The Daily Beast Podcast - Liz Cheney Is Ready to Follow Donald Trump to the Gates of Hell

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

The Jan. 6 hearing was everything it had to be, The New Abnormal co-hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Andy Levy agreed—and Republicans knew it. Liz Cheney, said Molly, in a conversation recorded just after the prime-time hearing ended, “is an extremely good speaker you can tell will follow Donald J. Trump to the gates of Hell.” So as the damning case was laid out, the MAGA set did their best to pretend it simply wasn’t happening. Plus: Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer talks about “why Democrats keep losing the messaging war,” his new book Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America and the “decades-long billionaire funded plan to build up an alternate information bubble,” and Ian Bremmer, author of The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – and Our Response – Will Change the World explains that there are four now: the pandemic, global climate change, “the proliferation of disruptive and dangerous technologies, and now you have the Russians invading Ukraine and a war in Europe.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart, conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down. And on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. What an excellent show we have today. First, we're going to talk to Dan Pfeiffer, who you of course know as co-host of Pod Save America,

and he's going to tell us all about his new book, Battling the Big Lie, how Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media are destroying America. Then we're going to talk to Ian Bremmer about his latest book, The Power of Crisis, how three threats in our response will change the world. But first, we stayed up late tonight to watch the January 6th trials, and we're going to tell you all about what we saw. Andy Levy. Molly Jongfest. It is 10 o'clock at night. We are discussing the hearing we just watched.

There was so much anxiety before it started. I mean, I was watching CNN. I was watching MSN. There was like this palpable anxiety. Like, will they be able to deliver? I certainly had it. I've written about this. I felt like they delivered.

Yeah, I did too. I thought they did a really, really good job. I thought the, I thought the, the opening was maybe not the best. But once it got, like Benny Thompson, I think is good. And I think he is gravitas when he speaks, but he's not the most exciting guy in the world. And I was kind of afraid, you know,

while he was talking, I was like, oh, God, just please let it not all be like this. You know, he did his intro, which was fine. And then he turned it over to Liz Cheney, who I was flabbergasted. Yeah, doesn't it hurt? It hurts. pains us so much

to admit this. Her father, right, was a terrifying warlord. I feel like we should be able to have a past to say nice things about Liz Cheney in this context, right? So like, I'm not saying she votes well.

She's a very conservative voter. I'm not saying I like her. I think her father is responsible for a lot of horror. She is extremely good speaker and she is You can tell that she will follow Donald J. Trump to the gates of hell. And she is ready to do it.

And you can, and you hear it when you listen to her on television. You hear a woman who is willing to follow that man to the gates of how. And I think that reads in a way that a lot of people, I mean, you know, you, in a lot of these hearings, you hear people who are just members of Congress. But here was a woman who is, you know, on fire to, crush this man and I think it stands out. It was absolutely compelling and the way she laid it out and, you know, and then intercutting it with the with the little sound bites and sometimes video clips of people like Bill Barr. I thought they was a really, really well done thing. A couple weeks

ago, I said that the one thing that really bug me about the committee was I thought that all of these, all of their hearing should have been televised so that people could see it. And so obviously I'm very glad that they did this. Yes, the unfortunate thing is the people who are most likely to watch this are not the people who need to watch this. But it's still important. It's important that this be on the record, the way the Watergate hearings are part of the historical record. Even if that's the only good that comes out of this, it's still important that this televised

portion was done. And I really did think that they acquitted themselves well. I thought, you know, the witnesses were fairly compelling. I mean, the police, the Capitol Police officer was very good. Yeah, I mean, the thing that I was struck by that I really enjoyed was they, you know, they did hours and hours of interviews with Ivanka and Jared. And they clipped a tiny, tiny, you know, probably between our number. and hour 10 when they got Jared to say why, you know, the

council kept whining that they were going to quit, right? Right. Right. Jared doesn't understand why somebody would quit just because you did something immoral or illegal. Just because they're morally offended. Yeah. Right. Right. I mean, just a fuck, you know, the guy was a fucking whiner, right? Yeah. So you had that moment, which was brilliant,

with his smug little face, you know, here's a guy who thinks he's too smart by half. Well, he's, I have, right? And then you had Princess Ivanka get up there and say, well, you know, I mean, it's like it really was like you saw that they didn't realize how stupid they were. And you had Ivanka say, you know, well, Bill Barr said that Daddy lost, so we assumed he lost. Yeah. I mean, I'm a little afraid that Tiffany might be number one daughter after tonight. Yeah, I think she might be out. But Jared, yeah, you could just picture, like, him having a conversation with someone who says, you know, I have to resign. This is, you know, what's going on is completely wrong. And just his face, Jared's face just going completely blank because he just, like the words don't make any sense to him. Like he knows what they mean individually. But when you put them together in a sentence like that, it's just like he has no concept of what you. you just said. It's such a foreign idea to him that, you know, someone might have a line

that they won't cross. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, no, I just, I thought, you know, the footage they showed was super powerful. And I honestly, I don't think I've seen any of it since, like, right around when it happened, because I just, you know, I don't watch a lot of TV news.

And, and obviously, on that day I was watching, and I saw it, and I didn't really feel any need to see it again. But they did are really, I know there was some footage that I guess we hadn't seen before, but regardless, it was really powerful. I don't understand. If you watch this with an open mind, there's no way to come out of this with any view other than this was an attempted coup and it was, at minimum, it was sparked by the president of the United States, Donald Trump. It's just, it's like, it's

beyond argument if you just want to look at the facts. Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, I just think, you know, what's funny is like I've watched the coup on television. I watch the violence as it was happening on CNN. And, you know, I was not at the Capitol that day. And like the people we've talked to who were at the Capitol and there's certainly, we talked to Congress people, we've talked to journalists, were all like deeply, deeply, like, scarred by the experience. And, but I, but I, you know, I had a terrible feeling watching it, like, you know, that kind of awful feeling. And I remember watching Jake Tapper sort of say that he had that awful feeling as it was unfolding. But watching the tape, I started thinking that I actually had that awful feeling again.

