The Daily Beast Podcast - Pete Hegseth’s Drinking Could Cause a Rift With Teetotaler Trump

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

It may be last call for one of Donald Trump’s most controversial nominees—and not for the reasons you may think. Then, author Jared Yates Sexton joins the program to emphasize the fact that nobody is coming to save us from the chaos of a second Trump Administration. Plus! A conversation with founder and editor of the popular blog Techdirt, Mike Masnick, about one of Trump’s scariest nominees: Brendan Carr. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Jared Yates Sexton, hosts of the Muck Rate podcast and the author of The Midnight Kingdom. A history of power, paranoia, and the coming crisis joins us to discuss the turbulent close of the Biden administration and what Donald Trump's return to power could mean for democracy. Then, founder of TechDirt and CEO of the Copia Institute, Mike Maznick, is here to break down his recent piece for TechDirt. Brandon Carr makes it clear that he's eager to be America's top censored, all about the intersection of tech policy and free speech in the upcoming Trump era. But first, let's have some fun. Breaking news over the weekend, which I will say I was shocked by, which is that President Biden has pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, on the trumped-up charges around his tax

evasion and getting a gun while I guess he wasn't supposed to be able to get a gun because of his drug use, et cetera, et cetera. And his sentencing was getting ready to come up. Now, I say that I'm shocked, to be honest, because after the fucking buddy photo ops with Donald Trump and this overt desire to normalize an incoming fascist as welcome back to the White House, I really didn't think that Biden was going to have it in him to pardon his son. And, you know, I love all of the nonsense bullshit outrage that is happening on the right. How many of Donald Trump's BFFs did he pardon on his way out the door in 2020? All of them who had actual credible criminal cases against them ranging from stealing and grifting off of their followers like Steve Bannon to like being a spy.

So like Hunter Biden filled out a form incorrectly. And the money that he didn't pay with his taxes, he paid plus interest. So, you know, the outrage can miss me. But I don't know, Andy. Are you shocked that Biden was able to conjure the courage to pardon him? I don't know. I have mixed feelings about this and none of them are particularly strong, I guess. First things first, the only response to MAGA people pretending to be outraged by this is just LOL. It's not worth engaging at any level other than that. I don't even need to talk about it anymore because that's it with them. So I think it's icky to use a... To use a professional term? A political term of art. I think it's icky. It's a little cringe. Oh, you have feelings. It's not quite chugy. I don't know if it's chuggy.

What are these words? Are these words from this century? They are. They are. Okay. All right. They're like the kids speak. Send me the Andy Thesaurus because I don't know. All right. So I think it's icky for a president to pardon his son. I think there are people far more deserving of pardons out there, probably hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. I can't work up any outrage over it because people who should know better, I have seen say, oh, by doing this, Biden is setting a precedent for Trump to act. Like, really? Okay. These are not random people. These are like, I've seen lawyers and constitutional scholars saying this. And it's like, where have you been living for the past 10 years or whatever?

The idea that Donald Trump needs a precedent to do whatever the fuck he feels like doing is insane. It's flat out insane. I'm completely unconcerned about that. I just think it's icky. And look, he has, you know, another, what is it, six or seven weeks to pardon other people. I would assume he's going to be pardoning, I hope, some of the. those people that I'm talking about who are, you know, more worthy than Hunter. It's icky to me, but at the same time, it's like we are so past the idea of norms in this country. So half of me is like,

you know, the idea that only one party has to be hamstrung by norms and has to follow them and pay attention to them is absolute bullshit. I guess on the other hand, you know, it's sort of the argument that people on the left make that say, well, you can't criticize these other countries for their foreign policy when we're doing this. You know, when we're doing X, you can't criticize someone for doing Y because they're kind of the same thing. So it's sort of that argument. It's like it makes it a little harder to look at like the things you talked about, like Kushner being pardoned by Trump. And God knows what he's going to do with the Jan 6 people.

I guess maybe it makes it a little harder to say, you know, hey, that's not how things work. Because look what Joe Biden did. He pardoned his son. And, you know, there's a way to frame that as it's sort of an abuse of the presidential power. Again, I'm not outraged about this because we're so past that. So that's why I say I have like mixed feelings about this, but my feelings are not particularly strong. It's funny because I don't have any mixed feelings whatsoever. It's like I saw it and I was just like, good for you.

These were bullshit charges and God only knows what would have happened if he didn't pardon him. then Donald Trump comes into office. Like it just to me, none of it made any sense. He should not have been prosecuted in the way that he was prosecuted because, again, it was the perception of there being some type of neutrality on the part of the Department of Justice. They had more vigor in their prosecution of Hunter Biden than it took Merrick Garland how fucking long, which now all of those cases have just been thrown out around Donald Trump. I just hope that as Biden, walks out the door that there are legions of people that are pardoned, as is the norm with presidents on their way out, but that they are, to your point, are people that are, you know, deserving,

that have been serving sentences around, you know, low-level drug offenses, and they've been in these maximum, you know, mandatory sentencing that is bullshit. So I hope that we see that. But I say that the only thing I was shocked because the neutering that has a lot of, you know, been done around Biden that he pretty much has done to himself. I was just like, oh, he's just going to, you know, once again preserve the perception of Democrats taking, you know, the higher ground. And I was just like, who cares? Yeah. I mean, look, the other thing is he specifically, Joe Biden had specifically said over and over again that he was not going to do this. So it looks a little hinky. You know, I apologize to everyone for all the technical words today. And to me, when

something is hinky, it feels a little icky. So I guess that's what I'm saying. On the other hand, look, this is what you would expect from the dawn of the Biden crime family. Like, of course he's going to pardon his underlings. You know, what is the point of being the head of a crime family if you can't take care of your actual family, Daniel? You're absolutely correct. Wrong. in that assertion. And speaking of crime and law, the rule of law actually no longer existing in this country, Donald Trump, in his parade of puppets, has announced his latest pick for FBI director, which is Cash Patel, who I don't even really know what to say about Cash Patel, except that he is a Donald Trump sycophant who has served in different departments.

