The Daily Beast Podcast - MAGA Leaders Use L.A. Fires to Push More Flaming ‘Bulls**t’

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

Republicans have jumped on the opportunity to weaponize coverage of the devastating greater Los Angeles wildfires into political divisiveness, says The New Abnormal co-hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy. “We have seen many people on the right, including Donald Trump Jr. Blaming this somehow on the fact that we've given money to Ukraine,” said Levy. Plus, New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac discusses Mark Zuckerberg’s overhaul of Meta's fact-checking system, and author Adrian Carrasquillo discusses how the media might cover the incoming presidential administration’s promised mass deportations. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac joins us to discuss Mark Zuckerberg's controversial overhaul of meta's content management approach and what that signals about Silicon Valley's shifting politics. Then, Adrian Carasquillo, author of The Huddled Mass's newsletter, is here to talk about his recent piece at the bulwark. The media isn't ready for Trump's mass deportation moment. All about how the media's narrow focus ignores the deeper realities of the potential. potential humanitarian crisis of an aggressive deportation policy. But first, let's have some fun. Danielle, I think before we start this episode, we need to wish a happy birthday to our fearless producer, Jesse Cannon, aka Talcan.

How dare you? Misinformation being spread of this podcast. It was actually his birthday on Wednesday. I remembered that. I don't think you did, Danielle, but that's fine. Wow. That's amazing. I'm sure he doesn't care or hold a grudge or, you know.

It doesn't matter because everyone knows that he loves me most. It's true, but this is the fight I'm constantly fighting. And this is why I didn't tell you yesterday that it was his birthday. The sabotage. Yeah. So, anyway, happy birthday, Jesse. Happy birthday, Jesse. Thanks, guys.

And now to the bad news. Yes, which is everything. Which is everything. but we'll start in Los Angeles where just absolutely horrific fires ravaging L.A. County. And I mean, look, I lived there for 10 years. I have a lot of friends out there. And I know L.A. now goes through these wildfires every summer. That's right. Usually it's the summer, not January. Thanks, climate change. But this one is off the charts, ridiculous. And I think this is the first time I have a lot of friends who are packed and ready to evacuate. Some have evacuated already.

and just in talking to them over the last couple days, there's a marked difference between how this one is being treated as opposed to the other ones, which I guess weren't as close to L.A. proper as we're seeing now. It's just absolutely horrific. Just everyone in L.A., please stay as safe as possible. And if you need to leave, do it. No property is worth your life.

You know, I have several friends as well that are in L.A. LA and have sent pictures from their front door who are not immediately, as of as of yesterday, we're not immediately in the affected area, like meaning that the area that they are in was not on fire. But the plumes of smoke look like something out of World War Z or some type of just, I mean, it looks insane. I looked on my phone this morning to see what the air quality was in L.A. and it was at like 164, which is like basically shut your doors, put up tape around the windows, do not go outside. Danger. I often go back to one of my favorite books, which is Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. And particularly now, because her 1993 novel starts out in her, home town where she was born in Altadena, February 1st, 2025. And the main character, Laura Alamina, says, there are wildfires everywhere. Another fire has just broke out. And the story when is about the ravages of climate change in this New World America. She wrote this book

30 years ago. And when asked before her death in around 2000, about her predictions, she said, I'm not a prophet. I'm just looking at what's being ignored and then projecting 30 years into the future. And it's like, my God, we've known and have been told about what could happen. And now it's here. And the ravages of this fire last year was the fire in Hawaii that like took down an entire town. You're talking about the fire in L.A. that has the firefighters are battling against category two winds of a hurricane and fire on the ground. I mean, you can't make this shit up. And what I continue to say is that this is not an act of God. This is an act of greed. This is an act of capitalism. This is what it looks like when you have people that billionaires hoarding resources and then selling the

selling, you know, creating the problems and then selling the solutions back to us. It is unthinkable and unimaginable that everything could be lost in the blink of an eye. And the last thing I'll say is that someone had posted on social, I think it was on blue sky, and they said, we have to understand that the only difference between us and a refugee at this moment is luck. That's it. And I think that that is something that, like, should sit with us because we keep watching these things on our phones until they are going to be at our doorstep. Yeah, for sure.

I think at least the one good thing that's come out of this is that Republicans have been right there looking to help and looking to, yeah, I can't even do it. Unfortunately, I was thinking, how nice would it be to have only had to talk about these fires in terms of, wishing people safety and stuff like that and not having to be quote unquote political about it. But unfortunately, that is not the world or the country we live in. And what we have seen over the last four or five days, however many days it's been, is just an unbelievable level of misinformation, disinformation, cruelty. It's mind-boggling what we have seen from so many people on the right. We have seen people like Elon Musk blaming the fires on DEI somehow. We have seen Donald Trump blaming them on Gavin Newsom and referring to him as Newscum. In the middle of all of this, this is what he thinks is the way to deal with this.

We have seen many people on the right, including Donald Trump Jr., blaming this somehow on the fact that we've given money to Ukraine. Oh, we've seen other people, including the publisher of the Los Angeles Times. spreading the false story that Mayor Karen Bass and the city's Democratic leadership cut the firefighting budget this past year. Completely false. They did no such thing. But unfortunately, that rumor has, to use an unfortunate metaphor, I guess, or maybe an apt metaphor, has spread like wildfire. I always think it's not possible for me to be more cynical. So obviously, I expected some level of this, but I'm sort of like looking at this with my jaw dropping, like, how do you people look in the mirror? How do you live your lives, knowing that you're just spreading outright

lies and willfully forwarding on misinformation and disinformation at a time when people are losing everything, people are dying, and this is how you're choosing to spend your days. It's beyond grotesque, and even I am sort of like floored by the extent of it. The DEI bullshit around this that, oh, well, because we have created some type of quotas for fire departments, this is why we have these fires. No, motherfucker. It actually is not. The reason why these things are happening is because of the oil lobby and the fact that you have all of these powerful corporations that lobby the government to do absolutely nothing about climate change because it will affect their bottom line and their profit. Like, this is why we are here.