You know, like you forget just how tortured it is to, torturous it is to watch violence happen. Yeah, absolutely. And look, it's always going to be, I mean, obviously they, you know, they edited the video for time and whatever, which is obviously, obviously, You can't show hours and hours of footage. And it's going to be more powerful when it's edited. And it was. I mean, it really was. And of course, by edited, I don't mean fake as already some people on the right or like, oh, well, everything was edited.

Well, no shit, everything was edited. Again, you can't, you know, you could watch the whole thing live once already. This is going to be an edited package. But, man, it was just powerful and scary. You know, it just, it did. It brought back a lot. of the feelings from those days, which I think is important. And again, I see, I know the House GOP, whatever, tweeted old news or something dumb like that. And it's like, you know what? Maybe it is

old news, but it needs to, clearly you haven't learned from it. And it needs to be shown again and again until you get it through your fucking heads that you're a bunch of traders. Yeah. I mean, I also think they don't, they just don't, I mean, Republicans are just terrified of this because they know they just can't win it, right? Like there's no, you know, you have this video of Trump. You have the tweets, you have Trump saying to do it. You have, I mean, there's just no world in which you can win this as a Republican, right? The best you can do is say it's partisan because at least then your side decides like none of it matters. But it's indefensible. And that's why you can't, that's why. That's why. they just will do anything to keep, you know, to keep their side from watching it because they know that this is just not going to help them. And they, and, and, and, and you know, what suburban women don't want is insurrection. You know, that's not good for anyone. Right. Let me turn to the subject somewhere else for you guys.

I see some people are shocked how much the committee's targets seem to be Trump, uh, rather than the Republican party itself. What did you guys think of that ones? I mean, Trump was the one who told them to do it. I mean, I don't know how you could get like Mitch McConnell out of that. I mean, as much as I don't like him, I mean, I think if you're going to go for someone, it's got to be Trump, right? I mean, I'm curious because they, you know, Liz Cheney several times mentioned that, you know, in Monday's hearing, you're going to hear and stuff like that. So I have a feeling that maybe they're going to drill down and start, you know, talking about people like some of their co, you know, house members. And it felt to me like they needed to start with the big fish.

And if you're going to get, you know, the first two hours, if you're going to get two hours in prime time, you're not going to be talking about Marjorie Taylor Green. You're going to be talking about Donald Trump. So, you know, I think that was the way that they had to go. And so I'm fine with that. This is not, you know, this is two hours out of Mali, as you said, like hundreds and hundreds of hours of testimony and God knows how many hundreds of hours of investigatory work. So you're going to concentrate on the big fish. I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, Henry Hill. Henry Hill is, you know, fine, but it's Gambino that you.

want. I'm glad we could bring this back to New York City mobsters. It's what I was hoping to be able to do. Yeah, I mean, it definitely seems like, I also think it's worth, I was wondering about this, I actually wanted to bring this up, because I was thinking about the timing, and there's been a lot of criticism about the timing. Like, did they wait too long? You know, was it, I mean, they were, maybe wanted it to be close to the midterms. Is it too late now?

have people been hardened against it. And I was thinking about when we saw yesterday, there was some reporting that said Brad Raffensberger and Brian Kemp or maybe not Brian Kemp, but Raffensberger is definitely going to testify. And you'll remember Raffensberger won his primary. Right. And Kemp won their primary like last week.

And I wondered if there was some element, if that had played into the timing. Because if they had to, testified and then ran, they would never have won their primaries. Right. It's conjecture, but I mean, it would make sense that they would want to wait until their primaries were over. No, I think that's right.

I'm sort of, like, my sort of supposition here is, is this is the big summation. So I kind of feel like maybe they're near the end. Am I, do, am I, like, completely off base with that? Wait, what do you mean? Like, they're having, like, they're doing this now as sort of a way of saying, hey, we've done all this stuff and this is sort of like presenting it to the American people. Yeah, but I mean, I don't, I'm not sure you could have gotten Raffensberger to testify if he needed to run a primary.

Like, I'm wondering if like some of the way they were able to get him to testify. Oh, I said, I misunderstood. He's rebuking Trump, the Republican Party. And he's also sort of going. on the record. And I just wonder if they knew that if he testified before that, if they knew he would then not win his primary. And, you know, I mean, there are a lot of people who wanted him to win his primary, a lot of Republicans, because the, the Trumpy candidate, I mean, I'm not saying he's great by any sense of the imagination, but the Trumpy candidate is really bad. It's amazing how many times

we have to say that. Well, it's important to. No, I totally agree. It's just amazing. I mean, It's legitimately amazing how many different elections we have had to say, and we'll keep having to say, you know, not that this guy's good by any stretch of the imagination. He's just not quite as as QAnon or whatever. Right, right, right. But it is just, it's nuts how often, like, I feel like every episode one of us has to say that. So it's just bizarre. The line that Liz Cheney said that I think will stay with Republicans for a lot. long time and get them. And it's already, I've already seen a couple of Republicans tweet about how

furious they are about this line. Yeah. Uh, is there was a time when Donald, there, there is a time when Donald Trump will be gone, but your disgrace will remain. And that has absolutely, you know, tonight I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone. Your dishonor will remain. They're super furious and saying that it's hilarious, but I'm telling you, like, you know, there was a moment where they felt, you know, there's no world in which some of these, like, Republicans who know better didn't hear that and think, like, oh, yeah. Yeah, that was easily the line of the night. It was, I mean, it was actually the only one that I took a note on and wrote down because it was, it was, it was an

absolutely great line. And I thought about also how it, how it applies to so many people I used to work. work with. Speaking of apparently Laura Ingram is apoplectic about that line on air right now. I'm sure she is. I'm sure she is. Because she's one of the people. I mean, Liz Cheney was obviously talking to her fellow Republican Congress, men and women,

that really does just sum up how I feel about so many people at Fox News. And so it just really like sort of hit home with me. when she said that. Speaking of which, we should talk about how Fox and the counter-programming, I saw Marjorie Taylor Green, who talked all week about

counter-programming this. I couldn't get her live stream to work for 20 minutes. Oh, really? It's going really well, apparently, this counter-programming, but I thought what Fox was doing is pretty interesting.