departments and agencies in government. He's a federal prosecutor. So on its face, he seems like he is actually more normal than the others that have been chosen. But then you just look a little, I mean, just a smidge closer. And you realize that he is probably crazy. One of his main goals, as potentially the head of the FBI, will be to unearth the deep state and go after the media because why not turn the FBI on the American people? Because that seems like where all of this is headed. So for me, I'm like, am I surprised? No. I have deeper thoughts,

but please, Andy, are you surprised? No, I mean, we've heard this name bandied about for a while. The thing that I think a lot of people aren't talking about is Chris Ray has been the head of the FBI since 2017. It's meant to be a 10-year term. It's specifically meant to be a 10-year term so that it overlaps presidencies so that it's not a straight-up political appointee position. So what Trump is doing here, now I hope you're sitting, Danielle. I am. He's violating a norm. What?

He is violating a norm more than an upside down stool at Cheers would. Wow. That to me is not the fact that he's violating a norm. Obviously, he does that every day of the week. But I don't think enough people recognize that. I think there's a lot of people who just think, oh, well, of course, the new president comes in and he picks the head of the FBI. That's not supposed to be how it works with the head of the FBI.

Like, it's specifically not supposed to work. work that way. He's supposed to be in office. He was appointed by Trump, by the way, in 2017. And then he served through Joe Biden's term. This is not Biden's FBI director. This is a guy Donald Trump appointed, but he served through Joe Biden's term because it's a 10-year term for the FBI director. So the fact that Trump is basically is firing him. You know, this is not a case where it's, oh, well, you were the attorney general for Biden. So yes, you leave office. No, Chris Ray is being fired by Donald Trump. So that's a big deal that I think is being overlooked. On top of that, yeah, I mean, Cash Patel is a nightmare. I mean, he's written entire books talking about the fact that he's a

nightmare, talking about coming after the media, blaming the media for helping Joe Biden steal the election in 2020, et cetera, et cetera. It's another example of what Trump cares about is loyalty. It's not much different really from the old Soviet system where you appoint the apparatchiks who you know will support you and you know will do what you ask of them. That's part of this whole replacing the rule of law thing with the rule of Trump. So back to your original question. No, I'm not surprised by this at all, but it really, really sucks. So here's where I've been as of late in my mindset. Which is that Donald Trump is actually not doing anything that is new.

And I know that we spend a lot of time, you know, with our outrage and rightfully so. But I just want to remind people as they're looking at Cash Patel's resume and they're looking at the things that he has said. And people are like, oh, my God, the FBI and blah, blah, you know that the FBI has been corrupt. Of course. We do know that the FBI. FBI with one of its longest term directors, its first director, Jay Edgar Hoover, was launching domestic attacks against the likes of Martin Luther King, Vietnam war protesters, whoever he presumed to be communists, and he had the post for nearly like 40 fucking years. And this is what I think

is a failure of civics and understanding history and understanding that Donald Trump, is literally just tapping into what has been done already in the United States. And now he's directing it at everyone or half of the population as opposed to, let's say, J. Edgar Hoover and just like the Black Liberation Movement, or those that were against the Vietnam War, or those that were, you know, speaking out on college campuses, so on and so forth. But like when you look and you actually understand what has been done, who has been surveilled in this country, like, you start to understand that there is actually nothing new under the sun here. And that what Donald Trump will have more access to is obviously technology

that makes it easier to surveil people without them actually knowing. But like, this is what America has done, particularly to various different movements that were not seen to be the norm or in the mainstream during those precarious times in our history. Yeah, look, you know, Jayhager Hoover is one of those people that, however awful you think he was, then you'll read a new book on him and you'll find out it was even worse than you thought.

Like, he was, you know, he was an American nightmare. And you're right that Trump is not doing anything new, but the fact that that's what he wants to replicate is, of course, you know, the problem, I would say. Yeah, I mean, it is the problem, but it's just like, understanding where we are and what we have been doing to various communities for, I don't know,

centuries. Speaking of things that don't seem to be new as it pertains to Donald Trump's circle, sexual assault and abuse and being charged with, or at least having a rap sheet that says as much, which is where we enter in with Pete Hegsef, who is currently Donald Trump's chosen person to lead the Pentagon as the Secretary of Defense. If it wasn't enough that he had a police report back in 2017 where an unidentified woman accused him of sexual assault, if it's not enough that then now recently an email has surfaced from his mother calling him basically a chauvinist

and mistreating women and a history of such that he needs to do some soul searching around, She has since, of course, retracted what she said very clearly in an email. Now, we have learned that Pete Hagseth on top of all of those things, as if that that shouldn't be disqualifying enough, his treatment of women and the fact that he's been accused of sexual assault. The thrice married, I don't even know how many kids that he has, multiple through out of wedlock. And I only say that because these people love to profess their religious standing. Now he's a drunk, according to reports, and has mismanaged not one but two different nonprofit organizations. Yeah, it's not good.

