The Daily Beast Podcast - Student’s Epic Takedown of Bridget Ziegler Is Perfection

Episode Date: December 31, 2023

Zander Moricz confronted the Moms for Liberty co-founder at a Sarasota town meeting who he said had once retweeted a hate article about him when he was a high school student. Plus! Foreign Affairs magazine’s executive editor Stuart Reid joins The New Abnormal to speak about his new book The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination. 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 Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Welcome back to another bonus episode of The New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here.

We hope you're enjoying this holiday season because we know we are. What a special guest we have for you today. Stuart Reed, executive editor at Foreign Affairs. He's here to talk about his new book, The Lumumba Plot, the secret history of the CIA and a Cold War assassination. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some Happy New Year clips? Clips. Clips.

Clips. End of the year clips. Yay, clip it. Since I know you guys love listening these so much, I had some that fell through the cracks in recent weeks and there's just so much bad stuff that we missed some. But luckily I saved them for you. Oh, thank you, Jesse. Thank God.

Let's start with... This is Fox News as Laura Ingram, whose clips lead me to believe her grip on reality is getting less and less tethered to the one the rest of us exist in. And I don't think she even started with the best hand dealt. But here we have her discussing. Let me check notes. A speeding limits. Yes.

Love the EU. They love Europe. They always want to be in Europe. They want to do the same thing here in the United States. I don't forget your constitutional rights. Those can be damned. Even your movement controlled. The National Transportation Safety Board is recommending that all new vehicles get technology

that makes speeding. quote, more difficult or completely impossible following in Europe's footsteps. Joining me now, Ned Ryan, American Majority CEO and founder. Ned, this is why they love the lockdowns. They like to keep us all moving as little as possible permanently. What's Mayor Pete going to do here, Ned? What does Mayor Pete want? Back on the bike for him?

Yeah, Mayor Pete, Little Pete, and the rest of the nanny staters want to dictate. it's almost 280 million Americans that have a driver's license how fast they're going to be able to drive and there aren't... You know what? Like, I think that their next campaign should be to go

break into cars, rip out seat belts, and just burn them. Let's just do that. And you know what? Don't stop there. Don't stop there. Go for the brakes too.

Because fuck them. Like, let's just do... They are so fucking stupid. I don't understand how this is allowed to exist. I don't understand how this is allowed to exist. This station, I don't get it. The only thing that I asked for, not even to take these people off of the air, just at the beginning, the middle, and the end of their broadcast that it says for entertainment purposes only. This is not,

and like, and just have that blacked out on the screen with somebody saying it just to make sure, beginning, middle, and end, this is for entertainment purposes only. This is not news. That's it. And they can say whatever the fuck they want. I feel a little sorry for Laura Ingram. Really? Hear me out. She is out there every night saying bat shit things. But in comparison to Jesse Waters and the five and some of the other shows on there,

she just doesn't get the juice. She doesn't get the clips. She doesn't get the, you know, the constant posting on mediaite and sites like that. And so, yes, I feel kind of bad for her. She's out there putting, she's putting in the work. She's putting in the work saying crazy shit. And she's just not getting a lot of attention. On any other network, she would be the lead crazy person.

And on Fox, like she's barely top five, I think. That's got a drag on you after a while. I think you have a good point here. Okay. Well, speaking of a lack of tether to reality, we now go to he who wears three shirts at all times, the human skin tag, Steve Bannon. Here he wants to talk about what.

Trump's new tax policy should be. Well, this is why I say, let's have massive tax increases on billionaires. The Forbes 500, 499 of them are not MAGA, right? Not MAGA at all. In fact, the large proportion are radical progressives. They made this mess through the Unip Party. Why shouldn't they pay for it? His idea of how taxation works is based on what your ideology is.

Mm-hmm. That's one way to do it. I mean... Yeah. Okay. You know, maybe next we can tax people more who wear multiple shirts. Why are we taking clothes away from those that have none? No, we need a shirt tax.