What did you guys see there? So from what we understand, Fox did not, the Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, who featured prominently in the January 6th, whose text messages to Kaylee McEnany featured prominently during the January 6th hearing did not go to a commercial break in order to keep his audience from turning the channel to CNN, which I think it speaks to. I mean, again, it's this idea this is indefensible.

You cannot win. Like, it's like the gun violence stuff. They can't win so they're just trying to run down the clock. Like, they know it's a loser for them. so they're just like anything they can do that's not this. And yeah, so it's not super surprising though. Andy, when you were at Fox News, did they ever do something like that? I can't remember a time that something like, I mean, obviously there were times when you didn't go to commercial,

but that was generally when there was a big breaking news story, like, you know, a bombing or a shooting or, you know, Shep Smith doing a car chase. But no, I can't. remember a time ever as like counter programming to the actual news that they then went commercial free. And I know you said Hannity did it and he may have. I know Tucker definitely did it. Oh, Tucker did it. Right. Right. Tucker. The brain. Tucker's a lot smarter than Hannity. So that makes up. But the thing is, let's let's be honest about what this is. It's cowardice. It's rank cowardice all the way up the chain at Fox News, you know, whether it's, whether it's, whether it's the people like Tucker Carlson, or whether it's Suzanne Scott in the executive suite,

or quite frankly, whether it's the Murdox. And it's just a fear that their listeners might actually hear something that goes against the narrative that they put out their 24-7, 365. And they are so afraid of that that not only did they not show the hearing, but as you said, they went commercial free because they, God forbid, someone change a channel for five minutes and hear something that, you know, they have never heard before because all their news consumption is from Fox News and maybe some of the other right-wing echo chamber.

Do you want my hot take on that for just a minute before we're out of time? I actually think that Fox, that it's not quite that, that I think they know just like they did after the Trump election. they know that they will lose their audience if they tell the truth. And that's what we saw after the election, right? They were like not going to do the big lie. And their ratings started to go down. And the Trumpy people started to go to OAN and started to go to Newsmax.

And there was like a conscious moment where Fox decided they would, in fact, do the big lie because that's what their people wanted. So I mean, again, and I think. think this is true with Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson knows better, right? He's a smart guy. I mean, he's a good writer. He knows what he knows exactly what he's doing. Like, it's one of these things where they're getting the ratings for saying the lie and they're chasing the ratings. And, you know, Tucker Carlson has four million people watch his cable show. So, like, I think it's sort of a, I don't even think that it's like as intellectual as like, we can't let these people see the truth. I think it's that

they know that this is the way they keep their audience. But either way, it's cowardice. And that's really what I meant more than, look, I don't think anyone who watches Fox News 24-7 is going to watch five minutes of this hearing and have their mind change. That's not what I meant. I just meant that Fox doesn't want to lose those people. Fox knows that that's what their viewers want. And as any good news channel does, instead of reporting.

the truth, you report what your viewers want, that's, I think, the definition of news, or no, I'm being told it's not the definition of news. News is supposed to be reporting the truth. Yeah, I don't know where I got that idea. But I'm going to say like, it was a good night for Tiffany

Trump. Yes, I think that's the big takeaway. And Eric, too. Even Eric, they're rewriting the will as we speak. They are absolutely. They're absolutely. texting back and forth, just emoji after emoji and, you know, confetti, all those little.

Dan Pfeiffer is co-host of Pod Save America and author of Battling the Big Lie, how Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media are destroying America. Welcome to New Abnormal, Dan Pfeiffer. Well, thank you for having me. I think we should start by talking about the book. Great. I love that. Yes. Tell us about the book. Give us a little elevator pitch for the book.

Sure. So I decided to write this book after the 2020 election when I was trying to figure out how it was possible that Donald Trump almost won an election in the middle of a pandemic where he had screwed it up 100,000 Americans a diet. And it was sort of the culmination of 20 years on politics of trying to figure out why Democrats keep was in the messaging war. And then as I was thinking about the process of doing it, January 6 happened. And I saw the fact that in an election that was close, but not that much closer than 2016 or 2000, you know, where there was no evidence of any sort of fraud Republican election officials that said it was a legitimate election, the Trump judges had thrown out everything, millions and millions of people, huge majorities of Republicans believe the election was stolen against everything their eyes and ears should have told them.

And that to me sort of summed up the challenge for Democrats. is how do we communicate in our politics where that is possible? So I wanted to understand how that happened. And I came to realize that what happened on January 6th is the end result of a decades-long billionaire-funded plan to build up a alternative information bubble for consumers. The ability to give us up the weapons to make disinformation and propaganda their primary political strategy. Why do Democrats second messaging? By the way, I feel like that's going to be on my tombstone, right? Like, just, you know, why?

As I write this in the book, you have to separate two things. You have to separate the things that people say and then how they get people to hear what they're saying. I will say in the defense of Democrats, and that is really a very self-interest in defense of myself. I'm a former White House communications director. I've worked on multiple campaigns. I've been in, if the extent there's failures, they are partially in some way, my failures. The thing about this way, Democrats for all of our flaws have won the popular vote in all but one election since 1988. like we did just win the House, we did just win the Senate, we won the White House, not by as much as we thought, but we did win it.

And the country, in part because of the way we frame these issues, have been moving in our direction steadily for basically since 2006. The problem we have is not what we're saying. I'm not saying it's perfect. It absolutely needs to be better in the book. I think I refer to it as like a focus grouped version of an Ezra Klein column is sometimes what we sound like. And I say that with all the law forever, Ezra Klein. And I have this conversation all the time. Why did Democrats like messages?

why I'm the reason for the book is trying to focus on the fact that our bigger problem, is that what we're saying? It's that no one is hearing it. It is being drowned out by right-wing propaganda disinformation. And that is making sure that people don't know what Joe Biden has done, but also it's deciding what the right-wing has the power now to decide what the political conversation is about. Make big issues good for them and bad for us. That puts us on the defensive every time. Yeah. I mean, that is like the conversation are Democrats to, woke. Like, that is a Republican talking point. Right. We are on their terms having that conversation.