in these places. It's not because we are just a bunch of people who don't believe in actual science. No, they just don't care. And so to waste time, we debate on the merits of whether or not what we're seeing with our eyes actually exist, which is an absolute and total distraction from doing anything about what is going on. And so it's like to look at this, and I think that, again, there are so many lies and stories and misinformation that is going around. But what you do know is who profits from devastation. What you do know is that for 30 years, we have been told about what happens when there is more carbon in the atmosphere. What is happening with the warming of our waters? The fact that California, it doesn't rain. I think that I saw somewhere where it said that it hasn't

rain since May. It's January. Yeah. So, you know, and then people are like, well, it's arson. It, like, it doesn't matter. What matters is that according to the Wall Street Journal, this is the costliest wildfire, which is still burning, that they are saying is upwards of $50 billion worth of damage. And there are other people that are so cynical and they're saying, well, it's the rich. It's, you know, it's their homes that are burning to the ground. Let me tell you, something. Watching firefighters remove, try and save just little bits of artifacts of people's lives, people losing everything in a moment, like trying to save a photo album just so that when these people come back, maybe they can have some bit of solace of like their lives that they have

lived. I mean, it's just like, I feel like one of the major things that Maga and Trumpism ushered in was this deep calcification of cynicism and we've just been numbed by it like i i am not surprised at anything that Donald trump has said i'm not surprised by any of the things that have come out of the mouths of Elon musk and other disgusting people that are heartless that are so callous but i just i really like we we have to find a way to kind of i don't know actually care about one another because like I say, you're looking at this right now and saying, oh, you're safely maybe on the East Coast or, you know, in the middle of the country, the next devastation is going to be at your front door. Well, and that's an important point because sometimes we hear things like, you know,

well, maybe you shouldn't be living there, you know, and first of all, yes, there are, you know, in some of the areas that have been hit by the fires, there are some fairly well-to-do people. And yes, they will ultimately be quote-unquote fine in an economic. sense. But they still, as you said, they lost personal items, items of importance. And then, of course, there are a lot of people being hurt by these fires who are not wealthy and who, by the way, can't just pick up and move to one of your approved places. And third of all, and this gets to your point, this is going to be all of us if we don't reverse shit. At a certain point, it's not going to really matter where you live if we don't reverse climate change.

because it's going to affect the entire planet. A lot of times people on the right will say this is not the time to talk about gun control after a school shooting. And they're wrong about that because guns are one of the reasons there are school shootings. To talk about the fact that, well, you should move in the middle of a disaster. Like, talk about the wrong time to be bringing that point up, even if you think it's a valid point. The focus right now you would think would be on helping people, on at the very least, the bare minimum, hoping that people are safe right now. And instead, you get Elon Musk posting

things like DEI means people die. D.I. He thinks that's very clever, by the way. It's not. No, of course not. Megan Kelly and the Daily Wires, Matt Walsh, blaming this on the fact that the Los Angeles Fire Department has a female chief who, by the way, worked her way up through the ranks for 22 years. It's not even like they just brought her in, which is the little coded message that these people are trying to send. The fact that this is where their brains go, and this is what they feel fit to talk about in the middle of a crisis, just, it really says everything about the kind of people they are, about the kind of person Megan Kelly is, about the kind of person Elon Musk is, Matt Walsh, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., the absolutely hideous lives of TikTok woman. The cynicism is

not theirs because they know what they're doing. I mean, I guess it is cynicism in the sense that they know that this is what their audience wants, so it's why they do it. You know, there are cynics who are, and I always sort of describe myself as this when people say you're too cynical. And I say, look, I'm cynical because at heart, I'm a romantic in the sense that I want everything to be good. And I get cynical because I look at the world and I think, you know what? So much of this could be so much better. And it sucks that it's not, but we keep doing this. And that makes me cynical.

But in my heart, I want things to be better. In their hearts, these people don't want things to be better. They are very happy when they can sit there and pretend to be outraged at something completely ridiculous. because they know it makes them money, it gets them views, it gives them power, and all of that makes them feel good about themselves. And that to me is, it's sort of a good cynicism versus a bad cynicism in my mind. And these people are just the worst kinds of cynics. You know, the other thing about this that we are going to see just aside from the unbelievable amount of money damage, you know, that is being caused, is what we've seen insurers starting to do

in high-risk areas. State Farm bailed on parts of California. State Farm being one of the largest insurers. Bailed on, I believe, on parts of California, has bailed on parts of Florida and Louisiana. And, you know, you're going to see that when people say, oh, just like, go and move, you're not going to have any ability to rebuild

because you won't have insurance. I'm so curious as to what happens, Like as we, what, we're moving from the coast like inward and then inward you see like tornado outbreaks like nobody's business. Oh, historic, historic. That's all we ever hear these days. And you will have no insurance. Everything will be a gamble about where you live and how you're able to survive. And so it's just, we're living in very, very scary times, very scary times.

I mean, one year, it's people freezing to death in their car in an unprecedented winter storm in upstate New York. It's a fire that takes over, you know, parts of Hawaii. Now, California is on fire. North Carolina was battered with Hurricane Helene. Like, it's one after the other, after the other. And there is no, to your earlier point, Andy, there's no season for these things anymore. They're happening all the time. I think the most disheartening thing is that there is a very simple answer for why all of this is happening and it's climate change.

But for some reason that there is a segment of our population that just reflexively refuses to believe the truth that is right in front of their eyes. And we're seeing it now with the fires. We're seeing it, you know, by blaming things on DEI or whatever stupid catchphrase conservatives have come up with these days, to basically mean the fact that the entire country isn't made up of straight white Christians. But every time they do that, it's because of a complete and utter denial of the truth that is right in front of their eyes, which is that climate change is real, has been for quite some time, and is unbelievably destructive, and something needs to be done about it. And it seems to be that last point that they all can't stand, the idea that something

has to be done about it. And I don't know if it's just like the ultimate in conservatism and fearing change and not wanting things to be different. But unless it's just because it gets them money and clicks and views and whatever, there has to be some reason they are so violently opposed to the idea that climate change is real, that a large part of it is manmade, and that we can actually do something about it if we, for once in our goddamn life, lives all worked together and decided that this was an existential threat. But they are so virulently opposed to that. And look, I guess it's similar to what we saw during COVID when the slightest restrictions became, you know, too onerous for them to bear for the common good of the country.