I like this Nettys state idea. Like you're walking into Costco. The greener at the thing checks your car. The next one's like, oh, three shirts. Got to pay a tax. Got to pay a tax. I'm trying to think if I ever wear three. I'm a two shirt guy sometimes, but three.

Under shirts are normal. Okay. Tank tops, normal. wearing three fucking collared shirts is what a serial killer does. It's serial killer and George Santos. Like it, you know,

there's not a lot of wiggle room. All right. I'm trying to figure out which of these horrible clips to play before the end. I thought this was the holiday episode. This is New Year. You ain't got nothing from an L for Santa.

I do at the end. I do at the end. Okay. I'm going to apologize at advance for this one. Here we have resident quote unquote comedian for Fox News, Greg Gutfeld, on the Five. Giving what might be the dumbest take I've heard in a while. I'm sorry. They're in trouble.

And here's why. They took the pro-Hamas cause and they slipped it right into the BLM costume. Never mind the radicalism, the violence, the sexual atrocity. They took the costume of the oppressed and they switched it. Now the Jews are the oppressor. young people they should worry about in their party. They should worry about Jews finally seeing the handwriting on the wall. You are the new oppressor. You are the new cops. You are the new Derek Chauvin. And Hamas is the new George Floyd. We desperately need to have a correction in the

Democrat Party because, you know, we've been saying this for years. A strong Democrat Party makes for a strong country. We need to have two sides of the same coin, right? They have to be based on common values, but you can't have common values if you separate everybody into identity boxes and then turn them on each other. And that's what the Democratic Party is suffering from right now. Bravo. Oh, he slipped up the last time and said Democratic Party instead of Democrat Party. I'm exhausted.

I was just waiting for him. No, no, no, no. Please go ahead. Nope. Go. I don't know who that was, but I guess it's some guy on Fox News. Yeah, he's just, he's gone. I mean, he's gone.

He is 100% gone. And I don't know if he believes all the shit he says now, or he just knows where his bread is buttered, and I don't really care. It doesn't matter. He's just gone. I honestly think that there has to be a brain breakdown that's happening. Because this is at a stage of psychosis that I honestly, like,

it's not even fucking. It's just, it's so insane. And I'm like, their brains need to be studied. Like right now, I'm reading the book that came out in 2014 Sapiens. And like, you know, what is the theory where there are actual multiple different human species that were on the planet at the same time or not? And like, you can find DNA and fossils. And I'm just like, Maga brains are going to be what is looked at like a thousand years. from now and them say, yeah, there was definitely a mine parasite.

Like, there was definitely, like, how did they miss this? These people are not fucking well at all. Are you saying there's an unwoke mind virus, Daniel? Oh, God. Just take me out. Look, money and fame are hell of a drugs. Okay. I'm going to try to make it up to you, too, for that one.

Are you? Yeah, I have. I have. I really am. Trust me. Come on. Oh, God. This really is a pallet cleanser.

This is Xander Morix. I'm sorry if I pronounced that wrong. At a Sarasota, Florida town meeting confronting Bridget Siegler, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, who you may know from the recent news of her and her husband being outed for having a threesome, and then it turns out that her husband is accused of raping the woman involved in said threesome. So he goes to the meeting to talk to her about her job. Our first ever interaction was when you retweeted a hate article about me from the nationalist while I was a Sarasota County school student. You are a reminder that some people view politics as a service to others while some view it as an opportunity for themselves.

On this board, you have spent public funds that could have been used to increase teacher pay to change our district lines for political gain, remove books from schools, target trans and queer children, erase black history, and elevate your political career, all while sending your children to private schools because you do. not believe in the public school system that you've been leading. My question is why doesn't an elected official using our money to harm our students and our teachers for her gain seem to matter as much to us as her having a threesome does? Bridget Ziegler, you do not deserve to be on the Sarasota County School Board, but you do not deserve to be removed from it for having a threesome. That defeats the lesson we've been trying to teach you, which is that a politician's job is to serve their community not to police personal lives. So to be extra clear, Bridget, you deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job. Not because you had sex with a woman.

