The Daily Beast Podcast - No One Can Be More Disappointed in Ron DeSantis Than His Wife Casey

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

This week on The New Abnormal, hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy discuss the end of Ron DeSantis’ 2024 dreams. Then, Protect Democracy Editor Amanda Carpenter walks us through a report she co authored about what we can expect from another Trump presidency. Plus! Author Ben Herold is here to tell us all about his new book,\ “Disillusioned Five Families and the Unraveling of American Suburbs.” 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 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 Kedinan, 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 an excellent show we have today.

United to Protect Democracy editor Amanda Carpenter is here to walk us through the authoritarian playbook for 2025. A report she co-authored about what we can expect from another Trump presidency and what we can do to avoid it. Seems pretty important. That author Ben Harold is here to tell us all about his new book, Disillusioned, Five Families and the Unraud. traveling of American suburbs. But first, let's have some fun. Well, it's finally happened. The never back down candidate, Rob, from the great petri dish of Florida, has finally rolled

his way out of the Republican primary, Ron DeSantis, friends. He is out. And no one can be more disappointed in him than his wife. This is a campaign that spent tens of millions of dollars and couldn't teach a man how to smile, laugh normally, or just have casual conversation with children. He is just effectively a loser. And then after being debased consistently by Donald Trump,

what does he do, Andy, turns around and backs his man. Okay, I need you to say actually $150 million. Oh my God. Ron DeSantis' campaign spent $150 million and he couldn't smile. Wow. Wow. Yeah, ain't nobody here shedding a tear for Barab. That's for sure.

I picture him now that the campaign is over. He sits down on his couch. He takes off his boots. He takes out the lifts. Pops open a bud light. and turns on Disney Plus. And, you know, it grabs a thing of pudding and no spoon. Oh, hungry.

And just gets back to being who he used to be. It's hard to know how to feel about this because he sucks. And he's one of the worst people in America. But we're still left with Trump. So you can only have so much schadenfreude, I guess. and then you're still looking at it going, all right, well, it's good that DeSantis isn't going to be president, but, oh, yeah, that Trump guy is going to be the Republican nominee. And like you said, the idea that, you know, he just turned right around, not even, like, didn't even wait a day and just turned right around and endorsed Trump.

That is just emblematic of the Republican Party in the year of our Lord 2024. four. They all bend the knee and Haley will do the same thing after she loses New Hampshire on Tuesday night unless she, you know, decides to stick around to then have the humiliation of losing her home state of South Carolina, which with these people, you never know. Because they are, they are into kinky shit.

The most fitting thing about all of this was that DeSantis in his sort of goodbye speech in a post that he put on social media, had a caption, success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts. Winston Churchill. That is not a Churchill quote. Oh, no?

No, no. And it is just, I can't think of anything more fitting than a guy who has absolutely gutted Florida's education department and its universities than to have a quote that attributed to Winston Churchill that was not said by Winston Churchill. It's just, it's like, it's almost a little too on the nose. And like, you know, if you saw it in a script or watched on a TV show, you'd be like,

all right, come on, I get it. You don't need to do that. But this is reality. This is the world we live in now. So, so yeah, goodbye to Meatball Rob. I feel sorry for the people in the state of Florida. Well, I feel sorry for the people in the state of Florida who don't like him. I don't feel sorry for the people who do like him.

But I am also glad that he is one state's problem as opposed to a national nightmare. The thing that I will, I mean, he's still a national nightmare because everything that he experiments with inside of the state of Florida is finding its way as a domino effect across the country. I just think about the fact that, you know, somebody had posted and said, if not for Ron DeSantis's craven ambition to be Trump light, there was. would have been no don't say gay bills. There would have been no gutting of AP African American studies. Every single thing, every single policy, there would have been no fight with Disney.

Oh, I'm going to take on Mickey Mouse. Every single thing that he did was in order to show Trump's base that he could be trumpier. And to believe it at one time or another that we thought that he could be a competitor. The thing is, he never had it. He had the policy craving But the thing that we have to understand, and I think that the Biden campaign needs to understand, is that what Donald Trump lacks in sanity, logic, intellect, he makes up for in his charisma. If Ron DeSantis had learned to smile, if he knew how to talk to children or tell a joke or laugh like a normal human being and not an AI bot, he literally could have been a real contender. And so it's scary to me to think that you would turn your state of.

upside down, you would gut all of these things and then go home with not even a consolation prize because he's not going to be the VP pick. Like he's a fucking joke. I wonder as he is, you know, eating his pudding, was it all worth it, Rob? Was it worth it? No, you raise a very good point that I think can't be made enough. And that is because I've seen people saying, see, the whole country doesn't like these policies that are popular in Florida. And it's like, you might want to slow your role on that. And I will say there's some evidence of that from the 2022 elections that a lot of the anti-woke stuff or whatever you want to call it, the anti-LGBQ stuff, the anti-Black stuff,

isn't playing well in a lot of areas in the country, which thank God for that. But the point that you made is, I think, the correct one. And that is, this is a guy who had a charisma deficit. And as other people said, he was sort of like the more he talked, the less you liked him. There's two things here. One is before we want to talk about how, oh, it was his policies that cost him this nomination. Because I don't particularly think that's true with the Republican base. I think the two things that cost him were, A, the charisma deficit.

And B, it was just, it was Donald Trump. And I think DeSantis and, you know, maybe a whole bunch of other people completely underestimated the absolute hold that Donald Trump has on Republican voters. And they are just enthrall to him. And nobody was going to beat him this year. And I don't even think if DeSantis had charisma, he would have beaten Trump this year. But he at least would have kept himself viable for being optimistic here and assuming that if Trump wins in 2024, that there'll be a 2028 election. Oh, Andy. Don't hold me to that because I'm not so sure about that.