So I guess it's just along those same lines. It's just very revealing of the ultimate selfishness and the idea that they don't want their pretty little lives to be upended in even the slightest way, even if that would mean making life better for a shit ton of other people. They just don't want that. No, no, because to them, people are other people outside of the group that you just named are undeserving. And they exist inside of a scarcity mindset. And that's, that's it.

Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg announced a bunch of changes. to meta's moderation policies, including ending its trusted partners fact-checking program and replacing it with a Twitter-style community note system, along with being, quote-unquote, less restrictive on topics such as gender and immigration. Here to explain what this all means and why Zuckerberg is doing it is the New York Times journalist who spends a lot of time covering meta, Mike Isaac. Mike, thanks so much for being here. Hey, man. Thank you for having me.

So, Mike, the party line from Zuckerberg and Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan is that all of this is being done in the name of free speech. And I find it interesting that you take them at their word here, that it's just that simple. Yeah, I'm sorry. I guess I do toe the party line here. No, I mean, I think all of the stuff that happened, all the announcements and stuff, first of all, the announcement itself and the way it was crafted is a whole other fascinating exercise in political theater.

But the free speech stuff, like, there's two things going on. One, 100% is pandering to the incoming administration. Facebook has a meta and Mark Zuckerberg personally have been hated by not only Donald Trump, but Republicans in general. They are all in power, about to be in power. And Facebook is doing whatever it can to sort of protect itself and survive in, you know, staring down antitrust lawsuits. There's a bunch of like legal stuff. Like Congress has power to really fuck Facebook up in a lot of ways. So I do think that some of the.

of this is the lens of survive at all costs. That said, I don't think you should wish anyone, and I don't think you would think this, Andy, but I don't think anyone should go back and think, well, Mark Zuckerberg is actually a liberal and wringing his hands as he grits his teeth and bends the knee and has to deal with it, right? Like, that is not fucking true. Mark is, we get into this in one of my stories, but, like, he has had a number of these views for some period of time. You know, I couldn't tell you exactly when his philosophy changed on some of this stuff. I think it goes back years and years. But he has always been in the camp of allowing more certain kinds of speech rather than less.

There's still like ways of picking that apart because they do take a lot of stuff down. That's different. In their ideal world, they wouldn't have to deal with any content moderation or touch any of this shit. I do think it's both. It's like meta, self-interest and self-survival. And then Mark kind of getting to be the version of Mark he's wanted to be for a while. Yeah, you wrote a piece or co-wrote a piece. at the Times, and the headline was Mark Zuckerberg's political evolution from apologies to no more

apologies. And you quote someone in that piece. I was Katie Harbath, a Harbath, who was used to work at Facebook and is now a chief executive at a tech consulting firm. And she said to you, she said, this shows how Mark Zuckerberg is feeling that society is more accepting of those libertarian and right-leaning viewpoints that he's always had. And she called it an evolved return to his political origins. 100%. I'm very wary of when I or others are writing articles on Silicon Valley for a very long time, it was true to some degree that it's this liberal bastion, right?

You know, everyone, all the lefties in San Francisco and like the techies are all libs and whatever. I don't think that's true. I don't think it has been true for a long time. Obviously, like, San Francisco has the countercultural roots. But like, that's not what this city is here. Like, there's a lot of fucking rich people. people here who have center to center right to right views. There was a strain of socially liberal,

you know, like we don't care if you're gay or whatever, but then like trans issues came into play and they're like, actually, we're not okay with that, you know, like, yes. So I do think these have been long held views by Mark, by Mark Andreessen, who is on the board of meta and is a very close personal friend of Mark Zuckerberg, who's very open with all this stuff all the time. And yeah, I just, I totally agree. I think like when you think of Silicon Valley now, not that you do Andy, but like when folks take of Silicon Valley, it is not the version that Fox News portrays. It is a very different version. And it is swinging right in ways that are playing out in city elections, in things that are

getting funded, in the companies that are being built. And that's how people really need to think about it, in my opinion. Yeah, for sure. And look, this is getting, I guess, a little off the point. But it's very interesting to me. I do feel like back in the early days, like the founding of Silicon Valley in those days, There was, I don't know if you would call it liberal, I would call it more of like a left libertarian slant, where as you said, it was basically a, hey man, live your life. And that over time, that has sort of evolved or devolved into more of a right libertarian slant where so much of it is about I don't want to pay taxes.

Yeah, no, totally. It totally is. It's totally about self-preservation in a lot of ways. I do think, and I think you're totally right. Like, libertarian, I don't really know what the perfect label or word is for a lot of this stuff. libertarian seems to be like the closest thing. And yeah, like it was exactly what you said, like freedom in the sense that freedom from encroaching government or taxation or or people telling you who to marry or things like that. Like that did exist, you know. It has been complicated now with social issues around gender and sex. And that is like just, I don't know if that's a generational thing as well as a Silicon Valley thing because I do think folks of a certain age out here are also, even the liberal folks are also taking umbrage with like, oh, I'm okay with this,

but not that. But it definitely was this sort of where the limits of their libertarianism are and what things they're trying to sort of police now has been very interesting. Yeah, for sure. There's a long quote from Zuck that he said in the video. I'll just read it. He said, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The only way we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government. And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened to other governments to go even further. So that thing at the

end feels like a lot of the ballgame to me. He is mad because he thinks the Democrats have, quote, unquote, gone after him. Oh my God. You're exactly right. And like, he was raining it in a little for a long time, and now he's let it loose a little bit more. I can't tell you how much folks at meta, but then really folks across a lot of the tech industry hated the Biden administration. And not necessarily because of some, like, let's say social policies, but more because Biden was more hawkish on tech, certainly than the Obama era. Like the DOJ and the FTC under Biden definitely came after tech companies in a way we had never