Right. I mean, nobody ever asked, like, are Republicans too racist? Right. Like, even if you take, like, we're having this huge conversation right now because the results in the primaries in California this week with the Sarasasco District Attorney and Rick Caruso in the L.A. mayor's race who ran on crime or Eric Adams. The whole conversation about our Democrats are doomed because they defund the police. Defund the police is a position pushed by activists for very good reasons, but it is not a position adopted by almost any elected Democrats anywhere in the country.

And huge swaths of the public think that Joe Biden supports defunding the police. Of all people, they think it. And they get to decide that. And we're not having a conference. We're not having to think of all the crazy things that Marjorie Taylor Green or Lauren Beaubair or anyone says, like there was a Tennessee state senator a few weeks ago

who said on the floor in the Tennessee State Capitol, that he wanted to burn the books that he wanted to ban. Imagine if a random Democrat had to that, Karin-Jamp here would be answering to that at the podium in the White House briefing room. And it just like passes by because we can't raise the salience of that issue because we don't have to make fun to do it. What about Representative Billy Long saying that women getting abortion is the reason for gun violence? The amount of things that have been said by Republican activists,

state legislators, members of Congress, since the Supreme Court hearing on Rochamon, Every one of those should tip an election, right? I mean, like, if you think about a very different media environment, you have the comments of Todd Aiken in Missouri about rape. You had comments from the Indiana candidate about rape that tipped elections. Now, they're saying things just that bad every day all the time, and they're able to push it aside by the sheer force of their messaging. So explain to me how exactly this works. Sure. So to explain how it works is you have to give it a little context, which is it became sort of a cardinal belief of the right after in the 50s and 60s that the reasons that conservative politicians were not waiting was the press was biased against them. This was Goldwater's huge thing. It's like it was the press's fault that he lost all about like two states, right? One large lives in history was because he had bad press coverage, not any other reason. And Roger Ailes was at the core of this when he went to work for Nixon is they began a process to do. do a couple things. The first was convince their voters to not trust the press. And this was important

because then you could do what Trump said in 2018, don't believe what you're seeing and you're reading. That's fake news. Believe what I tell you. And then, so now you don't have to worry about what the New York Times says or CNN or wherever it. And then step two is build an alternative place for them to go. That's Fox News. It was for a long time. And then when the internet came and particularly once Facebook reached sort of a level, a sort of tipping point of relevance in news and politics. It's bright bar, newsmax, free beacon, all of these places that. Gateway punt in. Gateway punt in. Like, you can go on and on. And what is interesting about almost all of them is they exist solely because a right-wing billionaire who wanted to win elections to help their bottom line gave them money to do it. With the exception of

like Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire, most of them are terrible money-losing businesses. Some of them or even registered as nonprofits. And the Republicans are smart. They realize that communications and messaging is information warfare. Too many Democrats think of it as public relations. And so this is a, they're not, these Republicans like the Mercer's or Dick Euline or Foster Fries, who recently passed away, all of them backed these ideas because they, they believed as an investment in politics, a way to shape the conversation.

Things are changing. There's more progressive interest in funding, progressive. media, but most progressives by Time Magazine, right? Right. Which is a worthwhile endeavor, but it's a different project. They want to be able to have a partisan media whose goal it is. It's not to push conservative ideas. It's to elect Republicans.

Like, here's an example of Fox. People think Fox is conservative, right? It is not conservative. It's Republican. Think about in 2012, right after, after Obama beat Romney, it became a cardinal belief among all of the Republican political operatives and funder class. The reason Romney lost was because he had a problem with the team.

So the way the problem was going to solve this problem was they were going to become pro-immigration. Fox News agreed with that. Rupert Murdoch came out for immigration reform. Sean Hannity came out for immigration reform. He supported it on his show. The quote-unquote news side of Fox was covering like in very positive, ways, like the efforts of Lindsay Graham and John McCain and Marco Rubio to work with Democrats. And the second they realized it was bad politics, they went right back to demagoguing immigrants

trying to create the incorrect impression that undocumented people commit crimes at a higher rate than the population during these incredibly disgusting stories about they found a prayer rug, you know, on the border as if a Muslim undocumented person is somehow more dangerous than someone else. Like, think of just what a weapon is that the White House calls the Trump White House or the Bush White House even, calls Fox News or one of these other people, and they know that there is someone whose goal it is to help them, someone with massive reach to help them achieve their political goals. I mean, even Roger Ayles wrote a memo at Dick Cheney's request about how to message 9-11.

That's how entwined they are. I mean, disturbing, but also slightly. Yeah, obvious, right? Of course he did. Fox News has just successfully become a messaging arm of the geopolitics. but it seems so obvious, and yet Democrats cannot get organized to counter it, right? There has been real resistance to radically rethinking how we communicate. I sort of call this the post-Facebook era.

I think Obama in 2008, and that was sort of the Internet era of campaigns. Facebook existed, but it was, and it was useful tool for organizing groups of people, particularly young people. but it was not a platform for news and politics like it was to become. In the internet period, Obama sort of rewrote the playbook about how you go about communicating. We were communicating directly to voters with videos, emails, all of these sorts of things that were brand new. And we created a direct channel such as you could in those days with your voters. Things changed dramatically in about 2014 because Facebook became so dominant that it sort of totally changed how people were getting.

their information to the point now where, I mean, think about this. Like, we are people, you and I are people who obsessive or Twitter, we're on Twitter, we get our news from Twitter. But 70% of Americans use Facebook. Half of those people use Facebook multiple, go multiple times a day, and 40% of them, 40% Facebook users use it, see it as a primary source of news. And if you go to Facebook, the dominant, dominant, I mean, it's a toxic successful of MAGA messaging.

Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, have exponentially larger reach and engagement than the New York Times have seen it. And that is not a good thing for where you don't want people getting their news. These aren't just Fox News viewers. These are people who go to Facebook who may be just like people not that engaged in politics or moderate or whatever else. They don't know they're opting into a right-wing media ecosystem. So one of the things we had Angelo from Media Matters on And he was saying that Ben Shapiro spends on Facebook ads. They spent $35,000 on ads surrounding the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial and their cringe ideas around it last month. They make a lot of money.

It is a very sophisticated understanding of how people get information, which is they understand how to gig the Facebook algorithm by what they do. It's called a boosted news program where you take a piece of content that you think will get a lot of engagement. But you can't fully depend on Facebook algorithm. algorithm to show it to people. It's much more efficient and less expensive than advertising on broadcast television. And so you show it to a bunch of people that Facebook believes are the people most likely to engage in their with this sort of content because they've engaged with it before. You can pick your audience based on things they like, things they're interested in, people who follow a certain page. And a lot of times what they do is they make sure that

liberals see their content because what they really want, it's the reason they write their headlines in the most trolless way is possible as a technique pioneered by Steve Bannon at Breitbart, is you write something that you know is going to trigger liberals because what are liberals going to do? What am I going to do? I'm going to comment about what a bunch of a-holes they are, or I'm going to tell them why they're wrong, or I'm going to show them by doing that red, angry face emoji. Right. But the thing is that Facebook shows the more engagement you get, the more people see the post. And they don't distinguish between thumbs up emoji and thumbs down emoji or truth or false. So they trigger us into giving them, they're hijacking our attention. We give it to them.

And then that post is now being shown to some of our people in our network who are not opting into that sort of content. And it's spreading like wildfire. So incredibly depressing. But also, just completely strange. What is your sort of prescription here? I mean, how do we get out of this? There's two steps to this. And I want to stipulate, and I say it in the book, there is, there are no easy answers here. We are decades behind. But there are some things we can be doing right now to narrow that gap. And I think we can sufficiently narrow it to be able to succeed, to prevent another January 6th, to succeed in 2024, et cetera. But the two things, the first thing is we have to build up a progressive megaphone. And that requires two things.

It requires progressive donors to invest in progressive content. And that can include media. It can include digital sites. You know, like there was a great thing that happened this past week where a group of progressives run by some very, very smart friends of mine just put together a media company and purchased a bunch of Spanish-Langus radio stations in Florida,

including the very conservative radio Mambi, I think it's called. It was a fount of right-wing Spanish-language disdhistoric. information in the 2020 election. We just had somebody come in and talk to us about how incredibly radicalizing that was in Florida. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's a thing that most reporters and Democratic operatives don't speak Spanish. So we just, it's happening and we have no idea. And so that, like that, so we need, we need funding to do it. The second thing is, is that Democratic politicians have to embrace and nurture the progressive media ecosystem like the Republican, Trump and the Republicans nurtured

the right-wing media ecosystem. Like Trump would try to get, using his Twitter feed, right-wing books on the bestseller list. Right, right, right. More people would read them, but then more people would get book deals to write right-wing books. A Trump tweet would generate massive traffic to like the Federalist or Gateway Pundit or something like that. And there is a real hesitancy among some Democrats to do something similar. They think they're going to get a bunch of crap from the mainstream press. If we engage with progressive media, won't count in like whatever in terms of, you know, whatever interviews Joe Biden does that are, you know, count as him engaging with the press. It doesn't count if it's

a progressive outlet. And so there's been this hesitancy. There are some who have been very good at embracing it. Bernie Sanders during his campaign was excellent at doing it. Elizabeth Warren has been very good. She is a positive America regular. And so she understands intuitively how it works. And so a lot of the younger Democrats are very, very good at it. And then this, the last thing is, And I think this is perhaps maybe the most important is we are, because we're not going to create a liberal Fox News anytime soon or we're going to be able to change the Facebook algorithm to be better for Democratic or progressive content. The one thing I've been, I've been screaming about this for a long time. I've screened about it for so long I said to write a book about it is we have the millions and millions and millions of people who we have like the Democrats have a grassroots army. It is awesome, right?

In the middle of a pandemic, their text banking, their phone calling strangers at all hours. any five free minutes they're texting people. And we should keep asking people to do that. That's obviously very important. But what if we turn that army of telemarketers into an army of messengers? We gave them, each person has on average about 150 to 200 contacts. That can be Facebook friends, phone numbers in your phone, Instagram. What if we gave those people the tools to go out and spread the message, right?

People get some out, why won't the press not cover Joe Biden? Biden's economic accomplishments. It's like, what if instead of a complaint about the press, we just shared information about Joe Biden's economic accomplishments with our network? And there is some good news on this front. The DNC, who gets so much crap all the time, actually launched a really, really smart program pretty recently in last couple weeks, using an app called Greenfly where you can download it, and they will give you content.

And the reason why this is so important is there are a bunch of research has been done, which shows that the amount of faith and trust that people put into it. to information. It's not based on where the particular news stories. It's not based on the outlet that news came from. It doesn't matter if it's the Wall Street Journal or Fox News or NBC or whatever is. What matters is who shared that piece? Is it someone they trust? And so if we get people sharing content with people who trust them who may not be, they may not be involved in politics at all, they may be, you know, quote unquote, swing voters, whatever else. But like that is this huge opportunity for us that we are only scratching the surface of. And I think if we could do that

strategically and at scale, it would be a huge, it would be a game changer for progressive messaging. So my last question for you is, I have long thought that President Biden and Obama too and Democrats in general, they should all do their own Twitter, that one of the things people loved about Trump, it might be the only thing anyone ever liked about him, was that they felt that he was doing his own Twitter and they could sort of communicate with them. And you see this. with like Elon Musk, people like to feel that they have a chance to really engage with the actual person and not the person's person's person secretary. You know what I mean? And I just wonder what you think of that. I agree with the premise. Like Trump obviously a historic liar,

incredibly dishonest, but he is an authentic, an authentic asshole, but he's authentic. And you saw that like, Well, I mean, it's not even that he's authentic. It's more that, like, he is actually tweeting. Right. And, like, the things that he is saying, the things he's tweeting, they're him. Right. Well, he's typing the little things. And, like, he was, like, retweeting, like, maga girl hates Jews, one, two, three.