Bravo. Bravo. Oh my God. If that wasn't a fucking read. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Try to live your life where no one can say that about you. Mm-hmm. You know, what did they say? Like, live your life in a way that people are not rejoicing at your demise or your death. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, everything that he said was facts. Who gives a shit who you are sleeping with?

You people are the only ones that care who other people are sleeping with. We do not. We care about book bands and racism and discrimination and homosexuals. phobia and transphobia and spreading of hate. And like, he's absolutely right. You deserve to lose your job. But we should be clear as to why you're losing your job. And it's not that.

Oh, my God. These people make me sick. There's a thing he said that just needs to be like a universal thing. And that is that you cannot sit on a school board if you send your kids to private school. 100%. To be an automatic disqualifier. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

The fact that that is not in every state's governing body. is a failure on our part. Yeah, I don't get it. Patrice Lumombo was the first elected prime minister of the Congo, but his leadership lasted for only 10 weeks in 1960 before he was deposed by a CIA-backed military junta. His ouster and eventual assassination had long-lasting ramifications not only for that African country,

but for how the Cold War played out globally and for the reputation of the United Nations. And now, executive editor at Foreign Affairs Magazine, Stuart Reed, has written a gripping new book called Lumumba Plot, the secret history of the CIA and a Cold War assassination. He joins us now. Stuart, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So let me set the stage. In 1878, King Leopold II of Belgium decides he wants to own himself a piece of Africa, and he sends Henry Morton Stanley of Dr. Livingstone, I presume,

fame, back to that continent, where he obtains the quote-unquote signatures of illiterate tribal chiefs on documents that give the rights to their land to Leopold. And that land becomes the Congo Free State under Leopold's personal ownership and rule, rule so horrific that you describe it in the book as earning a place in the pantheon of human atrocities. In 1908, Leopold sells the Congo Free State to Belgium, which is slightly better for the Congolese, but still pretty damn bad. Jumping ahead to the post-war War II 1940s, a young man named Police Lumombo leaves his home and relocates to Stanleyville, the third largest city in the Belgian Congo. He figures out that climbing the colonial ladder, as you put it, has,

its rewards. So he improves his French, becomes a government clerk, and starts working his way up the chain. By the late 1950s, he's kind of a big deal politically, which, and obviously I've left out so much fascinating detail that's in your book, brings us to 1960. Congo wins its independence, and La Mumba is elected prime minister. So I'll start there. A key part of your book is that you give Lumumba agency. Generally speaking, it feels like we talk only about what was done to him by external forces, which granted is an unbelievably huge part of the story. But you also talk about his own shortcomings and the mistakes he himself made. With that in mind, let's start with Lumombo's speech on June 30th, 1960. What was the setting and what did he say? So that was the day that the

Congo was becoming independent from Belgium. There was a handover ceremony. And King Baudoin, the king of the Belgians, was in the capital of what was soon to be his former colony there to handover power to the Congolese. And he gives this very patronizing speech. I mean, the whole Belgian colonial project had been one of paternalism. And this was a continuation of that. And so he tells the Congolese that they should be thankful for all that the Belgians have done for them and warns them not to mess things up by changing the structures around. And the president of the Congo, man named Joseph Kassavubu, responds with this polite speech thanking the Belgians. And Lumumba, who's, he's been elected prime minister, but is not on the schedule to speak that day. He stands up and goes to the podium

unannounced. He's not on the program and gives this really passionate speech that has gone down in the annals of sort of post-colonial history. And it's a speech in which he's telling the Belgians what the Congolese really thought of them and what daily life was like for the Congolese, the insults that they endured day and night, the racism that affected every aspect of daily life. And he tells this all to King Baudouin, the other visiting dignitaries. And it's seen as this great offense. And he sparks a sort of diplomatic incident and the Belgians threatened to leave. And what's interesting about it is the speech is a remarkable speech.