seen. I had talked to folks in Zuckerberg World who would tell me about the meetings they had with the Biden administration, how they were just held, held meta in contempt, basically, when they had to shake their hands. They're so mad that Biden's camp, they feel, didn't engage in the way that they wanted to. And it's so funny. I think like so much of Silicon Valley politics also tend to trend with who embraces them or shuns them at any given time, you know? And like, right now, it's very funny. They're running to the right, even though the right has also come after them for a while. But you can see this extended effort by Zuckerberg and a lot of other people basically kind of embracing these figures, whether it's the Ben Shapirs of the world. Mark, Charlie Kirk said he had a

meeting with Mark Zuckerberg recently, which is really interesting to me. So like, there's this sort of being done with the Democrats thing that not everyone in the Valley has, but quite a few of at least what some would call the tech oligarchs of the world and really embracing at least the Trump era and what they think they can get away with, particularly because they think they or they hope that their businesses will be left alone to a degree that was not the case under Biden. You know, I mentioned earlier that in addition to getting rid of the fact checkers, Zuckerberg also said that it would be less restrictive in what it allows on topics like gender and immigration. and this includes users now being allowed to post, quote, allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.

So apparently it's very important to meta's business model that users be allowed to attack queer and trans folks. And this to me is along the lines of what you said. It's like, well, the people we're sucking up to want this, you know, so we are going to go along with it. And I don't know. it just seems to me that, again, they want the conservatives to like them so much. And we've seen this throughout the years because it's always conservatives that push back on things being labeled as misinformation. Some would say because it's conservatives that were spreading the misinformation.

But I know that's a crazy thought. And so even this, it's basically Musk saying, sorry, Zuckerberg. It's hard to tell them apart these days. I was going to say you would be forgiven to not have much different now. I know. It's like Muskerberg or Musk Zuckerberg. Zucker, Lawn. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, he is perfectly willing to see queer and trans folks just get piled on and demeaned and diminished on his platforms because he knows that's what the right wants. I remember again, Joel Kaplan, his like, chief policy guy, we're talking about a lot of the people that they worked with, a lot of these sort of past initiatives that they did. The way that they just sort of trashed all of it very publicly, immediately after, you know, eight years of doing it was just really fascinating.

to me. I'm working on a story right now on like how it came about. Hopefully this will be out soon. I don't know. It's pretty intense. It's another one of those moments where folks at meta are pissed off, like internally. And like, look, people can say, oh, well, you work in meta, so fuck you anyway. But like, I do think that like there are people there who are not on board with this sort of thing. But at the end of the day, Zuckerberg is the boss. This is coming from him. I want to make clear. not like Joel Kaplan is running the show. Like at the end of the day, Mark says, this is what I want and it happens. And I think Mark just believes some of this stuff.

There was a thread that no one looks at on his platform threads yesterday where he was in the reply sort of defending like a reply guy, which I was pretty shocked at too. He had this line saying, you know, anyone, there's going to be people who leave our platforms. All those people are virtue signaling. And I was like, what the fuck? Like, is this now the language? It was just very slipping easily into, you know, right-coded language that you see all the time. And, you know, folks that I've talked to are like, look, this is Mark.

This is Mark being Mark. Like, he's kept it close to the chest for a while, but this isn't like a heel turn purely out of opportunism. I think there's multiple things going on, if that makes sense. Yeah, for sure. That's so funny because my next question was going to be about his virtue signaling comment. Oh, man. Because it struck me that he is basically also. admitting that that's what he has been doing for the past, I don't know, eight years or so.

You know, was it back in, I think you talk about it in your piece. Was it back in 2016 when he talked about how seriously they take misinformation? Yeah, that's right. And it turns out he was cosplaying that whole time. It sounds like, and that he basically was being political then. And yes, he's being political now very clearly. But as you said, he's being, this is more the real him than the 2016. in Zuckerberg was. No, you're hammering on exactly the right thing. And that was the thing that

bothered me, whatever day, this stuff with an announcement, Tuesday, I guess, is the announcement was wrapped in this. We're going back to our roots. These are our values, blaming sort of the administrations for all this stuff and kind of like wanting credit for being a champion of quote-unquote free speech on their platforms. And like, if they think that's true, if you believe that, we're not supposed to think you're noble now. If the past eight years, you were just doing the opposite thing because that was what you felt you had to do? Like, are you standing up for values now and you weren't then? Or are you standing up for values the whole time? Like, I don't, I just think they want to have it both ways. They want to wrap this into sort of air and nobility. And it's total

bullshit. And like the people, I'm kind of going probably a little rough, but like rough for me and New York Times reporter. But I think that from my reporting, people internally have realized this is total bullshit. And the trappings of his speech on reels where he, where Zuckerberg delivered personally, as well as Kaplan's stint on Fox News, where he trashed the fact-checking program, it's really shocked a lot of people inside. And it's one of those things where what you said is like, where the last eight years you being completely full of shit, or is this you now being completely full of shit? Like, it's just a level of cynicism from them that I haven't seen them play out before this. this openly is what I would say.

Yeah, for sure. You mentioned the trashing the fact checkers. I believe some of the quotes were, the fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created. And I know your colleagues, Stuart Thompson, talked to some of the organizations who were in that program, like the Pointer Institute. Yeah.

Obviously, they don't agree with that. I don't think anyone ever thought that the fact checking system at Meadow was great. Like, I haven't heard a lot of people saying, no, it works so well, you can't get rid of it. Nobody is saying that. But the idea of changing everything to community notes, and you've got Joel Kaplan saying, we have seen this approach work on X. And I can only take that to mean he's never been on X.