Jay Mayer wrote a long piece in The New Yorker that came out, I think it was Sunday night. And it is just, it is absolutely brutal. She's got the receipts, as I like to say, Danielle. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I thought you invented that. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

You mentioned two advocacy groups. They were the Veterans for Freedom and the Concerned Veterans for America, both groups that were supposedly helping veterans, as you would gather by their names. Instead, it seems like Pete Huggseth, as the head of each of those groups at different times, used a lot of the money that was raised to throw lavish parties, including trips to strip clubs, at which there were various accusations. by female employees of assault, of sexual assault, and various accusations that Pete Hegseth was so drunk at one of these

that he tried to get up on stage and dance with the strippers. And, I mean, I highly encourage reading the whole report. It's just thing after thing after thing. And Pete Higseth is very clearly, I think, if you read this article, he's very clearly an alcoholic. And the thing is, you know, I'm already seen some people on the right trying to excuse the sexual assault stuff. saying, oh, he was drunk. He didn't know what he was doing. It doesn't work that way. Sorry,

I know you want it to work that way, but it doesn't. Mayor talks to so many sources who worked for him, who say things like, I think it was that the Concerned Veterans for America Organization, when they heard that Trump was considering him for Secretary of Defense, the source tells mayor that their response was, quote, it wasn't no, it was hell no. It's an absolutely devastating report. And look, this guy, even without this report, we knew he shouldn't be Secretary of State. But this just makes it even more clear. I mean, this is a guy, one of the organizations you ran basically folded because he bankrupted them. And this is probably not the guy you want in charge of running the Pentagon with its budget and it's off the books,

discretionary funds, which God knows what those will be used for. So he's just off. And it's just like you can't really rank the degree of awfulness for each of the nominees and appointees for Trump because they're all just so awful. But I think HECSeth is probably near the top. I think now that Matt Gates has been thrown out, he has to be at the top. Yeah. But I mean, I will say that if he does not make it through the confirmation process, unfortunately, it won't be because of his abuse of women and treatment of women. and these accusations of sexual assault, it'll be because of his mishandling of funds.

I mean, nearly bankrupting an organization. And again, when you look at these folks' resume, Donald Trump has hit all these points. How many times did Donald Trump file for bankruptcy? How many women have said that Donald Trump either sexually harassed or assaulted them? How many times have you heard, you know, oh, on the set of the apprentice,

Donald Trump regularly used the N-word. and Heggseth is out there in the street drunk saying, kill all Muslims, right? So when you look at the people that Donald Trump chooses from his inner circle, it's almost as if he's like, look at my resume. Can you match it? Are you just as bad or worse than you're my guy? I think there's a lot to that.

I will say, and we were talking about this a little bit before we started recording, the one difference is the drunkenness and the alcohol. Yes. Because Trump is fairly famously a teetotaler. He doesn't imbibe alcohol at all. That may be the thing more than anything else that maybe sinks Heg Seth, not from the Senate, but may end up with him with having to be withdrawn, because that may be a bridge too far for Trump. But who the hell knows these days? But it'll be interesting to see if that's the case. Where is that bridge too far located? Is it Mars? It goes from like Alaska to Russia, I think, or something. Yeah. I am always thrilled when I welcome back to the new abnormal, my friend Jared Yates Sexton,

who is the author of The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis. Well, the Coming Crisis is here now, Jared, as well as host of the Muckrake podcast. We have but a few weeks, several weeks left, in. the Biden administration before Trump takes over on January 20th. And I guess my first question to you, Jared, is how are you feeling about the way that Biden is closing out his tenure and your thoughts about what could have been done differently and what should have been done? Yeah, Danielle, I've been watching this. I think like a lot of people, kind of wishing that it would have been rather different. The priorities that have been on display in Biden's lame duck period

have been military-industrial complex geopolitical moves trying to get Ukraine and the alliance around Ukraine ready for the incoming Trump administration and basically the abandonment of Ukraine, as well as what's been going on in Gaza and Lebanon, which I understand that those things are necessary. But I also have approached it, I think, a little bit differently than what a lot of people have. in terms of thinking that Biden was going to use somehow or another powers granted to him by the Supreme Court. By the way, the biggest asterisk imaginable next to that clause, of course. And the idea that there was going to be some sort of a sweeping resistance type firewall put up when that was never going to be the case. And on top of that, we also enjoy a system currently where any of those firewalls in the first place would never have stood anyway.

I don't know if it is just our inability. and you posted this on Blue Sky recently, where you basically said, look, there is no cavalry. There is nobody that is coming to save us. This idea that somehow Biden was going to take actions, like you just said, is false. And I also think that it is people's inability

to reckon with the moment that we're in and the severity of the moment that we're in. Speak to that, like this idea that somehow, these guardrails, somehow, things are going to hold and it'll all be okay. Like, is this just self-talk that folks are doing because the gravity of the situation is just too big? It's pure denial. And Daniel, one of the reasons, and you know, I'm very proud to call you, my friend, one of the reasons I've appreciated you, and I think you and I have been together in this, for the past few years, we've tried to tell people,

hey, this is a real situation. This is a real developing crisis. And you need to understand, that this isn't going to be taken care of easily. There's not some sort of a silver bullet. You're not going to fear white supremacy and sexism and on top of that the development of an oligarchical kleptocratic system. And on top of that, the institutions that a lot of people have been taught to depend on. And there's been a whole host and crowd of liberal grifters who have made unbelievable fortunes and platforms telling people, hey, this special report that's coming out is going to take care of this or the special prosecutor is going to take care of this or don't worry he's going to be ruled ineligible he's going to be held accountable for his crimes i think a lot of people have

more or less been terribly afraid of the of the fact that the reality of their world has come crashing down a lot of people have been raised in an america in which they have been peddled time and time again with conventional narratives of what this country is what it was founded on how it works and have more or less been told that don't worry, the experts have it, the institutions are sound. And in truth, from the very beginning of the United States of America up until now, this has been built on white supremacist's patriarchal wealth class controlled institutions. And so what we're actually watching now is the logical end result of those things that we have more or less been taught to think differently of than what they are. So, you know, one of the deals in my research is I've spent a lot of time studying cult mentality.

