The Daily Beast Podcast - Stephen Miller Rolls Out MAGA’s Indoctrination Plan for Kids

Episode Date: May 4, 2025

On the final episode of The New Abnormal, hosts Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie react to President Donald Trump’s chaotic first 100 days of his second term as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller rolls out MAGA’s indoctrination plan to protect children from “communists.” Levy quipped, “Is woke losing its power as a pejorative? Did they have to bring back communists like it's the 1950s or 1980s?” Thank you all so much for listening for the last 5 years. Please stay tuned to this feed for what The Daily Beast has next. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

And we thank you so much for being here today and with us for the last five years. Today, we have a bittersweet ending where we're going to discuss Trump's first 100 days in office between the hosts and the producers of this podcast. And then we will say goodbye. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to and be? tortured by my clips one last time clips all right mr trump

got to say this guy in the constitution does not feel like he's one of those conservatives who carries around his pocket and reads it like it's uh his favorite thing uh because and you know they work right out of the white house they've never done that that's never been done before no other president allowed that i think you know they say separation

they say separation between church and state They told me. I said, all right, let's forget about that for one time. We said, really, there's separation? I don't know. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not sure. But whether there's separation or not, you guys are in the White House where you should be, and you're representing our country, and we're bringing religion back to our country. And it's a big deal. Yeah, it's a big deal coming from the man that slept with a porn star while his wife, you know, just had a baby. You know what? I don't care. Like at this point, it doesn't even matter. Let them

work out of the White House. I care, Danielle. Oh, okay. So there. No, they should not be working out of the White House. Yes, we do have separation of church and state in this country. We did. And yes, it is a good thing. It's a great thing, actually. This is what they want, though. This is what Christian nationalists want. That's all this is. It's a SOP to his Christian nationalist base. I think we all know that Donald Trump is not exactly a scholar of the Bible, is not exactly religious. I don't really think he cares one way the other about religion or thinks about it at all, but he knows what these Christian nationalists want, what his evangelical base wants, and what they want has nothing to do with the Constitution. And, you know, Danielle, you mentioned those, the conservatives who carried the Constitution in their pocket. The sad part is, I would say probably 99% of those people think this is great because they never really cared about the Constitution. They only pretended to care about the Constitution when we had a black president and they wanted to pretend, again, that he was acting unconstitutionally, which he wasn't. They never cared about the

Constitution. They certainly don't care about it now. What they care about is installing a Christian government. At this point, it is not an exaggeration to say that what they want is an explicitly Christian nation by law. So no, I do care about this. And I hope, Danielle, that you feel shamed by everything I just said. I don't, but thank you. Okay. Actually, I prefer that.

You know, I've said here before that I wanted an atheist president, but then I didn't expect it the first one to be Donald Trump. What really is the dystopia is an atheist president, cosplay being the most Christian president. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's wild. Yeah, because this is.

cosplay, if I've ever seen it. Speaking of cosplay, a former host of this podcast, nicknamed White House advisor, Stephen Miller, Santa Monica Gerbils. And I got to say, while it's not nice to call names, it sure doesn't seem like

he minds being called it with what I'm about to play. Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values for schools that want federal taxpayer funding. So as we the Department of Education, and we provide funding to states.

We are going to make sure that these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology. For any nation to be successful, it cannot teach its children to hate themselves and to hate their country. So these are a few of the areas in which President Trump has fought the cancerous, communist woke culture that was destroying this country, where we led to believe that men were women, that women were men, the racial discrimination was good, that marriage. was bad and that safety and physical security mattered less than the feelings of liberal ideologues. Well, first of all, Jesse, let me just say that we're all former co-hosts of this show. That is actually a correct thing since I had my turn at that seat at one time.

Yes. I mean, all of this is terrible and awful, obviously. And Stephen Miller wouldn't know a civic virtue if it punched him in the face. Communists? It's 2025, buddy. Are the communists in the room with you, Stephen? Is woke losing its power as a pejorative? Did they have to bring back communists?

Like, it's the 1950s or 1980s or something? I mean, they did play woke into the ground, right? Well, they did. I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. What's old is new again. But communist? One might say we're post-woke guys.

Jesse, don't start with your dark woke. stuff. Can I let our listeners know that I get texts from Jesse every day about how dark woke he is? It's not every day. It's just about two times a week.

It's like a podcast schedule. Oh shit. You will bow before the heel of dark woke before this term is over, buddy. Oh my God. But I just, have to laugh every time they say communist.