Yeah, the sort of posturing of like, hey, Elon's actually doing great was super fascinating to me, especially when he used Elon as a foil to make himself look good for the past two years. I think there's a lot of stuff going on there. One, this is complicated. Like, fact-checking for Facebook, in my opinion, has always been a sort of fig leaf to protect them from governments and bad publicity. If you go to the media or the EU or the U.S. government and say, we have this network of fact-checkers and we're doing our best to combat misinformation. That looks like good. They're doing something.

But, like, it's like sticking your finger in a dam of billions of pieces of content that go through the platform every day. day. That is nothing. So them saying we're removing that is just a similar, you know, theater approach, I would say. I think, and there's a very specific reason that they led with that because the more significant changes in my opinion are making changes to the policy they called hateful conduct as well as the thing we haven't talked about, the complete reversal of putting political content back into all the feeds, which they also spent the past year saying, oh, people don't want this. We're taking it out. Like, it's just so craven. in a lot of ways. And like, they stand on this like ground of sand where anything they say is going

to be different tomorrow. And it's, I think like, there's a lot of people out there who say, like, look, this is, have you not known this for a long time? And I agree that they have been very opportunistic. And I've written about the way that he changes with the winds of political. But I don't think that they've done it this brazenly before. They probably tried to at least hide it a bit more. And now it's just sort of like, fuck it. We're going to cater to the right in a way that I think everyone is pretty clear about. Well, look, I mean, Trump loves cravenness. He craves cravenness, from a political perspective, it's very obvious what he's doing and why. Even the moving to Austin that has now come up. That was absurd. The shots he took at California, which I have to think it were

at least partially aimed at you, Mike Isaac. Fuck that guy. He lives here. I'm wondering how that made you feel. Well, it was laughable to me, but also to people inside of meta. First of all, there's a few things. One, they've had employees and moderation teams in Texas for eight years. To say that they're making some major change is absolute horseshit.

And everyone that I've talked to inside of the company was like, yeah, that's bullshit. Everyone knows it. It's purely for the Fox News audience and the people that, Mark and Joel are trying to signal to. So that's one thing. It's very funny that they're sort of doing this trailing what happened in 2020 when the lockdowns happened and all these techies here absconded to Miami and Texas thinking that San Francisco was a hellscape and too liberal and now they're all coming back because AI is a big thing here. But like it's still this sort of political negotiation tactic or political like flashpoint that I think plays well with conservatives who have

over the past four years of Fox as well as Republican candidates attacking California and San Francisco in particular, they can say, yeah, fuck California. We're going to Republicans because that's where there's no bias. Or we're going to a red state because that's where there's no bias, which is just, it's absurd. Everyone knows it's absurd out here.

Employees know it's absurd. That said, and I want to be clear, there are a significant number of people inside of meta who are cheering these changes. And that goes back to our earlier discussion of It's not total lib Silicon Valley. Some people are like, yes, Mark is being Mark. Mark is being authentic.

We need free speech. And like, that was not the meta of eight years ago. I think it has changed a lot. And that's super interesting. One thing I do want to say, though, is like Mark gets a lot of credit or is a self-professed long-term thinker. Everything he thinks about is the future and five, 10 years from now or 20 years. We're going to be living the metaverse.

And everything I do for my company is not short-term thinking. But it sure seems that he's making a bet on the future. the next four years and nothing beyond that, right? Like, the bet that he's making is Trumpism, even post-Trump is here and we'll worry about 2008 when we get there, which is very interesting to me. Yeah, for sure. And look, between him and Musk, I can only assume that in five years, I will be living on Mars in the metaverse somehow. Sounds great. Yeah. So you can't wait for that. I always love talking to you. Thanks so much for coming in and sharing your expertise with us.

Thank you. Thank you for letting me unload. I know you have some writing to do, so I'll let you go. Yeah, this shit is crazy. I've got to do another story. So we'll bug you again next time the platform blows up or there's some policy change. Excellent. Excellent.

Mike, thanks again, man. Thanks for having me. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal author of the newsletter, Huddled Masses. and the author of a piece in the bulwark this week, the media isn't ready for Trump's mass deportation moment. Adrian Carasquillo joins us, and Adrian, here's the thing. Donald Trump, for I don't even know how long the man was campaigning for, has been talking about throwing out,

and I use quotation marks and I'm using his words, up to 20 million people inside of the United States. And Republicans' minds in the way that they have shaped this narrative has expressed to the American public that 20 million people that live in this country are all criminals and are just running rampant all over the place, wrecking havoc and destroying America from the inside out. The media, corporate mainstream media, has done very little, in my humble opinion, to combat that narrative with the truth of what. the real immigrant experience is inside of the United States. Talk to us about your piece right now because I truly believe that the media is not, I don't think they're not ready for this story. They're not ready for Trump 2.0 in general and their coverage. So talk to us about what you believe we will see over the coming weeks and months and years ahead. Yeah. First of all, thank you for

having me. I think it's probably a confluence of events. We know that the media is battered and there's cuts. I don't think that the media does a great job covering immigration, as Enrique Acevedo from Univision said in my piece, because immigration is so policy-heavy, wonky, it's hard to really understand, even for the reporters and the people who follow all this stuff, it's easier to do, let's show some border bureau, let's look up the latest ice removal numbers. Let's keep it really, really, like, sort of basic. And then that way we don't run into trouble. And this is not a basic situation. I mean, Trump thrives when he can take an extremely complex issue and say, yes or no, black or white. Everybody's out. We're getting rid of everybody. It's done.

You know, and so it is incumbent on the media. It's been for a long time. And look, we have a podcast. You have a little bit more time to chat than I normally do in a piece. I'm not one of these people who, like, uses the quote media often, right? I think that for all of us that are a part of it, there are many parts of the media and some parts are entertainment and some parts are more news. But when you honestly look at the immigration coverage over the last, not just couple years, but over the last decade, it's very easy to get this tunnel vision of border focus, enforcement focus. There are undocumented immigrants, people who live in this country illegally, who either overstayed their visa or came across the border 10, 15, 20 years ago that are parts of communities. They go to your churches. They're your neighbors.