And cults exist to help people who need direction, who need a reality, they need leadership, you name it. And what you find with doomsday cults? And people always say, well, what happens after the leader says that this thing is going to happen and it doesn't happen? And what's incredible, Danielle, is that the cognitive dissonance is just thrown away like yesterday's garbage. People go ahead with it and they reframe their ideas. So even now, as Donald Trump is setting up a criminal administration, an oligarch-controlled administration, people are still under the belief that there are secret plans being carried out, that there will be some institution,

some sort of a white hat that will take care of all of this. And so people are living in an active, aggressive denial, which I understand it, but it also makes it much more likely that Trump and the people who control him are going to succeed in their plans. So people need to really sit with that denial and come around to what the reality is and what they need to do now in this new world. I think that really understanding,

to some extent, the self-protection that people have to pretend that there is a white hat that is coming in, that the Calvary will be on the way, that there is always, you know, the Hollywood ending that comes out, the good guys always win, that America is always the victor in its own story, right? Like, these are things that are not just figments of our imagination.

They have actually been laundered through public education and through our understanding of ourselves and this country throughout our schooling. And so to now be faced with a reality that is, so vastly different from what we have understood America to be. Can you speak to that? Because I feel like we blame people to a certain extent for holding on to the idea of Santa Claus, right? And we say, shouldn't you have grown out of that understanding that Santa Claus doesn't actually exist? And it's this idea that America is the beacon on the hill, right, only goes around the world, Jared, to do good as this example, this ambassador of justice and democracy.

And we never do wrong, right? We're only there to cast a finger on evil. And now that has been, over the last decade, wildly disrupted. And I said once recently on blue sky, I said, you know, did Donald Trump break? America, or did he just reveal America to itself? And I'll ask the same question to you. No, absolutely. One of the things I've been trying to say, every time I give an interview or some sort of a presentation, it's that Donald Trump is a symptom of a larger disease. And he's a clown, and he's absurd, and he just gobbles up attention because he is a fundamentally broken person and also our media

institutions are addicted to him. But we have to look beyond him. And, you know, you brought up the the Santa Claus example. And I want to say something that might sound a little bit harsh at first, but I really invite people to sit with it. What we're talking about are childish notions. And what we have been taught from our childhoods on are childish notions that all we have to do is take care of ourselves, go to work, you know, buy things, live our lives. Don't worry, the experts have it. And psychologically, that is a childish notion that is looking for politicians and institutions to be parental figures, that they know better and that we do not have a role in this.

In a way, Americans have been turned into adult children in that regard, because that is what power requires. That's what capitalism requires. The truth is very frightening because in order to understand what has happened, Danielle, not only do you need to understand actual history, you need to understand actual politics, the actual nature of power. But you also have to sit with the role that you have played in it, which means, so for instance,

yes, on one hand, you could believe that the Democratic Party is somehow or another a savior and they're going to take care of all of this. To start to disabuse yourself of that notion, you have to start thinking about the politicians that you've voted for. You know, the Democratic Party, for instance, was a huge partner in creating the war on terror and giving George W. Bush a blank check to go around and carry out white supremacists. capitalist exploration and chauvinist maneuvers. You have to sit with the role that you have played, and that's not an easy, comfortable thing to do. It is a lot easier to be enabled by a bunch of

people who don't want to give you actual history, actual understanding of power. In order to grow up, though, you do have to put a lot of things on the line. It is not an easy thing to grow up in this environment and understand that if anything is going to change, you are going to have to put your life, your reputation, your money, your privilege on the line. That is a really tall order. But unfortunately, that is the choice that we have to make now. We have to go back and look at everything that we were taught, everything that we were told, everything that we experienced and understand we were duped. We were sold a really, really comforting lie. And what you said about Donald Trump revealing what has happened, this is a moment of clarity, or it should be a moment of

clarity. It's a moment to actually look back on who we are and who we have been and understand that something fundamentally has to change. This is where I think that there has been a severe break in terms of these two Americas that we live inside of. The one America that Donald Trump is the king of, that you have and have seen his followers refer to him most recently as Daddy. Oh, Daddy is coming home. That What we need in America, Tucker Carlson said this, is a spanking, quote unquote, right? And that America needs a daddy. They need this strong man to come in.

Donald Trump said, don't worry, vote this time. You won't have to worry your pretty little head ever again after this. You have young white men, right, who find Donald Trump appealing because in a society that has changed drastically since their parents' generation and their grandparents' generation do not see room for themselves anymore in this evolving space where women had bodily autonomy, are striving for equal pay, black people have a seat at the table, people of color are being recognized, and you are seeing the browning of America. And that is terrifying. It goes against everything. that they have been told about their place in society.

So when Donald Trump has said, I will make things great again, he is saying I will rid you of the burden of trying to find your space because I'll clear all of these people out and there the space will be made for you. Then on the other side, in the other America, we have seen these changes that I just named as progression. But in that progression, we also have. to admit that people have in fact been left behind because we assumed that they were all willingly walking towards this new expansive space with us, not recognizing that a large swath were actually

terrified, couldn't find their footing, nor did they actually want to walk shoulder and shoulder with these other people. And so how do we now reconcile that at a time when we're in a backsliding democracy. I mean, it's slid all the way, you know, off the cliff at this point. We're in a lawless place where more destruction is headed our way than mending. How do we reconcile those two Americas right now? I want to touch on a lot of these things because what you've just brought up is one of the fundamental issues that is never discussed and is key in all of this. You brought up Tucker Carlson's daddy's coming home speech. And I want people to realize that every time Tucker Carlson or one of these authoritarian right-wing shitheads talks. It is an exposure of a psychosexual disaster. That's,

that's what's been happening in this country. And anybody who has ever actually studied the psychology of authoritarianism, they understand that if you want to understand it, you need to look at Freudian psychology and how that plays out in politics and culture. On the other hand, one of the things that we're starting to see, Danielle, is that for years, and of course we're hearing, oh, the Democratic Party went too far left or too far woke, that entire thing was about a lot of white liberals who were starting to talk about how they were allies and they were there to help people of color

and gay and trans people. And what's happened in the fallout after this election? What are we seeing? We're hearing, well, we really were trying to help gay and trans people too much that hurt us. I just listened to Ezra Klein a couple of days ago talk about, well, you know, I'd go into meetings in Washington, D.C., and there would be one person of color in the room

and everybody wanted to hear what they had to say, that's something we should consider. What we need to understand is that we have lived in a pseudo-environment for years now. And for anybody listening to this who has noticed complicity among the liberal class with the Democratic Party, you name it. It needs to be understood that we have seen a lot of gestures and a lot of hat tips towards the idea of making a more equal society. But the truth is, a more equal society scares the shit out of people.