Like, who even calls themselves a communist in 2025? Like, if you want, like, say socialist. I don't know, comrade. It's just so, it's just so bizarre to me. These people are just so weird. They're so fucking weird. They're stale, is what they are. They really are.

Let's go dark. Not dark woke for sure. Here's attorney general Pam Bondi. Yeah, she's going to go a dark place here. We've rescinded, um, death penalty. We are now seeking the death penalty on cases. I'm signing death warrants. We are going after terrorism. We are going after arsonists. Whether you're burning Teslas, we will arrested nine people so far in seven jurisdictions, no negotiations, 20 years in prison.

So Tesla's are federal property now? Yeah, I guess. Because I don't understand what her involved, what is the, what is the attorney general of the United state's involvement in Tesla's being burned in localities, unless they have deemed that Tesla's our federal property. Well, she works for Elon Musk, so. Oh, okay. Got it. Just checking.

What about the guy who, uh, firebombed the governor's mansion in Pennsylvania? Does she care about that? No, those were fireworks. I thought they were just sending him like a happy message. Oh. That's what they think. Oh, it was just a happy Passover message. Yeah.

She made no mention of that. Real shock. office is being used for partisan hackery. Yeah. All right. I thought long and hard about how to end this beloved, beloved segment by all except for you two. It actually is beloved by everybody but us.

That's what's funny. I couldn't think of a better way to send us off than these words from Governor J.B. Pritzker, who I think is doing the best job of any Democratic governor right now and most Democratic politicians of showing us the way through this bullshit. Let's listen to J.B. It's time for us to be done with optimism about their motives or their objectives. Time to

stop wondering if you can trust the nuclear codes to people who don't know how to organize a group chat. It's time to stop ignoring the hypocrisy and wearing a big gold cross while announcing the defunding of children's cancer research. And time to stop

thinking that we can reason or negotiate. with a madman. Time to stop apologizing when we were not wrong. Time to stop surrendering when we need to fight. Our small businesses don't deserve to be bankrupted by unsustainable tariffs. Our retirees don't deserve to be left destitute by a Social Security administration decimated by Elon Musk. Our citizens don't deserve to lose health care coverage because Republicans want to hand a tax cut to billionaires. Our federal workers don't deserve to have, well, a 19-year-old doge bro called big balls destroy their careers. Autistic kids and adults who are loving contributors to our society don't deserve to be stigmatized by a weird nepo baby who once stashed the dead bear in the

backseat of his car. Our military service members don't deserve to be told by a washed up Fox TV commentator who drank too much and committed sexual assault before being appointed Secretary of Defense that they can't serve their country simply because they're black or gay or a woman. Bravo. Bravo. Because I feel like some of that shade was directed towards Chuck Schumer. Yep.

And the other establishment Democrats who are like, ah, you know, I don't think we're going to try and impeach him this time. I think that there are some things that we can work with them on. That's how you do it. Thank you, J.B. Thank you. Yeah, I will pay him the highest compliment I can think of. He sounds like us. I don't know. He sounds kind of dark woke to me. Oh, my God. I love it. Well, dear friends, we have reached the benchmark. of the 100 days under the Trump regime. It is a hundred day of chaos, the 100 days of collapse,

the 100 days of calamity. I believe that I feel like we have aged in dog years or on whatever planet people age every minute is like 10 years. That's how I feel. Every part of me hurts. And every media outlet, their cartoons pretty much summed up.

The New Yorker, Lady Liberty, behind a prison cell, the economist, the bald eagle with broken bones. I don't know. We made it, I guess, but I don't know. Yeah, I feel pretty good. You know, I was expecting Trump to be, you know, like an authoritarian, to be kidnapping people and sending them out of the country, to be crashing the economy and you know I don't think really any of that has happened as far as I can tell am I wrong Are you high? I might be. I don't know on fentanyl or what like whatever Pambod is that fentanyl Yeah, it's been a hundred years of crappitude and or a hundred days of crappitude. And it's just I guess it's become a little cliche

But we all knew this was going to be bad and we all talked about how a second Trump term was going to be so, so, so much worse than his first one. But I do think that the speed and just the overall onslaught of things day after day after day, I think even though we were expecting it, I still think there's a lot of sort of like, holy shit, I can't believe this is happening like this feeling. Do you agree with that, Danielle? Am I right now? Like, holy shit, we didn't think that this would happen this quickly. I mean, yeah, exactly. I feel like you and I for roughly at least two years or whenever Project 2025 first came out,

we here at the new abnormal were reporting on it on a regular basis before mainstream corporate media picked it up. We walked people through some of the highlights, right? Like pretty much on a regular basis, we're providing the executive summer. This is what they are going to do under immigration. They're going to detain people. They're going to deport people. There will be no due process.