Or if Trump loses in 2024, I think, you know, DeSantis could have been a very viable choice in 28, except that I think maybe not so much now. I think he may have, you know, completely ruined any chance he has it being president. And there are, you know, because there are plenty of candidates who lose primaries and then go on to be, you know, four years later or eight years later, go on to with. the nomination. It just seems really tough, unless he gets a complete personality overall, it seems really tough to picture that happening with B-Ball-Rob. I don't think that he gets a second bite at the Republican Apple. I really don't. However, Joe Biden ran for the presidency. How many

times before he became president of the United States? Right. But I think obviously Democratic voters and Republican voters are different because one had a lobotomy and the other didn't. But I think still that I still wonder, and we'll never know, that if anybody outside of Chris Christie was actually serious about being president of the United States, if they actually showed up with their sleeves rolled up, ready and willing to go toe to toe with Donald Trump. There were so many things. And you could embrace all of his hateful, white supremac, misogynistic, anti-black, anti-LGBQ policies. but nobody was willing to take on the man and say, we're not going to be able to get our agenda done because this MFR is going back and forth between court cases

and like is battling for his life so he can't battle for you the way that I can. Nobody was willing to do that. And I wonder if you would have been able to peel off some of those fervent, you know, not the ones with the T-shirts and the, you know, the ones I'm talking about with like the fucking flag pants and like the pins and all other.

shit. Like, you wouldn't get those people, but I wonder if you would have been able to get a decent amount if you were like, yeah, the policies were right, but the man is wrong and actually be willing to stand on that. If as a collective, that field had done that where we would actually be right now. I don't know. Yeah, I honestly, I don't think it would make much of a difference. I just, I really do think, I mean, this is Trump's party. And among primary voters, it's so clear that this is Trump's party. I know what you're saying about the people in the in the t-shirts and the maga hats and whatever. I think it's deeper than that. You know, that's the vanguard of Trump's support. I think his support is wider among Republicans. And they just, you hear it all the time.

It's like, well, he gets things done. He does, you know, they have no evidence of any of this. But it's what they believe. And they are just, like I said, they're just completely enthralled to him. And basically, he can do no wrong. You know, it's tough to beat a candidate when a large chunk of the primary voters really do look at him as almost a messianic figure. I think it got underestimated. I think DeSantis, in particular, underestimated the level of support for Trump. Or maybe, you know, he thought, oh, well, if he gets indicted, maybe that'll change things. And as we saw, it didn't. And of course, you know, as you pointed out, he wouldn't even take him on on that. He just immediately backed up Trump and called all the indictments political and whatever. So, but I just don't think it would have made a

difference. Just my opinion. Yeah. I don't know what else to say about this matchup, but we will, we will know the final standing. Nikki Haley wanted a two-person race and boy, does she get one. And we will know at the end of the day on Tuesday that there will be one person standing. And sadly, that'll be a man that doesn't know who Nikki Haley actually is or like, or where he is, frankly, for that fucking matter. Yeah. Scared. Yeah, you know, we're recording this on the day before the New Hampshire primary, but, God, I don't even know what a current reference would be for like a psychic. But I don't think you have to be one to know that Donald Trump is going to win New Hampshire and it doesn't matter that Governor Sununu has endorsed Haley and that she's been spending time there and now it's down to a two-person race. I just don't think it matters.

Trump is going to win New Hampshire. And I think this is pretty much over. But it's so funny that you said he doesn't even know who Nikki Haley is. because I was going to say, I guess in his mind, she will just go back to her house seat. Yeah. And for those who don't know what we're talking about, over the weekend, or on Friday, I guess,

Trump was speaking, and he said, By the way, they never report the crowd on January 6th. You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, you know, they, did you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it, all of it, because of lots of things,

like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don't want to talk about that. So, yeah, he apparently thinks Nikki Haley is Nancy Pelosi. Yeah. We've been beating this drum for a while that, you know,

Republicans love to talk about Joe Biden and his declining mental acuity. Meanwhile, we got a guy out here who doesn't know the difference between someone running against him in the Republican primary and the Democratic former Speaker of the House. He's not sundowning. It's fucking midnight up there above the neck. Yeah. It's pitch black.

Let's just, you know, just to, because we could actually do probably an entire real of Donald Trump's consistent just inaccuracies. Oh, yeah. One being when shown a picture of going to. the E. Jean Carroll trial when shown a picture, when he said, I didn't know this woman. And he's like, oh, shown a picture of her. That's my wife. That's Marla. Excuse me? No. Point to her. He pointed to her in his deposition, pointed to her, said very clearly again, that's Marla. Donald Trump is not all there. And he continues to show that. But I think that his supporters, like you say, they're so fervent that they just think he's just so passionate, you know, that he just,

he loses words and sense and logic and whereabouts that like he just can't keep things together. But it's terrifying. I don't know how one would confuse Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi on so many different levels. I'm confused about that, but, you know, he did it. And it wasn't a joke. Well, they're both women and their first names start with N. So you can see. Oh, you're right.

Oh, you know. And then you have on top of that, like the people who. who defend him and enable him. And it's just unbelievable. And here in New York, we have a representative named Elise Stefonic. She has gone from sort of being a moderate, you know, sort of New York-style Republican to just being all in on MAGA and Trump. She just like, she woke up one day and was like, oh, every day is going to be Halloween for me and this is the costume I'm going to wear. And she was out there and someone asked her about Trump confusing Haley and Pelosi. And she responded. by saying that isn't a mix-up. The reality is, and then a reporter interrupted and said,

well, she wasn't speaker. And Stefanik said, Nikki Haley is relying on Democrats, just like Nancy Pelosi, to try to have a desperate showing in New Hampshire. And then the reporter said, but he was talking about January 6th. And then she just went on to say, President Trump has not lost his step. He is a stronger candidate, stronger than he is today than he was in 2016 and he was in 2020. Compare that to Joe Biden's weakness. Stephanic and people like her who just sit there and lie through their teeth just day in and day out need to be booted from office. It's just, it is unbelievable what has happened to the Republican party. There is nothing that Trump says or does that they will not defend. I mean,

if you can defend him confusing Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi specifically on January 6th and sit there with a straight face and say, oh, that wasn't a mix-up and act like he did that on purpose. You should not be voting on laws that affect Americans' lives. The fact of the matter is that Donald Trump was very clear when he said I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and I would gain in percentage points. I would gain voters. So there isn't anything that he can do. And that should scare the hell out of it.