And it is much easier to, enjoy, and this is going to sound like an oxymoron, and it both is and it isn't. People love the freedom to be unfree. And that means that societies that enter this cycle, they love not having their selves on the line. They love having people make the decisions for them. They like having someone to take care of things for them. Matt Gates is a great example of this. He gained the power that he had, and by the way, was taken out of a lot of really bad consequences of his actions, because his daddy showed up to take care of it for him. So what are we looking at now?

We're looking at a period in America in which things are getting worse, America is in decline, and people are getting terrified. And in those moments, they are more likely to revert to childlike versions of themselves. So what happens in that environment? You look for an authoritarian. And a lot of people who have supported Donald Trump are stuck in this arrested development, but there are plenty of other Americans, including a lot of moderate liberals who have a lot of hay about what it is they believe and what their principles are, who are starting to warm

to the idea of having a parental figure fix things for them. And what happens when you start to embrace that? The people who have started to get seats at the table, who have started to enjoy a little bit more equality, they're going to get thrown over the side of the boat. And this psychology that we're talking about now, it doesn't get discussed anywhere. It isn't recognized. It isn't taught. It's siloed by experts. Experts understand this. They've studied it. They've talked about it since the rise of fascism and Nazism. But the fact is that most people do not understand the psychological underpinnings of the crisis that we're currently in. I don't know what it is going to take. And I think that it will take this moment. I have said, and I'm going to ask you this last question,

are you at a place right now, Jared, where you think that Donald Trump and the destruction that is about to happen as necessary for Americans to finally wake up. You know, I've spent the last few years really hoping that it wasn't. You and I have spent a lot of time talking and working on this stuff and hoping that we could have avert this situation. And now that we're in it, I think I'm looking around. And personally, I'm more motivated and hopeful than ever because the conversations I'm having with people are much more honest than they were years ago.

It's finally reached the point where some people have hit rock bottom and they're like, I don't want to live like this anymore. Obviously, something needs to change. This is going to be a mess. And anybody who studies the history and cycles of these things understands that things are about to get very bad. And you're going to see a lot of things happen that seemed absolutely impossible just months ago, much less years ago. And so the conversations I'm having are with people who are suddenly starting to think, wow, maybe I was wrong about this and maybe I need to reconsider it. It doesn't mean that everybody's going to do it. But I am starting to see, pockets of people start to get it. They're starting to put their energy towards it. They're starting to get motivated. They're starting to get a sense of clarity. So I do think that we are going to see an

actual resistance to this as opposed to a memified online simulation of it. But it is going to get bad. And there is going to be suffering. And there is a hope, I think, still alive and still burning that eventually we're going to push back against this thing and create something better. But it is going to be very hard in the meantime. Yeah, I agree. And evidently, people need to learn the hard way. My friend, I thank you so much, just consistently for your insights, for your analysis, and for your friendship. Folks, you should be checking out Muckrake podcast if you are not. And also, Jared's book, The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and The Coming Crisis.

Thank you so much for making the time for the new abnormal. Always appreciate you. you. Thank you, my friend. Last week on the pod, we talked about how Brendan Carr, Donald Trump's appointee to be the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, was low-key one of the worst of the Trump appointment slash nominations. My next guest is obviously very smart because he agrees, saying that Carr, quote, may be the biggest threat to free speech in our government in a long while. Joining me to explain is Mike Maznick. He is the founder and editor of the essential techdirt blog at techdirt.com and CEO of the Copia Institute. Mike, thanks so much for being here. Always happy to talk to you. So the title of the piece you wrote at TechDirt is

Brendan Carr makes it clear that he's eager to be America's top censor. But Donald Trump describes him as a warrior for free speech. Surely you are not suggesting that the once and future president is lying, Mike. Oh, gosh. Where do we start on that question? What I wanted to make clear in the piece. And what I think is really important is recognizing the fact that, you know, whether it's on purpose or not with Trump, but it's definitely on purpose with people like Carr, they are using the language of free speech and claiming to be fighters and warriors for free speech when the reality is that they're doing the exact opposite. And they are very, very purposefully trying to silence opposing viewpoints. Yeah. So let's start with the one that

you term a quote unquote easy example. of cars sort of sensorial nature. His repeated threats to pull broadcast license, including threatening NBC for having Kamala Harris make an appearance on Saturday Night Live, the weekend before election day. How many ways is this wrong? Too many to list is part of the problem. I mean, there's the simple fact that NBC doesn't have broadcast licenses as people think of them. You know, it's the local affiliates that have brought. broadcast licenses that are regulated by the FCC. And there are some rules in terms of how they can use those licenses, but the idea of

pulling it for content is ridiculous. It is not something that is commonly done. There is, and I didn't get to this in the piece, there is actually an attempt by people on the left side of the spectrum to try and get the FCC to pull a license for a Fox affiliate, a single Fox affiliate in Pennsylvania somewhere, I forget exactly where. And that was decried by a whole bunch of people on the right who now seem to present themselves as like, well, now's our chance to get back at anyone for presenting any content, including like having Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live as being a reason that they can pull a license is absolutely ridiculous. And sort of the underlying message that they're getting at is don't platform our political opponents or we're

