The Daily Beast Podcast - MAGA Turns on Trump for Admitting He’s an Election ‘Loser’

Episode Date: September 8, 2024

White nationalist Nick Fuentes may have once dined with former president Donald Trump but he has now turned on him for finally admitting that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Plus! Yale Professor Jason Stanley, author of the bestselling novel How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, talks to Danielle Moodie about the upcoming election and the stark contrast between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. 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 Campbell News conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits 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 Kedden, 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.

Hello and welcome to another Sunday edition of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Yale Professor Jason Stanley, author of the best-selling novel How Fascism Works, and he'll join us today to tell us about his new book, Erasing History, How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, and it really is such an incredible book. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips! That was proper enthusiasm because today is actually a good batch for once. Okay, I don't know. I promise you, we're going to smile today a lot. Jesse, we're all very excited. You know why?

Why? Because you are now a married man. That will be true by the time the people hear this. Thank you very much. Yes. Thank you. All applause to Jesse. Mazel to. Thank you. So guys, I need I need to tell you about a man of faith, a man who has lived his life by the letter of what the Bible says to live it by. Oh, Trump. Yes. Okay. Here he is talking to Fox's Mark Levin. I thought it was me.

Definitely not me. You've been a man of faith. You go to church. You believe in God. Is this further? Your belief, your commitment. And obviously, God. In addition to that chart, saved your life.

He has a purpose for you. Do you think about these things? Well, I think you believe more because when you speak to experts, like my sons were shooting experts, but when you speak to experts, they said there was no chance that he could have missed from that distance. I think he was hurried. I think he was rushed because people were starting to say, like, you know,

there's a guy up there with a gun. That is pure. That is pure comedy. First of all, to utter without a sense of irony that Donald Trump is a man of God, to say that he has, you go to church, I mean, he may have been to a church at some point in his life. He held the Bible upside down. Do you know what I'm saying? Like the book was hot. Let's put it that way.

Like, give me. a break with that. Oh, my God. He's also selling a Bible. He's literally grifting off the Bible. Yeah, I mean, Mark Levin, oh, my Lord, I would be hard pressed in this world of conservative hacks. This might be the hackiest thing I have ever heard was him trying to position Trump as a man of faith who goes to church. And then, of course, Trump's answer was just hilarious talking about his. sons as shooting experts and saying that there was no way of missing from that distance. Let me tell you, I saw plenty of people on the firing range in the Army miss the 50-meter target, which is the closest one.

Sometimes you just miss. And to make a comment like that, I mean, it's such a small thing. It just greats on me. And it's just the extent to which he will just lie about everything is absolutely unreal. I actually think the lying did get worse this week. I think he's now at the point where he's just like, I'm going to throw everything at the wall in hope that something sticks

because they're very worried. I think Tim Walls is proving to have his old Teflon traits. And I think that they are getting very, very desperate around this. What I love is when he confesses to something like without realizing it at all, like just ignoring the God thing like he never, every time it's almost like he's like a vampire who can't go to your garlic or a cross. When somebody tries to be like, here is the easiest pass to see.

say you're a man of God, he can't actually bring himself to do it because he thinks it's below him, I think. Yeah, no, I think that's true. I wish he just had said, my sons are shooting experts. You may know them from viral photos of killing endangered species. I mean, for real. Yeah. Yeah. And like also, the animals that they shot is basically like taking a toddler to the zoo. Yeah. Where the animals are caged and chained and drugged and saying, go hit that target. Yeah. Awful. So in the scientific method, there's a conclusion, a hypothesis, peer review to cement these scientific theories. I'm starting to believe that we're getting the one of a fuck around and find out cemented into scientific law. So here we have anti-Semitic dining with Trump, Insel Groyper, King, Nick Fuentes, showing this theory being proven in real time.

And look, it didn't work out. It's just because it's bullshit. They sold out. They sold out everything that he, you know, MAGA represented at one point. and everything that it was is no longer. It's just really sad. And the 2020 comment, it's like, wow, that's how pathetic it's gotten. He's admitting, he says, oh, I lost by a whisker.

So what was the point? Like, what's the point of any of it? You lost in 2020? Seriously? I mean, what are we even doing anymore? Then you're a loser. Then you're a loser. You just lost.

then you lost to Joe Biden, you deserve to be charged. If he admits that he lost, then that actually vindicates the DOJ charge against him. Because the charge is that he knew he lost, but he lied to defraud the people. That's the, that's the DOJ's charge. So why did we do stop the steal? Why did anyone go to January 6th? Why is anyone sitting in jail? Why did anything bad happen to anybody?