Yeah. I mean, there are some upsides and the downsides to giving him access to his own Twitter account. You know, I think it's hard for me to imagine that Joe Biden is going to feel super comfortable just like mixing it up on Twitter like Elon must does and Trump did because you can only communicate like what I think the White House should do and we and we're and they're fine like Biden's going to be on Jimmy Kimmel this week. Right. But is you need to find ways to communicate with people where they can see who you are and take the full measure of you. For Trump, that was Twitter. That was a medium that he could authentically communicate it. We're going to have to

find ways for Biden to do that. Obama did that in a bunch of like direct video stuff, doing lots of comedy things, like being on those late night shows was something he was very good at. You know, doing a lot of sports stuff like the bracket or things where people could relate to them and sort of it sand some of the caricature off.

And so it is, Twitter, I don't know that Twitter will be the right thing. I think probably our next Democratic nominee will probably be someone who tweets to themselves because they will be someone who came up using that medium in their career. Yeah. You know, like there's just this difference between people who went back when they were normal people before they became politicians

actually used these tools, right? Like, it was a huge strategic advantage for Obama in 2008 that only a few years prior who had been a normal person who used email and the internet and YouTube like a normal person, right? But he was also a once-in-a-lifetime politician. I mean, yeah, thank you so much. Please come back. Thank you.

I will. Ian Bremmer is the author of The Power of Crisis, How Three Threats and Our Response Will Change the World. Welcome to the new abnormal, Ian. Yeah, I was used to the old abnormal, frankly, but I'm ready. I'm ready for this. We're here today talking about your book, The Power of Crisis. When did you start this book?

What crisis were we in the middle of when you started this book? Oh, we were at the beginning of the pandemic. Yeah, we were just locked down, and it felt like if you can't write a book when you're locked down, when can you write a book? Yeah, I managed to not write a book. a book then. So I want to talk to you about it's such a good title and we are in so many different crises. So your thesis is actually sort of hopeful. Explain to us a little bit. Well, you know, if you've been reading me for the last decade plus, my books have not been hopeful. My books have

all been about how various parts of our global architecture isn't fit for purpose, how we're heading into a geopolitical recession. I write about a GZ. or a non-polar order that is very problematic to lead to international peace. I write about the end of the free market, the rise of state capitalism, and how we're going to have a hybrid economic system that's harder to align and grow. A hybrid economic system? Explain that a little more, will you? Well, that when the world's largest economy is no longer a free market, but is rather,

or whether it's badly or poorly run, but as China and as state capitalist, then you no longer have a global free market. Then you have a hybrid system where governments are key in some and corporates are free and others. And it's obviously, it's much less efficient. And it's one of the reasons why globalization is sort of starting to fragment. And then Us versus Them was a similar sort of book looking at the rise of anti-establishment trends and populism and democracies all over the world. So all of these books have written in various ways, if you're touching different parts of the elephant, of how the global order is falling apart. And this book basically takes as its starting point, okay, well, we're in this geopolitical recession. And that means that you're going to get

all sorts of global crises, but in those crises are the seeds of the next more functional global order. And so let's look at that. And that makes this by definition, a much more hopeful book. Tell us about the crisis. So really there are war three and now there's four. You've got the pandemic that we've all been living through for the last two plus years. You have global climate change. You have the proliferation of disruptive and dangerous technologies. And now you have the Russians invading Ukraine and a war in Europe. And I mean, all four of these are crises with truly global implications and manifestations, all of which, you know, sort of put to question, do we have institutions that are capable of responding to these challenges? And if we don't, then how are we going to

reform or recreate them? But climate seems like, in my mind anyway, much worse than all the rest of them. Sorry about that. That's okay. But because climate is everywhere, right? I mean, the temperature goes up. That's everything. It's flooding. It's weather. it's heat, it's people, I mean, you know, it's the grid. I mean, it just ends up being everything, whereas like, you know, I mean, it just seems like out of the sort of the largest of them. Do you agree? Interestingly, I probably don't. I certainly agree with the way you just described climate in the sense that, I mean, it's the first, you know, sort of crisis at scale that not only has the ability to wipe humanity off the planet,

but also to affect the nature of the planet that we're on. Every other crisis that we've ever manifested, you know, has kind of been irrelevant to the Earth. This is the first one that isn't. I mean, except nukes. Well, even there, you know, you kind of talk about the ability of the planet to, you know, I guess that's true of climate change too. So yes, World War III definitely brings you there.

thinking about that. That's not in the context of the book I'm not talking about World War 3 and I don't think you should be. But I do think that the disruptive technologies that are presently exploding, whether you're talking about quantum computing or advanced, you know, sort of autonomous lethal drones or cyber, you know, offensive capabilities, frankly, as they grow, have the ability to be an even more existential question for the future of humanity on the planet. But I agree that you're talking about two very, very existential and global crises that we have to respond to. And climate's been, it's easier to say climate's a big deal because it's been with us for a long time. And we're finally accepting that it is, you know, of the scale that it

truly is where, you know, frankly, the explosion of disruptive technologies is a crisis of that scale that most people don't really take on board yet. You're still kind of a bit of an activist yelling about saving the whales and hugging the trees the way that, you know, climate types were 20, 30 years ago. Okay. So explain to us how we can sort of come together and give me a good example of your thesis here. Let me give you two quick examples because, you know, the funny thing is The pandemic isn't a great one. But I'll be obvious why it's not a great one in a moment. So the Russia crisis, which comes about just as I'm finishing the book, is in many ways

a great crisis. And because you have this NATO that is said to be obsolete and brain dead and the West that's divided and Biden, as people say he's weak and Merkel's gone and Macron's going his own way. And Putin sees an opportunity and says, I can go in, I can take these bastards out. I can get rid of Zelensky. I can integrate Ukraine into a new Russian empire. And they're not going to do a damn thing to me. And as it turned out, he was really wrong. And his invasion was a massive misjudgment. And it was a misjudgment because, frankly, it gave the West the impulse to actually strengthen their institutions and respond collectively in a way that not only is a lesson for Russia,

but even as a lesson for China as we think about Taiwan and has the potential to allow us to build stronger and more durable institutions. Now, why was that a good lesson? I would argue two reasons. First is Russia invades and everyone in the West is on one side. There is not a pro-Putin side. You have to go to Tucker Carlson to find someone who's pro-Putin in the West at this point. And secondly, the farther the crisis goes, the more our priors are confirmed, the more everybody learns, wow, this is a really bad guy. Wow, he's engaged in war crimes. Wow, the Ukrainians are really sympathetic and they're fighting courageously and they deserve our support. Literally, every day this war goes on has only led people to take it more seriously.