everyone. There isn't anything that he could do that he could say. And maybe, frankly, some of them, you know, are hopeful that he's losing his mind because then maybe it makes him easier to control. I don't know. But that could be it. After four years of a Trump presidency and three of his post-presidency, you would think literally every American would understand that as bad as his initial term was, it would pale in comparison to the authoritarianism we'd see should he reassume the office for a second term. And while our listeners undoubtedly do get this, it unfortunately seems that many Americans do not, which is why a new report by United to Protect Democracy, entitled The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025 is so important. Joining me now is an editor at Protect Democracy and one of

the authors of the report, Amanda Carpenter. Amanda, thank you so much for being here. Hey, happy to be here. So before we get into the substance of the report, which can be found for our listeners at authoritarian playbook 2025.org. I want to talk about something it says in the intro, because it's one of the parts that absolutely infuriates me, not about the report, but the fact that is true. Good clarification. Yeah, yeah, I realized as I was saying it. So it says Trump makes a seemingly outlandish promise that upends conventional understandings of politics. Then those who help Americans make sense of current events, the media, other politicians, pundits, and influencers dismiss, distort, or deny the very promised Trump has made. The dismissals, distortions, and denials are so much of the ballgame

here, aren't they? Yeah. Why do we feel so tired when we have to go through this again? I think it's helpful to remind people, you are tired because if you've been in sort of the anti-Trump coalition or just, you know, the sane part of America, you've been at this for almost 10 years, right? Started in 2015, this is the third time in three elections where Donald Trump will be on the ballot. You have every right to be tired. But your fatigue is what Trump and his allies are absolutely banking on. And so as we go through all these distortions and denials, I was very deliberate in this report that every promise that we talk about that would be damaging to our democracy, it comes straight from Trump. You already see this happening with this campaign where they point to

the Heritage 2020 project or Stephen Miller and say, oh, that's not us. You know, there's other people trying to take credit for what Trump will do and make promises that he hasn't made. No, that is not true at all. Everything in this report comes straight out of Trump's mouth or directly from his campaign. And quite frankly, Andy, the things that I think are most concerning are the things that I know Trump probably didn't come up with himself. When he talks about invoking the Insurrection Act, using alien enemies, and the,

impoundment. I mean, these are, you know, most people in Washington are pretty familiar with them, but these are specific things that he's talking about in ways that he can use and abuse executive power. Other people are teeing this up for him so that he just goes to the prompter and says it. And we all know Trump is really unscripted. The fact that he is on script with these very specific things about using and abusing federal power makes me take it even more seriously because I know there's a whole infrastructure behind him that will operationalize these promises in 2025. Couldn't agree more. So let's get into the report. The report is broken into major categories. And then those categories are each divided into promises, powers, and plans. And as you said,

the promises section shows in Trump's own words, what he's going to do. And then the powers and plans part show how these promises will be put into action. So for time purposes, I'm going to combine some categories. So let's start with the first two in the report. The first The first one is using pardons to license lawbreaking, and then there's directing investigations against critics and rivals. Explain what we're talking about here. Sure. So the pardon power, right now Trump is making the case in courtrooms and in his courtside campaign appearances, as I'm calling them, because he doesn't really do campaign rallies anymore. He knows the cameras will cover him. Courtside. So isn't that wonderful? What he is saying is that he has complete and total immunity. For anything he does as president,

he cannot be held liable criminally or otherwise because he was president. End of story. That is sort of his legal framework. The course may reject that. But if he becomes president again for federal crimes, he can pardon himself. Just like he has offered to pardon the January 6 rioters. Just like he pardoned his henchmen, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn and everyone else who stonewalled the Russia investigation.

And so when he's talking about immunity, I want people to also think about well, what happens if he becomes president again? Because it doesn't really matter what a federal court says if he can pardon himself for those crimes. That is how he renders himself above the law. And I expect your audience to understand these concepts. And I'm probably telling them something they already know. But what he doesn't get enough scrutiny for is how he is abusing that power to license lawbreaking that benefits him politically or otherwise.

I'm not predicting what can happen in the future. He did it as president. He gave pardons to people that he thought helped benefit him politically. I mentioned the people tied to the Russian investigation. It was only the people who Stonewold the Russian investigation who got pardons. You know, Michael Cohen sure didn't, but the people who didn't make deals. And Mueller is pretty specific about that in the Mueller report, Andrew Wiseman, who was involved in that. He said it is not lost on me that the people who did not cooperate got pardons.

I mean, this is Trump's way of not only obstructing justice, but nullifying that investigation. nullifying the thousand plus prosecutions that Department of Justice has gone after related to January 6th. I mean, this is their largest operation in history. And Trump is essentially saying, yeah, I'm going to make all that go away. And I don't mind because these people are hostages and did nothing wrong. He also gave partons to Janice D'Souza of 2000 Mules fame to Steve Bannon, Joe Arpaio. And the one that really concerns me just, you know, just from a policy perspective and how autocrats typically take hold of military. and use them for their own purposes,

are the pardons that he gave to war criminals that were popularized by Fox News. I mean, you talk about licensing lawbreaking and signaling your approval for really heinous, heinous crimes. It's all right there. And so once you render yourself and your allies above the law,

that then allows you to do something like take over the Department of Justice and weaponize investigations and target your perceived enemies because guess what? You're above the law. No one, no norm, no ethical code at the Department of Justice is going to come after you for corruption or lawbreaking or anything else because you've already taken care of that. And so the way that this report is set up, it shows you how you start with this mindset that a president can do anything and then how it flows down and through all the departments to fundamentally change what it means to be living in America in 2025.

Yeah. And that brings us to the next two categories, which are regulatory retaliation and federal law. enforcement overreach. You mentioned it earlier, and we've talked about it a lot on this podcast, Heritage's Project 2025. This feels right along the lines of what the report is saying in these categories. Yeah, a few people have sort of referenced Project 2025 to me after they've read this report. And I was like, yes, I've read every word of it. I understand everything they're saying. But the reason I did not write a response to Project 2025 is because Heritage is not running for president. But it all does work together because these are the people who will staff as a next administration. And what I did pick up on from the report that I think is really important is this

wide embrace of massive Article 1 power, which essentially is they're sort of trying to shoehorn a conservative philosophy, whatever that means to them anymore, onto Donald Trump. I mean, they're essentially saying, we believe in all-encompassing executive power. We had big debates about this during the Bush administration when it came to, you know, war policy, but they want to do it for whatever the president wants policy. And so there's a section in regulatory retaliation because this also has to deal with the Department of Justice. They don't believe in anything. There's this concept of independent agencies in Washington where you have these agencies that sort of operate on their own. They might have a bipartisan board, but they can make regulatory decisions without