It's completely true. It helped him politically. But it did aggravate the Belgians at the ceremony. And he was forced to give this sort of backpedaling toast at lunch. But it would sort of go down as this key moment where he pissed off the Belgians. and they were done with him at that point. First of all, it's a fantastic speech. I mean, reading it in the book, I don't know what his delivery was like, but reading it

was just jaw-droppingly good. And as you said, it was truthful and it was brutally honest. So he gives this speech in front of the king of the Belgians and also in front of representatives from the UN and countries worldwide. And they sort of leave there with maybe an opinion of him that is not super favorable. Yeah. I mean, in fact, in the months before this, Lumumba had, in fact, already sort of broken with the Belgians. This was, in many ways, the culmination of a long brewing row between Lumumba and his former colonial masters.

The U.S. embassy, there was a U.S. ambassador in Belgium, a man named William Burden, who was very pro-Belgian and basically passing on the Belgian line to Americans. And so the cables back and forth from Brussels to D.C. are full of assessments of Lumumba that he's unreliable, that he's erratic, that he's erratic, that he's, that he's, he's opportunistic and so on. So at that point, American officials were starting to form their opinion of Lumumba. The speech on June 30th didn't help. But even then, I think they were keeping an open mind about what this new leader would be like. Okay. So that's sort of the situation worldwide, and that's on June 30th. Five days later, on July 5th, the Congolese army known as the Force Public, mutinies. Why did they do this? The Force Public had an all-white, all-Belgian officer corps, a holdover from colonialism. And so, as you can imagine, the black rank and file was none too happy to,

you know, ostensibly have independence, yet every day they're saluting their white officers. There were also problems of low pay and all the overtime they had been putting in recently. So they were very disgruntled. They revolted against their white officers and started roaming the streets, terrorizing the white population that had stayed on after independence. And that's really where the Congo crisis, as it would become known, begins with this mutiny. Okay. And so Lumumba refuses requests from Belgium to allow Belgian troops to try to quell the mutiny. But a man named Moza Tuchumbe welcomes them when they arrive in Katanga, where he is the provincial governor. Talk about Tuchumbe and the province of Katanga,

because this is just an unbelievably critical point in the story. Yeah. So the Belgians intervene without Congolese permission, and they're parachuting down all over the Congo. And in the province of Katanga, they are, as you mentioned, welcome. So Katanga is the mineral-rich province in the southeast of the Congo, and it had always been somewhat separate from the rest of the colony, had a different administrative structure. It was the cash cow produced the vast majority of the revenues for the state. And Mois Jambay, the leader of that province on July 11th, he announces that his province has seceded from the rest of the Congo. And in this, he's supported by the Belgian. who view his province as sort of the last tollhold of Belgian influence in the Congo.

And this becomes the main sticking point, the great frustration that Lumumba has, that this province, which is the revenue-producing one, has broken off from the rest of the country. And most of Lumumba's actions in the months that follow can be explained by his desire to bring Katanga back into his country. Okay. So in fairly short order, the Belgian troops control most of the Congo. So, Lamumba appeals to the UN for help, and the Secretary General at the time, Dog Hamishold, flies there, as does the great Ralph Bunch, but they're unable to accomplish much. And Lamuba, who had been abroad trying to get money and support from various countries,

including the U.S., he returns and declares a state of emergency, which you describe as a remarkable authoritarian turn for him. Yeah, so just to back up a little bit. So the U.N. peacekeeping operation is this massive operation. the UN has never done anything like it before. And the goal is to bring stability to Congo. And Lumumba has invited them in, asked for help. But he gets frustrated with their inability to go into Katanga and bring that province back in.