Climate change turns out to have both of those two things in place as well. That in 2022, there's only one side of the issue that 195 countries get together. We all agree there's 1.2 centigrade degree of climate change that's so already happened on the planet. And so there's no other side to be on. You can say that you don't want to spend a lot of money on it, but you know that it's happening. Right. And it's happening because of humanity. And furthermore, every day that goes on, we're only learning more and more about how serious this crisis is and how we have to take more action, because it's not just affecting the whales. It's affecting California and Louisiana and Italy and Australia and all that.

So I think that those are two examples of how you have these institutions and you have this leadership that's eroding and listless and is not up to the task of responding to challenges. Clearly, all we do is we sit every day with our unwee and our anxiety. And suddenly a crisis comes along and it turns out. it's big enough that it forces us to do something. And I do see that with both climate and with Russia. Yeah. I mean, Russia certainly seems like the Russia case,

but that was so unusual in a way because, you know, we had seen the pandemic was just sort of a lot of blaming. And then, you know, yes, there were some countries did this, some countries did that. In America, we just killed everyone. And we've had more than a million people dead. And I'm not making light of that. I'm more just describing it.

But ultimately, vaccines came. They came in a lot, most, many of them made in America through some of whom were made by immigrants in America, but with, you know, with European, with the German backers, whatever, but American company. But I'm talking about bio and tech. Biotech, yeah. I see what you're saying, that that was ultimately not a success of a kind of global world because it really wasn't.

But Russia really was. But I was sort of shocked by how much it was. Like, I thought it was unusual. The pandemic, of course, was to begin with in the sense that the United States did come together in the early months. I mean, Operation Warpspeed was a tremendous success. Dr. Fauci, before he became this political pinata, was someone that was revered and listened to every day.

And we hung on every war, Democrats and Republicans and Republicans. and Republicans didn't matter. We were worried. And in the early days, Pelosi and Mnuchin got together for trillions of dollars of support and not just for the fat cats, not just for the elites, but for regular Americans to make sure we could get through this crisis so much so that there was a V-shaped recovery in the United States that vastly outstripped what the economists thought you'd be able to do. But the interesting thing, unlike climate, unlike Russia, the pandemic goes on.

and suddenly it's not that big of a deal. Right, right. Right, because a lot of Americans, well, we got vaccines, and it doesn't really affect young and healthy people. It's only really old people that already have preexisting conditions, so we don't care that much. And meanwhile, in China, they've locked down. They see that it's not working out in America and Europe,

and they're saying, you see, we know how to do this. And so screw those Americans and Europeans, we understand that if you lock down track and trace, we have the model. And of course, they get overconfident. It doesn't work for them either. So it's a very different path of crisis that unfortunately means we don't take advantage of it at all. And coming out of the pandemic, the U.S. is more dysfunctional and politically divided because of the crisis.

And U.S.-China relations are worse and less trusted because of the crisis. Where Europe, Europe actually is more functional and more unified because of the pandemic. They actually took advantage of the same damn crisis to say we need to ensure that Europe doesn't fall apart. We saw how close we came to it before. We're not going to let that happen again. But Europe's economy is in less good shape than the United States, even though Fox News would not let you see that. Their inflation is about the same. Their growth, of course, is historically less and is less now. They're much more vulnerable to Russia, of course, because of the geography and the trade. But the point was that when the pandemic hit, the Europeans did a Marshall Plan

and actually redistributed mass of wealth from the wealthy European countries to the poor European countries, exactly what they didn't do during the Grexit crisis, what they didn't do during the Eurozone crisis. And that meant that all of those Eurosceptics in the South and East of Europe that were saying the EU is no good increasingly are committed to the European Union. So there's more political stability and function in the EU today than there was before the pandemic. And it's because of the pandemic. And also in some part because of Brexit, right? Yes.

I think Brexit made a difference. I think that Brexit was a disaster. Will you explain that to listeners? It's a disaster for the British, but ultimately good for the EU in a weird way. I mean, bad for the EU economically because it obviously has caused a lot of friction in terms of trade and availability of labor and efficiency. But, I mean, precisely because the Brits said that Brexit was going to be great, They were going to have this much more robust, independent,

you know, sort of opportunity for global Britain. And, of course, it became very hard to do new trade deals for an independent UK. And meanwhile, the UK lost all of the access they had to the largest common market in the world. And that meant a lot of corporations and a lot of jobs decided that the UK wasn't so exciting for them. And it's meant that going forward, projections of UK economic growth are a hell of a lot worse. because of Brexit. And yes, the EU, I think, recognizes that they have a good thing going, especially in an environment where global leadership is so questionable, where international peace and harmony is not what you want it to be. And then on top of that, you lose the peace dividend for 30

years. You can't just rely on, let's do an energy deal with the Russians because they're closest and their cheapest. We've got a war going on on our eastern border. So again, the EU, more important, not less. Well, and also NATO, right? I mean, this has been like the biggest win for NATO since, I mean, the 50s, the 60s, right? Absolutely. NATO is both much stronger. It has a purpose.