interference from the president. And there's specific things set up so that a president cannot interfere with their rulemaking and decision making. And Donald Trump and Heritage, and all the rest say to heck with all that, we believe once a president is in charge, all of the people should report directly to him and they're there to carry out only his agenda, you know, constitution something, something, that comes later. And so once you have these people in place at, you know, the FCC or the weather agency or pick your spot, they can start to make selective decisions to benefit the president politically. And I reference the weather agency because we had that absurd stuff that happened when Trump was in power where they tried to replace where the

hurricane landed to make Trump look better. I mean, it's that absurd. But the thing that he did threaten to do in his first administration was something as obscure, not really for the people that work in this, but threatening to raise the postage rates on Amazon packages in order to punish Jeff Bezos for his critical Washington Post coverage. He talks a lot about revoking FCC licensing for broadcasters that would hurt NBC. You know, there's a lot of things that bureaucrats can do. as a conservative, I fear this, but long before Donald Trump came into power from my perspective, but they essentially see all this as tools that could be leverage in all kinds of ways in order to coerce loyalty. And they're very, very upfront about that. And so we talk about all the

examples and how that would play out. Okay. And then the next subject is domestic deployment of the military, which it feels like we came very close to during Trump's first term. Well, we did. It was Lafayette Square, right? So, yeah, the last two-sexuals, there's sort of similar, and they're hard to keep track up because there's really two agencies I am most concerned with. Number one, there's a Department of Homeland Security, which has a lot of forces, federal forces, available to a president to use, primarily like border patrol. And one thing that Trump talks specifically about and Heritage does as well is essentially gathering all kinds of other troops, whether they be military or what have you, whoever's available and putting them under CBP for the

purpose of immigration enforcement so they can do these massive deportation raids, get people in the streets, et cetera, et cetera. I consider myself somewhat of a borderhawk pretty tough on immigration. I know that once Trump has control of these forces, if they're out in the streets sweeping people up, it's not only going to be cruel. It's going to be Muslim ban times 10. It's going to be chaotic. Americans will very likely get swept up in it because when these things happen, there's not a lot a place for rules and standards and the ability to challenge these things legally because it's happening so fast. It's also a pretext to do other things, right? And it doesn't stop there. Once someone has that kind of power, very rarely, if you look at throughout the course of

American history, does it stop there? And so that is one avenue that through federal law enforcement or overreach, which I feel like it's very likely to happen through DHS, is laid out by everything that he said and the people around him and said. But then also through the domestic deployment of the actual military, which is what you did see at Lafayette Square. There's also a mix of these federal agents that I'm talking about. But the kind of the point is, when you picture what happened at Lafayette Square, no one knew what was happening. It was a mix of National Guard and Capitol police and D.C. police and people not wearing their badges and Army helicopters buzzing. It was a chaotic mess where people were hauled out. Their First Amendment rights were violated. And listen,

And I understand that, you know, there is writing and there's bad guys and things had to be put down. But that response was certainly an overreaction. He was talking about invoking the Insurrection Act to do even more. Donald Trump is now on the campaign trail, essentially saying, yeah, he wants to go in and take over cities that are run by liberal Democratic mayors because they don't think they're doing good job. I mean, he's not even using the pretext of a protest to threaten it at this point. And so I find that very concerning. And you have people like Mark Esper, his former Department of Defense Secretary, who actually stood up to him during Lafayette Square and said, don't invoke the Insurrection Act. He was later fired for it.

And I don't know if you saw this big interview that the Heritage Foundation president did with New York Times over the weekend where Esper is actually a heritage alum. Right. And the Heritage President is essentially saying Mark Asper really messed up because he disagreed with the president about Lafayette Square. What they're talking about is the Insurrection Act in putting true. on the streets to put down protests they don't like. And so this is all, it's all very clear laid out on a policy level. And what I want the people who will deny this is happening or it's possible to understand is that the Mark Espers won't be there next time.

Right. And I go to great lengths, you know, with all our team here, explaining this report why the constraints that existed in the first Trump administration will no longer be available the second time around because there's this overarching thing. places like the Wall Street Journal. They had a piece a few weeks ago saying, our system's strong enough to contain Trump. You know, I really wish that were to be true. But after studying how much power a president has and how easily he can abuse it, I just factually, that is not a true statement. No, I couldn't agree more. I'll skip the last category, which is the autocrat won't

leave risks to future elections. I only bring it up because I can't tell you how happy I was to see it because I get the feeling some people think that I have lost it. when I bring this up. Yeah. I mean, I will say that section is fundamentally different because it's not like I can look at it and say, okay, here's the plan that he'll have to do it. Right, right. I say he flirts with it all the time.

Absolutely. And given that other things that he's threatened, he has made good at or at least attempted to, it would be unwise in misleading to leave it out and ignore it. 100%. So I want to talk about the final third or so of the report where it gets into ways to prevent all of this from happening. And much as there are the five pillars of Islam, I feel like what you've got here is kind of the ten pillars of democracy. I don't have a ton of time. So I'm just going to read them all. Then you can speak to them as you see fit. And the ten pillars or whatever you

want to call them are create pro-democracy coalitions before the crisis arrives, take anti-democratic ideas and promises seriously, keep a broad pro-democracy movement united against the acute big-picture autocratic change, support Republicans that stand firm for Democratic institutions. I agree with you on this one. I think we should support you and the 14 others. Rally around nonpartisan independent public servants, uphold the rule of law and democratic institutions, protect the first targets and arrange to advocate for the most vulnerable, evaluate security at the community, household, and personal level, work to protect free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028, and continue building the democracy of tomorrow. So I've only got like three minutes left.

So just give me the highlights here what you think are important. Sure. Well, I guess I'd summarize it like this. I've had some reporters look at this and say, wow, if you laid out a lot of big policy problems, what are your policy solutions? And I said, it's people. All those recommendations come down to people.

When you talk about what the guardrails are, the norms, or all these other things that actually work to hold institutions together, it's not something written down in a book that magically keeps everything together. It is people. And so we opened this interview talking about almost 10 years. It's been a long 10 years.