going to take action against you. Yeah. So, you know, they keep making this claim with, oh, NBC violated the equal time rule. And as you point out, no, it didn't. Yeah. Fundamentally, it did not. The equal time rule, which again is something that folks like Brendan Carr and the entire Republican establishment have hated for as long as it's been in existence and have insisted was unconstitutional. And probably under this court would be declared unconstitutional. It has some very specific rules about if you are very close to an election, if you are using the public airwaves to platform a candidate, you have to give equal time to their political opponents. And NBC did not violate it because in response to having Kamala Harris on SNL and also Tim Kaine, who's running for senator, they offered equivalent time

to Donald Trump, which he used the next day during, I think it was both a NASCAR event and an NFL event, giving him free airtime. And they also did that for Tim Kane's senatorial opponent as well. And so they didn't violate the rule. They played by the rules exactly as they should. And yet, Carr still sees this as a real opportunity for him to attack and claim that, you know, that they're violating the rule and that he's going to go after them and that it's his responsibility as an FCC commissioner to do so. What he's doing is he's echo. I think you got at this in the piece. He's basically echoing things that Donald Trump says it feels like every day where he wants to

pull CBS's broadcast license for the interview 60 Minutes did with Kamala Harris, or he wants to pull ABC's broadcast license because he didn't like David Muir at the debate or whatever. So this is just, this is Brendan Carr just completely sucking up to Trump, right? Absolutely. I mean, Trump did this during his first administration as well, where he would threaten to pull licenses. So he does it all the time, and Carr knows full well that this is not how it works and that NBC doesn't have a broadcast license. Trump might not, but Carr absolutely does know this. So he's just echoing that exact same language and basically making it clear that he's here to do Trump's bidding.

And if Trump says we're going to pull NBC or CBS's license, then Carr is going to use the power of the FCC to claim that he's doing the same, even though he knows that that is not one of the authorities that he actually has. As you point out, what Trump wants and what Carr wants to help him achieve is an atmosphere in which, at best, media companies sort of self-censor out of fear of angering Donald Trump and his administration. So it's like a chilling effect, but a super powerful one, sort of like the omega-level mutant known as Iceman, Mike. Oh, my goodness. What a reference. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, right. I mean, that's the bottom line in all of this, is that he is making it abundantly clear that if you play,

platform people that Donald Trump doesn't like or if you present views that oppose Donald Trump, that he's going to make life difficult for you. And the end result of that is inevitably for these big companies that, you know, that don't want to spend all their time having to fight in court or fight with the FCC about licenses or things of this nature, is that they're going to be much more reluctant to actually platform anyone who presents any message that is in opposition to Donald Trump. And that's why it's a very clearly censorial attack and very much. much against the very basic principles of free speech and the First Amendment in the U.S. Yeah. And it's not just TV we're talking about here. So let's talk about social media and the

internet because it gets more complicated here, but it's also potentially more dangerous. So what are we talking about here? Maybe start with a quick overview of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and then we'll go from there. Yeah. So Section 230 is perhaps one of the most misunderstood laws around and yet a really important law for the way that the internet works. It is a fairly simple law yet is so constantly misunderstood and misreported on and misinterpreted that it's kind of problematic. You know, the basics of the law really straightforward, which is that if there is content on the internet that violates the law in any way, the law should hold the creator of that content liable for whatever it violates rather than the hosting company.

that allows for most internet companies to exist because without it, they wouldn't be willing to host most content. So social media and all sorts of other services that host third party content really are helped along by this law, which also allows them to choose to moderate as they see fit without facing liability for any mistakes or any content that they leave up. It's basically just saying, whoever created the content, that's who is responsible for the content. That law has been in place for, you know, since 1996 and has been found to be really, really important and has been widely defended. And I think five or six years ago, a lot of people suddenly started getting angry at it. And that's across the political spectrum with both sides fully misunderstanding the law.

You know, part of, you know, part of it is I think that basically people just got upset about certain content on the internet. And this was, again, true on across the political spectrum. And because people had sort of referred to Section 230 as the law that made the Internet or that enabled the Internet, they just decided that's also the law to blame for any bad things they saw online. And so you're getting constant attacks and you have both major political parties saying that they want to repeal it. And so there's been this just sort of concerted effort to misrepresent what the law does and then to misrepresent what repealing it would actually do. and, you know, Carr has taken an interest in this following an effort in the first Trump administration, towards the very end of the Trump administration, where he became obsessed with Section 230 and demanded that it be repealed, in part because some platforms were starting to fact-check him, not actually moderate him, but present fact-checks.

And he seemed to think that Section 230 was to blame for that when it's got nothing to do with it. What is this thing called NewsGuard? Because Carr seems to run. really not like it. And that's where he is getting into this whole. What NewsGuard is doing is violating Section 230. It's not even that. That's not even what he's arguing, to be honest with you. It's more complicated and more stupid than that. It's partnering with NewsGuard by social media companies. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, there's this, you just have to peel back layers upon layers of stupidity to actually understand why this is so wrong. But so NewsGuard is a company that was started. I can't even remember when it was started, but by sort of two.

media moguls. There's Stephen Brill who famously founded court TV and I forget what else. Like American lawyer, I think, and a few other publications. He's, you know, an sort of old guard media guy. And then Gordon Krovitz, who was for many years the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a very well-established conservative Republican, you know, the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal are not exactly known for being supportive of Democrats in any way. And so he's, you know, an established conservative voice. And they created this service called NewsGuard. And the idea behind it is that they would start to review different news sources online and rank them.

They have a whole ranking system with metrics that they go through and it's standardized. I've gone through it as a publisher. TechDirt has gone through it where they ask a whole bunch of questions, which I found to be kind of annoying and a little bit intrusive. And to me, you know, not the greatest questions in the world. but they have their system and they're sticking to it and that's part of what they can do. And so they rank all of these news sources based on what they consider to be a scale of trustworthiness and reliability in how those news systems perform. You know, I think it sort of came, these were sort of old school news guys.