In Queens, where I'm from, if you walk this stretch of Jackson Heights and Corona, where there's, incredible oud and culture and music and the train passes over. In Corona, one in five people when I did a story were undocumented in Jackson Heights, one in six people. So the first time he talked about mass deportation, I just walked like a 30 block stretch and I just talked to a bunch of undocumented people. So these people are not, the whole in the shadows thing is like a term that people use, but these people are like out there and you talk to them and they might be your neighbors, et cetera. So look, I just think that with the mass deportation machine about to wake up and the incoming administration saying a lot of different things about what that means,

what the definition of that is, I think the media really has to get serious about how they're going to cover the mass deportation policy. In your piece, you discussed to, you know, the images that we saw during the first Trump administration of children in cages, of the stories coming out of being kept in frigid conditions and the Trump attorneys going to court so that they would be. even have to provide hygiene products to young people, to just people in general, I don't even care if they are kids or adults that had been rounded up. Do you feel like those images did anything to really pierce our consciousness in terms of us really beginning to understand

who is going to be harmed in this moment? Like I feel like when I saw those images and we kept saying over and over again, they have kids in cages, that there was an outcry from the public, but it's, it has since muted over time. Yeah, for sure. I actually don't even remember who I was talking to recently, but they were talking about how we are still like overall welcoming to immigrants. I think they were talking to me specifically about New York, but they said those numbers have gone down over the last few years. The rhetoric is having an effect. People, of course, in nature, the economy's not doing well. You look for people to blame. And immigrants are a convenient scapegoat and they always have been throughout our history. The question that you ask me,

it makes me always think about the stuff I read about Cesar Chavez. And when he was doing his farm worker and his union work and things like that, there was an effort to make the sort of suburban, you know, white mother, affluent woman understand their plight. And to connect that when she was in the supermarket getting grapes, that those were picked by farm worker hands, and that, you know, when you're talking about these people having rights and being actual human beings and not just numbers on a deportation sheet, that you're talking about these real people, and this is real policy. And so if you think back to that time, they did a great job, and Robert Kennedy got involved,

et cetera. So I think about that now where I was talking to Paola Ramos from MSNBC, and she was saying, like, a few years ago there was this moral outrage and asking the question, can we even get back to that. And I think for Democrats, for immigration activists and for folks who think that human rights should be honored and the Constitution should not be violated, I think there is still that possibility. But again, it's a challenge. And I think that's what I was trying to get at. Like, it's a challenge. And it's going, you're going to have to do such a complex story that could include Texas detention centers, where Texas has offered to give all this land for more detention.

but you're also going to be going to cities in Chicago and Denver, which are sanctuary cities. And, you know, so there's so much there. And I think that it's possible to answer your question. I think that our country, perhaps, you know, reasonable people could disagree. But we're probably a slightly center-right country. You know, we're not maybe 50-50, but we're close overall. And so I think that a lot of the people who are kind of the centrist people, the moderates, the independence, Like they probably don't want to see on their TV screens that they voted for a guy to fix the economy.

And now there's these crazy humanitarian conditions. And the last thing I'll say on this is, that's what my story got into as well. I was covering immigration first around 2014 when Barack Obama had problems with an influx of thousands of unaccompanied minors. And then we saw what happened with Trump and with family separation, with kids in cages and things like that. Presidents can do the enforcement, but the humanitarian issues can cause them a PR nightmare. And I think that that's one thing that we're going to be watching for as well. You know, and I thought, too, that in your piece, you had interviewed a top Univisian talent, Enrique Acevedo. And I said, like, the clarity with the imagery.

He said, quote, most news platforms in the U.S. have focused on what happens at the border and done very little to understand the complexities of immigration coverage. Covering the border to explain our immigration crisis is like covering an ER to explain the COVID. pandemic. And I got it. I mean, I got it before, but like, I saw it clearly. Like, if we had just talked about COVID in the context of what doctors and nurses and medical technicians and personnel were dealing with in the hospitals, we would have missed entirely what was happening on the streets, what was happening in people's homes, what was, you know, like you're almost feel like we're begging for the media to open up the aperture on the camera and to show us the bigger picture. of what's going on. And to connect the dots, like you said, of your basic grocery store.

You go in, avocado toast so friggin' popular, so goddamn expensive. Where do you think those are coming from? Who is picking those? How do they arrive all four seasons in the United States? It doesn't make sense. Even the farmers and the owners of the CEOs of these factories and these farms who voted for Donald Trump. Now turn around and say, oh, I didn't mean for you to deport my workers. I thought you were going to deport somebody else. Well, first of all, when you brought up the avocado, it reminded me, I forgot if it was Washington Post. Someone had an image where they had basically like an avocado behind like a gate, behind like a fence. And somebody would like messaged me on Instagram being like it looks like the avocados in jail.

But the point that they were making was that avocados are going to be more expensive if there's this like tariff and trade war and everything. You know, my dad used to always say that if we don't like know our history, we're doomed to repeat it. And I think that that's part of this as well, which is this is not the first time that American politicians or Republicans have thought, let's be more hardline in immigration. Let's be more draconian. What about if we kick them all out? So SB 1070 in Arizona, they passed this really harsh immigration law that was ultimately overturned by Supreme Court. and it allowed for racial profiling because the way that you are going to know,

you're going to stop someone, why are you stopping them? Because they're brown, because you figure that they're Mexican. And so that leads to racial profiling and then you violate the civil rights of American citizens, et cetera. In Alabama, they passed, I believe, it was described as an even harsher immigration law

because I think there was stuff in there about going to hospitals and going to schools. Kids stopped showing up at schools. Immigrants moved out. And spoiler alert, the vegetables and the fruits were rotting on the vine. From what I remember for that time was that they tried to fill those spots with paying African-American workers more. And they were like, I don't want to do this job. And then it's like, you know, and all this produce was just rotting on the vine.