And these coalitions, they're really hard to keep together. Everything that Trump and his allies are doing are designed to divide us and pit us against each other and keep us mad and tired and angry. Resisting that is the thing in opening up these ways of communication, sort of just rediscovering what actually keeps us together, what makes the system work. I feel like the 2024 election is really just a giant civics test for the nation. And if we just get above 50 percent, collectively, we'll be okay. So you heard it here first.

Amanda Carpenter says that democracy, much like Soylent Green, is people. And that's the important thing here. More tasty. Yes, definitely. And more nutritious. Throughout the report, there are quotes from various people who are involved. with the Protect Democracy Organization. And there was a great quote from, I guess it was Genevieve Nadeau. I don't know if I'm pronouncing her last. John BF. Yeah. She's wonderful. Yeah, it's okay.

And she says, Trump is following the 20th century dictator's playbook of dehumanizing vulnerable groups in order to isolate them and justify cruelty by the state. He's backing up his rhetoric by threatening to invoke extreme and novel legal twos to effectuate an agenda of inhumanity on a scale we haven't seen for generations. I read that and I thought this is the kind of thing I would like to read in say the New York Times or the Washington Post. Yeah, I think they should call her and do an interview and quote her. She should be go-to. What do you think? No, I couldn't agree more. I am just, and this gets back to what I said at the beginning with where to me the whole thing where the media and other politicians, et cetera, dismiss, distort, or deny the promises that Trump has

made is like so much of the ballgame, I get very angry with, you know, the quote-unquote mainstream media for sort of not fully recognizing or not seeming to fully recognize the dangers that are being posed here by Donald Trump. True. Again, you can find the full report at authoritarian playbook 2025.org. And I would encourage listeners to check the whole thing out and share it with people they think might benefit from seeing everything laid out in such stark terms. Amanda Carpenter, thanks so much for being here.

Folks, I am very excited to welcome to the new abnormal author of the book Disillusioned Five Families and the Unravelling of America's Suburbs, Benjamin Herald. Ben, let's just jump right in. Like I was saying before, I am a child of the suburbs. My family came to the United States from Jamaica, moved out to an area that they could afford for the best school system that they could afford. And I know that people outside of this country listening to that, that sounds crazy to say, but it is the truth.

And your book is a mix of understanding white flight and the lie of the suburb. So talk to us about the title, disillusioned, why you chose it and how it sets the stage of the suburbia that is. Yeah, well, first, thanks for having me. I appreciate it being here. And, you know, I think really the thing is, With American suburbia writ large, like we as Americans have invested so many of our hopes and dreams and visions for the future into the suburbs and especially into their schools.

Like that's where you go to give your kids a better life. And that has a very, very powerful thing. But when I started talking to parents in different suburban communities around the country and especially suburban parents of color, again and again and again, I just heard this sense of what brought me to the suburbs isn't what I'm actually receiving. I feel like it's a bait and switch. the rug is being pulled out from under my feet. And so there's this disillusionment of, hey, this is the place where I'm supposed to find the American dream. And instead, I'm finding that I got stuck paying for the opportunities that somebody else already extracted. There are a couple of cities that you cover in your book, where your families are from, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles,

and Pittsburgh. Why did you choose those cities and what makes them similar and different in terms of the families that you spoke to in each of those areas. Yeah, this really started for me with my hometown. I grew up in the suburbs outside of Pittsburgh. It's kind of an aging in a ring post-war suburb that grew up really almost overnight in the 50s. And so my family lived in there in the 70s and I'm white. My family's white. All of my teachers are white. And everything just kind of worked for us. Being growing up in Penn Hills and attending the public schools there really was just like this kind of conveyor belt to a middle class life somewhere else. I left Penn Hills in 1994 after I graduated. And I really didn't look back. I thought the real world was out in the cities and the country. And so I moved to

Philadelphia where I'm based now. But in 2015, I started seeing all of these headlines coming out of my hometown about this monstrous $172 million debt that this small suburban school system had accumulated somehow. And then all of the ripple effects of that. You know, home values were stagnating. Property taxes were going up. Services were getting cut. And then I saw the demographics, which Penn Hills Public Schools were 72% white when I graduated. But by the time the next generation, you kind of took ownership of the school system, it was two-thirds black. And so what became very clear in Penn Hills in my hometown was there was there was this sense of someone else is now on the line for paying for the opportunities that families like mine already got. And I wanted to know, is this just a thing that happened in my hometown or is this

part of a larger pattern? And so when I started widening my lens and kind of looking at other communities around the country, what I came to learn is that there's this kind of common cycle that many, many particularly post-war suburbs go through where there's, you know, those first few generations where there's this great social contract in place. You get a cheap mortgage. You get massive tax breaks. You get a home that increases in value, brand new infrastructure, great public schools. And for those first mostly white generations who we live in the suburbs and exclude everyone

else, it works great. But at some point, the bill for all of that comes due. And because there's so much emphasis on keeping taxes low and so forth. And suburbia, then when that comes due, and because all of that infrastructure built up overnight and now it all needs repair at the same time, like those bills are big and they hit hard and they hit fast, but families like mine have often already left by that. And so what you see is someone else coming into suburbia following our path, but getting stuck with all of these burdens and debts. And so, you know, the five communities that I feature kind

of trace that arc from beginning to end. So outside Dallas, there's a new ex-urban community that was really just, you know, houses were still being built there when the family that I follow moves in. But there, you can see them kind of sowing that same seeds of like unsustainability and exclusion that is going to catch up with them. And then all the way on the other end, you know, look at Compton, California, which we forget was a suburb, but it had this really rich suburban history

in the 40s and 50s, and then the bottom fell out. And it went through this whole process already. So you can kind of see where any individual suburban community is by looking at it in relation to Compton's Ark. It's kind of like this crazy spread, like a virus that kind of takes hold

in the way that you're describing suburbia, which is that white folks move into this one area. They leave the cities. that have become increasingly integrated, condensed with, you know, with volume, you know, and land. You can't have. So the suburbs are created and they're created for white exclusivity. You go there, then you extract all of the resources, extract all of the things that you can. Black and brown people are finally able to move in because of policy changes, what have you. White folks pick up, fly again and strap them with the bill and then move on to the next place.