They're going to shut down the Department of Education. They're going to basically criminalize being transgender or a part of the LGBTQ community overall. They're going to seize this country and take it by martial law. They're going to shut down universities. They're going to threaten anybody who has any opinions that are not. not Donald Trump, you're amazing, you have the body of an Adonis. We said all of that.

This was not going to be like the first term when they didn't know what they were doing. It was going to be like Jurassic Park after T-Rex had tested the fence and weakened it and knew which way to go to get out. That's what Project 2025 was. So if you had an actual plan blueprint that you were going to hit the ground running with, why would you think that they would be moving at a sloth-like pace? Yeah, no, I didn't think they were going to be moving at a sloth-like pace, but I don't know. It does seem like it's been such an overwhelming 100 days, and absolutely nothing that he's done has been like, oh, my God, I didn't think he was going to do that.

Like you said, we'd been telling people, other people had been telling people that this is what it was going to be. I don't know. I guess I didn't expect, look, I have no frame of reference for this. And I guess I just didn't expect it to be like every damn day. It's been like, what the hell happened today? You know, like you wake up every day and you're like, oh, my God, he did this late last night or he did this this morning. Or, you know, as we often say, he did this right after we finished recording.

It's been unreal. The speed of the destruction of this country has been unreal to me. And just how quickly everything, whether it took hundreds of years, whether it took, you know, I don't know, let's say 60 years since like the Civil Rights Act and stuff like that, just the speed with which they have sought to and at least begun to dismantle so much of the progress that has been made in this imperfect country. It's been a little mind-boggling to just sit there and watch how quickly it crumbles. And a thing that I've been saying is it really does show how close to authoritarianism we have always been. And what a sort of fine line it has

always been between a democracy and, again, an authoritarian form of government, that he was able to do all this this quickly. You know me, Daniel, I'm not one of those people that thought, you know, America was this perfect beacon of hope. But I do have to say that, even for a cynic like me, even for someone who recognizes that since the founding of this country, it has been flawed, to put it gently. Just, again, the rapidity with which they have been able to overturn so much progress just to me shows just how close we have always been to being a dictatorship. I say this often, and I feel like we've said it here a lot, which is that while the forefathers

of this country formulating this idea, conjuring up a democracy, this idea of three branches of government that have co-equal power, that there was still, even as bold and innovative as an idea democracy was, a failure of imagination given the history that the world had been through with dictators and empires and monarchies and all of these things that were some were cruel, some weren't, some, you know, help the people, some did not, that there was a failure of imagination of what would happen if someone who didn't agree upon the principles of democracy somehow got into power. What I feel like is that America was just basically like a 250-year handshake deal. Like, we just all decided, yeah, I guess we'll go

along with it. You know, they come out and say, well, here's the rule of law. And we said, okay, I guess we'll follow it because if you break the law, then there are supposedly consequences for you. And you realize then that our government was so flawed. Democracy was so flawed because the assumption was that there would always be someone in the room or a party in the room that said, oh, no, we couldn't possibly do that. Like when we offer, you know, just, you know, just, you know, this week. Well, representative says, hey, ICE can't detain U.S. citizens and kidnap them. Like, that's not good.

And the entire GOP says, yeah, they can. It's like you couldn't have seen that coming. No. And they set up this system with checks and balances precisely for that reason. But you're right. When the people in charge seem to care more about checking their balances and their accounts from the bribes they're taking and from the graft and the corruption, than they do about democracy, then right.

What we're seeing is I don't even know if you can, I guess it is a failure of the imagination on the founders part, but the fact of the matter is they set it up. They set it up specifically with checks and balances. Like that was the whole idea was like, we're going to have three branches of government. So if any one of them or even if any two of them, you know, if something goes horribly wrong, we've still got the third one. And they just, I guess, you know, the problem is you could play this game forever. If all the branches go wrong, whether it's three, whether it's six, eight, 12, if they're all

captured by corruption and by venality, then what do you do? And did they picture that there would be a Congress where one party had the majority and that party was completely enthralled to a demagogue like Donald Trump? and basically acted to weaken themselves and to neuter themselves, because that's what we're seeing right now with the Republicans in Congress. They have completely abdicated any responsibility to the Constitution, to their oaths of office, and they've replaced it all with fealty to Trump. And that didn't happen to George Washington, for God's sakes.