Why did everyone get censored? Why is everything bad that has happened to the people that are involved? Why did that need to happen if you're just going to walk it all back and say, oh, I lost? Well, it would have been good to know that before 1,600 people got charged. It would have been good to know that before I had all my money frozen, put on no-fly list. ban from everything lost all banking and payment processing. Would have been good to know that before I. Oh my God.

This is amazing. Yeah, yeah. I drank those tears up real, real deeply. Holy shit. He is, as they say, so close to getting it. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, it's right there. Just reach for it.

Like, then why did we do all of the? Because you're fucking done. That's why. Because you were had. You were hoodwinked. You were bamboozled by a master manipulator and gripped her. That's why. Welcome.

Welcome to Earth One. The air is nice here. We breathe oxygen. The fuck. Oh, God. It's the old, am I the bad guy? It really is the thing, though, that like, at this point, it's like, you know, for those who don't know, Nick has abandoned the MAGA movement.

But like I think of when baked Alaska had his meltdown like this, like, oh my God, I can't believe this guy was grifting and I'm going to jail for him. And it's like, yeah, that's what you fucking get for fucking being had. Yeah. Yeah. Like, then what was all this for? Yes, that's the question we've been asking for three years. Three. Three.

Feels like the eternity. Then why did 1,600 people go to jail? Been asking. I don't know. I don't know. It's almost like this is what happens to everyone who puts their faith in Donald Trump. Yeah, yeah. It's that kind of a law. Okay, so as we heard in our last episode at our interview with the Washington Post-Will Summer,

the DOJ indicted a group who was paying influencers to influence on Russia's behalf without being registered as foreign agents. So, of course, Fox News, Jesse Waters is here to let me check my notes. Fully not fucking get it. If we see things online about DEI or migrant crime or even record inflation, it could be Russian propaganda. And anybody who emails this stuff around or says it on TV could be a Russian agent and should be under investigation. This show tonight has all the earmarks of Russian propaganda. How do we know when Trump campaign officials appear on prime time? They're just not really Russian cutouts whose phone.

need to be tapped. He does realize that he's on a network that paid out nearly a billion dollars for lying, right? He asks good questions. It's almost like he had this guy Paul Manafort on who all the time. But this is, of course, I think it was a couple weeks ago, I had Steve Bennon on from MSNBC talking about his book, Ministry of Truth, where he talks about how the right wing, you know, propagates these lies. And one of the big ones is the quote unquote Russia hoax. And in fact, there was not a Russia hoax. The idea that Trump's Russia scandal was shown to be nothing but a hoax is completely false. But they have said it so many times.

And then what they do is they use it to go after future things. And they say, see, they lied about that, the Russia hoax, just like they're lying about Trump's indictment. And, you know, the bunch of train seals that watch these shows nod their heads and bark approvingly. And so that's exactly what he's doing here. He's just continuing it because this is a literally. literal indictment of two people who ran a media company for taking money from Russian state-owned media to spread Russian propaganda. And there are only allegations right now. It could turn out to not be true. But boy, they do have a lot of evidence. I will shock you right here that the background

graphic was implying the Russia hoax while he said all this. Of course it was. Yeah. So I know you guys did not get enough Jesse. And I know you don't mean me. You mean not Jesse Waters. I No, you want more. So this time it's him from the five, since they need to have him on twice a day to say shit this dumb. So let's hear Jesse Waters give Jesse's a bad name. Women love masculinity and women do not love Tim Wall. So that should just tell you about how masculine Tim Walls is the other day. You saw him with a vanilla ice cream shake.

Had a straw in it. Oh. Again, that tells you everything. Judge Janine. What? So Andy as a fellow man I've always drank a milkshake with a straw Am I fucking up?

I think most people drink milkshakes with straws Like even going back to the old days When you know there were like malt chops and stuff like that Or you would sit at the counter at a luncheonette You see in movies or pictures You get the big old glass and a straw in it Now Daniel do women love masculinity You know I drink my milkshakes in a beer much

You know, so... I thought everyone did that. Respect. That's so weird. My tail's between my legs. It's pointless to even say this, but women don't like Tim Walls? Like, where is that coming from? Again, he's really stupid and he makes shit up, which makes him, I guess, a great Fox News host.