So as you mentioned, he goes to the U.S. for help and doesn't get it. And when he's back in Congo, he does have something of an authoritarian turn. He closes down newspapers, some opposition politicians are arrested, and so on. So that was a surprising turn for a man who came of age politically. fighting against Belgian colonialism and bristling under its censorship and so on. His argument was that he was being undermined by Belgian propaganda, beaming in from across the river in the French Congo, where after expelling the Belgian diplomats,

after having been expelled, they had sort of set up shop. So he did have this brief authoritarian turn. Spoiler alert, it's nowhere near as authoritarian as what just weeks and months later Mobutu would do. but he was criticized for it heavily by the United States who thought he, you know, some officials thought he was becoming a dictator and so on. And so, okay, so now we have to talk about Joseph Mobutu. You point out that Lumumba had been warned about Mobutu and pretty much ignored those warnings that he was possibly working with Belgian intelligence, possibly other external intelligence

organizations. Ignoring those warnings doesn't work out very well for Lumumba. Mobutu now controls the Congolese Army, which used to be the Force Public, but is now known as the Army National Congolese. In September of 1960, Mobutu declares a coup, and a few months later, he arrests La Mumba, and in January of 1961, he transfers La Mumba to Katanga, where he is brutally murdered. So, again, I've elided so much from the book, but I want to talk about America's role in all of this. And you write about various times where phrases like changing the scenery in the the Congo were used by the State Department. In August 1960, you say that the White House authorized a

secret CIA program to, quote, replace the Lumumba government by constitutional means. And you call this a watershed moment for the agency. Why? Because that was the first time in the Congo they had moved beyond mere intelligence collection to actual covert action, meaning changing politics on the ground. The broader context here is the Cold War. And the U.S. thought that or certain U.S. officials thought that La Mumba was turning the Congo communist. The evidence for that was extremely thin. As we discussed, he had asked the U.S. for help, been rebuffed. And it was then, and only then, that he turned to the Soviets for military assistance. He wanted to invade Katanga and bring that back into the fold. What happened is that events intervened. And so Lumumba is ousted

from power. He's fired by the president of the Congo, encouraged by the CIA to do so. Then Mobutu steps in to replace both the president and the prime minister, Lumumba, and announces that he's taking power in a military coup that was financed by the CIA and arranged by the CIA. And all the while, there's this bizarre assassination plot moving forward, which begins on August 18th, 1960 at the White House when Eisenhower essentially issues an order to assassinate Lumumba, although he doesn't say it in those exact words. And the CIA gets to work planning a bizarre operation involving poisons, which are flown to the Congo and supposed to be put in Lamombo. is food or toothpaste, that plot sort of peters out because, as you mentioned, Lumumba's been

overthrown and he's under house arrest now and the CIA can't get access to his house. But the U.S. tried many different lines of action to try and get rid of Lumumba. And as we can perhaps talk about in the second, his ultimate death, there was a key American role in. Yeah, before we get to that, I just want to bring up because my jaw dropped at this part in the book. You mentioned the CIA plot to assassinate Lamumba involved poisoning. And all of a sudden, there is the name Sidney Gottlieb. And anyone who has done any research or looked into the CIA program known as M.K. Ultra recognizes that name instantly. Yeah, that just blew my mind. Okay. So as, you know, as you say, events kind of took over. We did not directly assassinate Lumumba. But as you say,

Eisenhower did call for this assassination. We learned this from the church committee in the mid-1970s. We learned that the CIA had this plan. And at one point, it was in a. motion. But yeah, you talked about a gentleman who worked for the CIA who was stationed in the Congo, who while he didn't help assassinate Lumumba, he did his best to make sure we didn't stop it. Yeah, so the timing is important here. It's December 1960. Eisenhower is on the way out. Kennedy has been elected president and will take office on January 20th, 1961. And there's signs from the Kennedy camp that the new administration will pursue a more pro-Lumma policy in the Congo. First, he was under house arrest, then he escaped and was captured and thrown in a military prison.

