for. The short version is I got my PhD in neuroscience and then committed myself to working in government on policy to make kind of the research side of what we do in healthcare and the delivery of that even better. And I ended up working for then Vice President Biden as part of the Cancer Moonshot when it

was launched in 2016. Because of the personal commitment and experience he had, I was just so moved by the vision he had for really taking on this challenge. As soon as he asked me to come back and do it again, I went running back to the White House for him. So explain to us what the Cancer Moonshot is. It had a clear mission to accelerate, double the rate of progress for everything that touches someone facing a cancer diagnosis. So anything we can do to drive new treatments, to reach people with better care, we spent the last year of the Obama Biden administration working on that. And this time around, the reason I am even more excited to be back is when the president reignited the cancer moonshot in February, along with the vice president and the

First Lady, he set new goals. So what he said was, okay, this is a presidential priority. It's personal for me. It's personal for nearly every American, but there's real progress we can make. And so we set goals to decrease by at least 50 percent, the death rate by cancer over the next 25 years and to improve the experience of people and their families and caregivers living with and surviving cancer. He's talked a lot about ending cancer as we know it. And we took that literally and said, well, let's define how we know cancer. And that ended up being along seven pillars. And that gives us a shared agenda to not just say we have a 25-year goal, but to make progress

now that matters for Americans. So let's talk about your cancer cabinet. Can you explain to our listeners what that is? Yeah. So one of the first things that the president did when he reignited the cancer moonshot was say, I need a whole of government approach. This is about research. It's about driving new ways to prevent, detect, and treat cancer, but it's also about reaching more Americans with the tools we have.

And so it's not just the Department of Health and Human Services that has a huge role to play here, but everyone from the Department of Energy that has supercomputing capabilities that can drive research faster, the USDA, which can focus on nutrition and prevention, EPA, and many others. And so what the Cancer Cabinet is is the government's way of bringing the leadership from across the executive branch together to say, all right, let's do all of the things that our agencies can individually to make progress towards these goals. But let's actually work together and with this opportunity and the leadership from this president to find new things we can only do in collaboration. Some of this is kind of government agencies being able to interact with each other better, right? Absolutely. Can you explain a little bit about what that means? Yeah. Like I said, we set out these seven pillars, everything from getting cancer screening and early detection to more Americans, finding new effective ways to prevent cancer, better supporting people through a diagnosis, learning from more patients, addressing inequities. There are things that each cabinet agency and department across government has within their purview to make progress on those. But what we're really looking at is if we bring HHS, DoD, and the VA, Department of Veterans Affairs together, can we set up a trial network faster and to reach more people that will give us answers on, for example, new blood tests to detect cancer, many detect multiple types of cancer early?

I mentioned briefly the Department of Energy Supercomputing Power. Are there questions, research questions that the National Cancer Institute is asking about disparities, that we can't kind of see the pattern. We can't see the result. But if we had enough data, the supercomputing power at the Department of Energy could find new patterns, could find new clues. USDA, think about all that they could bring to bear on prevention. Well, if we partner them with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under HHS,

that's already doing a lot of public health work, what more could we do to reach people with the tools they need to prevent cancer or detect it early? So a criticism that you guys have gotten, and it's hard to think of a criticism like it's such an important thing to be doing. And also the goal is to reduce cancer death by 50% over the next quarter century, which definitely seems like ambitious, but not impossible, right? That's right. I mean, we will need new tools to prevent detect and treat cancer. And like I said, reach more Americans with those tools. But it is doable if we put this whole of government effort together.

The other part, Molly, that I want to mention is when the president set this out, he created these pillars so that we in the government and those in the oncology community, private businesses, health providers, patient advocacy organizations could have a shared agenda. And he asked all of them to step up too. So there's ways for folks to get involved, not just telling us how to do what we're doing better, which we welcome, but being a part of making progress together on this. A criticism is that there isn't enough focus on prevention in the moonshot. Can you explain to us what your take on that is? Yeah, I'm not sure where that's coming from. As I said, the way we defined the pillars that we're focusing on is how we know cancer today. We recognize that we don't do enough to prevent cancer today.