But if you look at any of the polling, I mean, the Harris Walls ticket is Kim. the Trump fan's ticket's ass. So I don't know where you're getting. Again, this is pointless because he's just making it up. So I'm the idiot here for expecting him to say something based in reality. Like, are there people that high five him? Like, did somebody, like, he said that comment and then like maybe they cut to commercial and they're like, oh, yeah, good one, Jesse. Like, yeah, bro. Like that, you got him. Because why? Like, other than that, like, why and what? Like, are you doing? I'm going to venture a guess that Tim Walls to score. Gwen did not deflate her tires to bring her home. Just going to put that out there. Yeah. Folks, I am very happy to welcome back to the new abnormal,

professor of philosophy at Yale University and the author of a myriad of incredible books, including erasing history, how fascists rewrite the past to control the future, as well as how fascism works and so many others. Jason, thank you for making the time to come back on to the new abnormal. You know, we're talking right now, and we are, I want to say, less than 60 days away from the presidential election, which is just wild to think about it in terms of time. What has been apparent now that there is a new Democratic candidate in Kamala Harris and Tim Walsh is the stark contrast to the Trump Vance ticket, one that,

is steeped in misogyny, in patriarchy, in fastistic sensibilities and authoritarian desire. And I want to get your thoughts on just, you know, the recent murmurings from both Trump and Vance on their feelings about women in particular, the place of gender roles in our society, and also the continuing of the stoking of violence that Donald Trump most recently did. at a rally in Pennsylvania where one of his rally goers climbed a scaffolding to attack the media. And he said it was, quote, beautiful. What do you make of where we are and what we are continuing to see from the right? So I think we're going to see if Trump gets into power.

We're going to see an autocratic regime. We're going to see an extension of what we see in some states in the south, many states in the south, where you have situations like North Carolina, where you have a majority of registered voters are Democratic, but a super majority of legislators are Democratic. We're going to see something like Tennessee, where abortion is illegal even in cases of rape and incest, where contraception requires parental consent for those who are under 18. And we're going to see the attacks on education that we've seen in the South with the attacks on DEI, critical race theory, essentially black history. And then suffusing all of this is the kind of patriarchy and misogyny that we see from someone like J.D. Vance,

a sort of sophisticated patriarchy and misogyny because it's the idea that women have to have a lot of babies. That is the central way in which they contribute to the nation. And this is connected to white supremacy because the idea is that there's population decline and we need women to have babies. Of course, we could just let in people on the southern border, let in immigrants, but that has never mentioned. This women have to have babies is complemented by severe, indeed, kind of genocidal anti-immigrant rhetoric. So it's clearly a white supremacist keep America majority white. That's not to say that there aren't people of color who support this agenda. It's also Christian nationalism we're facing, and that encompasses more than just white people. And then there's

acceptable people of color, maybe South Asians. But Republicans don't tend to call South Asians DEI hires. No one's calling Nikki Haley, a DEI governor. But this is what we're seeing, that natalism, women should have a lot of babies, explicit discussion. about how women with no babies are not really citizens. And this harkens back to fascistic ideology of rigid gender roles. Fascistic ideology gains support from, say, Christian nationalists or the extreme religious right because it promises to defend rigid gender roles. That's why trans citizens are such a target because they threaten rigid gender roles.

Can you just speak to Jason, like, What is the need for the rigid gender roles? Can you speak about like what they see it as serving a purpose to their ultimate goal? It's linked to Great Replacement Theory. So Great Replacement Theory is the foundational myth or the foundational guiding light of fascism. It animates fascist movements. It animated the British Fascist Party. Britain for the British. It animates Alternative for Deutschland and Germany. The idea is we have to defend our borders at all costs because we can. people, we can't replace our native population with foreigners that will diminish the greatness of the country since there are so many people in the world that could come into Europe or the United States and there's zero problem about population decline in these countries. It is linked to white

supremacy or retaining the character of the dominant group. And so women have to have babies on this ideology to replenish the dominant group. So the idea is immigrants have, uh, have many babies. And so they'd swamp the native population. So natalism is an essential part of great replacement theory. So the Nazis, for instance, as well as anti-abortion. Right. Because the dominant group has to have lots of babies. Listening to you and hearing the things that J.D. Vance has said that have now gone viral. Talking about the purpose of postmenopausal women is only to be in service to those that are still at optimal baby making ages. That we're talking about the quote unquote softening of boys and the denying of real masculinity and they're at love affair that they have

with what toxic brute force resembles and represents to them. And the reason why they say that the culture has gone off the rails is because of, I would assume, too much education, too much access to information. And so then you go into the banning of books and the narrowing of curriculum, all in service to the great replacement. Am I right? You're right. The idea is to extol the dominant group.