It's much more broadly committed and consolidated. It's about to expand to include Finland and Sweden, which no one would have expected before February 24th. The Madrid summit coming up in a few weeks will include Asian. allies. I mean, the last 10 years, everyone that talked about the U.S. foreign policy said it was either you focus on Europe or the Middle East or you pivot to Asia, but you can't do both. Increasingly, America's allies around the world, at least the advanced industrial democracies, all recognize they're on the same side. They're fighting the same fight and they're more consolidated. So there's an actual,

there's a real chance for NATO to expand, to meaningfully include America's Asian allies, too. So I want to get back to the book, but I have lots of questions for my own adification. Talk to me about the sort of your fantasy of how this goes down with climate. I wouldn't say, I get you. I mean, not say fantasy, but your hope. Look, in a sense, we're already there. And what I mean by that is the biggest problem in a world that is as divided as ours is, driven by algorithms and polarization and fake news and disinformation, is that people, they don't accept even the parameters of the problem. So, I mean, you've got a kid, the kid's having problem at school. Is it, you know, because you just got

divorced or is it because the kid has an emotional problem that requires pharmacology? Like, what is it? If you can't agree on that, you're probably not going to do much good for the kid. And we are in an environment on climate change where everyone agrees what the problem is. And so even though the United States and China do not trust each other, don't work together, If the Chinese invest a lot in solar and electric vehicles, supply chain, in wind, in nuclear, the Americans say, well, we better start investing a lot. And if we don't, the Chinese are going to take over the post-carbon energy space. The fact that we define the problem in the same way means even when there's competition,

there's virtuous competition, as opposed to vicious competition. Also, you have all of these actors outside of Beijing. in Washington that are themselves making a difference. So when Trump becomes president, he pulls the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord, you think that's going to be disaster? No, it turns out it doesn't matter because Mike Bloomberg and a bunch of CEOs and a bunch of bankers and governors and mayors across the country are still committed

to doing everything possible to adapting to a transition to renewable energy. The Europeans are doing a lot more than the Americans, and that's okay. it's all moving the needle faster. I mean, all of this is happening so quickly that we now expect that we are on a pathway of between 1.5 and 2.5 degrees centigrade warming before we hit net zero, before, in other words, there's a reduction in carbon in the atmosphere and you start to turn it around. That's still an enormously wide gap that you can fit tens of trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of lives into.

So it matters that you don't pretend, hey, we did what we need to do. Now we can move on to the next thing. Of course not. But the fact is that activists five, 10, 20 years ago were credibly saying we're going to hit four or five, six degrees centigrade of warming. We're not on a path to that now. We're actually, we've already moved much farther than one could expect. So, I mean, frankly, the optimistic component of let's use this crisis to force the world to

create the kind of institutions and architecture that will work for 21st century, we are already meaningfully on the way to doing that. Now, I can say all sorts of additional things I think we need to do to ensure that we don't slow down to make sure that, for example, energy prices are higher now. I'm super interested in this. And gee, I hope you're right, because this is the first interview we've ever had where something has ended on an optimistic note. And it's literally the first time this has ever happened. I thought, oh my God. So listen, I will be so thrilled if we're not all underwater in 10 years. So I really, this actually cheered me a great deal, which almost never happens. Ian, I hope you'll come back. I'm a fundamentally upbeat person. Sure,

I'm happy to come back. Okay, good. Thank you, Ian. Andy Levy. Molly Jongfest. Who is your, fuck that guy? Fuck, that guy is a member of the United States House of Representatives over in Washington in the District of Columbia. He is the House Minority Whip. He is Republican Steve Scalise. And he is very upset that there have been a lot of mass shootings lately. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that he's all that upset about the actual mass shootings. He's more upset about the idea that there might be some kind of, you know, gun legislation enacted. And he used an interesting analogy because he said that after 9-11, he said there wasn't a

conversation about banning airplanes. And okay, I mean, Lauren Bolbert said the same stupid thing, ignoring the fact that they're two completely different things. The skies were shut down for a couple of days after 9-11. I'm trying to imagine Steve Scalise's reaction if every time there was a mass shooting, we said, okay, we got to close gun stores for a couple of days. First of all, gun stores would never be open. That would be the easiest way to get rid of gun stores because it's always within two days of a

mass shooting. He would have been outraged that there was this kind of attempt at controlling gun sales. So he probably shouldn't use 9-11 as an analogy. also he shouldn't use it because anyone who flew before 9-11 and post-9-11 knows how much different the experience has been. Well, and also he was shot. Well, there's that too. You would think. I mean, he's a victim of gun violence.

I know, you would think. But look, I can't even get into that aspect of it. But I just stopped comparing it to 9-11 because 9-11 changed a lot of things in this country. And if you're sitting there basically not wanting things to change after gun violence, you shouldn't compare it to what we did after 9-11 because if we did for guns what we did for air travel after 9-11 there'd be a lot fewer mass shootings so he gets my fuck that guy for today my fuck that guy i don't i don't think i've ever had her before she now blocks me on twitter and i block her which is probably better that way her name is christina pshaw and she is

the press secretary of one Ron DeSantis. And I have to say, like, I am profoundly not a Ron DeSantis fan. I mean, profoundly. No. Like, his, the things he has passed have been completely deranged. But I always wanted to think of him as a little bit less. I actually think he's much worse than Trump. But any chance I had to think of him as a normal.

political was completely obliterated by Christina Prasaw, who goes after everyone who ever tweets anything about him in a completely strange and maniacal way. But that is not why she is my fuck that guy, though she did complain that many people who were journalists were secretly taking money. You saw that tweet, right, where she said that they were secretly taking money from, you know, lobbying for foreign government. Well, it turns out you're going to be shocked to hear this, but Prusha, a year into her tenure as DeSantis' press secretary, she actually was a registered for an agent for the Republic of Georgia. In case you're wondering, not a great democracy in which America would like to model itself after she worked in Georgia. according to her LinkedIn profile, she joins the governor's office in 2021, but has already really made a splash. And now as a registered foreign agent, I mean, should people who are registered foreign agents be working in the United States government? Not that Florida is the United States, but something to think about.

Yeah, it's not a good look, as the kids say. That's right. 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. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens?

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