Right. I think to be honest, just didn't like some of the way the internet was evolving and felt that it wasn't very trustworthy. And so they thought, well, why don't we build this service that can rate news providers and it will probably give higher ratings to the legacy news providers that we believe in and lower ratings to these, you know, young, stupid upstarts and blockers, you know, we can give a stamp of approval to some news sites and a stamp of disapproval to others. So his argument is what, that if a company partners with NewsGuard, that it's actually censorship? Yeah, there's so much dumb here. So some folks in Congress, some, you know, very Trumpist folks in Congress got very upset with NewsGuard because it was rating some

of their preferred news sources as untrustworthy. You know, I wonder why, right? But that's what came out of this. And they got upset and this idea that they were getting fact checked or there was criticism of the trustworthiness of, you know, whichever crazy news source, I don't even know which ones they were really upset about. But so in Congress, they started an investigation on NewsGuard and it was stupid. They sent this letter that was just like, this is an act of censorship, which it never

was, right? It's always been an act of like, we are expressing our opinion on the trust where they are of it. And in fact, you know, it is clearly a case of more speech, right? It is adding to the marketplace of ideas. You don't have to trust NewsGuard's opinions. And in fact, I don't. Like, I don't find their, their methodology to be all that reliable. Though when I said that in the past, they got mad at me and yelled at me. But that's a whole other story. But it's just this opinion. But because some, you know, tech companies have partnered with NewsGuard and use that rating system as part of how they determine something. I don't even know exactly what

any of the companies actually use NewsGuard for, but it is a tool that some of them have partnered with and that they've used. And so the idea behind it is that by using NewsGuard and accepting that they're lower ranked, you know, less trustworthy news sources are a problem, then they may be lower ranked, say, in Google Search. I don't know if that's actually the case if Google Search uses newsguard in that way. But the argument then is you are downranking these important MAGA Trump publications and therefore you are censoring them. And that is a problem, even though they're private companies that can do that because that is their own First Amendment right to rank things however they want. They have the editorial discretion to do that. All of this is free speech.

None of this involves the government. The only part where the government comes in now is with Congress investigating newsguard and Brendan Carr saying that newsguard is a problem and then threatening these tech companies for using NewsGuard and claiming, and this we get all the way back around to 230 in the dumbest possible way, that by using NewsGuard, they may be losing their Section 230 protections. And that might take another explanation to peel back another layer why this is so stupid, which is that one part of Section 230, not the important part, not the part that keeps coming up in court. But one part of Section 230 says that certain moderation efforts need to be

taken in good faith. And he is arguing that by using NewsGuard, any moderation that is related to that is not done in good faith, which is ridiculous because it absolutely is, but that is not done in good faith. And therefore, you could lose your Section 230 protections because of that good faith part of it. But again, that's not the important part of the law. The important part of the law does not have the good faith part in it. On top of that, even if it did, you could clearly argue that it was good faith. And if the government is going in and trying to determine that, the only case that I am aware of where the good faith part of Section 230 came into play was one where it was a directly a situation

with two competitors rating each other. And so they said that the rating was not done for legitimate. It was a case about a malware scanner. And so they said, oh, they called this other malware scanner malware. And so it was like an anti-competitive purpose rather than a legitimate purpose. And so if you had that kind of thing, like maybe you could make a case that arguably that it was not in good faith. But the idea that you are rating news providers based on a clear methodology that they use

across the board and that they apply consistently, that that would be ever, you know, in any legitimate court seen as not in good faith is ridiculous. But again, the good faith exception doesn't even matter. and the idea that you then lose 230 protections is wrong anyways. Again, it's layer upon layer upon layer of wrong nonsense, but you have to understand all of the details and nuances to understand why and how it's wrong. One more point. The FCC has no authority over Section 230.

Well, how do you know that, Mike? Well, I mean, there's a few different things. But when the law that became Section 230, Section 230 was a different law that was then combined into the Communications Decency Act. And I'm suddenly blanking on the name, but it was like the Chris Cox. Yeah, Chris Cox and then Representative Wyden put together this law. And in the intro to the law, they specifically called out that part of this law was to make sure that the FCC had no authority to regulate content on the internet. And then also during the floor debate about the law, Chris Cox made the same point where he said, you know, the whole reason we're doing this is to make sure that the government is not in the business of regulating.

how companies moderate their content. And so that was clearly the intent. And nobody had ever touched that or suggested that the FCC had any authority over internet companies or a Section 230 until right at the end of the first Trump administration, where some folks in the administration, when Trump was mad at 230 and he wanted to do something about it, he got some of his loyalists at the Commerce Department to issue this command for the FCC to investigate Section 230. And at the time, then Chairman Pye said, okay, we'll do this. Brendan Carr was gung-ho. Like, yes, absolutely. We can put out comments on how Section 230 should be interpreted. The third Republican on the FCC at the time was a guy named Michael

Riley, who actually came out and said, and he was a reliable Republican conservative voice on FCC things. And he came out and said, hey, guys, we can't do that. This is not right. And the First Amendment doesn't allow it, and I don't agree with it. And like a week later, he had to be reappointed to the FCC, and everyone assumed that that was going to go through, and Trump killed it a week after he said that. Say what you want about this stuff. But I think that also cemented in cars mine, like, you know, if I'm going to do this, if I'm going to position myself to lead the FCC under a second Trump, then I need to play the game and play along with all this nonsense. Absolutely unbelievable. Mike, thanks so much for coming on and breaking all this down. As you warned,

the internet stuff gets incredibly complex and complicated. So it's always useful to have someone like you who can explain it to my baby brain. And our listeners who are not baby brain and studies have borne this out. I've said this before. They are considered the most intelligent and attractive podcast listeners on the planet. But it's still good for them to hear you say this. Mike, thanks again. I love having you on. Thanks for having me. Andy Levy. Daniel Moody.