So this has happened before. It has not been threatened or undertaken at this comprehensive scale. And those are all the pieces that I think just like as my first piece, I just wanted to do a kind of like, hey guys, here's some stuff that you might want to think about. Because, you know, going back to the ER thing, yeah, if you imagine us having a bunch of TV cameras and a bunch of reporters putting recorders into patients and doctors' faces in ERs, we would have had dramatic footage. And we would have been like, oh, my God, people are dying.

But we would have not have known anything about the virus. We would have not known anything about the COVID pandemic at a larger scale and what people were doing and the people who were working under difficult conditions and things like that. So, yeah, exactly right. When he said that, I was just like, this is perfect. And look, there have been reporters that have covered this for a long time. Immigration-focused reporters, they're not all Latino, but a good amount of them are. And so I think that now's the time for media organizations to really take stock of what this coverage is going to look like.

Because the last thing I'll say on this piece is like, I included the ICE annual report in the story. Because that's still under the Biden administration. And they go to great pains to tell you that they, in. 2024, like arrested and deported, I think 81,000 criminals. They list all their charges. So if Trump comes in, I think one of the first things he's going to do, and he might do a lot of this other bad stuff too, there's multiple tracks here. But I think one of the first things he's going to do is take credit for what ICE is already doing. And he's just going to be like put a new coat of pain on what's already happening and be like, see, we're going after criminals. So that's why I think

it's so important to remember his promises to prepare for them, but to also report honestly on what's actually happening. In your piece, too, you talk about, obviously, the incoming, quote, unquote, borders are Tom Homan, who has said some of the most egregious, racist, disgusting things. You know, but recently you wrote this. But on Face the Nation this past Sunday, he said Trump will concentrate on, quote, public safety threats and national security threats, as opposed to what he had said earlier, which is if these, you know, blue state governors and mayors don't get out of our way,

we're going to, quote, unquote, steamroll you. So what do you make of what seems like a pivot in language? Is it just to soften so people again just go back to sleep, don't really pay attention to the issue? Is it that they realized that everything that they were saying was bullshit to begin with and that they're not going to be able to deport 20 million people? What do you make of his thoughts from this past Sunday? I'm working on my next piece, and it's New York focused.

And somebody told me that as useful as the bad rhetoric and the sort of shock and all statements, is also confusion. And that kind of stuck with me because it made me think that, like, if you said to me right now with limited information, because we don't know ultimately what they're going to do, what I think is going to happen is I think they're going to, like I said, take credit for some of the stuff ICE is already doing and with his bully pulpit. say like, see, we got some people. We got some criminals, like I said, we would.

But then I also think there's going to be these sort of, like, isolated, like, specific shock in all moments. Like, there was an NBC news story yesterday that said that there's talks within the Trump administration of doing a large-scale raid at an employer in D.C., right? So, you know, that gives him the ability, D.C., everybody's going to be paying attention and just showing that this is serious, right? So I don't know. I don't know that it will be a blanket sane.

policy everywhere. I think it will be sort of what they're kind of feeling, what statements they're trying to make. And so I guess this is the other thing that sort of continually I keep coming back to is like that's why I feel like it's so important for the media to really pay attention to this and not think that just because it happened in D.C. it's going to, if it's necessarily they're going to continue doing it everywhere, or just because it starts off with Holman saying, let's focus on criminals, they probably will be expanding the definition of what a criminal is. And then you're going after more people too. So, Yeah, it's going to be a mess in terms of what that execution looks like and then how does the media scramble to cover it.

So, you know, with a couple of minutes that we have left, Adrian, what will you be paying attention to and focused on covering with your newsletter huddled masses? Yeah. A great editor once told me good stories have conflict and tension. And I've always thought that in a moment like this, particularly where it does seem like the media is being a little bit cowed. by the threats from the incoming administration where Democrats are not fully united on fighting back on immigration. I'm looking for who is actually stepping up as an opponent to mass deportation policy. I think there's some obvious ones when you talk about sanctuary city mayors.

I have always liked to do stories that are sort of like counterintuitive. Like you might not really think about it. So, you know, yes, this situation goes against what the values that are. country was built on on just sort of like scapegoating and demonizing immigrants. There are people in this country who are not necessarily bad actors or coming from a negative, super-inty-immigrant, and they probably think that this is going to help the economy in their city or that there's things that are having. So I always, I want to just try my best with as much as I can in a twice weekly newsletter to kind of show different sides of this issue. But at the same time,

understand that what he is proposing, and then when you start getting into the wildest parts of what he has proposed, National Guard, even crazier than that, military to do deportations, even crazier than that, Alien and Sedition Act, which you would need to claim that, like, certain countries are enemies and that these are like, you know, these are enemies within the country. I mean, again, Trump a lot of times gets away with just saying the craziest stuff, now the rubber hits the road. What are we actually going to see? And so beyond sort of keeping the administration honest and accountable, I want to share that with the readers. Like, okay, we were told this was going to happen. Here's what's actually happening. I really appreciate

your work and your coverage. I think that it is critical at this time in our country and political landscape. Please tell folks, Adrian, how they can find and subscribe to your newsletter. It's really easy. It's bulwark.com slash subscribe. And you will get a lot of the great newsletters that we have. And it's really exciting. Like I was saying earlier, you know, we're in a crazy moment in this nation's history. My sister's a therapist. So I use this language sometimes. I feel particularly purpose driven and really excited about the work that I have coming. And we'll see how things go. And thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Really appreciate you. Thank you so much.

Danielle Moody. Andy Levy. Danielle, close out this. Is it the first week of the year? It is. I don't know how that's possible, but okay, I'll choose to believe you. Close out this supposed first week of the year. Alleged. It's not the first month.

Alleged. Who's your fuck that guy? Oh, my God. What a year it's been. What a year it's been. You would think when a legislative session comes to order to start out the new year, you would be eyeing. What are the most pressing issues that the constituents of your state are facing so that we can get down to business because a lot of people are hurting and there's a lot of work that needs to be done? That's what you would think, right? if you were a legislator that actually gave a shift about the people of your state. Idaho, not one of those states.