So you have an education system that just phrases great men as the drivers of history. This is anti-democratic because what it's telling students is that they don't have agency in changing things. That there are no social movements. There's just great men. And there's Martin Luther King who gets added to the white people because Martin Luther King ended racism, supposedly. So you've got to put him in. So the idea is history is just a history of great men. And so you need to erase the history. You need to erase social movements. So for instance, the Black Lives Matter movement can't be taught in the state of

Florida. And then you need to represent the past as innocent and great because we're making America great again. And so you want to reduce or eliminate black history. You want to certainly eliminate because heterosexuality and rigid gender roles are the center of this ideology we're seeing worldwide. I mean, Putin justified the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by saying that we have to stop this ideology of parent one and parent two that's destroying traditional European Christian civilization. That's a speech he gave on the eve of the full-scale invasion. So let's invade Ukraine and kill everybody to protect ourselves from St. sex marriage. The center of this ideology is rigid gender roles. So you need to completely erase

LGBT perspectives. Now, all of this is, you know, the whole package is completely inconsistent because the goal is to not make students feel badly. But who's meant by students here? White heterosexual students. And so for everyone else, your existence is to the point of your, you know, to your book, erased. And the erasure is what is necessary in order to then re-indocrinate the way that things are supposed to be. We've seen this happen. We've seen this take place in places like Iran. We've seen this happen in places like Russia and places like Turkey and Hungary. That's absolutely right. But there, to me, Jason, is something that is different about, I mean, there are many things that are different about the United States, but there is also something

different in terms of modernity and access to technology that, let's say, was not present in the 1970s in Iran when the Islamic religious authority would take over that country and they would be lapsed into decades of regression. Where do you see the difference in terms of how America shows up in this moment with access to technology, the modernity of the times that we're living in verses, say, in Iran in the 1970s or Hungary or Russia, you know, erasure is not so simple, I guess. And I'm not saying that any of those things that happened at that time were simple, but I'm saying that there is a different obstacle that isn't just about what is in front of people. There is a bigger world that we have access to.

Well, that's why in authoritarian countries, they have strict control over the internet. I mean, I think Iran is a good comparison to the United States. because what we face is a Christian version of Iran. So hopefully it will never get as brutal as Iran. I mean, Iran is breathtakingly brutal with how they treat anyone in opposition or anyone pushing for equal rights for women or democracy, mass executions, this sort of thing. And obviously, Russia is as extreme, if not more.

But we have the elimination of books. They're attacking librarians. They're attacking teachers and universities. But as you say, you know, they're not yet banning the internet. So in this country, that would be an extreme step to follow China, to follow other authoritarian countries in that regard. However, one thing I always tell my students and other people is that fact-checking the internet involves appealing to media, looking at mainstream media, and going to.

to your library. And so, you know, research involves going to your library because the internet, as we all know, can be weird. So, I mean, we do have, you know, libraries, like digitized books, but there's something particularly threatening about targeting the kind of public repositories of knowledge that are public schools and libraries. There's also an attempt there to spread fear and intimidation because librarians are facing fear and intimidation. Public school teachers are facing fear and intimidation. An authoritarian society is one where citizens are turning each other in. That's just authoritarianism 101.

So what they've done is they're moving from group of citizens to group of citizens, encouraging young people to turn people in. So now they're starting with schools, encouraging young people to turn in, to turn in, teachers and professors. Tennessee has an online reporting form to report any professor who teaches quote, divisive concepts, unquote. So part of this is just generating a culture of fear. What I want to ask is about the clear distinction that is being made with the Harris Walls ticket and this revival of hopefulness that people are feeling. That is not something that can be faked, frankly, because I think that for a really long time, for close to a decade, we were living in a

place of despair and just holding on. And right now, people are seeing possibility, not perfection, but possibility. And what do you make of that clear distinction that we are seeing and whether or not it's enough to combat what we've been talking about for today? Right. Despair, the idea that the nation is in crisis and must be saved versus a joyful movement that seeks an expansion of freedoms, understood as freedom to, as Obama said in his speech. You know, healthcare allows you to do more things. Less debt allows you to do more things. So whereas the Republicans are promising a restriction of freedom, the Trump Supreme

Court doesn't want students, people to walk around debt free because then they're not forced to do the bidding, then they might be able to, you know, be artists or something or social workers. But if they're laden down with debt, then they're kind of beholden to other employers. This is a point Du Bois made long ago in souls of black folk. That debt is a form of servitude. So the Republicans are essentially running an anti-freedom campaign. They're going to constrict our freedoms, women's freedom, LGBT freedom, and then the sort of loading us with debt in order to give the billionaire class freedom from taxes, regulation, etc. So I think there are some difficult conceptual issues for Americans to face, and I think Obama's speech at the DNC did bring those out,

that health care, not being in debt, that having more parental and family leaves, that these actually increase freedom. So I think it's not just joy, it's also freedom, but it's freedom that requires us not to think we're billionaires. Elon Musk doesn't want to be regulated. He doesn't want anyone to have power over him. He wants full power to do anything he wants, and that means less freedom for the rest of us. So if people can just remove themselves from the perspective of billionaires and think what they need to be free, then there is a chance here. That's what this election is about. It's about freedom.

Yeah. Well, Jason, we will leave it there today, folks. The book is Erasing History, How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. It is always such a pleasure to get into deep conversation with you. Always appreciate your time. Likewise, Danielle. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday.

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