Andy, how are you kicking off this week in December with your... Fuck that guy. Well, did. I'm going to go with Dinesh D'Souza. For people who don't know who he is, he was a guy who was, I guess you would say at one time he was a sort of respected member of the conservative commentariat. I mean, he wrote it National Review and whatever. and he has like so many people on the right gone completely off the cliff since Obama.

He has become like a full-blown conspiracy guy and he was very big in the whole stop the steel movement and that the 2020 election was stolen. And he did a film called 2000 mules that was widely circulated on the right as evidence of how the election was stolen. And the mules were these supposedly these people who were paid to. to stuff ballot boxes with votes for Joe Biden. Without getting into the weeds, the evidence for this supposedly, I guess, were based on data that a group called True the Vote said it had.

And that was a Trump group. I don't know if they were aligned with Donald Trump, whatever. But anyway, they claimed to have tracked cell phone data and all this stuff and had all this evidence of these drop boxes being stuffed by these mules. The movie comes out and Trump. promotes it all over the place. I think he even had, if I remember correctly, he had like a private screening of the movie at Marilago. Anyway, one of the guys who was alleged to be one of these mules sued Dinesh D'Souza and other people who were part of making the film. An undisclosed settlement

was made like, I don't know, five, six months ago. Twist now is that Susa has issued an apology. And he says, I apologize to Mr. Andrews. I make this a point. apology, not under the terms of a settlement agreement or other duress. So he can't even tell the truth in his apology statement. But because it is the right thing to do, given what we have now learned, I am sorry for any harm he believes he and his family have suffered because of 2,000 meals. He basically is throwing this group True of the Vote under the bus and saying that he says, we recently learned that the surveillance videos used in the film, which they got from this true the vote organization, may not have actually been correlated with Geolocation.

matter. He's lying again. This whole thing is an absolute lie. This whole movie obviously was based on a lie. And the problem is that it's easy to say, you know, let's just laugh at it, look at this ridiculous film. But as I said, it was very widely touted on the right. It seeped its way into the conservative ecosystem and became a really, really big deal and was held up time and time again as quote unquote evidence of how the election was stolen. and DeSouza, I would wager to guess, knew all along or didn't care where this data came from. He either knew all along it was just completely false or he didn't care because he clearly didn't bother to check. So yeah, great. He issued an apology to one guy.

That's obviously not enough. So fuck that guy. I mean, oh my. What gets in the water with these people that at one time you're considered completely normal and then you just, just morph into a conspiracy theorist. Well, it's not fluoride. Or maybe it is. Or maybe.

Maybe that's why they want to. Maybe we should get rid of it. Maybe we should remove it. Nothing like waterborne illness and tinfoil hats. Yeah. All right, Danielle. Hit me. Who's your fuck that guy?

So we're just coming off of the Thanksgiving holiday. And, you know, for those of you who may be new around politics, let me tell you that, you know, it used to be one of these things that we refer to, again, as political norms that the leaders of this country would use the Thanksgiving holiday to send out messages of gratitude, of community, take pictures at soup kitchens while they feed the poor and remind people to be compassionate and, you know, and grateful. And we've seen that. We've seen this all the way down the line on both sides of the aisle. Of course, that is until Donald Trump came in, you know, just kicking the door and throw out all the norms into the trash in 2017, where, you know,

not only do you not need to do anything of service or anything that is selfless, but you can be a vulgarian and a barbarian. And then there's J.D. Vance. So over the holiday, instead of, of course, sending out a message of Thanksgiving, wishing everybody a happy Thanksgiving full stop, or sending a picture of your tablescape. J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance posted a picture inserting himself and Donald Trump into a very famous, I think it's Norman Rockwell, right? Painting where Donald Trump is presumably the dad.

And J.D. Vance put himself in the role of the wife. the trad wife, I will say, in a apron holding instead of a turkey this souped up red wave map that they've all been using in the right wing to talk about this unimaginable landslide that Donald Trump won by, which we all know is wildly inaccurate, but what is truth? But it was the fact, dear God that this man put himself in an apron with Donald Trump as the daddy and posted that himself. He wasn't hacked. I don't think this was a dare or a bet. But this is how J.D. Vance sees himself in Trump world.

It got 17 million views by the time that I saw it. And I largely think that it was people going, no, this can't possibly be wrong. real. He couldn't have done this to himself. This man that projects so much toxic masculinity. I don't even know where else to go. But this is what our politicians now in the age of Trump have resorted to, have devolved into, which are crass and stupid memes instead of actual public service, empathy, leadership, or anything that looks remotely like that. That what we are in for is just years of stupidity inside of this idiocracy. But my God, Jady Vance, if you couldn't make yourself look even more out of touch,

even more like a caricature of what a man, a person should actually be in leadership, Like this may take the cake. And for that reason, you know, J.D. Vance, the trad wife. Like, bravo. Bravo. And fuck that guy. Okay. So I have some issues with you, Danielle.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I guess in your world a man can't wear an apron? Yeah. That's what it is. And serve dinner? That's what it is. Was he serving dinner, Andy?

Well, he's serving something. Mm-hmm. I'll leave it at that. I know that's right. I also enjoy the map that conservatives like to use as if land votes. It's very weird to me. It's like, yes, look at all those open swaths of land that are red where like three people live. And every single city where like people actually do live is blue.

But for some reason, they think this means something in their favor. It's bizarre. This whole thing is bizarre. On the other hand, I do think J.D. Vance will make. an excellent trad wife for Donald Trump. Mm-hmm. Good for him for living his best life, I say. But also fuck that guy.

Mm-hmm. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast, at the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts.

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