Except the fact is that there's not enough landmass in order to create this type of utopia. And you talk about this one area, Lovejoy, that is being created. So talk to us about the family inside of Lovejoy and kind of this moving further out. We'll just keep moving and we'll follow the American dream or the lie of the American dream off a cliff. Yeah. I mean, you set that up great just with that idea of this kind of like moving out in successive rings. and often that flight coincides with demographic changes in the older community and then the whiter and wealthier families move out. And so for generations, that ability to keep moving out was pretty widely accessible to the white middle class and to the black middle class.

But what we see now is the demographics are changing so fast in the country and especially in suburbia, where inside suburban public schools right now, white children are already in mind. So the demographics are changing so fast. And then like you said, there's this, you know, the reality that we can't just continually build out further and further and further from the cities because of, you know, the housing market is a mess, water issues, commute times, all of those things. So what you find is a lot of people who kind of feel stuck. And so the beckers are an affluent white family who they actually met because they were both working in bankruptcy consultants after Enron went down the tubes. And so that was there where they kind of met and we fell in love with each other. And so in the early 2000s, they moved into Plano, Texas. And really, they're thinking like, okay, we're just going to go check out some houses.

We're excited to be getting married. Let's kind of see what it is. And it just kind of works out really easily for them. They find a house on like their second visit. They make an offer and get it accepted on the spot. And then they move in. And they think they have kind of the set of and forget it, American suburban dream. But by the time their oldest child is ready to start school, the public school down the street,

the demographics have totally flipped for majority white to majority non-wife. And so they have their son there for a year. And they just decide it's not working. And they're not going to risk their kids. future for, you know, the things that they see and aren't happy with in that school. So they kind of go on this journey trying to find somewhere else. And it's really hard because it is a limited fool now. It used to be very easy to move further out. And now it's a challenge. But they're pretty wealthy. And so they end up in this community. The town is called Lucas, Texas. And it's a place

that is really, really intentional about its exclusionary zoning. So they guarantee that essentially only really expensive large houses are going to be built within there. Everything has to be on at least an acre and in some cases two acres. You have to have your own septic tank. You know, there's no sewers. There's no sidewalks. And so what the local leaders will say is like, that's why we don't have a single child in this district who lives in an apartment. And so the beckers move out to this district thinking, okay, we finally found this kind of old version of the suburban dream that we thought was maybe vanishing. But then what they find is even there, all of the things they want to kind of get away from and protect their children from, like there's no escape from it anymore. For me, I'm a former

educator and I think about the ways in which I'm just like, why not invest where you are instead of fleeing? You leave, you saying, oh, I don't like the way that this school is doing things, blah, blah, but it's not your decision to stay and like create better opportunity or let's say run for school board or do any of the things that would put money and change how the schools are being made up. It's just this idea of pick up and move because we have the privilege to do so. It's like, everywhere you go, there you are. So you can only run for so long. That's part of the moment I think we're really having as a country right now

and like suburban communities all over of like, oh wait, I'm carrying the problem with me. So it's going to be wherever I am. But, you know, I think part of the challenge with that is, you know, in terms of why not, you know, stay and improve, why keep moving out is because somewhere beneath all of our, you know, include myself in this as a white person who grew up in the suburbs and left, like beneath all of our defense mechanisms and, you know, our rationalizations and the things we choose to ignore and, you know, choose not to know, like, we kind of know that this thing is unsustainable. And that when the Ponzi scheme crashes, we don't want to be the ones it hits. And so it's not,

it's an informed, even if it's not explicit sense of like, we don't want to be stuck here because we know how bad it's going to get because everything, you know, we know everything that we didn't pay for. You know, the other piece of that that you build out in terms of like how you're looking at these families is also infrastructure. When you talk about the septic tank, you talk about certain areas of Texas and them deciding as, you know, them as a district or a city council, okay, we're not going to bring in public transportation. We're not going to have a subway or have a system that would bring out these outsiders into our place, right? We're not going to build walkable communities so that we can keep things exclusive in insular. And yet these are the very

things that make places attractive to live. Right. And one of the amazing stories that came out of Lucas, Texas. And again, this is a very small town, maybe 30, 40 miles north of Dallas. And as recently as like the 90s, it was mostly open ranch land and a few houses. And they only had one elementary school. And then all the kids actually had to go to the neighboring community for middle and high school because it was so small. And they were very intentional about that. But then it started to grow. And so you saw kind of the residential development happening. There's this kind of like people, again, and they realize what's happening. And so in the early 2000s, you know, there's people who are saying, hey, like, look,

the money isn't going to be here in 10 years to fund all of the services that all these people moving in are going to need. So we have two choices. We can raise taxes on the people who are already here or we can bring in new development. But the people who are living in suburbia don't want either part of any of that. So what happened was amazing. Like in the early 2000s, there's these like small, tiny little zoning and planning commission meetings happening.

And like the whole community turns out. You know, everyone's so fired up. They actually have to move the meeting from City Hall into the fire department. so they can set up more chairs. And people say, you know, there's expert after expert saying, I can't think of another community with this mix of residential low density and lack of other sources of income being sustainable. I can't think of us.

And they say, we don't care. We're going to keep it like this. And what they did was issue more debt. Big picture stepping back. What I ended up seeing in that part of Texas was here you have a community that goes from essentially open ranch land to this massive residential building boom to these kind of steep enrollment declines and budget crises. closed schools inside its public school district in the span of like 25 years, which is just an

extraordinarily fast change. What kills me and what is essentially killing the country is racism. Like, is the fact that we are having this issue and this decline and all of the things that you write about and these families discuss. I have seen in the suburbs that I grew up in, where all of a sudden I, you know, I'm going home to visit my family and I'm seeing all of these for sale signs. You know, and I'm seeing the headlines about the public school and now they're having to sell a building because they had bought a building that there weren't enough kids to fill up. And so now they're having to sell this building that costs millions of dollars. And I'm looking at all, I'm not like, what the hell happened here? Yes. And it's such a common experience. And I feel like

part of what I hope that the book is able to help do is that the suburbs, you know, American suburbs are so fractured. You know, you have all of these little jurisdictions and municipalities. And it's like, this kind of crazy patchworking code and everyone's kind of competing with each other for resources and residents and businesses. And so it's really hard to kind of connect the dots. But when you go into pretty much any suburban community in the country, you're going to find families of color who have very similar experiences to what you just described. And they're fed up with it. And so what I saw again and again with, you know, there was a middle class black family outside Atlanta and a multiracial mom and Evanston, Illinois. With those two families in particular, there was like these