But the president set a goal to change that. Can you talk to us about vaccines? Because one of your pillars is vaccines, right? Within the prevention pillar, one of the best tools we have is vaccines. For example, the HPV vaccine that exists today can nearly eliminate cervical cancer if we had boys and girls getting this vaccine across the country. It also prevents types of head and neck cancer. And there's other vaccines that are already in development that we're really excited about, either for prevention or in the early treatment of disease that can make a big difference for people facing cancer. Have an mRNA vaccine sort of opened the door to some exciting,

cancer vaccines? Yeah, as you can imagine, there were already scientists and researchers looking at this, like they were for vaccines for viral infections, like we've figured out for COVID-19. It's kind of accelerated those because once something is proven, that door is wider open. So, for example, there's already trials being done in the realm of HIV and in cancer using this technology for vaccines for those for those diseases. Are there things in this package because it's a very large proposal with lots? Are you saying ending cancer as we know it is a large umbrella? Well, I think what's good is that your goals are when they're more explained are actually ambitious but achievable. But I'm curious, tell our listeners something we don't know that is hopeful. Thing one, because I'm a

scientist and always enthralled by new advancements and what we're learning, And it's also kind of what pulled the president in the direction of really believing that we can do something here. When you talk to researchers or go to the conferences and see how far we've come, especially with some of these immunotherapies that use our own immune system to fight cancer, our understanding of genetics and the genome of the cancer cells themselves that are involved, we are now able to target therapies for some types of cancer in some individuals. And what I'm really excited about is we're at a time where we have those tools. And now we're just trying to find as many places as we can apply them as possible. We don't know the extent yet to

the impact that those advancements that we already have are going to make. And then the other thing I'm excited about is the president has put across the administration a strong emphasis on health equity, on equity broadly and in the area of health equity. And it allows us to ask the questions differently and to really take on some of the public health, some of the health care system issues that we haven't challenged ourselves or been able to take on and to use cancer as a kind of lens to do it. We learned a lot from the pandemic in those areas and really opening up and saying it is not acceptable that people have different outcomes based on who they are, or where they live or what their background or their ability to access care is, and we want to change that.

That's totally fascinating. How is it going? Well, a month in, we are off to a good start. Last week, we had the first cancer cabinet meeting, which both the president and the first lady attended, like I said, with leadership across the administration, putting their priorities out there. And so what we're going to turn that into is what the actual specific agenda looks like for this body for 2022 going forward. And we already announced some new actions. So the NCI said, we want to make sure that the research workforce of the future looks like more of America. And we know that has an impact on the type of research they do and the outcomes they have. So they announced a new Cancer Moonshot Scholars Program. FDI is looking at regulations around tobacco and menthol and flavored

cigarette. So I think we've hit the ground running, but as you said, it is a big challenge. We think we've set an ambitious but achievable goal, but there's a long road ahead of us to get there. Yeah. I mean, for sure. It's exciting because especially there's a lot going on, but it is ultimately many different diseases, right? That's right. And we're, I mean, the president is very clear-eyed about that. But what we believe is between what we can do from the federal government and what folks outside of government can do, we can chip away along these ways that we know cancer and really make a difference for Americans. And use that as a way to show that together we can make progress on other things as well. You know, the president is ever the optimist. So he always turns to that.

Yes, this is a big goal around cancer. But it also shows what happens when we all work together and make a difference for people's lives. Thank you so much for coming on and thank you so much for talking to me. Of course, thanks for the interest and the questions. 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 in the first to listen to Fever Dreams, new podcasts from the Daily Beast tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday hosts Swin Subisang and Will Summer, checking in on the movement

of the Radical Right. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts or your favorite podcast player to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's Fever Dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. Andy? Molly?