You know, the revered father of our country didn't have that. So to be sitting here and looking at what's going on, You can blame the founding fathers for a lot of things. And, you know, obviously the original sin of allowing slavery to flourish for as long as it did once we became a nation. I don't know if you can blame them for what we're seeing right now. Even in the Nixonian era, you had Republic. You had people like Barry Goldwater, arch conservatives going to Richard Nixon and saying, you got to resign, man. You have got to resign.

Can you picture that happening now? who Lindsey Graham is out there saying Trump should be Pope. I mean, and like not tongue and cheek. Like not as a joke. He's like, oh, yes. Like, he's listening to these cabinet members as they went around for their their 100-day reality TV show, which is basically what he hosted for two hours, talking about how wonderful and amazing Donald Trump is and only you could have done this.

And America is safer and stronger. And there's a renaissance. And people are drug-free and pigs full. and, you know, like, money's growing on trees and just, like, what are they pumping through the air in there? I don't know if you were to be inside of that kind of environment for 100 days. If Andy, you and I would come out talking like a bobblehead press secretary, and that's what we would sound like. Like, I'm at this point where I do believe that it's like the stupidity is contagious. I guarantee you we wouldn't.

And because there is, look, let me use a real life example. I worked at Fox News for 11, 12, 10, I don't even remember exactly how many years it was. I didn't come out like that. I sat there and, you know, I did my stuff. And look, this was not that Fox News was good back then. This was mostly pre-Trump. So it wasn't like fully captured the way it is now. But I watched a lot of people become Trump asking.

kissers. I didn't become one of them. And there's absolutely no way you would have to. This doesn't have to be about Trump necessarily. It's just, it takes a particular kind of personality and what you value in life to throw anything resembling principles aside and just do everything to cater to the whims of one person. And I guarantee you, you do not have that aspect of your personality. I definitely don't. think so. I definitely don't think so, but I'm pretty sure if Donald Trump at that meeting for his 100 days said, and now everyone inject bleach, I'm pretty sure. You know, Elon Musk, like the two hats that he had on his head, he'd have two syringes in his arm. Yeah, you know who would, Jesse, I think, would cave like that. Thank you. I really appreciate that. You know, it's funny because I was just

coming on here to say, we are now done with your final show of this. series. It's such a funny coincidence that happened with that remark, Andy. Let me get real earnest here. Yeah, please. You guys, I believe by my math, were the longest running hosts of this podcast, both of you. I truly am so proud of what all of us did, including Seamus, who's on this call and Deanna, who's been our editor for nearly every episode. I just want to say I'm proud of what all of us and I really will miss this, and I can't wait to hear what you guys do next. Yeah, this has been an extraordinary team and experience being a co-host of the new abnormal came in three years ago and was just like, all right, I don't know.

Let's just talk and get into it. And that's what we've been doing, you know, multiple times a week. And I think trying to provide some type of clarity and sanity in these incredibly wild. times. But while we are sad to leave the new abnormal, I'm super excited about our new show as the world churns. And the trailer is up right now on our YouTube page. So you should go there and subscribe because this is going to be both video and audio show. So you get to see Andy's pretty face all the time. Let me stay in earnest mode and say that. look absolutely none of this would be possible or would have been possible without jesse

thank you and shamus you know if you had given me a second shamus but now but now i'm going to say jesse and diana indiana and i'm going to stop there because i was doing this i was doing the earnest thing which does not come easily to me shamus he was being vulnerable chasmus called her but but no look jesse shamus and diana just an unbelievable team that made us sound so much, well, I can't say this about Danielle, made me sound so much smarter than I am and took out all the pauses and all the elderly times when I couldn't remember the word that I was trying to think of. It's been an absolute pleasure working with all of you. And yeah, like you said, Danielle, I can't wait to start this new chapter, even though I,

after my decade or so on TV, I loathe being on video, but I know that's where the kids get their information. So got to do it, got to do it, excited about it. Getting a haircut in a couple of days, but it's been a fantastic experience. I also, I have to thank Molly John Fass because she's the one that brought me on board. And I had been sitting out politics for a good couple years after leaving CNN. And she and Jesse dragged me back in and I don't know that I thanked them for that. The drag is accurate. It is. But no, a big shout out to Molly and again to you, Jesse, for hooking me up here.

It's been so much fun to do, and I have discovered how much more I like this medium than I did TV. So that was a nice discovery for me. Yes, and I'd like to say thank you to The Daily Beast for having us all these years. On Tuesday, you will hear new programming from them, which we're really excited about. So stay tuned to this channel. This has been the new abnormal. We thank you so much for all your support through the years. This podcast was a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and

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