immediate racist incidents that happened. Kids getting called slurs, unfair discipline. Can't get my daughter into gifted, even though she's straight A's and never missed a school day and its most pleasant child on her. Like all of those things happen. But there's also, like you kind of pointed out, there's like this deeper structural thing happening of like, A, it's being made clear to me every day that I don't really belong. And B, that when everyone leaves, I'm going to be left with vacant houses, old school buildings. We can't fill up anymore. Pumbling infrastructure, all of these things. And so, you know, it's that connection between the day-to-day personal experiences of racism and discriminations and then also just kind of being caught up in the structural cycle that really hits

black and brown families really hard. And then, of course, again, it's not as if people are going to be fleeing into the cities because just here in New York City, you can't afford to raise a family in the city. It is wildly expensive. Post-COVID, it's gotten even more expensive for real estate. In your mind, where does this end? How does this kind of rinse and repeat, this spreading of the suburban virus, how does it end? Well, I think the first thing is, like, we are in the moment of what I argue and came to believe very strongly through my four years of reporting and research on this was that we're really at the beginning of what is going to be a decades-long kind of process of this model, this kind of Ponzi-Skey model unraveling. Because it's just not sustainable and we've run out of land and the demographic numbers just don't work for this kind of flight and revisit the same cycle pattern anymore. So if we're going to deal with that, we need some kind of, like as a country, as people, we need some

kind of vision that allows us to navigate that. And so part of, I think, what's going to be really challenging and we're seeing this, you know, the beginnings of this and school board meetings, you know, across suburbs all over the country, is the sense that the dreams that we built American suburbia on, whether it was white exclusivity and advantage or black aspiration and trying to get equal opportunity or even the places that are really dedicated to harmonious integration. Like everyone's disappointed. everyone's disillusioned. Everyone's feeling stuck like these dreams I had and brought with me aren't working anymore. But part of what was really powerful for me was when I went back to my hometown and kind of was trying to confront both the big kind of metaphoric mess left behind in Penn Hills, but also this really concrete mess that my family left behind in our backyard and got to know one of the moms who lived three doors down from my childhood home was a sense of like, hey, we have to be able to have conversations that bring this, you know, our collective experiences of suburbia that are very

different and very fraught together because the dreams that are going to carry us through are dreams that are more about repair, about, you know, sustainability, about intergenerational care. But that's not what suburbia was built on. So it's going to be a tricky transition. Yeah. And I just think that, you know, your book comes at a time when the backdrop is the 2024 presidential election, is the divisiveness, the siloed thinking, this one party that wants to revert, back to when America was great, which I don't know when that was, but pre-1950, pre-1953, America, that it can't happen. And then another that doesn't really take full responsibility on why some people have not achieved the American gene and most likely won't. Because to your

point and what you keep going back to is because it was a Ponzi scheme. Yeah. And I think like, you know, even on the on the left, like you see these kind of national divisions that are already, you know, kind of firmly entrenched with, you know, kind of the Democratic nomination process where a lot of younger Democrats and progressives are like, this old kind of liberal version of like how we do things. Like, it's just, it never worked as well as we said it worked. And it's not relevant to the time now. And we saw that in these kind of local school politics in a place like Evanson, Illinois, which is, you know, the Northwestern, it's a college town, a lot of affluence is very diverse. It has this great history. They're very kind of

proud of their diversity, starting right around 2016, 2018, it was like, hold up, we've been sweeping a lot of stuff under the rug, and we're not going to do that any. We're not going to, we're not going to let that stuff slide anymore. And so what you saw was this real kind of schism between these kind of like, typically a little bit older, whiter, more affluent kind of liberals and younger progressive activists of color saying, hey, this is not like time for, you know, tinkering around the edges. This is time to really rethink things top to bottom. And that's, you know, it gets very fraught, too, when you're talking about kids schools and property values and all of those things. Well, Ben, you know, I want to thank you for writing this book for drawing our attention

to a lot of the root, I think, of where our divisiveness is right now, which is that some people access the dream for a few generations and now it's piddling out, some of never, and we're just stepping into that space, and now they realize it was a mirage. So I really appreciate you, folks. The book is Disillusioned, Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs. Ben Harold, I hope that you will come back and join us again on the new abnormal. Really appreciate you. Absolutely.

Thanks so much for having me. Andy Levy. Danielle Moody. Andy, how are we starting off this good, good primary week in America with your fuck that guy? I'm going to go with a guy who's a member of Congress, a Republican, part of the, I think it's the stupid caucus. I don't know if that's the official name. He is one of the dumber people in Congress.

It's Paul Gosar, and he's had a lot of sort of, I don't even want to call him flirtations. He's just straight up a white supremacist. He has spoken favorably about Nick Fuentes, who is a straight up white supremacist and a whole bunch of other things. So none of this is a shock. but I just wanted to highlight it for a couple of reasons. He is claiming that the fact that the number of white people that are being recruited by the army has been plummeting, that part is true. But he is claiming that it's because the army has been taken over by quote unquote, woke Marxist ideologies.

And he said all this in a fundraising email that he sent out. and he specifically called it a casualty of this cultural skirmish that has left our army beleaguered and besieged by woke ideologies. So a couple of things here. One is that military.com, which is the, who put out the report, and it's not a new report. It came out last year sometime. They actually looked into it and they identified some reasons, some actual reasons. And one of them is the booming job market. But of course, Republicans don't want to say that because then their constituents might know that under Joe Biden, there's actually been a booming job market. And also, sadly, the fact that the opioid crisis has hit young white men in particular. So there's that. So obviously what he's saying is also, is just not factual.

But it's interesting. You know, I wanted to make sure. So I looked this up beforehand because, you know, here's a guy complaining that not enough white people are joining the army. There is no record. of Paul Gossar's military service in his biography. And I suspect that's because he has no military service. And this pisses me off. You know, the other stuff, I mean, look, I don't want to, I certainly don't want to downplay the fact that he's a straight up white supremacist or any of that.