Why? Because the first legislative action that they took in this brand spanking new year was to introduce a resolution to overturn Overfell B. Hodges, which is the marriage equality case. and they go so far as to say that they would like to return to the quote-unquote natural definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. And that to them is more important than, I don't know, safer schools is more important than the environment, is more important than people being able to put food on their table. this is what Republicans care about. I don't know about you, but I'm assuming that the people of Idaho can't fucking eat a resolution.

Do you know what I'm saying? They can't put the resolution in their bank account to make their lives easier. But this is what Republicans focus on. The hope, of course, is that there will be other red states that then introduce resolutions, legislation, that will then be sued, that make its way up to our six to three rabid Maga Supreme Court.

We knew this was coming. We knew it was coming when Roe v. Wade was overturned. We knew it was coming when affirmative action was overturned. But again, the idea that this is the first act that you would take in Idaho's legislative session is just beyond to me. How people decide to become Republicans and vote Republican, I really cannot wrap my mind around it. What benefit this party goes to serve you. But I guess, again, so long as other people are harmed, it doesn't matter whether or not your life is actually better.

So for that reason, the Republicans of Idaho are my, fuck that guy. Yeah, Danielle, I think what you're overlooking here is that this resolution will bring down the cost of eggs. Oh, I might have missed that. Yeah. Do lesbians hoard eggs? Is that... I mean, don't even get me started on that.

Why are you like this? I'm calling producer discretion here. Let's get started. I want to hear this. I want Andy's deep opinions on lesbian eggs. What is more hoarding of your eggs than not having sex with men? Thank you very much. Okay.

Andy has left the building. No. I mean, look, I just, I don't want to hear anymore about how people voted for Trump to bring down the price of eggs. I just don't want to hear about it anymore. I'm not saying there weren't some people that did that, but the overwhelming ideological thrust of the Republican Party on a federal level and on pretty much every state level is exactly what we're seeing in Idaho. And your point, the most important thing here is the point that you made is that this is priming the pump for Thomas and Alito in particular. you know, also the other conservative justices who are just champing at the bit to get rid of gay marriage. And it will be absolutely shocking if we don't see a case wind its way up to the Supreme Court in the next four years on the issue of gay marriage.

And like you said, these are the, I don't even know if you'd call them the opening shots. I think, you know, the opening shots were really made in the Dobbs decision. And particularly, and I think it was Thomas's concurrence when he talked about basically, wanting to overturn Obergefell and loving, et cetera. So it's obvious why they're doing this. And this is what they think the taxpayers of Idaho are paying them to do. And the sad thing is they may well be right in Idaho. So yeah, fuck those guys.

All right, Andy. This is indeed the first full week of January. How are you closing out this hellscape? So I'm going to go back to the Supreme Court. Oh, wonderful. Which we were just talking about. And I'm going to talk about Justice Samuel Alito. Oh, dear.

Who fresh off of his wife flying interruptionist flags and his absolutely horrible decision writing, he took a phone call from Donald Trump on Tuesday, purportedly at the request of a former law clerk of his who was looking for a position in the incoming Trump administration. Generally speaking, Supreme Court justices are not supposed to take phone calls from the incoming president. Oh, no? No. And in particular, they're not supposed to take phone calls from the incoming president one day before the incoming president is filing a petition before the Supreme Court to ask it to halt the sentencing in his fraud cases, sometimes referred to as the hush money cases, I prefer fraud. And of course, Alito claims that, oh, that was never discussed.

And he didn't even realize that the lawyers were filing the petition that next day. I have no reason to believe him. Sometimes you say if people, well, I have no reason to not to believe them, you know. In Alito's case, I have no reason to believe him. Even if he didn't know that Trump's lawyers were going to file this petition the very next day, he knew damn well they were going to file a petition. This was not privileged information. We all knew he was going to file this petition.

So it's just another step on the latter to unethical hell. And it's just all out in the open now. Like Alito knows that ain't nothing going to happen to him because of this. John Roberts certainly isn't going to do anything about it. He's not even at this point, he knows he's not even going to get a toothless reprimand from John Roberts. So in the same way that there's no more quiet part where people, you know, they just say the thing now, there's no more hidden part or secret part with being unethical for justices of the Supreme Court. They just do it out in the open and they say, yeah, I did it.

And they know absolutely nothing is going to happen to them. And they are correct in knowing that. This is where we are now. So, yeah, once again, Samuel Alito gets a big old fuck that guy. the days when they would lie to us and pretend as if there were some, I don't know, not playing footsie under the table. Like it wasn't just so fucking obvious that you're in bed with Donald Trump. Like now you're texting and phone calls and the way that it's being thrown in our faces, knowing that what's going to, like you said, what's going to happen? Absolutely nothing.

So why even pretend to have any type of separation of power or branches or anything like that? Like everybody is in bed with everyone. Everyone is in cahoots to take down democracy, to take down the American Republic. And so let's just put it all out there in the open. It's so fucking disgusting that these people are even allowed to still sit on the bench with how compromised they are. And we're supposed to just like, oh, well, they're judges in these black robes. that somebody appointed them for life, and that's just it is what it is. Fuck them to hell, honestly.

I just, if we have another minute, I want to bring up something, and I can't take credit for actually remembering this, I saw some people posting about it on Blue Sky. Remember Loretta Lynch? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Remember that Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch basically ran into each other on an airport tarmac. Uh-huh. And they had a brief conversation.

And the uproar over that, Loretta Lynch was a... the Attorney General at the time, and Hillary Clinton was under investigation by the Justice Department over the private email server. And such an uproar was made about this meeting on a tarmac that Loretta Lynch had to come out and say, look, whatever the FBI and the prosecutors come out with about Hillary Clinton, I will accept it. Like, she had to make it clear and basically say that she was recusing herself because of this little meeting. And honestly, that was the right thing to do. But compare and contrast, I mean, Alito takes a phone call from Donald Trump the day before this thing is filed and ain't nobody suggesting that Alito is going to recuse himself

from this case. It's just not going to happen. So this is where we are now, the new abnormal. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com

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