Let me hear who the person is who really irritates you today. The thing is, we've talked about a lot of them already. So I'll add one in who we didn't mention earlier. And that is the longtime ally, as he has been described of former President Donald Trump, a guy named Roger Stone, who has been around since literally the Stone Age. And he, over the weekend, was talking about the Russia-Ukraine invasion. He claimed that Russia, in fact, invaded Ukraine for purely defensive reasons. And he said,

quote, Ukraine is not even remotely about what they're telling us. Ukraine is about the fact that Ukrainians have used their soil to place dual-launch missile pads, missiles that would be aimed at the Soviet Union. There are, in fact, biolabs there funded by our tax dollars cooking up. Who knows what pestilence to dump on the Russian people. Putin is acting defensively. He's not acting offensively, but you won't read that in the mainstream media. And you won't hear it any place but real America's voice, which is who he was talking to real America's voice.

We don't need to go into the fact that everything he said was completely wrong. What we are seeing, though, and I want to bring up someone else in this context, a woman named Cassandra McDonald. She writes for Gateway Pundit and is the editor of Tim Poole's little organization, Timcast. You used to be called Cassandra Fairbanks. Yes. And she tweeted, I officially end the quote, I don't support Putin but pretext charade.

I don't give a fuck. I like Putin better than Zalibank. At least you know who Putin is. Zelensky is a shifty little shit weasel. She should just say Jew. Well, she could have, but I guess she didn't feel like getting banned from Twitter on that particular day. But this is where we are now. We're sort of, we're getting to the point where it's becoming, like nobody who knew Cassandra

McDonald believed her little, I don't support Putin but charade anyway. We all know that these people support Putin. The big question is, do they support him because? he's racist and they like that? Or do they support him because they are in some way benefiting? We don't know. We don't know. But even if they're not directly benefiting, they are supporting him because he's an authoritarian and they love authoritarian. And we saw that with Trump. And he's a racist and they love racist. And he's a racist and they love racist. In the same way Donald Trump loved Putin, a lot of Donald Trump supporters love Putin. And it's all for the same reasons.

You know, so they're going to come out here and they're going to make up lies and they're going to talk about biolab theories that have been debunked before they even came up. And just for all of those reasons and more, fuck all these guys. I could not more heartily agree with you. Do you want to know who my fuck that guy is? Jesse, do we have time? I'm kidding, of course. Molly, I am dying to find out who your FTG is.

This is an interesting case in the fact that it's so incredibly Trumpy. And so there was a governor of Missouri named Eric Grightens. He sucks. He's violent. He kidnapped a woman and took pictures of her and did all sorts of stuff that is legal in a normal state. He then resigned because he had some shred of – I wouldn't even give him the credit. He resigned probably because he was pushed to resign. And then because it's Trump world, the members of Trump world were like, you resigning just for a few little crimes?

It wasn't even against someone. It was against a woman. And so they brought him back. And now he is the GOP Senate, Missouri frontrunner. One of the children came home from a visit with Eric in November 2019 with a swollen face, bleeding gums, and a loose tooth. He said dad had hit him. However, Eric said they were roughhousing and it had been an accident. The tooth later died and had to be removed.

This is from an ex-wife, right? This is the first wife, I think, and this is allegations. And she also has allegations that he abused her, too. Again, this is besides the story of him kidnapping this woman and the photos and that happened. That's a separate other story about this guy. So I don't know how this goes. He's a frontrunner. They're still a primary.

but, you know, he could end up being the GOP candidate. As opposed to the gun couple guy. Yeah, the gun couple guy is not doing so well. But there's another candidate who Josh Hawley, the worst person in the world, endorsed, who was called Vicki Hartzler. But there are a couple of other candidates. But I think Mark McCluskey, the St. Louis attorney who was most famous for branching a gun, had people walking by his house.

That guy is also running. I mean, the Republican pool is really something. It really is. My God. 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, politics and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media.

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