But I get really ticked off when someone says, oh, we need more X in the military. And then you look and say, well, you never joined. You never served. Yeah. Look, I'm a veteran. I don't think that makes me a better person than someone who's not a veteran. I'm not saying everyone needs to join the military. But the people who want to talk shit about the military with respect to stuff like this,

I don't mean with respect to policy or anything like that. But with respect to stuff like this, you can't sit there and complain that white people aren't joining the military when you, a white person, haven't joined the military. Like, there's something wrong there. It pisses me off. And so I just add that as sort of a... seasoning to the white supremacy stew he's got going on. And by seasoning, because it's a white supremacy stew, I of course mean a pinch of salt. I was going to, I thought maybe paprika.

No, no, no, no. We're going to go, this is full on just a pinch of salt, white supremacy. So for all those reasons, he is my fuck that guy for today. I mean, it just, it says everything that you need to know when you have members of Congress who are Republicans. I mean, I can think of no other place that is less fucking woke than the military. Like, are we kidding? But then on top of that, you didn't serve. So shut the fuck up. And it's such an easy thing to look up. But again, like, don't let, you know, the truth get in the way of a good story. Everybody else's kids should be sent off to war so long as you can sit cozy in your place of power and good pay. So fuck that guy. Yeah. So, dude.

Danielle, close out our show here. Who's your fuck that guy? Well, it's complicated because I have kind of a twofer. And why do I say a twofer? So the New York Times over the weekend did an in-depth interview with the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin D. Roberts. Now, folks who listen to this show know, Andy, that you and I have been talking about Project 2025, have been talking about this multi-billion dollar initiative that is being pushed to gut government agencies of career government workers and put in place those that pledge their allegiance solely

to Donald Trump, that they are trying to, as the article says, institutionalize Trumpism. So one would think then that you would open up this piece, this interview and see some hard-hitting journalism when Kevin D. Roberts is hailing people like Joe McCarthy a la McCarthyism and saying that he had a good idea, just bad tactics. McCarthyism for those who went to school and before they banned books and history, McCarthyism, Joe McCarthy created the red scare where anybody who was not aligned with him and his way of thought were put on blacklist, were thrown in jail were excommunicated from government, many had to flee the country, right, until he was brought to task by Congress for his tactics. And it has always been used McCarthyism, the term, as a negative.

This man is saying, oh, no, no, his tactics may not have been right, but he had a good point. You would think that the reporter Lulu Garcia Navarro would, I don't know, what is that thing called? Yes, asking a fucking follow-up that would then unearth for everyone that when this man, Kevin Roberts, is talking about, oh, the fact that there is a love affair that is happening with the likes of McCarthy, with Victor Orban, who they back, the president of Hungary. who she lays out in this piece, Lulu says, well, you know, what is it about your attraction to Orban? This man who is anti-LGB, anti-immigrant, who has said that he wants to create a pure democracy, whatever the fuck that means. We know he's talking about white nationalism and is avowed as self-avowed white Christian nationalist. Andy, when I tell you that there was not a pushback, where there was not a follow-up, where there was not a place when Kevin Roberts is talking about the fact that we need to increase the white

birth rate and that there are low birth rates, that we need to get rid of the administrative state. What he's saying is that he needs to get rid of people who have sworn an oath to the Constitution. She doesn't ask, what does that mean to you? This man when asked, do you believe Joe Biden won the election? No, I don't. Oh, okay. Well, that's your opinion and just keeps it moving. I mean, it was probably the most absurd fucking interview I have ever read. This man is a danger. Project 2025 is a danger to democracy, to the rule of law, to the constitution, to our rights as people, because what they believe, what Kevin Roberts believes is that white Christian nationalism is the way. Anybody who is a detractor of that line of thinking needs to be removed from places of power. He wants to provide absolute power to a Republican president, not just a president of the United

States, but a Republican president of the United States. And they are ready to go on day one. There was not a fucking question that was posed here. that would send the kinds of alarms and bells that need to come across with an article and with a man and with a project like this. This is the reason why reporters like Lulu Garcia Navarro outlets like the New York Times in the way that they want to talk about white supremacy in this very casual nature, as if it's just an opposing idea that we need to give enough space to. This man in the article said that the George Floyd uprising of 2020, you know, when people went into the street when we had at the height of the pandemic, no vaccine, but said that murdering a black man in broad daylight by suffocating him to death is something that we should not stand by and just allow to happen in the United States of America. Kevin Roberts from the Heritage Foundation said that those protests were worse than anything that happened on January 6th.

I'm sorry, what? And again, absolutely no pushback from this New York Times reporter. Anything that this man said, well, I don't really like the way that you're phrasing that, her response was, oh, okay, sorry, I didn't mean that. What the fuck? So for that reason, Lulu, Garcia Navarro, Kevin Roberts, outlets that are allowing for there to be this casualness of white supremacy and white Christo-fascism that is taking over and just allowing it to happen and presenting it as a normal idea and ideology, fuck those guys. All of them. It was a disgusting fucking read. Yeah, it really was. I won't repeat the things you said, because you said, because you're, you took care of that quite nicely. I just want to point to two things that to me just let you know

that Kevin Roberts, among all the other things, he's a moral coward. And there's two answers he gave that for me show this. He was asked, do you believe that Biden won the 2020 election? He says, no. The reporter says, can you tell me why? And he says, yeah, well, I think there are unknowns. Still a lot of unknowns about two counties in Arizona, multiple counties in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Is it possible Biden won? Sure. But can I say definitive? that he won? No. This is a guy who knows that Joe Biden won the election, but also has decided that he can't come right out and say that because it will piss off Donald Trump and a large segment of the Republican Party that agrees with Donald Trump that the election was stolen. So that's one example.

And the other one was he brought up Victor Orban earlier. And the reporter says to him, Orban brags about turning Hungary into an illiberal democracy. He's anti-LGBQ. He's anti-immigrant. He wants to prevent Europe from becoming mixed race, et cetera, et cetera. Robert's response to that is, I've not seen that. I mean, come the fuck on. These are all things that Orban has said.

And he didn't just say them once in like some, you know, drunken cocktail party. He has said them over and over again. This is his platform. And for you to sit there and say, I've not seen them. that after saying that you really like this guy, just again, the absolute moral cowardice. And I agree the interview was not good and there was nowhere near the level of pushback there should have been. And so yeah, fuck these guys. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it,

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