So Lumumba is in a military prison, and there's a real fear on the ground in Congo that he will be liberated from prison and restored to power as prime minister. This is a viable potential thing that might happen. And Mobutu, who's in charge as the military leader, is worried about this. And so is Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in the Congo, who was instrumental in removing Lumumba and supporting Mobutu as his replacement. And so a plan develops by Mobutu and his henchmen to transfer to Lumumba to send him away to his death, to send him to a province where it's known that he'll almost certainly be killed upon landing. And on January 14, 1961, Mobutu or someone from his circle, tells Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief, about this plan. And Devlin does,

two things, or rather doesn't do two things. One, he doesn't tell Mobutu not to do this. And in the context of their relationship where Devlin is handing over suitcases of cash, this is essentially a green light. He's advising him on all matters about being in charge and doesn't tell him to save Lumumba's life and not send him to his death. And two, Devlin keeps Washington out of the loop. So even as he's telling them about other twists and turns of the daily events going on in Congo, he deliberately sits on the most important explosive piece of news in the country, which is that Lumumba is about to be killed. Why does he do this? Because he understood correctly that at that point, with the presidential transition going on, Washington would tell him to put the brakes on this operation

because there were to be no new, big decisions in the Congo. These were policies that should be decided by the new administration, not the Eisenhower administration in its final days. So he doesn't tell Washington about that. And on January 17th, 1961, Lumumba's flown to the breakaway province of Katanga and killed shortly after landing. And Kennedy's inaugurated three days later. It's unreal. Look, at the top, I said that Lumumba's ouster and eventual assassination had long-lasting ramifications not only for the Congo, but for how the Cold War played out globally and for the reputation of the UN. For the Congo, it resulted in over 30 years of the brutal reign of Mobutu. Can you talk about those other two things, the ramifications for the Cold War and what happened to the UN's reputation

after Congo? So the UN's reputation lay in ruins after the Congo. Not only did the Secretary General Doghomershull die in the Congo crisis in a mysterious plane crash when he was on route to negotiate a ceasefire, this is after Lumumba's death, but also the Soviets regretted voting for the UN operation in the Congo, and it was really seen as a failure. The UN had bitten off more than it could chew. And so for the rest of the Cold War, the UN would never again try anything ambitious as its operation in the Congo. And so it stayed out of places that it might otherwise have been involved in and perhaps help. For the U.S., however, its operations in Congo were viewed as a success. Specifically, the CIA's efforts to get rid of Lumumba and support Wobutu

were seen as this clear Cold War win. By the narrow logic of the Cold War, this had some truth to it. You'd gotten rid of a potentially pro-Soviet leader and installed a nice, pliant American dictator in his place. Once you broaden the perspective just a little bit, it becomes clear that this was actually a massive failure. If you broaden it to include the Congolese people, for instance, what you have as a result of this is 30 years of dictatorship. If you broaden it to include stability as well, it turned out to be a long-term unstable move because Mobutu's regime collapses in 96, 97, killing millions of people in the Civil War. But to answer your question about the Cold War, I think what the Congo operation did because it was viewed as a success internally was it really

encouraged the CIA and other presidents to embrace covert action. So you see the Bay of Pigs Operation in 61, the U.S. support for the coup in Chile in the 70s and so on, you know, support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. You can't blame this all on the Congo operation, but I think it contributed because it was seen as this success. You know, acting behind behind the scenes in unsavory ways and undemocratic ways, America could sort of tip the balance of power in key countries and prevent the communists from gaining a toehold. So that's, I think, an important effect of what happened in the Congo. The book is so fascinating and I really only had time to scratch the surface of it. So I highly encourage our listeners to go out and read it. It's the Lumumba

plot, the secret history of the CIA and a Cold War assassination. Stuart Reed, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. This is fun. 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?

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